Category Archives: Uncategorized

Living with less than we need is Great!

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America is the land of opportunity ,where if you work hard you will be a success and all that shit. That is why in forty-five of the great states of the great america the median family income is below the living wage. Think a minute and let that stew inside your consciousness . In the richest country every known in thousands of years of human civilization on the planet we call earth, the vast majority of the people who live here don’t earn a living wage. No this is not an absurdist play or a postmodernist excursion into the ideology of the anti-hero. This is america. The GREATEST MUTHA FUCKIN’ COUNTRYY IN THE WORLD. WITH THE GREATEST ECONOMY IN THE WORLD AND THE GREATEST HEALTH CARE SYSTEM IN THE WORLD AND THE GREATEST SCHOOLS IN THE WORLD. CAN YOU FUCKIN’ DIG IT!!!!!!

God Damn are we being played!

And it’s really even worse than that because in a number of the most populous states like New York (population 19 million) and California (population 40 million and the fifth largest economy in the world) the median family income is more that $20,000 below the living wage. This means that the even more of the people in these two states do not make a living wage. Could you imagine how fucked up shit would be if we didn’t live in the GREATEST MUTHA FUCKIN’ COUNTRY IN THE WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THANK GOD WE DO!!!!!!

Clown Country

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The United States is really a joke and the people who believe in its great ideal are just a bunch of pointy headed clowns. The greatest democracy in world. “We’re going to spread democracy to the lesser countries because the US invented freedom. But the consequence of the US version of freedom is oppression. Shit man, one person’s freedom in a capitalist economy is another person oppression. The capitalist class is free because it controls the means of production. The workers are free to sell their labor to one capitalist or another or they can live on the street and starve. Workers begin to get free when they come together and organize their collective power against the capitalist. For with out the workers the capitalist is just a pocket pool player. That’s why they treat us like crap and continuously make us feel inferior. That’s why they spin tales of great men and women doing great deeds in their education and culture. The power is with the people and the only force that can save us from the coming catastrophes— environmental, economic, nuclear war— is the force of the people/workers.

Fiction, Reality and Rebellion: Justice for George Floyd

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People of all colors and creeds are pissed because they watched a racist execution on video. Since their days as a slave patrol, racist murder is what cops have been paid to do. And when the murder is complete, and the workers explode with righteous anger, cops harass and suppress the protesters and protesters anger turns into “property” destruction and “looting” (it’s always poor and working people who loot, of course). Herr Trump claims Antifa is behind the trouble and the Dems blame Russia. Wow shit is really whack, but also what should we expect?  We live in a world where fiction and reality have mingled. “Major Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects,” says Captain Renault. Strasser was a Nazi but today the suspects have a different supposed ideology.

It’s a twisted spin on old school anticommunism where the neoliberal Democrats huge intellects compel them to conclude that twenty first century Russia is communist “dictatorship” even though the Soviet Union imploded in 1991.  Trump, is in many ways a moron, but at least he is blaming genuine leftists, Antifa (which is barely an organized group) for instigating the growing movement against murdering racist cops. (As if righteous anger needs justification other than the actions of cops) The Democrats, on the other hand, have moved so far to the right that they think even a(n) (oh,oh,oh look at me ma!) brutal capitalist oligarchy, Russia, is pulling a Nakita Kruchev and undermining the US from within.  But when we put on the special sunglasses, it’s pretty clear that the US is simply a more insidious form of oligarchy. Trump wants to untie his orange locks and let his over-the-top oligarchy flag fly, but the Dems prefer to blow the tear gas around and meditate on the centering of meritocracy in their quiet room. Their mantra “Ohhhmmmmn, the best and the brightest, the cream(yes cream is white) rises to the top.”  The cream, of course are billionaires, racist rapist candidates and million dollar pundits shoveling manure on cable TV who use their combined capital, political and propaganda resources to turn the righteous anger away from themselves and capitalism and blame boogeymen both old and new.

