Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.
He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....
Sunday, February 20, 2011
CHOMSKY ON WISCONSIN PROTESTS
1 comment:
Brother Jonah
said...
had there been unions in Texas, I would still have two working feet and, my hands would be actually WORKING. The Halliburton subsdiary who rented my labor out to the pendejo who destroyed my right foot and left knee and left me without any recognized right to even exist, they charged the customers 5 times what they paid the workers. That means the shareholders made 4 times as much as the workers did, merely by sitting back and having their accountants collect the money.
The shareholders have collective bargaining, it's called the "Corporation". The armed thugs they have making sure they get away with stuff like killing workers, 29 at the Massey mine, 11 on the Deepwater Horizon rig, more than that every day in individual accidents, either killed quickly or killed slowly by serious injuries... We're not allowed representation, the armed thugs of the Police and Courts make sure of it. In Texas it's been effectively illegal to form or even join a union since the state was founded. You could go to prison for it.
BUT... banning Unions now... the Unions were forged in a time when it was illegal to say no to the Big Boss "man". At least this time we're not at square one with no experience at all in negotiation tactics. All the gains the Unions made were made in direct defiance of anti-Union laws. In Texas they're called States Rights... a state actually, in the eyes of their propagandists and proponents, to have the right to defy Individual rights and the collective rights of all the workers, and to spend state funds backing up the Very Richest against the Very Poorest.
Sounds a lot like slavery, right? In Texas when they send somebody to prison, he's Corporate Property, an unpaid slave of the Texas Correctional Industries corporation. The clear message is "either you work for our corporate masters at a substandard wage or we'll simply force you to do it for our corporate masters with NO wages, and kill you if you resist".
The Corporate Masters at Coffield Unit, in Anderson County Texas, murdered at least 9 inmates about 5 years ago, the exterior walls of the buildings are panes of glass, effectively a greenhouse. The only places where there's air conditioning on the unit are at the Records Conversion facility, but not for the comfort of the slaves, it's for the protection of the computers... at the Chapel... at the Warden's Office, the Officers Mess Hall, the infirmary... and the dog kennels where they keep the Devil Hounds who track down the slaves who escape. The prisoners are allowed, under conditions, to have a small fan in the cell. The prisoner has to pay for it from money his family sends. If the fan breaks down he has to put in a request to buy another, they have to BEG the boss-man for something that ultimately saves their lives.
If the prisoner doesn't have any money coming from his family, which is about half the slave population in the Texas Dept of Criminal "justice", too bad so sad. Die, Slave!
The prisoners who were killed for refusing to work in the cotton fields in temperatures that for a month never went below 90 degrees F. even at night, were placed in solitary confinement for "disciplinary" reasons. And their fans taken from them. There were "only" 9 killed in that heat wave, baked alive in an oven. Or so the "Corrections" officers claimed. Trouble is that if an inmate slave dies and the officials don't want the family to discover it... they have ways of hiding it. They'll tell the family their son or brother or daddy made parole, they put him on the bus and never heard from him again. In other countries like Iraq that's called "disappearing" somebody.
That's what the Governor of Wisconsin is trying to buy into.
1 comment:
had there been unions in Texas, I would still have two working feet and, my hands would be actually WORKING. The Halliburton subsdiary who rented my labor out to the pendejo who destroyed my right foot and left knee and left me without any recognized right to even exist, they charged the customers 5 times what they paid the workers.
That means the shareholders made 4 times as much as the workers did, merely by sitting back and having their accountants collect the money.
The shareholders have collective bargaining, it's called the "Corporation".
The armed thugs they have making sure they get away with stuff like killing workers, 29 at the Massey mine, 11 on the Deepwater Horizon rig, more than that every day in individual accidents, either killed quickly or killed slowly by serious injuries...
We're not allowed representation, the armed thugs of the Police and Courts make sure of it. In Texas it's been effectively illegal to form or even join a union since the state was founded. You could go to prison for it.
BUT... banning Unions now... the Unions were forged in a time when it was illegal to say no to the Big Boss "man". At least this time we're not at square one with no experience at all in negotiation tactics. All the gains the Unions made were made in direct defiance of anti-Union laws.
In Texas they're called States Rights... a state actually, in the eyes of their propagandists and proponents, to have the right to defy Individual rights and the collective rights of all the workers, and to spend state funds backing up the Very Richest against the Very Poorest.
Sounds a lot like slavery, right? In Texas when they send somebody to prison, he's Corporate Property, an unpaid slave of the Texas Correctional Industries corporation. The clear message is "either you work for our corporate masters at a substandard wage or we'll simply force you to do it for our corporate masters with NO wages, and kill you if you resist".
The Corporate Masters at Coffield Unit, in Anderson County Texas, murdered at least 9 inmates about 5 years ago, the exterior walls of the buildings are panes of glass, effectively a greenhouse. The only places where there's air conditioning on the unit are at the Records Conversion facility, but not for the comfort of the slaves, it's for the protection of the computers... at the Chapel... at the Warden's Office, the Officers Mess Hall, the infirmary... and the dog kennels where they keep the Devil Hounds who track down the slaves who escape.
The prisoners are allowed, under conditions, to have a small fan in the cell. The prisoner has to pay for it from money his family sends.
If the fan breaks down he has to put in a request to buy another, they have to BEG the boss-man for something that ultimately saves their lives.
If the prisoner doesn't have any money coming from his family, which is about half the slave population in the Texas Dept of Criminal "justice", too bad so sad. Die, Slave!
The prisoners who were killed for refusing to work in the cotton fields in temperatures that for a month never went below 90 degrees F. even at night, were placed in solitary confinement for "disciplinary" reasons. And their fans taken from them.
There were "only" 9 killed in that heat wave, baked alive in an oven. Or so the "Corrections" officers claimed. Trouble is that if an inmate slave dies and the officials don't want the family to discover it... they have ways of hiding it. They'll tell the family their son or brother or daddy made parole, they put him on the bus and never heard from him again.
In other countries like Iraq that's called "disappearing" somebody.
That's what the Governor of Wisconsin is trying to buy into.
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