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2017 Preface
Leon Trotsky foretold the ‘Partnership’ Between the Trade Bureaucracy and the Boss: From Leon Trotsky and the Iron Heel:
One must accentuate especially the role which Jack London attributes to the labor bureaucracy and to the labor aristocracy in the further fate of mankind. Thanks to their support, the American plutocracy not only succeeds in defeating the workers’ insurrection but also in keeping its iron dictatorship during the following three centuries. We will not dispute with the poet the delay which can but seem to us too long. However, it is not a question of Jack London’s pessimism, but of his passionate effort to shake those who are lulled by routine, to force them to open their eyes and to see what is and what approaches. The artist is audaciously utilizing the methods of hyperbole. He is bringing the tendencies rooted in capitalism: of oppression, cruelty, bestiality, betrayal, to their extreme expression. He is operating with centuries in order to measure the tyrannical will of the exploiters and the treacherous rôle of the labor bureaucracy. But his most “romantic” hyperboles are finally much more realistic than the bookkeeper-like calculations of the so-called “sober politicians.” It is easy to imagine with what a condescending perplexity the official socialist thinking of that time met Jack London’s menacing prophecies. If one took the trouble to look over the reviews of The Iron Heel at that time in the German Neue Zeit and Vorwärts, in the Austrian Kampf and Arbeiterzeitung, as well as in the other socialist publications of Europe and America, he could easily convince himself that the thirty-year-old “romanticist” saw incomparably more clearly and farther than all the social-democratic leaders of that time taken together. But Jack London bears comparison in this domain not only with the reformists. One can say with assurance that in 1907 not one of the revolutionary Marxists, not excluding Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, imagined so fully the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capital and labor aristocracy. This suffices in itself to determine the specific weight of the novel.
The Partnership With the 1% and the Trade Unions During World War II:
If the organized workers become fully conscious of their combined power and learn to use it in their own interests, no power inside this country or outside could stand up against them. Instead of the bosses dictating terms to the workers, they could, as they should, dictate terms to the bosses. Even today, in scattered strike situations, detachments of workers demonstrate their invincibility. They sweep forward against the bosses, against administration “troubleshooters,” against military men, and even against their own top leaders, to win their demands. The employers feel the enormous power of the workers and often assess it more accurately than the workers or their leaders. The bosses know that, by themselves, they cannot curb labor nor deny its demands. From all sides now the employers are summoning allies to their aid: government officials, defense commissioners, arbitrators, preachers of patriotism, army officers and, most important of all today, their lieutenants in the ranks of labor itself: Green, Hillman, Murray, Tobin, Lewis, and their staffs. The function of these labor lieutenants and their policy of class collaboration is to lower the self-confidence of organized labor, to underestimate its strength, to keep it from independent class action, and to weaken its will to struggle and to win. — Fourth International, January 1941, American Labor and the War
The Graph Below is a Graphic Example of the Decline in Standard of Living of the Working Class, Since the Trade Union Bureaucracy Declared Itself to Be ‘In a (Domestic) Partnership With the Boss’! Starting in the mid-1980s, This ‘partnership’ gave birth to the one, two, three, three ect. .. wage tier system! Selling out the futures of future young workers entering the labor force. And, since the lowest union wage is the immediately the highest non-union wage, this wage tier system cut the wages of the entire working class! When I was a union official, I called this system labors rush to the bottom! As in graphically shown in this: Shadow Government Statistics Graph
Real Average Weekly Earnings (Benchmark Revised) Production and Nonsupervisory Employees Deflated by CPI-W versus ShadowStats-Alternate (1990-Base) 1965 to August 2017, Seasonally-Adjusted [ShadowStats, BLS] 
The Fall of the Trade Union Movement
The following is something that I wrote several years ago, based on my experience as a union members for over forty years and my experience as an elected union official. I am retired Business Representative for Painters Local #4 in San Francisco. I was a working painter for 31 years, an elected union officer from 1979 to 1997 and a full-time elected official from 1994 to 1997. I am a socialist and a longtime social activist.
