Why the GOP Really Hates Unions

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



Why the GOP Really Hates Unions

By Art Levine, Huffington Post. Posted February 23, 2009.

The GOP and the business community are waging a short-sighted battle against well-paid workers, the very people they need to rescue the economy.



The Hoover-like GOP has been working overtime to oppose President Obama's stimulus package while hoping he fails. Meanwhile, a report released yesterday by the Center for American Progress Action Fund essentially underscores the real reasons Republicans and the business community have taken another equally short-sighted economic stance: fighting workers' right to organize. As Unions Are Good For the American Economy points out with irrefutable statistics, unionization raises wages and boosts the economy because it puts more money in the pockets of American workers.

(The report itself, of course, doesn't directly accuse the GOP and corporate interests of opposing economic growth and recovery, but reading its measured analysis of the economic benefit of unions leads to the inescapable conclusion that anti-union business leaders have a misguided zeal for low wages at all cost -- regardless of the impact on their own workers, their firms' productivity, their own long-term profits or the broader economy.)

In a conference call with reporters to discuss the report, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich observed: "One reason we're in the crisis we're in is because consumers have run out of money ... If they can't borrow anymore, and they have to rely on sinking wages, the entire economy is in trouble, because there's not enough demand out there." Reich added, "The point of the Employee Free Choice Act is to end intimidation and allow workers to join unions as they have a right to do. Workers want to be in unions , and if they did have unions, they'd have higher wages and benefits. And if they had higher wags and benefits, they'd have the purchasing power to buy more goods and services."

In fact, the relative stagnation of wages over the last few decades -- due in large part to effective unionbusting aimed at keeping labor costs low -- helped bring on the economic meltdown because too many low-income workers were suckered into mortgages they really couldn't afford. Those mortgages were in turn bundled into the "toxic assets" -- those various nearly-worthless investment vehicles -- that have weakened the world's financial systems and brought on our free-fall recession. As Daily Kos diarist Trapper John reported last year, "AFL-CIO Associate General Counsel Damon Silvers lays out how the decline in unionization which began in the mid-Seventies led to the burst of the sub-prime bubble, and ultimately to today's recession. And he wrote it way back in April." .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/128297/why_the_gop_really_hates_unions/

[izquierdista]

1. They would agree with Henry Ford

That $5 a day would be a great salary to pay a worker. Of course, $5 doesn't go as far as it used to......

[Warpy]

2. Well, then, it's up to us to do more with less, isn't it?

If $5/day was good enough for great grandfather, it should be more than good enough for the present wretched generation that seems hell bent on sending this country into destruction with its music, tats, and piercings!

What, you mean $5/day means they won't have places to live or enough food to eat? Poppycock! The free market will take care of that, always has, always will!

Our great forebears knew how to economize! There was none of that electronic junk! They wrote letters.

What's that, a stamp was two cents and now it's more than twenty times as expensive? So what? It's still a bargain!

People today are just plain soft! Anybody who can't live like a king on $5/day just isn't trying!

[8 track mind]

3. "why it will make a man out of ya!"

You Bethcha!

[nxylas]

5. Idiot who doesn't get it because it doesn't have a sarcasm tag in 5...4...3...

You know it's coming.

[Grinchie]

15. I found this Documentary the other day...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB0PG-PNerc">Pandora's Box Episode #3 - The League of Gentlemen

It started when I watched The China Syndrome the other night, and I went looking on YouTube for video on Chernobyl. Well, after seeing what's avaialable of the Horryfying aftermath of Chernobyl, I then found the Documentary "Meltdown at Three Mile Island", which coincidently occurred 12 days after the movie the China Syndrome was released.

Finally in the search list, I found Pandora's Box - Episode 6 - A is for Atom which painted the picture of how screwed up our Corporations really are.

The documentary is so well done, loaded with relevant, if historical information, that I was hooked and started watching all I could find.

The League of Gentlemen deals with the British Economy and the games they were playing with it starting in the 60's using a lot of the same techniques that we now see as the root cause of our worldwide economic meltdown. The question I ask is this: If the experiment failed so miserably previously, then why did America follow on to the same course of action?

My only take on it is that Margaret Thatcher and Reagan were colluding together, and used the Trickle Down economics metaphor to have an excuse to cut Social Services.

In the video, you'll even get to see the real "Trickle Down Economics machine". It's a model that uses water to simulate the flow of money throughout the economy.

Lots of stuff on labor, and how labor gets blames for inflation, when in reality Labor Unions are usually too late to get wages increased as Inflation overtakes the standard of living, forcing them to catch up too quickly.

Really good show when taken in respect to the current environment during the time in which it occurred.

If you want to see the other big connections to Big Government and Corporate control of it and the educational system, watch episode #4, Goodbye Mrs. Ant. Comapre pesticides to GMO and you have an identical match of how little control and testing has been done on GMO's. GMO's are like pesticides in the early 40's and 50's, All good, no harm, Heaven on Earth if you use them, blah blah blah.

[bemildred]

4. They hate political power that does not come from money.

Unions are just one example of that. They hate grass-roots politics too, for example.

[HillWilliam]

6. They hate political power that does not come from money

that wasn't inherited or stolen. The people who disdain workers are the same people who've never done an honest day's work in their entire lives and wouldn't know how. A single drink of liquor and a piece of @$$ in the same day would probably kill them they're so soft. Yet, they're somehow "better" than the rest of us because they were born pampered; fed, clothed, and housed with cash stolen across the very backs of the workers they hold so contemptable.

