By Diane Gee, The Wild Wild Left, Greanville Post
Some things, like unions in a class-divided society, are good, despite the possible flaws in their implementation. Other things, like profound inequality and plutocratic power , are bad, both in principle and practice. They’re irredeemable evils.
Its all in the FRAMING.
I think the time is right for this idea to go viral.
It is no longer about left/right, Democrats/Republicans, white/black, gay/straight, religious/atheist. It is about all of us versus the few CEO’s of Corporations [and the class of plutocrats they serve and that stands behind them] making decisions that keep us out of work, unable to get out of debt, and unable to thrive, if not survive in these times.
Here are a few talking points to sell it.
1- Taxes are nothing but pooling our money to buy things that are good for us all, but to expensive to buy individually. The road to your street. Teachers and nice schools for your children. Taxes are not bad if they are spent on things WE NEED and WANT. We cut taxes: how are your schools and streets doing? Bigger classrooms, fewer books, more potholes? Less support for the unemployed, for the sick and poor (a condition practically all of us are vulnerable to). Just to name a few of the things that taxes are essential for. When used CORRECTLY?
TAXES ARE GOOD.
2 – We allowed the Corporations to not pay taxes, in fact give them incentives to send our jobs overseas. Despite 40 years of promises, no jobs have been created here, only lost. [The flight of multinationals overseas is not new—”the runaways” phenomenon began in the 1970s. Of course impinging on their “right” to move anywhere they choose would be regarded as an attack on “property rights”, at the core of capitalism, and denounced loudly accordingly. Be prepared. ]
BUSINESSES MUST PAY TAXES.
3 – GE earned $14.2 billion in profits in 2010, but it paid not a penny in taxes because the bulk of those profits, some $9 billion, were offshore. In fact, GE got a $3.2 billion tax benefit. We have 312 million people. Even rounding that up to 320 million, that means each person in America paid $1000 dollars of their taxes directly to GE.
How did that purchase go for you? What did you get back?
QUIT SUBSIDIZING BILLIONAIRES and THEIR MEGACORPORATIONS!
4 – Let’s say the biggest baddest biker in the world wanted you to lick his boots. Alone? You would have no choice. Now, bring 100 of your equally pussy-by-comparison friends with you? Mr Big Bad biker would leave you alone. That’s what UNIONS are. You band together to make sure no one treats you like dirt. You demand decent pay, safe conditions, reasonable time off, and that Mr Big Bad doesn’t decide to take a dump in your front yard – pollute the land your family has to live on. [Unions are not perfect. Nothing is in a highly polluted pond, which is what THEY have made our current American society. And much of the badmouthing comes from less than impartial sources, from the very corrupt, prostituted media that are always willing and ready to the bidding for their masters: the plutocrats, the “own-it-alls.”]
So how has the Union busting worked for you so far? Do you have your choice of jobs among the many millions of jobs out there? If you work, are you working fewer hours and had a decent raise lately?
UNIONS ARE GOOD.
5 – Let’s say your neighbor stole your lawnmower, has been throwing rotting trash over your fence for years and plays his stereo at 50 million decibels every night until 3 next to your infants room, and you have to work at 6 in the morning. But? Every time you call the cops to complain, your neighbor slips the cop a hundred dollar bill to look the other way. Every time you complain to the City Council about him breaking noise and blight ordinances, he goes down and contributes to their campaign, and the relax the ordinances so what he is doing is legal. You have no recourse, no one to go to. It’s leave, or put up with it. Or suck up to the neighbor and hope he quits abusing you.
This is exactly what money does in politics. The rich do what they want, get laws passed that allow them to do whatever they want, and you can either leave the country, or put up with it.. or suck up, vote for them and hope they shit on you less. They throw 4 to 5 billion dollars each year into the pockets of candidates who promise to “take care” of their interests. Why would they answer to YOU, Mr & Mrs America, if you only gave $20.00 to their campaign?
