Watch me Speak at the Workers Strike Back Conference LIVE Now!
Join Chris Hedges, Kshama Sawant, Jill Stein, and working people from around the country for Workers Strike Back’s Fight the Rich Organizing Conference!
This livestream description was provided by Workers Strike Back.
Republicans & Democrats are parties of war & the rich. We need to fight the rich & both their parties to win what workers need.
It’s been barely a month since Trump took office, and he has already carried out a blitz of attacks on working people. With Elon Musk — the owner of Tesla and the richest person in the world, with a wealth nearing half a trillion dollars — Trump and his administration are focused on carrying out dramatic cuts to government programs and agencies. Trump has announced mass layoffs aimed at the more than two million federal workers, many of them union members. Trump and Musk’s goal isn’t to cut “waste” or “fraud,” as they have tried to claim, but to gut even the meager protections that workers have had, including sweeping cuts at agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as well as cuts at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. And while thousands of federal employees have been laid off, Musk’s companies SpaceX and Tesla rake in $8 million a day from government contracts.
Trump and the Republican Party do not represent the interests of working people. Trump is close not only to Musk but also to other of the richest billionaires in the world, such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Zuckerberg, all of whom are anti-union and deeply hostile to working people. Musk has boasted about retaliating against Tesla employees who have had the courage to demand their rights. Bezos and Amazon have carried out brutal and shameful union busting for years. And just days ago, Zuckerberg laid off 5 percent of Meta tech workers. While the bosses claimed performance-related reasons, the workers have publicly stated that they were laid off after taking parental or medical leave, and have described Meta as the 'cruelest tech company out there.'
The Democratic Party is not going to fight Trump. It represents the same big-business interests as Trump and has fought viciously to stop workers from winning things like Medicare for All and a $15/hour minimum wage, all while sending tens of billions of dollars to fund the genocide in Gaza and escalate wars around the world.
We also can’t be fooled by the latest public gimmicks of Bernie Sanders, the leaders of the Democrat-aligned NGOs, or business unionist labor leaders who look to funnel our movements back into the graveyard of the Democratic Party. We need to begin laying the basis for a new, antiwar, mass working-class party.
Workers need to build a fighting movement independent of the Democrats and Republicans to bring down Trump, the billionaires, and both their parties. We need mass protests, civil disobedience, and strikes to win Medicare for All, to tax Amazon and big business to fund quality affordable housing, and to end all military funding to the Israeli state and the genocidal occupation.
Excellent all. Chris will your portion of the speeches be available in a separate format?
I love this!