Are American workers lazy? Do they work when work is available?

As a child, my job was to take drinking water to the field laborers who filled my father’s truck at sunup, and worked until sundown. They were paid what my father could afford, and the same wage other farmers paid lest my father risked the consequences of rocking the fixed-wage boat. Still, in spite of low wages and long hours, they sang in beautiful harmony as they worked. When corporate farming displaced family farming, and mechanical cotton pickers and tobacco harvesters replaced manual field labor, my father became a factory worker, and convinced his employer to hire some of his field workers in spite of the discrimination of that time. As discriminatory laws changed, others got jobs in the cotton mills, but all continued to work.

According to Fox News propaganda, Democrats use “big government freebies” to get votes. Government assistance to displaced American workers is not free. It is paid for by yet to be displaced workers unable to utilize the tax breaks America’s super wealthy enjoy. Unsatisfied with the reasonable profits American labor created, America’s super wealthy now exploit the “pennies-on-the-dollar” virtual slave labor of third-world countries, yet prices remain constant or increase to U.S. consumers. Do Democrats use “freebies” to get votes, or strive to pass legislation to help displaced American workers?

Following the Civil Rights Movement, hard working Americans prospered for four decades until bipartisan legislation, NAFTA, GATT and CAFTA eliminated fair and balanced trade. Today, wealthy special interests ship raw materials to sweat shops in third-world countries, and finished products back here tariff free, while Fox News commentators insinuate displaced American workers, whose labor contributed to great corporate wealth, are lazy “entitlement seekers,” who “will not take responsibility for their own lives.” Fox news cleverly portrays victims of globalization as “freebie seekers,” just as they portrayed Trayvon Martin as a “thug” who attacked poor innocent George Zimmerman, now don’t they?

Think about it, please.

Robert C. Currie Jr.

Laurinburg