[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.
In the weeks and months ahead, there will be many political casualties of the Liberal government’s crisis surrounding the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion. The first of these, however, was the carefully-crafted illusion that the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board’s (CPPIB) investment decisions are free from political influence. Over two decades, the Board had painstakingly constructed the pretence that Board decisions stood above retail politics.
