PHOTO/ANGELIQUE HERRING, TAMPA BAY TIMES VIA ZUMA WIRE
If you need a reason to support and vote for political candidates who will fight for the things you need, here’s a good one: Your immediate future and the future of your children and grandchildren depend on how you exercise democracy at the polls.
In our two-party system, the Democratic Party handed the 2016 election to President Donald Trump by ignoring the pressing needs of working people in an age when robotic technology is rapidly destroying the basic structure of capitalism—destroying the industrial bargain that exchanged work for wages good enough to let workers plan decent lives for their families and their futures.
This destruction of the work we depended on, founded our very lives upon, is creating a rapidly growing group of workers who are denied that kind of life-sustaining work, and must change the system just to get the basic needs all human beings must have to stay alive and healthy. Trump’s election enabled the fascists in the firmly pro-corporate Republican Party to take control of our political system and begin to destroy all the protections against corporate exploitation and excess that were so painstakingly fought for over the past half century.
The Democratic Party will repeat those fatal mistakes of the 2016 election and guarantee Trump’s reelection in 2020 if it doesn’t start caring about the growing millions being kicked out of the economy by technology. Some of the most progressive candidates in the Democratic Party are moving in that direction, but are not yet close to what pushed out workers need. Workers need their government to guarantee that the basic needs of the entire working class are met, and that the considerable benefits of robotized production are applied to the whole of society, not just seized by corporate executives.
That’s where your vote comes in. The ruling class political parties are so tightly tied to fascist control by corporate power and money because hoarding essentials like housing and health care for the ruling class works for them. We the people need government that works for us. You show what you need—and build unity with the other millions of people being kicked to the curb by a dying capitalism—by defending democracy, using your right to vote for candidates who fight for your needs. That sends a message. Voting your interests allows us to stay independent of the ruling class drive to make workers servants to corporate power and profits, regardless of the cost to humanity and the planet.
Community College must address survival issues of faculty and students
