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I think the best answer I've heard is two simple words: cheap labor.
If you think about it, just about everything undertaken by the moneyed white men who run the show, if successful, eventually results in cheap labor.
The social issues are just window dressing and diversion. They don't really care about abortion or gay marriage, but such issues are useful to divide and conquer. If enough people think that sexual "morality" is the most important consideration in choosing a candidate, "useful idiots" can be trained to parrot pre-tested sound bites which the right wing talkers will repeat several times an hour, aroung the clock, around the dial.
Once elected, their support system of corporate money and fawning treatment by the "journalists" at Fox will continue so long as they oppose increases in the minimum wage, any legislation favorable to unions and any attempt to give ordinary citizens meaningful access to the courts. They will, of course, do all they can to decrease taxes on the wealthy and their companies. They will find new ways to shift the burden for basic social services to the hourly wage worker, thereby excusing corporations and their owners from having to concern themselves with things like health care, pensions or education.
I've been thinking about all this recently because it sure looks like the insurance companies, spending $1.4 million a day on lobbying, are about to "have their way" with our public option. Forty Republicans in the Senate, aided, abetted and, in some instances LED, by so-called Blue Dog Democrats, are about to "change" the health insurance industry by furnishing it with nearly 50 million more customers. With no apologies at all to Lil' Sarah, this is truly putting lipstick on a pig.
Similarly, card check, we're told, will "have to wait", pensions are now dischargeable in bankruptcy, and, while mega-banks and brokerage houses continue to award "bonuses" that would pay off the mortgages for entire subdivisions, labor is told they have to make more concessions if they want any job at all.
How long will it be before company busses are making morning runs to tent cities to pick up that day's workers? How long before workers are bidding against each other for jobs that have no insurance benefits, no retirement plan, don't pay overtime and laugh at the concepts of sick leave and workmens' compensation?
But, it ain't all negative. We should soon see an end to the "outsourcing" of American jobs to third world nations with low wages and lax enforcement of health and safety regulations. Hell, at the rate we're going, they'll be outsoucing their work to US!
Cheap labor: it makes all the puzzle pieces "fit".
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