Sunday, October 20, 2013

Labor's Growing Resolve

At Political Carnival, there is a post regarding Labor's resolve regarding Social Security and Medicare, including this video:



 The author, GottaLaff, pointed out this money quote from the AFL-CIO's Damon A. Silvers, the director of policy and special counsel, as he takes on the squawking heads of the corporate media (emphasis mine):
You're talking about people who themselves are more afraid of paying higher taxes than they are afraid of being poor in retirement. You're talking about essentially rich people. If you want to have a democracy of rich people, I suppose you're statement is true.
Sadly, that seems to be the way this country is headed. And the Democrats are increasingly becoming nothing more the flip side of the same coin. Fortunately, all is not lost. From the article, one can see that the unions, despite the assaults it has suffered across the nation, are still standing. And not only are they still standing, they're rolling up their sleeves and are ready to do what needs to get done, which does not including going along to get along (again, emphasis mine):
We're being really clear. We're not going to give cover to Democrats who think it's a good idea to take away economic security from our most vulnerable citizens. We're extremely clear about that and we are not embarrassed about it whatsoever. We want a really clear message out there: If you cut Social Security benefits or Medicare benefits to our seniors, to our most vulnerable people in our country, you are going to get no cover from the American labor movement. We're happy to say that all day long. We think the reality is that it is by only treating our most vulnerable people fairly that there's going be any chance of progress on public policy issues facing our country going forward. That's the reality.
And this is not just on a national level. This is going on at state, regional and local levels as well.
During the Spring 2012 Elections, I pointed this out, when the Milwaukee Area Labor Council chose to not endorse all the candidates they used to and also endorsed some upset candidates.

And that year, we saw a lot of people that turned their backs on the people lose their seats, including Jason Fields and Elizabeth Coggs.

More recently, there is less tolerance for such poor decisions, such as the foolishness of going along with AB110 or other maleficent actions taken by the Teapublicans.

Even more recently, you see the unions standing up to profiteers and plutocrats like Chris Abele, especially when he wants to exploit our most vulnerable citizens.

I've said it for a long time now, and will say it again, that this is way overdue.  Things are way out of control and getting worse.  The Democrats are sliding down to be the flip side of the same coin as the GOP.  Hell, the Democrats haven't even blinked an eye when Chris Abele was handing money out to rabid teabaggers like Joe Sanfelippo and Dale Kooyenga and holding fundraisers for Deanna Alexander.

There is only one way for the Democrats to win and that is to get the people involved.  Instead of doing that, they are alienating people to go after big money, even though they'll never be able to compete with the GOP in that area.

At least one group is still out there fighting for the people instead of kissing up to the plutocracy - the unions.

2 comments:

  1. What video - not working on the iPad once agin.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Here's the link :

    http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000209229&play=1

    ReplyDelete