February 27, 2014: What a Corker, Race to the Bottom, Voodoo That You Do

“And now go do that voodoo that you do so well”

                     ---Harvey Korman as Headly Lamar in “Blazing Saddles”

 

Senator Bob Corker (Rescumlican Tennessee) is caught in a firestorm over attempts by workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga to organize under the auspices of the United Auto Workers.  It seems that prior to the vote by the workers over union certification, the swine from Tennessee was caught dutifully doing the bidding of his corporate paymasters by telling the workers that if they vote against unionization that Volkswagen would build more auto plants in Tennessee and the American Southeast.  Conversely, calling the UAW the greatest job killing organization in the world, he told the workers that if they joined the union it would threaten their already existing employment and jeopardize any further expansion by Volkswagen in the American South.  Using these fear tactics, the kind of voodoo the Scums do so well, the auto workers in Chattanooga dutifully rejected the union. 

 

This is the same United States Senator who stood in the well of the Senate and called for American auto workers, as a price for the industry bail-out in 2009, to be forced to give up their wages and benefits and join the ‘race to the bottom’ by working for the world industry wage.  The Senator, you see, stood outraged that American workers should have the temerity not only to demand by to compel a higher standard of living than the prevailing world rate.  No matter that the Unions had already given back many of their gains, particularly fringe benefits, the man from Tennessee was not satisfied and stood ready, willing and eager to use the financial crisis to wring landmark concessions from the working class.  This, it seems, is the recurring pattern.  Use a crisis, any crisis to give the screws one more turn on the working people of this country; and, if a crisis doesn’t exist, simply create one such as in using the debt ceiling to periodically exact more concessions from the workers and to further shred the safety net beneath them.   

 

This is not your father’s Republican party.  I cannot imagine that in my youth even the most recondite reactionary would stand in the Congress of the United States and boldly calling for radical reductions in income for middle Americans.  A few may have held those views, but none would have stood upon the national stage and so brazenly expressed them.  It is a mark of the times that a United States Senator can openly conduct war on the middle class of this country and not feel a sense of political insecurity.  This particular scum won his seat back in 06 by running in the tradition of Karl Rove and Lee Atwater airing disgusting and racially tainted television commercials against his opponent Harold Ford.  In a campaign reminiscent of another scumbag, Georgia’s Saxby Chambliss, Corker savaged Ford with television commercials that violated every standard of decency, eking out a narrow victory.  Within months, knowing that his corporate paymasters would rapidly come to his defense he was calling for an end to hard won gains by the largely northern auto workers.  Now he feels safe to wage war on his own constituents.  I never thought I’d live long enough to see a United States Senator Stick pins into the hearts of his own people by openly celebrating their emerging poverty; but then it is a voodoo that they do so well.