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host · 11-19-2007, 11:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

Bullshit.....

....If you spent the time you do writing these posts and complaining about the government on bettering yourself financially I'd be willing to wager you would have far less to complain about.....

Oh woah is me, I can't compete they are all out to get me, we need to force them to give me what I haven't earned because I have a heartbeat.

This my friends is the essence of the socialist disease. The idea that you are somehow owed something, that life isn't fair, that you have a right to the fruits of others labor.

Your philosophy is that of a loser.....

Can you grasp that I am not motivated by feeling, or being personally disenfranchised? I am not complaining about "my own lot". My "philosophy" is about an awareness and empathy for the least of us and the challenges in their way.

Can you identify, at all, with this example. I'm not comparing myself to her, but I'm inspired by what she did:

Quote:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...romoid=googlep
Monday, Nov. 26, 1934

The 56,000 employes of the U. S. Treasury Department sat down to their suppers one evening last week with easy hearts. From now on they were going to be looked after by a woman who has spent all her life making other people happy. To be Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, President Roosevelt had appointed Josephine Aspinwall Roche, famed Colorado coal operator. Second woman ever to attain sub-Cabinet rank,* her special province was to be the U. S. Public Health Service, the welfare of Treasury employes.....

....Then her father's failing health took her back to Denver where she busied herself as chief probation officer, referee and clerk in Judge Ben Lindsey's famed Juvenile & Family Courts. In 1927 her father died.

From him Josephine Roche inherited a large but by no means controlling block of stock in Rocky Mountain Fuel Co., third biggest coal mining company in Colorado. Crushed and disorganized by long and bloody industrial warfare, Colorado miners were then brooding another strike. The strike broke. Six workers were killed, 35 injured at the Rocky Mountain Fuel Co.'s Columbine mine. Instead of scuttling back to the peaceful East, Josephine Roche bought control of the company, set out to create "a new era in the industrial relations of Colorado." She invited the dreaded United Mine Workers of America to unionize her five mines. She made an oldtime labor leader her manager. She upped wages to $7 a day, highest in the State. She provided for arbitration of disputes, for better working conditions. All this she put down in writing in one of the famed Labor-Capital compacts of U. S. industrial history.

Sullen employes became her loyal partners. Up went efficiency and profits but down on her came the wrath of the industry. Led by the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Co., her competitors started a cutthroat price war. With a high wage scale, Operator Roche was not prepared to fight. Her friends fought for her. Employes volunteered to lend half their pay for three months. Colorado unionists launched a State-wide sales campaign for her coal. Her opponents crawled from the field.

Today Miss Roche is proud that, despite Depression, her company is making more than in the days when her father spent tens of thousands on machine guns and barbed wire to strew around the mines. But she is not rich. Most profits go back into the company. She drives a battered Buick, stays at the home of her friends Senator & Mrs. Edward P. Costigan when she visits Washington. Surprisingly, she is a small, gentle, thoroughly feminine person with a soft voice, a quick, nervous laugh. Even in her coal mining office she dresses as most women dress for tea. At 47 her dark hair is greying, the lines of her firm jaw broadening, but her blue-grey eyes have lost not a spark of their vitality and fervor.

Last summer Miss Roche campaigned for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Colorado on an out & out New Deal platform, lost by a close margin to Governor Edwin C. Johnson. Left without a campaign of her own, Miss Roche joined her warm friend Mrs. Roosevelt in stumping successfully for the election of Mrs. Caroline O'Day as U. S. Representative-at-Large from New York.

At the National Coal Association convention in Washington last month, Miss Roche predicted the coming of a new era of security and well-being for workers throughout the land. Last fortnight President Roosevelt appointed her to his advisory council on legislation to that end—unemployment, old age, health insurance (see p.11). If & when those New Deal flowers blossom, they could logically be planted in the Treasury Department. And in or out of the Department it would be hard to find a more sympathetic, experienced and able gardener for them than Josephine Roche.

Quote:

http://www.cobar.org/group/index.cfm...EntityID=dpwfp

..... To goad the strikers into violent action, the coal companies mounted a harassment campaign, shining high-powered searchlights on the tent colonies at night or using the “Death Special,” an improvised armored car to which a Gatling-type machine-gun was affixed, to periodically spray certain colonies with machine-gun fire. On more than one occasion people were killed. A discussion on the Death Special was included in a Congressional investigation by the House Committee on Mines and Mining after its use in West Virginia earlier. The first Colorado use of the Death Special was at the Forbes colony of October 17 where the entire unprotected tent colony was raked with machine gun fire. One miner was killed, one child shot nine times in the leg, and 148 bullet holes were found in one tent alone.

<img src="http://www.cobar.org/images/mocktrial3.gif">
<i>Baldwin & Felts Death Special</i>

As might have been expected and just as the companies hoped,the strikers fought back. Retaliation was delayed, however, because of a disaster at a nearby New Mexico mine to which Louis Tikas had been called to support.

The type of disaster the mine owners didn’t want at precisely the wrong time, Stag Canyon Number 2 in the Dawson, New Mexico, complex of the Phelps-Dodge Corporation exploded (on October 22)as a result of new machines that created too much coal dust for the fans to handle, killing 260 miners (of which 35 were Greek and 133 Italian).

