Privatizing can costs lives and money. It does not save governments money and the costs are just passed on to the taxpayer, which takes money in the long run away from the government by way of sales tax and support for underpaid workers or by workers who lost a government job to a private company. When the oligarchies are taking control of coal mines like in the one in Turkey from government responsibility, the new private owners tried cutting costs for more profits. Usually it is done by cutting wages, safety of the workers, the loss of life of the Turkey miners make this very apparent.
All the government of Turkey had to do was look to how the private for profit operate: money over everything else. Mines have cost the lives of U.S. miners, two just the other day, and black lung disease is on the rise again. When the lives of workers are put under the control of the oligarchies, the workers’ lives will be damaged or they will die for the company’s profits, and most of the time the government will side with the money people, as Turkey’s did. The proletarians will be just collateral damage.
Just think of the families of those miners killed in the Turkey mine. Who or what will take care of their families? I bet it won’t be the owners of the mines—unless they are made to. This is the one of the horrible costs of privatizing, which is piled onto the backs of the workers and their families. The government, instead of showing compassion toward the grieving families, is using water cannons against them as they protests the shoddy work environment of the mines and the needless loss of lives.
The Turkish miners exemplify just how the oligarchies view the common worker—as disposable, a dime a dozen. Oligarchies have lost all sense of right and wrong and respect for human life.
In 2012 more than a quarter of all political contributions came from just 30,000 people who represented the 1 percent of the 1 percent, 90 percent who spent the most won. Today, we are an experiment in either a democracy, which started in 1787 or an oligarchy, which is winning. The nonunion people, like Trump and Musk, have most all the tools in their pockets to destroy our unions. They have money, they have the courts, they have law enforcement, they have the media, and 50 percent of workers that don’t know this don’t know the history of the working class people. This is the perfect storm to lose all the gains workers have made whether they’re union or not, even our Social Security and Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. So, now we will have to go way back to the late 1920s and ‘30s and dig up the old labor party books. One book, written in 1964, has the information, The Rebel Voices, an IWW Anthology by Joyce L. Kornbluh, educator, activist, and advocate. The history of our labor...
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