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It’s YOUR Strike Upsurge!

October 24, 2023
civil rights, democracy, economy, history, politics, strategy, unions
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UAW Local 276 at General Motors in Arlington, Texas, went out on strike this morning. They are the most lucrative GM plant, and they join the strikers at the most lucrative Ford and Stellantis plants who were called out over the last 2 weeks.

Texas AFL-CIO President Rick Levy and Secretary-Treasurer Leonard Aguilar issued the following statement on the expansion of the United Auto Workers strike to the General Motors plant in Arlington:

  “UAW workers at the ‘Big 3’ made tremendous sacrifices to keep the American auto industry afloat when it was in financial trouble. Now, with Texas sized profits as far as the eye can see, it is past time for that sacrifice to be fully recognized.”

  “Strikes like this are hard. They involve risk. They involve sacrifice. But when UAW workers in Arlington, Carrollton and Roanoke walked off the job, they did so to benefit every worker in this country. They did so to make sure the jobs of the future can sustain our families and benefit our communities.”

  “When employers get greedy and refuse to come to a fair agreement, strikes are the way workers get a say in writing the rules of the workplace, how we share the wealth we help to create. Without our brains and muscles, not a single wheel can turn.”

  “That is why the 240,000 members of the Texas AFL-CIO stand in complete solidarity with striking UAW workers. As they stand up for themselves, their families, and their communities, we will always stand with them.” 

    “One day longer, one day stronger.” –texas aflcio

UAW 276 joins smaller Auto Workers locals, Mack Trucks, the actors in SAG-AFTRA, and dozens of smaller union locals on strike in the current upsurge. The outcomes of these strikes will affect wages, health care, pensions, and other job benefits for all Americans for now and in the future. In other words, they affect YOU!

The Question Is

What are you doing about it? How can you help make sure that our side wins? In this form of struggle, the strikers bear the brunt of the battle. They’re the ones in the foxholes, and it’s them and their families who will suffer the most. That doesn’t mean that there’s no role for the rest of us.

Here in North Texas, we have been and continue to be the center of strike activity in the Lone Star State. Dallas has a big SAG-AFTRA local. Two smaller UAW Locals nearby have been on strike since September 22. Many individuals and several organizations are pitching in, including: Dallas AFL-CIO, Tarrant AFL-CIO (Ft Worth), State AFL-CIO, Young Active Labor Leaders, Democratic Socialists of America, and Texas Alliance for Retired Americans. Other unions that have made major contributions include the Bakers and Confectioners (BCTGM) and Local 540 of the United Food and Commercial Workers. The main thing we do is join the picket lines to see how we can help.

Lately, we’ve been finding ways to make sure the strikers’ families can get groceries. Tarrant County AFL-CIO raises money on their web site tcclc.org/uawsupport. They intend to help individual strikers with significant financial problems. The Texas retirees’ group has begun contributing cold weather gear, especially red scarfs. The scarfs make good symbols of strike solidarity.

Probably the biggest contribution from strike supporters has been keeping the issues before the public. Approval of unions, and approval of strikers, is at an all-time high. The indications are that all Americans are drawing together against the ultra-rich corporations that offer us nothing but misery. When we keep talking about the strike issues, especially on social media platforms, we keep building public support.

When I Ask For Help

When I ask individuals or organizations to do something, they do it. I haven’t received a “no” answer yet!

On the Saturday just past, Dallas AFL-CIO held a cookout to honor strikers. Two Democratic State Representatives, Julie Johnson and Johnny Bryant, bought the food and beer. Lou Luckhardt, principal officer, did all the work. The Postal Employees sent a bouncy house and sno-cone machine for the kiddies. The Young Active Labor Leaders brought a karoke machine. We posted videos and a bunch of pictures on the social media platforms we have. We sent out thousands of e-mails and will send thousands more. We got lucky, for a change, with the corporate media. Fox4 and NBC5 both gave us extensive favorable coverage. i’m waiting to see if my letter-to-editor gets published.