By late October, panic was spreading through the strike colonies as a result of the Dawson disaster as well as shootings at Forbes (and subsequent shootings at Walsenburg). Coal company harassment of strikers was intended to provoke a violent response, which could then be used as an excuse for calling out the state militia, shifting the financial burden for breaking the strike from Business to the State. Once that occurred, strikebreakers were escorted by the militia into the coal camps..

Armed strikers immediately began to intercept trains holding both deputies and strikebreakers. Tikas, having returned to Ludlow, participated in a number of these confrontations. One, in particular, stands out. Strikers attacked a railroad section house and the next day pinned down the head of mine guards for CF&I and several other guards at the Tabasco mine. The head of guards (Karl Linderfelt) subsequently sent messages to the governor and the commanding general of the Colorado militia insisting that attacks were imminent. Some believe that Linderfelt had been hired to be a provocateur because he was subsequently named commander of one of the two companies of militia (the one substantially manned by mine guards) which rode herd over the Ludlow tent colony. On October 28, Governor Elias Ammons called out the National Guard. ......

.....To the strikers, it was clear that the state had joined the side of the operators. The CF&I billeted guardsmen on company property, furnished them with supplies from the company store, advanced them pay. On a visit to the strike zone, Colorado state senator Helen Ring Robinson observed guardsmen entering CF&I offices to receive paychecks......

....The Colorado Industrial Plan effectively established a company union. The plan was outlined to CF&I managers and worker representatives in Pueblo on October 2, 1915. Feeling that there was little alternative, Colorado miners accepted the plan. And it became effective January 1, 1916. But critics such as UMWA Vice President Frank Hayes condemned the Plan as “pure paternalism” and “benevolent feudalism.” Mother Jones grew disenchanted with Rockefeller, declaring the Plan a “fraud” and a “hypocritical and dishonest pretense.” Yet the Colorado Plan served as the model for many other company unions that spread across the country and by 1920 covered 1.5 million workers or about 8 percent of the workforce.....

.......Widespread union recognition in southern Colorado only came with the New Deal reforms of the 1930s. <h3>But several years earlier Josephine Roche, a crusader for social and industrial reform and controlling owner of the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company, had already signed a contract</h3> with the UMWA that increased miners’ salaries, a move that attracted more skilled workers to her company. CF&I must have seen the handwriting on the wall because in 1933 it abandoned the Colorado Plan when a majority of miners voted in favor of an independent union. That same year the company negotiated a genuine collective bargaining agreement with the UMWA. And with the passage of the 1935 Wagner Act, company unions were outlawed.

One of the more unappreciated consequences of the Ludlow Massacre is its role in making public relations a priority for Big Business. Shortly after the Massacre, John D. Rockefeller hired Ivy L. Lee, publicist for the Pennsylvania Railroad, to mount a nation pro-management publicity campaign intended to rehabilitate his image. Weekly bulletins entitled “Facts Concerning the Struggle in Colorado for Industrial Freedom” were circulated to a carefully prepared mailing list of congressmen, governors, editors, journalists, college presidents, professional leaders and ministers. Lee toured the Colorado coal fields to better understand the audience he needed to win over. Rockefeller himself toured the coal fields in September, 1915. Lee’s spin-doctoring, Rockefeller’s coal field visits and expanded post-Massacre philanthropic efforts transformed Rockefeller from the “most hated man in American” in 1915 to one of the most respected in 1920. Not only did Ludlow become a significant event in labor history, but it spurred the birth of professional corporate public relations.....

I see a problem, global warming, or wealth inequity, I study it, and I seek and propose ways to ease or solve the problem.

You made no attempt to address the "evidence" of alarming wealth inequality, amply demonstrated in my last post. I read your "solution".

My criticism is that it denies the problem, and it overestimates, against the details provided in my last post, the ease of gathering and retaining wealth.

Quote:

.....Americans have amassed much of the world’s treasure. According to the report, in 2000 the United States accounted for 4.7 percent of the world’s population but 32.6 percent of the world’s wealth. Nearly 4 out of every 10 people in the wealthiest 1 percent of the global population were American.....

The current distribution of wealth contradicts your opinions. In the US reside people who hold nearly 33 percent of total world assets, and US population is just 4.7 percent of world population. Just ten percent of the US population hold 70 percent of that wealth. So, ten percent of US population, or .47 percent of world population, hold 22 percent of all the wealth in the world.

This startling statistic, along with the fact that the bottom 50 percent of the US population holds just 2.5 percent of total US wealth, impresses me that it is not "as easy" as you post that it is, to accumulate wealth.

There is a crisis. The first step is to recognize it, and investigate what can be done about it. When was the last time US officials sent economists to study what works and doesn't work in the attempts of governments in France, Sweden, and Denmark to manage wealth inequity and distribution?

UStwo, you don't even concede a role or responsibility of government to manage wealth or to attempt to make it's distribution more equitable.

In Canada, 58 percent of total wealth is in ten percent of the hands, and in the US, 70 percent is. Do you know what percent of Venezuela's wealth was in the hands of just ten percent, in 1997? I'm sure that Hugo Chavez knew the percentage.

If 70 percent of total wealth in the US in just ten percent of the hands is not only not a concern to you, but a "slur" provoking you to "shoot the messenger", is there a higher percentage that would concern you to the point that you might rethink your dismissal of "the problem", or would you simply ignore it until an American version of Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro emerges in reaction to the inequity?

I don't think that we'll be that lucky. We all own guns. We'll use them to delay dictatorship until after a period of violent anarchy.