Turning workers' needs into reality

To the editor:

 

One of the great things about The Chief is that Robert Ovetz's superb commentary on how the government created the Federal Reserve Bank to suppress workers' wages can be printed (Oct. 7 issue). If all the news media was as "free" as we are led to believe, this column would have appeared in the Daily News, The New York Times and The New York Post, as well as all the other publications that most people in this country read. Those papers are controlled by the insatiably greedy rich, who have an interest in keeping workers uninformed. 

 

How often do corporations raise prices because they absolutely have to, as opposed to greed for higher profits? The idea that Amazon or Walmart, owned by the richest people in the world, should increase their workers' salaries out of poverty without raising prices is something that is never considered by mainstream commentators. But in the 1940s and 1950s, unions were powerful enough to force many employers to pay good wages. This created the middle class and the rich remained rich.

 

The most hypocritical of the mainstream propaganda is when the powerful claim to be Christians. Anyone with even a little knowledge of Rabbi Jesus knows that he really frowned on greed. As Woody Guthrie wrote and sung, “Yes, if Jesus was to preach like he preached in Galilee/They would lay Jesus Christ in his grave.”

 

Here are some suggestions about how workers can change things. Union leadership has to fight for good salaries and better benefits, regardless of who is in power. There is no excuse for accepting Medicare Advantage over real Medicare to save $600 million in an approximately $100 billion budget.

 

They also should insist that the party that is supposed to be on their side, the Democrats, actually act in workers' interests. You also don't support the party that makes no pretense of being on your side, the Republicans. Since workers are a huge majority, they need to either take over the Democratic Party, support an alternate party such as the Green Party or form a new party of their own. This way abolishing the Electoral College and the National Reserve Bank, raising the minimum wage to a livable level, providing the complete national health coverage that all other developed countries give their citizens, enforcing antitrust and anti-price fixing laws and providing a secure retirement via a much enhanced Social Security can become priorities instead of pipe dreams.

 

Richard Warren