Now, in the latest example of how the Supreme Court has been shamefully politicized, we get a decision that basically makes it possible for an employer to demand, as the price for a job, a very specific, and very limiting, legal remedy, a priori, to pretty much anything the employer might do that would require legal action to seek redress for.

And you thought only rich people made their latest acquisitions sign prenuptials.

And even with all of that they reserve the right to pay us the very limit of barely enough to get buy on.

But why wouldn't they when they have successfully blocked all of the normal avenues that organized labor used to use to give it some negotiating clout, as to the pricing of the skills offered. Even now, when labor is in shorter supply than it has been for a while, real wage increases are still stagnant. And you, dear reader, to the extent that you are a working class stiff (hourly, or salaried), have allowed it to happen because you have forgotten so much labor history. And the fact that you have swallowed a lot of bologna about unions just being bad in, and of themselves; when the truth is they are like any other social institution humans might make: If the people who create them stay deeply involved in what is done with these organizations, they have at least a decent chance of performing as intended. Slack off, however, in attending to what is being done, with your organization, in your name in effect, and you will find them susceptible to whatever temptations are presently in existence in the current operating environment. And boy, isn't that just not such a good thing to be thinking about now.

So we end up with a lot of factors in play here. Labor got complacent, Capitalism has become infinitely more corrupt. And technology put a dagger into the notion that you can apply electricity to an organizing methodology developed when the lever, the wheel, the inclined plane, wind and water power, semi organized agronomy, and repeatable type, were pretty much the only major technologies in existence, and not have it have create really bad consequences. Especially where skills as commodities are concerned, and information itself, as a socially created thing in the first place, becoming private property. Coveted private property for now information is more golden than gold ever was.

Which brings us to why continuing with "Business As Usual" is a very bad deal for working people any more. And it will only be by organizing en mass, as working people, that we will be able to get a real society back.

Students are beginning to realize that organizing en mass may be the only way to demand safe schools. Teachers are beginning to realize that organizing en mass may be the way to demand schools be given the full breadth of resources they require to get the job done.

But that is still too limited. Too limited because the change sought here, though absolutely worthy in their own rights, seeks to accomplish that limited change as an isolated problem; when in fact you can not address much of anything of import now without it being part of a more comprehensive, and integrated set of changes, across the board of what is a very, very, complexly interrelated economic society.

That. That is what we have to understand now as working people. Assuming of course that we still value a Democratic society. One run by a well informed electorate who understand that government run by the rule of law has to be one that we just naturally have to be "deeply involved in" (to quote myself from the fourth paragraph above), certainly in a way that Capitalism's singular penchant for isolating people can't ever provide. So we have to provide the foresight to design it that way, from the ground up ourselves; precisely because this will be a grass roots lead revolution. And we will find a way to negotiate a Grand Compromise that will give us an alternative that can work.

What The Supreme Court's Decision On Forced Arbitration Means For You

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[Post Note: Let's be clear here. If you think the current occupant of the the White House has any inclination to truly work for working people, let that notion die the death it needs to die, for you, because nothing could be further from the truth. J.V.]

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[Post Note: Even if we assume they are sincere in this, their own dependency on money insures that the party that most cruelly let Organized Labor down will have a hard time making corruption go away. One might argue, in fact, that their piecemeal, and hardly very integrated reforms, will serve only to mollify whatever part of working America they're able to still resonate with, without actually changing much of anything of substance; leaving things ripe for a reformulated Right to thwart later on, as they have always done in the past, when people aren't paying so much attention again. This will also give the reformed Right time to work their big pocket connections to not only try and thwart the economy itself while the Dems are, supposedly, back in the majority. but also to find new faces with which to do what they've already learned to do in weaponizing information. J.V.]