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Monthly Archives: January 2021

One Crisis From Fascism

January 29, 2021
democracy, history, politics, strategy, unions
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One of the two major parties is becoming fascist!

We saw a small but ugly part of the Republican Party terrorizing Congress on January 6. Did you notice that Trump never disassociated from them? Have you noticed, since then, that the majority of the Republican Party has not disassociated from Trump? A majority of Republicans in Congress voted to overthrow the elections even AFTER the terror attack. Republican Congressmen are circling their wagons around Trump as the impeachment trial approaches. Devout trumpsters continue to be placed in Republican Party power. That includes their national party head!

Are the Democrats Worried?

Democrats are not worried, because Trump is dragging his party down as well as backward. Democrats may find them easy to beat in near future elections.

I’ve only seen a few actual statistics on how many people are leaving the Republican Party: 2,000 in Arizona,  5,855 in North Carolina, 4,600 in Colorado. We won’t get a clear idea how many are leaving before the next national election. Some states, like mine, don’t even keep track of party registration. However, we can assume that the Republican Party, which has been the minority in popular votes for several election cycles, will be smaller. Smaller and more fanatical.

Should We Be Worried?

Damnright we should be worried! Even with a somewhat diminished official membership, the Republican Party is still one of the two massive parties. America has gone from having two parties firmly committed to limited democracy to having only one. The Republican party of today has shown its willingness to dispense with democracy altogether. That is fascist!

Did Hitler and the Nazis have a majority party? No, they took power with a plurality of voters. In fact, they weren’t even considered an important electoral threat before the great depression began in 1929. But that one crisis was enough to catapault them to power.

America today is one crisis away from fascism.

What Can Be Done?

United workers are the only force capable of stopping fascism. Fortunately for America, we have a progressive union movement around which we can unite. That’s the course that should be followed. It’s the path to victory and a positive future.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” radio talk show every Saturday at 9AM Central Time. We podcast the radio show and another narrative every Wednesday morning on Soundcloud.com. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my old personal web site.

When We Failed

January 15, 2021
economy, history, politics, strategy, unions, women
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Book Review:

Windham, Lane, “Knocking on Labor’s Door. Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide.” University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2017

Capitalism is said to have begun in the middle of the 17th century in England. Workers and bosses have been fighting since then. Any period in that great long battle for democracy, dignity and a living wage would be an interesting period.

picketing

This author chose the 1970s in the United States. Certain underlying economic and social developments made it a period of interesting class warfare.

  • The civil rights movement and the women’s movement had created a more diversified, and more militant bunch of activists into organizable workplaces
  • The “American Century” of economic domination over the war-weary victims of World War II was noticeably beginning to end
  • America’s most devoted and seasoned labor activists had been driven away by the great witch hunt that began in 1946. Union militancy had turned into “business unionism.”

Union density peaked at about 35% of the workforce earlier, but unions still had about 20% of the workforce in the early 1970s. Union members had far better wages, better benefits, better pensions, and better jobs than the workforce at large. Part of the consequence of getting more for union members while ignoring other workers was increasing isolation for the unions.

Nevertheless, young people wanted to unionize. They fought hard. For the most part in the 1970s, they lost. One could argue that the events from 1947’s Taft Hartley law to 1970 had foreordained that labor would lose, but that isn’t Mr. Lane’s argument. It’s mine.

Lane argues that companies simply worked harder at union busting. They increasingly won government over to their side. By the end of the 1970s, when Ronald Reagan was elected, the downhill slide was evident to everyone. In 1995, maybe a little late, the AFL-CIO started trying to adjust to the new situation.

One shining light in Lane’s book is the early success of an organization called “9 to 5.” They organized women to fight for the workplace rights that the larger women’s movement had won through federal legislation. The idea of organizing outside the control of government authorities like the National Labor Relations Board was a good one, and they had some early successes. However, it didn’t last.

In fact, most of the hopes that young activists may have had for union organizing in the 1970s were crushed. This is not a happy book to read. I wish he had chosen the 1990s, when American labor began to show some real promise.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” talk show every Saturday at 9AM Central Time. We podcast it and “Workers Beat Extra” dialogue on Wednesdays on Soundcloud.com. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my old personal site.

Facts in the Way?

January 12, 2021
politics, strategy
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The last caller on my radio talk show Saturday said, “I don’t know what to believe.” Then we ran out of time. Nearly always, I am able to draw out the right wing critics who call. Within 4 or 5 exchanges, their underlying motivation is exposed. I realize, though, that a lot of people, sincere and insincere, are saying that same thing during the Trump era of “alternate facts.”

The woman who doesn’t know what to believe launched her criticism against me by revealing that the Washington Post, which I had quoted earlier as one of my sources of news, is owned by the richest man in the world. In other words, whatever news I had announced was compromised, because it came from people who are under the control of Jeff Bezos.

If we had more time, I would have drawn her out. I’m pretty sure she would eventually have admitted that she does know what to believe. She just doesn’t want to believe it. More importantly, she doesn’t want anybody else to believe it. I’ve had similar puzzles written into the comment sections of my Facebook posts. Some of them say that the January 6th rioters weren’t really Trump supporters, but disguised Trump haters who were trying to discredit him! That’s too far fetched to even consider, but major spokespersons, including the Attorney General of Texas, are saying it.

