National Nurses United

These are all great lessons for registered nurses, helping to inform and reinforce not only our current collective bargaining work, but NNU's social movement campaign to win Medicare for All. We must mobilize not only nurses, but patients and our wider communities across the nation to demand a more just and humane health care system. The strength of labor and community united is demonstrated throughout the book. During the Flint strikes of 1935 at General Motors, "GM used every tactic it could to force the strikers out of the plant, including cutting electricity, heat, and food. Support for strikers grew in the community–outside vendors provided food, a sympathetic local restaurant served up meals for all two thousand strikers…each day. The strikers' lives were intertwined with those of the community and small businesses around the plants, and that meant a sort of natural David and Goliath situ- ation, with GM as the giant to be slayed." Community support was also critical in the success of the grape boycott and the crea- tion of United Farm Workers. Not only did 14 million Americans stop eating grapes in response to the call for support from the Filipino and Mexican/Mexican American farm workers, but they also relied heavily on the support people who lived in the same area as the farm workers, especially considering the political and financial resources that the grape growers would use against them. Reading Class War USA, I was a little surprised at finding the clear correlation between the strength of a strike and the success of a movement. I saw how today's fights for wages and working conditions have benefitted from the fights of those before us across sectors. I saw how the tactics we use can be informed by these historic strike victories. Today's prison strikes have a his- torical home in the uprising at Attica in 1971, and continue to build on their platform, demanding safety and dignity. The power of strikers is exemplified in wildcat strikes ranging from the 1970 postal workers strike to today's wildcat teachers strikes. One of the most powerful in the book was the imagery of the Watson- ville, Calif. cannery strike where the primarily Latinx women crawled over a mile on their knees from the cannery to the nea- rest Catholic church. "Their Union Sisters placed blankets under their knees as they crawled on the cement, and then picked up those blankets and moved them to the front as the participants neared the edge of the next blanket. This took place with banners and images of Jesus, Mary, and the Saints held high. It was a vari- ation of the tactic successfully used by the United Farm Workers 15 years before. The procession moved all who saw it to tears. As they arrived at the Catholic Church, where the new company owners and the attorneys representing them worshipped every Sunday, there was no way to deny the strikers what they deserved. The company agreed to reinstate the health benefits, and the strike was over." My criticisms primarily center around the lack of call to action and the way some of the early stories in particular approach the loss of life and sacrifice that went into building the protections we have today. In the chapter discussing The Ludlow Massacre, a fight for the lives of mining communities culminating in 66 deaths and 10 days of pitched battle that ultimately ended with the president calling in the National Guard, an event Howard Zinn describes as "the culmi- nating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in U.S. history," the author ends the section by saying that "the primary mine owner, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., received a lot of criticism and blame for what happened." How is that a satisfactory ending? I am left asking questions. Did he have to pay for what he caused? Was he brought on charges, did he pay reparations, or was he "criticized" and still able to make profits off his mine? This book drives home how, historically, those perpetrating vio- lence against workers are never held accountable, ultimately profit, and continue their exploitive practices. Weber writes in a resigned way that "It is always thus: Those with money and power control the narrative, silence the truth, and thwart justice." He misses an oppor- tunity in some of the early movement stories to call out that this does not need to be the truth, that we can stop those who profit off human and planetary suffering, that this is not inevitable. —Anne Olivia Eldred Democracy in Chains: The deep history of the Radical Right's stealth plan for America By Nancy MacLean; Penguin Books under pressure from student activists, George Mason University President Angel Cabrera in late April issued a public apology of sorts for accepting millions of dollars in cash from the Koch Foundation, in a manner that, in his muted words, "raise questions about donor influence in academic matters" at what is a public institution. The Koch donations are intended to stack the hiring of like-minded far- right faculty and to support the Merca- tus Center, a pro-corporate research operation housed at George Mason that is a base camp for influenc- ing public policy and just a stone's throw away from the nation's capital. Mercatus and George Mason were in the news again in late July for sponsoring a highly slanted "study" that predicted a vast increase in federal spending over the next 10 years under a Medicare for All proposal by Sen. Bernie Sanders. Buried in the fine print was a finding the Kochs probably didn't count on: that an improved Medicare for All would actually save $2 trillion over that same period. No matter, the eye-popping projected cost grabbed the headlines and addressed a clear Mercatus/Koch goal, undermining public confidence that government could actually protect the public good. Subverting a government responsibility to guarantee healthcare as a right for all is just one piece of the Koch agenda. Its tentacles are seen across the landscape in imposing politicians and judges who will carry out its program of destroying unions and worker protections, decimating regulations on environmental pollu- tion and climate change, and other policies hated by the far-right crowd. Historian Nancy MacLean tells this backstory, described in chill- ing detail, in her recent book Democracy in Chains: The Deep His- tory of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America. MacLean traces the rise of the most extreme ideology represented by Charles Koch today to a little-known economist, James Buchanan. 14 N A T I O N A L N U R S E W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G J U LY | A U G U S T | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8

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