jim hightower
"STEALING OUR MIDDLE-CLASS FUTURE"
Mon Sep 1 11:13:21 2003
67.1.138.79

http://www.jimhightower.com/
Monday, September 01, 2003
"STEALING OUR MIDDLE-CLASS FUTURE"



Labor Day has gone all soft on us, and it's time to harden up on its true meaning.

This holiday is not some vague tribute to men and women who labor. Rather, it's a radically-democratic declaration of the intent to build and sustain a middle class in America – as a bold statement (and as fraught with perils) as Jefferson's Declaration and Lincoln's Gettysburg address. Far from being about taking a day off, Labor Day is about people taking democratic power.

Today, our middle-class power is being steadily filched by thieves in high places – the BushCo government, the corporate-friendly Wobblycrats in congress, and the corporate Kleptocrats themselves. All are busily hauling truck loads of money and power out of the middle class to the top, dumping it into the hands of CEOs and the wealthy investors.

We've seen pieces of this theft: the looting of our public treasury through givebacks to the rich, the White House assault on regulatory protections for everything from workplace safety to the 40-hour workweek, the high-tech industry's despicable manipulation of immigration loopholes to displace middle-class American employees, the privatization push through every agency of government, the secretly negotiated trade deals that empower global corporations to overturn labor protections throughout the world, the maneuvering to gut the pension laws so corporations can evade their legal and moral obligations to retirees... and so many more.

But the whole adds up to far worse than the parts, for it's the very framework of our middle-class possibilities that they're dismantling, and it's the egalitarian ethic of the common good that they are abandoning. It's said that the rich and the poor will always be with us. Perhaps, but it is not assured anywhere or in any time that the middle class will be there.

This Labor Day is no different than the first one that workers themselves declared in 1882 – it's about taking back power from the thieves who are trying to steal our middle-class future.

• "Stealing Our Very Soul" — Bob Scheidt, Mon Sep 1 13:13