[sparkscoffee] Re: [sparkscoffee] Labor’s Demise Is America’s Demise
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Sblumen123@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: sparkscoffee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2014 12:24:42 -0400 (EDT)
RR
The solution is socialism but you are brain washed into not believing it.
Comrade B
In a message dated 9/1/2014 9:13:35 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
ristad@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
By Paul Craig Roberts
Labor Day is a holiday that has outlived its time. Like Christmas, Labor
Day has become a time-out period. As Christmas has become a shopping spree,
Labor Day has become the last summer holiday.
The holiday originated in 1887 to celebrate the contribution made by
American workers to the strength and prosperity of the United States. The
first
Monday in September was chosen by President Grover Cleveland to avoid a May
date that would keep alive the memory of the previous year’s Haymarket
Massacre in which workers striking for an eight-hour day suffered casualties
from the Chicago police.
As time passed union leadership became a career rather than a movement in
behalf of a cause, but the labor movement in its initial years was
reformist. It brought safer working conditions into industry and
manufacturing.
Unions served as a countervailing power and constrained the exploitative power
of capital. An industrial or manufacturing job was a ladder of upward
mobility that made the US an opportunity society and stabilized the
socio-political system with a large middle class. A large and thriving
industrial and
manufacturing sector provided many white collar middle class jobs for
managers, engineers, researchers and designers, and American universities
flourished as did their graduates.
The labor unions provided the Democratic Party with a financial base in
labor that served as a countervailing power to the Republican base in
manufacturing and finance. Whether it was a plot or unintended consequence,
jobs
offshoring wrecked the industrial and manufacturing unions and destroyed the
Democrats’ independent financial base. The two-party system that had
maintained a reasonable balance was transformed into a one-party system in
which
both parties were dependent on the same monied interests and thus answered
to the same masters.
The consequence was the demise of the middle class and rise of the One
Percent. Today the US has the most unequally distributed income and wealth of
all developed economies and one of the worst in the entire world. Few
Americans other than the One Percent have a stake in the American economic and
political system.
The imbalance in the distribution of income and wealth cannot be corrected
through the tax system. The imbalance is due largely to the loss of the
jobs that provided the economic basis for the middle class. Correction
requires a retreat from globalism and the return to a largely self-sufficient
economy, which the US economy was during its glory decades. Globalism is a
scheme for impoverishing First World labor and taking power and influence from
the hands of the many and putting them in the hands of the few. The
champions of globalism are the champions of America’s destruction.
Today the Republicans are demolishing the public sector unions. These jobs
can’t be outsourced, but public schools can be replaced with charter
schools, prisons can be privatized, and many public services can be contracted
out to private businesses.
Public sector unions never had as strong a case for their existence as
manufacturing and industrial unions. Moreover, strikes by firemen, police
forces, school teachers, and trash collectors undermined public support for
public sector unions as did many unpleasant experiences with the licensing
bureaucracies of state and local government departments. Nevertheless, public
sector unions could serve as a check on ambitious executive and legislative
power.
Whether one has a favorable or unfavorable opinion of unions, their demise
is also the demise of countervailing power. A system in which there is no
countervailing power is a tyranny in which power is unconstrained and
unaccountable.
The American people have been subdued and turned into a flock of sheep.
Will they ever rise again?
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