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I have no idea how I got on the Lambertiste mailing list but just to
share with you comrades. Alan Benjamin, the Jeff Mackler of this sect,
is none other than Eric Blanc's daddy. Would love to be a fly on the
wall at their Thanksgiving dinner.
On 2/19/20 5:40 PM, The Organizer wrote:
*please distribute widely!*
*https://tinyurl.com/slmulaa*
**
*IN THIS DOSSIER ON THE U.S. WORKING CLASS AND THE 2020 ELECTIONS:*
(Editorial and three articles reprinted from the February 2020 issue of
/The Organizer/ Newspaper)
(1) Editorial: Democratic Party Crisis Deepens, New Openings for
Independent Working Class Politics
(2) The U.S. Labor Movement and the 2020 Elections — by The Editors
(3) “It’s About the Economy, Stupid!”: Trump and the “Success” of the
U.S. Economy — by The Editors
(4) 2019: A Year of Mounting Resistance to Bipartisan War at Home and
Abroad — by The Editors
* * * * * * * * * *
**
*(1) Democratic Party Crisis Deepens by the Day, **New Openings for
Independent Working Class Politics*
**
*EDITORIAL*
**
As these lines are written, the 2020 Democratic Party primaries have
begun in an overall political situation characterized by the /New York
Times/ on January 27 as one where, "day after day, there is one more
ripple in a flood of chaos streaming out of Washington."
One of the ripples in this “flood of chaos” — an electoral expression of
the outrage by workers and youth over their deteriorating working and
living conditions — is the sudden surge of Bernie Sanders. The
Democratic Party leadership is beside itself. Top party officials have
gone public with the alarm: Everything must be done to stop Sanders. The
mainstream media and liberal pundits are unhinged. Sanders is being
targeted as a “divisive extremist who will destroy the Democratic
Party.” The Business Roundtable warns that Sanders “will wreak havoc
with the economy.” Media reports speak of a “civil war” inside the
Democratic Party.
Sanders has been given plenty of leeway by the Democratic Party
leadership to raise pressing issues such as free college education,
canceling the student debt, single-payer healthcare, and taxing the rich
— as this helps to legitimize the Democratic Party at a time when its
traditional voting base has either continued to stay home on election
day, or bolted, in the case of white working-class men in the Rust Belt,
to the Republican Party. His New Deal-type program has struck a
responsive chord among working people and youth who have not experienced
the much-touted economic “recovery.”
Being allowed onto the roster of Democratic Party presidential
candidates, however, has come with a steep political price-tag: Sanders
has had to pledge time and again that he will campaign actively for
whatever candidate the Democratic Party nominates at its July 2020
national convention — including Wall Street favorites Joe Biden and
multi-billionaire Mike Bloomberg. When Hillary Clinton, Wall Street’s
candidate in 2016, recently chastised Sanders for not doing enough to
get behind her presidential bid, he replied that he had done “everything
humanly possible” to support her.
Sanders also has had to pledge his support for U.S. imperialist policies
worldwide, beginning with his unwavering support to the State of Israel
and its “right to security” — something he has done more than willingly.
His reply to Trump’s phony “Palestinian Peace Plan” highlighted the need
to return to a “two-state solution” and “international law,” both of
which have provided the cover to deny the Palestinian people’s right to
self-determination and their right to return to their homeland. The
so-called “two-State solution” is precisely what paved the way for the
Trump-Netanyahu plan to expel the Palestinian people from their lands
and extinguish the Palestinian national movement. In response to Trump’s
unilateral assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, Sanders
called on Congress to reassert its authority over going to war with Iran
— which only legitimizes a war endorsed by Congress, such as occurred in
Iraq in 2003.
For the Democratic Party leadership, it was never a question of allowing
Sanders to come into the convention with a majority, or even a plurality
of delegates. His role was to sheep-dog stray voters back into the
Democratic Party. It is no longer out of the question, however, for
Sanders to enter the Democratic National Convention with the most votes;
such is the anger from below and such is the political crisis in the
summits of the capitalist class.
If Sanders were to come into the July 2020 Democratic Party convention
as the front-runner, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) leadership
could orchestrate a “brokered” convention. DNC insiders already are
discussing such a fall-back plan.
What would this look like? Sanders would need 50 percent-plus-one of the
vote to get the nomination on the first round. That, however, is
extremely unlikely. So if Sanders is still ahead after the first round,
the super-delegates, mainly top Democratic Party officials appointed by
the DNC, would be given voting rights in a second round, which would
enable the DNC to “broker” — that is, select —the nominee of its choice.
