Great contrast -video at link
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Hard to believe, but before it was captured by reactionary billionaires and extremists, the GOP was a somewhat moderate political party that welcomed workers and unions.
They once joined us in celebrating the fact that American workers were the best trained and most productive workers, who made — and earned — the highest wages.
Similarly, both parties at one time celebrated the fact that American facilities and infrastructure were the best in the world, the product of American ingenuity.
Sadly, that optimism and sense of mission has been replaced in the GOP by a smallness that believes we can no longer afford to be great, that American workers are too expensive to employ, and that employers are better off hiring poor people in poor countries so that they can avoid things like worker rights, workplace safety, the minimum wage and labor unions.
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Did you know that the Santa Fe RR was the first large employer to provide employee healthcare to their workers and their families? That was back in the day when large companies were loyal to their employees and wanted to keep them happy for as long as possible. Santa Fe Hospitals used to be scattered all around their routes to provide all necessary healthcare their workers needed. It was a benefit to help attract the best of the best employees in the country. Pensions were another benefit companies used to provide for their employees. Now that’s been diluted into 401Ks.
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Playing golf?
How many friends of the working man play golf at private clubs nearly everyday?
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And they called it “Morning in America”
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Just go back and read the 1956 Republican Party platform. It favored investments in public goods such as infrastructure and education as well as a strong union movement. Today it’s considered to be radical or at least center left by some of the lazier precincts of the media.
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Harris & Walz are hitting the trail hard, not taking any votes for granted. They are also exuding energy that they will carry into the White House. The other team - taking a lot for granted and exuding little energy. Even the young sidekick exudes lethargy and, dare I say it, laziness.
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I believe unions are people (persons) under the law, like all corporations.
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Why use the 25th when you have a friendly billionaire at least one of whose associates has died conveniently?
Chart seem to end in 2007. Is there a newer one? Which I presume would look only worse…
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Plus, The Democrats actually have multiple GOTV offices in states. Last I looked. The pubs only had one office in PA!
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AND peevishness. He is very miffed that the masses don’t love him.
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Yes, and Ike was a New Deal Republican. These were once nonpartisan ideals.
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My first union job was with Youngstown Steel Door.
When I was 18 I would put on my steel-toed shoes, ear protectors, safety glasses, and asbestos gloves and go to work in a unionized factory making doors and side panels for railroad freight cars.
I worked summers in that Midwestern factory starting in 1974 and through to 1979. The newest overhead press there was built in 1941, and it was not even made in the U.S., but in the former Soviet Union. It, and all the other presses there, pre-dated Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) safety regulations, and worker injuries were commonplace.
And some of the nearby steel mills were originally pig iron mills from the 1800s that were converted as cheaply as possible. And by the early 1980s, many of those firms already had begun the process of subcontracting out their labor operations to the non-union South, or moving overseas.
When they finally closed a few years later, management blamed greedy unions and burdensome environmental regulations — but not their own short-sightedness and greed, the true cause of their demise.
Because as far back as the 1950s, American steelmakers who were still operating open-hearth furnaces repeatedly and blithely brushed off suggestions to adopt newer technologies such as basic-oxygen steelmaking and the electric arc furnace.
Truth is, we were out-innovated, just like we were in the 1970s when smaller fuel-efficient Japanese autos challenged our Big Three and their bloated gas-guzzling product — a product that was engineered to be scrapped after just 100,000 miles.
But instead of meeting the challenges of an increasingly competitive global economy by emphasizing innovation and investing in research and development, American corporate interests all too often sought to exploit economic anxiety among citizens — fueled by, among other things, manufacturing jobs and factories fleeing to sweatshop countries offering low wages and minimal worker protections, the rise of competitively priced foreign-made autos and consumer electronics threatening Americans’ job security, oil price hikes imposed by OPEC oil kingdoms, and the twin scourges of rising inflation and stagnating wages — by seeking carve-outs, privileges, unfair advantages, and relief from fair competition.
These efforts took the form of lobbying elected officials for relaxed enforcement of antitrust and anti-monopoly statutes, the enactment of anti-union and anti-worker “Right to Work” laws, and cynical “Buy American” promotional campaigns that obscured the true motivations of corporate interests that exploit nativist sentiment by pitting domestic labor against their overseas counterparts through their outsourcing investment strategies while cynically parroting slogans that appeal to economic patriotism.
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Most excellent!
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I haven’t seen a newer one with those parameters. I also presume it’s trending worse and reinstalling tsf would be economically devastating for those of us currently in the middle class.
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V.P. Harris is speaking in Detroit to a fired-up crowd of union members.
Aaron Rupar (@atrupar): “Harris: “Donald Trump intends to pull us back to the past. But we’re not going back.” (Stay for the “Trump’s a scab!” chants)” | nitter.poast.org
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