It is hard to believe that labor is now in a fight for the right to strike. The people who will fight labor over the right to strike are the local law enforcement, and they will be trained at the new “Cop City” that is built in Atlanta, Georgia, that the labor busting people want built.
Chief among them is the Home Depot Foundation that is helping to fund the Atlanta Police Foundation’s Cop City; but a private entity fiercely opposes the plan to build the $90 million training center in the South River in the Weelaunee Forest.
Cop City will have a shooting range, driving course, a mock city to train law enforcement from across the country. Part of the training center will involve urban warfare, which could be used against people excising their right to protest and labor strikes, which could be reminiscent of the Matewan Massacre.
One of the leaders against Cop City is Vincent Quiles, who had worked at Home Depot and tried to unionize the workers before being fired. Home Depot used a vicious union busting campaign to beat the unionizing attempt. Quiles researched Home Depot’s tax returns and discovered it was supporting Cop City and after researching what the project was, began a protest campaign against the project. He has a case before the National Labor Relations Board regarding his firing.
Unions should get behind the fight against Cop City, which could very well be used against union labors. Remember cops are the first line of defense for business owners. Law enforcement was not created to protect and serve everyone or to stop crime by the Have Nots and working class, they were created to protect and serve the wealthy and capitalism ignoring the ancient Turkish proverb says, “A hungry man is an angry man.”
Police were established by the wealthy to impose order on the working class. They were especially needed during the turmoils that seemed to occur when workers became fed up: 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894, and cops violently attacked the workers who only wanted better working conditions, better pay, better hours—same thing people are wanting today.
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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