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Why Are They Lying?

January 25, 2017
economy, elections, history, politics, strategy
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Trump is blasting his prevarication machine, and most people think he is “out of control.”

mad-hatter

The pundits and columnists seem confused by all the “alternate facts” blasting out. See, for example,
Trump’s disregard for the truth threatens his ability to govern
Dallas Morning News

But there is method to his madness

As I’ve said before on this blog, watch out for major attacks against democracy during this political period. They can’t fix the economy for the voters, so their only alternative is to make sure the voters’ power is diminished BEFORE the 2018 Mid-Term elections.

Trump and his minions are repeating this nonsense about millions of undocumented workers voting because he is building a case for more voter suppression. 

As Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels taught us long ago, the most outlandish lies will be believed if they are repeated often enough. From his “bully pulpit” the presidency, Trump can repeat a lie many many times.

Liars are blaming liars

The “responsible” journalists, of course, are doing what they should do today and calling him a liar. But who will believe them in these days of failing trust? Who will believe newspersons who basically echo the beliefs of their six giant corporate employers? The most popular television news service, Fox, is by far the least honest.

The newspersons are already largely discredited, they largely did it to themselves. And Trump is discrediting them more and more by repeating, more and more, that they aren’t to be trusted. That’s the second part of Trump’s conspiracy against democracy.

Will it work?

One is tempted to say that a national prevarication campaign won’t work because the people have their own access to information, particularly through the internet and particularly through social media. One is tempted to say that even the discredited newspersons, if they stick to their guns, will be believed by a significant part of the population. BTW, I wouldn’t count on their sticking to their guns. People work for whoever signs their paycheck.

The big lie technique worked for Goebbels. It worked for Hitler. Millions died for their lies. Whether or not it will work now and here in America depends on us.

–Gene Lantz

I’m still on knon.org radio and 89.3 FM every Saturday at 9 in North Texas. If you want to know what I really think, click here.

 

Is the Working Class Staying Alive?

January 12, 2017
economy, history, politics, unions
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Book review: Cowie, Jefferson, Stayin’ Alive. The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New Press, New York, 2010.

travolta

According to this author, the American working class met its death in the 1970s. Some of it was suicide, some of it was homicide, some of it was chronic depression.

He goes to great length to talk about how America’s powerful labor unions lost their clout, but he spends a lot more time and energy talking about the culture of the 1970s. “Saturday Night Fever” gets about as much play as the Hardhat attack against anti-war protestors.

Combining political and cultural changes isn’t a new approach. One of my favorite books is George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight. Labor and Culture in the 1940s. University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1994. Lipsitz explains where labor went wrong, 1940s and 1950s, while Cowie merely comments at length on the resulting shipwreck in the 1970s. Of the two books, Lipsitz’s is by far the stronger and more informative.

Cowie weaves a fascinating tale with very few heroes, but some stunning villains. One of the biggest reasons given for labor’s downfall is AFL-CIO President George Meany, who deliberately split the Democratic Party and destroyed the hopes of presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972. The vivid description of these events is the strength of Cowie’s book, but its weakness is that he doesn’t explain why. He says that Meany hurt the union movement very substantially because he was a “cold warrior” who didn’t want a peace candidate to carry the Democratic Party standard. But he doesn’t explain why Meany was such a “cold warrior.” Maybe Cowie didn’t know.

Back in those days, and for some time before and after, the AFL-CIO got a lot of money from the CIA. That’s why Meany was a cold warrior.

Cowie also explains that a lot of labor’s strength disappeared when steel plants were shuttered and when other American industries went overseas. He doesn’t say why. He doesn’t explain that international competition had recovered from World War II by the early 1970s and American corporations were forced to compete with excellent German and Japanese imports.  Maybe he didn’t know.

Cowie explains that labor was blindsided by clever politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He explains that they made mistakes of commission and omission and they just weren’t farsighted leaders. He didn’t say why. He didn’t explain what Lipsitz’s book had explained so well, that the militant leadership of the American union movement had been expelled and blacklisted during the post war witch hunt. Maybe he didn’t know.

The unions may have squandered their basic strength and their political clout in the 1970s, or at least they may have done better than they did. But the inference that the American working class just evaporated is just wrong. People still work, nearly all of us still work, and the working class is just what it was and has always been — the only people who can stand up to capitalism.

