Obstacles to Socialism: The Bureaucracies of the Trade Union Movement and the So-Called Socialist Countries

They have Proven to Have Been an Obstacle to Independent Action of the Working Class!

Part I Soviet Union Bureaucracy

Part II. The U.S. Trade Union Bureaucracy

My name is Roland Sheppard, I am a retired Business Representative of Painters Local #4 in San Francisco. I have been a life long social activist and socialist. Prior to my being elected as a union official in 1994, I worked for 31 years as a house painter. I was in the words of Robert Tressell, a Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, a phrase that Tressell used, in his book, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, to explain the exploitation of workers, under capitalism, who willingly sell their labor and donate the surplus value, which their labor produces, to the boss. I have led a unique life. I am one, of the few people remaining, who was at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X was assassinated. House painting was my vocation, but working for a better world has been my lifelong avocation. I became especially interested in the environment when I was diagnosed with cancer due to my work environment as a painter. I learned how to write essays, when I first got a computer, in 1998. Using the Internet and my word processor, I was able to put together all the medical legal arguments on my breakthrough workers’ compensation case in California, proving that my work environment, as a painter, had caused my cancer. During the course of the five-year struggle, I won a $300,000 settlement of my court case and, incidentally, I learned how to write. In my retirement, I am writing about my life experiences as a socialist, as a participant in the Black Liberation Movement, the Union Movement, and almost all social movements. My, essays are based upon my involvement in the struggle for workers democracy and freedom for all humanity. It is my hope that these essays, which I regularly update, when I discover more facts, will help future generations of Freedom Fighters. The following essays are based upon my 33 tears workering as a painter and 3 years as a union official and a socialist for 66 years.

Part I Soviet Union Bureaucracy

Party Congress Backs Gorbachev’s ‘Reforms’

The recent conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was designed to codify Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring) programs.

The June 28 to July 1 meeting of close to 5000 delegates was the First delegated party conference since 1941. When Gorbachev first proposed the conference in January 1987, his goal was to go over the head of the CPSU’s Central Committee in his effort to block opposition to his “reform” program.

But in the weeks leading up to the conference, it became clear that the “hardline” wing in the party leadership headed by Yegor Ligachev was determined to use its role in the party apparatus to prevent Gorbachev’s supporters from being elected delegates.

Many of Gorbachev’s closest friends and allies, such as Yuri Afanasyev, the chief anti-Stalinist historian, were to get elected. This led to a momentary rift in the bureaucracy which the Soviet masses were able to take advantage of to express their own independent demands.

For example, in the Siberian city of Omsk, 8000 people assembled at the initiative of pro-Gorbachev party members to protest the selection of delegates to the party conference. In Sakhalin, Kuybyshev, and Yaroslavl similar mass demonstrations took place.

But in a few instances, the rallies did more than demand the annulment of the mandates of the “hard-line” delegates. They also called for the removal of unpopular party officials, the legalization of independent unions and political organizations, and an end to the monopoly on political power by the ruling party. These demands, which hit at the very heart of bureaucratic rule, went far beyond the intentions of the Gorbachev reformers.

These rallies confirmed the fears of the bureaucrats who oppose glasnost on the grounds that the workers will seize the democratic openings and push them beyond the limits set by Gorbachev.

At the conference itself, the inter-bureaucratic contradictions and squabbles also surfaced. Politburo members were criticized from the floor, and for the first time since the early years of the Russian Revolution there were split votes on the conference resolutions.

Intra Bureaucratic Conflict

But it would be extremely shortsighted to think that the party conference reflected the new “socialist renewal” which, according to Gorbachev’s fellow travelers, is supposedly sweeping the Soviet Union.

The severe limits on democracy were immediately apparent. Criticism of the past was tolerated by Gorbachev, but criticism of the present that goes beyond the limits set by the ruling bureaucracy was shunned

This was evident in the “debate” between Boris Yeltsin, the former Moscow party chief, and Yegor Ligachev. Even though Yeltsin was allowed to present his views, his demotion in the party was upheld. Yeltsin’s differences with Ligachev are not ones of political principle. Both uphold the basic institutions of bureaucratic rule. If, however, Yeltsin had defended the democratic rights of the workers to control and manage the production and distribution of goods—or if he had defended the Leninist principle of self-determination for the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh—his fate would most likely have been similar to that of Paruir Airikyan, the Armenian dissident who was stripped of his citizenship and expelled from the Soviet Union.

The conference was called to reorganize the ruling Communist Party bureaucracy to adjust it to the developing political unrest of the workers and masses of the Soviet Union. A central aim of the conference was to gain support for the new economic policies introduced by Gorbachev. To accomplish this task, the party leadership found it necessary to grant a limited and tightly controlled democratic opening to the Soviet people.

Reviving the sagging economy

Following the examples of China and the Eastern European workers’ states, the Soviet leaders are trying to revive the Soviet economy by making profitable offerings to world capitalism This has entailed allowing the development of private enterprise in the Soviet Union and the use of capitalist “incentives” such as piecework, inflation, and unemployment to increase the productivity of the Soviet workers and farmers.

The Soviet bureaucracy is hoping that the current weakness of the world capitalist system, together with guarantees for repatriating large profits, will encourage the imperialists to risk investing in the Soviet economy. Gorbachev is gambling that his new economic policies will increase the production of consumer goods to quiet the discontent of the masses.

In his conclusion to the party conference, Gorbachev warned that “there is no alternative to perestroika .” He also called for “serious critical analysis to work out the policy of perestroika and later to transform it into practical decisions on the main directions.”

What Gorbachev means by “serious critical analysis” has been spelled out in numerous recent articles in Novy Mir, the Soviet Union’s leading political and literary journal. These articles contend that the centralized planned economy is the basis for the bureaucratic mismanagement of society—not the bureaucracy itself. The articles call for the introduction of a Soviet market economy.

In a recent article in Novy Mir, one author, Vasily Selyunin, goes so far as to criticize Lenin for abolishing private property (San Francisco Chronicle, June 7 1988). The author also accuses Lenin of laying the basis for the forced labor camps under Stalin, though he praises Lenin’s flexibility in promoting the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the early 1920s. (During the NEP, the Bolsheviks leaders allowed the introduction of limited capitalist market mechanisms to revive a war-torn economy.)

The reference to the NEP is, of course, used by the pro-Gorbachev intellectuals to justify the present economic policies and to give them Lenin’s stamp of approval. But Selyunin ignores the fact that the workers’ and peasants’ “soviets”—or councils—under Lenin were the pillars of the most democratic form of government in the history of the world.

Selyunin also overlooks the defeat of the revolution in Germany and the poverty—caused by the civil war and the invasion by thirteen capitalist countries, including the United States—which forced the retreat to the NEP and laid the material basis for the eventual rise of Stalin.

Stalin had “red professors” to justify himself as the continuator of Lenin. Now Gorbachev has his own “red professors” for the same purpose. In fact, the present policies more accurately reflect the views advocated by Nikolai Bukharin in the late 1920s. Bukharin’s recent rehabilitation is a reflection of the rehabilitation of his economic policies.

An organ of the bourgeoisie

An accurate description of the Soviet bureaucracy was written by Leon Trotsky in “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International” exactly 50 years ago. Trotsky wrote:

“The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution as a workers’ state. State ownership of the means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist development, opened up the possibility of a rapid growth of the productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers’ state underwent a complete degeneration at the same time: It was transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country’s economy.

“The bureaucratization of a backward and isolated workers’ state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into an all- powerful privileged cast constitute the most convincing refutation—not only theoretically but this time practically—of the theory of socialism in one country.

“The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: Either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”

Gorbachev’s economic reforms clearly reveal the bureaucracy’s role as the transmission belt of the world capitalist class inside the workers’ state. They represent a danger to the soviet workers and to the soviet workers’ state.

In China, similar reforms have progressed to the point where illegal private banks have been allowed to exist, where special capitalist economic zones have been established, and where corporations’ formed by the government in Hong Kong have been given over to the sons and daughters of the Chinese bureaucracy.

From Eastern Europe to China, the workers’ states have been allowing the penetration of capitalism. In so doing, they have introduced unemployment, inflation, and more anarchy in industrial planning.

