Damn that word "legacy." It used to mean nice things like the completely unexpected $500 left to you, struggling kid just out of college, in the will of a great aunt you hardly knew. Now the word applies to all kinds of ill-reputed scams.
George W. Bush was a legacy opportunist in every sense. He was given a Yale education thanks to family tradition and certain financial expectations on the university's side. A C student, he went on to lead a D-minus life before becoming straight-F president. All of this came about thanks to a legacy of political and financial clout wielded by his family. Now he's occupied with worries about his presidential legacy as seen by future historians.
He should worry. But the unfortunate legacies associated with George W. Bush bear no relationship to the "legacy" used to describe benefits at (say) General Motors. Legacy benefits are those that workers actually worked for and fought for. They fought not just for themselves but for all employees who would spend much of their lives working at GM over the decades and would continue to work in some security right now if not for a series of bad managers. A GM tycoon once said "what's good enough for GM is good enough for the country." Yeah. Right. Thanks to GM, we're all in trouble.
Those workers' benefits are the "legacy" Senators Corker and McConnell and others are using to stir up antipathy towards the working class and unions. Legacy benefits have nothing to do with daddy's and grandpop's money and political influence. They're health benefits and retirement savings, stuff that most employees in developed countries get automatically and that employees over the years have worked for. Mind you, the benefits accruing to GM's workers are not, dollar for dollar, as beneficial as those provided to most CEO's. The CEO's, after all, live in a world where they get away with believing the use of a private jet is just a natural extension of who they are.
All of a sudden people like Tennessee's Senator Bob Corker and other defensive Republicans want to portray workers' health and retirement benefits as some sort of scam perpetrated by lazy assembly-line parasites. Wrong. These are men and women who have organized and managed themselves more effectively than top management. The bottom line is that workers' health and retirement benefits didn't bring down GM. With an assist from a failing financial system in the US, it's GM's management which has put the company in the tank, not workers' compensation.
Finally, it's successive Republican "Corkers" in Congress who have stood in the way of reforming our healthcare and retirement security systems in a way which would help not only individual Americans find affordable and quality healthcare but would have taken a huge burden off companies like GM.
What we have here is a political scam built upon a political scam and topped by a political scam constructed by Republican politicians who have defended high prices demanded by drug manufacturers and health insurance providers, who have refused to set viable standards for fuel efficiency, and who now defend failed corporate management in industries like General Motors, industries who have managed to find a penny or two for the pockets of those very politicians. And now they're putting up a defensive barricade on the Hill, telling Fox to send in a reporter and camera, and blaming assembly-line workers in Detroit for their greed. Nice folks, right?
Update: For more on this, check out Alex Koppelman's piece at Salon.