Cowie’s great strength is in vivid description. Whether you lived through the 1970s or are just curious about how things got as bad as they did for working people, this is a good book to read. The AFL-CIO promotes it through Union Communications Service. That’s how I found it and I’m glad I did.

–Gene Lantz

you can hear me on knon.org or 89.3fm at 9AM Central Time every Saturday. If you want to know what I really think, click here.

 

Pick Your Fightback Strategy (Soon!)

January 9, 2017
economy, elections, politics, strategy
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I’ve been investigating the various strategies for dealing with the upcoming Trump government.

williamskennethmlk

Rowlett activist Kenneth Williams

The best was the simplest: “Get active, because leadership will emerge from the struggle!” Kenneth Williams said that on my radio show, “Workers Beat” Saturday at 9.

Another guest on the show, historian Max Krochmal who was talking about his new book, Blue Texas,  offered a lot of encouragement when he pointed out that Texans have organized successfully under much more difficult circumstances than we face today.

Here’s what Franklin Delano Roosevelt advised in the depths of the Great Depression, “Do something. If it turns out to be wrong, do something else. But, above all, do something!”

Several Strategies Are Being Offered

So far, I’ve had opportunities to check out strategies offered by the Communications Workers of America, Our Revolution, Indivisible, Democratic Socialists of America, Communist Party USA, and just about everybody I know. I like all of them and none.

A Union Idea

The CWA held a webinar on the topic of the upcoming Senate confirmations of Mr Trump’s cabinet nominees. They explained how terrible they are, of course, but we knew that. Their idea is to get the Democrats to delay the confirmation while we use our union networks, social media, and informal communications to rouse the population. In the short term, it sounded pretty good.

The Bernie Sandinistas

For over the weekend of January 7, I sat through about 7 hours of education, planning, and organization with Our Revolution in Dallas. I missed the first 5 hours. I was a little bit surprised to hear them talking almost exclusively about winning elections and conducting successful lobbying campaigns. Only one person mentioned street actions, and I actually had whispered the idea to him before he spoke.

I don’t think it’s because they were excluding street actions, I think it’s because lobbying and election work are what originally brought them together and, for many of these young activists, it’s the only kind of political work they’ve ever had.

At the end of the second day, I asked if I could make a proposal. I proposed that we support activities around the coming MLK birthday. It passed unanimously, enthusiastically, and with no discussion. Then they went right back to talking about elections and lobbying.

The Bernie people, where I live, are the largest, youngest, and most optimistic group in local politics. I was delighted to see them setting up a regional structure and electing officers. I understand that we’re going to be something of a model for organizing Our Revolution nationwide. I have high hopes.

“Indivisible” Plans to Copy the Tea Party

I saw some of this on Rachel Madow, and there were two guys at the Our Revolution meeting promoting a pamphlet and web page called “Indivisible.” It is apparently made up of former congressional staffers who had firsthand experience with the obstructionist tactics of the Tea Party during the Obama years. They recommend that Democrats do the same thing to Mr Trump.

One of the presenters said, “If we want to preserve what we are used to, our top priority needs to be… Use obstruction and delay to minimize the damage that we know is coming.” He explained that the one thing the Tea Party had going for them was the fact that they were organized.

One could drive a truck through the hole in this argument: Tea Party success came from their access to big money, not their organizational genius.

Our role in this strategy is to lobby the Democrats to get them to act like Tea Partiers. I’d  say it’s a whole lot better than doing nothing.

Democratic Socialists Are Fired Up

The Democratic Socialists of America, an offshoot from the old Socialist Party during the Vietnam War, have always wanted to take over the Democratic Party. They still do. Bernie Sanders got them close in 2016, so they are growing in numbers and enthusiasm today. If Bernie’s, and labor’s, candidate to lead the Democratic National Committee, Keith Ellison, gets the job, it will add even more credibility to this venerable political strategy.

Meanwhile, DSA activists are moving faster and with more certainty than just about anybody. Whether or not one agrees, long term, that the Democratic Party is going to transform into a working people’s party, anybody who craves action would do well to follow DSA.

Communist Party, USA Has Been Changing

I read a series of articles on People’s World, which is “sort of” associated with CPUSA, and sort of not. The writer recommended fighting the Trump government on all fronts and with all strategies. That makes a tremendous amount of sense, but doesn’t winnow down the opportunities very much. If you recommend everything, is it very much different from recommending nothing?

