Sucheta’s womanifesto

“Trying to explain anything to a bunch of hostile post-modernists whose only argument against a dissenting opinion is to send dissenters to gulags is sort of useless, but at least I can say I tried. Sex is biological and gender is an oppressive patriarchal construct that attributes certain behaviour and roles on the basis of sex. Trying to bring in the question of people with genital defects, ambiguous genitalia and other biological defects which are very rare is a mere distraction. It's like saying that having sight isn't a normal, biological feature because some people are born blind.

Gender is oppressive because it has been used to restrict, confine and oppress women by mounting certain expectations on them and forcing various restrictions on them. Biology also plays a major role in the oppression of women. Women are often subjected to sexual violence, attempts to control their reproductive choices and they are vulnerable on account of their biology too. Scientific research has proved that there's no difference in male or female brains. The only difference between men and women lies in their reproductive functions.

Gender roles are oppressive even for men, to an extent. If a man chooses to discard masculinity and do whatever he pleases...wearing dresses or makeup, learning how to knit, etc., well, more power to him. Wearing dresses or makeup doesn't make someone a woman because being a woman isn't a feeling, it's a biological fact. In fact, there is no such thing as "feeling like a woman". If you subscribe to that line of thought, then you're actually validating gender roles, you're actually saying that gender is not a construct, that women feel and act a certain way, and men feel and act a certain way. It is this notion of gender essentialism that feminists have fought against. Women have fought for the right to work outside of their homes, to wear what they want to and behave however they want.

The transgender movement isn't breaking down gender. It's actually reaffirming gender stereotypes when men say they "feel like a woman". There's no such thing as feeling like a woman. Being a woman is not a feeling, unless you affirm gender roles and femininity. Liking things that are stereotypically associated with women doesn't make you a woman, it makes you a gender non-confirming man.

It is also ridiculous that having lived lives steeped in male privilege, men now tell women how to be feminist. In many feminist conferences, "trans women" have prevented women from discussing periods, childbirth, contraception, even breast feeding because they find it triggering. They insist on not respecting the right of women to organise independently. Anyone who criticises them is threatened with violence, rape etc. which is typical male behaviour. This movement runs parallel to the MRA movement. When trans people complain about violence and oppression, let me point out that that violence is committed against them by men, not women. Yet they spend all their energy fighting feminists. The MRAs love this!

Does this somehow mean I hate so-called transpeople? I don't. I want all people to be free from all oppression and violence. But I will not have a man tell me what a woman is. Patriarchy has done that for thousands of years and the trans movement is its glorious descendant. It's interesting to note that most trans people are "male to female" and mostly white.

The trans movement has effectively moved the left away from issues like labour rights, workers' movements etc. We are making a huge mistake by co-opting post-modern politics. We know have trans-racial people, trans-disabled people and trans-species people. This has opened up Pandora's box and the only people who have benefited are the powers-that-be.

If I'm banned for this post, so be it.”

On May 5, 1862, the Mexican army defeated the French in the Battle of Puebla. This prevented French Emperor Napoleon III from supplying weapons to the Confederacy during the Civil War. Napoleon III had planned to trade weapons for cotton with the Confederate states during France's invasion of Mexico.

On May 5, 1862, the Mexican army defeated the French in the Battle of Puebla. This prevented French Emperor Napoleon III from supplying weapons to the Confederacy during the Civil War. Napoleon III had planned to trade weapons for cotton with the Confederate states during France's invasion of Mexico.

How Cinco De Mayo Prevented the Confederacy's Win in the Civil War (https://www.businessinsider.com/how-cinco-de-mayo-prevented-the-confederacys-win-in-the-civil-war-2022-

On May 5, 1862, the Mexican army defeated the French in the Battle of Puebla. This prevented French Emperor Napoleon III from supplying weapons to the Confederacy during the Civil War. Napoleon III had planned to trade weapons for cotton with the Confederate states during France's invasion of Mexico. https://www.businessinsider.com › ... How Cinco De Mayo Prevented the Confederacy's Win in the Civil War (https://www.businessinsider.com/how-cinco-de-mayo-prevented-the-confederacys-win-in-the-civil-war-2022-5#:~:text=On%20May%205%2C%201862%2C%20the,during%20France's%20invasion%20of%20Mexico.)

