Everyone, quick, whip your cat’o nine tails at the nearest laborers to honor the owners of capital.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor picked Labor Day to remind us all what a horrible, horrible person he is:Wonkette's Jim Newell gets the intended message Yup. Fuck you, all you workers who aren't your own bosses. You don't work hard and don't deserve to be honored, not like business owners do. And you, workers of the past who fought so that today's workers might have weekends and occasional holidays, minimum wage and overtime pay, the hope that if you're killed on the job your employer might have to pay a fine and fix the conditions that led to your death.

If everyone owned their own businesses, those would be very small businesses indeed. We'd have no industry, no buildings larger than can be built by one family. That's certainly not Cantor's vision of the world; he's not saying it would be better if everyone was a business owner. So when he singles out business owners alone as worthy of celebration, he is explicitly dishonoring the vast majority of Americans. And on the day, the one fucking day, when we take a couple minutes to think about the contributions of workers and of unions. As Balloon Juice's Freddie deBoer writes:



Can you imagine—can you imagine—if a leading Democrat deliberately dissed the intended honorees of, say, Memorial Day? Can you imagine how the mainstream media would report on it?

There's a reason we don't have plutocrats day. It's because the plutocrats are doing just fine every damn day of the year. And if you need evidence of that, look at the fact that the House majority leader can't stand for there to be even one day just giving lip service to workers.