Political Dynamite! American Unions Vote to Form Labor Party

This is an absolute bombshell! In this piece from the Jimmy Dore Show, Dore and his co-host, Ron Placone, discuss the sensational news that a meeting of union leaders that convened on October 24 have passed a resolution condemning the two-party system and pledging them to consider setting up a separate, independent labour party.

The resolution was introduced by the chair of the political committee of AFL-CIO, Lee Saunders, and Randi Weingarten, the head of the teacher’s union. This is particularly remarkable, as Weingarten was responsible for throwing the union’s weight behind Hillary Clinton regardless of the views of its members. Dore states that when they asked American teachers how they felt about their union supporting Killary, they said they weren’t consulted. Those are America’s two largest unions.

Weingarten said that the system had failed working people for decades, and that it had taken away the pillars supporting working people’s rights to good jobs and benefits on behalf of the rich and corporations. The resolution was passed at a meeting of about 50 delegates in an upstairs room where the convention was being held. The delegates contended that both the Republicans and the Democrats were under corporate domination.

Mark Dimondstein, who was the foremost promoter of the idea of a labour party, is the president of the postal workers’ union. He has been calling for it ever since NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement – was set up in 1993, which he said showed that both the Republicans and Democrats were in the pockets of the capitalists. Dore and Placone chuckle over the fact that Dimondstein must be having the biggest ‘I told you so’ moment, and encourage him to gloat all he wants, as he’s earned it.

The meeting was split over whether they should first start up an organisation and start discussing issues, or get into political races and risk becoming the ‘spoilers’ in the current two-party system. Dore states in response to this that it’s the two-party system that’s rigged. That’s how Americans now have Trump: it was due to a rigged Democratic primary and electoral college. One delegate, Velasquez, stated that the new party should compete in politics, but start at the local and state levels. Dore asks rhetorically why they should, and argues instead that they should compete at all levels. All the delegates agreed, however, that the Democrats have not done them any favours. They never have, and they never will. Dore believes that the reason why Velasquez wanted them to limit themselves to local and state level politics, was so that they don’t get called ‘Ralph Nader’, after the left-wing American politician, who attempted to run as a third party candidate.

Saunders and Weingarten are also members of the Democratic National Committee. The main resolution, however, said that they would set a pro-worker agenda, that would stand regardless of party. Dore states that this is similar to what they had in mind when they went to Canada for Peter Alard. That all the progressives would get together and produce a litmus test. They will thus endorse any political candidate in any party, provided that they support their pro-worker objectives.

Dimondstein said that they couldn’t take half a loaf, a quart of a loaf, an eighth of a loaf, or even crumbs any more. Dore states that they weren’t even being offered that under the present system. And he was applauded when he said that even when the Democrats got control of both the presidency and Congress in the 2008 election, they did not follow through with reform of labour legislation and other priorities for working people, but instead passed the Transpacific Partnership – TPP – the free trade deal. Dore and Placone states this was done by Barack Obama. They also make the point that it wasn’t done by Russian secret agents amongst the DAPL and Black Lives Matter activists. Dore states that it wasn’t the Russians, who threw the election but Barack Obama, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, Haliburton, Exxon, the Koch brothers, the people in New York, who had 200,000 people thrown of the voting rolls, and the Electoral College. He stated that the Democratic Party hadn’t done anything for them despite having the presidency, the Congress and the Senate. Dore states that this is what he and other progressives had been saying, but they were told they were stupid, petulant, children. Now the labour unions agree with them, and its those who called them stupid and so on, who now have no political sense. The people in the Democratic Party, who called them that and gave America Hillary Clinton are the people that are ultimately responsible for Trump. They are everything that’s broken in the Democrat Party.

Dimondstein stated that the Republicans entrenched union-busting, Bill Clinton deregulated Wall Street, and Jimmy Carter deregulated trucking. Dore reminds his viewers that, thanks to Carter, we now have truckers working 18 hours or so and taking methamphetamines to get to their destinations on time. Dimondstein made it clear that constructing a labour party would be a long-term plan and require both community and labour support, but it would be wrong to confine the movement for a labour party to the current two-party system. Dore goes on to say that if everyone, who felt this way had actually voted for the Green Party at the last election, it would have radically changed the political landscape. They might still have had Trump, but the Democrats would have been wiped out and the opposition instead would have been the Green Party with a genuinely radical agenda. Instead, half or eighty per cent of all progressives are trying to reform the Democrats, which he thinks is a fool’s errand.

