Listen, here’s the thing. If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.
~Matt Damon in Rounders
The history of workers having to fight for their rights is something that has gone on since the dawn of time. Over the course of history – workers have lost that battle and in many parts of the world today … workers are losing that battle. There is a direct correlation between the ultra-wealthy who regularly invest millions into various politicians and the slow attrition of worker’s rights and the stagnation of wages for the middle class that comes along with it.
I continue to be amazed at how many people DO NOT acknowledge that class warfare exists. If you do not fight for the rights you have today, they will not exist tomorrow. Here’s another tip – if you’re voting for a candidate who believes in “trickle down economics” – you can guarantee … that candidate has a lot of help and support from the billionaire plutocrat class. The New Yorker is one of the few to put it in those exact terms … of course – I do it every day. The New Yorker acknowledges class warfare exists … they get it. And their article is right on the money.
If you want to understand a brief history on the “working class” and the class struggle in America in the 1900′s – read this New Yorker article HERE:
Americans are famously reluctant to adopt the language of class warfare, or even to acknowledge its existence. In its place, they have embraced the argot and imagery of individualism: The hardy frontiersman loading his family and his possessions into a single wagon; the industrious immigrant tending his grocery store or gas station sixteen hours a day; the spotty post-adolescent hunched over his laptop trying to create the next Facebook.
But individualism is only part of America’s story: class conflict has always played a big role, too. The antebellum plantation economy was based on slavery, a legally sanctioned form of class warfare in which the workers had no rights. In the late nineteenth century, the rise of U.S. industrial might was marked by bitter, violent labor disputes, such as the great railway strike of 1877 and the deadly Homestead Strike of 1892. During the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, organized labor made great advances, many of which it has lost during the past thirty years.
