As I write this on January 3, 2026, the nations of the world, even moderate nations, are condemning the U.S. invasion and occupation of Venezuela. For American workers, the best news is that the national labor movement, the AFL-CIO itself, has joined the international labor community in condemnation.
The AFL-CIO’s action opens the way for discussions and resolutions in every labor body in America. The obvious demand is to remove all U.S. military forces from Venezuela immediately. Everyone must participate!
What we face in the United States goes much further than the invasion of a sovereign nation. We are facing a government that has committed itself to the use of bullying and brute force in order to achieve its aims. That bullying will not stop in Venezuela, nor will it stop in other invaded nations. It is, and has been for some time, the regular practice of the Trump Administration within the United States.
We can expect violence from them as they try to stop us from exercising our rights as citizens. They will be attacking protesters. They will be, they already are, looking for ways to frame anybody who stands against them.
And yet we will protest. We will demand our rights, including the right to vote unfit people out of office. This is the greatest test of the democracy in our history since the Civil War. We cannot fail.
Dallas activists had spoonfuls of ice cream and local history on December 21. A group of us gathered at a Dairy Queen just 2 miles uphill and west from downtown Dallas. At that site in 1854, socialists from Europe established their communal farm and changed North Texas forever. We talked about them and then walked together to see a stone monument nearby.
A French socialist named Victor Considerant rented horses in St Louis in 1850 or so. Then he rode to an open hillside outside the grubby little town of Dallas. The town was established only a couple of years earlier and was just beginning its first main industry, tanning stinky buffalo hides.
Considerant thought the area looked like his homeland and should, he figured, be good land for grapevines and a wine industry. Back in Europe, he was able to raise money for a stock corporation to start sending European socialists to Texas. They named their commune “La Reunion.”
They were literate people. Unlike the rough-hewn Scots-Irish frontiersmen tanning hides nearby, they were cultured, artistic, musical, and far-thinking people. Like the other socialist settlements in Texas from the time, they were “freethinkers” on religious questions and had no churches. What really set them apart was that they didn’t enslave other human beings.
“History Is Bunk”
The official story of Dallas, told in almost all the books, is that the only reason it became a great city and cultural center was because of the genius and foresight of the early capitalists who created it “out of nothing.” In truth, it was a crossroads long before the first trading post was set up. It was a shallow place in the Trinity river where natives and early Spanish explorers could cross.
Dallas was also a crossroad when the first transcontinental highway went through the middle of town and then came out toward Fort Worth on the very street that now passes in front of our Dairy Queen. The Dixie Overland Highway ran from Savannah Georgia to San Diego California.
The genius capitalists didn’t make Dallas a cultural center either. It was the socialists from La Reunion. The official story about all the socialist communards in Texas is that they failed because they weren’t good farmers and socialism just doesn’t work. But that doesn’t explain why they all went out of business at practically the same time, in 1860.
When the Confederacy established its wartime draft, soldiers went after the free thinking socialist communities. One of them, Comfort, near San Antonio, tried to send its menfolk to the Mexican border, but they were hunted down and massacred. At La Reunion, a shootout with the Confederates was their last page in history as a communal farm.
But it wasn’t their last contribution to Dallas and North Texas. The population of Dallas was about 1,000. There were 500 or so communards. Most of them moved to the eastern part of town and established East Dallas, where their descendants still hold La Reunion celebrations. They contributed to the arts and even in politics. One of them became Mayor of Dallas and has a park, Reverchon, named after him today. They were the people who made grubby little Dallas a cultural center.
One of the simplest and easiest things that labor leaders could do is to ask people to wear a certain color on a certain day of the week. The fact that they don’t do it and have never done it is the saddest evidence that we aren’t employing the simplest tactic for bringing union members and our allies together into an effective movement.
There are some obstacles, but they are technical and barely worth mentioning. They have to do with “what color” and “what day.” The first question is the easiest to answer because red has been the color of the workers’ movement since 1789.
