I should change my name to Ed Anger. Or Joe Jeremiad. I’m disgusted that the robber barons who rule the GOP were able, with much help from the corporate media, to push into the language the catchphrase “right to work,” which is almost as obscenely misleading as those “Arbeit macht frei” signs over the entrances to Nazi concentration camps.

How did we sink to where less than 12 percent of workers are represented by unions? To supporting a president who brags of saving GM and Chrysler but fails to mention autoworkers’ salaries and benefits were cut in half? To the dreary reality of an android named Mitt Romney bragging he would not have saved the auto companies?

The disaster didn’t happen overnight. It took tons of money and decades of propagandizing by the one percent and their mouthpieces in the media — people like David Brooks, the Earnest Weasel, who has warned for years that complaining about the growing gulf between the rich and poor is tantamount to inciting class warfare. As if class warfare isn’t inevitable if the law allows for the destruction of the middle class.

From a piece by Jack Random of CounterPunch:

… The Right to Work is the right of a worker to refuse to pay union dues. Because unions gain power by representing workers as a united front in negotiations with management, right-to-work laws negate that power…

We are the victims of a devastating fifty-year war against workers that is relentless and without mercy. The corporations have taken control of our government with unlimited sponsorship of elected officials. They have moved our industries to China, Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere, without any concern for the welfare of our nation or its people. They have outsourced our technology service, drafting and infrastructure planning jobs to India. They have reduced their share of tax responsibility to a minimum with offshore accounts and favorable legislation, forcing a beleaguered workforce to pick up the tab. And they have done all this with a sense of entitlement. We are just beginning to fight back…

The first part of the labor agenda must be to strike down right-to-work laws in the 23 states that now embrace them… The second part of the labor agenda should be an affirmation of the right to collective bargaining and binding arbitration as an alternative to the general strike…

The corporations that have taken control of our government will cry foul. They will accuse us of class warfare to which we will reply: yes, but now we are fighting back.