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I hear you Nephew. As a veteran of the armed forces you did, as I also did, defend democracy. Or at least your understanding of it. I am certain that you did not risk life and limb to defend a form of sham democracy that mocks the middle class in an unnerving attempt to discard hard won union organizing rights.
It's happening all over the country. Your area, Sea-Tac Washington, is catching yours as we here in the Philadelphia/southern New Jersey are catching ours and as your cousin S.C. is in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is. Indeed Wisconsin is like ground zero in the attack on public unions and the right to collective bargaining.
We are all public workers who have been led to believe that our union contracts and collective bargaining with management is the existential "being and ground" of workplace democracy. We have been fed the belief (soothing ideology) that our hard, dedicated work is actually valued and should be rewarded with reasonable salary, an array of work related benefits, including broad health care coverage, and a comfortable, affordable retirement pension. Moreover, for the past few years most of our union bargaining units have done their fair share in sacrificing some material gains in contract negotiations in our willingness to accept the not-so-rosy economic facts as they are on the ground. As an example my own teacher's bargaining unit has not had a new contract in almost 3 years and our co-share payments for medical insurance has ballooned tripling from what it was in the same period. Yet in making the sacrifices we never envisioned that our right to collectively bargain for our workplace rights would now be put in jeopardy.
Our state governments want to balance their collective budget shortfalls on our working class heads rather than tax the rich to even the score in a democratic show of equal pain for all rather that no pain for the few.
This strategy is a re-affirmation and renewed declaration of class warfare for it does nothing to make the rich and affluent share the burden with the rest of us. Also, as the cutbacks and job damages take hold, the most vulnerable of the poor, fixed income seniors and needy children and families among us will suffer disproportionately; many will, of course, die faster from disease, sickness, lack of proper healthcare, hunger, and homelessness. On the already mean and dangerous streets ion the 'hoods and trailer parks of our nightmares we'll incraesingly hear the angry gun shots of the paranoid suicidal, the spaced out madmen, the women/child abusers, the bands of haters who prey on the weak and the massive armies of drunk, drugged doped, unemployed urbanites who exist at the very periphery of the "good, moral and/or God fearing" society as it is "supposed" to be now and who will only get worst as things are allowed to deteriorate in the coming period.
Not necessarily to knock schooling, but mind you we have also been led to believe that education would be that which would save the masses of working people from economic dislocation and the pains of disruption. However, the truth is that an educated work force may or may not lead to overall economic success for that work force. Such success depends on other equal factors, including the power of elite, oligarchic dominance over capitalism that seeks always to keep from a democratically distribution of the rewards of profit-taking and the lack of competition under conditions of monopoly. I know socialism was not capitalism but did we did not learn well the lessons taught a few years back with the collapse of the old Soviet empire and the Eastern European NATO bloc? Over 90% of those populations were well educated; many with advanced degrees that put our American education system to shame in fields like mathematics and engineering. But those old socialist systems had no comparable employment for the educated masses and they had bad political set ups with respect to individual liberties. Ditto for what's happening now in many of the Middle Eastern nations where education finds itself demanding economic change from stagnation to betterment, but the resources are hoarded by an elite that must be shook up in order to hear the masses.
Today, we have highly educated public workers in our own country who are beginning to be treated like the mostly unlettered "loafs" of yesteryear's uneducated, but hard working and unionized, industrial working class that ran America's industrial apparatus in such a way that our nation became the world's most prosperous.
Seems that working class people like ourselves are being made to pay for the great financial fraud perpetrated by Wall Street from 2003-2008. That grand theft of corporate pirates left middle class taxpayers (us workers) to pay out almost $4 trillion to bail out the thieves who run much of private, big business America. Both Republican and Democratic administrations were implicated in that massive bailout. Now we "the people" part of our "democracy" must foot the pain while corporate thugs continue to get pay raises and cushy dividend rewards for running the economy into the ground.
We have got to re-educate ourselves to the new realities of the necessity of class struggle in order to advance our working class interests or we, as a class, will certainly be driven into the $2 to $10 bucks an hour economic ground that our management, owning and ruling class would love to bury us under ... and end up like that vast pool of "guest working, illegal alien" Mexican migrants from south of the border.
The so-called "New Normal" of economic reality being advanced by the Tea Party catering Republican led statehouses (and some Democratic ones to boot) is really the same old attempt by the haves to rip off and set back the progress of the have-less and the have nots.
Don't be duped then. Defend democracy yes, but fight elitism, plutocracy, oligarchy and aristocracy to death!
Peace then ... my Nephew. Love to family. Unk.
