United We Stand, Divided We Fall

[OneAngryDemocrat]

United we stand, divided we fall

No American worker is entitled to a job, let alone one that pays well and has benefits – but no American businessman is entitled to the cheap overseas labor that our many trade treaties allow, either.

Big Business got from government what they wanted: One free trade agreement after another.

Besides pink slips, what did the American worker get out of the deal?

Until such time that American laborers can expect an honest day’s wage for an honest day’s work from Big Business again, we demand from our so-called representative government just compensation.

Not because of what a laid off worker’s employer has decided to do when handing out all of those pink slips… but because of what GOVERNEMNT didn’t do: Government didn’t properly represent ALL of America; Government intentionally and deliberately ignored the interests of the American worker who has to get out there every day and compete on an skewed playing field with foreign labor.

Let us discuss “wealth redistribution” for a moment.

No, not the mythological communist plot, or socialist platform which Tea Baggers have routinely attributed to the President, but the very real, long-term, political agenda of the radical right and their libertarian allies.

The Constitution grants Congress the authority to regulate commerce between the 50 states and any foreign nation
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause).

The Constitution also grants Congress the authority to ratify trade treaties the president drafts into law
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_Clause).

Elected officials, acting on behalf of their corporate financiers, have repeatedly bestowed upon big business the ability to legally blackmail their American employees into accepting lower wages and fewer (if any) benefits under the threat of outsourcing their domestic jobs overseas — and then actually moving those jobs overseas when there’s nothing left for the employees to give up, pocketing the profits created by those blackmailed workers’ labor the entire time.

Like the crimes of extortion and theft, this practice is nothing more than “wealth redistribution.”

Unlike extortion or theft, however, what the business community has been doing is totally legal — but only because business is handing bags of money to the people who write our laws with legalized bribes innocently called campaign contributions.

Add to this incredible assault upon America’s workers all of the low tariffs Congress has placed on imports that force American businessmen who want to do the right thing and pay their employees a decent wage with decent benefits, but can’t, because of unfair overseas competition forcing them into seeking the lowest labor costs they can find.

Big business has “gamed” the system, and influenced Congress into ratifying all of those trade treaties and demanded all of those low tariffs, and today denounces any attempt to end this extortion as some kind of communist or socialist plot.

Our Founding Fathers were neither communists nor socialists.

And they knew exactly what it was they were doing when they wrote the Commerce Clause.

We have a right to demand our representatives protect the economic interests of the 99 percent of Americans who don’t own a factory, here or abroad.

We accomplish that goal by coercing our representatives to do something they haven’t done in a long time:

Represent us.

That’s neither a communist nor socialist plot — that’s representative democracy.

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