There could, of course, be variations to this scenario; this is all
uncharted territory.
This is why the ruling class has Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New
York, waiting in the wings in the event the anti-Sanders campaign does
not succeed in reversing the “Bernie surge.” Bloomberg is rising rapidly
in the national polls as a result of his $350 million adversting
campaign. More and more political analysts are saying that Bloomberg
would be the probable nominee if there were a brokered convention. He is
being touted as the “only candidate who can go head-to-head against Trump.”
Such is the disarray — in fact, crisis — in the Democratic Party that
Krystal Ball, a political analyst and host of “Rising,” noted that, “If
Bernie enters the convention with the most delegates but not a majority,
a brokered convention that denies Sanders the nomination will destroy
the Democratic Party.”
This is not inconceivable. The U.S. political system — whose
institutions and structures sit atop the powder kegs of a capitalst
system in its death agony — is in turmoil, and anything can happen.
*The Fight for Independent Working Class Politics*
**
Today, with a resurgent, fighting spirit on the shop floors and in the
workplaces across the country, workers are demanding to be heard [see
article in this issue on the mounting resistance to the bipartisan war
on the working class]. They are fighting to take back their unions to
fend off the capitalists’ assault on their rights and working conditions.
In the political arena, however, the unions remain tied at the hip to
the Democratic Party. This is the number one obstacle to building
working-class power and advancing the interests of the working class and
all oppressed people. **
**
Helping to break labor’s ties of subordination to the bosses’ parties
has been the central concern of /The Organizer/ newspaper since we began
publishing in February 1991. The immense human and material resources of
the labor movement, we have affirmed time and again, must be placed at
the service of building a labor-based party rooted in the struggle of
the unions and all oppressed communities. Seeking to “reform” the
Democratic Party is a dead-end.
More than 700 leading labor and community activists have endorsed a
Statement — at the initiative of Labor and Community for an Independent
Party (LCIP) — that calls for running independent labor-community
candidates beginning in 2020 at the local and state level, as a step in
the effort to build a new independent mass labor-based political party.
/The/ Organizer is an active builder of LCIP, promoting an ongoing
discussion on independent politics in the /Unity and Independence/
supplement to our newspaper.
The LCIP Statement of Purpose lays out the campaign’s two-pronged
objectives:
“Our first objective is to promote running independent labor-community
candidates beginning in 2020 at a local and state level around a
platform that embraces workers’ and communities’ pressing demands. ...
“Our second objective is to promote widely in the trade union movement a
committee that advocates for a Labor-based Political Party. A resolution
adopted by the October 2017 national convention of the AFL-CIO affirmed
that, ‘whether the candidates are elected from the Republican or
Democratic Party, the interests of Wall Street have been protected and
advanced, while the interests of labor and working people have generally
been set back.’ A second convention resolution concluded that, ‘the time
has passed when we can passively settle for the lesser of two evils
politics.”
The independent candidates and coalitions, moreover, cannot be limited
to electoral politics; they must be fighting for the issues contained in
the platforms, projecting these struggles into the electoral arena. This
will help to cement the alliance between labor and the oppressed
communities.
Important concrete steps are being taken to promote this orientation.
On December 7, 2019, unionists and activists came together in Cleveland,
Ohio, at the "Break the Grip of the Two-Party System" regional
conference. They came from across the state of Ohio and were joined by
guest speakers from California and Maryland. The conference was
sponsored by the Labor Education and Arts Project (LEAP), in cooperation
with the Labor Fightback Network (LFN) and LCIP.
The call for the conference put forward the need to lay the foundations
of a labor-based party rooted in the unions and the Black and Latino
communities. It stated, in part:
"With inequality skyrocketing, healthcare and student debt mounting,
climate change roiling the planet, civil and human rights under assault,
and wages and benefits evaporating, a majority in the United States
(57%) are now calling for a major new political party (source: Gallup
Headlines, July 19, 2019). ...
“Labor’s recurring support for the Democratic Party has gotten us no
appreciable gains. It’s time for a change! It’s time for an effective
alternative. ... We invite union members and community activists across
the country to join us in building the foundations of a labor-based
political party that serves the interests of the working class and all
oppressed people.”
Discussions are currently under way in several states to establish
democratically run coalitions that run independent working class
candidates for local office this coming November.
At this writing, the LFN, the Ujima People's Progress Party, and LCIP
are discussing convening a national conference for independent working
class politics following the Democratic National Convention. /The
Organizer'/s Editorial Board would strongly support such an initiative.
Everything indicates that there will be big openings for moving the
discussion — and action — around independent working-class politics many
steps forward following the DNC in mid-July.
