Union Perspectives

Where's all the cash? Hint, it's not in your pocket. The need for cash is necessary to alleviate the war on the poor. The latest facts show 1.5 million households with 3 million children have cash incomes of less than $2 a day. The number we usually use to measure third- and fourth-world poverty. Then in order to get the cash to pay rent in some dilapidated housing, buy diapers, and even tampons. They will have to sell their blood or their food stamps at a deep discount and the desperately poor people are willing to lose about 40 percent of the value of their food stamps, which is the going rate to trade some of their stamps for cash. There is about 15 million people who are in deep poverty with annual incomes of about $10,000 below half the poverty line for a family of three. A lot of the $2 a day people are single mothers without a high school diploma whose jobs have been in decline. This is one of many reasons that we need $15 to $18 an hour minimum wage, single payer healt...

You know when you’re winning when you get the attention of your opposition and especially when the opposition starts recognizing your organization after first trying to ignore you and then treating you with distain. The message of the 99% is now resonating with increasingly more “Have Nothing,” “Have Little” and “Want Mores.” The win is when the 1% starts to see themselves being boxed into a corner in which there seems no way out other than alienating the 99% of the working people. They are failing to recognize that in the 99%, 70.2% are registered as Independents and 2.4% are registered as Republicans. It is time for the 99% and unions to go for a full-court press for now 99% have the best time for our message to be heard by the lawmakers of our government. They will have to pick a side: the 1% or the 99%. If they do not recognize us, the 99%, there is no doubt the 1% will lose - this by the 1%’s own admission. We must come together and keep up the pressure. We have the 1% on th...