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Labor Unions Were Crucial in Bernie Sanders’ New Hampshire Victory -
Sanders was propelled to victory in the Granite State with help from a broad coalition of grassroots activist networks and community organizations, including Rights & Democracy New Hampshire, the New Hampshire Youth Movement and the Sunrise Movement. Campaign volunteers knocked on 150,000 doors across the state this past Saturday alone.
Another crucial player in Sanders’ New Hampshire coalition: organized labor. One of the state’s largest unions—the over 10,000-member State Employees’ Association of New Hampshire/SEIU Local 1984—endorsed the Vermont senator last month. Since then, the union’s members have been door-knocking and phone-banking for Sanders, and the local’s union hall in Concord has been used as a staging area for canvassers.
“Senator Sanders not only talks the talk about building a fair economy but has been walking the walk his whole career,” SEA/SEIU Local 1984 president Rich Gulla tells In These Times. “He’s somebody you can trust. He hasn’t just said, ‘ok, I’m running for president and this is what I think people want to hear.’ He believes in what he’s doing.”
Gulla explains that last September, Sanders joined a rally of nursing home workers in Brentwood, New Hampshire who were trying to unionize with SEA/SEIU Local 1984.
“What impressed me about him, he didn’t once talk about his run for president,” Gulla says. “He engaged the employees there and got them talking about why they wanted to unionize. Before he left, he pulled folks aside and kind of gave them a pep talk. He was speaking from the heart.”
A few days later, the nursing home workers successfully voted to join the union.
Another major New Hampshire union endorsement for Sanders came in December from the statewide organization of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), as well as APWU Local 230 in Manchester.
“What I appreciate about Bernie more than anything is that he gets the interconnectivity between problems,” says Janice Kelble, legislative director of New Hampshire APWU. “He’s been a huge advocate of postal banking, which is a win-win. It helps people in communities that don’t have banking available and helps strengthen the Postal Service. It solves a number of problems at once and he seems really good at doing that with a lot of issues.”
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On this day, 20 October 1985, local residents, students and farmers defeated riot police in a battle over the expansion of the Narita airport in Sanrizuka. Video footage is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXjd7GkHKfU&t=175s https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1240963382755476/?type=3
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when anticommunists tell u that “you havent paid attention to history” or “you need to study history” what theyre really saying is “why wont you take at face value the biased and often reductionist history you were taught by capitalists about why socialism is evil”. when they talk about “studying history” theyre not interested in talking about every coup the cia backed, every terrorist group the us funded in order to “fight communists”, every war that imperialist powers started over profit, or every innocent person killed in those wars. they dont want to talk about the history of violent racism and police brutality, or about every person the us government has tortured, or the history of suppression of leftists and the working class, or how companies fund right wing death squads, they just want to say “the ussr is why communism is bad”
ok since this post made a lot of people who cant stand to see capitalism critiqued in any form mad im going to provide sources for all the shit im talking about.
- list of us involvement in regime changes and heres a notable one when the cia helped overthrow the democratically elected socialist president of chile and replaced him with a fascist dictator who was responsible for thousands of deaths
- oh here, 35 countries where the us supported fascists drug lords and terrorists
- that time when reagan supported and funded islamic extremists because they were “fighting communists”, now go forward a decade or so and the us thinks islamic extremism is a huge threat
- a timeline of atrocities committed by the cia- did you know the cia took in a bunch of nazis spies right after ww2 so they could help the us once again fight communists?
- when reagan illegally sold weapons to iran and used the money to fund a right wing militia in nicaragua called the contras, who were fighting the left wing socialist sandinistas. oh heres all the human rights violations the contras committed while illegally getting money from the us, home of the free and land of the brave am i right
- torture under the bush administration and by the cia
- us war crimes and the casualties of the iraq war
- btw the us has most likely been lying about the amount of civilian deaths caused by drone strikes and the actual number is way higher than theyre officially saying and this is just from the obama administration
- that time coca cola used right wing death squads to murder and terrorize workers and stop them from unionzing
- nestle using slave labour
- how cointelpro targeted civil rights movements, black power movements, and radical leftists and murdered leaders of the movements
- when the us outlawed the communist party and being involved in communist actions
- and if you didnt know the us uses prison labour where prisoners get payed sometimes only a few dollars a week all for the profit of the prisons
- list of people killed by police by year
if you want to tell leftists they need to study history but you dont want to look at any of the crimes of capital, or the crimes committed in upholding capitalism then you dont give a shit about studying history. if you can recognize that gulags were fucked up and horrible, as you should, you cant turn a blind eye on the american prison system where people are being forced to work for almost no pay. so the question is do you actually care about studying history or do you just want to deflect off every critique of capitalism
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(via Britons with suspected coronavirus berate conflicting official advice | World news | The Guardian)
(Source: theguardian.com)
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