In the fight for Ukraine’s sovereignty are we seeing the handprint of the U.S. oligarchies? Are the U.S. oligarchies pushing the Ukraine government to slash mining jobs by selling off or shutting down state owned mines, cutting social benefits and carrying out other austerity measures to shore up profits for the capitalists and meet loan conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund? Despite the fact that austerity has been proven time and again that it does not work.
Once again, the toilers at the bottom are the ones to take the hit and the fight even carries over to the wage slaves in Russia where U.S. sanctions are squeezing food prices; meat and poultry prices have skyrocketed by 17 percent. It is just like all wars where the wage slaves are the ones who give their lives for the oligarchies of the world.
This is where unions must be strong. It is the only hope for the families of the Ukrainian and Russian poor. These fights are worldwide, such as with the Kurds, Turkey, Greece, France, England and here in the U.S. In Iran, 5,000 miners are fighting government steps to privatize the Bafgh iron ore mines. If the mines are privatized, jobs, wages and safety will be cut. Employment and living standards in Iran are under pressure as a result of the world capitalist system.
In the U.S., our workers are fighting to keep their jobs in the postal service, New Jersey casino workers, and Washington, D.C., taxi drivers. In Washington state berry pickers are trying to keep their union.
It doesn’t matter where one lives, the workers are getting short changed and are the ones paying the price for the oligarchies’ insatiable greed.
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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