The State of Today’s Trade Union Movement
Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and bruised itself. We’ve been enjoined by the courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, traduced by the press, frowned upon in public opinion, and deceived by politicians. But notwithstanding all this and all these, labor is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun. — Eugene V. Debs
The defeat of the air traffic controllers (PATCO) strike in 1981 marked a new turning point in the history of the trade unions in the United States. During the course of that strike, the federal government, in a bipartisan effort, seized all of the union’s funds and successfully bankrupted and broke that union. The lack of solidarity on the picket line, with the International Association of Machinists crossing the lines and the federal government using military personnel as scabs to break the strike, demonstrated the weakness and total bankruptcy of the trade union leadership. The unflinching willingness of the government to break PATCO sent a fear of death down the spine of every union bureaucrat in the nation.
The AFL-CIO leadership at that time responded with the following course of action:
They called for demonstrations in the nation’s capital and in other cities against union busting. But they covered up the partnership of Democrats and Republicans with the nation’s employers to break unions, to make picketing illegal, etc..
They developed new theories to cover up their bankruptcy. The code words were: “We can’t win strikes anymore; we need new strategies—the old ways don’t work,” etc..
Out of these echoes of doom, a new strategy, the “Corporate Campaign” and the concept of building a partnership between management and labor (alliance between capital and the labor aristocracy) was born.
They developed the “two-tier” wage system whereby lower wages and worse working conditions were negotiated for new workers entering the industry. In this manner, the AFL-CIO sold out the next generations of workers before they ever went to work. They also began developing other strategies to avoid strikes and risk the loss of their treasuries.
The so-called International Unions pledged to the government and their employers to police any local areas that did not follow their program of wage cuts and “productivity increases” (speedup). In the process, the International Unions consolidated their policies.
There were several turning points
In the 1980s there were many local areas, which fought back against these policies. The Bath, Maine, shipyard workers and San Francisco construction workers, for instance, resisted but failed to overcome the odds against them.
The UFCW leaders helped break the P-9 strike, by stetting Up a Local P-10, that was formed to make the Hormel scabs union! The AFL-CIO leadership also opposed any attempts of other unions to express solidarity with the Hormel strikers!
(1) One of the most famous of these struggles was the 1985-1986 P-9 meatpackers‘ strike against the Hormel Company in Austin, Minnesota, against the two-tier wage system that their international union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFC ( W), took credit for ‘inventing ‘, a long with the concept of a ‘partnership with the employers’. Local P-9 was one of the first UFCW unions to have this system imposed on it. The P-9 rank and file revolted against it and elected new leadership to oppose it. The problem with the Hormel strike was that its strategy contradicted its goals—the strikers used what was called the corporate campaign strategy.
This strategy was based on placing “moral pressure” (boycotts and threats of a boycott) on the company to get it to agree to the workers’ just demands. The corporate campaign worked fine until Hormel decided to open the plant with scabs.
Workers, at the time, were responsive to a class-struggle approach and a real battle was begun. The deciding factor in the P-9 defeat was the strikebreaking carried out by the UFCW leadership. That leadership, along with the Executive Board of the entire AFL-CIO, openly opposed any solidarity actions or support of any kind to Local P-9. They prevented any sympathy strikes by other Hormel local unions, and they worked with the company to organize the scabs. In the end, they organized a scab local P-10. This strike demonstrated that the “international unions” were more committed to their social contract with the government and the bosses than to the workers who paid the dues to fund the union.
(2) The next significant action was the United Mine Workers of America’s (UMWA) Pittston Strike in 1989. The UMWA put up a battle and closed other mines in solidarity with the strike. The miners union, during the course of the strike, got fined over $50 million for defying injunctions against picketing, etc.