UAW renaissance

Exposing transgenderism for what it is: A lie Exposing transgenderism for what it is: A lie https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/exposing-transgenderism-for-what-it-is-a-lie By Kara Dansky September 21, 2022 06:00 AM Gender blend There is a lot of talk in America today about “transgender rights.” News outlets talk about “transgender athletes ,” “transgender prisoners ,” and “transgender students .” Our society is steeped in debate about so-called transgenderism. However, I see very few people asking the question, “What does ‘transgender’ mean?” or “What exactly is ‘trans?’” The crux of the matter is this: People across the political spectrum have been persuaded to accept that there is a coherent category of people for whom sex is irrelevant and that this category of people is called “transgender” (or simply “trans”). Democrats on the whole support “rights for ‘transgender people,’” and Republicans on the whole oppose allowing sex-confused people to hijack sex-specific spaces. But regardless of whether or not a person supports or opposes “rights for ‘transgender people,’” that person probably believes that there is such a category of people. But there isn’t. “Trans” is a lie. It is a lie as big as the lie that the emperor is wearing clothes. He isn’t wearing clothes. He’s naked. He’s just too arrogant to acknowledge it, and everyone around him is too cowed to say so. > To understand how transgenderism became so entrenched in our society despite its obvious distortions, one must first understand the philosophy from which it began. Starting in the 1970s, a group of people in academia started talking about postmodernism — a new philosophical and political movement that dismissed claims to objective fact and reason. It objected to the idea that anything could be grounded in material reality. One of its main proponents was Michel Foucault, a French philosopher who taught for a while at the University of California, Berkeley. Foucault was also, incidentally, a known pedophile who advocated the abolition of age-of-consent laws. For Foucault, age was just a construct, which meant that adults should be permitted to have sexual relationships with children. Out of postmodernism came “queer theory,” the idea that biological sex is a social construct. Queer theorists in the 1990s argued from their ivory towers that the material reality of sex doesn’t exist and that it is a social construction meant to oppress. However, the “queer” theorists understood that if they tried to persuade ordinary people that sex isn’t real, they would have been (rightly) ridiculed and ignored. So they invented a new term: “transgender.” This term does exactly what it was intended to do — it persuades ordinary people that the material reality of biological sex isn’t real or, at least, that it doesn’t matter. There very well may be people who sincerely suffer from what the DSM refers to as “gender dysphoria.” But it does not follow that it makes sense or is healthy for a society to allow people to “identify as” a gender different from their sex. In fact, doing so will only create more confusion and anxiety in those who are very often mentally vulnerable to begin with. And before anyone asks, I am not a political conservative. I have always been a staunch leftist and, for as long as I can remember, a feminist. I registered as a Democrat the day I turned 18 years old, and I am still a registered Democrat (though I spent a short time as a registered member of the Green Party). Some have pointed the blame at feminists for the rise of gender ideology. But that’s not a fair accusation. Actual feminists fight for the liberation of women and girls, by which we mean female human beings. Feminists aren’t confused about the category of human beings for whose liberation we fight. We are not confused about the category of people whose voting rights suffragists fought for (at great peril to their own safety). We are not confused about the category of people who are subjected to the horrific offense of female genital mutilation. (The word is right there.) When feminists complain about male violence against women, we aren’t confused about what the words “male” and “women” mean. Feminists didn’t create this “trans” monster. And we are more than willing to work with anyone, even those with whom we might generally disagree, to protect the sex-based rights of women. The U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International, for example, of which I serve as president, works to advance the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights throughout U.S. law and society. We are nonpartisan and work with women across the political spectrum who agree with the principles outlined in the declaration. (We are also not shy about our support for abortion as a sex-based right for women and girls.) Because of our opposition to gender ideology and the harms that it is doing to women, we are often smeared by the Left as traitors to progressivism. However, we are not the ones who abandoned progressive values. That crime belongs to the gender ideologues who are pushing an ideology that is politically regressive in every way. Indeed, “transgenderism” destroys the equality that women have achieved and actually enshrines harmful sex stereotypes in law, medicine, academia, and throughout all of society. But that is exactly the goal of gender ideology: to take over our institutions and destroy from within any truth that grounds us to material reality, including biological sex. The entire edifice of “trans” is being driven by a vicious industry whose aim is to literally obliterate the reality of sex. This industry is a loose conglomeration of Big Tech, Big Pharma, medical supply companies, legacy media, and government agencies. I realize this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn’t. This industry operates out in the open, from renowned children’s hospitals to legacy newsrooms to the White House itself. Thankfully, more and more people are willing to speak up about this ideology and the damage it is doing to our society. But the only way we win this battle is if we push back as boldly and aggressively as the gender activists who pushed this on us in the first place. We have to tell the truth: “Transgenderism” isn’t real. “Gender identity” is a fake concept. The “transgender” emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. Kara Dansky is the president of the U.S. chapter of Women's Declaration International and the author of the book "The Abolition of Sex: How the 'Transgender' Agenda Harms Women and Girls." She has a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook and subscribe to her Substack .

