[Editor: 'Action Gets the Goods!' - A recent example of the power of organized labour.]
It is increasingly clear that educators’ unions have a new fighting spirit since the uprising of teachers in West Virginia last spring. The school year began with a wave of strike authorizations from LA to Seattle. Many of these votes were quite strong, United Teachers of Los Angeles voted by 98% to authorize a strike. In Seattle, however, the Seattle Education Association (SEA) held a strike authorization vote, but concluded negotiations without actually striking.
I detest the malignantly racist, sexist, narcissistic, and authoritarian pathological liar and bully Donald Trump on many different levels, and I share none of his sick world view, but the corporate media really is, well (to use Trump’s recurrent phrase), “the enemy of the people.”
LAST SEPTEMBER, as record-breaking hurricanes thrashed the Caribbean and southeastern US, the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance asked its readers a question: “What does it mean for whites if climate change is real?”
... the authors argue, capitalism also needs to be overthrown because climate change demands a social revolution along more egalitarian, “sustainable” lines. Business as usual, they say, is not an option, echoing Naomi Klein’s argument in her 2014 eco-socialist manifesto, This Changes Everything....
Jean Swanson was awarded the Order of Canada in 2016 for “her long-standing devotion to social justice, notably for her work with the residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.” She is author of the book, Poor Bashing: The Politics of Exclusion (2001). Over the past decade she has been an organizer with the Carnegie Community Action Project and Raise the Rates BC. She is a city council candidate for COPE in the upcoming civic election.
