Perdido 03

Perdido 03

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Billionaires Defend The Working Man From Evil Unionized Workers

Brilliant piece from Danny Lucia at socialistworker.org.

Read it all, but here's my favorite part:

WHO SAYS the corporate media doesn't care about the opinions of ordinary people? There have been lots of articles lately about what workers think, written by the people who study them the most--bosses.

As a vice president of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and a Wall Street Journal columnist, William McGurn naturally has his finger on the pulse of the American working class:

...

According to McGurn, a true American worker doesn't mind having their 401(k) cut by a CEO looking to increase his year-end bonus. But he's fighting mad at his daughter's teacher because she has a union that's been able to keep her pension intact.

This analysis truly does go against "popular orthodoxy"--otherwise known as: what most people think.

But McGurn's observations must have merit because they are corroborated almost word for word by Mort Zuckerman, real estate billionaire and publisher of U.S. News and World Report:

We really are two Americas, but not those captured in the stereotypical populist class warfare speeches that dramatize the gulf between the rich and the poor. Instead there is a new division in America that affronts a sense of fairness. That division is between the workers in the private sector and the workers in the public sector.

In Zuckerman's vision, government workers are different than you and me. They live in gated communities like Fireman Estates and flaunt their wealth on TV shows like Lifestyles of the Defined Benefit Plan and Who Wants to Marry a Child Services Case Worker?

In Public-Sector America, unionized postal workers and crossing guards pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for exclusive private schools for their kids, while the rest of us--Starbucks baristas, bank presidents, etc.--send our kids to overcrowded public schools. And now, this obscene inequality is apparently spurring a backlash from ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Mort the Media and Real Estate Mogul.

If Zuckerman and his fellow billionaire class warriors had any shame, they would be embarrassed by the bullshit they're slinging around.

But they have no shame.

Only an insatiable thirst for all the money in the world.

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