Posted by
Playful Walrus on Thursday, January 31, 2008 3:36:49 PM
At least, that is according to a
letter to the Pasadena Star-News written by J.O. Fitzgerald of Arcadia.
Fitzgerald writes:
Republican politicians in concert with the Bush-Cheney administration are responsible for the following over the last seven years:
1. Implemented by any and all methods, a persistent series of global trade scams to enrich the few and impoverish the many.
I would be curious to see the specifics of this. I tend to be for free trade. True free trade doesn’t really require agreements. But perhaps the “few” enriched are the people who have the ambition and creativity to take advantage of what is out there. It is a myth, though, that businesspeople get rich by impoverishing people.
2. Allowed rich campaign donors to take over the Republican party.
What have they done differently in this regard from the Democrats?
3. Made decent health care a luxury item for the American people.
Really? I have decent health care and I’m not rich. Walk into almost any American hospital, and you have access to some of the best health care in the world, regardless of who you are. Health care costs are largely up to health care professionals and insurers, with some costs artificially inflated through red tape from government regulation and from monopolies, including labor union monopolies. Very little of this is the fault of recent GOP elected officials.
4. Turned a blind eye to the re-emergence in America of sweatshops and child labor in everything from the clothing industry to Wal-Mart.
I’d really like to see some examples of this. How can Bush-Cheney put children to work when they are busy bombing them, as the Left charges?
5. Subverted the rights of workers to organize.
When are where? We've had no trouble organizing. We just organized a Superbowl pool.
6. Unlawfully re-classified millions of employees as "independent contractors," leaving them with no work benefits or labor rights.
Unlawfully, huh? How do they get away with that? And independent contractors can negotiate their working conditions and enough compensation to cover their lifestyles. It isn’t the President’s job to do it for them.
7. Converted the National Labor Relations Board into an anti-labor tool for corporations.
I love all of these assertions. Were they translated from Spanish from the union mailers?
8. Stopped enforcement of America's wage and hour laws.
When and where? I want to know so that I can open up a business and force children to work for me for $2 an hour for 16 hours straight.
9. Perverted our bankruptcy laws to allow interests to breach their union contracts.
I don’t know where this stuff is coming from.
10. Finally, downsized and off-shored American middle-class jobs.
They did? As I recall, the only jobs that the Administration and Congress are responsible for are Federal government jobs. So was the Pentagon moved to Mexico? If a business CHOOSES to relocate facilities, what is the Federal government supposed to do to stop them? Businesses are supposed to just stick around no matter how costly and difficult it becomes to operate, when they can do more and do it less expensively elsewhere?
There is a letter above this one that talks about parental responsibility in education. Perhaps if someone gets a good education, they can get a job where they won’t be forced to join a union, and they won’t live in constant fear that they’re services are so useless that they need the President of the United States to keep them employed by executive order.