There is a saying that there is nothing wrong with being knocked down, but it is when it becomes more comfortable being down than getting back up it is time to give up. For several decades, the American workers keeps getting knocked down as corporation after corporation move good, middle class jobs to third-world companies claiming poverty, even at a time when companies are reaching record profits. But the Whirlpool workers at the Evansville, Indiana plant, along with over 5,000 other working Americans, stood back up and decided they don't want to be knocked down anymore.

A rally hosted by the IUE-CWA and led by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka took place Friday, Feb. 26 with a simple message: The American Middle Class is being eroded by corporate greed.

"Whirlpool is a bad corporate citizen who is twisting this country's desire to reduce energy usage and using it to export jobs. We are pushing hard to ensure that good intentions on going green don't help fund loss of good manufacturing jobs," said IUE-CWA President Jim Clark.

There is a saying that there is nothing wrong with being knocked down, but it is when it becomes more comfortable being down than getting back up it is time to give up. For several decades, the American workers keeps getting knocked down as corporation after corporation move good, middle class jobs to third-world companies claiming poverty, even at a time when companies are reaching record profits. But the Whirlpool workers at the Evansville, Indiana plant, along with over 5,000 other working Americans, stood back up and decided they don’t want to be knocked down anymore.

A rally hosted by the IUE-CWA and led by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka took place Friday, Feb. 26 with a simple message: The American Middle Class is being eroded by corporate greed.

“Whirlpool is a bad corporate citizen who is twisting this country’s desire to reduce energy usage and using it to export jobs. We are pushing hard to ensure that good intentions on going green don’t help fund loss of good manufacturing jobs,” said IUE-CWA President Jim Clark.

In challenging times like ours, it is important to step back and look at the big picture. In the Senate we wrestle with painful choices to balance the state budget. Some factors affecting the budget are outside of our control, some we can control, and others fall somewhere in-between. While most legislative work addresses things we have direct control over, we should at least understand other factors influencing the resources available.

The cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars is the budgetary "elephant in the room." It's enormous and it's right in front of us, yet we don't talk about it as we face our economic woes. We don't need to get into arguments about the wars to consider the burden war places on our economy.

President Dwight Eisenhower, one of our nation's greatest military leaders, late in life, expressed deep concern about what he called "the military industrial complex." Eisenhower stated, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

For historians who like dates and bookends for their events, the “global war on terror” started with the destruction of the Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon (9/11). The idea of perpetual war provided large benefits to a few and pain and terror to much of the world, and to the rest of the world an increasing disbelief in the intents, means, and rationales for the war. Unfortunately for the academic writers of history, history itself does not operate within the confines of given dates - the flow of actions and counter actions never ceases. The 9/11 attacks were by any real accounting only another incident in the fraud that the imperial powers of the world have ‘perpetuated’ on the citizens of the world.