Since 2000, three million jobs have disappeared in the United States. Since 1973, real wages in the US have fallen by 20%. Around the world, unemployment and mass poverty is rising, workers’ incomes are falling and they have been for years. Why?
Freedom of Movement:
Uniting Immigrants & Native-Born
The working-class in the United States today is divided up into two different groups - citizens and immigrants - that have been separated more and more over time, both in terms of civil rights and workplace rights; wages and health and safety provisions. While the United States used to be a land of opportunity for immigrants it has developed a two-tiered society. Faced with the threat of detention and deportation, immigrants are afraid to protest sweatshop conditions and wages. Native-born workers are then forced by employers to compete against these US-based sweatshops, forcing all wages and working conditions down.
Why We Can’t Support the Democrats in November
We need to respond to the tired old argument put out by many “progressives”, that we have to be “realistic”, get ready to “fight the right”, and support the candidate of the “left wing” of the two capitalist parties.
A Generation of Capitalist Decay
On many indicators, the material conditions of the US working class have declined in the era of "neoliberalism", otherwise known as capitalism in decay.
The Alternative : Rebuild the World
In the US and in the world as a whole, there are gigantic unmet needs-- five million people a year dying needlessly of disease, two billion people undernourished, the vast majority of the world's population with adequate housing, education, or health services. There are also huge unused or wasted productive resources that could fill these needs: a hundred million workers unemployed, 20% or more of the world's factories idled, the most advanced resources squandered on arms production. What stands between those idle resources and those unmet needs is nothing more than a mountain of capitalist paper--trillions in debt, more trillions in profit-- that grip the world in an economic stranglehold. Sweep away the paper mountain of capitalism and the idle and wasted resources can rebuild the world.
BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW
The war in Iraq, and the occupation of that country do not serve the interests of either Iraqi or American working people. United States corporations, like any others, need to expand their markets so that they can ultimately make more profit. Seizing control of Iraq and its resources and then granting lucrative contracts to corporations such Halliburton is proof that “helping Iraqi people” are code words for corporate gain. This becomes even more apparent when, as a result of U.N. sanctions and U.S. bombing, diseases such as typhoid are emerging and there is a Burger King in Baghdad before there are oxygen tanks or other basic supplies in hospitals. This is not liberation.
