'A Just Society': Ocasio-Cortez Unveils Legislative Package to Tackle American Poverty and Inequality"It's a visionary plan that makes moral and economic sense, and most importantly, is informed by what's moving in communities all around the nation." by Jessica Corbett, staff writer https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/09/25/just-society-ocasio-cortez-unveils-legislative-package-tackle-american-poverty-and
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A road map to neutralizing the role of racism as a divide-and-conquer political weapon
Ian Haney López believes that Trump wants 2020 voters debating whether he is a "racist" — it's his strategy for winning. In 2014, he published Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. In the book, he named and explained how politicians used coded racial appeals as part of a strategy of racial divide-and-conquer to help the 1% get even more powerful. His new book, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America, explains how the political exploitation of coded racism has evolved under Trump — and suggests an evidence-based approach on how to beat it. The evidence comes from the two-year race-class narrative research project involving focus groups and national polling. The takeaway is that naming racism as a weapon of the rich and calling for coming together across racial lines proved to be the most effective way to defang the Right’s racial fear narratives and to build broad cross-racial support for racial justice as well as for economic populism. Download Chapter 10: 20/20 Vision: Comparing the Left’s Possible Responses to Anti-Immigrant Dog Whistling here. US Sanctions Are Designed to Kill
BY KEVIN CASHMAN ,CAVAN KHARRAZIAN, US sanctions are killing ordinary Iranians by the thousands. Through its control over the world banking system, America’s sanctioning power flouts international human rights law and poses a threat to the world. Jacobin. https://jacobinmag.com/2019/09/us-iran-sanctions-donald-trump-iran-deal-oil-banks? prospect.org/laborThe American Prospect has a new website. They have a specific link for labor issues.
Here. https://prospect.org/labor An interesting series of articles in Jacobin.,
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/09/working-families-party-endorsement-elizabeth-warren-bernie-sanders The AFL-CIO this week launched a website parodying Scalia's resume. "After years of quashing and eroding the rights and safety of working people, never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be nominated to lead the Department of Labor,"
Right now, nearly 50,000 UAW workers in 19 states are striking against General Motors. I’m sending this statement and support suggestions from our DSA Democratic Socialist Labor Commission. Read on for more about the strike and how you can help!
In solidarity, Maria Svart DSA National Director Statement from the DSA Democratic Socialist Labor Commission: DSA stands with the United Auto Workers on strike against General Motors Our union brothers and sisters at GM are the poster children of the slogan “They got bailed out, we got sold out.” While GM has enjoyed record profits, $11.8 billion last year, the company continues to squeeze concessions from workers. As socialists we know that the employer’s profits come from our labor. That is why we are heartened to see UAW workers declaring that they are ready to fight back. We stand in solidarity with them until they are victorious. We stand with them in their fight to beat back healthcare takeaways, end the two-tier wage system, and secure real wage increases. This strike connects deeply to two of DSA’s major campaigns: Medicare For All and building a democratic, militant union movement. One of the major proposed takeaways is around healthcare. Medicare For All is vital not only because healthcare is a human right but because Medicare for All would eliminate one of the major burdens in contract negotiations. GM is wielding health insurance as a cudgel to scare workers to accept concessions and the two-tier status quo. Winning M4A will strip such power from the capitalist class. The reports about the preparation for the strike are a textbook example of why we need democratic unions. In the lead-up to the strike members were not included in decisions; there were no informational pickets, no open bargaining, and no community outreach. We hope that this strike will help workers build a vibrant reform movement in the UAW and rebuild a union that is able to fight against the corporations. Any problems with the UAW officialdom do not diminish the importance of this strike, though. Members are standing strong. DSA will stand in solidarity with the workers until they win!Here is how you can help:
See also: What’s at Stake in the General Motors Strike Only a strong movement can put the management of capitalism on the political agenda. Nelson Lichtenstein September 20, 2019, Dissent. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/whats-at-stake-in-the-general-motors-strike Meyerson on TAPWhy the Striking Autoworkers Need to Win Big. Anyone who understands the need for the United States to reduce its stratospheric levels of economic inequality and to give its workers a boost into the middle class has to be rooting for the United Auto Workers members on strike now at General Motors. Those workers sacrificed a good share of their incomes to help GM weather the 2008 financial collapse, as Mike Elk reported yesterday at prospect.org, and now that the company has record profits, totaling more than $30 billion during the past three years, their demands—to reopen factories whose work GM has offshored; to provide full pay, hours, and benefits to the workers whom GM has relegated to a second tier or to the status of temp—are more than just.
Perhaps even more important to the nation at large, though, a successful strike at GM would continue to signal the return of the most important income equalization tool in American history: the strike. Over the past 18 months, teachers, hotel workers, and telephone company workers have waged and won major strikes, after decades in which the strike had almost disappeared from the nation’s economic landscape. Low unemployment rates embolden workers, but there’s nothing like a string of successful strikes to embolden them more. (And all praise to the telecom workers’ union—the Communications Workers of America—for persisting in waging, and winning, strikes over the past decades when most other unions hadn’t done the work required to strike and win.) When GM was the nation’s largest employer, and when unionization rates were so high that even non-union workers got raises so their employers could keep them from defecting to unionized firms, the UAW’s strikes at GM had far greater impact on the nation’s economy than today’s strike can have. America’s mid-20th-century middle-class majority was largely the creation of the more than 300 major strikes the nation experienced every year during the 1950s. We’re a long way from that level of broadly shared prosperity now, but one indispensable way to begin to re-create it is to roll the union on. Ergo: Go, UAW! ~ HAROLD MEYERSON |
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