Whenever one of the striking unions holds a public event, we do all we can to publicize it. We do all we can to attend every one. It doesn’t mean that we have stopped fighting on the political front. Texas is facing a major challenge to keeping public education and voting rights. We have an important election November 7, and unionists are already gearing up for 2024. To a newcomer, these activities may not sound related, but they are.

We’re standing up for working families, and we welcome you into the movement!

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON.org’s “Workers Beat” radio talk show every Saturday at 9AM Central time. They post my podcasts on KNON.org and Soundcloud.com on Wednesdays. If you are curious about what I really think, you could look at my old personal web site

Here Come the White People!

October 18, 2023
democracy, history, politics, strategy
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“Here Come the White People!” should have been a warning throughout history. People who had land, or thought they had land, found themselves on tiny reservations while their former lands were taken over by relatively prosperous white people. If the former landowners fought back, they were labeled “terrorists” and killed.

I could be talking about Geronimo, or maybe Pontiac, or Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull. I might be talking about the former occupants of the land known as Palestine, but not necessarily.

I might also be talking about the many enslaved people who followed General Sherman’s army in the Civil War. Sherman actually gave them land and, with it, the possibility of accumulated wealth some day in the future. This is the beginning of the idea of “Forty Acres and a Mule” that we still refer to.

After the shooting was over, President Johnson and the federal government made all the former slaves give up their lands. Title was returned to the slavemasters.

A few Black Americans received land when the Dawes Commission forced the tribes of Oklahoma to divide their communal land. Some of the tribe members were former slaves, and they received allotments. I’m not sure how that went down with every tribe, but I have read that the Chickasaws hired “Alfalfa” Bill Murray as their attorney to get all the land away from Black tribe members. Murray went on to become Oklahoma’s first governor in 1907, and Black people went on being landless and poorer than dirt.

Today on radio, I heard President Biden pledging eternal allegiance to Israel. He painted the Palestinians in the ugliest of colors. When I read the newspaper, I saw that the world is afire with protests. Even on U.S. campuses, people, including young Jews, are speaking up against Zionism and the liklihood of genocide in the Gaza Strip. Last night, an on-line group called “U.S. Labor Against Racism and War” held a webinar with 256 union activists attending. They have another one in two days.

What’s the Real Issue?

I don’t think the issue is the sorry state of Native reservations, nor Little Big Horn, nor the exploded hospital in Gaza, nor the maurauding soldiers from Hamas. The issue is land. The issue is land and it has been gleefully ignored in nearly a century of land-grabbing and settler outposts extending from Tel-Aviv.

I also think that another big issue is arising. For some time, the United States’ domination of world finance has been unchallenged, but the BRICS consortium is beginning to erode it away. Biden’s speech this morning must have accelerated that process.

History tells us that everybody should look out for the white people. Wikipedia tells us that the white people share of the world population is 15% and falling.

–gene lantz

I’m on KNON.org’s “Workers Beat” talk show every Saturday at 9AM Central Time. My “Workers Beat Extra” podcasts are on KNON.org and Soundcloud. If you are curious about what I really think, you might check out my old personal web site.

When Our Troubles Began

September 21, 2023
democracy, economy, elections, history, politics, strategy, unions
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Salon has very good news story covering developments 1982-present and the significance of today’s upsurge. Lone Star Project caught it for their daily news summary. I posted it on my FB page. It’s excellent.

https://www.salon.com/2023/09/21/uaws-high-stakes-gambit-this-strike-is-a-potential-paradigm-shift_partner/

My only problem with the article is that, like nearly all liberal analysis of today, it implies that labor’s problems began with Reagan in 1982. All of them, including the most erudite economists, start in 1982 with evil Republicans and recommend, as a solution, voting for liberal Democrats. They say that 1945-1982 was “normal” and that we could “get back” to that era by voting Democrat.

Nobody, except me and a handful of radical economists, especially Pikety, start with 1947, when America’s real troubles began. When the unions, some of them reluctantly, accepted the Taft Hartley law, solidarity ended.

