In this election, labor needs to get it right on whom to support. Labor supported Bill Clinton, whose chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel. Clinton opened the flood gates for union jobs to be shipped out of the country with the passage of North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA, and Emanuel, who is mayor of Chicago, is still union bashing. He would be back if Hillary Clinton is elected.
Look at what labor spent on President Obama’s election in hopes of getting the Employee Free Choice Act, which went nowhere. It was shoved aside for healthcare. Clinton’s NAFTA is now about to get Obama’s version in the form of Trans Pacific Partnership or TPP, which is NAFTA on steroids, labor says.
Labor needs people elected who will support labor’s fight for $15, free education, sick leave, family leave, single payer healthcare, the right to form a union, climate change, Black Lives Matter, immigration reform, lifestyle and income inequality and payment for Corporate use of our Commons. In order for this to happen it will take all of labor’s unions and nonunion wage slaves, which will bring together all proletarians.
Then we will need to vote people like Bernie Sanders for president, and supporters like Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Keith Ellison, Al Franken, and Kshama Sawant, who will stand up to Wall Street and the Big Banks. Our political clout should flow from our wage slaves rather than from the billionaires down. Trickle down doesn’t work with economics and it doesn’t work with fairness in politics.
This could be the unions’ last chance to make their clout felt. If unions don’t win the Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association case, which could eliminate the public sector unions’ ability to fund themselves through fair-share fees paid by those who benefit from unions’ protection.
Labor has more at risk than ever so this election could be the proletarians’ last chance. Get educated and vote smart on what is good for you and your family. Again, our last chance is right around the corner in 2016.
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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