SPECIAL COMMENTARY: THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM

Tom Privitere
photo:  Ove Overmyer

Special Commentary by Tom Privitere

WNY Director of Field Services, Public Employees Federation

Rochester, N.Y.-- In the days when Kodak, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb and other large manufacturing companies were flourishing in our area, those of us who made a choice to go into public sector service jobs...taking lower pay and, in many cases, fewer benefits, are now being vilified because we’re the “last soldiers standing” in the war against the middle-class.

The powers that be are turning many of those private sector workers, who are justifiably angry over being stabbed in the back by their former employers, into pawns goaded into fighting a battle against their own kind.

All you have to do is ask those people who thought that their Kodak and Xerox pensions and health insurance packages were going to take them through their retirement years. They gave their heart and soul to these companies; they provided the human capital that drove their engines of success.

Just recently, an AFL-CIO report shows the CEOs at 299 U.S. born companies earned a staggering $3.4 billion combined in executive compensation in 2010.  This is a 23 percent increase from the prior year. Nearly 190 of those chief executives got a pay raise compared to their 2009 levels.

This also comes at a time when rank and file workers and retirees whose lifelines and retirement benefits have all but dried up. And that is to say nothing of their co-workers jobs, which have been CAPTA’d and NAFTA’d overseas.

The class war is being won by the "2 percenters" who are successfully convincing middle-class Americans that public employees are the enemy. They say we are the cause of their woes-- that we are eating up their taxes and increasing their costs. If we are to point fingers at anyone, we should be recognizing the fact that extending the Bush Tax Cuts, opening corporate tax loopholes, greedy Wall Street fat cats and financial market deregulation are all responsible for the inability for federal, state and local governments to generate enough revenue to balance our budgets.

Tom Privitere (wearing red) attends the "Save Our Schools"
Rally at the Liberty Pole in downtown Rochester, N.Y. on
March 17, 2011.  photo:  Ove Overmyer

Middle-class Americans, including Tea Party folks who wave placards proclaiming the “Party’s Over” for public sector “parasites” ought to be told that they are being duped by the real culprits, that “eating their young” is somehow a good thing.

The fact is that the same people who are controlling the media are subliminally and overtly messaging a mantra to the masses that keeps us fighting amongst ourselves while they sit on their yachts, and in their ivory towers, rubbing their hands with glee as they count their millions and laugh at just how easily they have manipulated the conversation.

If you haven't been paying attention of late, these conquer and divide strategies pitting the “private” against the “public” sector is exactly what the “2 percenters” and multi-national corporations planned for us all along.

They have redefined “us” and “them.” They have ingeniously removed themselves from the field of battle and watch from above as working middle-class Americans of public and private stripes argue amongst themselves and waste energy finger pointing at each other. The real culprits in this class war insulate themselves from responsibility and exempt themselves from not only taxes, but dodge the blame for the disintegration of our free market system.

This is a race to the bottom folks, and I refuse to be a pawn in that game of war.