Senator Bernie Sanders will be our next president and we need to start planning now for how we will get single-payer healthcare, $15 an hour minimum wage, free college, immigration reform and taking on the banks and Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, prison/justice reform, and reduce the military industrial complex by making the Middle East deal with their problems instead of relying completely on the U.S.
These are just some of the things that need to be done. Also, we, union workers-retired or still working, must ensure that Sanders doesn’t forget us and will push for card check, which President Obama promised and then sold us out. In his campaign platform, Sanders also states, aside from the above items, but also passage of the Work Place Democracy Act to strengthen the role of unions, he leads the fight for $15 and a union for fast food workers and federal contract employees, and supports the Employee Free Choice Act or card check, and equal pay for women.
With all of this to do, there will have to be a revolution and an army working for us to get this done. Sanders sure as hell can’t get this all done on his own, as Obama’s presidency has shown us. We do not want to end up like Tunisia, Egypt and Ukraine went through their revolutions, but after they got rid of corrupt policians they didn’t have a plan in place to finish what they had started. Sanders winning will just be the start, in fact, it will be the easiest of the fights in comparison to what the other countries went through.
We will all have to stay together and be ready to hit the road running after Sanders wins. There can be no let up. This is why the unions must be engaged. We are a trained army in place, but we need the motivation encouraged by Sanders. Look at what the union plumbers did in a few days in Flint, Michigan. When Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Synder did nothing, 300 of our UA union brothers came to the rescue and installed faucets and water filters in 1,100 homes on Jan. 30th.
These could be the chock troops needed when Sanders becomes president. Let’s not elect Sanders and then ask ourselves what now. We did this before and that’s why we’re having to fight again for the ground we lost. We need to keep the movement going just like a snowball rolling down hill—it gets faster and bigger until it can rollover the opposition. We need to be the “too big to fail” and take the place of the too big to fail banks and let them “feeltheBern.” If we don't change things now, some say we will never be able to for the oligarchies will oppress every attempt we make to better our lives because in some twisted thought process they think if we get a little they get less.
We, the people, must make Sanders do all the things and follow what President Franklin Roosevelt told the people when he was in office, “make me do it.” If we don’t this country won’t change and the disparity will only get worse, as economist Robert Reich says, “Hillary is clearly the most qualified candidate for the system we now have. Bernie is clearly the most qualified to create the system we should have and need.”
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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