EVERY 30 YEARS YOU HAVE TO SWITCH SIDES
By Jon Christian Ryter
April 23, 2008
NewsWithViews.com
I was born into a working class union family. My dad, a factory worker in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, was a member of the United Mine Workers for as long as I can remember. He worked for Union Carbide until greedy tax-a-crats in Chippewa County taxed Carbide into a quick retreat from Michigan, shouting, "That's enough!" Carbide closed the plant in the mid-1960s, putting some 400 men out of work. Dad had enough time in that he was promised an equivalent job in Marietta, Ohio where he could work until he filed for retirement. He was a "pulverizer attendant" in Michigan and a "sweeper" in Ohio. It wasn't equivalent, the pay was not equal, but it saved his pension and that's all Dad was concerned about when he took the job.
Today, factories on their way to Mexico, China or Indonesia (where the industrialists' new pool of human capital lives) target American workers within five to ten years of retirement age and threatens to terminate their retirement plans and health benefits packages if they don't agree to buyouts. That's the difference 30 years makes. In the 1960s, American industrialists protected their workers, recognizing it was their sweat equity that built their business. The industrialist in the 1990s wanted to jettison the mature workers in order to cut costs. When you stop to think about it, just about every 30 years you have to switch sides.
Speaking to a very private group of rich, liberal fat cats in the trendy Pacific Heights section of San Francisco, Illinois' junior Senator Barack Obama stuck his $500 buffed leather loafers in his oversized liberal mouth last week when 61-year old Mayhill Fowler secretly recorded him as he played to the elitists in a speech that was not supposed to be heard outside the room: "You go to some of these small towns in Pennsylvania," he said, "and like a lot of small towns in the Middle West, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them..."
That statement royally ticked me off. But, for different reasons than it ticked off Queen Hillary. Clinton's playing the working class rubes in Small Town, Pennsylvania since Pennsylvania's presidential primary takes place next week and Hillary needs the votes of the rednecks with three rifles in the back window of their pickup and a rack of antlers bolted to the front chrome grill—even though she's every bit as anti-gun as Obama despite the rhetoric that her daddy taught her how to shoot when she was a little girl. But, this was good fodder for planting anti-Obama seed in the fertile soil of Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia. I was ticked off for a different reason. Sadly, not a single media talking head or Internet blogger even noticed.
Like most revisionist leftists with a gift for sleight-of-hand (or rather, sleight-of-tongue) rhetoric, Obama blamed the Clinton-Era, Democratic Congress-enacted North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] job losses on Ronald Reagan, not the co-presidency of Bill and Hillary Clinton since they started the jobs drain. Had I been Obama, I certainly would have. America seems to have forgotten who sent their jobs to Mexico and China. It was the Clintons. Obama told his liberal San Francisco donor pool that the job drain began in 1983. If that was correct Obama might have been justified in blaming it on Reagan. However, it wasn't correct.
Clearly, the economy under Jimmy Carter almost reached Depression-era levels in 1979-80, particularly for the middle class which was hardest hit by Carter's socialist economic policies from 1977 to 1981. Job growth under Reagan was reasonably solid, particularly in the exploding technology field. Changes in demand for goods and services added jobs where none had ever existed. Job growth in the Reagan years was best in the white collar, high middle income area and blue collar jobs at the bottom of the success ladder. Blue collar management and lower-tier white collar management jobs remained scarce because those were the jobs industry cut during the Carter years because the industrialists were already beginning to exploit the human capital in Southeast Asia by importing middle management "trainees" from Indonesia, India and Pakistan as the transnational bankers redefined the very nature of wealth as they prepared for the job exodus to the population-rich nations where an abundance of potential consumers needed jobs so they could buy the consumer products the replacement-market industrialized nations no longer needed.