Such a national conference, of course, would need to incorporate the
fight for independent Black working-class political action. Nnamdi
Lumumba, convener of the Ujima People’s Progress Party, expressed well
the articulation of the struggle for independent Black working-class
politics and the struggle for a Labor-based party in his presentation to
the “Break the Grip” conference in Cleveland. He stated:
“We need to organize people around their own class interests and their
own interests as nationally oppressed people. Helping to break the
active or even passive support to the two capitalist, imperialist and
white supremacist parties has been a fundamental goal of our efforts as
the Ujima People’s Progress Party, as we seek to build a Black
workers-led electoral party.
“While we support a national labor party that recognizes both the shared
and independent struggles of oppressed and exploited workers on the job
and in their communities, we affirm that nationally oppressed people
have to center the discussion and self-organization around their own
specific oppression. ... Having said that, we need to create a
mass-based working-class party that says capitalism does not serve you,
imperialism does not serve you, and racism does not serve you.”
In our view, convening such a conference also could help spur efforts in
the coming weeks and months to begin running independent labor-community
candidates at the local level in November. The conference organizing
effort, in that sense, could serve as a national coordinating campaign
to support local efforts in a few key states.
* * * * * * * * * *
*(2) The U.S. Labor Movement and the 2020 Elections***
**
Workers in the United States over the past 150 years have created their
own class organizations — that is, trade unions — to advance their
interests as a class and as champions of the working-class majority.
While the unions have been weakened heavily by the policies of the trade
union misleaders, they nonetheless represent the only class instruments
available for struggle.
Today, with a resurgent, fighting spirit on the shop floors and in the
workplaces across the country, workers are demanding to be heard. They
are fighting to take back their unions to fend off the capitalists’
assault on their rights and working conditions.
In the political arena, however, the unions remain tied at the hip to
the Democratic Party. This is the number one obstacle to building
working-class power and advancing the interests of the working class and
all oppressed people. Two recent examples illustrate this point: (1) the
struggle to win single-payer healthcare and (2) the struggle to stop the
corporate “free trade” agenda.
*Trumka and Medicare for All*
On the first point: To the great consternation of the thousands of labor
activists in the Labor Campaign for Single-Payer Healthcare, AFL-CIO
President Richard Trumka announced on the eve of the first presidential
debate that singe-payer — aka Medicare for All — is an issue that
divides the Democratic Party candidates, and therefore the AFL-CIO would
not be advocating for single-payer during the election campaign. Trumka
also argued that many unions with good healthcare plans are not willing
to give up their plans for single-payer.
The Labor Campaign for Single Payer rallied its members and supporters
to sign an Open Letter to Trumka reminding him that support for
single-payer is the position of the AFL-CIO, adopted at two national
conventions. The Labor Campaign insisted that the AFL-CIO should assert
its independent position, rather than tail-end politicians who do not
support labor’s program for healthcare.
Mark Dudzic, national coordinator of the Labor Campaign, also addressed
Trumka’s last point on the “good union healthcare plans.” He stated,
“I would challenge any candidate who claims to want to preserve ‘good
union plans’ to come up with a single example of a union-negotiated
health plan that can match the comprehensive benefits; seamless
coverage; ability to choose providers; and lack of copays, deductibles,
out-of-pockets and other ‘cost sharing’ outlined in both the current
House and Senate versions of Medicare for All legislation.” (/Everybody
In!/, Winter 2019)
The Labor Campaign held a national strategy conference in Portland,
Oregon, in October that gathered more than 350 union officers and
members from across the country. Throughout the conference, participants
expressed their anger at Trumka’s about-face while pledging to continue
and deepen the fight for single-payer.
*Trumka and NAFTA 2.0*
**
On the second point, the fight against corporate “free trade”
agreements: During the 2016 campaign, Trump surged in the polls and won
the election, with majority support in the nation’s industrial
heartland, by lambasting NAFTA as the “worst trade deal in the country’s
history.” Once in office, he threatened his Mexican counterpart with
increased tariffs if Mexico didn’t accept his revised NAFTA agreement.
The final revamped version is 90% of the original NAFTA agreement, with
some additional language, mostly unenforceable, on labor rights. It’s an
agreement aimed at promoting the interests of U.S. transnational
corporations — just like its initial version. The January 29 issue of
the /Wall Street Journal /called the deal a “not-so-new NAFTA” and went
on to explain that, “USMCA, like NAFTA, guarantees duty-free trade and
economic integration.” These are the code words that provided the cover
for the economic and social devastation caused by NAFTA over the past 25
years.
