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Showing Original Post only (View all)Americans need to STOP being "thankful" that they have a job [View all]
If you are thankful, or lucky, or fortunate just to have a job, youve surrendered the ability to fight for better wages, better working conditions and better benefits.
At one time in this country
not too long ago
you could work a full-time job and make it. You may not have gotten rich, but you could sustain a family and place yourself solidly into the Middle-Class. Hell, not only could you have secured housing, you may have even been able to take the family out once or twice a month for dinner and a movie
and the occasional Ice Cream Sunday on a hot summer weekend. You could take a family vacation. Maybe even put enough away to afford to send you kids to college with the help of a few grants or scholarships.
Bottom line is that you could live a somewhat secure and happy existence with one full-time job.
With the advent of Ray-Gunism, that secure and happy existence was no longer the norm, it became a luxury, and it became that almost overnight.
Instead of that happy existence being expected and earned, it became a luxury and if you wanted it? Well go out and get a second job you lazy bum.
Ask any young person today with a full-time job
ANYONE OF THEM
if they can afford an apartment without a roommate?
This is America? The land of the free?
Ray-Gun with his awshucks, grandfatherly charm convinced a majority of American (at least a majority of those that bothered to vote), that the folks that were really getting screwed in our country were those poor CEOs, Corporations and Idiot-Sons of inheritance. How much they struggled under their tax-burden to the point they could only afford 2 vacation homes and a boat.
The poor SOBs working on the factory floor, or scurrying like mice in a cubicle farm, or driving a truck 2,000 miles a day? Those were the lucky fuckers. Why they ought to just be thankful that they have a job.
You know how many times I hear that shit?
- You should be thankful
- You are so lucky
- You are so fortunate
As if laboring for these fucksticks for crumbs is some kind of privilege. Obviously, the pay we earn is bestowed on us by the benevolence of the masters.
Soon, an entire cottage industry was created to enforce and convince us that we should be thankful. Hate radio described union workers striking for better pay as lazy, ungrateful slobs who should just be thankful they have a job.
Books were written and promoted to explain to us how if we were just a little more thankful and worked a little harder, wed see improvement.
I would become apoplectic when middle-class friends would come to me and excitedly ask; Have you read this book; Who Moved My Cheese? "They gave copies to us at the office". Some corporatist screed that condensed living a decent and middle-class life, into a fucking maze where we are all scurrying around like fucking mice looking for cheese? That's Freedom?
I guess it was the corporations way of softening the blow. See if they eliminated your position so that the CEO could be rewarded with $10 Million in Stock Options (tax-deferred of course), you just had to look a little harder for your cheese.
Never mind that cheese was essential to the life and death struggle of the mouse, or the fact that sometimes your cheese was precisely where it was supposed to be, change simply became your ability, or inability to find curdled milk. If you couldn't find your cheese, well you just fucking shriveled up and died.
The American worker shouldnt be thankful, they should be marching with pitchforks.
Its way past time that we valued work more than we value wealth.
Because we dont just value wealth
we worship it.
Its why Amazon can extort $3 Billion in tax breaks without even breaking a sweat.
Its why the Waltons of Walmart can pocket a $153 Million dollar tax refund, while the salesman in New York sees his taxes increase $2, $3, or $4 Thousand.
Its why FOXCON can get $4 Billion in tax breaks while the infrastructure, schools and rural hospitals in Wisconsin crumble.
Its why Retrumplicans need to get an ass-kicking at the polls in 2020.
Now that would be something to be thankful for.