But CPUSA and its worldwide network justly claim to have more experience fighting fascism than anybody. Their basic text, Dmitrov’s “Against War and Fascism,” is the best exposition of what fascism is and how to put together a united front against it. Those are lessons from the 1930s, of course, and not directly applicable to today. I don’t think CPUSA thinks fascism has come to America, but they point out that there are certainly trends in that direction.

Historically, the communists would have put a lot more emphasis on workers and the working class. They would have had a clear aim of eventually taking power through class struggle. Nowadays, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference between them and the larger, more socially acceptable, less red-baited, legitimized-by-Bernie, DSA. Both of them say what Kenneth Williams said at the beginning of this article: “get busy!”

My Two Cents

I’ve been thinking through this strategy thing a lot. It’s the reason I started this blog.

I think there are things missing from all of the suggestions above. They don’t start with a solid analysis of what’s wrong, they are basically short-term solutions, and they tend to pine for the “good old days.”

What’s actually wrong is that American capitalism is at the end of its rope. It can’t deliver the goods any more, hasn’t been able to for some time. It isn’t fascist yet, but it’s going that way and the only thing that can stop the process is you and me.

The good old days weren’t that good, and nobody but nobody wants to go back to them. Americans want to go ahead to something better and they won’t settle for anything less.

Voters haven’t turned racist or backward, they’re just desperate. A lot of them voted for Trump for the same reason they voted for Obama — anything other than what we have!

As I said in an earlier article, there are no long term solutions for those of us caught in this system.

That’s why we need long-term plans for fundamental change. The goals are in Bernie’s book — things like free education, decent health care, democracy, and all the many fine things he explained so well. I think Bernie has set the goals very well, the argument should be over how to achieve them. For that, we have to organize everybody, and we organize through successful struggles.

Each of us need to adopt long term goals like those Bernie set down. We need to recognize that elections and lobbying are not the only way to struggle and that, in fact, real change is more likely to come from organized economic activity than from generous politicians. That means that fundamental fights over economic benefits weigh more heavily than purely social questions. It means that workplace organizations mean more than idealistic social groupings.

We have to analyze our own resources and opportunities so we can pick the struggles we join, even if we have to skip some of them.

Then we have to get busy and organize. Leadership will emerge from struggle.

–Gene Lantz

KNON hasn’t fired me yet, so I’m still on the radio at 9 AM every Saturday. 89.3FM and knon.org. If you are curious about what I really think, click here.

Long View: There Is No Solution

January 3, 2017
economy, elections, history, strategy
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We can better understand the system we live in by taking a long historical view.

rottenapple

Our economic and government system, while a great improvement over its predecessors, rotted to its core by early in the last century.

After that time, there were no solutions for the society as a whole. There were, however, solutions for certain wealthy people.

World War I and World War II, although they cost millions of workers’ lives and reversed a great deal of progress, turned out pretty good for the wealthy people of the United States. They enjoyed a prosperous, though temporary, period after each successful war. The people in the nations that lost suffered terribly, of course, but as I said, there were solutions for certain wealthy people after the 20th century began.

That so-called “solution,” world war, isn’t available to them any more because of nuclear proliferation.

Some time during the 1970s, the “American Century” of post war prosperity began to wane. Working Americans haven’t done particularly well since then, and have in fact begun to slide backward. The temporary economic “solutions” worked only for the very wealthy, and they continue that way today. Some people call this a crisis of capitalism.

The Crisis is Natural

If an economic system has to sell its products for more than they cost, and if the workers of a given nation do not have the resources to pay, then the products have to be sold somewhere else. The wealthy owners have to compete for that “somewhere else.” Since the 1970s, the wealthy owners of the United States have stopped winning that competition. It shows in all the statistics. Their only way to beat out their competitors is to reduce the wages, benefits, and social benefits of poorer people. That’s what they have been doing and what they continue to do.

Deregulation, Privatization, Corporate Welfare and Outsourcing are Necessary Props

To prop up the wealthy, to provide a “solution” for the wealthy (not for us), they cause their government to deregulate their businesses, privatize the socially-owned sector, hand out tax breaks and outright gifts to corporations, and outsource work to countries where wages and environmental regulations are more advantageous to them.