Under pressure from the government and employers, UMWA President Richard Trumka brought the miners into the AFL-CIO under an agreement of support to the labor federation’s “Corporate — Campaign” tactic and the cessation of sympathy strikes. After this strike got settled and the next national contract was in place with negotiated labor-management “workers circles” to increase productivity, prevent safety strikes, etc., the Supreme Court rewarded the UMWA by approving reduced fines against the UMWA.
(3) Then came the Southern California Chicano drywall workers’ wildcat strikes. These workers, almost all being Chicano carpenters excluded from the Carpenters Union organized themselves as an independent union. (Residential drywall work had gone non-union after the unions negotiated piecework and a dues system based on piecework in the early 1980s.)
In 1993, three thousand, out of a total of six thousand predominately Chicano drywall workers, went on strike using class-struggle methods. They adopted such militant tactics as organizing roving picket squads such as those that played a decisive role in many of the great strike victories of the 1930s. These militant strikes totally disrupted housing production in Southern California. (The employers cynically complained that there was no union with money to sue and no leaders to buy off.)
Understanding the plight of drywall workers and their need for material assistance, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters (UBC) stepped in to “organize” these workers. The dry-wall workers, believing promises of equal treatment in the union gladly accepted membership in the Southern California District Council of Carpenters.
UBC District Council officials signed a contract with the employers and brought these workers into the jurisdiction of the Southern California District Council of Carpenters. The results were that class peace was established, work resumed, dues began to be collected, and over time, most of these drywall workers were laid off and replaced by other members of the UBC.
At that time, Douglas J. McCarron, now president of the UBC, was the chief official of that District Council. McCarron, who also sits on the board of Perini Corporation, ran a successful campaign—with the support of the country’s carpenter contractors—to become president of the Carpenters in 1996. The contractors liked what they saw in Southern California, and he is now doing their bidding nationwide.
This strike demonstrated two things: Workers will organize even after a union is broken. And Labor bureaucrats like the Carpenters serve the very useful purpose of policing the workforce and preventing work stoppages. A “partnership” was formed between the employers and the Carpenters union.
(4) In the past, workers could go to other international unions like the UMWA, the Teamsters, or the ILWU on the West Coast if they had a problem with their International officials and affiliate with one of the other International Unions. Now all of them are in the AFL-CIO and following the official policy of “developing partnerships” between labor and management. Many of these internationals are now constructing, regional and multi-state councils as bargaining units. In this process, they are making local unions powerless and beholden to these multi-local union councils who now control the finances of all its affiliated local unions as well as their local officers.
(5) The one positive example in this past period was the Teamsters’ strike victory over the United Parcel Service (UPS) in 1997. Workers throughout the land supported the Teamster strike. Young people rallied to the demands of the young part-time workers for equality in wages and benefits. The battle cry was: “We are fighting for a better future for all working people.” This call struck a responsive chord among the new generations of workers who had been sold out and betrayed before they ever went to work!
The leader of the 1967 UPS strike was Ron Carey, who was elected president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) in December 1991.
A little background to Carey’s election will help make clear how the capitalist government took control over the Teamsters Union. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the federal government filed a RICOH Act lawsuit to take over the IBT to clean out its racketeering top union officials. A rank-and-file organization, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), supported the government’s direct intervention to give the government the right to oversee the day-to-day activities of the IBT in exchange for the direct election of International officers.
The illusion of a “mob-free union controlled by its members” appeared to become a reality when Carey got elected with a plurality since the entrenched IBT bureaucracy, or “Old Guard,” was split between two candidates. Even though the new Teamster president, who had a well-earned reputation of militant and democratic unionism, the government, in the last analysis, had final control over the union, including the right to oversee the union’s finances.
The Old Guard, however, retained control over the regional Joint Councils and had almost equal power with Carey at International conventions, since these delegated bodies were not based on “one person-one vote” proportional representation. Consequently, because the old mob-connected bureaucrats dominated large sections of the union, the average Teamster continued to suffer under their misleadership. Nevertheless, after the UPS strike was won, the hopes of the disenfranchised and betrayed young workers were raised throughout the country.
