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News :: Education |
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Putsch Vs The American People |
Current rating: 0 |
by Bryan
(No verified email address) |
31 Aug 2003
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Itâ€(TM)s Labor Day, and itâ€(TM)s time to take a quick look at the lot of the American worker.
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Well, it’s pretty crappy. Not just the unemployment rates. Those exemplify pretty crappy, of course. Officially, it’s around 6.3%, and unofficially (counting the people who have given up looking for work and whose benefits have expired) it’s somewhere around 10.5%. It isn’t just the pay, which is lagging further and further behind the increases the top 1% of wage earners see. Although with discretionary income falling each year, many west European nations have caught or surpassed us. (Yes, Americans have higher wages and lower taxes than their European counterparts, but said counterparts don’t have to deal with such privatized taxes as health care, pensions, higher education, and so on.)
The assault on unions continues unabated. Putsch won his efforts to get federal employees who found themselves reorganized into the umbrella gestapo known as Homeland Security to be no longer considered civil service, and so they got a gigantic cut in protections and pensions. In California, Arnie the Muscle blandly declared that he wouldn’t accept money from "special interests," which apparently consisted of unions and environmental groups. Agribusiness lobbyists sleazing around looking for price supports were not "special interests." Nor were other industries. Just people, particularly working people.
Arnie, like many capitalists who are related to fascists in one way or another, has declared the American people a "special interest" and corporations and pressure groups to be the true constituents of the American government.
You’ll be happy to know, however, that there is one place where the government is standing up to a major corporation for the rights of workers and demanding that those workers be given the right to unionize if they wish. The corporation in question is Walmart, which is known for its open contempt of workers (called "associates" in Wally world, which makes them 1099 rather than W-2, and thus Wally world doesn’t have to pay in on SDI or pensions or any of that.).
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the government in question is the Chinese government.
Putsch even went after the troops. Uniformed Americans in Iraq and in Afghanistan will lose a pay increase approved last April of $75 a month in "imminent danger pay" and $150 a month in "family separation allowances."
Well, what the hell’s the point in giving them extra money if they’re only going to get killed serving Putsch anyway? It’s not like they’re going to help the economy by coming home and spending that money. When Putsch tried to pretend he was a soldier, everyone laughed at him. So screw ‘em.
Putsch also went after 1.2 million general government employees, signing an executive order cutting a proposed pay increase to 2%. In a breath-taking display of hypocrisy, he declared in a letter to congressional leaders that he was using his authority to change the pay structure in times of "national emergency or serious economic conditions." In a blatant lie, he claimed that this would save America $11 billion a year. (That works out to $8,999 per worker per year – that WOULD be quite a raise!). And that money was needed for the war on terror. Pretty amazing stuff from a man who looted the national treasury to the tune of $350 billion for his rich buddies last year, and is dropping at least $5 billion a month on his lunatic occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Oh, make that $4.995 billion. He’s cheating the troops. I nearly forgot that.
Did anyone notice the son of a bitch talking about a "national emergency" when he pushed for his tax cuts that have led to all-time record deficits?
Well, we do have a national emergency. It seems we’re looking at a debt over the next six years of some $6.5 billion – the same amount that it was the day Putsch took office – and that’s using the hallucinatory scoring of the Congressional Budget Office, which has been ordered to pretend that the economy will respond to trickle-down economics the way the Hoover think tank thinks it will. It didn’t work in 1982, and there’s no reason to think it will work now. In fact, it hasn’t. The economy has failed to take off like a cat with tabasco sauce in his mouth. Which means that it might be 50% or even 100% worse than that.
Oh, and they aren’t counting the costs involved in occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. Even with the savings from cheating the troops, that comes to a fair amount of money. Enough to explain why Putsch has gone begging to the French and the Germans for help.
Still, it’s unfair and one-sided to pretend that Putsch is doing nothing to create jobs and spur the economy.
For instance, they are bringing three thousand bodyguards to protect America’s one-and-only president’s royal ass at the big economic conference in Bangkok in October. No word on whether he’ll show up in a clownish military costume, or how many times they’ll play "Hail to the Chief" while he struts and preens, but it’s three thousand temporary jobs that otherwise might not have existed if America had just shown slightly better judgement three years ago.
America’s government-by-the-highest-bidder form of electioneering is creating jobs, too. HCL eServe, the business process outsourcing arm of the Shiv Nadar-promoted HCL Technologies will be doing fundraising on behalf of Republicans from the towns of Noida and Gurgaon. If you’re not quite sure which state those are in, try India. Labor is cheap in India, and when you’re trying to bribe your way into office, every penny counts. The RNC, incidently, denies any involvement in this, so assume it’s being funded and arranged by several of the dozens of phony think tanks and public interest groups the GOP has formed to do their dirty work for them.
Nor is Halliburton, the corporate alter-ego of our esteemed vice-president, being ignored. Thanks in large part to the magic of bidless contracting, Halliburton has racked up a cool $1.7 billion in "reconstruction efforts" in Iraq. Like all American businesses partaking in the bold entrepreneurial adventure of privatized colonization, Halliburton has been declared above the law, so if, in the course of normal business operations, they should find it necessary to cheat, poison, kill, or abuse the local citizenry, then no law can ever touch them for it.
And some people try to insist that Putsch isn’t creating a business-friendly environment.
Even in Iraq, where the American occupation has been nothing short of catastrophic, Putsch is creating new jobs. Back in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, America tried hiring local people to police the streets, and a bunch of them were assassinated by other Iraqis. Something about "collaboration with the enemy." The French used to be real big on that against their fellow French during the occupation in World War II, and it made it real difficult to get those old trains running on time.
So America hit on the idea of training and arming the police someplace out of the country, and then bringing them in, fully prepared to maintain order through overwhelming force and political terror and repression.
Good government thugs and repressers are hard to find, but fortunately, Iraq has a ready supply. America is hiring former members of Saddam’s hated and feared Mukhabarat, his secret police.
Right wingers who stand tall and wave the flag proudly over the fact that Putsch saved those poor Iraqi people from the thugs, rapists and murderers of Saddam’s regime will be glad to know that he has taken those same thugs, rapists and murders, given them shaves, haircuts, and new uniforms, and soon will be deploying them on the streets of Baghdad by the thousands to help rebuild Iraq civilization. Apparently to something like what it was just last spring, it would seem.
But not quite. Viceroy Bremer assures one and all that he is still upholding the prime directive to get rid of all OTHER Iraqis who were members of the Ba’athist party, and to that end, is eliminating 95% of the doctors, scientists, technicians and professors from Iraq. I don’t suppose his vision of a rebuilt Iraq would require many educated people, anyway.
But this, along with the largess showered upon Halliburton, Noida and Gurgaon, the wealthy, and the three thousand lucky security guards who will get to be spear carriers in Putsch’s comic-opera strut to Thailand, shows that in his heart, Putsch has only the best interests of labor at heart.
Just as Colonel Sanders does with chickens.
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