But, that's we got Sunday as the editor grumbled about public sector unions and their ties to the Democratic Party.
Nevermind that about 11 percent of the American workforce is unionized today. Or, that unions, at their height of "power" in the mid-1950s, represented just 36 percent of the workforce.
Obviously, by sheer percentage numbers alone, unions never had monopolistic powers attributed to them and whatever clout they had is diminishing year by year.
And yet, this editor claims that unions are solely responsible for the desolation that is Detroit today.
And that this devastation will spread across the country because of unions and Democrats.
Really?
For more enlightenment on Detroit's demise, check out this concise piece in the National Journal.
The upper midwest is called the "rust belt" for a reason. The world has passed it by.
The same could be said for today's media.
What gave rise to the muckraking journalists was the desire to expose corrupt government machine politics such as Tammany Hall, and reveal the devastating effect that corporate monopolies were having on the economy.
Ida Tarbell, through her investigative pieces in McClure's Magazine, took on the greatest capitalist of all time in this country. As one writer described it, Tarbell "brought down the world's greatest tycoon and broke up the Standard Oil monopoly."
For a defense of unions, read up on the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York. The owners of the factory were not convicted of any wrongdoing in the deaths of 146 garment workers because there were no laws protecting these workers.
Flash forward to 2013 and the horrific collapse of garment factory building in Bangladesh where more than 1,000 perished. Corporations went to Bangladesh for cheaper labor and because there is little government oversight in such things as building safety. Was it good that these workers had no union to look out for their interests?
Of course, few Americans care about anything outside our borders.
So back to our problems.
As income disparity reaches levels experienced 100 years ago, the rich are engaging in "class warfare," pitting the lower and middle classes against each other.
The greatest achievement of corporations, and their supplicants in the press, is to convince millions of Americans that their diminishing incomes can be attributed to the middle class union worker next door and not to the millionaire executives taking an ever-expanding slice of the economic pie.
Here's a crucial section of that short article:
"In May 2012, researchers from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) took a stab at calculating the overall CEO-to-worker compensation ratio with the information already available. Here’s what they found: In 2011, the average CEO’s compensation was equal to 209.4 times that of the average worker, at least when stock options were included in compensation. That was up substantially from the 18.3-to-1 ratio found in 1965, but barely half of the 411.3-to-1 found in 2000.
Nonetheless, the institute found that CEO pay had grown 725% between 1978 and 2011, while worker compensation had only increased by 5.7%. That stratospheric growth in CEO pay has correlated with an overall explosion in income inequality; whereas the top 10% of income earners in the United States controlled only about one-third of all income throughout the 1970s, they now lay claim to over half, according to a report from economist Emmanuel Saez."
Or, check out this link about how many months a typical employee must work to earn what the CEO of his or her corporation makes in a single hour.
President Obama and Pope Francis have drawn attention to this financial imbalance that threatens the future of billions on this planet.
Unions are hardly the reason for this worldwide problem.
Republicans, except for Teddy Roosevelt, have long sided with corporations as they illegally crush competition, evade most taxes and send American jobs overseas. For decades, Republicans have extended the middle finger to the working class in this country. Bend's daily newspaper editor merely flipped off a good chunk of his readership with both hands.
By the way, I've never belonged to a union or worked in the public sector.
"By the way, I've never belonged to a union or worked in the public sector."
ReplyDeleteNo, but perhaps your wife is a union member, and you're a disgruntled ex-employee of the local daily rag. There's a reason one guy is writing a weekly column in the newspaper, and getting paid to do it, and the other guy is sitting at home writing a two-bit blog.