Austerity in Poland, demanded by the capitalist banks, gave rise to Solidarnosc. The development of Solidarnosc, although not yet victorious, confirms the prediction by Trotsky of the working class rising up against the political and economic policies of the bureaucracy. The present course by Gorbachev and others will provoke “two, three, many Solidarnoscs”—even in the Soviet Union.

A Working-Class Alternative

Contrary to Gorbachev’s pronouncement, there is an alternative to perestroika . The alternative is a democratically planned economy that is controlled by the majority of the population—i.e., controlled by the working class.

This is a society where soviets (regional and factory committees), modeled after the soviets of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s time, will democratically determine the economic policies and democratically distribute what is produced.

Socialization of the distribution of goods is the greatest incentive for increasing productivity, as the working masses have a direct and immediate return from the investment of their labor. The original Soviet Union was also based on democratic Soviet republics, which recognized the right to self-determination of all nationalities. The current demands of the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh should be supported according to this principle. The programmatic reply to perestroika was best put forward by Trotsky in the “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International.” He wrote:

“A fresh upsurge of the revolution in the USSR will undoubtedly begin under the banner of the struggle against social inequality and political oppression. Down with the privileges of the bureaucracy! Down with Stakhanovism (piece work)! Down with Soviet aristocracy and its rank and orders! Greater equality of wages and for all forms of labor!

“The struggle for the freedom of the trade unions and the factory committees, for the right of assembly and freedom of the press, will unfold for the regeneration and development of Soviet democracy.

“The bureaucracy replaced the soviets as class organs with the fiction of universal electoral rights—in the style of Hitler-Goebbels. It is necessary to return to the soviets not only in their free democratic form but also their class content. As once the bourgeoisie and Kulaks were not permitted to enter the soviets, so now it is necessary to drive the bureaucracy and the new aristocracy out of the soviets. In the soviets there is room only for representatives of the workers, rank-and-file collective farmers, peasants, and Red Army men.

“Democratization of the soviets is impossible without legalization of soviet parties. The workers and peasants themselves by their own free vote will indicate what parties they recognize as soviet parties.

“A revision of the planned economy from top to bottom in the interests of producers and consumers! Factory committees should be returned the right to control production. A democratically organized consumers’ cooperative should control the quality and price of products.

“Reorganization of the collective farms in accordance with the will and in the interests of workers there engaged!”

Rehabilitation of Leon Trotsky?

1917: Lenin and Trotsky in Petrograd

There is now talk in the Soviet Union of rehabilitating Leon Trotsky. The bureaucracy may finally acknowledge that Trotsky existed, but it will never rehabilitate the soviet form of 1917, which is the only true rehabilitation that can occur.

This will only occur when the soviet workers themselves remove the bureaucracy and regain control of the workers’ state. — Socialist Action August 1988

Part II. The U.S. Trade Union Bureaucracy

I Started Writing About the U.S. Trade inion Movement After I Retied as a Union Official in 1998.

The Fall of the Trade Union Movement

Debs

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.

Trotsky in his essay, Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay, (Which can be found atwww.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/1940-tu.htm) wrote that: “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 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.

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.

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 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.

How UFCW leaders helped break the P-9 strike

Slaughterhouse Fight: A Look at the Hormel Strike

(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. 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 a new leadership to oppose it. The problem with the Hormel strike was that its strategy contradicted its goals—the strikers used what wascalled the “CorporateCampaign”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 work force 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 statification 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 complete 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:

Union independence from government control!
Membership control over union organizations!
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!

2010 Elections:The Default of The Trade Union Movement

Save the Billionaires!

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.

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 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.

(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. 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 a 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 “CorporateCampaign”strategy.

(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.

(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.)

(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.

But the jury found Carey innocent of all charges.

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.

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:

Union independence from government control!
Membership control over union organizations!
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!

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. Constant Bi-partisan Counter Attack Upon The Labor Movement And The Social MovementsThe US Government

From that time on there has been a constant bi-partisan attack upon the labor movement and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Read my essays The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement and The Fall of the Trade Union Movement. Both of these decline were orchestrated by the betrayals by the leadership of these movements — not extend the gains of the movements for a better standard of living and improve our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — but to subordinate these past victories, to the election of lesser evil Democrats.

In todays world, with their pathetic record, the Democrats opened the way for Republicans to do well on November 2. That’s why any challenge to government will have to come from below.

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.

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 his article, Toxic Brew, , George Monbiot wrote:

The Tea Parties didn’t arise spontaneously: they were boiled up by big business..

The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has ever seen. And it is the biggest astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related.

An astroturf campaign is a fake grassroots movement: it purports to be a spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens, but in reality it is founded and funded by elite interests. Some astroturf campaigns have no grassroots component at all(1). Others catalyze and direct real mobilizations. The Tea Party movement belongs in the second category. It is mostly composed of passionate, well-meaning people who think they are fighting elite power, and who are unaware that they’ve been organized by the very interests they believe they are confronting. We now have powerful evidence that the movement was established and has been guided with the help of money from billionaires and big business. Much of this money, as well as much of the strategy and staffing, were provided by two brothers who run what they call ‘the biggest company you’ve never heard of.’

The rich who look to their ‘founding fathers’, the organizers of the first counter revolution and the subsequent constitution, use the terms of the the 1776 revolution — ‘Tea Party’ and ‘No Taxation Without Representation’ to help create the illusion of a movement to further destroy our rights through Obama’s current bipartisan austerity pogrom.

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 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.

We must begin to organize our own response to these attacks upon us, by acting as our revolutionary ‘founding fathers’ really did act during the first and second american revolutions — by building a movement committed to act independently of the government and the ruling powers. And as the Declaration of Independence states:

. . . “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”. . .

Let’s being to organize the third American revolution!

Leon Trotsky: Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay (1940) First Published in English: Fourth International [New York], Vol.2 No.2, February 1941, pp.40-43.
Online Version: Marxists Internet Archive, 2003.Transcribed/HTML Markup: David Walters in 2003.
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive www.marxists.org 2003. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (The manuscript of the following article was found in Trotsky’s desk. Obviously, it was by no means a completed article, but rather the rough notes for an article on the subject indicated by his title. He had been writing them shortly before his death. – The Editors of FI)

There is one common feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of modern trade union organizations in the entire world: it is their drawing closely to and growing together with the state power. This process is equally characteristic of the neutral, the Social-Democratic, the Communist and “anarchist” trade unions. This fact alone shows that the tendency towards “growing together” is intrinsic not in this or that doctrine as such but derives from social conditions common for all unions.

Monopoly capitalism does not rest on competition and free private initiative but on centralized command. The capitalist cliques at the head of mighty trusts, syndicates, banking consortiums, etcetera, view economic life from the very same heights as does state power; and they require at every step the collaboration of the latter. In their turn the trade unions in the most important branches of industry find themselves deprived of the possibility of profiting by the competition between the different enterprises. They have to confront a centralized capitalist adversary, intimately bound up with state power. Hence flows the need of the trade unions – insofar as they remain on reformist positions, ie., on positions of adapting themselves to private property – to adapt themselves to the capitalist state and to contend for its cooperation. In the eyes of the bureaucracy of the trade union movement the chief task lies in “freeing” the state from the embrace of capitalism, in weakening its dependence on trusts, in pulling it over to their side. This position is in complete harmony with the social position of the labor aristocracy and the labor bureaucracy, who fight for a crumb in the share of super profits of imperialist capitalism. The labor bureaucrats do their level best in words and deeds to demonstrate to the “democratic” state how reliable and indispensable they are in peace-time and especially in time of war. By transforming the trade unions into organs of the state, fascism invents nothing new; it merely draws to their ultimate conclusion the tendencies inherent in imperialism.

Colonial and semi-colonial countries are under the sway not of native capitalism but of foreign imperialism. However, this does not weaken but on the contrary, strengthens the need of direct, daily, practical ties between the magnates of capitalism and the governments which are in essence subject to them – the governments of colonial or semi-colonial countries. Inasmuch as imperialist capitalism creates both in colonies and semi-colonies a stratum of labor aristocracy and bureaucracy, the latter requires the support of colonial and semi-colonial governments, as protectors, patrons and, sometimes, as arbitrators. This constitutes the most important social basis for the Bonapartist and semi-Bonapartist character of governments in the colonies and in backward countries generally. This likewise constitutes the basis for the dependence of reformist unions upon the state.

