The following is comment on the Rio Grande Foundation’s call to end collective bargaining and support Governor Walker of Wisconsin.
Why shouldn’t workers have collective bargaining, the behind-closed-doors process by which civil service workers, including teachers, secure pay, health and pension benefits? These are your fire fighters, the people at the sewage plant, the EMS, the police, jail guards, teachers, custodians. These are working people who are trying to feed their kids and not get killed on the job. They are the infrastructure of the community!!
Why is the tea parody so invested, all over the country, in gutting unions, taking away workers’ protections and rights?
My guess is it’s the same model as private prisons: Contribute to local politicians’ campaigns, give them a little cash under the table, ensure the politicians give the McPrisons tax incentives to build in local communities (in other words, outside corporations, who will take their profits out of the communities, sucking up resources and infrastructure from those communities without paying their fair share) and being paid by taxpayers to provide a “service,” not at a rate less expensive than that community could have provided it, but probably at cost plus, just like the Halliburton tape I posted here.
In the case of prisons, corrupted law enforcement officers will make sure the McPrison factories are full with the surplus population that cannot find living-wage jobs, imported from all over the United States, to areas so remote their low-income family members can’t possibly visit them, know their conditions or maintain family and parental ties.
These McJobs the local government will have to contract for, once the unions are busted, will be low-paying, low-skilled, subsistence jobs. Working people will have to apply for food stamps, WIC, HUD and Medicaid, because they won’t be able to pay for everything they need at such low wages.
Private contracting companies would provide fire, ambulance, police, education, libraries, clerical… basically, at taxpayers’ expense, private companies would control the infrastructure of towns, municipalities, counties and even major cities, all over the country. We would no longer have any say, as citizens, as to how our tax money would be spent. We would not be able to maintain a decent standard of living for our citizens.
And almost all of the profit would go to corporations and Wall Street, sucked out of our communities.
Why is it OK to make one’s profits as a parasite on the American people?
Your corporations have taken most of the decent jobs overseas; you’re gutting our educational system, so we can’t even compete economically.
And now, in your last-ditch efforts to make more and more and more profit, you are, finally and ultimately, literally sucking the life blood out of the very taxpayers your damn corporations feed off of!
Corporate welfare
The largest federal welfare program in the United States is corporate welfare.
Hell, the tear gas used against the Egyptian people by their own government comes from U.S. companies, paid by the Egyptian government: money supplied by taxpayers in the form of foreign “aid.” Fifty percent of the Egyptian people are illiterate; there is no money for schools, but weapons, bought from U.S. corporations? Sure!
I have no heat, running water or sewage. I’m seven miles from the nearest loaf of bread and there’s no public transportation! And you want to take away my low income heating assistance? I almost died this winter!
But having an eight-hour work day, weekends, sick pay, collective bargaining, medical benefits, protections from exploitation and abuse: These are “socialist,” I suppose?
I don’t want my EMT trained by McAmbulance! I don’t want the Rio Grande polluted until it kills people!
I want to live in a place where kids can learn, fires get put out, people are good to each other and care about each other because they’re members of the same community, with each others’ best interests at heart.
When we privatize every damn job everywhere, we’ll be living like those poor workers in freaking China!
Why are you not going after these defense contractors? They are the welfare queens! Don’t you care that your grandchildren are going to be buried in garbage, toxic waste, poisons, carcinogens?
What we need is more protection for more workers, not less! This insane union busting is going to turn the whole darn country into one of those maqiladoras in Mexico.
Rogi Riverstone survives brain injuries and post traumatic stress, is a self-educated, independent radio producer, writer and blogger living in a rural area, 50 mile from Albuquerque. She is struggling out of the trauma and loss of a robbery that has left her destitute and isolated, in substandard conditions.