tulsagmb:

There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

“It’s nothing personal, but the two classes are natural enemies. We’re stuck in the middle of a war, a class war. That’s not a figure of speech. It’s a very real and ugly war with a body count that makes WWII look like a minor fender bender on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

It’s war, and we fight it every day, but our weapons aren’t guns and bombs. Our weapons are education, organization, and the various ways of withholding our labor. We fight with our arms folded.” —FW Tim Acott, Portland GMB-IWW

Also available “ready to print!”

via i.imgur.com

Imagine Berkshire Hathaway Inc burning to the ground. Class war, anyone?

Charles Munger, the billionaire vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., defended the U.S. financial-company rescues of 2008 and told students that people in economic distress should “suck it in and cope.”

fuckyeahanarchopunk:

wall street protest

Wow, I’ve heard the basic, safe-for-consumption version of the NUMMI closing in the news and even heard parts of NPR breakdown, but I had no idea the UAW leadership where screwing the workers too. I guess this should not come as a surprise to any radical/revolutionary/anarcho union member.

The anger of workers against the UAW exploded at a January 24 meeting of the Fremont local attended by some 400 union members. The eruption began during comments by UAW Local 2244 Bargaining Chairman Javier Contreras, who was booed and jeered as he attempted to present details of the severance deal. Contreras did not try to conceal his contempt for the workers, declaring that no matter how many spoke out at the meeting, “at the end of the day, on April 1, everybody in this room will not have a job, no matter what you say.”

When an older worker demanded to know “where the hell” the union officials had been for the last six months, Contreras shouted, “Shut the f— up, you motherf——!” At that point, furious workers rushed to the front of the room and chairs began to fly. Contreras and other UAW personnel gathered around the podium to defend themselves against the workers, while other officials pleaded for calm and called in the police.

The event was the latest sign of growing anger and militancy in the working class that foreshadows a renewal of the class struggle, as workers resist the drive to make them pay for the crisis of American capitalism and the multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street.

Not sure I agree 100% with the author but he does make some pretty good points regarding the working class. Emphasis mine see below:

The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States. This should come as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed. Unless you happen to be a member of the ownership class, your options are pretty much limited to barely surviving on service-sector wages or playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway). The very best you can hope for is to get a professional degree and then milk the system for a slice of the middle-class pie. And even those who claw their way into the middle class are but one illness or job loss away from poverty. Your jobs aren’t secure. Your company has no loyalty to you. They’ll play you off against your coworkers for as long as it suits them, then they’ll get rid of you.

All this begs the question: Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you’ll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I’ve got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.

And that’s just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You don’t even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you’ve never lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.

But it goes much deeper than mere surveillance and anxiety. The fact is, you are not free because your country has been taken over and occupied by another government. Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States. You are required under pain of death to pay taxes to this occupying government. If you’re from the less fortunate classes, you are also required to serve and die in their endless wars, or send your sons and daughters to do so. You have no choice in the matter: there is a socio-economic draft system in the United States that provides a steady stream of cannon fodder for the military.

If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the service of a government you didn’t elect “freedom,” then you and I have a very different idea of what that word means.

the working class in the United States has been brutally propagandized by jackals like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Members of the working class have been taught to lick the boots of their masters and then bend over for another kick in the ass. They’ve got these people so well trained that they’ll take up arms against the other half of the working class as soon as their masters give the word.

Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism will come with the return of the language of class conflict. It does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the working class, but we have to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have to grasp, as Marx did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill and lie to make money. They throw poor families out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars to make profits, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, loot the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship only money and power.

Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it. 

The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these modern barbarians, the way that banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Athens. These guys aren’t number-crunching whizzes making smart investments; what they do is find suckers in some municipal-finance department, corner them in complex lose-lose deals and flay them alive. In a complete subversion of free-market principles, they take no risk, score deals based on political influence rather than competition, keep consumers in the dark — and walk away with big money.

We also understand that a declaration is not a government; a creed is not enough. The Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality, for if everyone is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank or an inherited social order – if my notion of faith is no better or worse than yours, and my notions of truth and goodness and beauty are as true and good and beautiful as yours – then how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres?

Barrack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pp. 86-87