I don’t know about you, but this is my Country, and I won’t let a few Mafia-type bullies payola and bribe their way into ruining my life. Alone we don’t have the money to compete with them. Together, we can run them out of Dodge.
TAKE THE BRIBE MONEY OUT OF POLITICS.
6 – No race/creed/sex/orientation/immigrant is taking your jobs. We are all workers trying to not starve. 5.5 million jobs went overseas since 2000. 150,000 factories just closed outright, unable to compete with the businesses that sent the jobs overseas. Each of those factories employed hundreds to thousands of people. So call it 10 million jobs gone. With roughly 200 million working age people in the country? One in 5 lost their jobs to outsourcing.
What happens then? Those people can’t buy what you make, and the economy goes spiraling down. So more and more of you get laid off, and can’t afford what the next guy is making. Unemployment is really at about 22%. Almost a quarter of our citizens can’t find work and WANT to work… all because a few rich CEOs and Stock Market players make record profits off outsourcing to the poorest countries in the World.
The only solution to recover jobs is to do one of 2 things:
A) Make outsourcing ILLEGAL [which would clash head on with the capitalists’s enshrined right to do as they please, that is, sacred private property…Eds]
B) Let all large corporations be owned by the People. In other words, if we own them we will do what’s best for the employees—and the larger society— and make goods cheap enough to buy, with profits good enough to reinvest in more jobs. Then we can buy our own, and everyone else’s stuff. Economics is not that complicated. Face it. It is made complicated to keep ordinary people from understanding how their pockets are being picked.
KEEP THE JOBS, AND CONTROL OF THE JOBS HERE. [Workplace democracy!]
7 – The Parties we have are already corrupt. The media that promotes them is run by a monopoly of rich people who only sell us people who support them, not YOU.
Media Monopolies must be broken up, and it should be illegal to lie, like in the day of Edward R Murrow. The Fairness Doctrine must be restored, so we cannot be lied to anymore about who is responsible for our plight. [And also for good measure, since the same type of people, even when the media monopolies are broken up they would still be staffed by the same type of people, and serving the same type of goals their rich owners impose, Congress should fund generously radio and TV networks owned and administrated by the people, mandated to investigate and report on the needs and desires of ordinary people, no topics barred.—Eds]
Further, our private information should not be spied on, sold to companies, nor mined for their personal business. The Government should serve us, and the ONLY reason they do this is at the Corporate bidding. Money shouldn’t buy the message, and money shouldn’t steal our rights.
TAKE BACK OUR AIRWAVES. TAKE BACK OUR PRIVACY.
8 – We have a right to Health Care, care we could purchase cheaply if we pooled our money, and demanded fair prices and a right to care for all. There is no reason that the United States should have one of the lowest infant mortality rates, and among the worst record in the world for access to healthcare. Hospitals should be non-profit, and health care should be free.
HEALTH CARE ON DEMAND IS YOUR RIGHT!!!
9 – Education is the key to the future of your children, the future of our Nation. Why should only the children of a puny elite able to afford an Ivy League education? Most Universities have turned into nothing but a money making scheme for the few Stockholders, and a way to make graduates endure massive debt when they get their degree.
Shouldn’t all kids get to go to school if they wish to? How much can you put aside in this day and age of no work, to see your kids through a degree?
HIGHER EDUCATION SHOULD BE FREE!
10 – If you want to earn a decent living, see your family healthy, strong, secure and educated there is not a vote you can make for a Democrat or a Republican at this point that can make this happen.
If all 200 million of us decided to create a “Party of the American Worker” we could run every one of them out of office and pass laws that served US, not the 74 people that make 50 million or more a year.
Think about that number. Seventy-four —yep, 74—people really run our lives and our government.
We need a clean slate here, and a government that works for US not them.
UNITED WE WIN, DIVIDED WE WILL PERISH.
DIANE GEE serves as contributing editor for The Greanville Post. She maintains a personal blog at The Wild Wild Left.
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