Not only did the CIO separate from 14 of their best unions after Taft Hartley, the remaining unions raided them. What inevitably followed was decades of union isolation from one another and, even worse, from the public at large. The so-called “Treaty of Detroit” in the 1950s was a tragic error, not a wonderful accomplishment by Walter Reuther of the Autoworkers. When the UAW accepted employer-provided pensions and health care, they turned their backs on everybody else. We’re all paying for it now.

The great tragedy marked by Reagan’s firing and blacklisting of PATCO air traffic controllers was only made possible by the failure of the rest of the labor movement, and its public supporters, to respond. PATCO union leaders made several bad mistakes, including among them their having supported Reagan for election, but the historic lesson from the PATCO firing was that nobody helped them.

Once we understand that it was the lack of labor solidarity, not just Reagan, that was the root of our problems, we can see an actual solution — and it’s not just voting for liberal Democrats. It’s building up the movement for working families!

The current labor upsurge, especially the UAW strike, is attempting to rectify a catastrophe decades in the making. It will take all of us to win!

–Gene Lantz

I”m on knon.org “Workers Beat” radio talk show every Saturday at 9AM Central Time. They also post my “Workers Beat Extra” podcasts there and on Soundcloud. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site

3 More Ways the UAW Could Win

September 11, 2023
civil rights, democracy, economy, history, politics, strategy, unions
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There are at least three ways that the UAW could win against their 3 large corporate opponents without a massive strike:

  1. A rolling strike: The UAW could strike only in the plants where they are strongest, and the strikes could be limited to relatively short periods. The auto industry is interconnected and uses just-in-time inventory; consequently, one facility might shut down several others for lack of components.
  2. A slowdown: My own local, 848 in Grand Prairie, Texas, ran a successful campaign in 1984-5 and defeated a rich and powerful corporation by “running the plant backwards” for 15 months. During that time, only 65 of us were fired and required strike pay. The first 10 months or so were very difficult and not successful, but we learned how to carry out the fight and, eventually, went on strike for only 11 hours before we reached victory. All 65 of us marched back in the plant with back pay in our pockets! I wrote an account that is available on-line.
  3. A Hit-And-Run: Around 1960, my union local invented an entirely novel tactic. Instead of going on strike, they looked through the membership to see which departments were strongest for the union. Those departments alternated one day work stoppages. A lot of the members were entirely unaffected. Some of them did not even know that a battle was going on, but the stronger units were slowing down production.

Because of just-in-time inventory and assembly-line production, the UAW does not need an expensive full-fledged strike to win. Just a few workers can shut down an assembly line; just a small component shortage can shut down a factory.

I’m not a labor lawyer, so I do not know what tactics might run closer or further from the law. Also, I do not know if any of these suggested tactics might result in as much public support as a full fledged strike against all 3 big auto corporations would surely engender. I don’t know which tactics might result in more political support as the 2024 elections loom large. Ultimately, I believe that the key to victory is the support of the American people, and I believe that working families have that support, and will win more of it as time goes by.

I’m just pointing out that there’s more than one way to defeat a greedy corporation.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on knon.org’s “Workers Beat” talk show at 9AM Central Time every Saturday. My “Workers Beat Extra” podcasts are on knon.org and Soundcloud. Lately, my personal web site, http;//lilleskole.us, has picked up some malware, so be careful.

Should Labor Use Commercial “News?”

August 7, 2023
democracy, history, politics, strategy
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The answer is “yes,” but there are powerful caveats.

Why Do Unions Tend to Avoid Commercial Media?

American law protects a union’s right to communicate fully and openly with their members. Unions can even publish their candidate recommendations – but only to their members. Unions have to be much more careful when talking to  any audience that may include people who are not their members. Some unions don’t talk to them at all.

For unions, there are good reasons to avoid the commercial media. The laws are stacked against us, and the “news” sources virtually all belong to giant corporations who are, after all, our worst enemies. Try Googling “Who owns America’s news?”

https://www.google.com/search?q=Who+owns+American+news%3F&oq=Who+owns+American+news%3F&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i512l2j0i22i30l7.8422j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

And you will find that it’s 15 billionaires in 6 mega corporations. Every one of them would fight to the death to keep their own employees and those of their corporate advertisers from organizing.

