We're getting sick and tired of Rupert Murdoch's attempts to smear the Occupy movement as a bunch of freeloading anti-American hippies. It took the Australian media mogul's New York Post all of 37 days to compare Occupy Wall Street with Nazi Germany.
We think it's pretty damn patriotic to dedicate your time and money to making America a better place for 99 percent of its citizens. We think standing up for 99 percent of Americans demonstrates true love of country, whether it's by camping out in a park, marching in the streets, refusing to cross a picket line or doing any of the things that labor activists have been doing for years.
Patriotism in this country requires more than short hair, conservative clothing and a membership in the Republican party. For too long people like Murdoch have gotten away with treasonous behavior even as they accuse others of being anti-American. Exhibit A is the
Also on our list of unAmerican activities is ripping off the U.S. millitary, aka war profiteering. Our friends KKR and CD&R -- the fast buck artists who bought US Foods, where Teamsters are now striking -- paid $30 million to settle charges that they overcharged the military for supplying food to U.S. troops. Lovely.
The Project on Government Oversight names a number of corporations accused of defrauding U.S. taxpayers. At the top of the list are a whole slew of companies -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman -- that would like us to think of them as patriotic. We don't. Not if they're cheating American taxpayers.
Also unpatriotic: sacrificing community values like safety, education and public health for privatization and corporate profiteering.
We'll round out our list of un-American bad actors with U.S.-based companies that fire Americans in order to hire people overseas. Within the past decade, U.S. corporations fired 2.9 million Americans and hired 2.4 million overseas. That isn't patriotic. And we'd like to once again ask the foreign-funded Chamber of Commerce to please take "U.S." out of its name.
