A woman moves from a steel union city, a city that supported thousands of families, but these unionized steel mills began to move overseas and left the inner city working class with no jobs, no healthcare, no future. Many men, including in my family, who were once steel workers that were laid off, now go scrapping for metal and aluminum in trucks and white vans to bring whats left of the decaying city of Gary, Indiana to the local junkyards that litter the working class’s trash bin of a life.Fast forward 37 years, this woman now has no dental or eye care covered in her insurance plan from a fertilizer plant and is not guaranteed health care for her entire life. She is on medical leave, but isn’t being paid because her employer said she can’t prove she injured her spine at work. She has been provided no protective measures against the chemicals in her workplace that she handles everyday at work, just like her coworkers. She began to work at a fertilizer plant in Indiana after moving away from Gary, Indiana that experiences inner city violence from black, brown and white youths who don’t understand the class war and are taken to war by military recruiters and teachers in their schools, cops on the street and the corporate bosses who demand more wage cuts, lay offs and destruction of the unionized workplace.

The youths in Indiana all experience a true sense of the feeling of desperation in a world where they are forced into institutions by law, of so-called “education” that takes away their empowerment and lays it in an authority figure, a teacher or a principal. Federal budget cuts erode away at creative classes, whats left is another scrapyard, one of on-the-job training of short-term goals to benefit corporate figures and their under bosses, down to low-level management who agree to earn more than you, because they are the only ones able to provide work for you and sift the fruits of your labor upwards to people who do less than them.

At the recent G20 summit, the man representing America said he picked Pittsburgh, because it was a city of “positive” change, where unionized steel workers had demanded “too much” of their employers so their employers had moved steel mills to other countries, specifically China, the biggest bureaucracy that does the job best of fragmenting the solidarity of workers with tools of oppression with physical force. This man also said that the steel workers needed to make a transition from steel workers to service workers, working for the monster corporation at minimum wage like a Target or Subway.

Women at the local factories face harassment everyday, who strive to pay their mortgage eventually one day and keep food on their table for their children. The children who have less and less of a chance at a decent wage to support themselves in their own future.

The youths I’ve talked to in Indiana have all expressed desires of a better future, but have resorted to experimenting with drugs and alcohol as a form of release from this nonsense world where the few, rich can savor all the fruits of the many poor’s labor. The temporary employment agencies here will train you for a job and place you on a waiting list as a potential scab in case their workplace has been unionized. The service worker jobs available do not provide nutritional foods, but your dependency on their destructive gains is the goal of the monster corporation. The monster corporation will not stop until it destroys everything.

Two young men worked at a plastic tubing factory in Indiana were laid off during a strong union movement in the area about the same time the massive layoffs began. In Goshen, Indiana the large working class community was hardest hit with a 18.3% unemployment rate that still stands at 15% unemployment. Many young men are worried about maintaining their household, because they want their own appropriate housing and for them to be able to earn enough to maintain their living situation. They collect unemployment, have went back to working part-time at the restaurants or service worker jobs they worked during or after high school or construction work. All of their work combined, many still make so little they are eligible for unemployment and struggle to pay their bills. No Jobs, No Education, No Future.

The factories close, but the army always has room for more soldiers. When the working class awakes and becomes active in their struggle for their own rights we may have change. The progressive domestic policy of Barack Obama has been positive, but its two steps backward on the foreign policy with the escalation of more troops into Afghanistan and the largest prison in the world being built there. We, as the working class, need nutritional food and no bombs. We need free education, not on-the-job training. Less prisons, but most of all, we need solidarity, marches and action against these manipulating tools of the working class. We need more bikes and fuel-efficient cars and the proper use of the mass-transit capabilities of the railroad system. These are our demands, and this is just a start. We need actions to follow words, comrades. Start local, become global and we can find love, compassion, understanding, equality and equanimity.