Archive for the ‘Labor’ Category
By Thomas E. Brewton
Marxian economic dogma explains why liberal-progressives, the Obama administration in particular, push for restructuring our constitutional government to concentrate more power in the hands of labor unions and the Federal government.
Marxian economic dogma has been emphasized to an increasing degree in our colleges and universities, even in our high schools, since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal imposed state planning upon the United States in the 1930s. That emphasis became dominant in the late 1960s and 1970s. Today so many generations of teachers and students have been so thoroughly and subtly imbued with Marxian concepts that they are unaware of their ideological environment, assuming that such concepts represent exclusive truth.
Marxian doctrine leads to the assertion that private property is power and that such power is used by employers to exploit the workers. To end exploitation, government must restructure society, using progressive income taxes, high death taxes, and punitive regulation of private businesses, coupled with welfare-state entitlements.
What then are the elements of Marxian economic doctrine that underlie the Democrat/Socialist Party's socioeconomic paradigm?
First, the conception of scientific socialism, as opposed to the earlier varieties of utopian socialism. Utopian socialism had propounded broad concepts of social justice, appealing to the reason and benevolence of society. Marx and Engels dismissed this as unscientific and ineffective.
The Department of Labor has released the latest unemployment figures, and it looks like the highest peaks have been during Democratic administrations of high spending and taxing. This almost breaks the unemployment record of the Great Depression under the FDR Democratic administration!
World Net Daily reports:
Unemployment was declared to be 9.9 percent in April, but the real unemployment rate – measured to include those who want work but have given up looking and those part-time employees who prefer full-time work – hit 17.1 percent, rivaling October's 17.4 percent, the highest since the Department of Labor began keeping these statistics in 1994.
Nearly half the unemployed, 46 percent, have now been out of work for 27 weeks or longer. . .
. . . A 21 percent unemployment rate nearly reaches peak jobless rates of the Great Depression, when unemployment reached 25 percent in 1933. . .
By Thomas E. Brewton
As the proposed trade agreement with Colombia reveals, labor unions are organizations of self-centered greed, which disingenuously cloak themselves with pretense of God, country, and mom's apple pie.
President Bush, by calling for Congressional approval of the trade agreement with Colombia, is compelling liberal-progressives to choose between the high-flown, one-world internationalism to which they give lip service and kow-towing to organized labor.
Columnist Robert D. Novak described it this way in his April 4th article:
President Bush will send Congress a trade agreement next week forcing Democrats to make an unpleasant choice. Will they do the bidding of organized labor and reject a pact negotiated more than a year and a half ago with the country's strongest ally and best customer in South America?
…But to forget about a vote this year, as Pelosi wants, …would humiliate Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, a free-trader and a bulwark against the spreading influence in Latin America of Venezuela's leftist strongman, President Hugo Chávez.
Our liberal-progressive school system instructs callow youth that labor unions are agents of good and right. The facts are quite different.
The president of the United Auto Workers union has implicitly acknowledged the stark truth: industrial unions are killing American manufacturing jobs. Unions’ salvation, he says, must come from ukases promulgated by the commissars of a new socialistic, Democratic administration.
In a June 13, 2006, article by Jefrey McCracken, the Wall Street Journal reported:
United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger, acknowledging that his union confronts the toughest challenges in its 71-year history, told delegates to the UAW’s leadership convention that solutions to problems such as rising health-care costs or the rash of auto suppliers filing bankruptcy-law protection must come largely through the political process.
Union leaders expect a Democrat-socialist to win the presidency, and they expect a payoff via protectionist legislation that will reduce business profits, throwing non-union workers out of jobs and augmenting inflation, to the cost of the vast majority of citizens who are non-union members of the labor force.
by Thomas E. Brewton
American labor unions are pushing candidates for the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential nomination toward expansion of the welfare-state and massive inflation of the sort that the Great Society spawned.
After both World War I and World War II, the British Labour Party led England into its destructive liaison with socialism that destroyed British industry and reduced England to the "sick man of Europe."
Harold Meyerson's January 31, 2007, column in the Washington Post describes the behind-the-scenes power exerted by labor unions, especially the government employees unions. Their immediate goal is imposition of universal, socialized medicine, of the sort championed in 1993 by Hillary Clinton.