“Just 37 years ago, there were 50 companies in charge of most American media. Now, 90% of the media in the United States is controlled by just six corporations: AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp and Viacom”

The Big Six’s big media game

Economics and Foreign Policy

Our “news” is most shamefully dishonest when it comes to economic and foreign policy news. They literally sing from the exact same hymnbook, and that hymnbook is written by corporations with no input from working families. One would like to exclude “public” media such as NPR or the BCC, but it would be a mistake. Compare any news item on the economy or on foreign policy over the full spectrum of what is available. Even the phrasing is practically identical!

Exceptions like the all-volunteer community radio station KNON in Dallas are so small as to be almost negligible. The hour-long talk show, “Workers Beat,” which I have proudly hosted for decades, is the only worker-friendly program on the Texas airwaves and one of only 3 or 4 in the entire South!

When labor takes actions big enough to affect the economy, we sometimes get news coverage. But the bosses’ “other side” version generally gets more.

Consider the Vietnam War

In the 1960s, tiny newspapers sprang up with the truth about the war in Vietnam. While the commercial media went on, as they always do on foreign policy questions, raving about the wonderful work that America was doing in Southeast Asia. tiny newspapers like “Space City News,” “Abraxis,” and “Mockingbird” (I worked on Mockingbird) in Houston and many cities were publishing actual accounts from soldiers’ letters.

Consider the pacifists. They carried out dramatic anti-war actions time and again, but could not get favorable news coverage anywhere except in the “underground” press. Singer Joan Baez was arrested almost daily for trying to stop young men from going overseas. Her commercial news coverage consisted of being denigrated as “Joannie Phoney” in one of the most popular comic strips.

The truth, years later, giant demonstrations and the underground press eventually eroded the truth through. After that, it wasn’t the glorified accounts of Vietnam’s battlefields that swayed the public. It was the scenes of coffins and body bags landing at American airports. Since Vietnam, America has preferred to fight its wars with machines and proxy combatants. Journalists are vetted and “embedded” by the military.

Does my condemnation mean that all commercial “news” must be disregarded as untruthful? Certainly not. Corporate bosses insist that their commercial journalists be scrupulously honest on all the smaller issues, the better to fool us on the big ones.

 Public Actions Can Get Good News Coverage

Even though giant corporations monopolize virtually everything we read, hear, or see, democracy still gives us opportunities. The American people believe in democracy and think they have it, even in their news sources. The print trades that once ran the great newspapers may have been broken years ago, but journalists are now joining writers’ unions, especially The Writers Guild formed by the Communication Workers of America. The internet and social media may be spreading innumerable lies, but truth also finds it accessible – and commercial news sources are made wary. More than anything else, handy mobile phones give Americans access to friends and sources they can trust.

The larger and more public our actions are, the more likely they are to get honest coverage. The better that our news conferences and news releases are, the more likely they are to be covered accurately. The more adroitly we use quasi-democratic platforms like talk shows and letters-to-editors, the more likely we are to get our message out.

It is good to understand the corporate media with all its anti-labor proclivities, but it is even more important to take advantage of every possible avenue to reach working families with the truth. We can do that. More and more, we ARE doing it!

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON.org’s “Workers Beat” radio talk show every Saturday at 9AM Central time. My “Workers Beat Extra” podcasts are usually published on Wednesdays on KNON and Soundcloud. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my old personal web site.

Escaping from, or with, Joe Biden

July 8, 2023
democracy, history, politics, strategy
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The American people have zero say-so on foreign policy. None of us ever wanted to die in wars, nor to send our sons and daughters to die, but the people in charge, whose sons and daughters are safe, keep creating havoc around the world. None of us wants our tax money spent on killing everybody’s children anywhere, but we have no say-so. We have to rely on Joe Biden.

Biden and the Democrats created the proxy war in Eastern Europe. All the Russians asked was to stop NATO to stop creeping up on them, but the U.S. would not even discuss it. When a crime like this war is committed, the detectives are supposed to ask “Who benefits?” But our detectives, the public “news” persons, are just house pets who faithfully repeat everything that the state department tells them.

