Let Us Now Praise Courageous Men and Women

The most sustained human rights violations carried out by the global oligarchs over the past few decades have been against workers, whether in the US rust belt or sweatshops in China.

You can tell what the oligarchs fear by what they seek to destroy -- unions. Amazon, the country’s second largest employer after Walmart, pours, like Walmart, staggering resources into blocking union organizing. According to court documents, it formed a reaction team involving 10 departments, including a security group staffed by military veterans, to counter the Staten Island organizing and had blueprints for breaking union activity worked out in its “Protest Response Playbook” and “Labor Activity Playbook.” The strike-breaking teams organized compulsory Maoist-type meetings, up to 20 a day, with workers where supervisors denigrated unions. It employed subterfuges making it hard to vote for a union. It put up anti-union posters in the bathrooms. It fired workers suspected of organizing. And it relied on the gutting of antitrust legislation and OSHA, as well as the emasculation of the National Labor Relations Board, which left workers largely defenseless, although the NLRB made a few decisions in favor of the union organizers.

[chrishedges.substack.com]

The trick will be keeping these organizers from the entrapments of power and wealth found in large unions which have helped diminish our union structure over the past few decades.

{Amazon, like most large corporations, has no more commitment to worker’s rights than it does to the nation. It avoids taxes through a series of loopholes designed by their lobbyists in Washington and passed by Congress. The company dodged about $5.2 billion in corporate federal income taxes in 2021, even as it reported record profits of more than $35 billion. It paid only 6 percent of those profits in federal corporate income tax. Amazon posted income of more than $11 billion in 2018 but paid no federal taxes and received a federal tax refund of $129 million. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world, is worth over $180 billion. He, like Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, worth $ 277 billion, plays with space rockets as if they were toys and is finishing work on his $500 million yacht, the largest in the world.}

At a time Russian oligarchs and politicians are targeted, ours are rewarded for the same crimes.

{Bezos owns The Washington Post. The billionaire bioscientist Patrick Soon-Shiong owns The Los Angeles Times. Hedge funds and other financial firms own half of the daily newspapers in the United States. Television is in the hands of roughly a half dozen corporations who control 90% of what Americans watch. WarnerMedia, currently owned by AT&T., owns CNN and Time Warner. MSNBC is owned by Comcast, which is a subsidiary of General Electric, the 11th largest defense contractor in the US. News-Corp owns the Wall Street Journal and NY Post. The ruling oligarchs don’t care what we watch, as long as we remain entranced by the trivial, emotionally-driven spectacles they provide. None of these outlets challenge the interests of their owners, shareholders or advertisers, who orchestrate the assault on workers. The more powerful workers become, the more the media will be weaponized against them.} For those new/ish to the group, see the discussion Abby Martin has with Peter Phillips on how that 90% of information is developed for the public on the second pinned post from the top. For a quicker explanation you can jump to the 10 minute mark. Hopefully that will draw a desire to view the entire video.

At a time Russian media is targeted as a state controlled propaganda machine, along with certain other countries, RT is now denied access abroad, as many of our own citizenship fails to see how our own media structure is a oligarch---state controlled apparatus which commits the very crimes placed on those abroad. I assure you as I regularly watch RT I get pretty much all sides of all the issues. They have virtually no fear in providing what our MSCM is showing their followers while providing other views and information in regards to such. I have the full ability to observe more facts and information to draw a intellectual opinion without a biased agenda attached to it. Hedges goes on to give examples of how our MSCM deceives its followers.

{The ruling class, through self-help gurus such as Oprah, “prosperity gospel” preachers and the entertainment industry, has effectively privatized hope. They peddle the fantasy that reality is never an impediment to what we desire. If we believe in ourselves, if we work hard, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, we can have anything we want. The privatization of hope is pernicious and self-defeating. When we fail to achieve our goals, when our dreams are unattainable, we are taught it is not due to economic, social, or political injustice, but faults within us. History has demonstrated that the only power citizens have is through the collective, without that collective we are shorn like sheep. This is a truth the ruling class spends a lot of time obscuring.}

This manufactured survival of living on credit has lead to a heinous social mass poverty rate in which with every recession more victims emerge. Each time the ending results are bailouts and or oligarchy welfare exacerbating inequality in preparation for the cracks to fall through to widen. If the evidence since 2008 wasn't enough, surely 2020 should be raising grave concerns of this manufactured reality by now. At any moment any one of us under the right circumstances can fall into that crack. With the current conditions this manufactured war in Ukraine has caused, even more so. The US government especially is dangerously pushing the world towards a restructuring of a world currency change which many of us could face drastic hardships.

{Any advance we make in social, political, and economic justice immediately comes under assault by the ruling class. The ruling class chips away at the gains we make, which is what happened following the rise of mass movements in the 1930s and later in the 1960s. The oligarchs seek to snuff out what the political scientist Samuel Huntington cynically called “the excess of democracy.” The sociologist Max Weber, for this reason, called politics a vocation. Social change cannot be achieved simply by voting. It requires a constant, ceaseless effort. It is an endless striving for a new political order, one that demands lifelong dedication, organizing to keep the rapacious excesses of power in check and personal sacrifice. This eternal vigilance is the key to success.}

In other words. Voting for more of the same which we get within our 2 establishment parties, no matter which holds power, will never genuinely address our social concerns. {Capitalists, as Karl Marx pointed out, have only two goals: Reduce the cost of labor, which means impoverishing and exploiting workers, and increase the rate of production} Marx teachings is of a constant address to thwart off the control of power monopolies, willingness to constantly address society to society found in Leon Trotsky fight for socialism, therefore, requires the unity and collaboration of workers in every country on the basis of a common program and perspective. The current structure of hegemony of the western nations will never serve the citizenry within equal means. Capitalism is like an animal, pulling in all its needs to survive it must eventually take a shit. We become the shit it's willing to leave behind.