1984 in 2008

An editorial in The New York Times, No Friend of the Workers, today http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/opinion/18fri2.html?ref=opinion [1] was a scathing indictment of the Labor Department. Now I don’t want to lecture anyone about what they should be paying attention to, but this one was too hard to ignore. The editorial was spot-on in it’s reporting, and that was gratifying in itself. The New York Times has published a number of editorials that could come under the banner of “dissent”.

In the article, there were clear indictments of the Labor Department. In one paragraph of the editorial the Times stated:

“President Bush has filled top posts across his administration with people who do not agree with the missions of their organizations. His Environmental Protection Agency has failed to protect the environment; his Justice Department has promoted injustice.”

This has been apparent since the early days of the administration. It is unfathomable why so many Americans have put up with this regime for so long. The truth be known, almost every agency in the Bush administration has turned out to be an oxymoron. The Defense Department has become the Offense Department. Homeland Security has become Homeland Insecurity. The list goes on and on.

The American worker has been the target of drawbacks and benefit reductions for the last decade. On the backs of the workers, the top 10% of American families control 71% of this nation’s wealth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth [2]. This leaves 29% of this nation’s wealth to share among the rest of the 90%. Does this make any sense? Meanwhile, while workers aren’t getting paid their last paychecks and are being paid below minimum wage, and disabled kids are being paid in cash to operate heavy machinery in clear violation of child labor laws, the Labor Department does nothing.

The Times also said this about the Department of Labor:

“The G.A.O.’s findings suggest that the government is not doing its job of going after employers who “cheat their employees out of their hard-earned wages,” said Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who chairs the committee that held this week’s hearing.”

The NY Times ended their editorial with this note:

“The first step in getting the nation’s laws enforced again will be entrusting enforcement to people who believe in them. We hope the next president will do that.”

Gee, swell, we hope so too. Hoping that an agency of the Federal government will do the job that it was created for is a travesty! This is clearly and eerily similar to George Orwell’s 1984, where the Department of Love was really the Department of Hate. The situation we have been living with only proves that the American people are compliant as well as complicit in allowing governmental abuse to continue for as long as it has.

Some well-meaning people have tried to tell me that socialism will never work in America. I’m here to tell you that rampant capitalism isn’t working either! These times have workers doing two jobs in order to stay employed after drastic “downsizing” of their workplaces. Unions are ineffective. The Department of Labor is deaf and dumb. If this is capitalism at its best, socialism, or at least portions of it, is defiantly more desirable.

Make no mistake, the Democrats and Republicans that feed out of the corporate trough will not change the plight of the American worker. I can’t believe I just wrote that, it is such a hackneyed and overused statement. Still, it is the truth. Maybe that’s why we have heard it so often.