Trumpka as Hoffa?

My attention was directed to this raving right-wing excuse for a blog by some forum friends. Yes, I'm actually linking to a blog I adamantly disagree with. Not a clever thing to do in terms of traffic management, but who cares.

The author of this blog, apparently one Doug Ross, pretends to mistake Trumpka for Jimmy Hoffa Junior, saying "All these labor leaders look alike to me". Given that he'd just mentioned Frederica Wilson, Maxine Waters, and Jesse Jackson, I suspect that this was right-wing code-speak for "all black people look the same". Ahh, the more it changes, the more it stays the same.

(Edit: Yes, I realize that that Trumpka and Hoffa, Jr are both white)

What we have here is transference, in which the the Right accuses the Left of the transgressions which the Right itself has instigated. The violent demonstrations of the Teabaggers are retroactively justified by pointing a finger at the Left and screaming "Violence! Commies! Revolution!" as soon as the Left dares to defend itself, and this while blithely ignoring the calls for revolution which have been coming from the Tea Party, (and other loathsome creatures of the Far Right), for over three years now.

I sometimes wonder if maybe I shouldn't avoid all discussion of the Left/Right divide on this blog, because it plays right into the divide-and-conquer game, and the last thing we need is to fight among ourselves. But on the other hand, how can I avoid this subject when the GOP has waged a war against the poor and the unemployed for over a decade now?

This is certainly not to say that the Democrats as a whole have been anything more than lukewarm friends to the unemployed and disadvantaged, and Obama might as well be a Republican for all he's done to help (which is, let's face it, more or less nothing).

From 1776 to 1861, the people of the USA managed to compromise, and built one of the greatest nations on earth. Then that willingness to compromise was sabotaged by powerful men who had a vested financial interest in seeing it destroyed, men who reaped huge profits from the chaos of war via fat government contracts.

And the nightmare of the War Between The States does not need to be explained to any of you, I'm sure.

Again today, we stand on the brink of chaos, our willingness to compromise and agree to disagree having been sabotaged by powerful men, (and women), who stand to profit from the resulting nightmare.

Lenin said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then as farce.

A New Campaign For The 99ers

The problem we 99ers have is that we have become invisible. We get no attention from media or politicians, and ignoring us has become far cheaper and easier than helping us. Now, we cannot do anything about the cost of helping us. That is a fixed number, although it keeps creeping up as we grow in numbers.

So, the problem is that variable A (cost of helping us) is greater than variable Z, (cost of ignoring us).

We need to reverse that, so that Z, (cost of ignoring us), is greater than A, (cost of helping us).

And we cannot reduce the value of variable A, (cost of helping us).

Therefore the only way to achieve our goal is to increase the value of variable Z, the cost of ignoring us.

In summary,we have to make it prohibitively expensive to keep ignoring us. And, at least for now, we need to accomplish this without breaking the law.

So, here is a simple suggestion for a first little baby step in that direction.

I want to convince every 99er in America to re-apply for unemployment once a month. There is no rule against this, there is no prohibition whatsoever. We just fill out a new application every calendar month, telling the full and honest truth. And every month, the state unemployment machinery has to process all those applications, and send us a form letter saying "you have already received the full 99 weeks of blah blah blah, etc, etc".

The California EDD admits that there are 469,000+ of us in California alone. That means about 120,000 applications a week for them to process, deal with, and respond to.

There is also a secondary benefit to this idea. If and when something like HR 589 should ever be passed, all of us will still be active in the files of our state unemployment departments. Until today, Cal EDD hadn't heard from me in over a year. If HR 589 did pass, would they remember me?

Anyhow, I am truly fired up about this idea. It's something we can do, and do for free, and in most states we can do it online.