It’s Temporary

Even though the wealthy people are able to get their government to cooperate in their economic “solutions,” the results are only temporary, because the wealthy people in other countries are doing the same thing. It’s a competition usually, nowadays, called, “the race to the bottom.” That’s what we call it. They probably call it “good business.”

Things get temporarily better for the wealthy class while everybody else suffers.

Comes the Trump Government

President-elect Donald J Trump will accelerate all of the “solutions” listed above, solutions only for the wealthy and not for us, and they will be, if anything, temporary fixes. The crisis will continue, there is no way to turn it around because the international competition will still be there.

No matter what reforms we may attempt, the overall competitive system will remain rotten and will continue to get rottener.

We need a new system.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on knon.org and 89.3FM in Dallas at 9 AM every Saturday. If you want to know what I really think, look at my life’s lessons

Why Bernie Sanders’ Wonderful Book Is No Good

December 26, 2016
civil rights, economy, education, elections, history, politics, strategy, unions
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Bernie Sanders, “Our Revolution—A Future to Believe In.” St Martin’s Press ebook, September 26, 2016. Available from Amazon Books and on Kindle

sandersberniefragmented

S’Wonderful, S’Marvelous!

This must-read book details two important political contributions:

  1. A blow-by-blow account of the miraculous Bernie presidential campaign
  2. Detailed explanation of legislation needed to rescue and advance the people of our nation

The account of the campaign answers the question about how they managed to get so far toward the Democratic Party nomination when they started with virtually nothing and refused to sell out to big contributors. Most of America and even Bernie seem to be surprised at how well people responded to a truthful, direct, approach to America’s actual needs. It’s an inspiring story that needs to be studied.

Part Two, “An Agenda for a New America: How We Transform Our Country” details the problems we face and proposes practical solutions in the form of legislation needed. In many cases, Bernie Sanders had already proposed proper legislation in Congress. In general, his proposals are designed to:

  • Restore and advance democracy
  • Remedy injustices, including racial injustices
  • Restore equality
  • Fix the economy

But It’s No Good

The big problem with Bernie’s wonderful book is the last line, “September 26, 2016.” He completed the book before Donald Trump’s upset victory for the presidency and before Republicans completed their take-over of all three branches of the federal government plus the majority of state governments.

So what do you do with wonderful proposals for legislation when progressive legislation has almost no possibility of passage? What do you do with an inspirational story of a hopeful electoral campaign when our foundation of democracy is crumbling?

Apparently, Bernie thought, on September 26, 2016, what most Americans thought – that the Democrats would have a big victory on November 8. The glaring fact that they didn’t, and the anti-democratic trends already underway, put new perspective on politics in 2017. Bernie’s thoughts of September 2016 are certainly good to know, and actually kind of miraculous to behold, but not much actual use, are they?

We’re going to have to do some thinking of our own.

Some Positive Suggestions

Rather than leave off on such a negative note, let me make a couple of general proposals that might be helpful in 2017

  1. Electoral politics is not the only form of struggle. The most important power that working people have is our ability to withhold our economic cooperation. It is essential, therefore, to dedicate ourselves to organizing workers – to vote, yes, but to work together in other ways too.
  2. We may think that history only repeats itself, but it doesn’t. Bernie Sanders (and also Donald Trump) campaigned on the idea of re-setting the calendar to some earlier date, but we can’t go backward even if we tried. We have an entirely new situation that needs entirely new proposals. For example, we don’t need to fix the Electoral College or even the electoral system as it exists. We need direct participation in government decisions, and for the first time in human history, direct participation is now possible!
  3. Economies can’t be re-set to earlier times. Sanders, and other writers, seem to want to move us backward to pre-Reagan days. Trump apparently wants us some time before the Civil War. We actually need proposals that account for our present situation and then advance into a better future. For example, if certain financial institutions are “too big to fail,” Bernie Sanders suggests that they are “too big to exist” and need to be downsized to the levels of the 1990s. With our present technological abilities, we don’t need them in the downsized version either. If they are “too big to fail,” certain banks and insurance companies need to be taken over and run for the public good.

We must be grateful to Bernie Sanders and others who have taught us so much. A great future awaits!

