Who are those “thugs”, again?

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Too many politicians want us to believe that unions are impersonal, soulless monsters when they are actually the members, the workers, who are the unions.

Sure, there are certain union leaders who are corrupt and like the power, and will do what they can to preserve it, but the union member have been responsible for such things as health insurance, the weekend, decent wages, equal pay, the 40 hour work week, making the middle class, and doing the work they do.

We are told that unions are weak and unnecessary.

If unions are so weak, why all the effort to get rid of them?

And isn’t interesting that those who want to disband unions are the corporations who want no shared control over hours, wages, or conditions of employment?

Without the unions, the corporations could treat people like dirt.

They could pay lousy wages earned in demeaning working conditions making it necessary for people to work for too many hours.

They long for the good old days of the early 20th Century factory conditions where even children had to work to make ends meet; people lived in hovels with the promise of the American Dream while making sure it won’t happen; and being able to fire workers at will for something as simple as asking for a living wage.

Here is an example of those workers that corporations and those politicians who are in their debt like to refer to as “thugs”.

A group of union plumbers took matters into their own hands in addressing the poisoning of the people in Flint.

This past Saturday 300 plumbers from unions across the country went to Flint to install new faucets and water filters for free because existing faucets were so old they could not accommodate water filters provided by the state.

The United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry, known as the United Association, ran the operation using fixtures donated by the Plumbing Manufacturers International.

Unfortunately, though, new tests revealed that the levels of lead in some homes exceed the ability of filtration systems because, while most filters can remove up to 150 parts per billion of lead, some homes were found to have lead levels of more than 4,000 parts per billion.

The union took their action because the state of Michigan and local Flint officials gave residents no option but to consume the heavily leaded water.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder at first allocated only $5 million to help Flint residents buy water filters and bottled water, and President Obama authorized another $80 million.
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If this poisoning had been done by a private corporation, the people of Flint could have sued them, and probably would have gotten more than what the governor has allocated. But, as it is, they aren’t allowed to sue the government, even though it is clear the state government knew what was going on for a very long time and just brushed it off.

Examples of the benefits of being able to sue for injury would include Toyota’s having to pay $1.6 billion to all Toyota owners for the loss of the resale value of their cars affected by sudden acceleration, and General Motors having to pay $35 million to the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, and $900 million to the Justice Department in penalties because of faulty switches in its 2005 Cobalt that had resulted in 125 deaths and 250 injuries.

GM then was required to recall and fix all the 2.6 million vehicles in question at its own expense.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Flint are having to continue paying for the water that is poisoning them.

The State Attorney General has assigned two investigators, former Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Todd Flood and retired FBI Special Agent Andrew Arena, to determine whether any laws were broken in leading up to and during Flint’s ongoing water emergency.

Although the AG claims
“This independent investigation will be exhaustive and thorough” and that “Without fear or favor, I will carry out my responsibility to enforce the laws and protect the families and citizens of Flint”,
One of the investigators, Todd Flood, has generously given donations to state Republicans, including the governor, who, after GM went to him to complain that the water from the Flint River water was causing their car parts to corrode when being washed on the assembly line, spent $440,000 to hook GM back up to the Lake Huron water, while keeping the rest of Flint on Flint River water.

Also, what might be of interest is that the head of Nestle, a company that sells bottled water and was allowed to continue bottling it for sale both in and out of the state during the worst of the California drought, has stated that no one has a right to water, and the wife of Governor Snyder’s chief of staff during the crisis, Dennis Muchmore, is the spokesperson in Michigan for the Nestle Company which is the largest owner of private water sources in the State of Michigan.

Nestle has been sued for the 200 gallons of fresh water per minute it takes out of the ground and bottles for sale as their Ice Mountain brand of bottled spring water.

Now Nestle is getting a lot of positive PR for supplying bottled water to Flint.

Because one of the first things Governor Snyder did when he took office in 2011 was to get a multi-billion dollar tax break passed by the Republican legislature for the wealthy and for corporations,
this meant he needed to get the missing revenue through another source, so schools, pensions, welfare, and safe drinking water were tapped.

He invoked an executive privilege to take over cities by firing the mayors and city councils whom the local people had elected, and installing his cronies to act as the governments of these cities, most of which had majority Black populations.

The result was 102,000 people exposed to poison water with the children growing up to be adults affected by it.

While the government in Michigan does what it can to explain itself and find someone else to blame for their own crime against the people of Flint, the “Union Thugs” did what they could to help people.

Now, the real Thugs would be?

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