We, proletarians, are now trying to fight the second Gilded Age. The workers have lost the muscle and drive to confront a system run by and for the very rich 1 percent and the people who should be sided with the Have Nots and labor has been brainwashed into believing that they should be supporting the corporate domination of the economy and against Social Security, Medicare, and food stamps even though most of the proletarians are receiving or will be receiving Social Security, Medicare and food stamps.
Do people get dumber with age instead of getting smarter? Or is it the corporate media like Fox brainwashing these people who are recipients of some type of pension from a government or union and they don’t understand that they have been suckered by the likes of the Koch brothers.
Then there are the veterans, who buy into the same kind of crap by listening to radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, who are broadcast overseas to our troops, but not the progressive voices. These Armed Forces do not understand that they are voting and supporting people who would like to cut their benefits, like their health care and VA benefits.
They do not understand who’s on their side. Just because some politician wears an American flag pin on their lapel does not mean that the politician will vote for the veterans’ best interest. When the military personnel is discharged and becomes a veteran there is no work because the GOP stopped all funding for infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, water mains and fiber optics among many other projects that need to be fixed or built.
It all goes back to the lessons from the Art of War: to survive and win you must know who your enemies are and then you must know yourself, and understand what a Trojan horse looks and sounds like. If not, there could well be one in your camp that you do not recognize until it’s too late.
Forbes just released its ranking of America’s richest families. The magazine stopped at the top 200 families, each worth $1.2 billion, together these families are worth $1.3 trillion. Why would people this wealthy want to prevent ordinary citizens from obtaining their basic needs?
To change the abundance of labor in the world is to put more money in the pockets of the laborer to buy the products their fellow workers are making. Otherwise, when there are more products than money, there is slump in the economy. Austerity policies, low wages and automation (robots) were also of concern in the 1950s when Henry Ford II, CEO of Ford, took Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers Union, on a tour of a new engine plant.
Ford gestured to a fleet of new machines and said, “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?” The union leader turned to Ford and said, “Henry, how are you going to get robots to buy your cars?”
This type of change in the labor has created a new type of working class that swings from task to task in order to make ends meet while enduring the loss of labor rights and bargaining rights. They are called “precariat” workers, a group of workers who live on the verge of collapse due to the instability of the nature of their job…