Over at his blog Lance mannion has written the best rant I've seen (ever) on the predatory and cynical efforts of the neo-cons and their corporate lackys to dismember the American middle classes. Chief among the richest of the rich with the most lucre in his vault and still insane for more is Bernie Marcus the king of Home Depot who has been aggressively lobbying against the Employee Free Choice Act along with his trough swilling corporate bailout pals who, you guessed it are fat recipients of public smackeroos but still want more. Why if employees had fair wages the top 16 per cent of the population couldn't own 90 per cent of the nation's wealth and by god then where would we be? Etc.
I'm no pinko and by jinkies I believe in the right to make money. But the spectacle of corporate bailout recipients lobbying against the rights of workers to form their own representation is quite a big chunk of hypocrisy. The more so since these same fellows have sneeringly referred to social programs like Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security as "entitlements" ever since the Reagan years. Clearly corporate handouts are not entitlements–they're the just desserts. Yum Yum!
There sure seem to be lots of Bernies in the news these days.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
Marcus the Home Depot king appears to desire a return to a time when paternalistic capitalism was the norm. We poor slobs that work for a living should trust the goodness of robber barons to care for us and provide a living wage. I think not as I doubt Marcus or Mellon, Rockefeller and others ever lost sleep or worried about workers that lost their lives in mines, died of cancer from inhaling coal dust or children who toiled in factories seven days a week. While I am not a fan of organized labor I trust Marcus, or worse yet, Bill Gates, about as much as I can throw them across a football field. What is needed and has long since been absent from business is a sense of ethics. When we have people like Marcus and Gates and others worth billions of dollars and at the same time have middle class families that struggle to make ends meet our economic system is profoundly flawed.
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Let’s call it like it is–America’s executives are on–gasp–welfare!
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