Who benefits?

It’s not the Russians nor the Ukrainians. They’re just doing all the dying. It’s certainly not the Europeans who are paying through the nose for oil and gas now that they can’t get it from Russia. It’s clearly not the starving people who can’t get grain and fertilizer from Ukraine and Russia.

It’s the American oil companies! Anybody who stops and thinks about it will see it! In fact, if they think their way through “who benefits” from the proxy wars in Syria, Iraq, and Libya; they’ll get the same answer: American oil companies.

What’s next?

As the war drags on, the U.S. and the Westerners under U.S. control keep upping the ante. They send just enough weaponry and guidance to keep the automated conflict going because keeping it going, not ending it with any outcome, is in the interests of the oil companies. Possibly, the U.S. oil companies might consider ending the war once they have established, once and for all, that they have taken over all of Russia’s former oil customers. There’s no telling how long that may take.

The most recent development is Biden’s announcement in early July that he will send the illegal cluster bombs that have been condemned all over the world. They come in rockets that explode in the air and send smaller bombs that explode at about eye-level for all the people they will kill. 6% of them fail to explode right away and are left for little children to find and detonate for several years to come.

The war isn’t anywhere close to ending. Just to make sure Russian doesn’t pull out, Biden has made sure to keep NATO creeping up on their borders. Even the pacifists in Sweden have been conned into the game. Ukraine can’t quit because they are defending their homeland. Russia can’t quit for the same reason, they are defending their homeland against certain attack from NATO.

An editorial in the July 8 Washington Post suggests a way to end the war: get Ukraine to join NATO. They would probably do it if they NATO would let them. Biden might let them, too, if the much-vaunted Ukrainian counterattack is failing, and I suspect it is although no one can tell because the state department hasn’t told the American “newspersons” to say anything about that.

If Ukraine joins NATO, then all the Western Powers are obligated to attack Russia. Russian, surrounded sure to lose, would have only two choices: surrender and let the Western powers do anything they want with them, or nuclear war.

Biden could stop it

Joe Biden has a long history with Ukraine. He was there when they were still friendly with the Russians. He helped engineer a new government takeover to be hostile to the Russians. He was there when the Russians said they would invade if the NATO threat continued. He’s been there to promote and aggravate this ongoing war all along.

If the oil companies decide that they have taken over enough (unlikely) or if Joe Biden decides he can stand up the the oil companies, this proxy war could be stopped. In fact, Biden could come out of it looking pretty good if he “suddenly” decided that the U.S. could “intervene” (as if they hadn’t been involved all along) for the sake of peace.

Biden could call a meeting and mediate the peace. At his behest, NATO could pull back. The Ukrainians and Russians could negotiate their territories. People could stop dying. America’s military could spend a lot less of our money. Biden, hero of the hour, would assure his re-election. And the world could take a breath.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON radio’s “Workers Beat” talk show every Saturday at 9AM. My “Workers Beat Extra” podcasts are usually posted on Wednesdays on KNON and Soundcloud. If you are curious about what I really think, you might look at my old personal web site.

July 4 Means What?

July 4, 2023
civil rights, democracy, history, politics, strategy
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What does Independence Day mean to you? For Gerardo Contreras, pictured above, it’s a time for serious celebration. He decked out a beautiful float for labor’s participation in the 2023 parade in Arlington, Texas. Saint Gerardo is always making such tremendous contributions to North Texas labor.

In one of his most famous speeches, Frederick Douglas told white America, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine, You may rejoice, I must mourn.” Douglas said that the Declaration of Independence was not a statement of fact, but only a promise for a better future. Martin Luther King Jr used that same theme in 1963. Dallas civil rights activist Kenneth Williams re-affirmed it on KNON radio last Saturday.

Labor organizer Eugene Victor Debs had harsh words for those who wave the flag while promoting pain and suffering:

As for me, I’m wiling to accept Frederick Douglas’ hopeful interpretation of Independence Day as a promise that is so far unkept. The problem is, and what everybody needs to figure out for themselves while musing about it, is this: Is the U.S. moving closer to keeping that promise or further away?