–Gene Lantz

Hear “Workers Beat” on KNON radio, 89.3FM and knon.org every Saturday at 9 CST

Click here if you want to know what I really think

Democracy — the Main Battleground

November 30, 2016
chauvinism, civil rights, economy, elections, history, politics, strategy
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I urge all progressives to fight reactionaries on every front, but the main one is going to be the battle to save basic democracy in America.

trumpinfrastructure

Simple logic:

  1. The idea that Trump’s policies are going to make life better for Americans is laughable
  2. Given the present system of American politics, the Republicans will not maintain power through the 2018 mid-term elections
  3. They know it
  4. The only way for the anti-worker forces to maintain power is by scrapping democracy
  5. Therefore, progressives must fight for basic democracy now

Will Trump Improve Life for Americans?

Economist Josh Bivens has a good summary of expected Trump policies on line. It doesn’t look good.

Mr. Hitler made immediate improvements in the German economy by massive infrastructure programs and by going to war. Will Mr Trump be able to do the same?

The U.S. Congress has blocked infrastructure programs all the way through the Obama Administration, even though they would have greatly shortened the long recession. It is unlikely that they would allow Mr Trump to implement anything good along those lines, because their main commitment is to the barons of finance, not construction businesses and certainly not to the American workers. Actually, I’d love to be proven wrong on this.

Mr Hitler had tremendous early successes in his war-making, but that was largely because the Great Powers did nothing to rein him in. They thought he would put an end to communism before he struck at any major capitalist countries. It is doubtful that Mr Trump will be able to use war to improve the American economy in any meaningful sense, and it is unlikely that he will receive cooperation from the other major capitalist countries in whatever adventures he undertakes.

The world wars that resulted from the economic crises of the 20th century are not considered available as a “solution” to economic and political crisis today, because of the imminent destruction of the planet.

Capitalist economies have always suffered from phases of “ups” and “downs.” “Down” is already overdue after the long recovery during the Obama Administration. The current expectation of new “tight money” policies, combined with Mr Trump’s new tax cuts for the rich and deregulation policies will create an immediate and painful crisis for working people.

Hard Times Will Likely Dominate the Mid-Term Elections

If one assumes that our American levels of partial democracy continue, it is unlikely that the party in power will fare well in 2018. In fact, the party in power usually does very poorly in mid-term elections.

None of this is a secret, neither to progressives nor to reactionaries.

What Can We Expect about Democracy?

Since around 1980, American democracy has already taken hard knocks at the hands of Republicans. Unions were assailed in every imaginable way. The Voting Rights Act was gutted, big money was sanctified by the Supreme Court, Republican redistricting largely overcame the popular vote, and voter suppression schemes were put into effect all over the nation.

The Obama Administration fought to maintain democracy, but does anyone think the Trump Administration will? If Mr Trump were to make outlandish anti-democratic Executive Orders, for example, who in government would oppose him? Not the legislative branch that is already in the hands of Republicans, and not the judiciary which will return to a reactionary anti-worker majority as soon as Mr Trump makes his first appointment.

Mr Hitler, it is often pointed out, won an election without winning the popular vote. How did he stay in power? How will today’s reactionaries try to stay in power?

Get ready to organize and fight!

–Gene Lantz

Listen to “Workers Beat” at 9 CST every Saturday morning on 89.3FM and http://knon.org

If you want to know what I really think, look at my life’s lessons site

Do You Have Some Ideas on What to Do?

November 12, 2016
chauvinism, economy, elections, history, politics, strategy, unions
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On the day after the election, small groups of demonstrators hit the streets in a number of American cities. I just got a request that I join a call for a general strike — a national work stoppage — on Inaugural Day. I call this kind of non-thinking acting-out “knee jerk activism.” It’s more traditionally called “ultra-leftism” and has been correctly labeled, “the infantile disorder.”

strike1877

We had a tremendous general strike in 1877

Union activists are used to hearing people call “strike!” when they have no idea whether or not the tactic would work. A lot of them don’t care. If a union called a strike every time some hothead wanted one, we’d get a lot of people fired for nothing. When my union ran a successful 15-month “work to rule” contract fight, there were people calling “strike” instead of doing the hard work of a long struggle. The three of them that I knew personally were all promoted to foreman immediately after the union won. They were company stooges, as it turned out. The company knew that the union might win the long battle, but we would almost certainly have lost a strike.

