Graffiti seen on doorway
near Gramercy Park in NYC
Photograph courtesy Pak So
... and The People have spoken.
On June 27, 2011, Roger Cohen wrote an Op-Ed article titled America, Awaken for The New York Times. From the Readers' Recommendations of comments and responses to the article, Winning Progressive of Chicago, IL writes the following:
"I agree that it is ridiculous that our country has neither a comprehensive energy policy nor an industrial policy. But to lay these failures at the feet of President Obama while ignoring the real culprits - the Republicans - is inaccurate and unfair.
In the closing months of the Bush Administration, our nation lost nearly 3.6 million jobs. And from the day that President Obama took office, the GOP has launched a war on jobs designed to ensure that the economy did not recover. This war included watering down the stimulus bill and removing aid to state and local governments, filibustering small business lending fund and tax cuts for more than nine months, eliminating 250,000 jobs by filibustering renewal of the TANF Emergency Fund that the GOP had previously supported, filibustering 20 nominees to the Treasury Department and three to the Federal Reserve (including a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics), holding unemployment benefits hostage to further tax cuts for the wealthy, and opposing a recent proposal to provide a payroll tax cut that the GOP had previously supported. These actions were motivated by a desire to ensure that President Obama is not re-elected in 2012, which Mitch McConnell has noted is the GOP's number one priority.
So, yes, let's bemoan the economic problems facing our nation, but in doing so let's focus our anger on the Republicans who are responsible for causing and continuing those problems, not on the Democrats who are trying to fix them."
. . . . . .
On June 30, 2011, Sarah Lyall wrote an article titled Public Workers Strike in Britain Over Pensions for The New York Times. From the Readers' Recommendations of comments and responses to the article, KT of NYC writes the following:
"My family has belonged to unions, including public service unions, for fifty years. That is why, although many earned only average salaries, all the seniors in our family lived safe, healthy retirements. My uncle, a member of the longshoreman's union - he was an office worker - is now 92 years old and still lives independently. His union pension and veterans' benefits (he is a member of "the greatest generation"), along with Medicare, have enabled him to stay healthy. No way that he could have supported and educated a family -- three kids, now employed, good citizens -- on his longshoreman's salary.
The Republicans want to destroy all of this. The British unions have the right idea: fight now, and fight until the other side agrees to be fair and reasonable. I'd bet that the real issue is not raising the retirement age, since we all agree that people are now living longer that they did 50 years ago (in part, I believe, because of adequate pensions and medical care); or even small, reasonable increases in worker pension contributions. The issues are exactly the same as in the United States: fewer benefits for fewer people. Paying more for less is what the corporations and governments are offering. Sharing the burden of keeping us all healthy and safe is not part of their credo.
Unless American workers start to fight back, and American voters realize that, regardless of all the "Christian", "family values" and "individual rights" spiels, the Republicans are not friends of the middle class, we will wake up one day, as did the public service workers in Wisconsin, and find out that the financial rug has been pulled out from under us. The British workers have figured out that "united we stand, divided we fall". Will we learn the same lesson, or find out, too late, that our fates will be far worse than that of our parents' generation; and that the fault for that outcome lies, not in the stars or machinations of a few Wall Street moguls, but in ourselves."
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