The transnationalists who fill the campaign coffers of the most "deserving" (i.e., compliant) members of Congress tried to pressure Reagan into building a swinging door at the border that would let America's industrialists move their jobs into Mexico and return the goods they created south-of-the-border back to America's retail community without protective tariffs that would price the cheap goods out of reach of working class US consumers, tariff-free. Reagan refused. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush agreed to bully NAFTA through Congress, but the union-backed Democratic Party wasn't buying what they saw as a jobs-drain bill that would cut into labor's revenue stream. Bush-41 couldn't nudge NAFTA will a herd of elephants and a bulldozer.
In 1992, the money barons decided a herd of donkeys might have better luck than the elephants. They backed Bill Clinton that year because the Clintons agreed to build that swinging door. A deal was then cut with the AFL-CIO that would make them a UN NGO and allow them to unionize every US factory in Mexico. They shook hands on the deal, not realizing that without a Taft-Hartley law in Mexico to force corporate management into binding arbitration, collecting union dues didn't mean a whole lot. Particularly when Mexico made it clear they were not going to enact any new labor laws that would punish those bringing all of the new jobs to Mexico. The unions were hoodwinked.
Labor decided to punish the Democrats in 1994. It had been about a decade since the GOP controlled anything on Capitol Hill. In the midterm election of 1994 the Republicans captured 54 Democratic House seats and 8 Democratic Senate seats. (Republicans had not controlled the House since 1952 or the Senate since 1985.) Aside from one 2-year flip-flop in the Senate in 2000, the GOP had held Congress since 1995—until they began voting like Democrats. (You can be an "Ass" in Congress for just so long before the voters revolt.) The GOP Voter Sleep-In of 2006 returned both houses to the Democrats.
Obama continued his petty tirade against the working class for the benefit of his elitist audience in San Francisco, dismissively decrying the plight poor in the small towns in the Midwest, "And, its not surprising then, they get bitter; they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." And, without speaking the taboo words for any politician in the United States who wants to get elected, Obama fired a shot over the bow of both the 1st and 2nd Amendment. When he speaks in the public arena about his own relationship with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright (usually to offset accusations about his Islamic background), Obama sounds like a yeoman for Christ. However, when he is speaking privately to his own ilk—and does not know he is being recorded—his contempt for fundamental Christianity resonates in his voice. The "Obama blooper" was not a blooper. He did not misspeak.
Advertisement
To those on the far left—even those who campaign for re-election as Methodists, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics or whatnots—Obama's views are construed as both normal and intelligent. The views of the born-again Christian are viewed by the left as very dangerous and more threatening to liberty than Islam in the minds eye of the establishment elites.
And although she feels exactly the same about guns and Christians, the polls show Hillary Clinton regaining her 20 point lead in Pennsylvania because of Obama's gaffe. The reason the Democratic race is still up-in-the-air is not because rank-and-file Democrats can't decide who they want, but because rank-and-file Democrats don't want either of them. When you're given a choice between a cup of Kool-Aid laced with cyanide or arsenic, neither one is appealing. It's the gun to the temple that makes you choose. But, not even the rah-rah media talking heads can make the choice palatable. When John McCain starts looking presidential, you know there's nothing but trash on the other side. Had the Democrats picked Zell Miller, they would own the White House for at least 16 years.
If the Democratic candidate was anyone but Obama or Clinton, that individual would win the White House without even campaigning since George W. Bush (who thinks he sees Ronald Reagan whenever he looks in a mirror) has sold out not only his constituency but the entire nation.
On top of NAFTA, plans to grant amnesty to 18 million illegal aliens with what are quasi-grants of citizenship, the expediting of the Council on Foreign Relations' plans to merge Canada, the United States and Mexico into the North American Union, the Bush-43 Administration is pushing hard to get House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to put the vote for his Colombian free-trade agreement back on the table. Democrats said the FTA was removed from legislative consideration because Bush broke an agreement he had with the Democrats not to send bills for fast track consideration that were not approved by the majority party. The reality is that Bush has not re-authorized the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act of 2002 [TAA] that expired last year. TAA financially helps those who have lost their jobs due to free trade agreements, telling Pelosi he would work out an agreement he could sign.
