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Showing posts from January, 2017

History On Our Side, If We Use It

Well, the robber barons are back in charge and the unions are at their lowest numbers since the last time the robber barons were in charge. The last time they had control the workers rose up and organized even though their ranks were split. There were the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL), some were the coal miners, some were the Teamsters, they all seemed at times to be fighting each other, but in today’s fight there is no room for that type of bickering. We need to have a little of all types of organizations, even the ideology of the International Workers of the World (IWW) also called the Wobblies. We, at this time, just cannot afford to be split for the new government, which is antiunion will throw everything at us. They will have the attorney general, the U.S. Supreme Court, law enforcement, the National Guard and new laws that will be signed into effect to control protests and strikes, which can result in huge fines or jai

Is UBI An Answer To Inequity?

Can workers today make more than their parents? At this time it is 50/50, but people born in 1940, the chance of children making more than their parents was at 92 percent—why? One reason for this is economic growth has slowed from 4 to 5 percent in the past decades to just 2 to 3 percent today; and almost all of the benefits of the 2 to 3 percent growth goes to the top with people in the lower income bracket are stuck with stagnant wages. The Americans at the bottom 50 percent are making an average of just $16,000 a year while the top 1 percent makes $1.3 million, and send their children to elite schools so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Part of the attack on the 1.7 million poor workers are employed by temporary agencies. Of these 1.7 million workers, 900,000 are on zero hour contracts. This problem is worldwide. Workers in the UK are facing the same problem, some 20 percent of the workers do not know if they will get a full week’s work. The people who are and have be

Is California Next?

Is California next on the Koch brothers’ agenda? The Republicans will have 33 governors in office, and in 25 of those states, the Republicans will also control both the governorships and the legislations. The Democrats have six governors and legislations, and the rest of the states are politically divided. Sam Lansing is chief operating officer at the Americans for Prosperity, a conservative super pac bankrolled by the Koch brothers, and he thinks now is the best opportunity to accomplish a lot of the big-ticket items in 10 to 15 states. People in these states will be steamrolled on policies, such as destroying unions, Social Security, Medicare, right to work laws, school vouchers to break the teachers’ union and private prisons, while giving tax breaks wealthy. How long will it be before the GOP and the Koch brothers start in on California and New York, which will now be considered their holy grail for destruction. They decimated the unions in the birthplace of public unions, Wisc