Naivetics

Union "rights" - isn't that what Unions were for in the forst place?  to break bad laws?
I don't know about the Union ads on TV at the moment - asking Labor to make sure the Unions and workforce get back their empowerment to strike on social issues.  It's a sort of a vicious circle thing, isn't it?

I mean, Unions were originally formed to prevent unscrupulous employers from taking advantage of the workers.  Unions were the "power of the people" creating some equilibrium in the economy which grew up along with our Industrial and Technological Revolutions.  They were about changing the laws.  Now they seem to have sat back and let the government extract their testicles, gonads, and vas deferens, to the point where they have to run ad campaigns to try and get their right (to get rights back) back.

Come on Nutless Ones - all it takes is for everyone to take their nose out of the feed trough and all strike together. Every single last person in the workforce. A resounding slap in the face of the "government." (I parenthesise that word because it is to be hoped that every government worker will also be on strike.)

Why doesn't it happen?  Because a lot of people are not unhappy enough with their lot yet.  Unions started to gain power in an environment where a lot of people were working very hard and still not able to support themselves and their families, and thus rife for exploitation.  Banding together was the only way to negotiate.  But today, it's hardly that big of an issue.   We have enough.  Even though a government is adroitly removing over half of that from your pockets in various forms of taxes and fees, we have enough.

So "naivetics" (my simple view of politics) doesn't work.  And speaking of that, here's another thing that puzzles my naivetic senses:

The financial crisis.  Caused?  By the collapse of a few key lending institutions.  Why did they collapse?  Because the people they were lending to, stopped paying.  Why did they stop paying?  They didn't have enough.  Now everyone in the USA is going to share a portion of the burden that the "not enoughs" have dropped.  It makes Unions irrelevant in a way.

And it avoids the real issue, which is that a few people at the tops of those pyramids became, and still are, very very rich.  When in fact they didn't do such a great job, actually.  Had they been more vigilant in their oversight, they would have picked that their field agents were making poor risk choices, and acted to stop them.  But all they chose to see was lots of customers, ergo lots of income.  Right?  As they always say, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and watching a table load up with food without wondering who was gonna pay for all that was just sloppy management.

Aren't there criminal laws that can be applied in this case?  See, the fact that they're not being applied makes me think maybe the government was looking away too, and still are.  Maybe they can handball this hot potato until the luckless new guy gets in.   Maybe they too were watching the table load up with food.

The facts that my naivetics can see are that in the USA, people's rights have been curtailed and denied for decades, their individuality has been repressed, and by means of  schools, advertising, and enforcement, they have been brainwashed to a great degree to become a pliant mass.

It actually seems not to have worked, because now those chickens are coming home to roost with a vengeance.  The USA is considered an annoying voice but no longer a superpower nor even relevant to many, and it has now collapsed financially, making it less of an economic force too.

To top it off, the USA now plans to use that economic disaster to welsh out of carbon emissions responsibilities.  That means that at some stage, some real new world power is going to have to step in and tell them to shut their machinery down, or have it shut down percussively.  NOTE: See below for update, a scant day later.

And the only difference between the USA and Australia is that they have a few decades' head start on us...  C'mon Aussies - always always keep the bastards honest!  We have a chance to not follow the USA into that nasty place reserved for the fallen school prefect.  Let's not muck it up - tell the government that we expect follow-through and action on the issues such as petrol prices, carbon emissions, sustainable energy, and environmental issues.

Maybe then we'll have a voice as a people again, and with any luck that voice won't be speaking a foreign language.

:UPDATE: Companies may not know that we're a few decades behind the USA - seems they too want carbon emissions relief *now,* same as their reflections overseas.  Told you it wouldn't take long...  This is where Rudd needs to use some of those gonads he extricated from the Unions, and put his foot down...