My concern is what kind of jobs will those be?

Are people aware of the problems in the existing warehouses, a “perma-temp” system? Poverty-level jobs, wage theft, discrimination and abuse, lack of benefits and unsafe working conditions are some of the problems these workers face. Companies seem to get around their responsibility to their workers by contracting out to temp agencies.

While I applaud the work that must have been done to secure this facility in the Will County area, attention must be made to the working conditions of our fellow citizens. A job that doesn’t pay a living wage is hardly a job at all.

Elaine Torrence

Lastly, Mr.Barron objects to my “fascinating request for cooperation, compassion, empathy, and tolerance. “Evidently Mr. Barron sees the world as a Darwinian survival of the fittest. People are isolated, alone, powerless, and pitted against each other in an “impersonal and democratic market”. This,as I have shown,is pure ideological fantasy, probably derived from the discredited theories of Milton Friedman or from Ayn Rand’s tales from netherland.

A new paradigm is gradually replacing the above Darwinian ethos and at its core is the Judeo-Christian ethic of Jesus: that whatever you do to the least of my brethren you do unto me. Cooperation,empathy,compassion, and tolerance are integral to our cultural and religious belief system and can be historically traced from Jesus, to St.Francis of Assisi, to more contemporary humanists. Albert Schweitzer’s embrace of the sanctity of all living creatures and ML King Jr’s “beloved community” are testaments to humankind’s progress toward a world in which tolerance,empathy, and love shape our lives and institutions.

Donald Torrence

The above letter published in the Joliet Herald is in response to an individual who believes compassion and empathy are useless commodities in a free market.

That’s why I signed a petition to Michael Einhorn, Mayor, which says:

“Stop the Detention Center project in Crete”

Will you sign this petition? Click here or copy and paste -

http://signon.org/sign/stop-crete-detention?source=s.em.cp&r_by=1239389

Thanks!

Michael Andrew Anthony

The most fundamental way for an individual to effect change in our political system is to vote. An individual can organize, ring doorbells, make phone calls, etc., but voting is at the core of our representative government. Our path to full suffrage, which always came through our legislative bodies, has been long, contentious and tedious. It took three amendments to the U.S. Constitution and numerous federal and state statutes over two-hundred years to bring us close to full suffrage. By taking the legislative path these changes were debated, argued over, editorialized, and allowed for public comment and, in the case of statues, were subject to judicial review. The changes were accepted by the citizenry as law because the country, as a whole, agreed they would add to the common good.

None of this occurred with the Citizens United ruling because it came directly from the judicial branch of our government, bypassing the legislative process and leaving no avenue open for appeal. There is no precedent for such a major change to our political system becoming the law of the land in this manner.

The Citizens United decision, decided by a slim five to four vote, allows unlimited amounts of money to flow into an electoral process that is already awash with money, reeks of corruption and lacks the confidence of the country’s citizenry. This ruling devalues the individual vote and has the potential to transform the political landscape.

It should be seen for what it is, nothing but a brazen power grab by the highest court in the land which has the potential to disrupt the delicate balance of power between the three branches of government.

Ron Kurowski

Unprecedented amounts of money is pouring into candidate’s coffers. The sources of the money remain unknown. (Unknown, that is, to the public, but very clear to the candidates.) The money could have corporate origins. It could be drug money for all anyone knows. Or it could have foreign origins. Who knows? Only the candidates know who they are now VERY obligated to because they have been bought with these outrageous sums of money.

A by product of this Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. FEC, is that any candidate currently in office who is not getting these scads of money must now spend more time soliciting contributions than actually serving the people who voted him/her into office. It is a lose/lose proposition.

Are legislators going to serve those who gave them the money or those who voted for them because of the ads purchased by the money?

Think about it. Are your needs as an American citizen being met? Does your State Representative/Congressman care more about Grover Norquist, to whom (s)he promised to never raise taxes, than you? Does your legislator refuse to raise taxes on the richest Americans while sticking it to working Americans? Could this be due to the fact that the wealthiest Americans have donated huge sums of anonymous money to a campaign that pulled the candidate up from oblivion? Do not imagine for a moment that there are no strings attached when anonymous donors hand out their cash!

Is this the way our government should work? Should America sell democracy to the highest bidder? If your answer is, “No” then, you REALLY SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE to inform the public about the outrageous Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. FEC, that we must amend before our democracy ceases to exist.

Although you missed the opportunity to educate the public about the effects of corporate money on politics, it is not too late to sign the petition to amend Citizens United v. FEC at Movetoamend.org.

Midge Allman

The NDAA gives further institutional impetus to the militarization of American society. Traditionally and constitutionally the military has been kept from domestic policing. Under the NDAA, American citizens could be adjudicated by military tribunals which do not allow the same constitutional protections guaranteed in Federal courts.

Secretary of Defense Panetta and FBI director Mueller and others in the U.S. security establishment were against these unconstitutional additions to state power. The question, then, is who pushed for this augmentation of state power and the destruction of the constitutional safeguards guaranteeing the civil rights of American citizens? Chris Hedges stated that, in his opinion, it is the “corporate elites” who wanted these provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act. “They don’t trust the police” to keep order and protect their assets and want to be able to call in the army. This, according to Hedge’s, is the response of the “corporate elites” to the Occupy Wall Street movement and the challenge it poses to their socio-economic dominance. All citizens should be concerned about the far reaching effects of the assault on their constitutional rights posed by the NDAA.

