labor

Several months ago, Maxford Nelson, executive director of a right-wing think tank, the Freedom Foundation, showed up at a Washington state legislative committee hearing to oppose a bill to make dues checkoff easier for the state’s public workers.
The lawmakers jumped on him, questioning what he was even doing there, since the foundation is supposed to be — and advertises itself as — non-profit and non-partisan. Federal and state tax rules bar such groups from overt political lobbying.

The trouble with some Trotskyists is they’re always “supporting” other peoples’ revolutions, says Diana Johnstone. Their obsession with permanent revolution in the end provides an alibi for permanent war. By Diana Johnstone  Special to Consortium News I first encountered Trotskyists…Read more →

MEXICO CITY, —  With a presidential election approaching, the crowds assembling here Tuesday for International Workers’ Day — or May Day, as it’s know the world over — were more animated than usual, the floats and rallies resembling performance art. Thousands poured into Mexico City’s main square, the Zocalo, to hang in effigy the wage-killing labor reforms of outgoing President Enrique Peña Nieto and depict the suffering and struggle of Mexico’s workers. A giant lemur wearing prison stripes represented the oligarchs who privatized the country’s telecommunications industry.

Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn’t be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out. That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today’s war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

Unlike the U.S., Europe has strong, influential labor unions; yet they have been unable, or unwilling, to stop the austerity-based policies demanded by European institutions, reports Andrew Spannaus. By Andrew Spannaus  Special to Consortium News in Milan, Italy Railway workers…Read more →

Cognitive dissonance in Psychology
The psychological tension that occurs when one holds mutually exclusive beliefs or attitudes and that often motivates people to modify their thoughts or behaviors in order to reduce the tension.
Anxiety that results from simultaneously holding contradictory or incompatible attitudes, beliefs, or the like, as when one likes a person but disapproves of one of his or her habits.
Motivated Ignorance in Politics

My best friend Roland is a public school teacher in Compton.

RMT demonstration at King’s Cross Station in London (RMT Photo)

In our last article, we predicted that the 2020s will be an era of transformation.  We focused on the development of the movement since the “Take-Off” phase of the 2011 Occupy encampments, followed by Black Lives Matter, Fight for $15, Idle No More, carbon infrastructure protests, debt resistance, immigration protests and more.

As we head into a pivotal mid-term election year, it is clear the Democratic Party establishment has not learned a key lesson from the 2016 election. That is, that many of the party’s former and current constituents reject the party’s establishment leadership and its lackluster program. These voters are looking for alternatives. In 2016, en masse they deserted the party for a new kind of politics they found in Bernie Sanders and some saw in Donald Trump.