Who’s Promise?

Thomas Jefferson, the main author of the Declaration being celebrated, was a member of the ruling class of his day. In fact, he was an unapologetic slave owner who talked about everyone being equal while piling up wealth from the misery of Black people. If the Declaration was a promise, was it a promise from Jefferson’s ruling class or a promise from someone else?

If the Declaration was a solemn promise from the small layer of rich colonists who signed the Declaration, they are defaulting today. Americans are losing our constitutional rights. Americans are losing our economic rights. Americans are being pushed down into deep and inescapable poverty. Americans are suffering from climate change. Americans are being taxed so that the oil companies can take over European markets. Americans are dying on battlefields and incurring the guilt of killing many others. Americans are getting shot in their own neighborhoods, even on Independence Day!

The small layer of the ruling rich is betraying every promise made to the 99% of us who are forced to work for them. If the Fourth of July is their holiday celebrating their promise, they can stuff it!

Or Is the Promise One of Our Own?

If the promise in the Declaration of Independence is a promise we made to ourselves, then celebration might be in order. Even while our bosses shred our rights, heat up the Earth, and create new wars; we are learning and organizing. The younger generations carry more knowledge and organizing ability in their pockets than Jefferson or anybody in history ever dreamed of. It only remains for us to use it, and our 4th of July promise will be fulfilled!

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON radio’s “Workers Beat” talk show every Saturday at 9AM Central Time. KNON posts my podcasts on Wednesdays. If you are curious about what I really think and how I came to think it, check out my personal web site.

—

Labor Party: Shall We Just Forget It?

June 16, 2023
elections, history, politics, strategy, unions
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As long as I have been around the progressive movement, well over 50 years, we have expected to see some kind of American Worker’s Party break the two-party stranglehold over politics. Working families, then, would have a real alternative at the polls, we imagined. But it didn’t happen and isn’t closer to happening today. Maybe it’s time to give up on it!

Take a quick look at the history of 3rd parties. The last successful one was the Republican Party around 1859. What a thrill it must have been for the progressives of those days, most of them abolitionists, to have a new political party that offered real hope of ending the very worst of all ingrained American practices, slavery!

Then, let’s see, there were the Populists, mostly farmers, of the 1890s. They died when they endorsed the Democratic Party candidate for president. Gene Debs and the Socialists were able to get 1 million votes while their candidate was in prison, and it was sensational but not threatening to the system. President Theodore Roosevelt tried to get his career restarted with the Bull Moose Party before WWI, but didn’t get far. In 1947, former Vice President Henry Wallace tried to save the Franklin Roosevelt “New Deal” program. I recently read that he received a paltry 2.8% of the popular vote. Billionaire Ross Perot was effective enough in getting Republican voters to make sure that Democrat Bill Clinton won the presidency. The Greens have made some small inroads on Democrat voters, but were embarrassed when people learned that they were taking money from the Republicans.

In 2016 and 2020, lots and lots of American young people thought Bernie Sanders would either take over the Democratic Party from inside or create a powerful new progressive party, but Bernie has already endorsed Biden/Harris and I don’t know what those young revolutionaries may be thinking. Today, the Democrats are worrying that the “No Label” Party, financed by mysterious dark money, will take some of their votes and throw the 2024 election to Trump. But nobody is worried that we’ll end up with three viable parties nor that one of the two “main” parties will get replaced.

Side note: There is a party in existence called the “Working Families” party. They are interesting in states where they are allowed to endorse Democrats or Republicans, but not so much when they have to run on their own.

When I first heard of it, a Workers Party made sense. The unions still had over 20% of the workforce organized and were much stronger in politics than they are today. There were labor (or labour) parties here and there in other countries that were in and out of power from time to time. It just seemed like a natural intermediate step. But there are several reasons, today, to consider giving up the idea.

For one thing, we were just wrong about labor parties. We didn’t analyze the “winner-take-all” aspect of American politics. Other nations generally have parliamentary systems that allow proportional representation in governing bodies based on their percentage of the popular vote. They might win a few seats one year, add a few the next year, and eventually rise to power.

