Parity

I’ve always loved that word. I love the way it sounds, and I love what it means.

[par-i-tee] – equality, as in amount, status, or character; equivalence; correspondence; similarity; analogy

Parity is the single most important ingredient in what made America great back in the day. We didn’t start this country off with parity. Contrary to what Michele Bachmann will have you believe, our founding fathers did not fight to free the slaves that they owned (holy shit, that woman is an idiot!). Nor did they advocate for their wives’ right to vote and right to work. No, parity was more abstract back then. It was an ideal, espoused in our founding documents. The actuality of parity is something that was fought for, and earned throughout the evolution of our nation. I believe that those ideals of parity that were fundamental in our founding documents, were the motivational tools that kept Americans fighting for equality over the course of our evolution. We are now in an era where parity is being systematically dismantled in our country. I fundamentally believe that in any given situation, the best possible result is achieved when two opposing forces with parity are forced to compromise in order to get to the end result. The greatest era in American history was one in which the government butted heads with corporations, and achieved compromise that resulted in the greatest expansion of our economy that we’ve ever seen. Thank you, FDR for showing us how to get it right. We no longer have that parity between corporations and government. We now have a situation where both entities are on the same side, leaving Americans with no one to fight for us. The situation in Wisconsin is the perfect illustration of the further breakdown of parity. Make no mistake, what Scott Walker is trying to do in Wisconsin has nothing to do with balancing a budget. It’s about creating more disparity. Just to recap, Scott Walker was sworn in as governor of Wisconsin a month ago. At the time of his swearing in, his state had a budget surplus thanks to his his democratic predecessor. Here’s where the story starts to sound really fucking familiar. This asshat, Scott Walker took that surplus and spent $140 million dollars in a month. He gave the wealthiest Wisconsinites $67 million in tax breaks and spent the rest on kickbacks to cronies, thereby creating a budget crisis. A crisis that he wants to remedy by (say it with me) crapping on working people. This situation would be pretty fucked up if it were just about a reverse Robin Hood menacing working people in Wisconsin, but that’s not what he’s doing here. He’s not asking Wisconsin state employees to make sacrifices in order to balance the budget that he fucked up this year. He’s asking them to forever relinquish any bargaining power they have. This is about the age old GOP tradition of busting unions. Unions that by the way, were formed in order to remedy the disparity between American workers and corporations that existed early on in our country’s history. Before unions, the average worker faced 12 hour work days, 7 days a week. But that isn’t as bad as it sounds because they got to work right next to their kids. It really was a golden age of quality time with the family. You see, because there was no parity between workers and companies, people got fucked. Corporations have no feelings or compassion because they’re not people. Corporations are motivated purely by profit, which doesn’t leave much room for human rights’ issues to prevail unless people organize and created a modicum of parity. Regardless of what you do for a living, you have benefited from the existence of unions. You wouldn’t have a weekend if it weren’t for unions. You wouldn’t have vacation time were it not for unions. You wouldn’t have dozens of other rights that you take for granted if it weren’t for unions. I’m not saying that unions are perfect. Far from it. Unions definitely have their fair share of corruption and embezzlement. But they create a level of parity. Without unions, labor’s power is eviscerated. And when one side is eviscerated in any negotiation, we all lose. How you personally feel about unions is irrelevant. I would hope that you would have the common sense to understand eviscerating workers is a bad idea, just as eviscerating corporations would be a bad idea. We need parity. I am utterly flummoxed and disgusted by anyone that doesn’t understand this. Listening to right wing media this week has been a particularly vomitous  experience. The constant barrage of insults against working people that just want parity is not something that is comprehensible to me. You wanna know who has the right to negotiate their working conditions, benefits, and termination packages? Every single fucking asshat on Fox news that is telling you that unions blow, that’s who. You wanna know who else has a shit ton of bargaining power? Really fucking rich people, regardless of their level of competence. That’s right, Crazy Carly Fiorina negotiated the $40 million dollars that she ultimately got paid to leave HP, because she sucked. Can you, in your wildest dreams, imagine sitting on one side of a negotiating able saying, "And if you need to fire me, I will need $40 million before I leave"? I can assure you that every single Fox News "personality" has negotiated generous exit packages for themselves, in the event that they get fired. The fact that they have disdain for people who want what they have is appalling, but it’s also the very foundation of Fox news. You shouldn’t listen to people that tell you that you don’t deserve what they have. That makes you a fucking idiot and a tool for a machine that places no value on you. You also shouldn’t listen to anybody that wants to eviscerate one side in any power struggle. That person is a tunnel visioned ideologue that can’t understand the value of parity.