I’m old and wise, myself

Republicans have a circular firing squad

In the last 20 years LGBT exercised power over the system and foisted trans on us.

To be more precise, what had become very apparent to the business community was that it was getting its clock cleaned. Used to having broad sway, employers faced a series of surprising defeats in the 1960s and early 1970s. As we have seen, these defeats continued unabated when Richard Nixon won the White House. Despite electoral setbacks, the liberalism of the Great Society had surprising political momentum. “From 1969 to 1972,” as the political scientist David Vogel summarizes in one of the best books on the political role of business, “virtually the entire American business community experienced a series of political setbacks without parallel in the postwar period.” In particular, Washington undertook a vast expansion of its regulatory power, introducing tough and extensive restrictions and requirements on business in areas from the environment to occupational safety to consumer protection.[2]

In corporate circles, this pronounced and sustained shift was met with disbelief and then alarm. By 1971, future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell felt compelled to assert, in a memo that was to help galvanize business circles, that the “American economic system is under broad attack.” This attack, Powell maintained, required mobilization for political combat: “Business must learn the lesson . . . that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.” Moreover, Powell stressed, the critical ingredient for success would be organization: “Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”[3]

U.S. President Richard Nixon holds a commission that he will present to Lewis F. Powell Jr., left, and another will be given to William Rehnquist, right, at a White House ceremony in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, Dec. 22, 1971. Both Powell and Rehnquist are commissioned as Associate Justices of the Supreme Court and will take their oath Jan. 7, 1972. The two men were appointed to the Supreme Court by President Nixon. (AP Photo/Charles Tasnadi) U.S. President Richard Nixon holds a commission that he will present to Lewis F. Powell Jr., left, and another will be given to William Rehnquist, right, at a White House ceremony in Washington, D.C., Dec. 22, 1971. The two men were appointed to the Supreme Court by President Nixon. (AP Photo/Charles Tasnadi)

Powell was just one of many who pushed to reinvigorate the political clout of employers. Before the policy winds shifted in the ’60s, business had seen little need to mobilize anything more than a network of trade associations. It relied mostly on personal contacts, and the main role of lobbyists in Washington was to troll for government contracts and tax breaks. The explosion of policy activism, and rise of public interest groups like those affiliated with Ralph Nader, created a fundamental challenge. And as the 1970s progressed, the problems seemed to be getting worse. Powell wrote in 1971, but even after Nixon swept to a landslide reelection the following year, the legislative tide continued to come in. With Watergate leading to Nixon’s humiliating resignation and a spectacular Democratic victory in 1974, the situation grew even more dire. “The danger had suddenly escalated,” Bryce Harlow, senior Washington representative for Procter & Gamble and one of the engineers of the corporate political revival was to say later. “We had to prevent business from being rolled up and put in the trash can by that Congress.”[4]

Powell, Harlow, and others sought to replace the old boys’ club with a more modern, sophisticated, and diversified apparatus — one capable of advancing employers’ interests even under the most difficult political circumstances. They recognized that business had hardly begun to tap its potential for wielding political power. Not only were the financial resources at the disposal of business leaders unrivaled. The hierarchical structures of corporations made it possible for a handful of decision-makers to deploy those resources and combine them with the massive but underutilized capacities of their far-flung organizations. These were the preconditions for an organizational revolution that was to remake Washington in less than a decade — and, in the process, lay the critical groundwork for winner-take-all politics.

