9/2/19: Apparently, not enough people in Ireland binge on Fox News. The Irish believe in climate change and are planning to plant 440 million trees in the next twenty years, to address the threat.
The planned mix will involve 70 percent conifers and 30
percent broad leaf trees and should create roughly 40 square miles of new
forest annually.
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The fat cats sent American jobs to Sri Lanka and Vietnam and
Bangladesh.
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Labor unions once protected American workers.
TODAY, OF COURSE, is Labor Day, which means it’s time for President Trump to insult the president of the AFL-CIO, the union that has devoted itself to fighting for the rights of the working man and working woman for decades.
The battle is joined when Richard Trumka, chief of the union, says Trump is hurting the people his union represents.
“He came to our members and said,” in 2016, “’I’m going to change the rules of the economy,’ and they believed him. And, quite frankly, I wish he would have changed the rules of the economy,” Trumka said during an appearance on Chris Wallace’s Fox News show.
“Unfortunately, the rules he’s changing has hurt them,” Trumka said. “He’s opposed every increase in the minimum wage. He’s changed the regulation to take overtime away from a couple of million people. He’s proposed a trillion-dollar cuts to Medicare and Medicaid... He’s rolled back health and safety standards towards workers.”
And that means…
Trump Insults!
First, Trump tweet-hints that Trumka is a liar, which at some point you might imagine even Trump supporters will realize is classic projection:
Just watched AFL-CIO President
Richard Trumka on @FoxNews and thought to myself how different he is
on TV than he is when he is with me at the White House. Likes what we are doing
until the cameras go on.
We got robbed on Trade and
everything else while his Dems just sat back and watched. NAFTA is the
worst Trade Deal ever made - terrible for labor - and Richard let it stand. No
wonder unions are losing so much. The workers will vote for me in 2020 (lowest
unemployment, most jobs ever), and should stop paying exorbitant $Dues,
not worth it!
Kill the unions? It’s another terrible Trump idea. Unions once ran closed shops, meaning only members could work. If we still had that, we’d solve our undocumented workers problem. Unions used to be able to fight for workers to have real pensions. Unions fought for overtime pay and paid holidays and sick days and paid vacation, two weeks per year or more.
The Republicans attacked them at every step.
Union workers were greedy, conservative editorialists complained. Jobs were shifted from “high wage” states like Ohio, to “low wage” states like Texas. “Hey, that fattened our profits, nicely,” the fat cats who almost always support Republican politicians said with a grin.
“Well, why don’t we send more jobs overseas, and fatten our own bank accounts even more? There are no unions in these low wage states to stop us or complain!”
And, lo, the fat cats sent American jobs to Sri Lanka and Vietnam and Bangladesh. And then they rested on Labor Day.
Think this isn’t some GOP scam? Dig around for a few facts. In years before the coal mines were unionized, several thousand miners died annually in unsafe conditions. Texas, one of the reddest states in the land, has long turned a blind eye to the fact that 400,000 undocumented are employed in the construction industries in that state. Mitt Romney, in his famous 47% speech, talked up the joys of investing in Chinese companies, who paid their workers a fraction of what American workers demand. Trump himself hired undocumented Polish workers in the 1980’s to build Trump Tower in New York, and then tried to stiff them on pay.
Would he still hire the undocumented now if he could fatten his own bank account? Sure, we already know he does. (See: 4/9/19 and 7/5/19.)
POSTSCRIPT: The Trump administration takes so much heat after announcing plans to deport individuals with life-threatening illnesses, here legally in the U.S.A., that they suddenly backtrack.
Because the policy is ghoulish and cruel.
