"Thanks for being part of this movement. Thanks for being part of this party."
In two consecutive sentences, federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh's speech to his party's recent convention referenced a central source of both division and potential dynamism.
Is the NDP a party, or a movement? And does it matter?
St. Paul, MN – Following several union meetings on Wednesday night, I was made aware that a National Guard unit was occupying the St. Paul Labor Center in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota. Other union members and I were sharply aware of the National Guard’s role in repressing protests during the trial of Derek Chauvin and the recent killing of Daunte Wright, and we concluded immediately that our union hall had no place in those militarized efforts against the Black community, activists, and working class people.
(Reuters) -Amazon.com Inc’s fierce resistance to unionization, skepticism among workers that organizing could get them a better deal and decisions on election parameters all contributed to the apparently lopsided defeat of a labor drive at the company’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, people close to the events said.
In so far as participating in bourgeois democracy remains a component of socialist strategy in Canada, voters on the Left are largely limited electorally to the New Democratic Party (NDP). As with many western socialist and social democratic parties, however, the federal NDP has been following a steady course of neoliberalization over the past decades. The party’s commitment to the workers’ movement and its own foundational labour-centred principles have been jettisoned in favour of a far more moderate political project.
Last year was $8.2 billion less painful for 77 big fossil fuel companies, thanks to a tax bailout provision in a big pandemic stimulus bill.
The tax-law change did little, however, for nearly 60,000 workers those companies fired, leaving them stretching the $1,200 checks they received under the same law. Individuals were not eligible for the CARES Act loophole, which allows big polluters to reduce past taxes owed based on their recent yearly losses.
The only debt problem our government has in this time of immense national need (and extremely low borrowing cost) is that we're not incurring enough of it—for the right purposes.
Usually, the Powers That Be swat away the kind of big-ticket reforms our country needs by haughtily asserting a few hoary economic fables they dress up as immutable "truths."
