When you hear 'America' and 'oil' in the same sentence you may think of George Bush or Dick Cheney talking about WMDs before invading the oil-rich regions of Iraq at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
“There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”
Or maybe you remember the habitat devastation caused by Deepwater Horizon
…
But the oil that I speak of is one that perpetuates the cogs of machine. It is the symbolic oil that penetrated the nose of the working class child laborer as he crawled through the confined spaces of a machine in a textile mill. This oil is our lifeblood. This is the inheritance of our ancestors.
It is the stock of an Amazon Warehouse or the stock of sheep for a shepherd. It is the ability to continue by the same game for the owners, the head and by proxy, the hands. It's the continuation of the classist subjugation of the working class. We hold the path to the future. Will we be just another generation who passes on the problems of this world to our children of tomorrow? Will we even afford to have children for tomorrow?
We have a duty to collectively bargain for our dignity and wages earned so that all workers can afford to live in this country. That a living wage is not a pipe dream but a reality that must be realized at a systemic level.
As a union worker and the son of a union shop steward, I ask that you bargain. That you drive a bargain against a system that doesn't care about you so it can project military power around the Earth to support imperialism veiled under the Invisibility Cloak of globalism and free trade. We cannot settle for half wins by making concessions for our representation. It is representation that we must strive for to build a future at all. We have a foundation that allows for change through its processes by the will of the people. We must represent ourselves because it is only propaganda that made us believe we must go through them for representation.
That we must wear chains to not even walk but crawl slower than in Fallout New Vegas when you were over encumbered. Instead of Van Graff loot it's crippling debt.
There was a chant that the great patriots who guided the foundation of our country rallied behind,
“no taxation without representation!”
So I ask, what heroic slogan should we adopt for ourselves?