Dore and Placone are amazed that this story has received so little press attention. It should receive more, as the 2016 election showed how little footing the Democrat Party now has with the working class. Placone states that it’s now time for progressives and working class organisations to stop endorsing the lesser of two evils, because that can result in the more evil getting into power, and the lesser evil becoming worse. He states that we have now reached the crisis point with that, and if we haven’t, he doesn’t know what will wake people up. But whatever it is, it’ll be too little, too late. Dore suggests that it might be when the ice caps finally melt so that the coastline is now in Minnesota. Obama would probably come back to open the arctic for drilling just one more time. He has been responsible for opening it up to drilling twice. Dore also points out that there are a lot of people interested in forming a third party – progressives, Greens and others – and it’ll eventually happen.

This is absolutely stunning. If it goes ahead – and I sincerely hope it does – then America will be transformed into a country, whose political system is far more like that of Europe. Especially if Bernie and the progressives manage to get single-payer healthcare passed.

What the American unions are discussing is precisely what the British Labour party went through a century and more ago. The Labour party has its roots in the Lib-Labs, the trade unionists elected to parliament as working class members of the Liberal Party. Then after the passage of the Taft Vale judgement, which ruled that trade unions could be sued for damages and losses caused by strikes, they then decided to form an independent party to press for working class policies. This was the Independent Labour Party. The Labour Party as it is now was founded in 1901 as a party formed from the unions and various socialist organisations and societies.

As for pressing for all political parties to put forward pro-worker policies, that was the goal of the Fabian Society when it was founded. There’s a lot of sheer rubbish spouted by the American right-wing conspiracy nuts about how it was some kind of secret society. It wasn’t. And it’s still around. It became part of the Labour party. I should know. I was a member briefly in the 1980s. I’ve blogged about some of their pamphlets I bought and read, even citing them. Unfortunately, they’ve now been heavily infiltrated by the Blairites, and are one of the chief sites of anti-Corbyn activism in the party.

And something similar appears to have happened in Canada in the 1960s and ’70s, when hippy radicals formed the New Democrat Party up there.

If this does go through, it should encourage similar left-wing movements around the world, and strengthen the genuine socialists in the British Labour party and the European socialist parties.

And I’ve no doubt that the capitalists and big corporations will now try and throw everything they can at it to stifle this vital new change. I’m not surprised that very few newspapers carried the story, because the newspapers generally represent the interests of big business. And big business and the capitalist class is absolutely terrified of the unions and genuinely working class organisations. That’s why the British press, including the pro-Labour Mirror, has been so consistently against Jeremy Corbyn.

However, it has also been pointed out that before the First World War, America did indeed have a very strong left-wing movement. There were the Communists, the Wobblies and Eugene Debs and his attempt to form a labour party for America. What set this back was the Cold War, which allowed the forces of the right to smear and vilify them as part of the global Communist threat. Now that Communism has fallen, fewer Americans are being taken in by this ruse, and the spirit of Eugene Debs lives on.

I hope this all goes through, and that it’s successful. If that happens, then the world will be a fair bit better for working people.

God bless it, and American working women and men!

Private Eye Anti-Corbyn Jeering and Anti-Democrat Party Revolt in America

Last week I put up a piece commenting on the considerable anti-Corbyn bias in Private Eye. The Eye has run a series of articles attacking the Labour leader since he won the election, including a series of cartoons, mainly raking over controversies from the 1980s from the angle of the Blairites, entitled ‘Focus on Fact’.

In its issue for 5th-18th August 2016, the magazine ran another series of pieces attacking Corbyn. One of these was the following satirical commentary.

It shows a photograph of Corbyn side by side with the American Democratic Party politicians and presidential nomination hopeful, Bernie Sanders. If you can’t read it, the text runs

Spot the Difference 2

America

Grey-haired old socialist politician with a cult-like following accepts that for the good of his party he must step aside to end party infighting that will gift government to their ultra-right opponents.

Britain

Grey-haired old socialist politician with a cult-like following refuses to accept that for the good of his party he must step aside to end party infighting that will gift government to their ultra-right opponents.

It’s a spectacularly bad piece of political analysis, but it shows very clearly the very strong bias towards the Democrat and New Labour political establishment running through the Eye. Bernie Sanders, who campaigned against Hillary Clinton, was denied the Democratic nomination through dirty tricks. The Democratic establishment and party machine under Debbie Wasserman Schultz rigged the caucuses in Shrillary’s favour through the use of superdelegates, along with other machinations. The result has been a major political scandal. Sanders’ supporters turned up to protest at the Democratic National Convention the other week complaining that they were silenced. Sanders stepped aside, and urged his supporters to vote for Hillary, despite the fact that she stands for everything that he and they oppose: corporate power and corruption, the indiscriminate use of military force, the overthrow of democratically elected left-wing regimes and their replacement by brutal fascist dictatorships, further welfare cuts and poverty in the American heartland. It’s been pointed out by The Young Turks that Sanders was massively more popular than Shrillary, and stood a far better chance of beating Fuehrer Trumpf. But Bernie was too left and radical for the Democratic establishment to stomach. So they knifed him in the back, just like the Labour rebels are doing to Corbyn.

