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The United States of Dystopia
We Need a New New Deal, Green or Otherwise
Our current economic plight as a nation brings to mind a long on line conversation I had with a Republican friend over 20 years ago. It began because he was in a state of high dudgeon over “some guy making over $20 an hour for putting wheels on new cars as they float slowly on an assembly line that is up high so he won’t get a backache. And then he gets raises just for staying there.” My bailiwick is public policy, so I took the time to draw out the particulars in terms of news I could use.
I am not informed what the prevailing wage for work on the line was at the time, but his beef was that the prevailing wage caused a “market distortion” that does harm to the U.S. economy and therefore to us all. Scratching just a little more revealed he identified the source of this irrational behavior by the Big Three auto makers as the United Auto Workers.
Dang, I was thinking to myself, the Devil is long gone, killed in a plane crash. The human manifestation of the Devil would be Walter Reuther. To the Republicans, Reuther was a “labor boss” who would support the Soviet Union over his own country — a fine irony in light of current affection for Vladimir Putin in the White House.
Reuther was an early supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr. and of Cesar Chavez. He also threw his union’s…
