So James Hoffa used the phrase “sons-a-bitches” in a speech to workers on Labor Day.

Big deal. Former Vice President Dick Cheney used the F-bomb on the Senate floor and the right never uttered a complaint. Bush was pictured flipping the bird to press photographers. Not a word. In fact, Most Americans never saw the photo.

But now the right is complaining Hoffa was vulgar and inciting people to violence.

Of course, if you heard the whole sentence, which most Americans have not, you know he’s talking about voting the sons-a-bitches out, not killing them.

Of course, Sarah Palin’s little targets on her web site weren’t there to signify a call to violence, nor were the words “lock and load.” The people who showed up at political rallies toting guns weren’t meant to threaten anyone.

But if the words or actions come from someone who’s worker-friendly, that’s different.

Thing is, if you celebrate Labor Day, you can thank the unions and the people who died to establish worker rights.

Before unions, companies owned entire towns. People were paid in company scrip — not money — which was redeemable only at the company store. Goods were expensive enough so that no one could afford what they needed, so workers were always in debt to the store, and to the company, which meant they couldn’t just quit; they had to keep working for the company until their debt was paid off.

Children as young as 5 or 6 went to work. Corporate people loved them because their little hands could fit into the machinery to untangle fabric or threads and get the machinery working again, and if they lost a finger or a hand in the process, there were always more little hands.

My grandparents both worked in textile mills in New England when they were children. My grandmother left school in the second grade to work in the mills. She taught herself to read and write and later taught my grandfather.

But workers toiled 12 to 16 hours, every day. There were no vacations or paid sick day, coffee breaks or retirement. There was no minimum wage, no Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. There was no Workers’ Compensation Insurance or Unemployment. There were few, if any, safety rules. Human beings were expendable.

Corporate thugs did all they could to keep the workers down, including beating them up and killing them if they tried to form unions or otherwise make working conditions better.

Those are the days big corporations, and the politicians they own, want to take us back to. You bet we want those sons-a-bitches out of government.

At the state and federal level, programs that help the poor, the sick and the elderly are being slashed, as is education, which was supposed to put all people on a level playing field. Of course, that hasn’t been the case, as schools in wealthy towns were able to fund their schools better.

But now everyone is affected as class sizes increase and teacher aides, custodians and administrators are laid off. Money for new buildings and upkeep of older buildings is disappearing, and it will be all of us who suffer as children don’t get the education they need.

Education has been under attack for 30 years as legislatures have cut spending and standardized testing has increased. Teachers have little or no time to be creative or to help students develop critical thinking skills. And people with a lack of critical thinking skills are much easier to convince they should vote against their own best interests.

Too many Americans really think we can’t pay for education, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. I call it the politics of scarcity, and it’s wrong.

We are not broke.

Legislators in Raliegh, in other state capitols and in Washington have chosen to make these cuts. They have slashed taxes on the people who can most afford to pay. They call them the “job creators,” but there are no jobs. US corporations are sitting on a nearly $2 trillion surplus that they’re not investing back into the economy.

Legilsators can choose to raise taxes on the wealthy and leave the social safety net in place. Instead they have chosen to cut taxes and let the nation’s most vulnerable drop through what’s left of the net.

This was a choice. It was not the choice most Americans wanted. The majority of people in the United States don’t want Medicaid, Medicare or Social Security touched; they don’t want our children’s education compromised by injudicious cuts.

But our legislators have chosen to ignore the will of the people.

Don’t forget this come election time.

After all, we have a choice, too.

In the Preamble to the US Constitution, its authors wrote that the purpose of the document was to:

* Form a more perfect Union,
* Establish Justice,
* Insure domestic Tranquility,
* Provide for the common defence,
* Promote the general Welfare, and
* Secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

So, what does that mean?

I think the Founders knew they weren’t perfect and that the nation would evolve. Our simple and elegant Constitution was designed to grow and evolve with the nation as it matured into a more perfect union. It never was meant to be unchanging. Our Founders knew that times would change, that nothing is ever static.

As for establishing justice, our court system was intended to allow access to all. People are created equal. Of course, in the original document, only men who owned property were considered equal. There were no rights for African-Americans, Native Americans or women. Since the Constitution was written, justice has become available to them as well, although people with better resources tend to have better outcomes in the system than do the poor. Still, the aim is to evolve so that access and outcomes are more equal.

Of course, justice in my mind includes social and economic justice. There’s little of that in this nation today as working Americans face a jobless economic “recovery” that has offered record profits to corporations that, in turn, refuse to hire new workers. And as far as paying taxes, the Center for Tax Justice, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, says “the U.S. is already one of the least taxed countries for corporations in the developed world,”  as a percentage of gross domestic product. Who’s worse? Only Iceland.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that the United States has the worst income inequality of the 24 industrialized nations that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. We’re even behind Pakistan and Ethiopia.

That isn’t justice, although those who claim to want to follow the intentions of the Founders are the very ones fighting to give corporations more and more power. Something’s bass-ackwards here.

As for insuring domestic tranqulity, our gun laws do little on that front. I’m not saying no one should ever own a gun, but no one needs to own an assault rifle. The Second Amendment has been taken to its limits and beyond in allowing too many people who shouldn’t own guns to get their hands on one (or more).

In addition, our own political leaders do little to promote donestic tranquilty with their confrontational, less-than-truthful approach to public policy. It’s in-your-face and to hell with the consequences. The rhetoric promotes discord, even violence, not domestic tranquility.

And how do we rate at providing for the common defence? Well, we’re good at starting wars, although not many of them have anything to do with protecting Americans. We send American soldiers on deployment after deployment, and when they come home damaged physically and emotionally, we abandon them. The wars we wage enrich big corporations that snag no-bid contracts to provide substandard, even dangerous, services and housing, but they leave families shattered and impoverished.

Promote the general welfare. Let’s see, we’re slashing every social safety net out there so we don’t have to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans or close corporate tax loopholes. People are dying for lack of health care, they’re forced into homelessness because of the greed of Wall Street, whose executives have prospered from the misery they’ve caused.

Promoting the general welfare might mean getting health care to all Americans, regulating the greed of Wall Street and the huge corporations and, actually creating jobs instead of killing them. The Tea Party darlings in Congress have taken us to the precipice of disaster in their so-called negotiations over the debt ceiling, and we might well topple off the edge because of their desire to see President Obama fail.

We are not doing anything to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, at least not for most of us. I suppose if you happen to be the progeny of a fabulously wealthy corporate executive, you’ll have plenty of “blessings,” but not if you’re the child of a working American.

Those of us on whose backs this country was built are now watrching it crumble.

This is hardly the nation the people who wrote our Comstitution envisioned.