If you’re reading along in Facebook, you’ve seen lots of responses to the Trump election victory, and nearly all of them are way less than helpful. Some are silly, and some are outright dangerous!

First, Figure Out What Happened

Nearly all the pollsters were wrong about the election results. The best single explanation I’ve seen was in a “letter to editor” in today’s Dallas newspaper. A guy named, I think, Roland Young wrote that when the pollsters called, “We lied!” Some of Trump’s voters may have been too ashamed to confess.

But the best explanation of the pollsters’ failure is that their approaches are based on previous history, and the 2016 presidential race was, to state it modestly, unique.

Are Americans Mostly Chauvinists?

Elections are the best evidence we have of the national character. If the Electoral College puts Donald Trump in office, does that mean we’re mostly chauvinists like him? Actually, more than half the electorate voted against him, and only 56% of all eligible voters went to the polls at all. The ones that went voted for marijuana and higher minimum wages by much better margins than they voted for Trump.

Everyone who voted for Trump did not do so because they wanted to express their chauvinism. They surely didn’t vote for him because they think his far-flung ideas are actually going to solve America’s problems.

What They Wanted Was Change

I think it is fair to say that they voted for change. We see this in the unions all the time. Members who haven’t taken the time to investigate the candidates in union elections will nevertheless vote to “throw the bums out” against whoever is in office. Next election, you can’t find anyone who admits they voted for the incumbents and it’s “throw the bums out” again. After a lifetime in the public eye, and because of the outright duplicity of the national Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton was a perfect target for that kind of sentiment.

People voted for Trump over Clinton for the same reason that they had voted, in 2008, for Obama over Clinton. Change.

People voted for Donald Trump because they are dissatisfied with life in America and they don’t know what else to do about it.

I don’t exactly blame them. I’m dissatisfied too, but I know what to do about it.

Educate and Organize the Working People

Media pundits are blaming “white blue-collar workers” for electing Donald Trump. His voters were probably Anglos all right, but they didn’t represent the working class. The working class is the solution, not the problem. The progressive leadership of the AFL-CIO is head and shoulders above any Democratic or Republican Party politician. For now, it’s better to follow them than Bernie Sanders, too.

If we’re willing to do the long hard work of educating and organizing America’s workers, we could win elections. We could win strikes, even general strikes!

But it will take some work.

–Gene Lantz

Click here if you want to know what I really think!

 

 

“Runaway Inequality” Has a Missing Chapter

September 29, 2016
economy, history, politics, strategy, unions
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I’ve been raving about this book for months, but it has a giant hole in it. There’s no treatment of what’s happening to the right to retire!

emmettseniorcrowd

Senior Day at the Texas Capitol

I’ll put some of my notes about his fine book at the end. In a nutshell it explains that inequality went wild once the American workers movement — especially the unions — allowed themselves to be isolated and neutralized. Around 1980 — after the unions had chased away all the communists and all the international friends and all the progressive movement and, finally, each other — the corporations and their government lackeys were able to privatize, deregulate, un-tax themselves, attack progressive organizations and subvert democracy at will. They’re still doing it even though the weakened unions started wising up in 1995.

Conquerors attack their enemies at their weakest point. That means that the general attack against all working Americans tended to focus on the most vulnerable. In our case, the most vulnerable are the children and the seniors. The book talks a little about the corporate onslaught against public schools, but it doesn’t mention seniors at all!

Fight for the Right to Retire

The right to retire was put on firm footing in America with the passing of the Social Security Act in 1935. Medicare/Medicaid was added before 1980 Reaganomics became policy. In the 1960s, Americans could look forward to resting their “golden years” on a three-legged stool of personal savings, pensions, and Social Security. Now in 2016, the first two have been decimated and Social Security is under multiple threats every time Congress is in session.

In 2002, the new and progressive AFL-CIO leadership put together the Alliance for Retired Americans. It consists of a lobbying office in Washington DC and far-flung supporters here and there around the nation. We usually meet in union halls and most of our initial supporters are union retirees, but we reach out to all seniors and, for that matter, anybody and everybody who wants to save the right to retire in America before it’s too late!

In 2006, we faced a major challenge because President Bush made it his top priority to privatize Social Security. He came close, but we stopped him. Since 1980, there have been a succession of crazy proposals to do this and do that with retiree benefits. All of them are obscured in language, but in the final analysis they all mean cuts for seniors.

