WORKERS - January 24, 2008

While watching some of the Democratic candidates for president in the past few weeks, I took note of some of the good works they had been attributing to themselves and, I must admit, being a bit impressed by some of them. Hillary was proud of the time she had expended on civil rights, gender rights and human rights but I noticed, as before, no real attention to the rights of American workers as such. Obama had given attention to the needs of those workers who were desperately poor, but nothing noteworthy about the average workers, those in the middle of the wage scale, at about $12 - $20 an hour. As with Hillary, these workers were not poor enough, it seems, to have gained his pity, and thus were ignored. Indeed, except for Kucinich and Edwards, none of the candidates seem to have shown any concern for average working people, though all the GOP, and even some Democrats, showed interest in the needs of American corporations, banks, and the needs of the owners of our economy. And it occurred to me that was just fine with those owners and their friends and sponsors in the media, who largely find lordly concern with the crippled and discriminated tolerable and even commendable, so long as it is purchased by a stringent ignoring of the needs of those workers, once thought prosperous, who flourished in the age when the unions were still paying attention to the needs of the working class generally. So Hillary and Obama and all the GOP pass muster with Rupert Murdoch and those like him, while they pay no heed to the likes of Kucinich and Edwards, who do not worship at the altar of economics according to the U. of Chicago. And where are the workers themselves in all of this? It appears that they are too wrapped up in the horse-race aspects of the election, or even in the entertaining parts of the lives of the Packers and the Badgers, to pay attention to their own needs and those of their families. And their unions are too busy playing the game of politics and the strategies of power to have any time or effort left to protect the workers, their families, or their economic welfare.