Who Can Beat Trump?

[Eric the Green]

(09-17-2018, 07:03 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(09-17-2018, 03:42 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Blues don't look upon bosses as people looking out for us. Blues look upon bosses as out to make money-- and frequently do so at the expense of others if they are not taxed and regulated properly. If reds were looking after their own economic interests, they would see the bosses in exactly the same way. Instead, they vote for the bosses, based on their prejudices against poor, non-white people. And then they wonder why some blues call them racists.

This was not always the case.  My father joined the Bell System just after World War II.  He was from a New England Telephone family, with a grandfather, father, mother and uncle once hired by the company.  It was said that once you were hired by a Bell company, they would look after you for life, and it went beyond just one generation.  My second job was with New England Telephone, a summer job as a janitor before going off to college.

He told a bunch of stories, including that of an immigrant who died with no family on this side of the Atlantic.  Her supervising operator became family, did every thing expected of family to make the funeral arrangements.  People then took care of coworkers, and the big corporations encouraged it.

I was let go decades later as an engineer just before becoming vested in health care.  My uncle was also let go, only to be rehired as a contractor, someone expendable during a downturn.  The idea of a two way loyalty with the employee was long forgotten.  Ironically, I was let go by Verizon.  They had recently bought my division of GTE.

Trumps slogan is about making America great again.  I suspect he doesn't know or care about what once did make America great.  The commies made a joke of it.  "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."  That is not the way to greatness.

Good story. Corporations were similar to socialist countries then; welfare capitalism it was called. Good times, except for those of marginal communities, and if you liked conformist, spirit-dead culture. But there was a national consensus forged in the great crisis, and spanning the first turning and mostly well into the second. It may have been a narrow window in time, as we look at it now, between the age of the robber barons, when workers often had to fight for their rights and fair treatment, and the age of the corporate raiders and junk bond investors, when the trickle-down theory took hold.