Email from Keith Ellison re: the TPP and the Democratic Platform Committee.

[bread_and_roses]

50. Right! It's all the WORKERS' fault!

really ... how very neo-liberal of you. Your remarks are so very similar to some that Clinton I made lo these long years ago in regard to NAFTA .... and we all know how well that's worked out.

it's terribly dishonest to blame business for our own failure to retrain for new jobs as our old ones were coming to an end. Sure, business knew many of their employees were literally refusing to change, were too improvident and even feckless to take proper care of themselves, and in this laissez-faire era declined the role of babysitter.

So ... all those factory workers who lost jobs were "too improvident and even feckless to take proper care of themselves" .... and they should have retrained for .... which new jobs exactly? Men and women who'd worked all their lives, taken care of themselves & their families all their lives .... should have retrained for .... McDonald's? Hotel housekeeping? Were they all supposed to become hedge fund managers?

You do realize not everyone wants, or is suited to, some sort of technical work? Many of those who could make a switch DID go back to school .... in computer sciences, etc. - only to eventually lose out to H1b visa imports. Others went to call centers .... then THEY started to be outsourced ....

As for those who waste long hours hanging around by their fingernails, they really should finally be hitting the books. The economy will never be "fixed" enough to pay good wages to workers whose skills are obsolete.

Really? Sooooooo.... let's see - child care workers, pre-school staff, elder-care home aides, janitors, refuse collectors, farm workers - just a few of the job classifications I can think of that are seriously, seriously underpaid, in which workers "hang [on] by their fingernails," always one day away from a utility shut-off, an eviction, an empty larder, an unpaid car insurance bill - we don't need those workers anymore? They are paid so little because their "skills are obsolete?" We have robots who can do those jobs now?

No. The collusion of "Liberals" and the Democratic Party in throwing away ordinary working people, in destroying public services by privatization, in allowing our infrastructure to crumble while there are millions out of work who could and would do that work, in kow-towing to Wall Street and the Vampire Insurance and Prison-for-Profit and Charter School and dirty energy companies, in allowing a sort of indentured servitude to the Masters for health care while wages eroded and the working class and poor fell deeper and deeper into debt and despair ....THOSE are some reasons why workers are "hanging on" by a thread. Not their "fecklessness" or "obsolete skills."

Your post could serve as a short course in why the working class has abandoned the Democratic party. It abandoned them. There is all sorts of work in the world, and all of it that is useful - like taking care of children and elders, harvesting food, and picking up our garbage deserves dignity and a living wage.

The contempt that absolutely drips off your post for ordinary working people is simply .... I have no words that suffice. I signed in here for the first time in a long time because I could not believe those statements seemed to left unchallenged. I even signed (unread) whatever those terms of service were - if I have violated them, too bad - I'll never be back anyway.