“I say what I think/ that the company stinks/ ’Cause I’m a union man!”Bravo, John Saltas, for your editorial [“Coal Miner’s Fodder,” Private Eye, Aug. 16, City Weekly]. The Republicans, the business owners and almost all the rich people of the world have been putting their Cole-Hahn shoe in the ass of the working people of this country for too long, and it’s about time we started to strike back.

If the Republicans don’t want national health insurance, don’t want government to make employers carry insurance for their workers, won’t regulate living wages and won’t legislate safe working conditions, who’s going to?

Mining magnate Robert Murray is the face of everything wrong with business and politics in this country. Hate the science, hate the workers, love the money. And talk about Jesus as much as possible, because he’s going to be back soon, and we don’t need to take care of the planet or the poor.

My parents were both college graduates, and they were both from West by-God Virginia and from poor backgrounds. My father, the rocket scientist, grew up in a log house. My mother’s father worked for the Works Progress Administration, and was an engineer on the B&O Railroad. But they both taught me that Roosevelt was right, and Reagan was wrong, and while it’s OK for government to help people, it’s not OK for the rich to use government to harm people for their own benefit.

Social Security isn’t a handout to the poor; it’s the least this government can do for the folks who worked to make this country great for their entire lives.

Health care isn’t a privilege; it should be a right for everyone in the greatest country that ever was.

And the American labor movement—the people who brought you “the weekend”—should be honored and, in these days, revived, even if the good they do for teachers is sometimes overshadowed by the misuse by the Major League Baseball Players Association or National Football League Players Association. It’s the good they do for the coal miners, autoworkers, nurses, public employees and cops that is the reason for their existence. Unions are not the past of this country. They are the history.

And, in these days of Republican/big-business control of the government and the environment, unions need to be the future as well—or there is no future, except for the wealthy.

Jeff Stickley
Murray