Bitter?

This is a great post over at the "Silenced Majority Portal: for Informed comment, political humor, and the pursuit of fun." blog

Bitter
Nothing in US History would have EVER changed if people had not been embittered, angry, upset & outraged at the status quo.

No Declaration of Independence.
Think the colonists weren't royally pissed off at the British and King George III? After the first couple of flowery paragraphs it's basically a long list of gripes & grievances against ol' Georgy Boy.

No Abolitionist Movement.
Think Frederick Douglass & William Lloyd Garrison & Wendell Phillips & John Brown were not OUTRAGED at the horrors & brutality of slavery?

No Emancipation of Slaves.
Think slaves just accepted their lot? In fact it wasn't Lincoln or the 13th Amendment - it was the slaves who freed the slaves (see Eric Foner, Ira Berlin, etc).

No Populist Movement.
Google "1892 Populist Party Platform" for some wonderful rhetoric of outrage!

No Progressive Movement.
Think Upton Sinclair was not outraged? Jane Addams? Emma Goldman?

No Labor Movement.
Think working people gracefully accepted being ground into the dust by the bosses every day of their lives?

No Vote for Women.
Think women were not embittered by their exclusion from the nation's political life?

No New Deal.
Think people weren't royally pissed off during the catastrophe of the Great Depression?

No Civil Rights Movement.
Think MLK was a "dreamer"? That SNCC came out of complacency with Jim Crow? The whole thing was born of nothing more than anger, outrage, embitterment, and HOPE.

No Vote for Black People.
Think it was white people's generosity of spirit that extended the right to vote to African Americans?

No Environmental Movement.
Think environmentalism emerged as a full-blown social movement from the 1970s to the present because people were not incensed about all the crud in the water, air, and earth?
(image from OPOL; message from Docudharma/link to be added)

Republicrats! My new tag

needed to try out the new tag, Republicrats, and in doing so,
found a rather cool Blog, Politics in the Zeros, with this image



From

Free Trade's working victims, Bangladesh's workers cannot afford rice, John McCain on free trade

I would call the price changes, which followed the high price of oil, as a crime against humanity - Dr Sajjad Zohir, Dhaka Economic Research Group

After 7 weeks, American Axle says the UAW offer to end the strike is not good enough, while it threatens to leave the USA for good.

Do you blame them if, thanks to "Free Trade", they can go to the lowest bidding country, where workers can not even afford to buy rice at $.40 a pound?

The American dream was sold out, at the end side of this article I add some information about Hillary's husband, her campaign strategist and John McCain's very ugly record's on protecting American workers.


Food lines have become longer as prices have gone up, Fights over food frequently break out in the queues

Bangladesh faces food crisis

From BBC (4/10/08) :

There is a simple enough way of judging how serious Bangladesh's food crisis has become this year - it is to count the changing number of people queuing up to buy government-subsidized rice each day.

As the weeks have passed and the sun above Dhaka has become stronger, so the queues are now forming earlier, and more and more people are joining them.

The shops are little more than bamboo and sheet-metal sheds set up on patches of waste ground, and the men working in them are soldiers of the Bangladesh Rifles. This unit's normal job is to guard the country's borders. But for months now it has been helping preserve the country's stability by selling cheap food to the poor.

The rice they sell is three-quarters of the market price.

Originally the shops saw the poorer class of people, the rickshaw pullers and day laborers, but recently the higher paid, such as teachers, security guards and government workers are on the line waiting to get rice from the government subsidized shops. Bangladesh is known for it's garment factories, whose clothes are exported to such outfits as Levis and H&M among others, but factory owners are reluctant to raise wages due to stay competitive with China.

Now you might think that we are talking a lot of money for rice, but in fact the wages are so low in the country that the working class must stay in line, often fighting with other people to get the staple food in their country, rice, for 3/4 of the going rate.

So, what exactly is the going rate*?

Almost 2 lb's of rice sells for around $0.94 United States dollars.

Even if the family needed 40 pounds of rice, at the regular price, thats only $20

Working class people, who are making the products which were once made in the United states are so underpaid by these multi-national corporations that they cannot even afford rice.