The government moved in very quickly to quash this rise in rank and file Teamster hopes for a better future after seeing the power of a strike led by a militant leadership. They removed Carey from office on trumped-up charges of alleged irregular spending of union funds, which court-appointed officials had the right to oversee, during his reelection campaign in 1996. This was done without a union trial and outside of membership control.
(Incidentally, direct national elections in a union with over 1.5 million members are not democratic. For example, it costs over $700,000 to put out one mailing to the membership. Consequently, even though the IBT constitution gives “equal access” to each candidate, the employers can heavily influence such elections. Thus, as in city, state and federal elections, the candidates who raise the most money for their election campaigns tend to come out on top.)
In fact, at the same time that government election overseers investigated Carey’s 1996 campaign finances, they also investigated complaints, against campaign financial irregularities by his challenger, James Hoffa Jr. Though he had reported anonymous contributions from hundreds of thousands of small cash contributions from rank-and-file Teamsters — amounting to millions of dollars — he was, nevertheless, “cleared” of any wrongdoing, while Carey who won the election was removed from office and expelled from the Teamsters Union.
Although Carey was an effective strike leader, he did not know how to fight the government, and he was also under the illusion that the government had intervened in the IBT for the good of the union and union democracy.
Instead of fighting his undemocratic removal from office and the union by appealing for a mobilization of the ranks, he decided to take his case to the courts instead of to the membership. Unfortunately, TDU did not oppose the government’s removal of Carey and has steadfastly continued to support government control over the IBT.
In its latest move to vilify Carey and punish him for the “crime” of representing and fighting for the membership, the federal government has arraigned Carey in federal court on charges that he lied to federal investigators and a grand jury when he denied that he knew of a scheme by some of his election campaign staff to launder union money into Carey’s election campaign coffers and to line their own pockets.
But the jury found Carey innocent of all charges.
Meanwhile, the still mob-connected Old Guard is now back in power in the Teamsters Union with the support of the government and remains in office even though Carey won his court battle and was acquitted.
The capitalists, their government, and their lackeys in the trade union bureaucracy have learned the lessons of the past, whereby local struggles in 1934 by Teamsters in Minneapolis, Auto Workers in Toledo, and Longshore workers in San Francisco followed by the sit-down strikes of 1936–37, led to the rise of the CIO and the demise of many international union officials.
They are now directly intervening in local areas, with the assistance of the government, to maintain their “social contract” with capital, i.e., to prevent local struggles from developing. Today, the union membership is in the process of losing control over their union officials and contract negotiations.
This is the logic of all reformist bureaucracies in workers’ organizations. Although the trade union bureaucracy is dependent upon the membership, since the members are the material base on which the bureaucracy’s privileged existence rests, the present trade union leadership has proven itself unwilling and incapable of defending workers under constant attack from the employers and the government. They fear they will be hit with another PATCO if they do anything in the interests of their membership. They also fear that if they start to fight, the membership might elect new leaders, more capable of fighting, and kick them out. In this sense, the bureaucracy’s only hope for its continued existence is to continue their “partnership” with the capitalists and the government to transform the unions into state unions and to completely atomize the membership.
This is AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s stated program for the trade unions. The government is assisting the International Unions in this endeavor. In return for their “favors,” the bureaucrats get to continue to collect dues, not for services to the membership, but as payment for their services to government and business.
Part of this program is the concept of forced mergers to remove local centers of resistance to class collaboration. Previous to now, local unions or regional councils could only be put under control by the international union through trusteeships for specific charges of financial bankruptcy, financial malpractice, or corruption. Now trusteeships can be imposed for disobeying international presidents or when negotiations are at an impasse and the union is forced on strike.
