Organizing, Education & Labor Unions: A Revolutionary Green Party New Deal!

https://youtu.be/dno8BDVMF6c?list=RDdno8BDVMF6c

Howlin´Wolf: Goin´Down Slow 

Many Labor organizations support The Green New Deal. Some Labor Leaders must face Facts:

 

Please forward this email widely to your lists, and to anyone active in the labor movement. If you are a labor activist who would like to sign this statement, please contact us.

 

 

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Dear Friend —

Working Americans and organized labor faced an unprecedented bipartisan attack by the war party Democrats and Republicans in the November 2020 elections.  Republicans brag and Democrats lie about exporting terror, munitions, jobs and wars enforcing corporate crimes. 

As long-time labor activists, we urge a vote for the Green Party national ticket in 2024. The cornerstone is a Green Party New Deal about Peace, People and Planet.

November 2024 is on the horizon… and the Time is Now. 

The Green Party New Deal includes support for workers’ rights, including the rights to peace, a living wage, a safe workplace, fair trade, and the right to organize a union at work without fear of firing or reprisal.

The Green Party New Deal supports real financial reform, not only to make the rich and large corporations pay their fair share of taxes, but to establish democratic control of our economy rather than leaving Wall Street in the driver’s seat.

For more than three decades, there has been bipartisan agreement to shift more income and wealth to the richest Americans, while living standards for the rest of us have declined. Income inequality has reached levels not seen since 1927 – right before the Great Depression. The economic crisis caused by the greed and misdeeds of Wall Street resulted in a trillion-dollar bailout of bankers, while the housing foreclosure crisis was ignored. Wall Street bailed and Main Street sold out. 

With more than 25 million Americans out of work, the response of politicians at the state, local and national level has been to cut spending for education, housing, and the safety net, threatening cuts to Social Security and Medicare in order to protect tax cuts for the rich and wasteful military spending. Democrats like Governor Cuomo in NY have joined with Republicans like Governor Walker in Wisconsin to make public employee unions into public enemy number one, seeking to slash pensions and wages while laying off teachers and other workers.

Democrats are always the “friend” of labor – during election season. Yet it was Bill Clinton who gave us NAFTA. The Democrats in 1947 gave us the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act – and they have defeated changes to it ever since.

Barack Obama promised a $10/hour minimum wage and the Employee Free Choice Act for majority card-check union recognition – but failed to push either once elected. And he sold us out on both health care and peace. His dozens of expanding wars bankrupted the nation. 

The labor movement in every other industrial nation has built its own political party, independent of corporate money and control. They have organized the working class majority to take political power for the benefit of workers and economic justice. They have secured single-payer health care, affordable public transit, free public college education, secure pensions, four to six weeks of paid vacation for all workers, paid maternity and free sick leave, and labor laws that protect their rights to organize and strike.

It is time for labor to practice the politics of courage, rather than the politics of fear and appeasement. We must support candidates who back labor when they run against the two corporate parties. We urge a vote for whichever combination of Green Party Leaders can take us to victory in November 2024. The American people are real tired of dozens of expanding wars. Only the Green Party will shut down the wars and invest in peace, people and a healing planet where we can endure, survive and prevail. We can elect leadership for a Green Party New Deal and an Economic Bill of Rights in November 2024. War has not been working for 40 years and in the last few years with Biden, Trump, and Obama have bankrupted the nation and crippled the planet with wars about extraction.

There are more of us than them and we do not have to take it anymore.

https://youtu.be/SyVhBfIFbiQ?list=RDSyVhBfIFbiQ 
Albert King – Blues Power 

Vote for Peace, People and Planet.  We deserve a future.

Yours in Solidarity,

Tim Flanagan, former publicist for the American Federation of Teachers, co-host of Labor Radio for ten years, JWJ steering committee member for more than ten years and a labor union member (AFL-CIO) and supporter since 1971. 

In 2016 the following Union Leaders embraced peace and rejected the war parties… and Green Party Support is growing stronger every day.

Jim Moran, Director (retired), Philadelphia Area Project on Occupational Safety and Health

Justin Harrison, CWA Local 13000 Unit 1 President

Allan Herman, IATSE Local 927 Executive Board member

Steve Edwards, former president, AFSCME Local 2858 (ret.) Chicago IL

Tom Crean, chapter leader, United Federation of Teachers, New York City

Marty Harrison, Executive Board member TUHNA/PASNAP (Temple University Hospital Nurses Association/ Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals)

David Myron, Michigan Education Association (MEA/NEA); Former Local President, Perry Education Association

Mike McCallister, National Writers Union Local 1981, Former Chair, South Central Wisconsin Labor Party

Charlie Hoyt, Labor Activist, New York, NY

Hugh Giordano, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 152 Mays Landing, New Jersey

Sunyata Altenor, Committee of Interns and Residents New York City

Charles Post, Professional Staff Caucus New York City

Warren Davis, American Federation of Government Employees Local 2006 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, (retired)

Eric Hoyt, Graduate Employees Organization, Amherst, Massachussetts

Karen Young, Newspaper Guild, CWA New York, NY

Frank Jackson, GEO-UAW 2334 Amherst, MA

Howie Hawkins, Teamsters Local 317 Syracuse, New York

Barry Eidlin, United Faculty and Academic Staff, Madison WI

Marie Stolzenburg, Teaching Assistants Association, AFT Madison, WI

Nick Limbeck, Chicago Teachers Union, Chicago, IL

Mark Dunlea, Hunger Action Network New York, NY

Ron Dicks, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, San Francisco, CA

Ashok Kumar, Labor Activist, Former member Dane County Board, Madison, WI

Brian Rothgery, Labor Activist, Milwaukee, WI

Patrick Burke, Western Mass. Jobs with Justice, Springfield, MA

Charles Levenstein, Massachusetts Teachers Association (retired)

Isaac Silver, labor activist, Chicago, IL

Jonathan Fluck, Actors’ Equity Association, New York City

Danielle Albert, Labor Activist, New York City

Chris Robinson, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776 Philadelphia PA

Trudy Quaif, Public Employees Federation steward (retired), Albany, NY

George McAnanama, Transport Workers Union Local 100 (retired) New York City

Jonathon Flanders, International Association of Machinists, LL 1145 Troy, NY

Neal Pritchard, United Steel Workers Local 1000, Corning NY

John Ailey, Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR), IL

Mike Whalen, UNITE-HERE, Local 17 (retired) St Paul, Minnesota

Gordon McClelland, Labor Educator, Carpenters (retired), Guilderland NY

Francesca Gomes, Delegate, United Federation of Teachers, Brooklyn, NY

Genevieve Morse, Shop Steward CSU, Massachusetts Teachers Association,
National Education Association

Kshama Sawant, American Federation of Teachers Local 1789, Seattle, WA

Sarah & Ben Manski, American Federation of Teachers, Madison, Wisconsin

Seamus Whelan, MNA/NNU Massachusetts Nurses Association/ National Nurses United

Frango Akrivos, Teamsters Local 1L New York

Greg Beiter, Shop Steward, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 587

*Organizations are listed for identification purposes only.

For further reading:

“Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts.”

~Molly Ivins

https://thewordsmithcollection.wordpress.com/2015/10/27/unions/

“History is a great teacher. Now everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.”

~Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

https://thewordsmithcollection.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/about-unions/

The NW Alliance for Alternative Media and Education, and The Portland Alliance.

 

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The Wordsmith Collection: Writing & Creative Arts

 

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