John Sweeney: 'What's Wrong with America?'

[Sapphire Blue]

(Cross-post from GD: Politics)

John Sweeney
'What's Wrong with America?'
Posted August 17, 2007 | 07:31 PM (EST)

Earlier this month, Steve Skvara, a disabled, retired steel worker who can't afford his wife's health care, shook the AFL-CIO's Presidential Candidates Forum by asking tearfully, "What's wrong with America?"

We should all be asking that question today.

We've got six coal miners trapped beneath more than 1,500 feet of Utah coal and rock, three brave men who struggled to rescue them are dead and six more are injured.

And it's not because of an act of God. It's because of the acts of man.

The disaster still unfolding at the Crandall Canyon mine did not have to happen...

(snip)

Safety concerns about the Crandall Canyon mine surfaced months ago, and safety experts warn of particular dangers in the "retreat mining" technique used there after it was approved by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration....

(snip)

No one should be surprised it was approved, though. The Bush administration has been systematically dismantling and cutting funding for workplace safety rules and oversight since it came into office.

(snip)

Something is deeply wrong with America today. Working men and women have lost their value to the people who have been running this country for too long. Ruthless CEOs wring working people dry and the neocon ideologues in the White House help them.

Our wages are stagnant, our benefits are disappearing, the middle class is shrinking and, for the first time, there's a good chance our children will not be better off than our generation. We're the most productive workers in the world but we have to work more hours, more jobs and send more family members into the workforce just to keep up.

The heroes who rushed to Ground Zero to save lives and who dug and sweated and struggled for months after Sept. 11, 2001, are suffering today from neglect and indifference. Neglect and indifference left thousands stranded on rooftops and in a dark convention center after Hurricane Katrina. Neglect and indifference meant deplorable conditions for veterans recovering at Walter Reed. Neglect and indifference kill far too many of us on the job.

There's a reason so many people who never will step foot in a coal mine are riveted by the story of the trapped, dead and injured miners. There's a reason Steve Skvara's comment at our presidential forum moved so many people. There's a reason candidates committed to improving the well-being of working men and women took back Congress last year and will take back the White House next year.

Working men and women--the great majority in this country--want to fix what's wrong with America.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-sweeney/whats-wrong-with-americ_b_60935.html

[Faygo Kid]

1. Great, but I despair. We have lost almost every battle, except Social Security.

And that hangs by a tenuous thread, as the Bush cabal turns its sights on privatizing Medicare as an alternative way to destroy the New Deal. Endless unjustified war and an unprecedented transfer of wealth into the hands of a relative few are what we now have to live with, and while I hope for a turnaround, I don't really feel it will happen anymore. Don't get me wrong - I intend to fight on as John Sweeney calls upon us to do, but it's hard to believe that more than a few are listening. One more threat of a terrorist attack - legitimate or not, or a gay couple getting married sometime somewhere, and it all unravels.

And the voices on the Right of that tiny percentage, from John Gibson to Hannity to O'Reilly to countless others, grows ever more shrill for censorship (see Daily Kos). I have a sense of foreboding for the remainder of 2007 that is deep and wide.

[truedelphi]

2. And even Social Security exists in name only

Every time you turn around they lengthen the time of your paying in and lessen the chance of your living to see a payout.

What is it now - age 67? By the time I'm sixty-seven (a bit over a decade from now) they probably will have changed it to seventy-seven.