by James Turnage, author of “The Holiday Killer”

45,000 General Motors workers are on strike. In 2009 these same men and women sacrificed pay increases and offered other concessions to their company to aid efforts to save GM from bankruptcy. This happened at some level in every other business in America. It’s time these companies paid the American worker back for their sacrifices.

One member of the UAW called the strike “a battle for the middle class.”

Just minutes before the deadline for negotiations were scheduled to end, GM made a “serious” proposal which would have offered workers a two-percent wage increase, but raised their healthcare costs.

The truth is this is symbolic of the greed of big business in America. After President Obama’s efforts to restore our economy began to show results, companies across America started to rehire some of their laid off employees. However, in many cases they were offered lesser wages than they received prior to the great recession, and occasionally with fewer benefits.

This story is definitive proof that capitalism has failed the American worker. I write about ‘income-inequality’ frequently. This is a more serious problem than Republicans and the media would like you to believe.

The great recession of 2008 allowed the wealthy and large corporations to move America into a plutocracy. While most Americans struggled to maintain an acceptable quality of life for their families, the one-percent richest Americans took advantage of the situation and experienced an increase in their profits and personal wealth. And they don’t want to share their billions of dollars with American workers.

Enter Donald Trump. Immediately after his inauguration trump gave the wealthy another tax break. Then, in 2018, Trump, Moscow Mitch McConnell, and Lyin Paul Ryan passed Trump’s “tax reform” bill. In reality this law, passed by Republicans, is a gift to the super-rich and corporations who were already paying only 18 percent on average. Tax breaks for the middle class would last only one year. Tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans were permanent.

Republicans began waging a war against the working class more than 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan implemented his fiscal policy of “supply side economics,” better known as “trickle-down economics.” He claimed that increasing the profits of the super-rich, or as he called them “job creators,” would increase jobs by expanding their businesses. Of course, this did not happen. The one percent of wealthiest Americans placed their extra profits in offshore accounts.

Every Republican president followed Reagan’s lead. After Bill Clinton left office, the treasury had a surplus of funds. He repaired the damage caused by George H.W. Bush’s failed economic policies. George W. Bush quickly squandered the surplus; placed our nation into two unwinnable wars; and left our nation in a near depression in 2008. Now millions of ignorant voters have given us a man who failed at everything he attempted in his pitiful life. A man with no talent and a low-level of intelligence was placed in control of the world’s largest economy. Once more a Republican gave more money to the wealthy and the consensus of economists is that another recession is imminent.

Republicans are not your friends. History proves that most Americans are better off economically with a Democrat in the White House.

Remember this when you vote on November 3, 2020.

“The truth lives here.”

Op-ed by James Turnage

SOURCE

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