Businessmen of the World, Unite!

The organizational counterattack of business in the 1970s was swift and sweeping — a domestic version of Shock and Awe. The number of corporations with public affairs offices in Washington grew from 100 in 1968 to over 500 in 1978. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington, but by 1982, nearly 2,500 did. The number of corporate PACs increased from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by the middle of 1980.[5] On every dimension of corporate political activity, the numbers reveal a dramatic, rapid mobilization of business resources in the mid-1970s.

What the numbers alone cannot show is something of potentially even greater significance: Employers learned how to work together to achieve shared political goals. As members of coalitions, firms could mobilize more proactively and on a much broader front. Corporate leaders became advocates not just for the narrow interests of their firms but also for the shared interests of business as a whole.

Ironically, this new capacity was in part an unexpected gift of Great Society liberalism. One of the distinctive features of the big expansion of government authority in the ’60s and early ’70s was that it created new forms of regulation that simultaneously affected many industries. Previously, the airlines might have lobbied the Civil Aeronautics Board, the steel companies might have focused on restricting foreign competitors, the energy producers might have gained special tax breaks from a favorite congressman. Now companies across a wide range of sectors faced a common threat: increasingly powerful regulatory agencies overseeing their treatment of the environment, workers, and consumers. Individual firms had little chance of fending off such broad initiatives on their own; to craft an appropriately broad political defense, they needed organization.

Business was galvanized by more than perceived government overreach. It was also responding to the growing economic challenges it faced. Organization-building began even before the economy soured in the early 1970s, but the tumultuous economy of that decade — battered by two major oil shocks, which pushed up inflation and dragged down growth — created panic in corporate sectors as well as growing dissatisfaction among voters. The 1970s was not the economic wasteland that retrospective accounts often suggest. The economy actually grew more quickly overall (after adjusting for inflation) during the 1970s than during the 1980s.[6] But against the backdrop of the roaring 1960s, the economic turbulence was a rude jolt that strengthened the case of business leaders that a new governing approach was needed. When he penned his influential memo, Lewis Powell was chair of the Education Committee of the Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber was one of a number of business groups that responded to the emerging threat by becoming much more organized. The Chamber doubled in membership between 1974 and 1980. Its budget tripled. The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) doubled its membership between 1970 and 1979.[7] The expansion of the Chamber and the NFIB signaled not only a rise in the collective capacity of business; it brought a harder-edged form of mobilization. Composed disproportionately of smaller firms, these organizations were especially livid about the rise of government regulation. Big companies had an easier time absorbing the administrative costs of complying with new rules, and more opportunities to pass the costs on to consumers. Moreover, business associations based on a multitude of small firms proved especially capable of mobilizing mass outrage, which would turn out to be a very effective political weapon.

Of course, big business fought back as well. In 1972, three business organizations merged to form the Business Roundtable, the first business association whose membership was restricted to top corporate CEOs. In part at the urging of Bryce Harlow, lobbyist for Procter & Gamble, this new organization combined two groups focused on relatively narrow business issues with an informal organization called the March Group. The March Group had grown out of a meeting with top Nixon administration officials and prominent executives and was designed to bring together many of the nation’s most powerful CEOs. Within five years the new mega-organization had enlisted 113 of the top Fortune 200 companies, accounting for nearly half of the economy.[8] The Business Roundtable quickly developed into a formidable group, designed to mobilize high-level CEOs as a collective force to lobby for the advancement of shared interests. President Ford’s deputy treasury secretary Charls Walker, a leading corporate organizer about whom we’ll say more in a moment, later put it this way: “The Roundtable has made a lot of difference. They know how to get the CEOs into Washington and lobby; they maintain good relationships with the congressional staffs; they’ve just learned a lot about Washington they didn’t know before.”[9]

