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Edited on Tue Aug-03-10 02:08 PM by ThomWV
If I were to build a pyramid of the hierarchy of Government at its top would be the Federal Government in its three branches and below that would be a State Government tier, and below that the Counties, and lower yet a layer of city and community governments. But down at the bottom, at the very basic level of governmental organization I'd put Labor Unions. I say that because indeed unions are the most basic form of self governance. By agreement of its members a union sets the standards by which those same members will each apply their labor to the task of sustaining self and family. I can think of nothing more basically democratic than a Union. That, I would suggest, is why assaults on unions are the most egregious assaults against our democracy, because they strike at its very core.
Make no mistake, there are those who would rule us. They are the great monied interests that hold the wealth of the nation in their hands. They are the 1% that owns it all, they are the 1% that controls it all. They are different from us, and they ply their trade of control differently than we do. They demand control from the top down whereas we organize from the bottom up. From the shooting of striking workers at the Ford Motor Company gates to today's starvation tactics the owners and overseers have been at war with the working man for a century. You can watch the history of the labor movement to see where the battle lines met and meet; from Dearborne to Matewan, from the Rouge to the Ohio.
Money will focus at the top, and so it should come as no surprise that our Government is in bed with big industry. It should be obvious to any interested observer how inexpensively individual members of our House of Representatives and Senate can be bought. As bad or worse, in a generally regional pattern you can trace the ownership of statehouses across the nation. The government of my own state, West Virginia, is wholy owned and servent to the coal mining industry and mine owners. Local government is little better. In other states its agricultural interests, in others yet its petroleum or the chemical industries, in somer the extraction industries, but its always some industry and never control by the people who feed their lives to the profit making machines.
If there is an future for us in this upside down world it will come from joining together to make things right, to wrest control from the monied and powerful interests that would suck us dry of every speck of our energy, and indeed our dignity. The place to do that first is in the workplace. Unionize! Start at the beginning and support your Union's PACs, because they are your best chance at a voice agains otherwise overpowering forces.
Thank you for giving me this opportunity to rant.
* I had several part time jobs as a teenager which were not Union
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