Verizon Bosses say, “Divide and Conquer.” We say, “Please Don’t Duck.”
Posted on August 28th, 2011 | by A Worker |
Verizon ad tries to divide workers
With the “great power” of their “superior” intellect and imaginations — diluted, unfortunately, by blue blood inbreeding — the Verizon bosses have reached into their billion dollar bag of tricks and come up with a brilliant plan – divide and conquer. (For more examples of genius see Big Ideas x 0 = 0).
They think that they can take out ads to convince the rest of the working class that the union workers at Verizon should pay for health care because so many other workers have been forced to do so by the insatiable greed of the corporate rulers. Now this may work on some, because too many workers are blinded by their own greed and the brainwashing of the corporate media and school systems.  But many of the rest of us know that it’s the bosses who should be forced to pay for the health care of the working class — the productive class. We produce wealth. They steal it. The chart below shows the increase in the percentage of net income per household from 1970 to 2005, and it’s only gotten worse since then.
So at a time when the income of the bottom 95% is barely growing and the top 1% has seen their income rise by 175 % the representatives of the 1% at Verizon think that union workers should pay for more of health care and and health care insurance costs. Over the past decade, the annual cost of family coverage has risen 131% and the annual cost for single coverage is up 120%. In each of the past 10 years, insurance increases have outpaced inflation — sometimes by as much as 11 percentage points. The USA spends more on health care than any other industrial country.
The reason for this disparity is that all other countries on this chart have some kind of single payer system. What we need in the US is Medicare for all (See previous post) and if the Verizon honchos really cared about saving money on health care they would support that. But they don’t. They simply want to take more money from us and stick it in their already overstuffed pockets and dish more out to Wall Street.
Call me a crazy conspiracy nut (You’d be wrong,but that’s your right), but it sure seems to me like I’m starting to see a lot of policies, political strategies and corporate demands that make me believe that the powers that be think a whole lot of us are expendable.
- cutting pensions and Social Security
- cutting health care
- cutting retirement health care and Medicare
- sending more and more jobs to other countries
- high unemployment combined with a “permanent” decrease in jobs and job growth (too many workers and too few jobs)
- destructive environmental policies
- the continuing reliance on fossil fuels
- what seems to be becoming a permanent state of war
The list could go on. “Work until you die and, we don’t want to pay anything if you get sick. If you can’t afford health care, it’s not our problem,” the bosses say. These bastards are always doing their calculating, and they have figured out they don’t need so many of us around. We’re too big a threat. They’re looking to get rid of as many of us as they can before we wake up and get rid of them.
We need to get busy organizing a labor movement that fights for the rights of all workers. Today is the day; tomorrow is too late!
