Union Perspectives

What do Apple, Microsoft, Starbucks, Fiat and many other corporations have in common? They all know how to dodge paying their taxes or at most pay very little taxes. One way they do this is to have their headquarters in very low tax nations, such as Ireland. This is about to change. The European Union’s (EU) 28 states agreed in October to share details of tax deals they reached with big companies to make sure they are fair to other countries. The EU has already ordered Starbucks and Fiat to pay millions in back taxes. Italy is making Apple pay $350 million in back taxes. The other way to avoid paying taxes is by using Bermuda as a tax haven. Microsoft stores billions in an entity named R.I. Holdings. It is a law firm in Hamilton, Bermuda, a UK territory that charges no corporate taxes. Microsoft has places like this to hide its money so it does not have to pay taxes around the world. This is just some of the ways large corporations and their stock holders and chief executive officers (...

Could the USA’s corporate capitalist system survive without wars? Probably not and terrorism is good for business. Terrorism will most likely never be defeated because it keeps profits high for the military industrial complex. The Paris attacks occurred on a Friday, when the Stock Market opened on Monday defense industry stocks, like Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop, Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Booz Allen Hamilton soared in anticipation of the coming weapons sales and security contracts. There will never be an elected person who wants to stabilize the world and have no wars or unrest. They will not get corporate backing for their elections if they went against these corporate giants. Since 9/11, five countries have disintegrated as nations: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The destruction of these countries were the result of direct American interventions. The fifth, Syria, came from a flood of U.S. arms to the so-called moderate rebels. The forth, Yemen, ...

What has the Democratic party and the last two Democratic presidents done for labor? Bill Clinton promised labor law reform, but when elected he wasn’t at all interested. However, he did give labor North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the union presidents were furious, but with some schmoozing and attending White House galas they soon forgot unions were thrown under the bus and all the money they donated. Then along came Barak Obama, who promised the Employee Free Choice Act, also called card check, and it never happened. Both he and Clinton had control of Congress at the beginnings of their administrations, but now it looks like Obama will give us the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), instead. This trade agreement is even worse than NAFTA. NAFTA and TPP are perfect examples of why labor needs to hold their endorsements until there is a solid commitment from the presidential candidate. Hillary Clinton is an extension of Bill, a corporatist and beholden to Wall Street and big...

Truck drivers and owners should take a look at how Russian truck drivers are protesting a new crippling tax per kilometer. The Caucasus drivers are striking a road tax, dubbed “Plato,” on trucks weighing more than 12 tons are charged more for each kilometer of federal highway they drive. There are more than 2 million trucks registered in Russia. The 1.5-ruble tax is to be doubled in March to 3-rubles-6 kopecks per kilometer. If truckers refuse to pay the tax, entrepreneurs are fined 40,000 rubles ($634.43 U.S. dollars), and companies 450,000 rubles or $7,109.38 in U.S. currency. If a driver makes 40 to 50 rubles per trip, and the trip tax would be 15,ooo rubles, how are the truckers supposed to support themselves? Adding insult to injury, the collection system has been turned over to a private company by the son of a close associate of President Vladimir Putin. The Russian truckers converged on Moscow crippling the beltway in what they called the “snail,” driving slowly tying up traff...

In the fight to defeat lifestyle and wage inequality, we must understand how we got here by understanding the history of humans and how they have been controlled. First, it was just savagery, which lasted more than a million years. Then barbarism came along and lasted five thousand years. And then it was slaves where we belonged to the master for life, followed by the feudal serfdom or tenant, who were also likely bound for life to the lord and his land. From there we went to capitalism, which is only 450 years old. In this time the industrial age was launched around the start of the 19th century, which brought large numbers of new wage slaves from the countryside to the cities and factories creating capitalist captains of industry and later masters of entire countries and their continents as their riches increased, riches that included wage slaves. Their riches also came from using our Commons to get ahead and using the wealth accumulated from our Commons and our labor swelled their r...

Will Donald Trump be the leader the right wing GOP has been waiting for to lead toady’s version of the America’s Silver Shirts? Silver shirts was based on Nazi Germany’s Brown Shirts. Trump has already gotten the support of the White Supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan and all the closeted angry racists of the GOP party. Remember, people laughed at Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini and said the two would never come to power. We all know the horror and terror they wreaked upon the world. If the U.S. doesn’t wake up this country could very well see the same thing happen here. The Silver Shirts were America’s answer to the Brown Shirts, same kind of ideology, same kind of entitlement over others and same kind of twisted propaganda that unsuspecting people fell for. There could be small revolutions fighting against terrorism—in all its forms, ethnic-type of discrimination, or even the young, disenchanted low-wage college people who have huge debts but low-wage jobs. The young who bought int...

The world’s ills are driven by greed and the never ending lust for power over the proletarians by the oligarchies, who hide and hoard their cash so they don’t have to pay their fair share of taxes. When the government cannot meet their expectations of payments they then demand austerity measures thereby placing the deficit burden on the workers, who did not cause the problem. Governments provide so many loopholes and tax breaks for the wealthy, which ends up shorting all of us, but the people at the bottom pay the greatest price. Most of the wealthy people today got that way not by hard work, but by their DNA, they inherited the wealth. Their lack of a work ethic means they lack the guilt or awareness that their greed hurts most of the population when the austerity measures are implemented. The wealthy invest in banks, which the countries like Portugal and Greece have had to keep their Eurozone partners and creditors happy by taking from the poor to make the rich richer. When the money...

When labor and unions are diminished, inequality goes up. Just look at South Korea. They are facing the same thing as the U.S. where the 1 percent are getting richer each day while what’s left of their middle class is growing poorer by the day. This is a very rich country that could be the poster child for how the capitalist system should work to the betterment of all, but instead greed has taken over and the wage slaves have had to go to the streets. At this time, South Korea is in the same fight as us with the need for a living wage, healthcare, pension, free education, the right to form a union, free assembly and free speech. The people, led by unions, including the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, are accusing the government of passing policies that weakens democracy, changes labor laws to benefit the corporations/wealthy and rewrites the country’s history to a conservative bent. Han Sang-gyun is calling for a general strike against "labor conditions that only fattens ca...

The fight for $15 to $18 an hour and the eradication of wage and lifestyle inequality will need education, ideology and tactics. The duty of the militant minority is to promote class-consciousness and solidarity among the wage slaves fostering in them a revolutionary spirit to fight for what is their civil rights. This can be accomplished in two ways: education in theory and education in class warfare. In this way, the wage slaves will become conscious of their power as one, and will learn the class nature of the capitalist state, which will gain them greater insight into the nature of the class struggle. The old International Workers of the World (IWW) believed such an education as essential before the class war could be won. The IWW organized propaganda leagues and industrial education clubs for the purpose of education (think mobile phones today). We could send out brief messages, such as sit down and watch your pay go up, emancipation, educating, and organization. This should be th...