The role of the business community not only grew but expanded, shifting into new modes of organization that had previously been confined to its critics. Recognizing that lawmaking in Washington had become more open and dynamic, business groups remade themselves to fit the times. The expanding network of business groups would soon be capable of hoisting the public interest groups on their own petards. Using rapidly emerging tools of marketing and communications, they learned how to generate mass campaigns. Building networks of employees, shareholders, local companies, and firms with shared interests (for example, retailers and suppliers), they could soon flood Washington with letters and phone calls. Within a few years, these classically top-down organizations were to thrive at generating “bottom up”–style campaigns that not only matched the efforts of their rivals but surpassed them.

These emerging “outside” strategies were married to “inside” ones. Business organizations developed lists of prominent executives capable of making personal contacts with key legislative figures. In private meetings organized by the Conference Board, CEOs compared notes and discussed how to learn from and outmaneuver organized labor. In the words of one executive, “If you don’t know your senators on a first-name basis, you are not doing an adequate job for your stockholders.”[10] Business also massively increased its political giving — at precisely the time when the cost of campaigns began to skyrocket (in part because of the ascendance of television). The insatiable need for cash gave politicians good reason to be attentive to those with deep pockets. Business had by far the deepest pockets, and was happy to make contributions to members of both parties. Clifton Garvin, chairman of both Exxon and the Business Roundtable in the early 1980s, summarized the attitude toward partisanship this way: “The Roundtable tries to work with whichever political party is in power. We may each individually have our own political alliances, but as a group the Roundtable works with every administration to the degree they let us.”[11]

The newly mobilized business groups understood that Democrats and Republicans could play distinct but complementary roles. As the party with a seemingly permanent lock on Congress, Democrats needed to be pried away from their traditional alliance with organized labor. Money was key here: From the late 1970s to the late 1980s, corporate PACs increased their expenditures in congressional races nearly fivefold. Labor PAC spending only rose about half as fast. In the early 1970s, business PACs contributed less to congressional races overall than labor PACs did. By the mid-1970s, the two were at rough parity, and by the end of the decade, business PACs were way ahead. By 1980, unions accounted for less than a quarter of all PAC contributions — down from half six years earlier. The shift was largest among Democrats, who were of course the most reliant on labor money: Nearly half of Senate incumbents’ campaign funds came from labor PACs in the mid-1970s. A decade later, the share was below one-fifth.[12] By this time, however, business PACs were shifting away from their traditional focus on buttering up (mostly Democratic) incumbents toward a strategy that mixed donations to those in power with support for conservative political challengers. Such a pattern was evident in the critical election year of 1978. Through September of the election season, nearly half of corporate campaign contributions flowed into Democrats’ coffers. In the crucial weeks before the 1978 election, however, only 29 percent did. By the end of the 1978 campaign, more than 60 percent of corporate contributions had gone to Republicans, both GOP challengers and Republican incumbents fighting off liberal Democrats.[13] A new era of campaign finance was born: Not only were corporate contributions growing ever bigger, Democrats had to work harder for them. More and more, to receive business largesse, they had to do more than hold power; they had to wield it in ways that business liked.

Read the Powell Memo. (Download the PDF.) Footnotes 1. National Journal, 1974, 14.

2. David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 59; R. Shep Melnick, “From Tax-and-Spend to Mandate-and-Sue: Liberalism After the Great Society,” in The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism, Sidney Milkis and Jerome Mileur, eds. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).

3. Lewis Powell, “Confidential Memorandum: Attack on the Free Enterprise System,” August 23, 1971, quoted in Kim Phelps-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: Norton, 2009), 158, 160.

4. Thomas Byrne Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality (New York: Norton, 1984), 114.

5. Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes, ch. 8.

6. Calculated from http://www.bea.gov/national/xls/gdplev.xls.

7. Ibid., 198.

8. Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes, 198; John Judis, The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust (Pantheon: New York, 2000), 121.