The national AFL-CIO leadership acted again, as it did with
single-payer, as a surrogate to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the
Democrats. Pelosi, having been compelled to file impeachment articles
against Trump, stated that it was necessary to show that she and the
Democrats could co-legislate with the Republicans on issues they held in
common, such as trade; they were not obstructionists.
Rather than affirm labor’s opposition to corporate “free trade,” the
AFL-CIO leadership gave Pelosi what she requested. AFL-CIO President
Richard Trumka traveled to Mexico, met with Mexican President López
Obrador and Secretary of Labor María Luisa Alcalde, wrested some minor
concessions on labor-rights language, and returned home with the changes
requested by Pelosi. This, then, gave Pelosi the green light to approve
the signing of the agreement.
An environmental activist in the group 350.org <http://350.org>
expressed online her disgust with Pelosi for “handing Trump the election
in November on a silver platter” with her call to support Trump’s trade
deal. Seeing Trump sign the NAFTA 2.0 agreement, flanked by union
members in hard hats was indeed, repulsive. Here is a president who does
not hide his intention to destroy trade unionism in the United States
praising himself as a champion of working people. This sad spectacle was
enabled, shamefully, by Pelosi and Trumka.
* * * * * * * * * *
*(3) “It’s About the Economy, Stupid!”: Trump **and the “Success” of the
U.S. Economy*
**
Back in 1992, during the Bill Clinton and George H. Bush presidential
election, the slogan “It’s about the economy, stupid” was used to put
forth the proposition that all elections are about the economy. Trump
has appropriated this slogan. In his State of the Union speech on
February 4, Trump hailed the “success” of the economy under his watch,
pointing to the 3.6% unemployment rate (the lowest since the 1960s) and
a record-breaking stock market. He figures he can ride out the
impeachment fire-storm and coast to victory in November on the basis of
the economy alone. “That’s all people really care about,” he repeats
from time to time.
Not so fast.
According to Professor Michael Klein of Tufts University, “While the
unemployment rate is currently near a 50-year low of 3.6%, that
statistic doesn’t tell the full story and can mask a deterioration in
the labor market” (/Conversations/, April 2019). Klein notes that more
than 6 million working-age adults, discouraged, have stopped looking for
work and therefore are not included in the unemployment statistics. This
represents 3 percent of the workforce. The highest concentration of this
category of workers is in the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin,
Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
Then there’s the issue of under-employment, with 61 million people
technically employed but barely scraping by in mostly part-time (temp)
jobs. Long gone are full-time jobs with pensions and benefits. It’s now
mostly part-time (temp) jobs. It has reached the point where 80% of
workers are living paycheck to paycheck with little or no savings. In
the “economic boom” state of California, 54% of private-sector workers
have no savings for retirement. Labor economist Jack Rasmus argues that
the real unemployment rate hovers around 9 percent.
The full story shows that there are tens of millions of millennials and
youth indentured with $1.6 trillion in student debt who can’t get homes
or families even started.
The full story shows that the net worth of the median U.S. household has
dropped 36 percent over the past 20 years, involuntary part-time work
has grown 40 percent during the same period, and traditional pensions
(which used to cover half the workforce) now cover only one-fifth of the
workforce.
The full story shows that from 1973 to today, productivity went up 74
percent, but hourly compensation only went up 9.2 percent. It shows that
in 2019, three individuals had a combined wealth of $248.5 billion, the
same amount of wealth as the bottom 50 percent of U.S. households, or
160 million people. Meanwhile, the bottom 38 percent of American
households have “O” net worth.
What about the booming stock market?
According to CNBC on January 23, liberal billionaire George Soros took
aim at Trump, warning that, “the U.S. economy could be headed for
calamity as a result of the president’s efforts to juice American
business and stock prices ahead of the 2020 election.”
“The stock market, already celebrating Trump’s military success, is
breaking out to reach new heights,” Soros told guests at an informal
dinner in Davos. “But an overheated economy can’t be kept boiling for
too long.”
What Soros said is on the mark. Like Obama before him, Trump has been
able to stave off a recession artificially with increased public and
private indebtedness (Americans’ outstanding consumer debt has surpassed
$4 trillion for the first time, while the national debt has jumped to
$23 trillion), deregulation of financial markets (which has spurred
mega-speculation), massive increases in military expenditures ($735
billion in 2019), and other fiscal and monetary instruments.
All these measures have postponed the day of reckoning, only to make the
coming recession, or crash, all the more devastating. Now the economy is
overheated and boiling over. Some economists are predicting that a crash
could take place as early as 2020.
