100 years ago the 1% had control of much of our government and refused to pay living wages and ignored working peoples suffering. Sound familiar? When people protested, these super wealthy robber barons simply painted them as lazy troublemakers and if necessary brutalized them... or murdered them.
One of those greedy 1% robber barons was John D. Rockefeller. One of his many holdings was the Ludlow mine in Colorado. He exploited the miners and kept them in debt, working in dangerous conditions and when they finally had enough, the miners struck... and Rockefeller sent in his goon squads and local police. Before it was over, more than 100 were dead.
"The strikers paid the ultimate price in blood for rights we take for granted today," said Dean Saitta, chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Denver. "Safe workplaces, overtime, the 40-hour week -- all were gains that followed Ludlow. We owe our weekends (off) to those strikers." Yet we now are fighting these same battles again in 2014. If you replace names like Rockefeller with Koch and suffering miners with poverty wage employees working for billionaires like Wall-marts Walton family you see the struggle we fight for now is the same one american workers were fighting 100 years ago. The same greed... the same tactics of repression. The same corrupt politicians serving the rich.
But then, we seem not to be able to learn from even very recent history. Any politically informed person knows that the republican "trickle down" agenda of the 1% plutocrats has failed more than once over the last few decades and yet, ignorant people line up to support the republican attempt to take us back to the same policies that caused the meltdown only six years ago!
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