9. Quoted in Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power (New York: Times Books, 1986), 80.

10. Quoted in Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Ethics and Profits: The Crisis of Confidence in American Business (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), 65.

11. Blumenthal, Rise of the Counter-Establishment, 78.

12. Taylor E. Dark, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 149.

13. Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes, ch. 8 1

Ultra-left anti-Democratic Party president principle is obsolete; it’s dangerous to say there is no difference between Democrats Liberals and fascist Republicans

Arizona grand jury indicts Republican fake elector conspirators

Republican Party War on Women

Trans ideology was pushed to such legal dominance by LGBT ideologists and activists. T's are "marginal "; LGB's are powerful, not oppressed ; so LGB is not eligible for a liberation movement.

Trans ideology was pushed to such legal dominance by LGBT ideologists and activists. T's are "marginal "; LGB's are powerful, not oppressed ; so LGB is not eligible for a liberation movement.

Class struggle trade unionism returns after 70 years

UAW President Fein is leading the return to class struggle trade unionism; Reuther abandoned it in the face of McCarthyite redbaiting . Union membership went down steadily for decades because of company unionism .

Friends ( and Comrades) On Friday, Volkswagen employees in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted overwhelmingly to join the United Auto Workers union.

This is a truly big deal. The mainstream media — most of whom no longer have labor reporters — have barely mentioned it, but I believe it marks a major turning point for organized labor.

The victory in Chattanooga is the first successful organizing drive of an automaker outside of Detroit’s Big Three and the first major union victory in the South.

Volkswagen had told workers — in a very conservative Republican area — that the “UAW = Biden” and that the union would “turn Chattanooga into Detroit.” Six southern state governors attacked the union as a threat to “liberty and freedoms” and in a joint statement condemned the UAW’s push to organize in their states.

But the union and the workers triumphed anyway.

We are witnessing a historic rebirth of the labor union movement in America. Labor unions are not just an interest group. They are gaining the heft, solidarity, and passion to become what they once were — a movement.

And it’s about time.

For 30 years — from 1946 to the late 1970s — the American middle class expanded, largely because American labor unions won increases in wages and benefits that roughly tracked gains in overall productivity.

Non-union companies gave their workers similar raises because they knew they’d be targets of union organizing if they didn’t.

As American workers produced more, they got paid more. It was America’s postwar social contract.

As unions gained leverage at the workplace, they also gained political power. Unions supported major federal laws — Medicare and Medicaid, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the Family and Medical Leave Act. They became the major force countering the growing political power of large corporations.

But since the late 1970s, union power has been waning. As a result, the wages of production workers have been nearly stagnant, adjusted for inflation. And workers have lost pension benefits and job security.

Think about it. More than four decades of near flat wages, even though the United States economy is now more than three times the size it was four decades ago.

Where did the economic gains go? Mostly to the top.

Whenever I bring this up, some people accuse me of being a class warrior. I’m not. I’m a class worrier. For years, I’ve worried about what would happen to America as the middle class continued to shrink and most of the economic gains went to the top.

Well, I think we’re now seeing the results, as millions of Americans have grown so cynical and despairing about their chances to make it that they’re even willing to support an authoritarian sociopath for president.

As the voices of workers became muted inside corporations, their voices also became muted in Washington. Why else would America enter into trade agreements that caused millions of working people to lose their jobs, without access to new ones paying them at least as much? Why else would entire regions of the nation be economically abandoned, without any concerted national effort to reverse the tide?

More states fell for the snake oil of so-called “right-to-work” laws, which should be called “right-to-work-for-less” laws.

Meanwhile, Wall Street was deregulated, allowing ever more of our economy to become dominated by the moneyed interests.

To add insult to widespread injury, Wall Street was bailed out after it brought the world to the precipice of economic Armageddon. Millions of people lost their jobs, wages, and homes in the financial crisis, but not a single major Wall Street executive was charged with a crime.

Corporate raiders got the right to mount hostile takeovers of companies and then demand bigger profits. And since payrolls comprise about two-thirds of corporate costs, the raiders forced corporations to limit wages and benefits.