The Dem leaders move further to the right while they point their manicured finger at the insane clown president, and I can’t help but feel the Dems are in many ways worse than the Iron Cross tatted Republicans who at least have the decency to wear their racism like a swastika printed blue tie around their wrinkled turkey necks. With insidious sleight of hand the Dems spin their dark magic economic tricks, funneling more and more of the wealth that workers have and continue to create to the top point zero five percent (.05) Meanwhile they have the audacity to send up arch racist Joe Biden has a candidate against the Cheeto dusted nincompoop. My oh my, US “democracy” has sunk lower than it ever has been, maybe even lower than the days when slave masters were president.

And so, in the middle of a pandemic, we have anger, disillusion, peaceful protest and the hope that a new world is posssible. Wall Street is booming while working people struggle to survive. The conditions that have created these protests have nothing to do with foreign agents and are not being orchestrated by outside agitators. They have been created by the neoliberal shenanigans of the ruling class,the zero point 5 percent(0.5) whose only fantasy is to squeegee every tiny little portion of wealth from the rest of us. People want change and they want justice for the victims of police murder. They want this murderous cop, Derek Chauvin, locked up for kneeling on George Floyd’s neck until he died. We are mad as hell and we can’t take it anymore.

Stop and Shop Workers Strike for Sustainable Jobs

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Stop and Shop workers striking right now all over New England, we salute you, and say solidarity now and for as long as it takes.

Bosses cause strikes, not workers.  Profits cause strikes, not workers’ greed.  

The corporate spin-doctors are already at it. They try to paint workers who are struggling to survive on crap wages as unreasonable and hurting customers.

    Stop & Shop spokeswoman Jennifer Brogan said that “we are disappointed that the UFCW chose to order a work stoppage in an attempt to disrupt service at our stores.”

    That’s right Jennifer, workers are striking because they want to hurt the customers that they interact with everyday while you drink latte’s in the corporate PR suite. Does it get any worse than a corporate PR stooge………OMG

    Meanwhile in reality, we learn that according to a representative for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the company has proposed “drastic and unreasonable” cuts to workers’ health care benefits and take-home pay and increase to their health care costs.  They also want to take away premium pay on Sunday—something that many food service workers rely on to make ends meet.

    Nancy Peska, who has worked at Stop and Shop for 39 years said, “This is a tough day for me because I love my job, but they want to double what we pay in health insurance premiums and co-pays. And they won’t take that off the table.”

    And Peska is not just worried about herself,

    “I’m able to make a comfortable living, but I’m not getting rich,” she said. “I want the younger people I work with to be able to have that.”

    It’s not the workers who are greedy. It’s the bosses. Stop and Shop is owned by Dutch-Belgian conglomerate Ahold Delhaize. Stop and Shop raked in $2 billion in profit last year and got a US tax cut of $225 million in 2017.  The company is claiming that the attack on workers’ wages and benefits is necessary, but they refuse to provide any financial information to prove it.  We’re supposed to believe them and that Trump pays his taxes too. Nope, we ain’t falling for that malarkey.

Workers strike to fight for their livelihoods and to try and protect their family’s future. Bosses force workers to strike to increase profits and the value of their stock options.  We know which side we’re on, how about you?

A New Beginning

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I have sat on this blog for a few years now, and I think that I’ve found the vision I require to actually to begin to comment on the world here. Sustainable Labor will look at the economy, the state of the planet and the movement for liberation from the perspective of the working class. My first post will take a look at the Green New Deal. It will be posted soon.

Creativity makes Us Human

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Creativity and production are part of what make us human. But for many of us our creativity and the products of our labor are turned into commodities and sold by someone else in the market. No economic  system that allows this can be called sustainable.

We sell our labor and our lives to the bosses who use us to accumulate riches and buy politicians and governments which become the instrument of oppression against us. Capitalism dehumanizes us, turning us into profit making machines.


In makes no difference whether the economy is green or fossil. What makes our current economy unsustainable is not just the way it gobbles up the earth’s resources and poisons the atmosphere, it is unsustainable at its root because it commodifies the the creativity of workers, a huge aspect of what makes us human.  Capitalism has no role in the building of a sustainable economy. We need a new system.

