In America today, we have the Haves and the Have Nots, which is the very rich and the poor. What is missing is the middle, which is the group that makes it all work. They are the spenders who pay taxes, raise families. They are the supporters of the very rich and the supporters of the poor. This support system has worked very well until the very rich gets greedier and begins hoarding all the cash and cutting out the middle class with inequality.
Inequality is done in many ways. Some is through laws enacted that shut down unions. This defund unions, but also stops worker training apprenticeship programs the unions provide. Shutting down these programs helps to turn our country into a wasteland of poverty. With the power concentrated at the top, democracy cannot thrive.
This happened in the Guilded Age at the end of the 19th century. Now it is happening today. America cannot ever be great again until there is a large middle class with good wages, healthcare, free education, and good pensions. If we keep the extreme inequality, it will be the breeding ground of demagogues.
Our country, at this time, has become a billionaires republic. Just look at who our president is and most of his cabinet are, and if they are not billionaires, they are retired generals. This is a perfect storm for disaster. It didn’t just start with Trump, this has been a long time in the making and both political parties are responsible.
We are at the cusp of the GOP finally destroying Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Social Security, and with the help of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which has cleared the path for long-term de-unionization. Then a new aggressive business lobby worked in the 1970s and ‘80s to break unions and drive down tax rates for themselves.
Then the Democrats built alliances with Wall Street. Unequal economic is the enemy of political democracy so inequality must change or the class struggle can turn into a political or military conflict and law enforcement are and will be the same as the military. We’ve seen this before and they will have the reserve National Guard. Cops are already dressing like the military and have a lot of the same equipment. How will this end?
At this time, I would say the very rich oligarchs are winning. We must understand where we have been, how we got here, the whos and the whys. There are good books to read that can educate you on these topics. One such book is, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century.
Yes, they are coming for us. Workers need to have one another’s backs because no one else will. Neither the broader labor movement nor the Democratic party are prepared to meet the urgency of this moment. So it’s going to fall upon the rest of us to mount a real resistance against Trump’s authoritarian takeover. We’re going to have to get our hands dirty. I don’t care if you have a good, well-paying union job and you are in the middle class now—if you see a worker being dragged out of his workplace regardless of how skilled the job and potentially taken to another country, you should be ready to be there for that worker. When I.C.E. shows up, gather around and shame them into leaving. It has worked in other places. America is sleep walking into authoritarianism, and if there’s anyone out there who is a member of a labor union that is safe—at this point— and doesn’t think this applies to them. Understand that they just haven’t gotten to you yet. They’re coming for all of us. There are ...
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