Mr. President, I'm Going to a Protest in St. Paul.

FredStembottom

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Sat Apr-11-09 12:06 PM
Original message

Mr. President, I'm Going to a Protest in St. Paul.

Today, I go to a protest rally. This will be my 2nd ever. The first being that day, unprecedented in history, when the world's first global protest came together to give George Bush the simple message: Attacking Iraq will make everything worse.

That's the level of threat that is required to get me, a timid, overworked, overwhelmed, aging blue-collar worker out into the streets. Protesting is a young person's realm. Not a place for a 50-something man, riddled with work injuries and chronic illness. Nor is it at all clear how the company I work for might react should I be seen protesting in the streets.

Anyone working for one of these large multi-national companies knows what I mean.
These huge behemoths operate with such impunity! They are virtually un-regulated. Supra-governmental. They dismiss millions of workers and their families into utter darkness with a single conference call. Those left behind do the work of 2 (or 3!) under relentless computer-monitoring and demands of 100% accuracy 100% of the time ("you've got 46.7 seconds for each customer - and they must leave completely satisfied. You spent 48.4 seconds on a customer last week and another complained that your smile seemed insincere. One more of these violations and we will have to put you into Performance Enhancement Mode").

And when we manage to do the work of 2 people, day after day, with 100% accuracy, at the expense of family, health and more, we are rewarded with a cut in our pay and hours. Starting and quitting times are dictated based on the amount the company feels like paying that day. Break times become "flexible" and unlimited - if no customers are present at the drive-thru, neither is your pay. Effectively converting hourly wages into piece work. Benefits wither. Health care is removed in stages by ever-increasing co-payments. Retirement benefits...... just a thing of the past now.

Mr. Obama, we are so proud to have you representing America to the world. You have done much that is breathtakingly positive. But appreciating these positive accomplishments is rapidly becoming a luxury. It is just too hard to watch so many families I know disappear under the economic steamroller. It occupies my mind entirely. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs comes home with a vengeance.

I can't do it, sir. I have tried for months to be patient and see trillions of dollars heaped onto the very people and institutions who caused this economic mess. I have watched one too many executives feel bitterly betrayed because they were asked to do with one less corporate jet or give up the oshibori towels in the men's room.

I can't watch anymore as those like me, the blue-collar workers of this land, are treated with such harshness and contempt. I refuse to be told anymore that national salvation is just one more wage-concession away. Sir, for those like me, the wage concessions began 28 years ago! In the 90's, as the wealthy partied on every magazine cover in the grocery store, our wages slid backwards! We have now lost something approaching 50% of our buying power right through the boom-boom years.

Maybe, Sir. Just maybe that has something to do with America's current predicament. In every gloss of economic theory I was ever presented with in high school, one basic idea was always present: that only money in circulation, through the most hands possible, does an economy any good. Vast amounts parked off-shore do nothing. Vast amounts passing between only a few, select hands is also stagnation. Economies are like car engines - they only work when mysterious balances of air-to-fuel, heat-to-cooling, combustion-to-inertia are reached.

Economies are not bon-fires.... or churches. They are engines that can fly apart as well as stall out if those mysterious balances are not reached. The economic enthusiasms of the past 28 years were simply wrong. Wrong on their face. Which a side-lined group as diverse as the goofy Ross Perot to the sober academics Bluestone and Harrison (The Great U-Turn) tried to tell us. And yet, these fringe-group economic theologies were implemented! Massively!( Which should remind you of a certain war and an earlier protest I mentioned above.)

The engine blew apart as it had to. And fixing it requires ONLY that we RETURN to the regulatory environment we had before. The ones in place during America's greatest years. Back to the 50's!
I emphasize ONLY and RETURN not for your benefit but for the edification of the Cable TV harpies who try to cast a mere return to what we had as Socialism. Backing away from radicalism - the cult-like radicalism of the Free Marketeers - is not Socialism, it is America recovering from an injury done to it.

So, Mr. President, I protest today. I protest in hope of saving myself, my family and friends' families suffering worse than mine. But even more than that, sir, I will be out in the street trying to speak directly to you. To have a say in this country's affairs that an army of advisors surrounding you would never allow me to have. I want to give you courage. I want you to know that many millions are down here with me, never appearing on TV, never invited to policy forums. Let us appear! We wait to buoy you up on one of the greatest surges of support an American President has ever experienced.

Help those who were calculated right out of the policies of the past 28 years. Return to the policies that helped complete Nobodies like me get ahead a little each year - that helped us SPEND a little each year and spurred us on to design, innovate and manufacture for each other. Do that and watch America's engine fire up on all cylinders!

See you in St. Paul!