In Mexico the trade unions have been transformed by law into semi-state institutions and have, in the nature of things, assumed a semi-totalitarian character. The stateization of the trade unions was, according to the conception of the legislators, introduced in the interests of the workers in order to assure them an influence upon the governmental and economic life. But insofar as foreign imperialist capitalism dominates the national state and insofar as it is able, with the assistance of internal reactionary forces, to overthrow the unstable democracy and replace it with outright fascist dictatorship, to that extent the legislation relating to the trade unions can easily become a weapon in the hands of imperialist dictatorship.

Slogans for Freeing the Unions

From the foregoing it seems, at first sight, easy to draw the conclusion that the trade unions cease to be trade unions in the imperialist epoch. They leave almost no room at all for workers’ democracy which, in the good old days, when free trade ruled on the economic arena, constituted the content of the inner life of labor organizations. In the absence of workers’ democracy there cannot be any free struggle for the influence over the trade union membership. And because of this, the chief arena of work for revolutionists within the trade unions disappears. Such a position, however, would be false to the core. We cannot select the arena and the conditions for our activity to suit our own likes and dislikes. It is infinitely more difficult to fight in a totalitarian or a semi totalitarian state for influence over the working masses than in a democracy. The very same thing likewise applies to trade unions whose fate reflects the change in the destiny of capitalist states. We cannot renounce the struggle for influence over workers in Germany merely because the totalitarian regime makes such work extremely difficult there. We cannot, in precisely the same way, renounce the struggle within the compulsory labor organizations created by Fascism. All the less so can we renounce internal systematic work in trade unions of totalitarian and semi-totalitarian type merely because they depend directly or indirectly on the workers’ state or because the bureaucracy deprives the revolutionists of the possibility of working freely within these trade unions. It is necessary to conduct a struggle under all those concrete conditions which have been created by the preceding developments, including therein the mistakes of the working class and the crimes of its leaders. In the fascist and semi-fascist countries it is impossible to carry on revolutionary work that is not underground, illegal, conspiratorial. Within the totalitarian and semi-totalitarian unions it is impossible or well-nigh impossible to carry on any except conspiratorial work. It is necessary to adapt ourselves to the concrete conditions existing in the trade unions of every given country in order to mobilize the masses not only against the bourgeoisie but also against the totalitarian regime within the trade unions themselves and against the leaders enforcing this regime. The primary slogan for this struggle is: complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state. This means a struggle to turn the trade unions into the organs of the broad exploited masses and not the organs of a labor aristocracy.

* * *

The second slogan is: trade union democracy. This second slogan flows directly from the first and presupposes for its realization the complete freedom of the trade unions from the imperialist or colonial state.

In other words, the trade unions in the present epoch cannot simply be the organs of democracy as they were in the epoch of free capitalism and they cannot any longer remain politically neutral, that is, limit themselves to serving the daily needs of the working class. They cannot any longer be anarchistic, i.e. ignore the decisive influence of the state on the life of peoples and classes. They can no longer be reformist, because the objective conditions leave no room for any serious and lasting reforms. 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.

* * *

The neutrality of the trade unions is completely and irretrievably a thing of the past, gone together with the free bourgeois democracy.

* * *

From what has been said it follows quite clearly that, in spite of the progressive degeneration of trade unions and their growing together with the imperialist state, the work within the trade unions not only does not lose any of its importance but remains as before and becomes in a certain sense even more important work than ever for every revolutionary party. The matter at issue is essentially the struggle for influence over the working class. Every organization, every party, every faction which permits itself an ultimatistic position in relation to the trade union, i.e., in essence turns its back upon the working class, merely because of displeasure with its organizations, every such organization is destined to perish. And it must be said it deserves to perish.

* * *

Inasmuch as the chief role in backward countries is not played by national but by foreign capitalism, the national bourgeoisie occupies, in the sense of its social position, a much more minor position than corresponds with the development of industry. Inasmuch as foreign capital does not import workers but proletarianizes the native population, the national proletariat soon begins playing the most important role in the life of the country. In these conditions the national government, to the extent that it tries to show resistance to foreign capital, is compelled to a greater or lesser degree to lean on the proletariat. On the other hand, the governments of those backward countries which consider inescapable or more profitable for themselves to march shoulder to shoulder with foreign capital, destroy the labor organizations and institute a more or less totalitarian regime. Thus, the feebleness of the national bourgeoisie, the absence of traditions of municipal self-government, the pressure of foreign capitalism and the relatively rapid growth of the proletariat, cut the ground from under any kind of stable democratic regime. The governments of backward, i.e., colonial and semi-colonial countries, by and large assume a Bonapartist or semi-Bonapartist character; and differ from one another in this, that some try to orient in a democratic direction, seeking support among workers and peasants, while others install a form close to military-police dictatorship. This likewise determines the fate of the trade unions. They either stand under the special patronage of the state or they are subjected to cruel persecution. Patronage on the part of the state is dictated by two tasks which confront it.. First, to draw the working class closer thus gaining a support for resistance against excessive pretensions on the part of imperialism; and, at the same time, to discipline the workers themselves by placing them under the control of a bureaucracy.

* * *

Monopoly Capitalism and the Unions

Monopoly capitalism is less and less willing to reconcile itself to the independence of trade unions. It demands of the reformist bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy who pick the crumbs from its banquet table, that they become transformed into its political police before the eyes of the working class. If that is not achieved, the labor bureaucracy is driven away and replaced by the fascists. Incidentally, all the efforts of the labor aristocracy in the service of imperialism cannot in the long run save them from destruction.

The intensification of class contradictions within each country, the intensification of antagonisms between one country and another, produce a situation in which imperialist capitalism can tolerate (i.e., up to a certain time) a reformist bureaucracy only if the latter serves directly as a petty but active stockholder of its imperialist enterprises, of its plans and programs within the country as well as on the world arena. Social-reformism must become transformed into social-imperialism in order to prolong its existence, but only prolong it, and nothing more. Because along this road there is no way out in general.

Does this mean that in the epoch of imperialism independent trade unions are generally impossible? It would be fundamentally incorrect to pose the question this way. Impossible are the independent or semi-independent reformist trade unions. Wholly possible are revolutionary trade unions which not only are not stockholders of imperialist policy but which set as their task the direct overthrow of the rule of capitalism. In the epoch of imperialist decay the trade unions can be really independent only to the extent that they are conscious of being, in action, the organs of proletarian revolution. In this sense, the program of transitional demands adopted by the last congress of the Fourth International is not only the program for the activity of the party but in its fundamental features it is the program for the activity of the trade unions.

(Translator’s note: At this point Trotsky left room on the page, to expound further the connection between trade union activity and the Transitional Program of the Fourth International. It is obvious that implied here is a very powerful argument in favor of military training under trade union control. The following idea is implied: Either the trade unions serve as the obedient recruiting sergeants for the imperialist army and imperialist war or they train workers for self-defense and revolution.)

The development of backward countries is characterized by its combined character. In other words, the last word of imperialist technology, economics, and politics is combined in these countries with traditional backwardness and primitiveness. This law can be observed in the most diverse spheres of the development of colonial and semi-colonial countries, including the sphere of the trade union movement. Imperialist capitalism operates here in its most cynical and naked form. It transports to virgin soil the most perfected methods of its tyrannical rule.

* * *

In the trade union movement throughout the world there is to be observed in the last period a swing to the right and the suppression of internal democracy. In England, the Minority Movement in the trade unions has been crushed (not without the assistance of Moscow); the leaders of the trade union movement are today, especially in the field of foreign policy, the obedient agents of the Conservative party. In France there was no room for an independent existence for Stalinist trade unions; they united with the so-called anarcho-syndicalist trade unions under the leadership of Jouhaux and as a result of this unification there was a general shift of the trade union movement not to the left but to the right. The leadership of the CGT is the most direct and open agency of French imperialist capitalism.

