Senator Marco Rubio is willing to drive in one more nail into the coffin of American labor unions. On Feb. 12, Republicans Lamar Alexander and Marco Rubio co-sponsored legislation labels as The Rewarding Achievement and Incentivizing Successful Employees (RAISE) Act. Their objective is to amend the National Labors Relation Act hated by the anti-labor industry, which essentially is all of them. In a way, it is disingenuous for me to say their objective is to amend that legislation because there is another objective. Marco Rubio is, or will be, a candidate for President—there is no chance he will even be a candidate let alone win that high office. His objective is clearly to entice big money donations to his potential campaign. It is an open unabashed invitation for the Koch Brothers to by his candidacy. He is selling out labor unions for money, which is nothing new. Republicans corrupted the Supreme Court for taking the power of the vote out of the hands of “we the people” and put it into the hands of the economic elite. Citizens United, as decided by that court, accomplishes that objective.
The reason this legislation is so dangerous is that it sounds as if it has an honorable objective. It intends to destroy equality and introduce meritocracy into the workplace. Of course, fairness depends on who decides what is meritorious. However, the objective of these Senators is not honorable; they intend to remove equality among workers, which is the forte of unions. They focus their legislation at the most vulnerable unions among all unions. They aim at destroying public service unions, which represents employees of “we the people”, which makes us the ones responsible for paying their salaries. This translates directly to “our” taxes, which is our money—we earned it so we should be able to keep it. All species are greedy but people are cleverer than any other specie in their greed. This means some people can, and do, use their innate greed for nefarious purposes, which usually is to gain political/economic power. This brings us full circle back to Rubio, Koch Brothers, and the success of unprincipled political operatives such as Karl Rove. Look at Scott Walker in Wisconsin; he generated wide spread hate or himself by destroyed collective bargaining for public service unions but was reelected in a recall election because “the people thought a recall election was unfair”—my head spins from such twisted logic bought by a majority of everyday people by mega-dollars donors and sold by political operatives.
It may seem that what is happening is Republicans are aiming at just a small segment of society that is public service unions but in truth, they are aiming at destroying the foundation principle of our democracy—“one man, one vote”. Their objective is to make our votes unequal. The sadness comes from the fact that they are winning. This same scheme is destroying our hard-earned social-capitalist economic democracy and turning it into a plutocracy. There can be no clear evidence of that then the recent congressional approval of the Keystone Pipeline. There is absolutely no logical reason—none—zero—for building that pipeline but one; greed of a foreign oil company. There is no logical reason—none—zero—for destroying unions but one, greed. In the case of public service unions, power seekers are turning our own greed against ourselves as epitomized by Marco Rubio.
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