Blue Collar Politics

[BREAK] If you needed to give someone a wake-up call on the need for unions, this piece would be a good primer. As most sentient beings could tell you, just because increased productivity leads to increased profits in a company/industry that does NOT mean those who produced the profit will get to share in it. In Realityville, a place the corporate Repugnants would rather isolate and quarantine, report after report shows that the lack of organization amongst the workers causes the profit sharing to get stuck in a bottleneck somewhere below the corporate execs and the shareholders. This forces the Execs to grab some of the productivity cash and grant the rest to the stockholders. Since the Reagan years, and accelerating with the Bush administration,there have been four distinct, but oh so very connected, stories on the business pages of our newspapers.

• 1) Union membership declines.
• 2) Corporate exec pay rises at record breaking rates. (war profiting CEO's do even better!)
• 3) the "real wage" of the lower and blue collar working classes has dropped.
• 4) Republicans refuse minimum wage hikes..

Meantime, instead of giving appropriate page/TV space to crimes based on the harm to society, white collar criminals get little press while kids dealing pot and the sporadic news of corrupt union officials gets plenty of space/time. So, Jimmy Six-pack/Jane Merlot is often the first to spout off with "Why should I shell out dues money to someone?" Jimmy goes home with less real cash each year, and, although working more hours and producing more each hour he/she works, Jane/Jimmy wonders why he can't afford to live like he did yesterday. And the corporate pirates chuckle at the ease with which they've enlisted Jimmy/Jane in a war of self attrition, while those gaining from the employees labor keep divvying up the huge productivity cash pie! Wouldn't you? ===== [/BREAK] How the World Works - Salon.com Too productive While browsing the World Bank Web site this morning, a headline caught my eye: "Rapid Growth in China, India Are Reducing Extreme Poverty, UN Labor Agency Says." That's odd, I thought, the International Labor Organization doesn't usually specialize in repeating World Bank talking points. As noted here before, the single most common justification given for expanding free trade are the hundreds of millions of people who have escaped extreme poverty in India and China as a result of the integration of those nations into the global economy. But the ILO's attention tends to focus on other matters. I guess executive summaries are all in the eye of the beholder. Here, for example, is the lead sentence of a Shanghai Daily article on the same ILO report referenced by the World Bank, "Eye-popping economic growth and productivity gains in East Asia haven't led to adequate job creation, higher wages or improved working conditions in the region, the International Labor Organization said in a report yesterday." More Here!

[BREAK] Getting rid of our war mongering, torture loving, elitist, science despising, corporate puppet(see "A Quiet Break for Corporations - washingtonpost.com") of a President won't, I'm sorry to say, even begin to get our once proud America back. Public education MUST be radically reformed if we are to have any hope of raising generations that will excel and help generate economic benefits, while having the general knowledge that leads to critical thought and a love of the rights, privileges and opportunities a true democratic republic like ours (once was?) can bring. (And other more administrative idiocy must also be reformed.) In contrast, No Child Left Behind only guarantees our kids will be capable of punching the picture of the cheeseburger on the cash register at McDonald's and fill out the easiest, but most unfair, income tax forms. So, I'll stray from the news pages here to recommend you visit Salon.com (Registration or viewing short ad required) and read about how HBO's The Wire shows that when the NCLB is shown without the imaginary wardrobe of Bushie produced pedagogically provocative propaganda, it is, in the "reality based world", just another cluster bomb fired in the escalating Class War that decimates the lower classes and makes the difference between a good/expensive private/parochial education and the public education we throw at the masses an even more discriminatory munition than it was prior to Bush and the Repugnants used an administrative Shock & Awe on our poor kids. (In a cruel bit of irony, a President who so wants to win one of the military wars he wages has only managed to show much progress in one . . . the Class War that divides the nation and enriches his peers!) [/BREAK]

Educational TV | Salon Life The most scabrous critique of Bush's education policy isn't coming from a think tank or newspaper but from the grittiest drama on television, "The Wire."

Continued here

[BREAK] Yes, Virginia. Iraq is not the only place where Liberty's skirt is dragging through some self-made mud. Unfortunately, when the Dems extricate us from Bush's Baghdad Blunder, most Americans will feel so glad that our "right hand" is cleansed that they will ignore the steady dripping of mud/blood from the left hand, that forms an ugly, and growing, toxic pool at her feet. ----- [/BREAK]

This Modern World � Blog Archive � Why do “they” hate us? Is it somehow connected to the way we cut off their limbs with chainsaws? Jonathan Schwarz: Why do “they” hate us? Is it somehow connected to the way we cut off their limbs with chainsaws? Before the 9/11 attacks came along, I used to work with groups trying to get the U.S. to stop funding Colombia’s right-wing paramilitaries. The pretense, of course, was we were funding the Colombian military in their heroic struggle in the War on Drugs. The reality, that the paramilitaries were run by the Colombian government to murder anyone to the left of Elliot Abrams, is finally being acknowledged: The government of President �lvaro Uribe is being shaken by its most serious political crisis yet, as details emerge about members of Congress who collaborated with right-wing death squads to spread terror and exert political control across Colombia’s Caribbean coast…All are from the state of Sucre, where the attorney general’s office has been exhuming bodies from mass graves… It’s difficult to overstate the level of human depravity exhibited by the paramilitaries. One of their favorite techniques is to kill people with chainsaws: More here