No less graphic, although in a different sense, is the picture of the development or the degeneration of the trade union movement in Spain. In the socialist trade unions all those leading elements which to any degree represented the independence of the trade union movement were pushed out. As regards the anarcho-syndicalist unions, they were transformed into the instrument of the bourgeois republicans; the anarcho-syndicalist leaders became conservative bourgeois ministers. The fact that this metamorphosis took place in conditions of civil war does not weaken its significance. War is the continuation of the self-same policies. It speeds up processes, exposes their basic features, destroys all that is rotten, false, equivocal and lays bare all that is essential. The shift of the trade unions to the right was due to the sharpening of class and international contradictions. The leaders of the trade union movement sensed or understood, or were given to understand, that now was no time to play the game of opposition. Every oppositional movement within the trade union movement, especially among the tops, threatens to provoke a stormy movement of the masses and to create difficulties for national imperialism. Hence flows the swing of the trade unions to the right, and the suppression of workers’ democracy within the unions. The basic feature, the swing towards the totalitarian regime, passes through the labor movement of the whole world.

We should also recall Holland, where the reformist and the trade union movement was not only a reliable prop of imperialist capitalism, but where the so-called anarcho-syndicalist organization also was actually under the control of the imperialist government. The secretary of this organization, Sneevliet, in spite of his Platonic sympathies for the Fourth International was as deputy in the Dutch Parliament most concerned lest the wrath of the government descend upon his trade union organization.

* * *

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.

* * *

The nationalization of railways and oil fields in Mexico has of course nothing in common with socialism. It is a measure of state capitalism in a backward country which in this way seeks to defend itself on the one hand against foreign imperialism and on the other against its own proletariat. The management of railways, oil fields, etcetera, through labor organizations has nothing in common with workers’ control over industry, for in the essence of the matter the management is effected through the labor bureaucracy which is independent of the workers, but in return, completely dependent on the bourgeois state. This measure on the part of the ruling class pursues the aim of disciplining the working class, making it more industrious in the service of the common interests of the state, which appear on the surface to merge with the interests of the working class itself. As a matter of fact, the whole task of the bourgeoisie consists in liquidating the trade unions as organs of the class struggle and substituting in their place the trade union bureaucracy as the organ of the leadership over the workers by the bourgeois state. In these conditions, the task of the revolutionary vanguard is to conduct a struggle for the complete independence of the trade unions and for the introduction of actual workers’ control over the present union bureaucracy, which has been turned into the administration of railways, oil enterprises and so on.

* * *

Events of the last period (before the war) have revealed with especial clarity that anarchism, which in point of theory is always only liberalism drawn to its extremes, was, in practice, peaceful propaganda within the democratic republic, the protection of which it required. If we leave aside individual terrorist acts, etcetera, anarchism, as a system of mass movement and politics, presented only propaganda material under the peaceful protection of the laws. In conditions of crisis the anarchists always did just the opposite of what they taught in peace times. This was pointed out by Marx himself in connection with the Paris Commune. And it was repeated on a far more colossal scale in the experience of the Spanish revolution.

* * *

Democratic unions in the old sense of the term, bodies were in the framework of one and the same mass organization different tendencies struggled more or less freely, can no longer exist. Just as it is impossible to bring back the bourgeois-democratic state, so it is impossible to bring back the old workers’ democracy. The fate of the one reflects the fate of the other. As a matter of fact, the independence of trade unions in the class sense, in their relations to the bourgeois state can, in the present conditions, be assured only by a completely revolutionary leadership, that is, the leadership of the Fourth International. This leadership, naturally, must and can be rational and assure the unions the maximum of democracy conceivable under the present concrete conditions. But without the political leadership of the Fourth International the independence of the trade unions is impossible.

The Condition of the United States Working Class — Where Do We Go From Here?

In his Book, The Iron Heel, for the aliance or ‘partership’ between the labor bureaucracy and the capitalist class; As Leon Trontsky explained is his essayTrotsky and the “Iron Heel” (1937):

“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.

Since One-Third of All Black Men in America Are Classified As Ex-Felons. and Black Ex-felons Have a Life Time Employment Probability Rate of 4,7%, the Actual Government Statistics Are Grossly Understated, the Overall Real Condition of the Working Class is Perpetual Pauperization!

My life has recently intersected, in a most personal way, two of Mark Twain’s famous quips. One I shall defer to the end of this essay. The other (sometimes attributed to Disraeli), identifies three species of mendacity, each worse than the one before – lies, damned lies, and statistics. — Stephen Jay Gould

I begin by stating that this essay exposes the bi-partisan lies of the capitalist class, the capitalist economists, and their media institutions, that the US capitalists has been repeating about the standard of living of the United States working class. Donald Trump’s audacity and lying are but a reflection of the level of mendacity of the United States Capitalist Class.

The last 4 decades, in the United States, have been the largest transference of wealth From the Poor, the Working class, and the Middle class, to the rich, the 1%, in the history of the world!

This has been done trough ’normal exploitation’ of the working class, and through Austerity Programs (Cutting the social wages of the working class.), through Government Lies and Statistics, Usury, and with the full Compliance and Silence/Support of the United States Trade Union Bureaucracy!

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Capitalism Austerity Has Meant More Wealth for the 1% and Pauperization of the 99% — Austerity means that the Rich Get Richer and the Pauperized Get Poorer

Since the 1%’s Government and their Media Monopoly has created an illusion of prosperity. And that the misleaderships of the Trade Union Bureaucracy, along with the misleaderships of the mass organizations of Blacks and other oppressed minorities, and women’s movements have supported this illusion. In the first part of this essay, I will present a series of images and quotes, to give you an idea about the real state of the United States Economy. In the second part of this essay, I will explain why the capitalists have been able to impose their worldwide austerity program and how where we should go from here.

Austerity Real State of the United States Economy

There are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful … overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies and culture and education for their minds and freedom and human dignity for their spirits. In this America, millions of people experience every day the opportunity of having life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in all of their dimensions. And in this America millions of young people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity. But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the ebullience of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America, people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. — Martin Luther King, The Other America 4/14/1967

There are still two Americas of the those that have and those have not. Since Martin Luther King speech, there has been ‘merger mania’ resulting in an ever-increasing concentration of the wealth, in today’s world, this has division has reached such a point that now, according to Oxfam, the World’s 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%!

While 44%of the working class struggles to stay alive: “Even as the U.S. economy hums along at a favorable pace, there is a vast segment of workers today earning wages low enough to leave their livelihood and families extremely vulnerable. That’s one of the main takeaways from our new analysis, in which we found that 53 million Americans between the ages of 18 to 64—accounting for 44% of all workers—qualify as “low-wage.” Their median hourly wages are $10.22, and median annual earnings are about $18,000. Brookings Institution study/”

During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three-Point Political Program has been Austerity, Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and, if opposition to austerity develops, The Iron Heel.

Democracy in the United States?: As the Capitalist Robber Barons Steal from the 99%: Only the 1% Voted For Austerity — The 99% Should Decide On Austerity — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From Austerity! Under Austerity, All of the World Will Eventually Be Pauperized, Humbled, and Desecrated Like Greece and Puerto Rico. Socialism Means True Democracy — The 99% Will Rule! — Not the Few!

In the United States, under President Obama, The Capitalist Parties (Republicans and Democrats) openly declared a policy of austerity in response to the capitalist crash in 2008-2009, as a solution to the crisis of capitalism.

Labor/Boss ‘Partnership’After I retired as a business agent for Painters Local #4 in 1997, I wrote The Fall of the Trade Union Movement in 1998. I was elected, in 1994, by the membership, who were very much aware that I was a Socialist I instantly became a part of the Trade Union Bureaucracy. Being inside the body of beast. I saw how corrupt they were. Though the Democratic Party and the Cliton Administration, they had become openly and contractually in a Declared a Partnership with the Boss! I also learned that the Building Trades Internationals had made such a promise in 1983 and pledged to take care of any local areas, that might oppose such a partnership. (The NLRB helped them in this prices.) For a more in depth analysis of this process read The Fall of the Trade Union Movement in 1998

One result of this ‘Partnership’ Was the Complete Betrayal of the Working Class. The Betrayal has led to the unions assisting the employers to drastically cut the standard of living of the entire Working Class!

In 2007 I updated my essay, The Fall of the Trade Union Movement in 1998, with these three paragraphs:

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.”

When I was a painter in the late seventies, during contract negotiations, I inform my union official that we should leave wording the of the cost clause of living clause based on the 1967 COLA to remain so worded, for there was about to be a change in the official cost of living by the government. In the eighties, were got very large wage increases because the clause was never changed! We got wage increases that we never would have gotten, based on our bargaining strength. The Fed had dropped the coat of food and gas in their new cost of living estimates The feds put out false figures to make the economic outlook appear better than it really was.

