Children of Osterville
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this sunny and much warmer day, now afternoon, here in the great seaside village of Osterville, and I bid you and yours a healthy and happy adieu. Day seven of the protests in, what?, is that a typo? Wisconsin? Scott Walker, the newly elected Governor of the great state of Wisconsin and willing bed partner with big corporate interests everywhere, has created the initial epicenter in this country for rolling labor bashing, along with the bashing of the unions that protect them. Teachers, police, firefighters, garbage men, social workers, really all Federal, state and local employees of all stripes within that state are going to have their wages cut by 8-10 percent, as the newly emerging Republicorp systematically takes away collective bargaining from hard working public employees in order to “get their fiscal house in order.” Ed Shultz, of “The ED Show”, airing every week night at 10 p.m., EST, only on MSNBC, who is a true champion of the people, has been way out on front on this one, as we look to our television screens and witness over 30,000 protesters descend upon the capital building in Madison, packed with ordinary citizens who now out number the protesters in the island nation of Bahrain, a country so far away, nestled in between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden’s waters unable to cool the growing fury over corruption and oppression that is mirrored now right here in the good ‘ole US of A. Union busting is nothing new to this country, but after the Citizens United case ruling by the suspect Supreme Court, it has taken on a whole new meaning. Individual governors, emboldened by the big bank rolls of multi-national corporations, feel comfortable in slashing state and local governments because they know their corporate masters will bail them out in the end, at least until they make a mistake. Karl Rove, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, Michelle Bachmann and Speaker of the House, John, “So be it”, Boehner, otherwise known as ‘billy bob’, have all jumped aboard the union bashing bandwagon, villainizing hard working men and women who represent the very notion of the overly used cliched statement, “the American people”, the backbone of our society at large. As Ed put it on his show last night, “There is no fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, and Scott Walker is just cooking the books on this one.” Public employees, on average, make less than their private sector counterparts, and the negotiated salaries of these workers was set in stone long ago. Take New Jersey for example, many of the pensions of these workers have been ransacked over the years, as have many other state and local budgets and none of these public employees salaries or pensions have anything to do with this nation’s real deficit crisis. Do you want the real culprits? Look to the darkened hallows of Wall Street and the previous administration’s systematic dismantling of decades old regulations, put in place to PROTECT the American people, by removing the teeth that once belonged to regulatory agencies such as the SEC, securities exchange commission, or the EPA, the environmental protection agency. Thirty years of republican policies are the true villains in this nightmare facing the hard working real American people that make up 98 percent of the population here in the United States of America. In 1907, congress passed the Tillman Act, that effectively curbed the influence of corporations and their “mission statements”, the unstated ones, towards the American public, the American economy and the health of the nation at large, and it worked quite well for roughly 70 years or so. Flash forward to the year 1980, and the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House. If you go back in “time”, look over some tape of the President at a closing bell ceremony on Wall Street. With Reagan that day was Donald Regan, the appointed Treasury Secretary, former Chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch, and if you look closely at the tape, you can make out the member of Reagan’s cabinet mouth the words, “wrap it up”, or hurry it up, telling you all you need to know about what really happened and what would happen in years to come. This is when the crisis began, in it’s infancy, for we in this country, never had these monumental problems after the Tillman Act was implemented into LAW, as the nation suffered through two World Wars, The Great Depression, an assassination of one of our best and most popular Presidents and the Cuban Missile Crisis, spurred on by the Bay of Pigs, which almost ended life on planet earth as we now know it. By the year 1982, the dominoes began to fall, as the destruction of that act became apparent to both it’s detractors and it’s proponents. Slowly over the course of the past thirty years, the big banks, big insurance, big coal, big oil, big pharma and the rest of the usual suspects began buying politicians and thus, U.S. legislative powers, creating the laws that we all live by, giving these corporations a carte blache to do anything they want, and what they want now, the final piece to the puzzle if you will, is to destroy the collective bargaining power that unions currently maintain as the last bastion of hope for the average worker who has seen his or her wages stagnate over the past thirty years while the top two percent have seen their income go up by 278 percent during that same time period…in other words, the game has been fixed in favor of the coming plutocracy, the plan all along. These monstrous multi-national corporate entities have only one goal in mind–PROFIT over the people, the environment and education, for if we keep the people sick and hungry, poor and destitute, they will have no will or strength to rally and fight for their GOD given rights to free speech, freedom of assembly and freedom from tyranny–something the Egyptian people already revolted against just a few days ago. The multinationals are creating the PLUTOCRACY that they always wanted, rule by the wealthy, and to hell with the rest of them, effectively turning this country into a slave state. The Last Great LION of the Senate, the late, great, Teddy Kennedy (D-MA), said this on the Senate floor a few years before his passing...”What is the PRICE, we ask the other side, what is the price that you want from working men and women? What cost? How much more do we have to give to the private sector and to business? How many billion dollars more? Are you asking, are you requesting? When does the greed stop?!!” As Ed said, “This is ground zero for labor, the reason why republicans are trying to steal money from the poor and destroying the unions is very simple, if they undercut labor, it will undercut everyone in this country who makes a pay check. Labor sets the bar for wages and don’t think they don’t.” David versus Goliath indeed. Fortunately, we all know how that turned out. And it will once again. This truly is a battle for the very soul of this country and the seditious manner in which these faceless, many times nameless, blood sucking predators, who are only pieces of paper, not real people as the Supreme Court seems to think, yet are considered ‘people’ by said suspect Supreme Court, these monsters, who are obviously run by monsters, are going after our friends, our neighbors and our family members–this will not stand in the end–to quote Mr. Jeff Bridges in the classic film “The Big Lebowski”… “This aggression won’t STAND MAN!” Like the unrest in the Middle East, a rolling revolution, a youth inspired revolution of epic proportions, this anti-union bill proposed by a puppet politician, a cookie made from the “man behind the curtain’s” master cookie cutter, named Scott Walker, or assh$le if you prefer, will spread throughout the country, inspired by REPUBLICORP’s assertion that “we’re broke”, while we all know that it is NOT because of the hard working true American people, such as teachers, policemen, firemen, social workers, and the like, no, it is because of what occurred directly after Ronald Reagan was elected to the highest office in the land, whereby he was directed by a group of sharks on Wall Street to begin the dismantling of proven methods that disallows corporations, both foreign and domestic, to run rough shod over the KEY principal this country was founded upon–“WE THE PEOPLE!!!” Have a wonderful day everyone and say a little prayer for our brothers and sisters in Wisconsin. They could use all the help they can get. PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