Bush sent the Colombian free trade bill to Congress last week under his "fast track" authority, urging immediate action on the legislation. Pelosi took what Bush is calling "...an unprecedented step" to change the rules and deny a vote on the Colombian bill for the balance of 2008, informing the White House that she felt it might be possible to put the FTA back on the table under the right circumstances, but her concerns were centered on the worsening economy and "...we are putting the concerns of the American working family first." Pelosi admitted she is using Bush's Colombian bill as leverage to force Bush to re-authorize the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act and initiate other pieces of legislation to stimulate the economy. When you compare Bush and Pelosi, on the surface, she's become a little more conservative than she was before she became "Madam Speaker" and Bush has become a whole lot more liberal than he was before he became "Mr. President."
In a Rose Garden speech on April 16, Bush, who very clearly knows that carbon dioxide emissions are not responsible for global warming, asked Congress to enact legislation that would begin cutting greenhouse gases in 2025. Although he was not specific what type of legislation was needed, Bush said he was trying to head off court-imposed greenhouse gas caps from lawsuits recently filed by environmental groups under The Clean Air Act and The Endangered Species Act. Bush stressed that those decisions should be made by the people who are impacted through their elected representatives and not by judges based on the advocacy of special interest groups.
In his speech, Bush noted that he was opposed to every current piece of legislation on the table including the "cap and trade" proposals that would allow transnational corporations to trade pollution credits in order to ease the burden on themselves since the "cap and trade" system benefits only the Fortune 500 companies and penalizes small local or regional companies that couldn't afford to "sell" their pollution to third world companies who, in turn, would assume the blame for the pollution for money. Opponents of the "cap and trade" bills saw measures like the Lieberman-Warner Act (sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman [I-CT] and retiring Sen. John Warner [R-VA]) as anti-competition bills not anti-pollution bills since they give mega-corporations a pass while they cripple local or regional companies. James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, told reporters that the "cap and trade" measures they had seen were all disastrous.
Sen. Clinton, whose husband (along with Al Gore, Jr.) signed the Kyoto Protocol (which then, under the terms of the Law of the Nations, became binding on the United States as the UN Treaty on Global Warming—without Senate ratification) gloated over the fact that Bush was forced into a corner, saying that Bush was finally "...forced to acknowledge global warming as a problem," adding that the proposal he offered "...looks like it was written by Dick Cheney's energy task force." Tucker Bounds, a McCain spokesman said: "For those public officials like John McCain who have long stood for taking on the challenge of global climate change, getting the advocacy of the White House is an important step." If the politicians on both sides of the aisle want to solve global warming, the "fix" can't be achieved by restricting carbon dioxide emissions since global warming is caused by cyclic solar flares on the sun, not increased levels of greenhouse gases on Earth. Reducing the production of carbon dioxide will not only not solve the problem of global warming it will create two wholly new problems.
First, carbon dioxide is the "food" plants consumes to manufacture the crops we eat. Curbing carbon dioxide will decrease the food supply on Earth at a time when the world's population is growing. The net result of carbon dioxide reduction is increased starvation. Second, through photosynthesis, by absorbing carbon dioxide, plants create oxygen. Reduce carbon dioxide you reduce the quality of the air we breathe. Tinkering with nature will cause the very problems the eco-alarmists claim will result from global warming. Let the environmentalist "fix" global warming by regulating carbon dioxide as a toxic pollutant and when the world begins to starve, the eco-idiots will stand up, shouting in unison as the rest of us are gasping for breath, that they were right all along.
|
Subscribe to the NewsWithViews Daily News Alerts! |
Like I said, about every 30 years or so you have to switch sides. But, which side is which? When both sides look the same and act the same, where do you turn when you feel the need to switch?
� 2008 Jon C. Ryter - All Rights Reserved
[Read "Whatever Happened to America?"]