When I started my Daily News Digest , I came across Shadow Government Statistics website written my an honest economist — John Williams. I use mainly his charts to prove my arguments. I am an email subscriber to Shadow Government Statistis. (See his short biology, from his website below.)

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Walter J. “John” Williams was born in 1949. He received an A.B. in Economics, cum laude, from Dartmouth College in 1971, and was awarded a M.B.A. from Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Business Administration in 1972, where he was named an Edward Tuck Scholar. During his career as a consulting economist, John has worked with individuals as well as Fortune 500 companies.Although I am known formally as Walter J. Williams, my friends call me “John.” For 30 years, I have been a private consulting economist and, out of necessity, had to become a specialist in government economic reporting.

One of my early clients was a large manufacturer of commercial airplanes, who had developed an econometric model for predicting revenue passenger miles. The level of revenue passenger miles was their primary sales forecasting tool, and the model was heavily dependent on the GNP (now GDP) as reported by the Department of Commerce. Suddenly, their model stopped working, and they asked me if I could fix it. I realized the GNP numbers were faulty, corrected them for my client (official reporting was similarly revised a couple of years later) and the model worked again, at least for a while, until GNP methodological changes eventually made the underlying data worthless.

That began a lengthy process of exploring the history and nature of economic reporting and in interviewing key people involved in the process from the early days of government reporting through the present. For a number of years I conducted surveys among business economists as to the quality of government statistics (the vast majority thought it was pretty bad), and my results led to front page stories in 1989 in the New York Times and Investors Daily (now Investors Business Daily), considerable coverage in the broadcast media and a joint meeting with representatives of all the government’s statistical agencies.

Nonetheless, the quality of government reporting has deteriorated sharply in the last couple of decades. Reporting problems have included methodological changes to economic reporting that have pushed headline economic and inflation results out of the realm of real-world or common experience.

Over the decades, well in excess of 1,000 presentations have been given on the economic outlook, or on approaches to analyzing economic data, to clients—large and small—including talks with members of the business, banking, government, press, academic, brokerage and investment communities. I also have provided testimony before Congress (details here).

An old friend—the late-Doug Gillespie—asked me some years back to write a series of articles on the quality of government statistics. The response to those writings (the Primer Series available at the top-center of this page) was so strong that we started ShadowStats.com (Shadow Government Statistics) in 2004. The newsletter is published as part of my economic consulting services. — John Williams

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Stock Market Recovery Up—No Trickle Down For The Working class!

Due the Labor Bureaucracy’s collaboration with the Boss, Real Wages Have Been Cut Over 100% Since1974! — Wages Have Not Kept Up With Inflation! Since the Neoliberal Labor Bureaucracy declared itself to be in a (Domestic) Partnership With the Boss’ (‘Bedding the Boss!’)! was fully institutionalized starting in the mid-1980s, this ‘partnership’ gave birth to the one, two, three, etc. .. wage tier system! Selling out the futures of future young workers entering the labor force. And, since the lowest union wage is 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! 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’(Class Cooperation)! Through the 1980s and 1990s they even included this ‘partnership’ into their work agreements and the partnership was fully established! 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 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 is graphically shown in this: Shadow Government Statistics Graph.

At the same time, Real Wages have Fallen Since the Wage Price Freeze of 1972 (Shadow Government Statistics): Graph 3 plots the seasonally-adjusted earnings as officially deflated by the BLS (red-line), and as adjusted for the ShadowStats-Alternate CPI Measure, 1990-Base (blue-line). When inflation-depressing methodologies of the 1990s began to kick-in, the artificially-weakened CPI-W (also used in calculating Social Security cost-of-living adjustments) helped to prop up the reported real earnings. Official real earnings today still have not recovered their inflation-adjusted levels of the early-1970s, and, at best, have been in a minimal uptrend for the last two decades (albeit spiked recently by negative headline inflation). Deflated by the ShadowStats (1990-Based) measure, real earnings have been in fairly-regular decline for the last four decades, which is much closer to common experience than the pattern suggested by the CPI-W. See the Public Commentary on Inflation Measurement for further detail. This process has led to a greater productivity and windfall profits for the capitalist, without more value being added to society.

The ‘Big Lie’ About Real Wages Has Been Going On For Decades: Shadow Grovernment Statistics Graph:

Real Average Weekly Earnings- Production and Nonsupervisory Employees

Actually, the figures are even worse, if you count those who ‘don’t count’ or who were never counted, those who cannot find work and those who have been, at one time, in the prison industrial system, (See the Following Quote.)

In the last two-and-a-half decades, the prison population has undergone what the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics director Jan Chaiken last year called “literally incredible” expansion. Chaiken reported a quadrupling of the U.S. incarceration rate since 1975. That rate, more than 600 prisoners for every 100,000 people, is by far the highest in the industrialized world. The U.S. incarcerates its citizens at a rate six times higher than Canada, England, and France, seven times higher than Switzerland and Holland, and ten times Sweden and Finland. Beyond sheer magnitude, the second aspect of America’s incarceration boom is its heavily radicalized nature. On any given day, Chaiken reported, 30 percent of African-American males ages 20 to 29 are ‘under correctional supervision’ — either in jail or prison or on probation or parole. Especially chilling is a statistical model used by the Bureau of Justice Statistics to determine the lifetime chances of incarceration for individuals in different racial and ethnic groups. Based on current rates, it predicts that a young Black man age 16 in 1996 faces a 29 percent chance of spending time in prison during his life. The corresponding statistic for white men in the same age group is 4 percent. According to Thomas K. Lowenstein, director of the Electronic Policy Network, 7 percent of Black children- nearly 9 times more than white children- have an incarcerated parent. — Race, Prison, and Poverty

July 24,2020 Update: Since One-Third of All Black Men in America Are Classified As Ex-Felons. and Black Ex-felons Have a Life Time Probability Rate of 4,7%, the Actual Government Statistics Are Grossly Underrated, the Overall Real Condition of the Working Class is the Process of Pauperization!

The following quote and graphs from the Brookings Institution article, Brookings: Meet the LOW-Wage Workforce are a graphic example of the pauperization of the Working Class.: “Describing Low-Wage Workers More Than 53 million people—44% of all workers aged 18-64—are low-wage workers by our criteria. They earn median hourly wages of $10.22 and median annual earnings of $17,950.”

Pension Robbery Swindle

Pensions of Union Workers Cut in Federal Budget (Video Interview with Michael):

DESVARIEUX: So, Michael, today we’re going to be talking about the federal budget. What has really stood out to you in that budget?

HUDSON: Well, there’s something very radical happened, that people haven’t been talking about very much. Normally a budget is supposed to decide what gets funded and what doesn’t get funded, and it’s simply a decision of what to cut back. A budget is not supposed to rewrite the law. But what happened is something very radical. They rewrote two laws. One of the laws was about bank derivatives that Elizabeth Warren has spoken about, promising to bail out Citibank and other banks. If they lose on derivatives, they’re going to get bailed out like they did in 2008.

And the other was a decision not to bail out the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the government’s pension fund insurer. They’ve decided–they passed a new law. They rewrote the law. They declared the 1974 ERISA act protecting pensions illegal, and they said if pension funds cannot pay their retirees, they get to be cut back and they don’t get to go to the government to get a guarantee. We’ve abolished the government guarantee on pension funds if the pension fund is run by a labor union, meaning if a pension fund is a multi-employer fund that has more than one employer contributing to it, like airline funds, truckers funds, Teamsters funds if you’re a truck driver, insurance employees, we’re going to give the fund managers, mainly the financial managers on Wall Street, the right to cut back on these pensions that are due. So the pensions that people had expected to receive when they made their wage contract saying, well, we’re not going to ask for as fast a wage increase if you give us security when we retire, all of this has been rewritten.

And the ironic thing is the Democrats led this fight against labor a year ago, this special ruling was put in, and people who were supposed to be Democratic liberals, like Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, decided to have something also radical in the new budget. They weren’t going to report which representatives voted yes or no for these amendments. So the Democrats covered up their tracks, and you can’t see that they were really behind the Wall Street constituency in saying, we’re going to cut back the pensions. And you can see what’s on the mind, basically. The government said, look, we’ve got to balance the budget in the face of Obama’s sort of escalating the military confrontation with Russia and China. And on the face of an increased bailout for the banks, there’s just not going to be enough money to guarantee the pension funds. So we can’t do for the pensioners what we did for the bankers in 2008.