My UAW local promotes wearing red on Wednesdays.” By giving away free red shirts during contract negotiations, we’ve increased participation. The AFT in Dallas promotes wearing red on the Thursdays when they go to school board meetings. Various unions promote a color and a day during times of great need such as during contract negotiations, but they choose color/date for contrast, not unity, and limit the whole idea to their particular members.
The only union with an effective program is the CWA, which promotes red on Thursdays since one of their members was killed on a picket line some years ago. Because CWA is big and because they have by far the most effective color/day program, I recommend that everybody adopt red on Thursdays, even if their union has another color or wears red on a different day. It’s not that hard to choose a color twice a week, and it doesn’t have to be a shirt.
If labor leaders are just too timid to pick a color and a day, I recommend that they run a short and cheap on-line survey of members. It wouldn’t be binding and wouldn’t even be scientific, but it would be a start and at least a formalistic indication that we intend to build a movement.
All the small stuff aside, the easiest thing would be to make a motion in every labor meeting that we ask all supporters to add wearing something red on Thursdays to their other clothing plans.
Last week’s Pew Poll revealed that President Biden’s approval rating has continued to fall and has reached a dismal 33%! If we put some perspective around that figure, we can discover something really worth knowing. Think about it, how could Biden’s approval ratings keep falling while the economy keeps improving?
Compare Biden to Other World Leaders
The Los Angeles Times checked approval ratings of other world leaders of industrialized nations.
Canada’s Justin Trudeau 31%
Britain’s Rishi Sunak 21%
Germany’s Olaf Sholz 17%
Japan’s Fumio Kishida 17%
They added in several more observations. Donald Trump’s approval is harder to measure but they give him a measly 42%. While President Biden started his term with well over 50%, Trump never had over 49%.
Compare Approval Ratings over Time
The Los Angeles newspaper also checked back a few decades and concluded that President Eisenhower (1952-1960) was the last one to keep decent approval ratings all the way. That was in the days of the “American Century” when unions demanded and received 3% raises every year, plus cost-of-living raises, plus pensions, plus free health care. After Eisenhower, every American president started out with over 50% and then fell steadily to the end of their term.
The evidence shows clearly that declining approval ratings can’t be blamed on any of the simple things. It’s not the person’s age, not the state of the economy, not war, not peace, not scandal, not any of the issues of any particular period. It has to be something big, something powerful, and something consistent.
Once You See It, Things Make Sense
People in America and other industrialized countries do not like the system they live under. It’s that simple.
Want to know why Trump won in 2016 in spite of every possible prediction? Voters thought he represented some kind of new system. What they got was tax cuts for the rich and an intensification of everything that was wrong with the old system, but many of them are still desperate for some kind of positive change, and many of them, incredible as it may seem, will continue to hang those hopes on Donald Trump.
The system we live under produces the worst kind of inequality. We could call it the “rich get richer and poor get poorer” system. Just last week, in the same newspapers, we read that the stock market had peaked and, that same week, homelessness in American also reached an all-time historical high! If you read carefully, you would also have seen that the number of young Americans who expect to vote in the 2024 Presidential race is tanking!
It isn’t just Biden, Trump, Trudeau and the rest of them that can’t get high approval ratings. It wouldn’t help much to substitute other Democrats for Biden or other Republicans for Trump. We would still have the same system and approval ratings would continue falling!
Change Will Come, Because It Must
My recent blogs and podcasts have been about the outlook for fascism, for a general strike, and a viable workers’ party. Those are the trends underway, and we’d better be working hard for one of the last two.
–Gene Lantz
I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” radio talk show every Saturday at 9AM Central Time. On Wednesdays, they post my “Workers Beat Extra” podcasts on Soundcloud.com. If you are curious about what I really think, try my personal web site at http://lilleskole.us.
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
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.
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
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?”
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”
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.
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.
genelantz 