And the discontent generated by the Democrats’ betrayal of Bernie Sanders is challenging the entire American two party system. Counterpunch has run a series of articles commenting on the way younger, radical Democrat supporters are now turning to the Green party and Jill Stein. Geoff Dutton ran a piece in the magazine, ‘Let’s (Third) Party’, arguing for the inclusion of third parties in the American ballots to stop Clinton and Trump. See: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/05/lets-third-party/
More recently, the magazine’s columnist, Barbara Ellis, wrote a piece entitled ‘Found – A New Major Opposition Party’, arguing that a third mass party was emerging from voters dissatisfied with the way the two dominant parties follow the agenda of the major corporations against the wishes and interests of the 99 per cent. This is partly based on the history of American third parties, like Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor party, which emerged in the 1930s, and became so powerful that the Democrat party sought to make it part of their umbrella organisation. See: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/10/found-a-new-major-opposition-party/

The Young Turks and related radical internet news programmes have also commented on the growing support for Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, and the bitter resentment against a corrupt political system that denies severely ordinary Americans a voice. In the clip below, for example, The Turks’ reporter Jordan Cheriton talks to a young political scientist professor, Rex Troumbley, at the Green Party convention. Troumbley teaches at Rice University, and was a supporter of Bernie Sanders. He then switched to the Greens when the Democrats did the dirty on the people’s candidate. Troumbley explains very clearly why young millennials are dissatisfied with the two party system, a system that is ‘set up to disenfranchise’. He makes the point that they are far more receptive to radical views about their nation’s history – those that take into account the fact that the Founding Fathers hated and feared democracy, the genocide and dispossession of the Amerindians, slavery, Jim Crow and the rest, rather than the upper-class White male perspective pushed by establishment outlets like Fox News and the Republicans. And these kids want radical change.

In the piece from The Young Turks below, Jordan Cheriton talks to Bernie Sanders supporters, who have formed the Demexit campaign, modelled on Britain’s Brexit. Just as Britain, in their opinion, left the Union when it felt it was no longer part of it, so the Bernie Sanders’ supporters are leaving the Democrats to move to Jill Stein and the Greens because of the way they are not represented by Shrillary and the establishment Democrats.

And I could go on. Clinton and Trump between them are the most unpopular presidential candidates in American history, ever. In a recent poll, only 27 per cent of American voters were happy with Trump’s finger on the nuclear button. And Clinton was only marginally higher at 38 per cent. And the dissatisfaction is growing. The Liberal hosts of one American political programme on MSNBC went into absolute meltdown the other day when they found out that John Negroponte had endorsed Hillary Clinton. Negroponte’s a truly heinous individual. He was one of Reagan’s people responsible for arming the death squads in Latin America, amongst his other crimes against humanity. Jimmy Dore, another reporter from the TYT, made a point of criticising them for only just waking up to how horrible HRC was, after they had criticised her opponents, like the Turks, as ‘misogynists’ and ‘Bernie Bros’, and derided Susan Sarandon as ‘insane’.

I’m putting this up because, although it’s American, it parallels what’s happening over here with the attempts of the Labour establishment to stick the knife into Jeremy Corbyn. The Blairites are corporate warmongers exactly like Clinton. Tony Blair modelled New Labour on Clinton’s New Democrats, which took over the pro-corporate, anti-worker, anti-welfare policies of the Republicans. Private Eye and the Blairites sincerely wish that the Labour left, who have found a voice with Jeremy Corbyn, will shut up and abandon him, leaving them to continue the same policies of courting the middle classes and the corporate establishment, including the right-wing media, while privatising everything and destroying the welfare state. They’re aghast that the working class they have marginalised, ignored and sneered at are supporting Corbyn and abandoning neoliberalism. But, looking at what’s going on in America shows that removing Corbyn won’t change anything. He’s started a grassroots movement. If they get rid of him, people will leave the Labour party en masse, and a major third party will emerge from his supporters. It could be either the Greens, or parties like the TUSC, the Socialist Party, or Left Unity. Or it could be a completely new third party. Either way, the demand for a genuine, socialist alternative will remain, and it will challenge the Labour establishment. Regardless of the lies and spin the Blairites and Private Eye want us to believe.