Euphemisms by Daniel & Cletis

The extreme right wing has always been good at euphemistic language. States' rights was the favored code word justifying slavery 150 years ago and Jim Crow 100 years later. Religious freedom works well for denying women's right to control their own health care and doubles as justification for denying people's right to marry whom they choose. Voter suppression magically becomes about protecting electoral integrity.

Another euphemism in the news recently is right to work. Like states' rights, religious freedom and honest elections, right to work sounds like a good thing. It isn't. Right to work is nothing more than a cynical euphemism for union busting.

Trust me. What's good for the global economy is generally bad for workers. Corporations now have the whole world to find the cheapest available labor in their never ending pursuit for higher profits.

Unions won some early rounds but they've lost every round for the last forty years to an increasingly globalized economy. Can you spell NAFTA CAFTA and TPP?

Capitalism has no conscience. People are expendable. The environment is expendable. Reviving labor unions may well be the only thing standing between the American middle class and extinction.

Not Your Grandfather's GOP

Republicans have not always been totally crazy you know. Here are a few quotes from prominent members of the Grand Old Party you will not hear these days ... 

* “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Dwight D. Eisenhower

* “Labor is prior to ... and independent of ... capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration.” Abraham Lincoln

* “I believe there should be a very much heavier progressive tax on very large incomes, a tax which should increase in a very marked fashion for gigantic incomes.” Theodore Roosevelt

* “Today’s so-called ‘conservatives’ don’t even know what the word means. They think I've turned liberal because I believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That’s a decision that’s up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the Religious Right. It’s not a conservative issue at all.” Barry Goldwater

* “While I am a great believer in the free enterprise system and all that it entails, I am an even stronger believer in the right of our people to live in a clean and pollution-free environment.” Barry Goldwater

* “We establish no religion in this country. We command no worship. We mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are and must remain separate.” Ronald Reagan

Now, contrast these words with those of Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, or any of the other cave dwelling troglodytes who constitute today's GOP leadership ...

The Yellow Rose of Texas

I grew up in Kentucky and am well aware Stephen Foster did not write “… the people are gay” in his masterpiece, My Old Kentucky Home. He wrote “… the darkies are gay” which was changed some years back. However, until this morning when I was jumping around in Wiki, I did not know the fascinating story behind The Yellow Rose of Texas.

Here it is in brief:

Interestingly, the Yellow Rose alluded to in the song was most likely a mulatto woman named Emily D. West who was born a free woman in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1835 Emily indentured as a housekeeper for a year and was taken to Texas where, not long after, she was kidnapped by Mexican cavalry and forced to travel with Santa Anna’s army. 

In 1842 an Englishman, William Bollaert, wrote in his journal that Santa Anna was in bed with Emily when his forces were routed by Sam Houston's army at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836.

Bollaert's story grew and after his journals were published in 1956 Emily's legend became more widely known. Apparently, the original lyrics of the Yellow Rose were a tribute to her skin tone and great beauty. Like My Old Kentucky Home the lyrics have been changed over the years and no reference to Emily’s color remains.

Here are the original, handwritten lyrics of the Yellow Rose dated 1836 and archived at the University of Texas. No authorship is claimed. 

A Spock would say, "Fascinating."

 ... There's a yellow rose in Texas, that I am going to see/No other darky knows her, no darky only me/ She cryed so when I left her it like to broke my heart/And if I ever find her, we nevermore will part.

Chorus: She's the sweetest rose of color this darky ever knew/Her eyes are bright as diamonds, they sparkle like the dew/You may talk about your Dearest May, and sing of Rosa Lee/But the Yellow Rose of Texas is the only girl for me.

When the Rio Grande is flowing, the starry skies are bright/She walks along the river in the quite summer night/She thinks if I remember, when we parted long ago/I promised to come back again, and not to leave her so.

[Repeat Chorus]

Oh now I'm going to find her, for my heart is full of woe/And we'll sing the songs together, that we sung so long ago/We'll play the bango gaily, and we'll sing the songs of yore/And the Yellow Rose of Texas shall be mine forevermore.

[Repeat Chorus] ...

This is not the original but it is very early .... 1858 

Beware the Preacher

Mike Huckabee says: "I almost wish that there would be, like, a simultaneous telecast, and all Americans would be forced — forced at gunpoint no less — to listen to every David Barton message, and I think our country would be better for it. I wish it'd happen."

