ELITES’ FINAL SOLUTION FOR USPS

This week the Postal Service and its corporate backers proposed a final solution to its financial problems: Layoff a quarter of its workforce, break its union contracts and strip current workers and retirees of their Federal Employee Health Benefits coverage.

If anyone can’t see by now that the financial elites - the bankers, the corporations and the barons of Wall Street - are now openly at war with the middle class and the poor, they’re simply blind.

The postal bosses will use Tea Party and Republican Congressmen to introduce legislation to unleash these Weapons of Mass Destruction against postal workers and retirees. If this legislation is successful, similar measures will quickly be rolled out against state and local government workers and eventually federal workers.

Any legal challenges to these attacks on workers will be quashed by a corrupt Supreme Court years from now.

Those who know American history, will recognize the pattern. Many of the same tactics were used to enslave black people and destroy the Indian nations. In each instance, the rich and powerful corrupted Congress and the courts to trample on the weak and powerless in mockery of the ideals expressed in our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

So what do we do about it?

A good start would be to recognize we really are at war with people and institutions out to crush the middle class. The Tea Party, Republicans, the Chambers of Commerce, people like the Koch Brothers and Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and all the rest of the right wing shills in the media. These people really do mean to destroy us.

The second thing we need to do is not believe anything they say. Lies live on their tongues and fall from their mouths. This enemy will use every form of deceit to convince you that, far from being out to destroy you, they’re on your side, they’re trying to save you during these perilous economic times. They will ask you once more to trust them. Don’t. Not ever.

The last thing I suggest is that we fight back against them and never negotiate or compromise with them. That mistake has been made too often by everyone from President Obama to APWU President Cliff Guffey and our national officers. Our enemies are not reasonable. They seek nothing less than our complete destruction.

They’ll either destroy us or we’ll destroy them. It’s one or the other.

This isn’t a war any of us asked for. They control most of the financial, judicial  and legislative weapons as well as police power and they have shown no reluctance to use them against us.

I don’t know what the odds are, for or against us. But if we’re going down, I say we go down fighting.

　

　

　

Gazette aligns itself with Chamber of Commerce spin on debt ceiling debacle

By Dan Sullivan-

Reading the August 2 editorial masked as a news item reporting local response to the debt ceiling debacle in Washington, it's obvious to me that the Gazette has swallowed the Chamber of Commerce Kool-Aid in one gulp.

Where do jobs come from? Not from the Mitchell Stapleys and the know-nothing propagandists of the right with their straw man arguments that the Gazette promotes as news.

We don't have a government spending crisis in this economy. For crying out loud, our capitalist economic system is based on spending! What we have is a jobs crisis. People can't spend if they don't have jobs.
　
So where are the jobs? Well, they're in Communist China and India and Vietnam where the capitalists and the Chamber of Commerce boosters sent them over the last 30 years to increase corporate and business profits. And the plan has worked for the rich. Their share of the wealth in America has grown enormously during this time while everyone else's has declined.

The economy grows when poor and middle class people have money to spend on goods and services. The only entity big enough to infuse money into the economy in amounts that make a difference is the federal government. Small business won't create jobs if there is no increase in demand for their goods and services. Corporations won't create jobs here when they can hire workers at slave wages overseas. There are certainly no patriots in corporate offices or on Wall Street. So to expect them to create jobs out of some patriotic impulse is worse than foolishness. What I would call treason they call best business practices.

The federal government needs to create a jobs program rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. We have roads that need repair, airports that need to be upgraded, water and sewage systems that are failing. We need to find new sources of energy and forms of transportation. It takes taxes and government spending to accomplish these goals, goals that actually promote economic growth and jobs in the country.

Most people forget that the Internet wasn't the creation of some Chamber of Commerce tax cutting scheme that miraculously created jobs. It was an outgrowth of government defense spending.

Henry Ford was wise enough to see that he could only sell the cars he was building on his assembly line if there was a large enough market for them. So he created the market by raising wages for his workers so they could buy the product he was paying them to produce.

We need to rebuild our infrastructure. We need good paying jobs in this country. And we can't count on business or the Chamber of Commerce to create them.

Our 30-year experiment with the politics of greed hasn't worked for anyone but the rich. It's time to tear a page from the New Deal playbook and get this country moving in the right direction again.

It's time for a government jobs program to rebuild this nation. It's time for regulations and legislation which require corporations and Wall Street to invest in America, not in Communist China.

Thirty-years of Chamber of Commerce and right wing brainwashing has left many Americans without the freedom of independent thought that is required to govern ourselves wisely. Which is why we're in the mess we find ourselves in today, where corporations conspire with Communist China to destroy American manufacturing jobs and undermine our economy while politicians aid and abet this folly and we sit idly by.

Americans need to think for themselves again and not blindly follow the ideology of the Chamber of Commerce and corporate interests. Or their promoters and apologists in the Kalamazoo Gazette editorial and advertising offices.