It Came From Mills' Facebook Page!!! Part Deux

1. I didn't discuss George Meaney because I've never heard of him. Am i safe in assuming he was against public employee unions because, like FDR, he felt workers shouldn't have the right to shut down the government with strikes? No problem. There is no public employee union in the country that has the right to strike. That's why all these teachers are using sick days. Right to strike is the first thing they give up in these contracts. As far as the danger of public employees electing their nominal bosses and gaining too much power that way... That's simply insane. Have you noticed how public workers go from a tiny percentage of the people when you're talking about their benefits to some kind of electoral majority when you're talking about their influence on elections? But it wouldn't matter if FDR and George Meaney were God and Moses when they said those things. Union members are people too, and they are citizens of the US. The constitution guarantees them the right to assembly and the right to free speech, they don't have to give up their citizenship rights to get a government job. If they want to join a union they can.

I keep saying "a deal's a deal" because in every other aspect of American life, the deal is sacred. It is only working people who can get screwed out of what they deserve by the other side simply tearing up their deal. And I compared teacher salaries (or prison guard salaries, or truck driver salaries, or lawyers salaries, all of whom work for the state) to CEO salaries, because you keep comparing them to the bottom rung, to people who flip burgers or work at Wal-Mart. Both comparisons are kind of unreasonable.

CEO's of small companies do a little bit of everything. They negotiate with vendors, they keep the books, they try to squeeze a little more from clients/customers, at a small company the CEO makes every decision that's above the level of simple day to day operations.

At a big company, like say, AIG, all of these things are delegated. They have whole departments devoted to keeping the books, teams of lawyers to negotiate contracts, the CEO is just the guy that approves their decisions. And plays a lot of golf. That was the Enron CEO's entire defense. That he didn't know what was going on was illegal, he depended on the assurances of the CFO and the outside auditing company, Arthur Anderson. He just signed his name to their work because they told him it was all right. Yeah, the CEO is the guy holding the bag. But it's a bag filled with money and get out of jail free cards. I'm not saying they should make $19,000 a year and be grateful. But, really, they have an easy job compared to teachers. And notice how nobody's saying we need to cut CEO salaries, or executive salaries, or corporate profits to balance the budgets. As you yourself say about public employees why shouldn't the recession affect them?

But, honestly, nobody IS saying they should be immune to the recession, they're WILLING TO NEGOTIATE. They're even willing to make the fiscal concessions the governor wants. But they're not going to negotiate themselves out of existence.

Union influence in elections simply can't be compared to corporate influence. You yourself stated that unions are less than 15% of the workforce. And they're not the best paid 15% either. If the Democrats really depended on unions to win elections the Democratic Party would have gone extinct sometime in the '80s.

Unions do serve a purpose. They keep people from being exploited. The 40 hour work week, child labor laws, workplace safety laws, basically everything that separates us from serfs on a salary, was won for us by unions. The wealthy interests in this country want to roll back the clock, and they've been working against unions behind the scenes for decades. Looks like they're about ready to come into the open. Once the unions are gone, they can start rolling back every other labor protection. And as far as the market goes... unions are as much a part of the market as any corporation. What? People shouldn't be able to help determine how much their work is worth? We just have to trust the bosses to be fair? Sounds like a sucker deal to me. There has to be at least two sides for there to be a market. That's what the market is, people negotiating on an open playing field. Somebody standing in a booth screaming "Lemonade, $500 dollars a glass! Take it or leave it!" is not a market.

The difference between a union and a corporation, Mills, is that a corporation could fire every one of its employees, and as long as its shareholders were willing to maintain their investments, just hire a whole new workforce and continue on. That's actually been done. If the union "fires" all its members, what it's just done is disband. What matters for a corporation is how much money it has, what matters for a union is how many people it has. Yes, there's some overlap, but even a union that's completely broke can still negotiate as long as it's membership stays united. A corporation that goes broke is out of business.

2. I did address this point, but Facebook only allows entries of 8,000 characters max. I wouldn't cut a goddamn thing. Social spending in this country has been under the ax for 30 years already. It's not Democrats who are doing the spending, it's Republicans. But since they're spending$100 billion a year on wars instead of health care, I guess that's ok. I would raise taxes on rich people. The richest people in this country have been paying less and less in taxes ever since the Reagan Administration. They went from paying 90% under Roosevelt and Truman, to maybe 35% now under Obama.

Meanwhile the budget keeps getting bigger. Not social spending though. That was slashed under Reagan. Clinton cut welfare spending. Bush II looked for even more cuts. And added two very expensive wars to the tab. The military budget however has not been cut. Clinton made some modest cuts, but that funding was largely restored even before 9/11. And we've packed on more and more state security agencies since then. The big spender however, is Medicare and Medicaid. Again, this is somewhere where Bush II added a bunch more spending to the tab with the prescription drug benefit. Republicans think the answer is to eliminate all government programs that don't turn a profit and cut rich people's taxes to 10%.

The real problem however is that we're spending money like our top tax rate is 70 or 80% but it's less than half that and we've been borrowing the difference for the last 3 decades. We've been cutting and cutting and cutting for 30 years. We can't cut anymore. If we cut more, then we might as well not have a government because it won't be doing anything anyway and a whole lot of our most vulnerable people will have to just fend for themselves.