This is becoming more than just a fight over collective bargaining rights. - Democratic Underground

Not that the bargaining rights aren't important. They are. They're very important.

But this has become about more than just that. It's about the right of people to run their own country and to not have to be servile to those who won the birth lottery.

It's about making people who were born into wealth understand that they should have no more power politically than any one of us. And it's about taking that power away if they refuse that understanding.

The kind of "freedom" the Koch's are fighting for is not freedom for you and I. What they are fighting for is the least possible government interference in the dealings of large businesses. That may sound good in principle to some people. The problem is what it leads too.

Without anti-trust laws you end up with single parties controlling multiple industries. And controlling whatever parts of our lives depend on those industries. That is not freedom for us.

Without estate taxes you end up with dynasties stretching over generations and controlling more and more wealth and power. Power over the little guy. That is not freedom for us.

Without safety nets we all end up at the mercy of raw capitalism, where we can suddenly find ourselves with no income through no fault of our own. That is not freedom for us.

Without health care we can end up at the mercy of diseases that are no fault of our own. Diseases which will either kill us or bankrupt us. That is not freedom for us.

Without pollution laws you end up with the destruction of our lands and the pollution of our air and water. The fouling of things that at one time were pure and free for everyone. That is not freedom for us.

Without campaign finance laws you end up with the few ruling over the many. That is not freedom for us.

Without unions you have no protection from capricious firings and unsafe, unbearable working conditions. That is not freedom for us.

The freedom that people like the Kochs want is the freedom for themselves to become royalty in America. The freedom to tell the rest of us the way it will be.

THAT IS NOT FREEDOM FOR US!!!

via www.democraticunderground.com

Comments

[Joepdx]

You know what's also not freedom for us? An economy in which we produce primarily not for need or appreciation, but exchange. I hope this slips into the meme too, that working for (more and more) money is exactly what Koch Bros. want for us - not working for quality of life, for non-monetary things - health and wellness, PLEASURE, curiosity, reverence, and above all love.

The threat unions pose to capitalists is not that they will steal the capitalists' precious jouissance or destroy their economic machinery for extracting it from workers, trees and mountains. The contradictions of capital are enough to do that, and unions better insulate their members from that process than all the piles of money the corporate rich (and their middle-class tools) bury themselves in. No, the bigger threat is that unions point to life beyond the monetized world.