Around 1986, it became possible for corporations to disregard their responsibility for pensions in bankruptcy proceedings. In 2015 Congress decided that trustees of multi-employer pensions could solve their budget problems by cutting retiree benefits. The budget for administering Social Security has been cut so severely that many offices had to be shut down and many counselors laid off. Corporations and anti-worker politicians come up with some new attack every few weeks.

Here in Dallas, voters will find on their November 8 ballot a proposal to slash the pensions of City employees. The Dallas newspaper already endorsed it as sound policy!

It’s fight or die!

–Gene Lantz

Click here for more of these ideas

Some notes from the book:

Leopold, Les, “Runaway Inequality. An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice.” Foreword by Chris Shelton, President of CWA. Labor Institute Press, 817 Broadway, NY NY 10003, 2015

I think I put 3 references to this book on genelantz.org. I found it very exciting that CWA was holding classes and giving away copies of a book on more-or-less radical economics.

pg2 (shelton) “We’ll see data showing that elected officials rarely act on the agenda most Americans support.”

pg4: “Most of all, the media turns a blind eye to the fact that we live in a capitalist system.”

pg4: “…there is, in fact, a fundamental conflict between employees and owners, between the rich and the rest of us.”

pg5 “Economic elites will only give up power and wealth when they’re forced to do so by a powerful social movement.”

pg29-30 (Leopold) list of reasons for economic crisis of late 1970s, including competition from industrialized countries.

pg194 “…American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts.”

pg204 “This policy of military Keynesianism led to an unofficial partnership between the government, large corporations and labor unions. These groups worked together (more or less) to prosecute the Cold War.”

pg 288 “…Wealth inequality and unionization levels are intertwined.”

pg288: List of “what happened to unions” begins, “The decline of unionism started when unions started cooperating with the government ‘anti-red’ efforts during the McCarthy era.”

The book doesn’t actually generalize, but it does show that the entire process of rising  inequality was a result of union isolation —  first from the world movement, then from the domestic progressive movements here at home (anti-war, civil rights, etc) and finally, with the merger of the AFL and the CIO, from one another. “Solidarity” was still a good song, but it wasn’t really practiced 1947-1995 in the American union movement.

pg 289: “…Unions and the rest of us are on the losing side of a gigantic class war — a war that we have to recognize, discuss and address if unions are to grow again.”

 

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Our Labor is All We Have

September 11, 2016
economy, strategy, unions
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Yesterday, I was given the opportunity to help striking workers.

symfrenchhorn

The Fort Worth Symphony Musicians are on strike. A couple of the leaders were on my radio show, then I went over to Ft Worth for their rally, march, and picket last evening. I was so proud of them for their courage!

The number of important labor strikes diminished after Reagan was elected in 1980, and has almost disappeared today. They are all tangled up with government supervision and extremely difficult to carry off.

Withholding Our Labor Is Our Weapon

The truth is, all we have is our labor, and almost the only real economic power we have is to withhold our labor. That doesn’t always mean striking. It might mean some kind of slowdown or “work to rule.” it might mean a sickout or “blue flu” day.

There are laws closely regulating what you can and can’t do on any kind of concerted action. That’s because our enemies, the bosses and their government lackeys, already know that withholding our labor is about all we can do — and they intend to limit it as much as they can!

Despite everything, we can still win strikes. Our slogan is “One Day Longer!”

Boycotts, too, are Highly Regulated

The same is true of boycotts, which are much less effective weapons, but we can use them because  workers are also consumers.

We Have One Greater Power

Solidarity is our greatest strength. The Musicians Union might not be able to shut down the city of Fort Worth because they don’t occupy a vital economic center. But they could hit the economy hard if they had enough friends and allies. Suppose the taxi and bus drivers committed to helping, for example!

With enough friends and allies, labor could apply all kinds of economic pressures. Further, by pooling our financial resources to make sure strikers’ families keep eating, we could make a strike last indefinitely. The Musicians, by the way, have already thought of that. They have an on-line donation site.

If we were really pulling together. workers could win everything we want. That has to be the goal. The isolated strikes of today, like the musicians in Fort Worth, are good practice for us all!

–Gene Lantz

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