To achieve this, corporations sought to bust unions — outsourcing jobs abroad and moving to “right-to-work-for-less” states. They also illegally fired workers who tried to organize — at worst getting their hands slapped by a National Labor Relations Board that might eventually order them to reinstate workers and give them back pay.

Ronald Reagan legitimized all this when in 1981 he fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers represented by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization.

The result was a dramatic decline in the bargaining power of ordinary workers — both inside companies and in American politics. And with this decline came a shrinkage of the American middle class. It’s estimated that between 1979 and 2017, the typical U.S. worker lost out on $3,250 in pay every year due to the decline of unions.

In the 1950s, over a third of all private-sector workers were unionized. Today, unionized workers comprise just 6 percent of private-sector workers (10 percent of all workers belong to a union, but many work in the public sector).

From 1946 through the early 1970s, unions staged hundreds of major strikes each year. Between 1981 and 2022, the number of major strikes dropped to a few dozen per year.

But here’s the good news: The pendulum is now starting to swing back.

It’s not just the UAW. Recent contracts negotiated by Hollywood writers, UPS workers, Kaiser Permanente health care workers, and even university employees, among others, provide significant pay increases and more job security (writers even got some protections against AI).

Last year’s union contracts gave workers an average first-year wage increase of 6.6 percent — the highest raise since at least 1988. With signing bonuses and other lump-sum payments added in, 2023’s average first-year wage increase was 7.3 percent, also a record high.

Overall, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. union membership grew by 191,000 workers last year — although the share of employees represented by a union fell slightly as strong job growth outpaced organizing efforts.

More good news: Most Americans are solidly behind unions. Approval of labor unions is near 70 percent, the highest point in five decades. At the same time, confidence in big business is at its lowest point in decades.

What accounts for this burst of labor activism and public support?

Partly, I think, it’s the harsh inequalities exposed by the pandemic. The pandemic dramatically revealed how much easier it is for rich Americans to survive than everyone else and how dependent all of us are on average workers just doing their jobs.

Couple this with the rise in populist politics in a system looking increasingly rigged against average people — starting with Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong showing in 2016, while Donald Trump posed as the “voice” of workers.

Union victories have fueled a virtuous cycle — encouraging more workers to join unions and more unions to flex their muscles and demand wage hikes.

Then there’s the tight post-pandemic labor market, in which consumers are spending like gangbusters, the economy is surging, and employers worry about getting and keeping the workers they need.

Not the least is Joe Biden — the most pro-union president America has had in 60 years. And a National Labor Relations Board that’s the most pro-union board I’ve seen in decades.

“Congratulations to the workers at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on their historic vote for union representation with the United Auto Workers,” Biden said Friday in a statement.

Don’t wait for Trump to say anything positive about what just happened in Chattanooga.

Finally, both good news and a sign of how resistant corporations have become to unions: The share of non-union workers who would like to have a union at their workplace is far higher than the share who actually have a union representing them.

This is good news in terms of potential organizing drives. But it’s also evidence of the continuing effectiveness of corporate union-busting and the need for much stronger federal labor laws.

I believe the pendulum will continue to swing toward unions. Which means better wages and working conditions, a larger middle class, and laws and regulations that benefit the many rather than the few. And the possibility that America’s working class will return to the fold of the Democratic Party, where it belongs.

" At a time when there’s a lot to be disillusioned about, this is the clearest, most positive trend in America.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

"Class struggle unionism is the belief that our union struggle exists within a larger struggle between an exploiting billionaire class and the working class which actually produces the goods and services in society. Class struggle unionism looks at the employment transaction as inherently exploitative. While workers create all wealth in society, the outcome of the wage employment transaction is to separate workers from that wealth and create the billionaire class. From that simple proposition flows a powerful and radical form of unionism. Historically, class struggle unionists placed their workplace fights squarely within this larger fight between workers and the owning class. Viewing unionism in this way produces a particular type of unionism which both fights for broader class issues but is also rooted in workplace-based militancy."