Anger brews over government workers’ benefits (AP via Yahoo! News)

It’s hard enough to read political news these days without so many articles containing such mind-bogglingly misinformed statements in the first few paragraphs that they deflate your will to get to the end of the article.  You expect that kind of talk from politicians — it’s what they get paid for, and I don’t mean the cheques they draw from the government — but when the “people on the street” who are interviewed for these articles say things that make me cringe, it makes me wonder what the use is in trying to counteract the misinformation that’s out there.  It’s not that I expect my piddly little blog to do much against the kind of organizations I rally against, but in the past there was a certain amount of comfort I could take in the possibility that I could, if not change a few minds, at least introduce new perspectives that would create a more informed dialogue.  The way things are going lately, it’s no wonder I can’t find the reserves to blog about every political issue that comes my way.

The interview subject in the beginning of this article, Erin MacFarlane, has every right to be angry over losing her job and being forced to take less-paying jobs without benefits.  Directing that anger at public workers who get paid well and have good benefit packages is misguided, though.  There’s an underlying assumption to her statements that good pay and benefits have always been the dominion of public workers, and that people employed in the private sector have never been able to have those things except at the managerial levels and above, and that’s simply not the case.  There was a time when many, many more companies — certainly not all, but many more than is the case today — paid all their workers a living wage and gave them good benefits, and we aren’t exactly talking colonial or Civil War times.  This was not all that long ago, at least in the history of America.

Erin is 36, and I turn 35 later this month (I’m still waiting for someone to form an exploratory committee for my 2012 presidential run), so I understand where this lack of historical knowledge comes from.  We weren’t even in first grade when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, the start of the undoing of all the good that organized labour brought to America in the 20th century.  We couldn’t watch the evening news without hearing trickle-down Republicans and their minions in the Religious Right talking about how it was far more unjust that a CEO have to pay a little more in taxes than it was for the nation’s poor to lose funding for programs that helped them put food on their tables, heat in their houses, and clothes on their children’s backs.  This widening of the gap between the haves and have-nots exploded under Reagan and has only continued to get worse, even under Democratic presidents, because the message has been so powerful and pervasive.

Michael Moore — for all that I often disagree with the rhetorical devices he uses — spoke brilliantlyon this topic when he addressed pro-union demonstrators in Wisconsin, so I will just direct you to his words.  The people who run the corporations that are increasingly powering this country — and a country should be powered by people, not corporations — could very easily use their accumulated wealth to create well-paying dignified jobs.  Erin was fired from Harley Davidson, whose CEO, Keith E. Wandell, received over $6.3 million in salary and benefits in 2009.  Harley Davidson should be revealing their 2010 numbers sometime around my birthday, and do we even need to speculate on whether or not Mr. Wandell sacrificed some of his exorbitant salary so he didn’t have to lay off so many workers?  Will anyone honestly be shocked if his compensation rose significantly year over year?

Yes, national unemployment recently dipped back under 9% recently, but as many have pointed out, most of these jobs were low-level, non-benefitted positions that I can only call crap jobs.  I only say crap because I try not to swear on this blog any longer, because the synonym for crap that rhymes with spit is far more appropriate for these kinds of jobs.  Were these positions created because economic conditions suddenly shot upward?  Actually, the economy’s been relatively stagnant in recent months.  Republicans, however, took back control of the House, and even got President Whitmore to extend the Bush tax cuts for the ultra-rich even before they were sworn into office, and now they can point to the unemployment figure and say, like a snot-nosed little boy, “See!  See!  Tax cuts for the rich really do work!”  Those jobs could have been created over a year ago, at wages even higher than what are being offered now, but these CEOs don’t care about improving conditions for their workers.  They only care about fattening their own wallets.

Thinking about the union battles that have been going on since the new year — Wisconsin may be getting all the attention, but an even worse bill is going to pass through Ohio’s state house here soon (unlike Wisconsin, our bill will take collective bargaining away from police and firefighters) — brings to mind the petulance of many of the most vocal on the Religious Right.  Because they can’t have premarital sex, or same-sex marriage, or whatever they believe their faith restricts them from having, they think the rest of us shouldn’t have those rights as well.  Greedy misanthropic CEOs have stopped offering well-paying jobs and good benefits packages?  Don’t blame the CEOs or the right-wing politicians who’ve let them make their workers suffer; instead, point an angry finger at public workers who still have good jobs and say, “If we can’t have good jobs, neither should they!”

I bring religion into this because one of my new friends has me researching Christianity a bit in my spare time (not that I have much of that these days), and even though I’ve always known that Christ spoke a lot about treating others with fairness and respect — something you never hear from the Religious Right leaders who choke our airwaves with their miasma of hatred and intolerance — my research just makes me see all the clearer how the Religious Right has perverted not just religion in this country, but through religion all the other facets of our country.  In the past ten years of suffering this country has endured, from the 09.11 attacks to the prolonged recession, if love and humanity were ever mentioned it was only in the context of loving those in “the in-group.”  Those outside of that group — Muslims, homosexuals, liberals, you know the list — are seen as unquestionably out to “destroy America” and not deserving of love or equal rights or anything but scorn and derision.  More than ever now I see how that completely goes against Christ’s teachings.

Just as my friend has decades of experience studying Christianity I doubt I’ll ever be able to catch up with — she was raised Roman Catholic — it feels hopeless for me, as one woman, to try to counter thirty-plus years of Republican/conservative/corporatist rhetoric and how it’s pervaded and perverted this country.  I have to try — if I thought it was truly useless then I wouldn’t be writing about it now — but it’s getting harder and harder to see the use in it, to believe that what I write here and what I speak with others about will do more than help me sleep a little better at night.  I want to make the world a better place for others (and myself by extension), but in the face of all this entrenched opposition it feels all but impossible to do that.