The shoppers are no longer just rickshaw pullers and day-labourers, as they were in January, but government workers, security guards and teachers.

Instead of two orderly queues, one of men, the other of women, there are now often four queues, and a scrum of frustrated people at the front.

"The price rise has been really hard on the people of Bangladesh," Milon Das, a primary school teacher, said.

"Though I am a teacher, my salary is low, and I cannot afford rice at the normal markets. This is our country's biggest problem."

Social unrest has been predicted if the situation worsens, predicts a former government minister

"There will be chaos, there will be demonstrations, there will be muggings, there will be hijackings, there will be strikes," Mohammed Akhtar Hossein, who works as a security guard at a luxury block of flats, said.

"If people don't have food in their stomachs they will go out into the streets to take whatever they can because they have to survive."

This is the cost of Free Trade

The cost of Free Trade, it is destroying the entire planet. Almost 500 textile mills in the United States have closed their doors for good here in America since Bill Clinton slammed the Bush written NAFTA into law against Congress, Bush Jr. has been adding Free Trade agreements all along, Now Bush has been trying to slam the Colombian Free Trade Agreement through Legislature and with a mostly partisan Congressional vote to slow the Fast Track status of the agreement, he almost accomplished his task.

I'm not saying that this is a Dem/Rep thing, but you can tell who stands to gain by the agreement, or is too stupid to realize that extending Free Trade to the absolute worst country for a worker isn't a good idea, you can see them by their NO vote to slow down the fast track decision on the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Take a look at the tally here, Republicans are in italic.

As a matter of fact Bill Clinton has made a lot of money speaking in favor of Colombia Free Trade and Hillary's campaign strategist has been at meetings lobbying for the agreement.

John McCain is no winner either, he has stated he is a "free trader", he also voted in favor of NAFTA, CAFTA and other bad trade deals.

[1]McCain Has Voted for Every Other Bad Trade Agreement That Has Come Up. McCain votes in support of any and all trade agreements regardless of their negative impacts on U.S. workers. He voted for trade agreements with Oman, Singapore, Chile and Morocco, among others, as well as for Fast Track bills to make it easier for the president to enact trade agreements without strong worker protections.[2]

McCain in 1999: “I Would Negotiate a Free Trade Agreement with Almost Any Country.” “If I were president, I would negotiate a free trade agreement with almost any country willing to negotiate fairly with us.” [3]

And John McCain has not protected workers from the ill affects of these agreements

McCain Supported President Bush’s Outsourcing Efforts. McCain voted to allow overseas outsourcing of government contracts after President Bush’s economic advisers released a report saying America should outsource its jobs. [4]

McCain Voted Against Limiting Tax Breaks to Companies That Re-Import Foreign Manufactured Goods. He voted against a bill to tax multinational companies on income from foreign factories when goods are shipped back to the United States and to require companies to notify employees and give a reason before they move their jobs overseas. [5]

McCain Supported Waiving and Weakening Buy American Laws. McCain voted to allow the Secretary of Defense to waive Buy American laws for defense systems and place our defense manufacturing industry in jeopardy. He also voted to exempt defense goods from six European countries from Buy American requirements that traditionally have required most military equipment and defense systems to be manufactured in the United States. [6]

McCain Voted to Allow Unsafe Foreign Trucks on U.S. Roads. McCain voted against an amendment to prohibit Mexican trucks from operating beyond a limited border zone because they are not held to the same safety standards as U.S. trucks. [7]

McCain Abstained from Voting to Protect Steel Jobs. McCain abstained from a vote to filibuster a bill to protect steelworker jobs from illegal dumping after 10,000 steelworkers lost their jobs. [8]

McCain Voted Against Providing Health Insurance for Employees and Retirees of Bankrupt Steel Companies. McCain voted against a measure that provided temporary health insurance assistance to retirees of bankrupt steel companies. [9]

The EPI (Economic Policy Institute), states in part "since China entered the WTO in 2001, job loss has increased to an average of 353,000 per year. U.S. jobs"[1]

NAFTA was the beginning of the Global adjustment which we are all now seeing with our own eyes. Current administration bullying our jobs away with henchmen on both sides are doing everything in their power to make it worse.