Now, here are a few things we would be hearing courtesy of Huckabee's idea of a historian, David Barton: 

1. Demonic powers control the government.
2. The Founding Fathers opposed the teaching of evolution.
3. Jesus opposed the minimum wage.
4. The Bible opposes Net Neutrality.
5. The US would have won the Vietnam war if it had flown just one more bombing run.
6. Prayer stopped the BP oil spill.
7. Intolerance of gays is a sign a nation is undergoing a spiritual revival.
8. We can't find a cure for AIDS because it is God's punishment for sin.
9. Life begins not at conception, but before conception.
10. People are probably on welfare because they are not reading the Bible enough.

According to Barton, "The NRA was founded in order to protect freed slaves from lynchings and that there never used to be school shootings in the 1800s because all of the kids carried guns to school."

Want more?

Barton's book, The Jefferson Lies, was pulled by his conservative publisher because Barton fabricated quotes in an effort to depict Jefferson as a staunch Christian. According to Barton, Jefferson said this about separation of church and state,

"On January 1, 1802, Jefferson wrote to that group of Danbury Baptists, and in this letter, he assured them—he said the First Amendment has erected a wall of separation between church and state, he said, but that wall is a one-directional wall. It keeps the government from running the church, but it makes sure that Christian principles will always stay in government."

This one directional section is a completely made up by Barton whose lies were even too much for many conservatives to stomach. Yet, Mike Huckabee still believes in Barton and wants us to eat this swill .... at gun point if necessary.

Now, one from Huckabee:

 

"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution," Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. "But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."

No thanks, Mike ....

Selfish

I’ll make you a bet. Think back on your school days. Remember any selfish kids? I'll bet you do and I'll also bet you don't remember them fondly. Selfishness is not a quality most of us admire. 

Consider GOP presidential hopeful Sen Marco Rubio. Rubio is hard line on immigration and distances himself from his own immigrant heritage by falsely claiming his parents were political exiles fleeing Castro.

They weren't. Rubio's parents immigrated to the United States in 1956; three years before Castro took power in Cuba. Oddly, Rubio now works to shut down the immigrant dreams of others; even kids who were brought here as small children and have known no other home.

Consider also Ben Carson, a prominent neurosurgeon turned GOP presidential candidate, who grew up eating meals courtesy of the food stamp program and wearing glasses provided through a tax-payer supported initiative.

Food and vision care provided by government programs for a child who now says, "Obamacare is the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. In a way, it is slavery, because it is making all of us subservient to the government."

Want more? Consider recent vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan whose dad died young. Ryan, who received Social Security benefits until he was eighteen, now does all he can to privatize and destroy Social Security; derisively referring to those who need help as, Takers.

Many conservatives fail to understand that Social Security was never intended to be just a retirement account. We pay into it with the knowledge there will be money for us in our later years, but also with the understanding we are contributing to the well-being of millions of Americans we will never even meet; people like a sixteen year old kid named Paul Ryan. 

Public assistance is a truly noble idea and goes to the heart of the fundamental American belief that we are in this together; that we contribute to a common cause; that we work to create a supportive, compassionate society.

In short most of us aren't self absorbed ... and most of us aren't going to support politicians who ask us to be that way.

Union Made

The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.

Sarah Cleghorn 1915

 

Not so long ago child labor was wide spread in America and widely accepted. There were no protections for kids and adult workers were little better than slaves. To a large degree it was union men and women who put an end to that. 

Now, by design, we again find ourselves headed in the wrong direction. Workers' rights are increasingly non existent; taken away by corporations and the politicians who do their bidding. So called Right to Work Laws, unfair trade agreements, and outsourcing have destroyed unions and consequently much of our middle class. 

None of this is an accident. The corporate take over of America is a choreographed, generational effort that has largely achieved its aims ... average real wages have not grown since 1973 while investor returns on an hour of American labor have more than doubled ...

Why? Consider this graph. Without unions workers have little say and the loss of union political influence has created a vast wealth disparity in America. Now, this 0.1% of our population, with the help of the best government money can buy, speaks of the wealth of Midas in dismissive terms. 

Oddly, these very Conservatives often scream about *wealth redistribution* policies when they are liberal efforts to feed the hungry or house the homeless but say nothing about tax laws that redistribute wealth upward.

Every work related benefit each of us enjoys was hard won by union men and women and we need to point that out to everyone we meet. We will not rebuild a vibrant middle class without first rebuilding unions that speak for workers.