Northern Valley Beacon

George Will gloats today in his column over what he regards as the end of the union movement. He is among those conservatives who long for the days of lords and serfs, masters and slaves, and he sees Northwest Airlines as a leader is sloughing union mechanics and pilots and hiring "scabs." As the airline enters bankruptcy reorganization, it has the pretext for lowering its skilled jobs to the level of thralldom.

George W. Bush is using the crisis of Katrina in the same manner. Rep. John D. Dingell (D-MI) points out in a statement made last night, . "With a stroke of the pen, in one of his first Katrina directives, the President cut the wages of the workers who will undertake our largest reconstruction project since the Civil War."

While the country is being diverted with a transportation crisis and the Katrina aftermath, the feudal wing of the conservative movement is waging a class war against working people--which means everybody who is employed and has a boss. Iraq, Katrina, and energy prices are diversions away from the right wing's efforts to established feudalism in America--a system we thought we had dispatched with the Civil War.