(For those who don't know Kokomo, Indiana it's an unusual place. It's politics are prob. close to Kansas, sitting as it does where the Industrial North of yore meets the Bible Belt.) Anyone else but me wondering when this would happen?
April 7-9, 2006 Quality Inn (Located On US 31) Kokomo, Indiana 46902 Meeting Introductions 7:ooPM Friday Saturday & Sunday Begin With Registration At 8:00AM
Future of the Union SOLIDARITY NOW!
Working people are under attack as never before. The institutions on which workers have depended–the Democratic Party and the unions have utterly failed to defend us. Democratic as well as Republican politicians support the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, savage cuts in social programs, outsourcing jobs, attacking public education, rewriting bankruptcy laws to benefit credit card companies. Union officials work with corporations to cut wages, rob retirees of their pensions, impose wage tiers, cut health care. They replace worker solidarity with worker-against-worker Company Teams. They support the war-makers in DC.
Meanwhile most working people, blue-collar and white-collar, employed and unemployed, remain unorganized and largely defenseless.
The politicians and the unions are part of the problem. We cannot rely on them and we cannot change them. We have to go around them, to create institutions that we control to fight for the values, the livelihoods, the future of working people.
SOLIDARITY NOW is a new organization formed in Peoria, IL in 2005. Our goals are to rebuild the culture of mutual support that is natural to working people, to fight for the goals of working people, and to build a movement for democratic revolution.
If you are an auto worker, a teacher, a nurse, a student, a professor, work in an office or school or hospital or university, are employed or unemployed, working or retired, we invite you to join Solidarity Now and to join us in Kokomo for our National Meeting.
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."