Union Perspectives

When you decide to buy a house, like most people you take a loan out from a bank. As a result, the bank actually owns the house until it is paid off. But, while the bank/mortgage company owns the house, you’re paying the property taxes and insurance to protect the property that the bank owns yet the bank pays nothing, plus the bank is earning interests on the loan you’ve taken out to buy the house in the first place. It’s a win-win for the bank. The banks and mortgage companies can also sell your house and make money on it while paying no taxes and getting interests on your house that they actually own and can foreclose on you. Taxes should be pro-rated. They, the banks and mortgage companies, pay most of the taxes at first but then as the loan gets paid down, you pay more of the taxes until you own the house at which time you pay one hundred percent of the taxes and you have no more interest to pay. Most home loans are for fifteen or thirty years. Just think about the taxes you pay ...

In 1797, Thomas Paine wrote, “Every individual is born with legitimate claims on natural property or its equivalent.“ With all that is going on in Washington, D.C., that has all our attention, we should not forget what is really important to the 99 percent, which is the economic inequality. What we need to do to fix it is a new bill of right or sorts that would include, such things as universal basic income (UBI), minimum wage of $15 to $24 an hour, universal healthcare, free education, more unions, and to rebuild the wealth of the 99 percent. We need a housing plan like the old G.I.Bill, which paid G.I.s to go to school and made it easier to buy a house with very little costs upfront. We need to vote in people who will support this bill of rights for the 99 percent. We are never going to have enough jobs for everyone and even the jobs we have or will have will not pay enough to live on. Most jobs will be part time with no benefits and most people will have to work two to three jobs...

You cannot use the gross domestic product (GDP) as a barometer of how a country is doing as a whole, and the well being of the people. The GDP deals in averages and aggregates. Aggregates hide the nuances of inequality, which is one of its prime faults. The GDP looks at the stock market and unemployment to gauge what is good or bad, but unemployment, which is currently at 4.1 percent is not a true number as many people are working at gig jobs and being paid in cash just to survive while hoping for a full-time job with healthcare and a pension, which by today’s standards are a pipe dream. Ten years ago, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy wrote that the gap between reported well-being and people’s lives experience was creating a gulf of incomprehension between the expert certain his knowledge and the citizen whose experience of life is completely out of sync with the story told by data of the GDP. The gulf, Sarkozy put into words, summarizes the anger that is currently tearing so ...

Ever think about why free education ended at the high school level in California and why we do not have free higher education? It is because the money people needed their wage slaves just smart enough to do the bulk of the work to make the oligarchies and corporations wealthy. The management positions would be reserved for family members and others who come from wealth and can afford an education. In 1847, the first public university, Baruch, was established in New York. In 1862, the first Merrill Act was established that established public universities through federal land grants. At that time, many states opted to charge for education, except for California. Three months after California established its public university system in 1868; it decided to make its university system, the largest in the country, free. That was until 1966 when Ronald Reagan ran for governor; he attacked free education just as he attacked “welfare queens” in his campaign for president and the GOP uses immigr...