F*ck em with a saguaro cactus. Sideways.

[Mopar151]

9. Rush is a prime example

I'm "celebrating" my 2nd day on layoff (from good people - just no work). The self-same peices of crap can't do my job - not smart enough, incapable of logical thought, candy-assed, and can't hit square with a hammer! I'm a machinist, BTW, and last Wednesday was programming a 1922 drawing into a CNC mill. Dolts don't stay long, in my trade.

[HillWilliam]

11. Exactly! Dolts usually peter-principle themselves into upper management

either by inheritance or connection. Look at BushCo, the best example to date of "failing upward". I've never seen any project improved by ignoring the folks on the line and implementing upper management advice. In my experience (I'm nearing 52) it has been the advice of people who've never done the job (yet who seem to "know it all" because they have an MBA) that will increase the price and decrease the productivity every swingin' time.

When the cuts come, it's never upper management and it sure as hell isn't their inflated salaries. I've watched CEO after CEO of mid-sized companies destroy one company, make a killing trashing it out, put a load of good people out of work, make sure their salaries were reduced at their next venue, then move on to trash another company and repeat the same sorry act. This has been going on it IT (we used to call it Data Processing) since the 1980's.

Those of us in IT have been warning the rest of America it was headed your way since the 80s and no-one believed us. We were almost invisible, expendible, replaceable; always the first to go and the last to get raises. We were the first victims of outsourcing and the first victims of offshoring. The rest of America said, "it can't happen to us."

Well, it has.

"I told you so" still tastes like shit and brings no pleasure.

We're all in it together now, and we still have dolts at the top. I'm all for locking arms together, putting our boots firmly on the ground and saying, "NO MORE DOLTS AT THE TOP". Management needs to earn its keep just like the rest of us.

[Mopar151]

16. Some new rules would help

"Mergers & Acquisitions", "Shareholder Relations", pension looting and the whole festering swamp that is accounting.... The dolts are all about "making the numbers", and it does'nt matter what it does to the underlying value of the company, ot what liabilities it creates going forward.

[paparush]

7. Repugs want a slave-wage class.

Undereducated, economically depressed, emotionally depressed, docile, zombi-fied worker class.

I swear its what they want.

Cheney and Bush worked like demons to destroy the last vestiges of the New Deal and make the above a reality.

[bemildred]

8. That is what they want.

You can't be really, really, filthy rich without screwing the living shit out of lots of other people. I mean sort of rich, well-off, yeah, you can get there by hard work and honesty; but for really, really, filthy rich in only one lifetime, you have to cut some corners.

[Enthusiast]

12. But, wealth = virtue. nt

[infidel dog]

10. Absolutely right. We must fight for EFCA with everything we have.

The Republi-criminals have to be crushed and stuffed into the trashcan they prepared for the American middle and working classes.

[Stinger2]

13. Foreign Auto Makers Won Billions in Government Subsidies

Foreign Auto Makers Won Billions in Government Subsidies 

To hear Southern Republicans tell the story, the financial
burdens facing Detroit’s automakers are self-made troubles to
be settled by the laws of Adam-Smith capitalism

http://washingtonindependent.com/22236/cars



Chinese expect to build cars in Mexico in 2010, may sell cars
at big-box retailers

Perhaps the most interesting part of this scenario would be
the distribution chain. Instead of using franchised
dealerships, Mexican-built Chinese cars could be sold at large
retail chains like CostCo and Walmart. GS Motors, the Mexican
distributor for China's FAW brand, is already trialing this
strategy in Mexico and would likely do the same in the States,
assuming the program proves successful in smaller markets.

http://www.autoblog.com/2009/02/09/report-chinese-expect-to-build-cars-in-mexico-in-2010-may-sell/


The markets have invested Billions in Foreign Auto Makers if
GM, Ford, Chrysler fail  more money for them, It’s Pure Greed.

[Stinger2]

14. Watch that old sneaky oil man T Bone Pickens

The Port Authority of San Antonio has been working actively with the Communist Chinese to open and develop NAFTA shipping ports in Mexico.

The plan is to ship containers of cheap goods produced by under-market labor in China and the Far East into North America via Mexican ports. From the Mexican ports, Mexican truck drivers and railroad workers will transport the goods across the Mexican border with Texas. Once in the U.S., the routes will proceed north to Kansas City along the NAFTA Super-Highway, ready to be expanded by the Trans-Texas Corridor, and NAFTA railroad routes being put in place by Kansas City Southern. Kansas City Southern’s Mexican railroads has positioned the company to become the “NAFTA Railroad.”

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=16077

Trans-Texas Corridor paved with campaign contributions?

San Antonio construction company, capital consortium from Spain stand to gain

The contractors building the Trans-Texas Corridor – a massive statewide transportation network critics claim is an important part of the controversial proposed integration of the U.S. and Mexico – have made large contributions to the campaigns of Texas politicians, including Republican Gov. Rick Perry.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=51023

Watch that old sneaky oilman T Bone Pickens, Why? How do you get wind energy, or how do you get Imminent Domain on swats of land miles wide when you need feet, call it for wind energy and take the property.