Words.
Words conjure imagery. And those images are powerful powerful things. And people should know that, especially powerful people that write things like laws.
But somehow it doesn’t surprise me when that powerful lawmaker who doesn’t know these things is one Charles Rangel.
You see, the words and the control of them has long been in favor of the populist. It’s easy, or at least not hard, to step up and claim that “the man” is somehow keeping “the you” down. And if carefully crafted, this message rings true to whole swaths of people that otherwise wouldn’t have anything at all in common.
You can knit together the treehugger with the socialist. The feminist with the farmer. And now, the unionista with the slave.
Speaking Monday at a Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) event about GOP-proposed budget cuts, Rangel brought up Republican governors’ plans to target public sector workers, as in the case of Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-fix plan in Wisconsin.
“It doesn’t really make any sense at all for the president of the United States to talk about creating jobs in order to improve the economy and find out that mayors and governors are talking about laying off people,” Rangel said. “Collective bargaining is something that is so close to slavery in terms of abolishing it, that it is not an American concept to tell people that they cannot discuss their economic position.”
Serious.
Slavery.
This is what the Unionista has become.