Say What?

There are polls that supposedly show blue color workers drifting to the Republican Party. All right, I know blue color workers are not intellectuals who spend any time studying the candidates or the political process, but I always thought they had some basic instinct for survival. I always thought that even people who are not paying attention can only be screwed a certain number of times before they realize they are being had. I always thought they would then respond appropriately to the politicians who are conning them. A blue color worker who votes for Republican candidates today is defying all reason and common sense. This worker is like a lamb walking up to a lion and asking the big cat if he is hungry. Even if those workers are cynical enough to think that all politicians are corrupt, it does not take an intellectual to realize that not all corruption is equal. Nor does it take an intellectual to understand that competing interests support different candidates. For instance, a large manufacturer will always support a candidate who is running against someone who is supported by labor unions. What this means is that even low information voters should be bright enough to realize how important it is to know who is buying whom.

The Citizens United Case greatly increases the influence of money on our elections, and it is making it far more difficult to see precisely who is buying whom. Large corporations now funnel their money into political groups with euphemistic names in an effort to conceal their influence. The names of those businesses are hidden from you and me, but the politicians who are receiving the funds indirectly know who is putting up the money. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is one of the organizations engaging in this deceptive practice. It is pouring millions of dollars into the campaigns of Republican candidates from a general fund that includes money from unrevealed U.S. sources and money from foreign countries such as India, China, Russia, and Bahrain. The Democrats are sounding the warning loud and clear. They think you have the right to know if foreign interests are influencing our elections and who else might be buying your politicians. The Democrats have introduced a bill to force all organizations that support political candidates to reveal who contributes funds to those organizations. The Republicans are preventing that bill from being passed.

The reason why the Republican Party does not want you to know who is supporting their candidates is all too obvious. Here is a hint for you: the Republicans are blocking a bill that would do away with the tax incentives given to companies who export your jobs; the Republicans are also threatening to repeal the recently enacted legislation that will protect consumers and the recently enacted legislation that will regulate the people who have gambled away the value of your 401K and other pension plans. In other words, the Republican Party does not want you to know they still represent the people who are exporting your jobs and the financial institutions that caused this recession!

Who the Republicans are now representing is not a historical departure for them. They have always received most of their financial support from large businesses, and the Democrats have always received much of their financial support from labor unions. It is not my intention here to be an advocate for labor unions, but it is an indisputable fact that labor unions have a strong incentive to keep and increase the number of jobs in this country because it is the people who work here that belong to those unions. The large businesses, on the other hand, have a strong incentive to drive down the cost of labor by exporting jobs. Given the high unemployment and low wages caused by George W. Bush’s recession what the Republican Party is now doing is unbelievably destructive. They are even opposing extensions of unemployment benefits and many of them want to lower or repeal the minimum wage while extending the budget busting Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country!

I am not naïve enough to think that blue color workers read this blog, but you do. If you know a blue color worker who is thinking of voting for a Republican candidate buy him a beer at a crowded bar where he has to stand up. And try to pull his head out of his ass!