APP - Culture versus Reality

Lowaicue said:
So 'unions' are bad because YOU had a bad experience?
Some unions are turned bad by incompetent leadership and inactive membership, some unions are made good by efficient leadership and active membership.
You really have to stop this 'binary existence of yours. There is much more to life than love and hate, good and bad, black and white.
I was a member of a union, many years ago, that managed to expose decidedly dodgy accounting and presentation of the company finances. Union action forced the company to be open and to honour a previous agreement with the staff and workers.
That's just one.
Unions in the UK have been good, bad and indifferent. The good ones seldom make the headlines. The bad ones are never out of them.
Click to expand...


And ALL unions have been targeted for the past 40 years by corporations, the Chamber of Commerce and very well funded money interests who have waged a propaganda campaign to paint unions as the corrupt device of 'lazy' workers. Rush Limbaugh yesterday said the word 'worker' is Marxist. Really Rush? So that means WORK is Marxist.

When corporations engage in illegal activity, what do they call it? White collar crimes. When a union engages in illegal activity what do they call it? RACKETEERING.

The 'feds' are right in there helping destroy unions, the vehicle of the people.

Here is a true story everyone should read and comprehend.

lewrock.gif


How Thuggish Federal Prosecutors Destroyed My Family

by Bill Barnwell
December 18, 2004

Almost two years ago my family directly felt the wrath of the U.S. Department of Justice. You see my dad was a bad guy. He was a high ranking union official and a city councilman in Michigan’s third-largest city. Basically he was high-profile and belonged to two entities that the feds do not like. In the eyes of the feds that made him a juicy target. And after years of harassment, surveillance, and multiple fishing expeditions, they finally managed to destroy his life and almost destroy our whole family.

Not so conveniently for dad, the feds had been poking around both the union and the city for years. In the city, the Justice Department has been running investigations for decades, trying to hang any high-profile scalp on the wall that they could (usually with very little success but a whole lot of money spent). Organized labor, of course, has never been high on the favorite list of federal prosecutors. Many times the scrutiny is deserved. Other times it’s just a typical case of the feds acting like their totalitarian selves using and abusing power and persecuting innocent people.

I grew up paranoid because our telephones were always tapped. Outside the house, down the street, there were always suspicious cars sitting on the side of the road for hours at a time. The message was always clear: we’re watching you and we’re coming to get you. This was not a fun way to grow up.

Dad worked his way up the union and became one of its strongest leaders by the mid-’90s. In 1999, in his first bid for public office (and after I literally knocked on over 9,000 doors campaigning for him) he just barely won election to sit on the city council. On election day, I knew the next four years were going to be a headache, but I had no idea how bad it would be.

Almost immediately after he was elected he started getting subpoenas to various grand juries being convened by aggressive federal prosecutors in Detroit. We also experienced the joy of all this splashed in the newspapers. Almost immediately his and others’ reputations were being sullied by federal prosecutors for the sole crime of being high-profile juicy targets. In his particular case, he belonged to two hated entities of the feds: the union and a high-profile city government where the feds had previously failed to see their multimillion-dollar investigations gain much legitimacy.

But in January 2003 everything changed for us when the feds came to my parents’ door to deliver an indictment. I went down to visit them that day because it was my day off. My life was already stressful. Two weeks after graduating college I went to my first pastorate where I was virtually alone. Plus I was starting graduate school already. But anyway the doorbell rang and I went to see who was there. It was two feds telling me to get my dad. When I went and got him they informed him that he was being indicted for "conspiracy" and "embezzlement." We were shocked.

Well, not really. After years of harassment and who knows how much money spent, it wasn’t completely surprising what was happening. The next day the indictment was on the front page of the local news and covered by both TV and radio. It was absolutely miserable.

The feds wanted the scalp of my dad’s union boss so they first attempted to go at some of his subordinates to see if they could get them to roll over. Working up the food chain and trying to scare people and broker plea deals are common tactics of the feds. Their case against my dad boiled down to this: In late 1997 and early 1998 he supposedly "forced" three business agents to go help build the frame of the house for the boss’ secretary and allowed these guys to get paid for the work. Since they were there on "business" time they shouldn’t have got paid for their labor according to the feds, hence the embezzlement charge. Since they supposedly cooperatively tried to keep this dirty deed a secret the feds tacked on a "conspiracy" charge as well (charges of "conspiracy" are almost always examples of prosecutorial padding of indictments. Just about anything these days can be called a "conspiracy" by the feds).

Whole story
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The metamorphosis of a party in two telling phrases

"Labor is the United States. The men and women, who with their minds, their hearts and hands, create the wealth that is shared in this country—they are America."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower

"We're going to crush labor as a political entity"
Grover Norquist - Republican economic guru, and co-author of the GOP's 'Contract with America'
 
True story. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent....

My friend, old Dave was senior shop steward for a substantial company in a very small town in southern England.

He had led his members out on strike, the reasons have faded with my memory. The boss summoned my friend when the men walked out. 'Dave', he said, 'you won't last a week. Why don't you advise them to return to work?'

'Nah', said my friend Dave, 'they've only just started. I don't think you understand their determination, Mr. Chalfont.'

'A week', said the latter, 'you'll be back in a week.' And he opened the office door to allow my friend's exit.

Six weeks later Dave was called into the office again (there had been several visits before this).

'Come over here to the window, Dave', said Mr. Chalfont. 'Your men out there. They must have run out of money by now. Tell them they can come back and we'll give them 'x' (about 50% of the increase demanded).
Some of them must be getting desperate. Some have children Dave, how can they buy food?'

Dave stood alongside Mr. Chalfont and the pair gazed at the men and the banners outside in the carpark.

'I told you, Mr. Chalfont', said Dave, 'I told you you didnt understand them.
Those men will eat grass before they let you beat them. They'll eat grass.'

Mr. Chalfont watched as Dave rejoined his men outside and suddenly realised that these men were not the soft pushovers, the willing workhorses, the non politically aware dumbed down yokels that he and his board had assumed them to be. He saw real men. Men of determination. Men in whose shadow people like him and his fellow board members should be pleased to dwell.

There was a hurried board meeting and the next day the men marched as one into the factory. They had got a little closer to receiving a fair day's pay for a fair day's work.
 
deregulation = heaven, because corporations only do god's work


This must be what Olam Ha Ba feels like.
 
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