So this has turned out to be just an absolute disaster. Yeah, it looks like a lot of union pension funds and public service pension funds are going to go the way of what happened in Detroit and California cities, of being cut back when there’s not enough. And part of the problem is that these pension funds were all set up in a way that they were guaranteed to lose. The whole idea was to pretend that companies didn’t have to pay very much to support their workers or to put money aside to pay pensions, because they said, look, these funds can make money on Wall Street, they can make eight and a half percent a year. Well, as it turns out, pension funds are not making eight and a half percent a year; they’re making–if they want to be safe, they’re making less than one percent a year, which is the government Treasury bill rate.

So what they’ve done is they’ve gotten sort of desperate, and a lot of pension funds have gone to pension to hedge funds and Wall Street. They’ve gone to Wall Street money managers and said, look, can you–we’re desperate, we’re going to have to go under; can you help us make more money? Well, the Wall Street sharpies think, well, okay, sure, we’re going to put your money in derivatives and other things. And the banks that have been managing these funds, like Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust, have actually done very badly. And the most troubled fund of all of the ones in question are the Teamsters fund for the central states of America. And the government’s trying to blame labor very much in the way that Malthus blamed labor a few hundred years ago for its poverty. The whole idea is, well, a few years ago there were, like, four workers for every retiree, so it was easy for the workers to pay into the funds and organize it sort of like a Ponzi scheme, keep paying in, and there was enough to pay. But now that the economy’s been de-industrialized, there are more retirees for every worker. So the Obama administration is saying, well, the problem is that there are just not enough workers to pay. Sorry, they lose.

But the Congressional Budget Office has found that that’s really not much of the problem at all. A lot of the problem is that the pension funds have gotten desperate, turned over their money to Wall Street. Some of this was done under the Congressional and Justice Department force. A lot of union pension funds, especially the Teamsters, were run by the mafia. So the government said, well, look, the mafia are crooks; let’s turn the money over to Wall Street. What they didn’t realize is that Wall Street people are just as crooked as the mafia, and they did pretty much a strategy that was pioneered, I think, by Prudential Insurance a couple of decades ago, back a generation ago. Every day, Prudential would buy and sell a given stock. If the stock went up, they’d put the gains in their own account; if the stock went down, they’d say, oh, that’s the accounts of the clients we’re managing. Well, that’s pretty much what Wall Street’s been doing with the pension funds. They’ll play both sides of the derivative gains. They keep the gains for themselves and pay themselves bonuses and high salaries, and the losses are all stuck to Orange County or Detroit or Birmingham, Alabama, or other public funds. And there have been a number of lawsuits where Wall Street’s had to give back the money. And they’ve all been accused of fraud.

But the Justice Department said, well, wait a minute. These banks who were cheating the pension funds are too big to fail. They’re systemic. We can’t throw Citibank in jail. We can’t go against Northern Trust. So, essentially, now that Wall Street has realized that there is nothing to stop them from ripping off the pension funds, this is the largest single volume of capital to be grabbed. And that’s up for grabs. And, basically, this is the first step towards the fight they’re going to be seeing over the next two years to balance the budget by cutting back Social Security, which has been Obama’s chief economic aim from the beginning, and then to privatize pensions and to privatize Social Security. The argument’s going to be made to American workers, well, wait a minute, you’ve seen your pension funds aren’t able to pay, you’ve see them lose money on derivatives. There’s only one way to be safe: take responsibility for yourself, and you manage your own money in the 401(k)s and the other personal programs.

So they’re going to privatize all of the pension funds. And by making your own choice, what this really means is the individual employees are going to have to turn over their funds to the same Wall Street companies–Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust–that have managed the–mismanaged the corporate pension funds and the union pension funds. And so the whole idea is that all of a sudden, now that employment is not growing, now that wages are not growing, instead of making profits by underpaying labor, Wall Street’s going to make profits just by siphoning off all of the savings that have been put aside in advance to pay the pensions. The argument will be, I’m sorry, folks, there’s not enough to pay the pensions or the Wall Street calculators who made these forecasts made a terrible mistake. Unfortunately for you, under the law that Congress has just rewritten, not only do they get paid before you, but we’ve just canceled the government’s responsibility to insure you. We’ve taken away your insurance. That’s going to be the fight that we’re seeing. And now that the Republicans are in control of both the House and the Senate, the Democrats can say, ah, let’s support Wall Street and blame it all on the Republicans. And they’re going whole hog, really, to stiff the pension retirees.

Federal Government Keeps Cheating Retired Seniors— The Federal Government’s ever-changing cost of living index.: Retired workers living on social security, are cheated out of social security wage increases by 5%, if you used how the government ‘figured’ the social security increased in 1990, and by 8% how it was ‘figured’ in 1980. Our ‘labor leaders have remained silent in their duty to their partners. The graphs below demonstrate the 1% government’s sleight of hand.

Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Inflation Charts Alternate Inflation Charts The CPI chart on the home page reflects our estimate of inflation for today as if it were calculated the same way it was in 1990. The CPI on the Alternate-DataSeries tab here reflects the CPI as if it were calculated using the methodologies in place in 1980. In general terms, methodological shifts in government reporting have depressed reported inflation, moving the concept of the CPI away from being a measure of the cost of living needed to maintain a constant standard of living.

Since June 2009 Americans have lived in the false reality of a recovering economy. Various fake news and manipulated statistics have been used to create this false impression. However, indicators that really count have not supported the false picture and were ignored. For example, it is normal in a recovering or expanding economy for the labor force participation rate to rise as people enter the workforce to take advantage of the job opportunities. During the decade of the long recovery, from June 2009 through May 2019, the labor force participation rate consistently fell from 65.7 to 62.8 percent. —Paul Craig Roberts, The Diminishing American Economy

Bureau of Labor Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate is 63.9%

The Above Graph and Quote Proves the Accuracy of Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Unemployment Charts. The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers. The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.

Another aspect is that the real unemployment rate is at 1930s depression levels.: Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Unemployment Charts The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers. The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.

U.6 and Shadow Government Statistics Alternate U.S. Unemployment Rates Headline (U.3 and U.6) versus ShadowStats Alternate 1994 to November 2019, Seasonally-Adjusted [ShadowStats, Bureau of Labor Statistics]Robber Baron Usury Capitalism in the United States

A new factor has been added to the exploitation of the working class and oppression of the masses — Robber Baron—Style Usury!

The 1%’s Billion Dollar Government Usuury: the practice of making unethical or immoral monetary loans that unfairly enrich the lender. Originally, usury meant interest of any kind. A loan may be considered usurious because of excessive or abusive interest rates or other factors. Historically, in some Christian societies, and in many Islamic societies even today, charging any interest at all would be considered usury. Someone who practices usury can be called a usurer, but a more common term in contemporary English is loan shark.

Robber baron, pejorative term for one of the powerful 19th-century U.S. industrialists and financiers who made fortunes by monopolizing huge industries through the formation of trusts, engaging in unethical business practices, exploiting workers, and paying little heed to their customers or competition. Alternatively, those who credit the explosive growth of American capitalism during this period to the indefatigable pursuit of success and material wealth are likely to celebrate these entrepreneurial tycoons as “captains of industry.” Among the sectors in which they compiled their great wealth were the oil, steel, liquor, cotton, textile, and tobacco industries, railroads, and banks.

It took 100 years, but America has returned to its unequal past. With a vengeance. — America 2018: Even More Gilded Than America 1918

Related Article: “A Ponzi Scheme” The Economy is Only A Paper Moon

2019 Update: The Banks are Now Making a Profit Risk Free:

When Mary Poppins was made into a movie in 1964, Mr. Banks’ advice to his son was sound. Banks were then paying more than 5% interest on deposits, enough to double young Michael’s investment every 14 years. Now, however, the average savings account pays only 0.10% annually – that’s 1/10th of 1% – and many of the country’s biggest banks pay less than that. If you were to put $5,000 in a regular Bank of America savings account (paying 0.01%) today, in a year you would have collected only 50 cents in interest. That’s true for most of us, but banks themselves are earning 2.4% on their deposits at the Federal Reserve. These deposits, called “excess reserves,” include the reserves the banks got from our deposits, on which they are paying almost nothing; and unlike with our deposits, there is no $250,000 cap on the sums banks can stash at the Fed amassing interest. A whopping $1.5 trillion in reserves are now sitting in Fed reserve accounts. The Fed rebates its profits to the government after deducting its costs, and interest paid to banks is one of those costs. That means we the taxpayers are paying $36 billion annually to private banks for the privilege of parking their excess reserves at one of the most secure banks in the world – parking their reserves rather than lending them out. The banks are getting these outsized returns while taking absolutely no risk, since the Fed as “lender of last resort” cannot go bankrupt. — Ellen Brown, Why Is the Fed Paying So Much Interest to Banks?