But better than a trusteeship for removing elected local unions and district councils is something brand new — the “merging” or “consolidation” and of local unions and establishing undemocratic regional and district councils. The courts have consistently upheld this anti-democratic practice by top union officials in the past period. Rather than “trusteeships,” which can last no more than 18 months and are restricted by law, the Internationals have been instituting “mergers.” Mergers, whether “voluntary” or forced, last forever. Each merger separates the members further from control of their union and its affairs, and it increases the control held by the officers of the International Union.
Ironically, the top union officials are using the anti-union laws on the books to turn the unions into their opposite. Had they organized a real struggle against the Taft-Hartley law in 1947, the basis for their establishment of top-down union dictatorships could not have been possible.
In fact, the Carpenters union uses the Taft-Hartley law to raid other building trades unions. They are now preparing to split from the AFL-CIO in order to go about their raiding unfettered by any formalities of union solidarity. Since they do not recognize picket lines by other trades and work side by side with non-union workers, they claim that if the other unions won’t organize these workers, then they will organize them and claim the jurisdiction! They then sign these workers up at a significantly lower wage scale.
For example, when I was a Business Representative for the Painters Union in San Francisco, I found a job in a high-rise building in downtown San Francisco that had both non-union carpenters and painters. I proposed to the Carpenters union officials that we do a joint picket line. They informed me that they were “too busy.” I then organized a job action and informed the building owner that the building would be closed the next day. A few hours later, the building management informed me that they had now hired a union contractor. When I went to the job site, I found that the same non-union workers were now in the Carpenters union, signed to a “modular agreement” with the pay scale more than $10 per hour below the wage scales of carpenters and painters! I informed the Carpenters union officials that they were, in effect, “nothing but scabs with a union label.”
At this point in history, it is important to make an accurate assessment of the trade unions. They are in the final stage of the institutionalization of the unions as organs of the state. The hope of the Teamster strike victory over UPS, as the antithesis to this process, had been temporarily dashed by the removal of Carey by the government.
The whole process of stratification of the unions that was begun during World War II, delayed after the post-WWII upsurge (1945–46), then accelerated by the Cold War-based witch hunt of the late 1940s and the 1950s, including elimination of radicals and militants from leadership of the unions in compliance with the Taft-Hartley Law, is becoming complete or will be completed in the near future.
During the period of the witch-hunt, the concept of partnership between capital and labor was solidified by the Democratic Party becoming the political party of the trade union leadership. 1
The United States is one of the few countries in the world where the leadership of the unions openly belongs to and has allegiance to a political party of the ruling class.
In the 1930s, the labor upsurge did not begin until workers started to go back to work. In this recent “boom” of the economy there has been no such upsurge of the working class. One example of such an upsurge was the UPS strike, which had a leadership that appealed to all workers to oppose the concessions of the previous 15 years. The UPS strike demonstrated the willingness of the class to fight in its own interests. It also demonstrated that in the other international unions the internal bureaucratic structure has degenerated to the point that the union bureaucracy no longer feels the pressure of or the need to respond to the membership.
The “social contract” that was first initiated by the UFCW leadership during the P-9 strike is being implemented more and more widely. Basically, with few exceptions, the rights of union workers have been atomized to the point that they are prevented, by labor-management and government ,policy, from organizing against the class collaborationism of the trade union bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy acts in place of the union as a whole. The membership just pays dues, through the dues check-off system, with no control over how the unions function. The union bureaucrats have been in the forefront of organizing the decline of the standard of living of the whole working class as part of their “partnership” with capital, with the bureaucrats receiving regular payment through the dues check-off system.
This is the “partnership” that the trade union bureaucracy has been creating to police the working class. We have to understand that this has been done behind the backs of the working class and that the working class has suffered the consequences of the decline in its standard of living without a fight due to its systematic atomization. 
