Union Perspectives

In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency during the Great Depression. People were looking for bold leadership and that’s what’s happening now. Roosevelt’s New Deal was a package of reforms to rescue capitalism from collapse and thwart rising labor militancy from growing into independent working class political action. The Have Nots now have a long needed leader in Bernie Sanders, who has devoted his entire life for the betterment of the working class so it perplexes me as to why union members would support Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Though we can’t blame Clinton for her husband’s policies, such as NAFTA, mainly because she has enough baggage of her own. Unlike her opponent Sanders, Clinton supported the Iraq invasion, Wall Street bailout, authorizing the Patriot Act twice in 2001 and 2006, supports TPP, which is considered worse than NAFTA, offshore drilling that is killing our oceans, and Foreign U.S. Military intervention that is bankrupting our economy. Her top donor...

We, here in the U.S., have our very own Greece. There is the destruction of the city of Detroit, which has been raped and pillaged by hedge fund vultures who are major donors to both political parties, which means the politicians then pass laws to protect hedge funders’ money, that is usually invested in bonds. On a bigger scale there is Puerto Rico, which has labored under colonial rule since Christopher Columbus landed on its shores in 1493 and claimed it for Spain. After the Spanish American War in 1898 the U.S. acquired Puerto Rico in the treaty of Paris and ruled it as a territory since. Puerto Ricans are considered natural born citizens, but like all stepchildren they must abide by U.S. laws without a voting member in Congress. For decades the island was a jewel of the Caribbean with the highest per capita income in Latin America, but in 1996 when a Republican Congress and the Clinton administration agreed to a 10-year phase out of section 936, a tax exemption for U.S. manufa...

Wage inequality, which has led to flat family incomes and has led to $115 billion in federal loans for college. These college loans equal $7 million in student loan defaults and this in turn had led to a new industry which feeds off student loan debt. The companies are debt collectors who make calls for government contracted debt collectors. The companies making these calls are just one part of a system feeding on federal student loans. There are also debt services, refinance lender firms that help former students avoid defaulting on their loans and for profit schools that makes money as borrowers try to repay more than $1.2 trillion in government backed education debts. The beneficiaries of the loan programs are for the most part not the students, they are companies like debt services like Affiliated Computer Services Inc. Now part of Xerox Corporation and Education Management Corporation, which operates for for-profit colleges and whose largest shareholder is Goldman Sachs Group In...

Instead of cities blaming unions and their union pensions for cities going broke, the cities should take a lesson from unions on how to negotiate with Wall Street who are the ones who, with their financial fees, are sucking U.S. cities dry. In 2014, the labor unions found that Los Angeles city had spent twice as much on bank fees in 2013 as it had on street repairs, which resulted in a campaign slogan: “Invest in our streets not Wall Street.” It was a call to the big banks and Wall Street, thugs who gamble with our pension money and are not willing to help on fees charged, which keeps going up. This is where the cities should take a page from the labor movement and bargain collectively on interest rates and other financial deals. This needs to be done now because during the last 20 to 30 years banking industry has shifted its profits schemes to now rely heavily on fees—the money charged for creating loans and packaging them into securities, selling them and servicing them. They charge...

What happened and is happening in countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal has already happened here in the U.S. The blatant facts are it is not the fault of the borrowing people or countries; it is the reckless lending by German, U.S. and other banks or lending institutions, like Goldman Sachs. Greece should have never been let into the Euro and only met the membership criteria by working with Goldman Sachs to cook its books much to the detriment of the Greek people. The books were cooked to hide Greece’s debt with currency swaps after the 2008 crisis. The banks that lent so recklessly were bailed out and Greece was left holding the bag. The idea that Greece is to blame for its woes and should do like Ireland did is wrong. If this all sounds like we here in the U.S. have heard and seen this financial criminal behavior before, we have and again the banks and Wall Street were bailed out and the people were thrown out of their homes. At this time in Spain, nearly 350,000 Spani...