Labor, unions, $15 an hour minimum wage, pensions, and safe working conditions are all under attack here in the U.S. and around the world. In the U.S., the Republicans have put out a bill to gut Social Security and raise the retirement age to 69 years old.
The anti-worker people are coming for everything President Franklin D. Roosevelt accomplished. They want to destroy Social Security and Medicare. This is what Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, told an audience at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Donald Trump, who was handed the presidency by the electoral collage, is lining his cabinet with other like-minded people as himself. Trump has recruited corporate individuals that he promised his followers he would banish from Capitol Hill. Trump filled the Secretary of State position with an Exxon Mobil executive; for the head of the Treasury; Trump chose an executive from Goldman Sachs; Secretary of Labor is a fast food executive; he chose an anti-gay person as his Attorney General; and the “bankruptcy king” as Secretary of Commerce. What could go wrong?
The onslaught is on as Trump has fulfilled the right wing’s wish list to see laws and regulations gutted on climate change, nutrition, education, healthcare, wages, voting rights, the environment, social benefits, work-place safety, and any and all legislation that made this country strong and enviable.
In 1933, Hitler said, “We must reduce workers’ salaries and take away their right to strike.” This is now happening all across the U.S. and in parts of other countries. In Michigan state, the legislators adopted anti-labor laws, which can fine workers up to $2,000 for protesting. The outgoing North Carolina Republican governor, Pat McCrory, signed a bill passed by the GOP-held legislature that strips the newly elected Democratic governor of some of his authority and reduces Democratic Party's control over election boards.
This is just the beginning, and a lot of what is happening is not being reported by our corporate owned media. The decimation of our country can be laid at the feet of people who vote without investigating the promises politicians make to get elected and the greed that motivates people to screw a country into ruin.
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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