The above graph demonstrates how effective this partnership has been in lowering the standard of living of the working class. The bottom 40 percent of the population had a drop of 76.3% in household net worth from 1983 to 1998! The only households that have kept up with inflation in net worth have been in the top 1 percent of the population! As older “first tier” workers retire or leave the job market, these figures will become even more dramatic as these workers are replaced by part-time, lower-tier workers with fewer benefits. The prosperity of the 1990s is based more on these facts than the health of the capitalist economy.
When the younger workers begin to struggle for their rights and full equality, some of the key demands will be based on the following concepts:
1. Union independence from government control!
2. Membership control over union organizations!
3. Independent working-class political action and organization based on support for class struggle and in opposition to all partnerships with capital and/or the government! 
http://www.wellredusa.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=11
All these points are needed in order for workers to begin to regain what has been lost. They open up the possibility of democratic workers’ control over production and all economic decisions facing their lives, and the necessity for the construction of a socialist society.
2000
The US ruling class is skilled in flattering and cultivating ‘leaders’. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of union leader acquires the boss’s contempt for the ordinary worker. He is often more at home with the employers than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from a workers’ representative to the boss into the employer’s representative to the workers. The tragedy has happened so often that these union ‘leaders’ now acknowledge that they are ‘in partnership’ with the boss/ruling class. — Paraphrase of Martin Luther King’s, The Black Power Defined
When I first wrote about my observations, as a union official, in the 2001 essay, The State of Today’s Trade Union Movement, I was hoping that I was wrong about the assumptions that I had made about the present State of the Trade Unions, at that time.
Unfortunately, what I had written, about the direction of the trends in the trade unions, have been confirmed by events since I first wrote the essay.
The last labor upsurge (Post World War II Labor Upsurge) in the United States occurred over 50 years ago in the late 1940s, The workers were victorious in their struggles to regaining their standard of living that was lost during the war and its ‘wage price freeze’. (Which was supported by the Communist Party as part of their defense of Stalin’s policy of subordination of the class struggle to the ‘Defense of the Soviet Union’.)
The response of the ruling class was to amend the National Labor Relations Act, with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, (”The Slave Labor Act”) to give the employers a “level playing field” in their relations with labor. The right-wing of the labor bureaucracy, taking advantage of the class-collaborationist policies of the Communist Party, used this law to expel any opposition, to their class collaboration policies, from the leadership of the trade union movement.
In the process, they consolidated their power, which has continued to the present time.
The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.”
He observed this trend when he stated :
In the United States, the Department of Labor with its leftist bureaucracy has as its task the subordination of the trade union movement to the democratic state and it must be said that this task has up to now been solved with some success.
In today’s world. Every union has adopted and implemented the slogan of a “partnership with the boss.” (When I was working the worst epithet that one could say about a union official was that he/she “was in bed with the boss.” Now it is their slogan! And they are doing their best to stay in the boss’s bed as the boss threatens to toss them out to cut costs.)
In essence, today’s unions have adopted the slogan of what is good for the boss is good for the union, or as Charles E. Wilson, the former head of General Motors and Secretary of Defense under President Dwight Eisenhower infamously stated to a congress committee: “What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what’s good for General Motors is good for the country .”
To add insult to injury, this policy has gotten so bad, that “my” International Union President, of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT.com), has sent out a DVD to every member, at considerable expense, to inform my brothers and sisters, by their own admission, that the union will sound and act like a boss!
Union Painters who may be late to work, abuse coffee break, take too much time for lunch, or (God Forbid!) leave work early, will face the wrath, not of the boss but of the Union’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out Policy”! If you are caught three times in violation of these rules, then these painters are not only out of a job but out of the union!
The recent bipartisan changes in the bankruptcy laws and the accounting laws, under both President Clinton and President Bush, have allowed companies like United Airlines, Delphi, etc., to tear up and rewrite union contracts and cut pensions at will and with the support of this pathetic Trade Union Bureaucracy.
