Union Perspectives

Are the Boy Scouts of the Border Patrol the new Silver Shirts of trump? The Border Patrol agency began an Explorers program, much like the law enforcement Explorers program, that offers young people, in the Border Patrol’s case, Latino youths training and mentorship and trump indoctrination. The Silver Shirts were members of the paramilitary group the Silver Legion of America, an underground racist organization founded in North Carolina by William D. Pelley, a journalist, in 1933. Pelley based the group on Benito Mussolini’s blackshirts, an Italian nationalist, fascist group. In 1935, a Nazi agent convinced heiress Jessie Murphy to give cash and the use of her ranch. The Silver Shirts wanted to use the 55-acre Murphy Ranch in the Los Angeles hills as a fortified world headquarters after the fascist global conquest. Pelley said he would save America from Jews and non-whites and called for a Christian Commonwealth in America that would combine the principles of racism, nationalism, a...

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 ...

One of the best solutions to inequality here in the U.S. and the world would be for everyone to have one share of the Commons, the wealth made from using what belongs to all of us our natural resources: air, water, gas and oil, among others. This is not a new thought nor is it welfare. Thomas Paine, 1737-1809, wrote that every individual is born with legitimate claims on natural property or its equivalent. A modern day exchange between two very conservative GOP Fox news commentators, Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs, found that they agree with the concept of dividends for Commons. O’Reilly said, “It’s my contention that we, the people, own the gas and oil discovered in America. It’s our land and the government administers it in our name … land and water are the domain of we, the people.” Dobbs said, “The oil that we’re talking about belongs to us as you said … In Alaska, there is a perfect model for what we should do as a nation. We should have—let’s call it the American Trust. Have the oi...