Union Perspectives

People make a living in one of two ways: labor or non-labor. The people who are at the top tend to live off non-labor activities, such as capital gains, dividends and other forms of property income, which is taxed at a lower rate than labor income. The rest of the people get their income from labor, which is considers Social Security and pensions as deferred wages and salaries. The top 1 percent’s money is earned from non-labor. This is not to say that the bulk of income should come from non-labor, but everyone should get some non-labor income as a birth right otherwise our middle class—what is left of it—will disappear. It will disappear and with it the capitalist system as we know it today and along with it our democracy. Our government will be turned into something that will not work well for the 90 percent. If we want to change the wealth inequality in this country and distribute the wealth more evenly, we need to change the way our economic system is operated. Entrepreneur Andr...

When Trump said he was going to make America great again, he was referring to his own bank account not yours. While he and his grifter family members are making millions at our expense, the 90 percent of us are circling the drain. What a lot of Trump’s supporters don’t understand, is that at the behest of the GOP, he is deliberately putting people in top positions to run our programs into the ground to bankrupt the country so we can no longer afford the programs President Franklin D. Roosevelt put into place that dragged us out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. The greed of Trump and the rich knows no bounds, and they are eating their seed corn by attacking unions and minimum wage. For those not familiar with this old saying, it simply means that every seed you sow has the potential to either be eaten right then or planted for next year's crop. As a farmer, you must ensure you have enough seed corn to replant your fields, but if you eat your seed corn, you’ve got nothing to pl...

Now is time for all unions, AFL-CIO, to step up and put their differences aside just like former president of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Walter Reuther dreamed of. It’s time for unions to do something bold, like Medicare for all and free education. Unions were the leaders in all these areas, consider child labor laws, free speech laws, pensions, and unemployment benefits when people were out of work; and the Social Security we have today. All of these things will go away if we do not come together and fight. At this time, it is workers’ unions against the corporations and the very, very rich, who would like to break our unions and even take away the minimum wage. We even know what their play book is on how the GOP is going to do this. The tax breaks Trump gave the rich has put us into debt is step one, step two is Trump and the GOP spends as much money as they can on the military complex, making many of the rich even richer...

The biggest fear the GOP and Trump have are Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, financial and climate regulations, and social changes opening the door to people of color. Sanders and Warren will push an anti-corruption and anti-inequality programs and Medicare for All with a $15 an hour minimum wage. They should also be looking at a UBI (universal basic income). Rising the minimum wage to $15 an hour will not stop the inequality, but I UBI would help. The GOP will counter by accusing Sanders and Warren of being scary Democratic Socialists, which Sanders and Warren should wear the title as a badge of honor and point out the obvious—all the socialist-type programs the U.S, already has in place, such as Social Security (which we pay into), Medicare, Medicaid/MediCal, law enforcement, fire and rescue services, and schools. The GOP and its followers will deliberately conflate socialism with communism, which is a misnomer. Communism and socialism may have some similarities, sharing of the cou...

UBI (universal basic income) is gaining traction in the U.S. and worldwide. Support for a UBI is no longer the working person’s dream, but economists and finance writers are now writing in favor of redistributing the wealth in a fair way. Naysayers will always be against a UBI because they’re blabbering the ultra wealthy’s rhetoric, ignoring that a UBI keeps the capitalist system thriving while creating jobs to fill the spending by the people. Capitalism is driven by 76 percent of the majority of people, who actually spend their money instead of hoarding it. Capitalists say because they create something or take risks with other people’s money they should be able to hang onto all of their wealth, but what they fail to admit to is if they didn’t have people’s money to speculate with or the average person didn’t buy their products, they wouldn’t have their wealth. The UBI concept was dubbed “helicopter money” by the GOP financial guru Milton Friedman some 50 years ago when he said putti...

Time to look at what a $3,000 a month universal basic income (UBI) would do. People would still work, maybe go back to school to improve upon their skills, which would make them a better employee, or maybe some would even start their own business. Some would even take a vacation and spend money to supporting the local economy, spend time with their families or volunteer as a firefighter-first responder, kids sports like Little League or Pop Warner teams, or get involved in local politics, like school or water or fire boards. These are just a few of the things people could do if they had a little extra cash from a UBI. At this time, we have 41 million Americans living below the poverty level. This would end poverty and poverty wages. Wages would go up because people would be spending more, which would mean more jobs to replace the products bought. The UBI idea is not new. The concept was started in England’s Tudor period (1485-1603) basically that every person was to receive a guara...

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...