Empire:
No doubt one is a wretched plebian harassed by debts and military service, but to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen one has one’s share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws, according to Sigmund Fraud in The Future of Illusion, 1927.
This is the thinking of the GOP’s Tea Party people, who believe we are the best country in the world and all other countries should be like us. These people they are a part of an empire and think it will never end. This is again an illusion told to the uninformed GOP followers who blindly listen to the talking heads who are funded by the oligarchies. The GOP Tea Party members are not the only people with an illusion of an empire.
Our union leaders also fall into this trap by not voicing their opinion on U.S. trade and foreign policy for it is usually so bad and explosive that is normally avoided in polite company within the union movement. Every action or failure to act has consequences and labor silence on questions of empire building has made the movement largely complicit in the actions of the U.S. government and the world stage. This collusion has come at a great cost at home and abroad yet the labor movement sees foreign policy as irrelevant.
Labor needs to fight for social justice and get over the illusion of the USA as a worldwide empire and focus on our needs at home like a living wage, pensions and good healthcare, free education and the protection of our commons. The unions could start by getting behind the $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage which would set the wage bar and force the Walmart-type businesses to do the same. Then maybe you could think about the U.S. being an empire in social justice if other countries followed.
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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