Some of the other comments to my Facebook posts kind of try to chip away at the facts. “The rioting crowd included pro- and anti- Trump people” one guy said. But the biggest ruse of all is just to change the subject. In the discussion about the riot, one of my perpetual detractors accused me of being for gun control. Another one said that nothing I had to say could be right because I hadn’t “accepted Jesus Christ.”

I’m leading up to a point here. The point is that some Trump supporters, maybe most of them, just want to believe whatever they want to believe. Facts are just in their way.

This may seem like a digression, but I also noticed on Facebook that somebody from a national Catholic organization said that Catholics should take their share of the blame for the assault on democracy. I rather agree, but not because of the instances he quoted.

The problem of selective belief is much broader than Trumpism. There are lots of selective believers on the anti-Trump side, too. A lot of them are religious. Religion, all religion including the Catholic religion, encourages us to believe things that we know could not be true. They call it “faith.” I call it misleading, dangerous, and often hurtful.

Truth comes to us directly through our senses. “Not truth,” the nonsense people prefer to believe, comes to us through our imagination. We all develop a set of prejudices that we usually refer to as “common sense.” For most decisions, it’s pretty helpful. But it’s a great hindrance when things happen to us that haven’t happened before. We need to consult the facts, not our store of prejudices.

All philosophy falls under one of two headings: materialism and idealism. The materialist believes facts and science. The idealist believes whatever they want. Individuals cross the line between the two philosophies depending on what is at stake. They might believe science when stricken with a deadly disease; they might fall back on superstition when problems are less urgent.

But what does all this have to do with January 6th and the woman who called the radio station?

Everyone with internet connection has seen reams of facts from all kinds of sources about the January 6th riot. They know what happened, what happened beforehand and what happened afterward. For some, their layer of prejudices is more important than facts. So they challenge the information sources and say, “I don’t know what to believe.”

As for Jeff Bezos, surely the woman realizes that virtually ALL, not just the Washington Post, commercial media in America are owned by the very wealthy.  It’s important to keep that in mind and be suspicious, but it doesn’t prevent people from being able to make up their minds about factual developments. They can decide what to believe. They just don’t want to.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” talk show every Saturday at 9AM Central Time. We podcast it, along with “Workers Beat Extra” commentary on Soundcloud.com. If you are curious about what I really believe, look at my old personal web site.

Don’t Scream, Analyze

January 8, 2021
chauvinism, civil rights, democracy, economy, history, politics, strategy
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The rich rulers of America have not chosen fascism at this time. That’s the only reason we don’t have it yet.

Today’s endless stream of denunciations of the January 6th fascist riots in Washington are excellent as far as they go. All of them blame Donald Trump. Some of them call for his removal. Some call for the removal of Senator Cruz and the other Republicans within Congress who provided the “legitimate” cover for the rioters and looters. One of those Republicans made videos of himself breaking into the Capitol with the rioters!

But every outraged denunciation I have read so far misses the point. The January 6th fascist uprising is just one of many such outrageous political acts around the world. There is a universal fascist movement, and it is gaining power.

Like any political development, there are reasons for the burgeoning fascism. Those who lay the blame on individual demagogues, even truly disgusting opportunists like Donald Trump, haven’t made a proper analysis. Without a proper analysis, a practical remedy is impossible.

The root of the crisis is unbounded inequality. The prevailing economic system is making the rich obscenely richer and the poor even poorer. Logic infers that the remedy is a different system, but there has been inadequate leadership in that direction. Instead, the world’s discontented are being channeled toward racism and supernationalism.

Instead of understanding that the system we live in can only make inequality worse and does not have the capacity to do otherwise, we are told to blame peoples of other nations, ethnicities or skin coloring.

Racists rioted and attacked their capitol in Germany last August. They rioted and attacked their capitol in Washington in January.

As we live in the U.S., we must primarily concern ourselves with the fascists here at home. They are not so hard to understand, because their political tendency has always existed and was made most clear during the American Civil War. They lost that war but won the peace and continued to dominate people of color.

Their political home was the Democratic Party until the civil rights movement became victorious (1965). After that, the Dixiecrats re-aligned with the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan announced his run for the presidency in a notorious racist town, Philadelphia, Mississippi. Powerful Senator Phil Graham of Texas quickly changed from Democrat to Republican, as did many other reactionaries.

But the Republican alliance of rulers and racists was always unstable. It only needed the pinch of a worsening crisis and an unstable demagogue like Donald Trump to split the coalition with violence. The racists ransacked the Capitol, the rulers piously tried to pull their skirts up out of the muck they had created. In the immediate future, they will likely emphasize their other political party.

That is what happened on January 6th, and it is far from over.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s ‘Workers Beat’ program at 9AM Central Time every Saturday. We also podcast “Workers Beat Extra” on Soundcloud.com. If you are curious about what I really think, take a look at my personal web site