Corrupt capitalism making way for demagogs and state tyranny

GUEST: Bob Price, long time peace and justice advocate and professor at CCSF in San Francisco, talks about labor activism in the face of the recent Supreme Court assaults on the rights of working people.

Supreme Court hands bosses big wins

Bob Price knows labor history in the US. Most of us just don't. I didn't know that the Taft Hartley Act's greatest victory over labor involved the outlawing of wildcat strikes that had been so effective during the 1930's. The diminishment of labor unions has been going on for a very long time. Only it has been hidden from the nation's workers.

Wages fall as unions loose their power, and we have seen that for the the last thirty years. Union bosses bear part of the blame, so comfortable and so exclusionary. Like our venial politicians, they have simply been bought by the corporations and the billionaires.

When will working people wake up? In a sense, they have already. They have realized something is rotten in the system, and voted against the crook they knew, Hillary Clinton. Of course, they got an even greater con artist in her place. We have seen the same process at work in Germany and Japan in the 1930's. Corrupt capitalism making way for demagogs and state tyranny.

But labor isn't dead yet. The $15 Per Hour movement proved that. Now the nation's teachers are fighting decades of underfunded schools and diminished salaries. A revitalized labor movement may yet upset the one percent's lock on power. But labor has to reshape the Democratic Party or form one of their own to actually halt our nation's slide towards authoritarianism.