Enemies of Unions Are Enemies of the People

For the workers to fight and win their labor battles, they must understand what they are up against and the history of their enemy, such as the banking system and the world banking system, and numerous others. There is a good video that explains these systems in animation that a friend, Ian, told me about. The video is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mII9NZ8MMVM . I highly recommend people take the time to watch this simply explained video on a complex topic. It’s like the video, Who Moved My Cheese, https://www.google.com #q=who+moved+my+cheese+video . Both are very educational. One must also understand big pharma and health insurance companies and how they buy our politicians in both political parties, who then kill any attempt at single payer legislation. They now are buying politician to fight the marijuana laws so they can sell their synthetic marijuana pills, and to do that they will support laws that make marijuana illegal except for what they sell. This explains why U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants to reverse all the progress made in legalizing marijuana and make it illegal across the board. Another issues being used against us, is the lie that Social Security is going broke and that workers will never get their money back, but what they have not told us is that the government borrowed $2.7 trillion from the Social Security system under President Ronald Reagan, and $1.37 trillion under President George W. Bush. To understand the “whys” and the “whos" who are responsible for most of these efforts to hurt the working people, we can lay blame at the feet of the corporate Democrats, and more so at the modern conservative movement, which was founded on anti-communism and anti-unionism. This was started by Senator Berry Goldwater, considered Mr. Conservative. He built his career bashing unions. Ronald Reagan went after unions and broke the air traffic controllers union. The union backed and financially supported Reagan. Nice return on the union’s investment. This betrayal opened the floodgates to the “Right to Work” laws infesting states across the country. This law breaks unions by taking away dues that support unions. This was open season on workers, which represents about 6 percent for the private sector. Unions need to change the way they do business in order to win back the lost ground and to build upon what’s left. They also need to counteract the stigma created by the likes of Goldwater and Reagan and educate workers on unions history and how and why people sacrificed their lives to make the work place safer, pay more equitable for the work done, pensions and healthcare. Another area of concern involves the wealthy using their money to change our Constitution to benefit them. Charles and David Koch and other ultra right billionaires have been working since about 2010. They have formed groups like the Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force, Compact for America, Austin, Citizens for Self-Governance and using the American Legislative Exchange Council to convene a national constitutional convention in order to rewrite the Constitution to include rigid fiscal constraints into the document our founding fathers wrote. The last time Article V of the Constitution was used to amend the document was in 1787 in Philadelphia. The right wing has trying to force a balanced budget amendment since the 1930s. This was the platform of the Tea Party, also funded by the Koch brothers. Their claims is that they want a balanced federal budget, but they want to prevent the government from using the Keynesian strategy for stimulating the economy, which allows the federal government increase the national debt by borrowing money during times of economic depressions. If they are successful in amending the Constitution, it would ruin our economy for years—but not their bank accounts. If they succeed, it will mean the end to programs, like Medicare, that help us little people, but our taxes will increase to pay for the functioning of our country and the rich will maintain their tax cuts. Thirty-eight states are needed to convene a convention. The states that have signed on to convene a national constitution convention are: Wyoming, Arizona, Alabama, New Hampshire, Ohio, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Michigan, Louisiana, Indiana, Texas, South Dakota, North Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, Idaho, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin. There are ways, other than what our U.S. trade unions do, to control pensions healthcare, training, and wages. This is somewhat like the Ghent arrangement. In this system, trade and labor unions and not the government are responsible for paying entitlement benefits, mainly unemployment benefits. In Europe, this model is called Work Councils. Another way the U.S. workers could win is to separate the AFL/CIO union back to two unions. There would be more power in their unions as separate entities. They could shut down the country with a national strike or we could have two unions, instead of one, in each state, which would give unions more influence in electing politicians who support unions. If we don’t wake up to what the GOP and the ultra rich are doing to this country, we are screwed. The way things are going right now, we will lose our democracy and America the Great will become America the pathetic.