Tag: Middle class

It's sad that Barak Obama had to be the first black to be elected president. Ever since he got into office, Obama has been leaning over backward to avoid being patronising, or looking like it, to African Americans.

it’s time for America to wake up - and particularly poor and middle class Republicans. Because entrusting this nation and our economy to the GOP would be like entrusting our children to convicted child molesters:

The working conditions created by the inept and irresponsible managers within the postal service is not only un-American, but creates a serious danger to the unsuspecting public at large.

Inspired by the popular uprisings in Arab countries, the anti-imperialist 'Occupy Wall Street' protests are creeping with vigorous rapidity into other states in the USA.

Unfortunately, politics is much like religion - no matter how much evidence is brought to bear that a person’s preacher is a hypocrite, a crook, and a pedophile, many of the people in the church will refuse to believe their lying eyes, because it’s not what they want to see.

- Letting the tax cuts for the super-rich expire while keeping the rates for the working class offers President Obama a political opportunity to satisfy progressives, co-opt...

- What the GOP and Tea Party allies are doing is not just reckless, it's sociopathic - By Bob Cesca at Huffington Post We're only three months...

The richest 2% of this country have a great scam going for themselves. The poor and the middle class provide all the sacrifice, while the rich reap all the benefits. Our tax money is funding the wars and our children are providing the human cannon fodder, while the rich are reaping windfall profits and we're paying their taxes. Then, they call US greedy socialists if we ask for a crumb to feed our families. What a scam!

What we once thought of as American corporations have now become international in scope. They have no loyalty to any one nation, nor do they have any respect for any geographical boundary. They're now competing with countries that pay their workers less per week than many American workers spend on lunch per day. As a result, the American middle-class standard of living has become a liability and is under an aggressive assault by both the corporate and governmental establishment.

"We also found that union representatives received excessive payments from grievance settlements. Union representatives in four districts (Colorado/Wyoming, Alabama, Mid-America, and Capital) were involved with the allocation of class-action grievance settlements for six grievances that resulted in union representatives receiving payments that were significantly more than other members of the class. Specifically, union representatives received $33,447 (or 24 percent) of $141,639 in settlements for these six grievances. One union representative in the Mid-America District received as much as 35 percent of a grievance settlement, while other payees received less than 1 percent.

War is big business, and a lot of people are becoming obscenely wealthy by sending poor and middle-class kids to their deaths. They tell us it's in defense of America, but if that were true their kids would be fighting as well. Don't rich kids love America too? That's grist for another discussion, but I can guarantee you one thing - you'll never see the name of a Bush or Cheney child scroll by on the nightly news.

Until the Brentwood facility was finally condemned by the CDC, Brentwood postal workers handled all of the mail for Washington, DC, including the ‘official mail’ that contained the anthrax-laden envelopes addressed to Senators Daschle and Leahy. While Capitol Hill workers received prompt medical care, Brentwood postal workers were ordered by USPS officials to continue working in the contaminated facility. Two Brentwood workers died from the inhalation of anthrax, and dozens more are suffering from a variety of ailments related to the anthrax attacks. For decades U.S. presidents have gone all over the globe lecturing world leaders on human rights. Yet, our very own United States Postal Service is among the worst abusers of workers' rights outside of the third world.

But the Republicans told us to not to worry. They said, if you'll just give up the right to write off the interest on your credit cards and other debts temporarily, the rewards that the rich are enjoying will eventually "trickle down," and you'll all be showered with the benefits of a robust economy. But their promise never came to past. The only thing that trickled down was our having to pay the tax burden of the rich - and even as I write, the rich are enjoying additional tax breaks while we still haven't regained the simple right to write off the interest on our debts .

At 600,000 strong, plus family, friends, and neighbors - and in an election year where incumbents are hanging on by their fingernails - postal employees are in the driver's seat of a tank. Yet, they're allowing themselves, and their families, to be robbed by a guy with a butter knife - and not just once outside a liquor store, but repeatedly in what is supposed to be the sanctity of their workplace. This has got to come to an end.