A Living Wage is a Requirement of a Sustainable Ecconomy

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We need $15 an hour, and we need it now, not five years from now like most democrat politicians want. A sustainable economy requires wages that sustain a healthy,productive and rewarding life.

We shouldn’t walk into the the bosses’ office with our hats in our hands, nope. We need to walk in with our fists in the air. We have the power. All we lack is the organization. No small thing for sure, but easily attainable if we work together.

But that’s our problem. We workers let the bosses divide us by nation, race, gender, orientation. We let them divide us based on how much money we earn or the perception that “skills” are what should determine the value of labor. But the idea of skilled vs. unskilled workers is just another wedge driven through our unity. It is based on the false perception that there is an unlimited amount of jobs for “skilled” workers and that all an individual needs to do is get the right “skills.” This is just another trick of the neoliberal pseudo economists and lackey pundits.

The bottom line is this. Workers create the value and thereby the wealth in the economy, but because bosses are greedy and often too incompetent to make profit and still pay workers a wage that allows them to meet living expenses, many workers are forced into a situation where they can barely survive. In the upside down world of capitalist economy the bosses are turned into the producers of value and labor is an “expense.” But if all the bosses disappeared tomorrow the economy would continue to operate. Their demise might cause a bump or two as workers reorganized our work places without the boss, but we would carry on. If all the workers disappeared, however, the engine would seize and the profit would stop. When it comes right down to it most bosses, and all of the big bosses, are little more than parasites living off blood of workers, sucking the life out of us so they can consume far more than they need.

There is no need to detail the corporate profits accumulated by the one percent or more accurately the the tenth of one percent over the last forty years. They have made unfathomable measures of wealth, while most of the rest of us have had to strap flippers on our feet to simply stay afloat and avoid breathing in the water that presses against our throats.

We don’t have to accept this. We are the many and they are the few. We need to organize, to see through the bosses’ lies that divide us and demand our share of the wealth we create: the vast majority of it. We can get  $15, a living wage and helluva lot more.

Time and Money, Money and Time

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How do we measure the value of time. Time is a limited resource for all of us even though there seems to be an unlimited supply from the universal perspective. When we look at time in relation to our labor we can see that we trade our time, our lives, to earn the meager necessities of out existence.

In my daily toil, for instance, my coworkers and I produce great amounts of value measured in revenue for the company and the capitalist but only receive in return a fraction of what we produce in wages. I can create revenue to pay my entire yearly salary in one day —not everyday, but on certain days when I do a certain kind of work. There is no doubt that in one month’s time I and my coworkers create value well in excess of our salary What about the other eleven months. Capitalism takes our lives from us to sustain itself and its profits,then uses the proceeds to both oppress us with state power and confound us and fool us into accepting its presentation of reality with education, media, history and culture.

We must rebel!

Work Less, Live More and Save the Planet Too.

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Sustainable Labor is down with Alexandra Bradbury from Labor Notes. She suggests that we find innovative ways to lower the cost of living.

“We wouldn’t need to work so hard if the rent (and mortgages) weren’t so damn high. If transit were free, and frequent enough. If we had free health care and higher education.

Sound utopian? It shouldn’t. Take the federal money already going to higher ed in loans and grants, hand it straight to public universities instead—and you could have free tuition for all, tomorrow. Same with health care: single-payer would cost less than we already spend on our dysfunctional private system.”

WE agree. Read the rest of her thoughtful piece at Labor Notes.

Keystone Pipeline will not create Sustainable Jobs

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The proposed Keystone  XL pipeline that will run from the tar sands of Alberta Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is a loser for workers and the planet. While it will create some temporary construction jobs, it’s estimated that it will only create thirty-five “permanent” jobs.  Between the amount of carbon that will be burned extracting the oil from the tar sands and the fumes from the spent petroleum it is an all around loser for working people’s futures. Let’s hope Obama vetoes the bill that will undoubtedly be passed by neanderthals in Congress . You can read more about it in this piece by Zoe Carpenter in The Nation.

White House Threatens to Veto Keystone XL Legislation