Don T

In March of 1894, in the midst of the worst recession in the history of the country, Jacob Coxey began a march to Washington with nearly five hundred unemployed people to demand that Congress pass legislation that would create jobs by building bridges and roads.

Coxey carried with him a statement which questioned why “lobbyists of trusts and corporations have passed unchallenged on their way to the committee rooms, access to which we, the representatives of the toiling wealth producers, have been denied.”

Last month, in the throes of the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression, thousands of the unemployed, activists, and union members travelled to Washington to “Occupy the Capitol” and demand that Congress pass legislation that would create jobs by fixing crumbling bridges, building schools and improving other public infrastructure.

Coxey never got to read the statement he carried with him as he was arrested when he approached the steps of the Capitol.

Unlike Coxey we didn’t get arrested, but like Coxey we never got to confront our representatives with questions that are as relevant today as they were in 1894; questions that go to the core of what is the proper role of a democratically elected government in mediating how the fruits and burdens of a society should be shared. The questions may be couched in terms of economics, finance and political power, but fundamentally they are moral questions. The answers to these questions inform our society and define what kind of people we are or hope to be. The answers to these questions reveal to the world what we most value, what is most important to us.

These questions are not new today, nor were they new in 1894. These questions first penetrated human consciousness when, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality wrote, “The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine….”

Ron Kurowski

Published in The Times Weekly

This has to be called what it is: extortion. The state, which recently raised taxes on both business and residents to help close the hole in its budget, cannot afford to give tax breaks to profitable companies. But it was forced into a bidding war with other states to keep those corporations here. This is the new normal now with Tea Party type governors in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states who are more than willing to get into bidding wars with states like Illinois.

What is telling about how powerful corporations have become is that they no longer even try to justify their demands with economical or financial reasons. They simply make demands.

For instance, the CME Group has over $1 billion in cash. It also has $550 million in reserve for possible liabilities it may be responsible for in the MF Global scandal. But despite its huge cash reserves, its very profitable business and the fact that it has no competition, it demanded and received an annual tax break of $71 million. And shortly after the tax break became law CME announced it was suspending any charitable contributions its foundation was making to the community. Good corporate citizenry is no longer in vogue. Blatant greed has taken its place.

What Sears and the CME Group accomplished with their extortion of tax breaks was to continue the shift of wealth upwards from the middle class and working poor to the top 1%. Every dollar of the $371 million tax break has to be made up by everyone else or the services those dollars would have bought no longer get provided. Either way everyone, except the top 1%, loses.

Ron Kurowski

Letter published in The Times Weekly

Mr. Tom Lewis of New Lenox comments on my November 27th letter, that my advocacy of a fair, just distribution of wealth was tantamount to communism. Raising the specter of communism to silence dissent has long been a strategy of the American political right. We witnessed the “Red Scare” after WW I and the McCarthy onslaught on free speech after WW II. Mr. Lewis is giving credence to the undemocratic impulses festering underneath the surface of American history that break out whenever a movement advocates changes in the status quo.

There was no mention in my article of the “modes of production” being controlled by the state. My intention was to show that the poor and the middle class have been asked to bear the brunt of a crisis that they did not cause. Financial institutions knowingly put toxic assets on the market and sold them for a profit. The Fed bailed out the banks to the tune of 7.77 trillion dollars while doing nothing for the sub prime mortgage holders who lost their homes. Mr. Lewis, how would you address this issue?

Citizens United has allowed corporations to pour unlimited funds into the political process. We now have the best Congress money can buy. The public is left out of this equation. Wages are declining, pensions and savings are being wiped out, and 49 million Americans are living in poverty and another 50 million are near poverty. How would Mr. Lewis address this problem?

I applaud the world wide awakening of ordinary people saying “no more”.  In my article I called for a transformation of our value system to emphasize cooperation, compassion, empathy, and tolerance.

Donald Torrence

We are living in an amazing historical moment. We are witness to an awakening world consciousness. The old paradigm of vertical control by elites is being questioned. From Greece, Italy, England, Chile, India, Japan, to the Occupy Wall Street movement, we hear the voices of dissent demanding an equitable distribution of wealth. The majority of the world’s populations have been negatively impacted by the Neoliberal economic policies that benefit multinational corporations and international banking interests.

The world’s populations are questioning the economic philosophers of greed. Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Milton Friedman created a cannon of thought that sanctified the free market as an immutable mechanism which enshrines self interest (greed) as the dominant human characteristic that will result in prosperity for all. Unchecked capital accumulation by oligarchical corporate interests result in their exploitation of society. Thus we have a distribution of wealth in the U.S. where the top 1% of the population has assets equal to the 150 million people at the bottom of the economic pyramid.  This is a world wide phenomena as international capitalist interests solidify their economic and political power.

The awakening has arrived. People throughout the world are raising their voices in protest and declaring a new world is possible. They are advocating economic development which encompasses goals that are ecologically sustainable and are in harmony with nature. And, above all, we must supplant the value system of laissez faire capitalism with a value system that emphasizes cooperation, compassion, empathy, and love. A value system that recognizes the sanctity of nature in all its varied forms and of humankind’s connectedness to the web of life. The time has come for the stewards, the sustainers of life, to replace the rapacious destroyers of life in their quest for profits.

Donald Torrence

Published in The Times Weekly and the Joliet Herald News