2001-04-28 - 19:30 M DST

THE WONDERING JEW

Nth Verse

Well, if I were totally paranoid I would swear that Big Brother is watching my every move and disapproved of my tonight's entry. It disappeared, poof - and I did NOT punch the wrong key.

Another rant, it was. Centered around an article by Gene Amole the Grand Columnist at the Rocky Mountain News, which deals with the bit that festers in my mind all the time. Quote - "China trade-off--Follow the Money." Unquote

My line of thinking always has been concerned about the abuse of human rights by BIG money.

The opium trade fostered by the Big Money of the Brits, the trade in slaves here in America, (rum, slaves and cotton) the massive treaty crushing and violations by the Great White Father in Washington in Indian Affairs. And when finally the Indians were pushed off into land uninhabitable and were assigned agents who were supposed to do right by them we are now finding out what happened to who, but the whys and unknown guilty parties are still truly unknown.

The plight of the wage earner from old times to the present has always been pitiful. Want to get ill ? Read union history in America, it is grim. And the unions are disappearing now - - - wonder why ? And NAFTA is not helping. Some study (wish I had the full data on that one) suggests that when all is figured out, the average man has enough money to feed, clothe, house and send his children to school - while he works his buns off in quiet desperation to keep the whole thing going. The "quiet desparation," bit came from Thoreau - and today it seems the same. Wives and husbands each working a job and trying to raise kids. Well maybe we are a bit better off, back in granny's day women didn't dare try to work out, besides they wouldn't be allowed to do more than maid work or waitress work which didn't pay s__t and for the most part still doesn't.

If I hadn't been very lucky in my later years, Heather and I would be struggling to survive on Social Security alone, living in substandard housing having an inadequate diet, without proper medical care, wondering when the next catastrophe would hit. I can bet the direction it would come from -- out of the Shrub, no ?

I have served my time doing piece-work. It is a funny thing, piece work always had a fixed rate of reimbursement for a given operation - so much per piece. Which didn't buy many groceries. When a smart worker found a shortcut that would let him turn out more pieces per day - by his own ingenuity and sweat -- then the time study man would show up and voila! the workman would have to jump through the hoops to keep from getting fired for underproduction. Never could quite figure that one out, if I made money for the company by meeting quota at so much per piece, why should my increased production not be paid at the same rate as before ? I would still be making money for the company.

I started work before there were many rules governing safety, and most of them were rules to avoid loss and damage of equipment and machinery, such as fire hoses etc. best we had were fire escapes and exits. OSHA seems to be becoming much more subservient to industry than ever before.

Wonder if this entry will disappear too ? This could be the same song, Nth Verse . . . . . . .

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