The Virtual Elimination of Usury Laws in the United States

In the 1960s, when credit cards were being established by the Banks, a series of State Government and Supreme court decision made usury legal. State Usury laws were thrown out by the Supreme Court if the Banks moved their headquarters into states that not have strict or any usury laws. Thus credit cards charged 17% ‘loan shark loans’ if credit card loans were not paid in full.

As a result, the working class was buying cars, other commodities, ect., with credit card debt. Not to be outdone by the banks, the Federal Government made ‘loans’ to poor, working-class, and middle-class college students, in order to get a college education. The real education has been that in today’s world, these loans will never be paid off and neither will the growing interest debt. The majority of the population will never get out of debt. The below graphs show the extent of the ever-growing debt.:

Average Credit Card Debt in America: September 2019

Why Does The US Gov’t Charge Interest On Student Loans? Why Is The US Gov’t Effectively Engaging In Usury With Such A Fundamental, Public Good?(Note That Usury Spiked After the 2008 Crash)

None of the above changes in the United States, by the Capitalist Class, could have been made, if not for the betrayal, collaboration, support, default, and/or silence of the United States Labor Bureaucracy. That became codified in the 1980s through the slow application of the Taft Hartley, Kennedy, Landrum, Griffin laws.

The Way out of the Current Condition.

All is not lost, for today’s youth, due to these austerity laws, that they inherited from their forefathers. Are opposed to the austerity political programs of the world capitalist class.

The majority of today’s are sympathetic to socialism! This is shown by the support for Social Democrats like Bernie Sanders. However, the Social Democrats do not and have not directly opposed Capitalist Austerity.

As the Capitalist Thieves Steal from the 99% — Only the 1% Voted For Austerity — The 99% Should Decide On Austerity — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From Austerity! Let the 99% Vote on Austerity!

Austerity is a Political Program, and it Must be Oppose Politically.

In most of the countries in the world, there are working-class and Socialist Parties. Through the default of the Trade Union Bureaucracy and their political party, the party of Obama austerity, the working class has no voice for their frustration with austerity.

I believe, at his time, that, at his time, it is utopian to call for a labor party, based upon the trade union bureaucracy. But rather, socialist should speak out against austerity and try to form an anti-austerity organization, study groups, clubs, ect., to begin a discussion of how to fight back under the present conditions. We must educate, agitate, and organize against austerity.

Update: Just as I wrote these words, it seems that the Rank and File Workers want a change. Today’s (September 16, 2019) headlines:

46,000 UAW Workers Strike at GM Plants Nationwide Canadian Aluminum Workers Launch Factory OccupationIn a rare move, hundreds of workers of the Nemak aluminum factory in Windsor, Canada, decided to occupy their factory when it was announced that it would close down soon. Pablo Vivanco reports

‘When We Fight, We Win’: Protesting Stagnant Wages as GM Rakes in Record Profits, 50,000 Auto Workers Go On Strike“We are standing together in unity and solidarity for our members, their families, and the communities where we work and live.” Demanding fair wages, decent healthcare benefits, and their share of General Motors’ “record-level profits,” nearly 50,000 United Auto members went on strike just before midnight Sunday following failed contract negotiations. “Today, we stand strong and say with one voice, we are standing up for our members and for the fundamental rights of working-class people in this nation,” said UAW vice president Terry Dittes ahead of the strike, which will grind to a halt dozens of plants across the U.S. By Jake Johnson “The Rank and File Have to Take Control!”: Ford, Fiat-Chrysler Workers Call for All-Out Strike Alongside GM WorkersAt midnight Sunday, roughly 49,000 autoworkers struck at General Motors (GM), shutting down production at the largest US-based automaker. The strike is a major episode in the resurgence of the class struggle. American autoworkers are now at the tip of the spear of a global counteroffensive by workers against poverty, inequality and job losses, encompassing not only autoworkers but teachers, public transit workers, Amazon workers and the entire working class. Overnight, things rapidly happen. This response by UAW workers in Canada and the United States, hopefully could be a sign of a beginning of a fight against the austerity policies of the last four decades. These strikes deserve our full support! A working-class victory could be a beginning of the rise of the class struggle. We must oppose and expose any government and labor bureaucracy intervention to organize a defeat!

Based upon past history a rapid rise in the militancy of the United States Working Class has happened after a long endurance of Capitalist Classes’s attacks against the lowering of labor’s standard of living. Also, based upon past history, the United States Working Class has moved in an apolitical direction. – the Rise of the Socialist Party and E.V. Debs after the last Guilded Age in the United States (1870-1890(.

There is also a bright light in the world picture. Jeremy Corbyn an anti-war leader and Labour MP, who, in 2017, got elected as the leader of the British Labour Party, running against the Labour Party Blair Leadership, who had complied with the austerity program imposed upon the working class by the 1% in the United Kingdom. This was and entrenched Bureaucracy like the U.S. Trade Union Bureaucracy

Corbyn ran on a clear program against austerity. He spoke at mass rallies of workers he agitated against austerity. And hundreds of thousands of young workers joined the Labour Party to elect Corbyn!

Jeremy Corbyn Speaking at a 2017 Campaign Rally

The specter of Jeremy Corbyn has terrorized the Capitalists!

Video: Jeremy Corbyn tells Morgan Stanley: ‘You’re right, we are a threat’ Jeremy Corbyn has told Morgan Stanley it is right to regard him as a threat, after the investment bank warned its clients that a Labour government could pose as much of a risk to British business as Brexit. The Labour leader hit back on Thursday, accusing Morgan Stanley of being part of the same “speculators and gamblers who crashed our economy in 2008”. In a video posted on social media, he also promised a new approach to financial services regulation. “Nurses, teachers, shopworkers, builders, just about everyone is finding it harder to get by, while Morgan Stanley’s CEO paid himself £21.5m last year and UK banks paid out £15bn in bonuses,” Corbyn said.

“Labour is a growing movement of well over half a million members and a government-in-waiting that will work for the many. So when they say we’re a threat, they’re right. We’re a threat to a damaging and failed system that’s rigged for the few.”Corbyn said the greed of bankers had plunged the world into crisis a decade ago and the UK was still paying the price because the Conservative party had “used the aftermath of the financial crisis to push through unnecessary and deeply damaging austerity”. “That’s meant a crisis in our public services, falling wages and the longest decline in living standards for over 60 years,” he said. He highlighted Morgan Stanley’s $3.2bn settlement with US authorities for its role in the creation of flawed mortgage-backed bonds during the global financial crisis, and the bank’s four meetings with senior government figures including Philip Hammond, the chancellor, last year. Corbyn said Labour would soon be publishing policies on the finance sector and how it planned to transform the economy. He was moved to record the video, posted on his Twitter feed and Facebook page, after Morgan Stanley released a note telling investors about what it perceived as the risks of Corbyn taking power.

Morgan Stanley warned about the nationalisation of key industries, higher taxes and a shift in spending priorities towards low-income households under Corbyn’s leadership, which it said could damage valuations of UK companies.

It told investors that another general election was likely towards the end of 2018 once Theresa May’s government realized it could not secure the Brexit deal it wants and the Tories began to fall apart, opening the door to Labour taking power.

“The UK is in the midst of a double whammy of uncertainty in the shape of Brexit and a fragile domestic political situation. Taken together, these two factors – which are interrelated to some degree – cast a long shadow over the policy backdrop and economic outlook of the UK,” the report from Morgan Stanley’s European equity team said.

“For the UK market, domestic politics may be perceived as a bigger risk than Brexit. From a UK investor perspective, we believe that the domestic political situation is at least as significant as Brexit, given the fragile state of the current government and the perceived risks of an incoming Labour administration that could potentially embark on a radical change in policy direction.