An example of the Trade Union Bureaucracy’s bankruptcy are the “buyouts” at Delphi Corporation, under the threat of “bankruptcy” brokered by the United Auto Workers’ officialdom. The UAW bureaucrats are indicative of the current trend of the “leadership” of the trade union movement. This “leadership” is protected and encouraged by the government and has allowed Delphi to offshore 185,000 jobs to the detriment of the 50,000 Delphi jobs that had remained in the United States, prior to the buyouts. Now the workers that remain earn less as Delphi profits more
Out of the Delphi struggle, a new union formation was born — Soldiers of Solidarity (SOS) — to combat the treachery of the UAW officialdom. It is an example of how workers will form new organizations independent of the bureaucracy.
January 2008
2010 Elections Update: The Default of The Trade Union Movement
Both of the declared ‘lessor evil politics’ and ‘partnership with the boss’ polices of the United States Trade Union Bureaucracy, and their counterparts in the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement , etc., have lead to a the recent quick economic decline of working people, and small businesses, in this country.
Being ‘partnership with the boss’ means that they cannot campaign for the taxation of the rich, but rather they support the ‘lessor evil’ Democratic Party, which has either proposed/voted for every ‘tax reform’, since Kennedy, to reduce the taxes of the rich at an expense of tax increases for the working class and small businesses — a ‘Robin Hood in Reverse’ Program, which has brought forth the largest transfer of the national wealth in American/World history, from a majority of the population to a small percentage of the country’s wealthiest families.
Being in ‘partnership with the boss’ also means to bail out the rich and hope for a few pennies to trickle down to the working class, the oppressed minorities and the poor. This happens in the context with an all out attack upon the social gains that were won by the working class Trade Union struggles in the 30s and 40s and the civil rights movement of the 60s.
Being ‘partnership with the boss’ also means that you cannot opposed the US wars and war spending abroad, to bring the money home to put people to work.
Painting by Anthony Freda: www.AnthonyFreda.com
What has been the response of these bureaucracies to these ‘Robin Hood in Reverse’ policies? They organized an October 2, 2010, demonstration, not to oppose this evils, but proposed that we vote for ‘Progressive’ Democrats, the political party that has been in the forefront of these bipartisan ‘Robin Hood in Reverse’ policies to oppose the Republican Party in the November 2010 elections!?
Since the Trade Union Bureaucracy along with their counterparts in the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement , etc., defaulted, from their leadership responsibilities, and proposed no alternative to oppose these unjust ‘Robin Hood in Reverse’ policies.
Even though the majority of the people fed up with the government being in partnership with the Banks and Wall Street. The rich, were able to seize this opportunity, by vacuum of leadership due to this default of leadership, to use this unjust taxation and their Media Monopoly for their plundering attacks on government spending for social security, social welfare, and education, etc..
Just as the rich created the illusion of a mass movement for Obama as a ‘change’ candidate in 2008, they created the illusion of a mass movement for the ‘change’ Tea Party.
In order to regain what has been lost and win equal rights for all, we must stop supporting those who are oppressing us — the US capitalist class and their Democratic and Republican political parties. And go back to what made all movements powerful — opposing all capitalist parties and relying upon ourselves to build our own economic and independent political power.
That means organizing in our own interests as the working class majority and the oppressed national minorities to unite the protectors of humanity’s habitat, anti-war fighters, all those opposed to the injustices of capitalism, to stop the unending ‘war on terrorism’.
For the good of the working class, it is time for the leadership of the social movements to resign or be replaced along with the ‘partnership with the boss’ and created a partnership with the oppress minorities — their natural allies! To begin anew the policies that won our basic rights in defense of our standard of living — through our own actions, independent of the tiny minority minority, that own this country and the Democratic and Republican Parties. To follow the example of France and take our opposition to the streets!
The labor movement could then use its wealth, not to support Democrats, but to start our own national newspaper and media formations, to counter the Media Monopoly and its lies, in defense of the rich. We will then able to act in our own interests and build our own political party in opposition to oppression by the rich, as the Sons of liberty did at the original Boston Tea Party in opposition to British Capitalism.
