by James Parks, Jul 7, 2008

George Carlin

Workers across the country know the Employee Free Choice Act would level the playing field and allow workers to make a fair and free decision on whether they wanted to join a union. But as we approach the 2008 elections, it also wouldn’t hurt to heed the words of the late comedian George Carlin.

Writing in his “Community Voices” column in the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska AFL-CIO President Vince Beltrami says that although he can’t repeat Carlin’s famous “seven dirty words you can’t say on television,” he can substitute seven of his own that working people should remember when we vote in November―greed, corruption, indictments, convictions, apathy, short memories and injustice.

Click here to read the entire column. 

Beltrami recalls how Carlin, who died June 22, blasted working Americans in a monologue called “The American Dream”:

for doing nothing while the “real owners” of America stick it to working folks and how the real owners, Big Business interests, have taken control of politicians, the media, the judges, etc. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated citizens, capable of critical thinking. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.

Carlin went on to complain that workers “keep electing these rich [expletive] who don’t give a [expletive] about them.”

Just a few days before Carlin’s death, Beltrami took on a conservative talk show host who was lambasting the Employee Free Choice Act and who had his facts all wrong. And he warns that this encounter was just the beginning:

Get ready for a big media blitz, bought and paid for by the owners of our country, where they will spin this act as something dastardly designed to take away workers’ rights. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just look behind the curtain if you can, to see who is peddling the opposition message and the motivation will be self-evident.

The same conservative right-wingers who are fighting the Employee Free Choice Act have given us a Supreme Court majority that sides with corporations, not workers, Beltrami says. In a recent 5-3 decision, the high court ruled ExxonMobil, which made $40.6 billion in profits last year, has to pay only $500 million in punitive damages for its 1989 oil spill, the worst in U.S. history. Exxon dragged this case out for nearly 20 years after one of its tankers spilled 10.8 million gallons of crude oil on the Alaska coast. The original jury awarded $5 billion in punitive damages. (Justice Samuel Alito owns Exxon stock and did not participate in the decision.) 

For working people to get a fighting chance, Beltrami concludes, we must work to elect new leaders who want real change. He says:

When the elections come around in November, we can do what we’ve always done and get what we’ve always gotten, or we can demand change and give regular folks a fighting chance. If we don’t, in my frustration, don’t be surprised if I lament by shouting out Carlin’s original seven dirty words at the top of my lungs. Rest in peace, George.

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