Union Perspectives

Are the Boy Scouts of the Border Patrol the new Silver Shirts of trump? The Border Patrol agency began an Explorers program, much like the law enforcement Explorers program, that offers young people, in the Border Patrol’s case, Latino youths training and mentorship and trump indoctrination. The Silver Shirts were members of the paramilitary group the Silver Legion of America, an underground racist organization founded in North Carolina by William D. Pelley, a journalist, in 1933. Pelley based the group on Benito Mussolini’s blackshirts, an Italian nationalist, fascist group. In 1935, a Nazi agent convinced heiress Jessie Murphy to give cash and the use of her ranch. The Silver Shirts wanted to use the 55-acre Murphy Ranch in the Los Angeles hills as a fortified world headquarters after the fascist global conquest. Pelley said he would save America from Jews and non-whites and called for a Christian Commonwealth in America that would combine the principles of racism, nationalism, a...

Is today’s I.C.E. Bone Spur Trump’s equivalent to Hitler’s Brownshirts, which was turned into Hitler’s private army of street thugs? Is I.C.E. the old U.S.’ Silvershirts, who can now threaten and intimidate people at will by splitting up families, even taking children from babies to teens from their parents. They have begun to deport people who have been here, living lawful, peaceful lives some for up to thirty years, some who served honorably in the military and others who are legal immigrants and were awaiting citizenship. Yet Trump’s in-laws quest for citizenship was fast tracked while Trump is denying citizenship to others. These I.C.E. people have a vast statutory power, a chilling new directive from the top inside America’s unfolding immigration tragedy. I.C.E. is the fastest growing bureaucracy than any agency in peacetime. The I.C.E. enforcers are Trump’s private army and they love him because these people are among the less educated, have profound inferiority complexes, an...

Where is the AFL-CIO on things like $15 to $24 an hour minimum wage or on the universal basic income (UBI). Also, the idea that the French has on a universal robot tax to support the UBI. A robot tax because the more technology advances, the more machines take over our jobs. Then, there is the attack on the U.S. prevailing wage, the Davis-Bacon Act, which Republicans have attack and now want to end prevailing wage protections. This is not only a union matter, but a nonunion issue for all workers who now earn a living wage when working on government jobs. It is time unions and nonunion workers get together and hit the streets, and if we don’t the workers will be working for less than minimum wage and no union healthcare or pensions. The union busting GOP are turning the working class against itself, black against white, men against women, Jews against nonJews. Using hate, division, white supremacy, misogyny, religion and racism are the choice weapons in every union busting fight in...

The workers of the U.S. and the world have been conditioned by the 1 percent, corporations and Stock Exchange for the past 30 years. It is not that hard to understand. First, the 1 percent took control of the media, newspapers, and television and radio stations. They give grants to educational institutions, which, in turn, they want their people put on the educational boards. Then the 1 percent supports or buys states’ governors who will support the 1 percent’s right wing ideology? Now with these things in place, the 1 percent uses propaganda programs to get the 99 percent to vote against their own interests and blame others for all that goes wrong. By the way, propaganda was invented here in the U.S. in 1913-’14. Then it was copied by the Nazis and refined around 1934, when Hitler and his terrorists blamed the Jews, gypsies, gays, communists, socialists, trade unionists, and Catholics, which brings us to today. We are supposed to be the poster child for democracy and honest election...

In all wars the one thing that always happens is the dehumanizing of the opponent—usually one side will lie and make up names and other propaganda to make the enemy look bad and the other side to look good, and usually each side is on the side of some god. The opponents will just throw crap on the walls to see what sticks or resonate and this type of war tactics has a long history. It is done because most humans have some compassion for each other, but in order to get the opponents to fight or even kill each other, the enemy must be seen as not worthy of living. Usually, this is done to the people lowest on the economic ladder and can be by race, religion or location. There were times in this country when the Irish, Chinese, Indians (both American and East), Italians, blacks, Philippines, or Japanese, were looked upon with disdain. Then there were the religious hate toward Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Muslims and Seventh-day Adventists. Then there is where people live, Ukraine comes to mi...

The fight about inequality in the coming year will bring increasingly conscious and organized resistance by a growing vanguard of wage slaves pushed to the wall by bosses’ drive to cut wages and increase what they call productivity. This will be punctuated by street battles with ultra-rightist movements fighting against unions, militants, revolutionary socialists, women, blacks, gays, immigrants, Jews and others. This will happen even in the most stable democracies if the working class fails to take power out of the hands of the oligarchies. This is why the $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage is so important at this time. For one reason, it is a rallying point, and two, it will show the workers they can have a better life if they set aside all other differences and work together. The pressure is beginning to pay off as evident in a recent survey of American millionaires, 51 percent think inequality is a major problem for the U.S. About two-thirds also think higher taxes on the wealthy and ...

Unions need to study labor history and reboot using the lessons learned by what has worked and not worked. Labor must only support people who are trusted-worker friendly and be very careful not to make mistakes, such as some labor leaders did when they supported Ronald Reagan. The records of some of our presidents: Abraham Lincoln valued organized labor; Grover Cleveland sent the Army to suppress labor movements; Harry Truman challenged the right to strike on the coal and steel mines, and railways; Lyndon Johnson acted on issues of the work-place safety. Reagan, an FBI rat known as #T-10, destroyed the air traffic controllers union, PATCO. This union and many others have never fully recovered at this time. The wage slaves, have nots, have little, and used to have are forging a comeback, but even so, we still have some reluctant workers who are still slow to step up to the plate. To those people, they must remember this poem by Martin Niemoller: “First they came for the communists, an...