* * * * * * * * * *
*(4) 2019: A Year of Mounting Resistance to Bipartisan War at Home and
Abroad*
The year 2019 witnessed a mounting resistance by U.S. workers and youth
to the class war unleashed against them by the two wings of the bosses’
party — the Democrats and Republicans. Though the focus of the wrath has
been on Trump and his policies, the Democrats have not been let off the
hook, as they’ve been complicit all along with this assault on workers’
and democratic gains and rights, that is, by U.S. imperialism’s
permanent war agenda at home and abroad.
In the direct arena of class struggle, a resurgent labor movement has
kept up and expanded its strike wave from 2018. At this writing, 8,000
hospital workers in the Swedish Medical Center chain in Seattle,
represented by SEIU 1199NW, have walked off the job in a three-day
strike following nine months of fruitless negotiations. They are
opposing the cost-cutting measures imposed by management that adversely
impact both workers and their patients.
Educators in the “Red [Republican] States” of West Virginia, Oklahoma,
and Arizona — reconnecting with the fightback spirit of the Chicago
Teachers Union of 2012 — kicked it off, reclaiming the strike as an
instrument in their fight for better jobs and working conditions, but
also for improved public education for their students. Across the
country, even in the smallest and most remote towns, “Red for Ed”
rallies brought together hundreds of thousands of educators and parents
to oppose the privatization of education pushed by both ruling-class
parties.
Following the Red States’ example, educators in the “Blue [Democratic]
States” also reclaimed the strike and their unions. It began with the
United Teachers of Los Angeles and continued in Oakland, Denver,
Baltimore, and back to Chicago — to name only some of the main cities.
In every case the striking educators faced-off against Democratic Party
mayors and legislatures responsible for dismantling public schools
through charter schools and vouchers. In most cases they won significant
improvements in their contracts, with provisions aimed at enhancing “the
common good” — including language opposing charter schools and calling
for housing for educators and support for homeless students.
The educators’ strike wave, in turn, encouraged other workers, with
their unions, to engage in the fightback. Locomotive workers struck for
two months and beat back an attempt to impose a two-tier wage system.
Communication workers across the Southeast waged the biggest strike in a
decade in this region, winning wage increases and fending off
concessionary demands on healthcare and pensions. General Motors workers
stood firm in the longest national strike in the United States in
decades and made some modest gains. Mental health workers at Kaiser
organized one-day strikes and got the funding for positions that were
slated to be eliminated. All in all, the number of strikes and strikers
in 2019 reached 30-year highs.
The inherent power of the working class also was evidenced when Sara
Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, issued a
rousing call to labor leaders to prepare a general strike against
Trump’s budget shutdown. The strike call was not tested. The bugle call
was sufficient to compel Trump to retreat.
At a time when the mainstream media were predicting the decline and
collapse of the labor movement following the Supreme Court’s anti-union
ruling in the /Janus vs. AFSCME/ decision (which made the entire public
sector “right to work”), a significant sector of the labor movement has
stood up to to say, “We Are Not Going Away, We Are Fighting Back!”
The resistance also has been expressed in countless other arenas. The
fight against the bipartisan U.S. imperialist wars in the Middle East is
one such arena. On January 4 and 25, 2020, tens of thousands of people
marched in the streets in more than 90 U.S. cities to protest the U.S.
war in Iran.
In an interview conducted on January 26 with /The Organizer/ newspaper,
Ajamu Baraka, national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace,
explained the leadership role played by BAP in the recent antiwar
protests nationwide. He went on to describe the permanent war agenda
that has targeted Black people, in particular, stating, in part:
“The imperialist being waged against Black working class people — and
against the working class in general — in the United States requires
containment of any and all forces opposed to their agenda. This is
what's behind the increased State repression against working class Black
and Brown people, in particular.
“We see the antiwar issue as an issue of national oppression, just as we
see it, of course, as a class issue. We say to our friends and
colleagues, and to our people: Not one drop of blood from the working
class and the poor to defend the interests of the capitalist oligarchy!”
[See full interview in this issue.]
The resistance has been expressed, as well, in the fight in defense of
women’s rights, especially abortion rights (largest women’s marches in
U.S. history over the past three years); the fight against police
killings of Black youth and the school-to-prison pipeline; the fight for
immigrant rights (against the deportations and separation of families,
policies expanded under Obama); the fight in defense of democratic
rights on every level (voting rights, LGBTQ rights); the fight against
the destruction of the environment ... and more.
On every front, working people and the oppressed have said, “Enough Is
Enough!”
_________________________________________________________
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