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| Mageau on the attack |
By Catherine O'Reilly Collette
After reading Jim Mageau’s attack on me and on my husband Will, I have this response:
I am proud to be a union member, as I have been for the past 35 years, including the 27 years I spent working as a union staff member. During my working years, I gladly paid into our union’s pension fund for the benefit of the retirees who were drawing pensions. Now I am retired and I enjoy the pension I worked for. That’s how pensions are supposed to work. As a pensioner himself, I would have thought Mr. Mageau understood the concept.
If Mr. Mageau still considers himself to be a Democrat, he should be ashamed of himself for attacking unions, especially over pensions. As a proud Democrat, I believe in the right of working people to join unions and bargain collectively for better wages and benefits. Unions are working people’s best hope for a better life. Democrats believe in that. I believe in that. But does Mr. Mageau?
I am not surprised that Mr. Mageau would be so familiar with the quote he attributes to Lenin – that if you repeat a line often enough people might start to believe it. That’s what Mr. Mageau does himself, like claiming that Mageau v. Anderson
In fact, virtually every accusation, charge and claim in his “letter to the editor” are things he has said before. Time and again, his claims have been thoroughly discredited by the facts.
It must be very exhausting to be so filled with rage all the time. For this reason I feel sorry for Mr. Mageau. But that does not mean that his baseless attacks on good people like unionized workers and hard working town staff and volunteers should go unchallenged.
