Week of 10/11/2010

The Perverse Fixation on Unions
– by David Matthews 2

Have you ever heard of the White Elephant trick? It’s a doozy!

If I were to tell you to not think about a white elephant, you will. No matter how hard you try, you’ll think of a white elephant. In fact, the harder you try, the more times you’ll THINK of a white elephant.

Apparently conservatives, neo-conservatives, and even some libertarians have the same problem when it comes to unions. They just can’t get unions out of their heads. Everything… EVERYTHING… every single thing that deals with politics has to involve unions, either in thwarting them, starving them, denying them, or otherwise attacking them relentlessly.

Conservatives and neo-conservatives will sabotage critical legislation, potentially sabotaging the nation itself, in order to get some sort of assurance that a union won’t get any kind of gain from it. National tragedy? People in desperate need of assistance? Lives at risk? Sorry, but you’ll just have to suffer because cons and neo-cons would rather see you DEAD than to have your needed emergency aid touched by even ONE union worker!

One has to wonder what kind of depraved mind would play such games with the lives of others… and then the answer comes automatically when you realize that we’re talking about a group of people operating with pretty much zero accountability, and not much can be said about their honor or ethics either.

But seriously, these guys have UNIONS on the brain! Every time you talk about reforming a costly system, bringing aid to people that desperately need it, they can’t help but then blurt out “And what are the UNIONS getting out of this? You can’t get a program passed without the UNIONS benefiting from it!”

These are the same people that had no qualms whatsoever bailing out Wall Street and the mega-banks, but then screamed bloody murder over giving even one penny of bailout money to automakers because it’s “payback for the unions”.

You can’t talk about job creation without them screaming about “UNION JOBS!” Oh yes, you can build houses using questionable workers from other nations, you can import workers to fill American jobs, and you can rubber-stamp deals that would outsource American jobs overseas, but you can’t talk about creating a single job in this country without them accusing you of creating UNION jobs.

Knock it off!

Do you hear me? KNOCK THE HELL OFF!

I am so sick of hearing about UNIONS!

Do you know what a union is? Really? Truly?

A union is nothing more than a poor substitute for good management.

Seriously, that is all that a union is, stripped down of all pretenses and platitudes; it is an organization that was created on behalf of employees to combat the abuses of really BAD managers. Every union that exists today can be traced back to a series of workplace abuses that did not have to happen, and would not happen if those businesses had management that was more appreciative of their workers. I know that sounds overly simplistic, and of course there were other factors involved in the rise and growth of unions as a political force, but if the business community basically treated it as an inside challenge to do better instead of as an outside invasion, there wouldn’t be such a thing as unions today.

But, hey, this really isn’t about unions, but rather it is about the cons and neo-cons using the unions as their perpetual bogeymen and ready-made excuses to destroy this nation.

Now it’s sort of strange that for a political faction with a mad-on hatred for unions, they somehow don’t necessarily share that revulsion with ALL unions. For instance, they don’t seem to have any problems with police unions. They can slam teamsters, dock workers, automakers, flight attendants, pilots, teachers, government workers, but somehow they tolerate police unions. Not only that, but they are seemingly oblivious to unions in professional sports, and they stop short of throwing a party when Hollywood unions go on strike. If unions are such the bane of existence that they paint them to be with such a broad stroke, why still support or otherwise root on certain unions?

Well there’s a reason why. The reason is this: these guys attack and otherwise demonize the unions that THEY would otherwise have on their side.

Remember Ronald Reagan’s presidential win in 1980? Well some of us do. Anyway, Reagan won because he managed to get the support of the Teamsters. Yes, that’s right; the man that was considered the ICON of conservativism actually sought out and got help from a UNION to become President of the United States!

Okay, so some of you are saying “Yeah, but that’s thirty years ago! That was a whole different time!”

No, not really. Because not long afterwards, Reagan pissed off union groups through the Air Traffic Controllers strike.

So… suck up to the unions when they can HELP you and then piss all over them when they can’t. That seems to be the game plan here.

But then again, there’s another reason why unions get demonized… and that is the company that the conservatives keep.

Think about it… what part of America do unions mostly represent? Hard working lower-to-middle-class people! Sure some unions bosses are in the upper echelons, but the base are really on the lower-half of the financial pyramid.

And how about the people who constitute “the base” for conservatives and neo-conservatives? Wall Street, Big Corporate, the super-wealthy, business owners and managers… and, yes, some middle-class people, but for the most part they spend their time with the upper-half of that same financial pyramid.

Oh sure they love to praise “small business owners”, but when you realize that under the rules that conservatives and neo-conservatives helped to put in that “small” is usually in name only. I mean, does anyone consider the Chicago Tribune to be a “small business”? And yet it is. In fact a lot of big multi-million dollar companies get away with being declared “small businesses” thanks to those same rules. So while you and I consider “small businesses” to be mom-and-pop stores, understand that the cons and neo-cons are thinking more Wall Street than Main Street.

Yes, I’m talking about class warfare here.

But this isn’t class warfare from the bottom-up as has been traditionally perceived over the past century. No, this is old-OLD-school class warfare… subjugation from the top-down. The people with the money and the power want their cake and eat it too. It’s really that simple.

The people up top don’t like unions. They don’t want unions to exist. But they also don’t want to do the things that would make unions needless. They don’t want to curb their own abusive incompetence as managers, thinking instead that being an unrepentant a-hole is somehow a good thing. Yes, denial of their own status as oversized sphincters also plays a role in this.

So they “contribute” (purchase) a group of parasites that promise to put the hurt to unions. They turn to that group of parasites that put up obstacles to unions and give them as much power as possible to subjugate the bottom-half of the economic pyramid, mostly because it is easier (and cheaper) to do that than to actually BE effective managers.

The problem, then, is that those same parasites now know how to press the buttons of their economic “friends”. All they have to do is say “unions” and they get all the money and support they want.

Of course it should also be mentioned that unions then “contribute” (purchase) their own gang of parasites that promise to give them more and more power and to cement their own position in the business world. And they too are often led around by those same parasites come election time.

But let’s get brutally honest here… this whole issue with unions, both as the convenient bogeymen and as a social group, is a NEEDLESS matter! As much as the people up top refuse to admit it, the unions were CREATED by their own abusive incompetence. And as long as they REFUSE to admit that fact, they empower their own parasites in politics to use unions as their ready-made scapegoats and political reaction.

Thus we get to the real reason why those political parasites and their special interest enablers are so fixated on unions… because it gets a rise out of the upper-crust and gets them to open up their pocketbooks without actually doing anything to get rid of the unions. They certainly don’t want to tell their “friends” what it would really take to deal with the subject, because it then deprives them of their leverage.

Listen, folks, the business world can get rid of unions all on their own. There is no big secret to it. It doesn’t require politicians or their enablers. It doesn’t require new laws or regulations or even the removal of laws or regulations. It can even be summed up in three simple words: STOP BEING A-HOLES!

But I suppose that is too much to ask for, isn’t it?