Please peruse this scary article that a reader of this blog sent to me:
Earlier this month, Mitt Romney received fawning press from the right wing media for turning out hundreds of coal miners to stand behind him during a speech on his energy plan in Beallsville, Ohio.
“To win Ohio, [President Obama’s] got to win eastern Ohio, and he’s got to get the votes of the people in these communities all around us here, and you’re not going to let that happen, because you’re going to keep our jobs,”Romney said that day.
It turns out that the coal miners did want to keep their jobs — in fact, that’s the only reason that many of them bothered to show up for Romney’s event. A group of employees at the Century Mine where Romney held his event recently complained to WWVA radio host David Blomquist that they feared they would be fired if they didn’t attend the Romney rally. Making matters worse, management did not pay the employees for the day because they were outside listening to Romney speak instead of working in the mine.
“Yes, we were in fact told that the Romney event was mandatory and would be without pay, that the hours spent there would need to be made up my non-salaried employees outside of regular working hours, with the only other option being to take a pay cut for the equivalent time,” the employees told Blomquist on his radio show. . .
Furthermore, the employees claim that “letters have gone around with lists of names of employees who have not attended or donated to political events.”
On Monday, Blomquist gave Murray Energy Chief Financial Officer Rob Moore a chance to defend his company on his show. Moore essentially confirmed the allegations.
According to Moore, the company “communicated to our workforce that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend.” It seems that Moore may not fully understand the meaning of the word “mandatory.”
Sorry for the long quote but I believe it is important to see the situation as fully as possible. If this is true, then I have to say that it is quite scary. This is precisely what Russia’s President Putin and his party “United Russia” do to guarantee good turnouts for their political rallies.
If this is what Romney’s campaign does before Romney even gets elected, then what should we expect once he is in power? Oh, Soviet Union, here we come. As if the bailouts were not enough to give us all a scary reminder that Soviet practices are alive and well, here is the good old Soviet tradition of taking people off work and sending them to political rallies they had no interest in. But then the USSR, at least, never withdrew the salary for the days missed by employees because of such events.
I want to hope that the information provided in the article is not true. Does anybody know anything about this event?
Don’t watch the following video if you are not prepared to feel very, very sad:
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