Not us. With America, nobody cares anything about proportions. It’s winner take all! If a party wins 49.9% of every vote in America, they still get nothing. The party with 50.1% gets everything.

For another thing, the organized unions that we were expecting to move up to the next stage of political power have diminished. We had about 35% of the workforce organized in the early 1950s, and we have about 10.1% now. Even if they wanted to launch a workers party, they might not have the strength.

The Bright Side

The positive way of looking at American electoral politics is to consider that progressives may not need any kind of political party to win power. Stages may not matter. With modern technology, especially mobile phones, smart people with a good program and a winning organizational model could organize almost anything in a matter of days. That’s what happened in the “Arab Spring” countries. They had no need for an interim political stage, but went straight from powerless to empowered!

Did the Labor Party Idea Just Wear Away?

Not so many years ago, I can remember top labor leaders saying that they, too, wanted a workers party. They said that building our political strength year by year within the two-party system would eventually give us the power to move off on our own. Now, I wonder if they were serious. I also wonder if the hope for a labor party is still alive among the top union leaders. I tried to find out this morning (June 16, 2023) when they were getting ready to vote, by a big margin, to endorse the Democratic ticket earlier than ever before in history. I was watching them on a webinar, so I asked innocently in the chat box, “Does this mean we’re giving up on the workers party idea?”

I didn’t get an answer. I was kicked out of the meeting and couldn’t get back in. It might have been an error. People make errors in webinars.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” radio talk show every Saturday at 9 AM Central Time. They post my podcasts on Soundcloud.com, usually on Wednesdays. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my old personal web site.

Secret Police Hate Folk Singers!

June 10, 2023
art, civil rights, democracy, history
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Book Review:

Leonard, Aaron, “The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA-1939-1956.” Repeater, 2020

Some of the first songs I ever learned were “Good Night, Irene” and “On Top of Old Smokey.” I still sing them. They were top-of-the-chart popular songs by The Weavers in the late 1940s. Then the Weavers disappeared and I didn’t hear anything about any of them until the late 1960s, when everybody knew and loved Pete Seeger, Lee Hayes, and Ronnie Gilbert. I didn’t know much about how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI secret police hounded and threatened them and everybody who listened to them until I ran across this book.

Thanks to the young man who joined our “flying pickets” action for telling me about it. I think his name was Gregory something or something Gregory. He said I could get it through the public library, but I failed at that and bought it for Kindle from Amazon for $8.95. Good investment.

Attacking artists like the Weavers, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Sisco Houston, Hudie Ledbetter and others was supposedly justified by Hoover as part of his lifelong campaign against communists. The funny thing is, it’s kind of hard to call these artists reds. Sure, they were in and out of the CPUSA, but so were thousands of progressive and liberal-minded people in those days. I think what really pulled Hoover’s chain was the plain fact that they sang the truth, and fascists hate truth passionately.

I appreciate the author’s speculations, near the end of the book, as to just how much the world might have benefitted if these artists had been allowed access to audiences, recording studios, TV, and movies during those dreadful anti-communist witch hunt years.

Also, I appreciated the way the author gave the background of America’s witch hunt. Like most historians, he makes sure that the readers know that he doesn’t agree with nor approve of communists. People are still too afraid to say anything positive in print, but he does tell the truth about why CPUSA fell from a very large political force down to a miniscule one: government persecution. Not that they didn’t make some mistakes.

Leonard’s criticisms of CPUSA errors during the period ring true to me, because I have talked to old reds who lived through it. Their errors in dealing with the witch hunt came directly from misunderstanding the economic and political situation at the end of World War II. I can see why they would think that American fascism was imminent, but they were wrong and it led them to make unnecessary mistakes.

The folk singers didn’t make any of the decisions nor any of the mistakes. They just sang the truth and sang it well. That was plenty of reason for J.Edgar Hoover!

–-Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” talk show every Saturday at 9AM. They usually post my weekly podcast on KNON and on Soundcloud during Wednesdays. If you are curious about what I really think, you might look at my old personal web site.