---

Notes: *from the above article "The price of a kilogram of coarse rice, the staple food of Bangladesh's poor, has more than doubled over the past 12 months, to about $0.60 (30p)."
.60 Euros = 0.94938 U.S. dollars
1 kilogram = 35.2739619 ounces
[1] John McCain Revealed [2] S. 33569, Vote #190, 6/29/06; H.R. 2739, Vote #318, 7/31/03; H.R. 2738, Vote #319, 7/31/03; H.R. 434, Vote #353, 11/3/99; H.R. 3009, Vote #115, 5/16/02, Vote #117, 5/21/02, Vote #207, 8/1/02; S. 1269, Vote #292, 11/4/97 [3] (Speech to the National Press Club, 5/20/99) [4] S.1637, Vote #32, 3/4/04 [5] S.1637, Vote #83, 5/5/04 [6] S. 2400, Vote #135, 6/22/04; S. 1050, Vote #191, 5/21/03 [7] H.R. 2299, Vote #252, 7/26/01 [8] H.R. 975, Vote #178, 6/22/99 [9] S.Amdt. 3433, Vote #117, 5/21/02

Did unions drop the ball ignoring Edwards?

Excerpt of the opinion piece, which a lot of us were wondering about:

The Glorious Future that American Unions Walked Away From
by Ian Welsh at HuffingtonPost.com

Unions in America have been in a decline for over 60 years. Union membership has dropped from almost 35% of all workers in 1945 to less than 15% today. In fact, union membership has declined to almost exactly the same percentage as it was in 1930 before FDR took power and encouraged the growth of unions. The first crucial battle the unions lost came after FDR died, when over Truman's veto the Taft-Hartly Act was passed in 1947. Truman called the Taft-Hartly Act a "slave labor bill".

Since then unions have lost critical battle after battle; the mainline old unions centered around industrial concerns like GM and Ford have shrunk to a tiny fraction of their former self; and despite the efforts of the SEIU unions and others, new economy workers mostly have not been organized.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), created by the Wagner Act in 1935 as independent agency of United States Governments holds the official mandate to conduct elections for labor union representation and to investigate and remedy unfair labor practices. Under the Bush administration, the NLRB has:

• made it impossible for large numbers of workers to join unions(pdf);
• potentially reclassified many workers as supervisors (including many nurses) in order to remove them from unions;
• passed numerous rulings which treat employers in one way, and unions in another.

Unions have spent the last 7 years under assault by the Bush NLRB.

The union movement, it is fair to say, is in many respects in its weakest position in over 60 years.

Another 4 or 8 years of a Republican presidency could doom American unions, pushing them below 10% and subjecting them to more and more hostile NLRB rulings, which will cripple what ability they have to organize. Even a moderate Democratic president who halts the slide at the NLRB but doesn't reverse it will leave unions in a shaky situation....(continued with paragraph omissions)

All of the Republican candidates would be awful for labor, and differ only by the degrees of the horror they would unleash.

Amongst the Democratic candidates it's safe to say that Hilary Clinton, who has as her main advisor a union buster and whose husband did very little for unions, would be a largely status quo President. Her board would be decent, she'd be bad but not awful on trade, and she wouldn't sink a lot of personal capital into union issues.

As with many things with Obama, it's hard to determine how good or bad he'd be, but one has to have their doubts about a Democratic candidate who argued that union advertisements in Iowa were unacceptable, and who acted as if union money were the equivalent of corporate money. Certainly there are those who see unions and corporation as little different--but they aren't friends of unions.

John Edwards has spent the last four years working with unions, walking their picket lines and making their cause his. He's clearly the most pro-union of the three remaining candidates; his primary issue is economic justice and he believes that corporations have too much power. His campaign, from the very beginning, was predicated on union support.

But unions didn't reciprocate..... (continued with paragraph omissions)

Neither Clinton (experience) nor Obama (non-partisan change) will come into office with a mandate to help unions.

