As Wisconsin Goes...

During a players' strike against the National Football League, my father remarked, "I'm all for the workers, but these guys are not workers." By which he meant, they were millionaires squabbling with billionaires.


Some of the same lack of sympathy was apparent in Wisconsin, and I hear it right here in New Hampshire. People quote newspaper stories about the lavish pensions retiring police officers in Boston get. They complain about the heavy burden on town budgets for pensions for retired police and firemen. They point out these men and women are getting these pensions at age 50 and going out and getting other jobs. They became police at age 20, retired at 50 and never went to college. 


These same citizens complain about public school teachers who are burnt out, recycling lessons for years, incompetent and destructive to children, and these  public employees in schools cannot be fired because of union contracts. And that particularly burns because non union citizens live with the knowledge that they themselves go to work every day and are just one back talk away, one angry outburst away from being escorted off the premises, carrying  all their stuff in a cardboard box,  escorted by security. The average citizen is non unionized, especially in New Hampshire, and lives at the pleasure not of some royal monarch but at the pleasure of some financial monarch.


And so the average citizen resents the protected job and the security of the unionized public employee. He resents the union worker who works for a non public, private employer, too, because money from the Koch brothers has been used to "educate" him that unions are what have made General Motors unable to compete with Toyota and Volkswagen.  


So unions are bad for the country, and bad for the economy  and only good for the few unionized workers. The sweet deals they've negotiated for themselves show how greedy these workers are. The workers don't deserve these good things. Somehow, the owners and managers and bosses, who also benefit from the profits of the company are not seen to be greedy or to be benefiting unjustly.


The average citizen resents the power the government has over him, but he accepts the power the financial monarchs have over him.  If his boss fires his coworker, well, we all know we have to please the boss. Doesn't matter if the firing was fair or made sense or not. That's the way it is.


You really have to hand it to the Republicans: They have "educated" American citizens to internalize the point of view of the bosses, and to believe what is good for the bosses, and what is bad for the worker is good for the nation. 


Take your hat off to them.  (Just the way you do for the Queen.)