The mainstream media never becomes interested in a story until there's an explosion - twenty-nine mineworkers trapped in a poisonous coal mine, eleven oil workers vaporized in the Gulf, or when a postal worker snaps from abuse and walks into the post office with an M16 and brings death and destruction to his co-workers. But what's happened to the families of the twenty-nine mineworkers, eleven oil workers, or victims of postal mayhem since? We'll never know, because they've been relegated to the trash bin of yesterday's news.

But there is an upside to the ledger. Postal employees don't have to beg for justice - they can demand it. They have both the law, and the numbers on their side. There are 600,000 postal employees in America, then when you add all of their family and friends, that's a formidable political group. In addition, in today's political environment up to 76% of the American people are unhappy with incumbents. So postal employees can very easily pull together to make a politician's willingness to fight for workers' rights a litmus test in order to be elected - and that goes for your union officials as well.

The document reads, "We the people," not we the government. This is a covert encroachment on the American middle class that the people simply must repeal, or the rights of all Americas will be placed in dire jeopardy. Once the government declares open season on its employees, who's left to protect us from private exploitation?

The American people have always been comfortable in their belief that while the citizens of many other countries are routinely victimized by their government that 'it can't happen here.' But what the comfortable middle class fail to understand is the comfort that they take so easily for granted is under dire threat. They've been so mesmerized by MTV and their hedonistic pursuits that they're totally oblivious to the fact that under the new global economic structure the standard of living of the American middle class has become a liability to American business. While many may not feel the pinch yet, if they don't wake up, their carefree way of life is going to become a thing of the past.

Currently, the postal service's primary function is to save money at the expense of customer service. So actually having to deliver the mail is looked upon by upper management as an inconvenient, but necessary nuisance in order to obtain their bonuses. In fact, due to the bonuses and the upward mobility awarded managers for saving money, in effect, the entire system is geared to enhance the enrichment of high level post office executives. As a result, the postal service's primary mission is no longer efficiently delivering the mail, but to serve as a welfare system for high paid government bureaucrats.

BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE   The United States Postal Service: An Assault on the American Middle Class The federal law is clear. 18 U.S.C....

As a United States government agency the U.S. Postal Service should be at the very forefront of the fight to protect employee rights. For decades U.S. presidents and government officials have been lecturing countries all over the world regarding the need to protect human rights. Yet, the evidence shows that our very own United States Postal Service is running what can only be described as a latter-day plantation, with the Office of Inspector General, the agency directly mandated to protect the employee, in direct collusion.

Walmart is a microcosm of the revised American business strategy under the new world order. One can look at Walmart's business model, and the socioeconomic profile of its employees, and see exactly what direction American business, and our society, is headed as a whole.

Elizabeth Warren, the head of Congressional oversight for the Troubled Asset Relief Program who is under consideration to head a new federal consumer financial protection agency, accurately predicted the current crisis of the American middle class five years ago. She did so in an interview conducted by Massachusetts School of Law Dean Lawrence Velvel and the solutions she offered to the escalating problem are even more relevant today.

I write a political column for several publications across the country. I'm also a staff writer for VT, a publication that will be particularly interested in this case, because not only does government corruption and the assault on the middle class have a negative impact on returning veterans, but Ms. Snow's only son is a Master Sergeant in the United States Air Force. Thus, while he's off defending this nation, his very own government is both robbing and abusing his single mother who he's left behind at home.

The economic pain our country is experiencing did not begin when the financial sector nearly collapsed over a year ago as a result of the greed and recklessness of Wall Street. The decline of the middle class has been going on for many years. Describing "a lost decade for American workers," The Washington Post said the past 10 years were the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times. USA Today said incomes of the young and middle-aged "have fallen off a cliff since 2000, leaving many age groups poorer than they were even in the 1970s."

That's what has led to the current disaffection by both liberals and conservatives toward government. The American people can sense their rights slipping away, but they have yet to come to terms with what is actually going on. They have yet to realize that congressional gridlock is a convenient way of denying them their rights. They have also yet to recognize that the majority in the senate is allowing the minority to abuse of the filibuster procedure because both parties are in collusion. The Republican filibuster provides cover for the Democratic majority for failing to enact, or greatly watering down, legislation being demanded by the people, but neither party wants to enact.