I can only assume that labor read too many polls and made too many political calculations. Unsure of who would win they went with the "inevitable" candidate (Clinton) instead of the one who had spent 4 years working for and with them. And as a result, if Obama or Clinton win, Unions are going to get a Democratic president who appreciates their help (just like Bill Clinton did) but who isn't really willing to go all out for them (just like Bill Clinton didn't).

The irony here is that if labor had taken a strong stand and put their own best interests first instead of triangulating and currying political favor, the strongest pro-labor candidate would be in the lead today.

Unions would have had a good chance to elect a massively pro-union president--who would have owed them his presidency.

Imagine that alternate world.

Now instead, imagine what four more years without solid support for all American workers and radical reform at the NLRB will mean for you, your pocketbook, and your family.

Decisions like these are what has made the American union movement what it is today.

Full opinion piece can be found here

Big Media forcing candidates down our throat as biggest threat to workers and possibly our country gets ignored.

14 years and 2 days after the NAFTA agreement took affect we are at a juncture in this country. We have Big Media telling us that only their front runners have a chance to get elected into office, to the point that there is almost no mention of Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul. Why would that be? In fact ABC and Fox are having Paul excluded from the New Hampshire GOP debate. But what do Paul and Kucinich have in common? Neither of them are members or have heavy ties to the Council Of Foreign Relations. Who? According to WorldNetDaily.com

" just discussion forums for movers and shakers, or, as critics have long alleged, secret societies shaping a new world order from behind the scenes. On that last point at least, no one could challenge the critics: All these groups operate in considerable secrecy, away from the scrutiny of the American public.

According to a variety of sources, the following presidential candidates are either members of one of the groups or have strong ties: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, John McCain, John Edwards, Fred Thompson, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson."

Well seeing that the CFR's newest campaign is the North American Union and the end of the sovereignty of the United States as we know it. Having people like Paul and Kucinich who have repeatedly called for a repeal of the illegal NAFTA agreement, and complete withdrawal from the WTO, one can only wonder why they are hidden from the main stream.

Is this all mumbo-jumbo conspiracy theorist jargon? You have to make up your own mind. But before you do take a look at how badly the media acts when someone threatens it's interests, in 1998 two award winning reporters in Florida were about to air a series of stories of the dangers of Bovine Growth Hormones (which winds up in the milk we feed our families) on Fox's local affiliate, pressure from the hormone maker Monsanto led Fox TV to fire the two reporters and sweep under the rug much of what they discovered but were never allowed to broadcast.

Doesn't anyone besides myself notice that the Teamsters defending our borders from Mexican domiciled trucks isn't on the front page of every newspaper, or that when 28,000 workers who were once misclassified become union members isn't the lead story, and in fact, not even mentioned on the mainstream media?

Please don't get me wrong here, I neither believe in everything Kucinich and Paul say, but getting rid of all these anti-American worker agreements would be a good start and I love pointing out what doesn't get mentioned in the Main Stream. I truly believe that we need more views from different political parties.

It's our world and only through the distribution of opposing idea's can we be individuals with all possibilities in front of us. Educate yourself, open your mind and have your own opinions, don't let Big Media do it for you. Where are we headed?

"My relationship to power and authority is that I'm all for it. People need somebody to watch over them. Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave."- Arnold Schwarzenegger 1990

Alas, American Idol is starting up again, gotta go dumb myself down to tolerate the upcoming election and the choices they leave us with. Big kudos to Letterman and Worldwide Pants for supporting the Writers Guild strikers, now I hope the WGAE can settle their own labor dispute with their Newspaper Guild Of NY writers. Oh, and lo and behold, Mike Huckabee has decided to cross the picket on the Tonight show, wheres the story in that?

*noteworthy recent news articles our candidates should be more involved in

American workers are laboring longer hours

Labor Unions and Taft-Hartley

*Some Sources

obviously YouTube and Google

BigLabor.com - what got me thinking about this

Democracy Now- Long video with Lou Dobbs interview - Worth the view

Democracy Now on
Atrocity-Linked U.S. Officials Advising Democratic, GOP Presidential Frontrunners

RealChange.org/

NewsWithViews.com/

CarolinaJournal.com/

WorldNetDaily.com

Freedom.org

PRNewsWire.com

Blog.AFL-CIO.org