“Against this backdrop, even if we see good progress in the Brexit negotiations, the scope for UK sensitive assets to rally may be muted unless we also see an improvement in the government’s position in opinion polls.”

Morgan Stanley said British utility companies, especially in the water and power sectors, were most at risk from a Labour government, but postal services, telecommunications and travel companies could also be affected.

Higher taxes and a corporation tax rise to 26% might damage British financial services, Morgan Stanley said.

“Spending priorities … shift in favor of low-income households and the public sector and away from outsourcers and defense companies,” the report continued. “Higher low-end wage growth could also impact service-oriented companies with low margins, such as retailers.”

From Britain: Victory for Corbyn! The genie is now out of the bottle:

As the Financial Times, gritting its teeth, commented: “Jeremy Corbyn has returned as leader of Labour, tightening the grip of the hard leftover one of Britain’s oldest political parties.” The ruling class is alarmed at this advance of the left and will do whatever they can to stop it. The right-wing is a Fifth Column of big business within Labour. They are careerists like their counterparts in the capitalist parties. They will jump ship when the time comes. Britain is heading into unchartered waters. The Tories, although repackaged, are heading for a bust-up over the Brexit negotiations. The splits in the Tory Cabinet can already be seen. This is simply a foretaste. With a new economic crisis, the scene will be set for a general election showdown. At that point, the capitalist Establishment may call on the right-wing in the Labour Party to split to prevent Corbyn coming to power.

Jeremy Corbyn at the National Anti-Austerity March 20/06/2015After the election. the labour party put forth a Manifesto against austerity, under the slogan; For the Many — Not the Few! For the 99% to decide their own fate For the Many Not the Few!

Using the Monarchy, the British Capitalist Class has undermined parliamentary in England, suspended parliament, and called for elections.

The response of the young working class has been for over 200 hundred thousand young workers to join the Labour Party to fight against Austerity and the threat to democracy! A victory for Labour could become a poll for the workers of the world.

To end austerity, intimately, we must work to build one, two, three, and many working-class political parties. And develop a new world working-class order, under the slogan, For the Many Not the Few! With this goal we can begin to build a more effective worldwide movement. Against the Capitalist Robber Barons who steal and have stolen the world’s wealth from the 99%! Fight Against Austerity!

As the Capitalist Thieves Steal from the 99% — Only the 1% Voted For Austerity — The 99% Should Decide On Austerity — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From Austerity! Let the 99% Vote on Austerity!

Obamas’ and the 1%’s Political Program, After the 2008 Crash has Been to Bailout and Protect Capitalism the 1% and to Attack the Standard of Living of the 99%. Must Oppose Austerity In the United States and World-Wide! — To Begin, We Should Form a National Coalitions of Workers, Blacks, and Oppressed Minority Coalition to Call For a National March Against War, Poverty, and Austerity In Washington DC!

The Condition of the United States Working Class — Where Do We Go From Here?

In his Book, The Iron Heel, for the aliance or ‘partership’ between the labor bureaucracy and the capitalist class; As Leon Trontsky explained is his essayTrotsky and the “Iron Heel” (1937):

The last 4 decades, in the United States, have been the largest transference of wealth From the Poor, the Working class, and the Middle class, to the rich, the 1%, in the history of the world!

This has been done through ‘normal exploitation’ of the working class, and through Austerity Programs (Cutting the social wages of the working class.), through Government Lies and Statistics, Usury, and with the full Compliance and Silence/Support of the United States Trade Union Bureaucracy!

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Capitalism Austerity Has Meant More Wealth for the 1% and Pauperization of the 99% — Austerity means that the Rich Get Richer and the Pauperized Get Poorer

Austerity Real State of the United States Economy

Labor/Boss ‘Partnership’After I retired as a business agent for Painters Local #4 in 1997, I wrote The Fall of the Trade Union Movement in 1998. I was elected, in 1994, by the membership, who were very much aware that I was a Socialist I instantly became a part of the Trade Union Bureaucracy. Being inside the body of beast. I saw how corrupt they were. Though the Democratic Party and the Cliton Administration, they had become openly and contractually in a Declared a Partnership with the Boss! I also learned that the Building Trades Internationals had made such a promise in 1983 and pledged to take care of any local areas, that might oppose such a partnership. (The NLRB helped them in this process.) For a more in-depth analysis of this process read The Fall of the Trade Union Movement in 1998

In 2007 I updated my essay, The Fall of the Trade Union Movement in 1998, with these three paragraphs:

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.”

When I started my Daily News Digest , I came across Shadow Government Statistics website written by an honest economist — John Williams. I use mainly his charts to prove my arguments. I am an email subscriber to Shadow Government Statistis. (See his short biology, from his website below.)

* * * * * *

Stock Market Recovery Up—No Trickle Down For The Working class!

The ‘Big Lie’ About Real Wages Has Been Going On For Decades: Shadow Grovernment Statistics Graph: Real Average Weekly Earnings- Production and Nonsupervisory Employees

Pension Robbery Swindle

Pensions of Union Workers Cut in Federal Budget (Video Interview with Michael):

DESVARIEUX: So, Michael, today we’re going to be talking about the federal budget. What has really stood out to you in that budget?

Bureau of Labor Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate is 63.9%

A new factor has been added to the exploitation of the working class and oppression of the masses — Robber Baron—Style Usury!

It took 100 years, but America has returned to its unequal past. With a vengeance. — America 2018: Even More Gilded Than America 1918

Related Article: “A Ponzi Scheme” The Economy is Only A Paper Moon

2019 Update: The Banks are Now Making a Profit Risk Free:

The Virtual Elimination of Usury Laws in the United States

Average Credit Card Debt in America: September 2019

Why Does The US Gov’t Charge Interest On Student Loans? Why Is The US Gov’t Effectively Engaging In Usury With Such A Fundamental, Public Good?(Note That Usury Spiked After the 2008 Crash)

None of the above changes in the United States, by the Capitalist Class, Class, could have been made, if not for the betrayal, collaboration, support, default, and/or silence of the United States Labor Bureaucracy. That became codified in the 1980s through the slow application of the Taft Hartley and Kennedy, Landrum, Griffin laws.

The Way out of the Current Condition.

All is not lost, for today’s youth, due to these austerity laws, that they inherited from their forefathers. Are opposed to the austerity political programs of the world capitalist class.

As the Capitalist Thieves Steal from the 99% — Only the 1% Voted For Austerity — The 99% Should Decide On Austerity — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From Austerity! Let the 99% Vote on Austerity!

Austerity is a Political Program, and it Must be Oppose Politically.

Just as I wrote these words, it seems that the Rank and File Workers want a change. Today’s (September 16, 2019) headlines:

Corbyn ran on a clear program against austerity. He spoke at mass rallies of workers he agitated against austerity. And hundreds of thousands of young workers joined the Labour Party to elect Corbyn!

Jeremy Corbyn Speaking at a 2017 Campaign Rally

The specter of Jeremy Corbyn has terrorized the Capitalists!

Higher taxes and a corporation tax rise to 26% might damage British financial services, Morgan Stanley said.

From Britain: Victory for Corbyn! The genie is now out of the bottle:

Using the Monarchy, the British Capitalist Class has undermined parliamentary in England, suspended parliament, and called for elections.

As the Capitalist Thieves Steal from the 99% — Only the 1% Voted For Austerity — The 99% Should Decide On Austerity — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From Austerity! Let the 99% Vote on Austerity!

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The Default of the Labor Union Bureaucracy Set the Stage for Trump!

From My essay The State of Today’s Trade Union Movement (1998)

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 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.

* * * *

The Result of This ‘Partnership’ Was the Complete Betrayal of the Working Class!

The Betrayal has led to the unions assisting the employers to drastically cut the standard of living of the entire Working Class!

This Process has been going on for over 40 years and consequential demoralization of the working class.

The last 4 decades, in the United States, have been the largest transference of wealth From the Poor, the Working class, and the Middle class, to the rich, the 1%, in the history of the world!

The Labor bureaucracy have scapegoated minorities and immigrants for the cuts to working class standard of living to hide their misleadership and paving the way for Tump’s scapegoating!

Stateification of the United States Trade Unions

In the United States the trade union movement has passed through the most stormy history in recent years. The rise of the CIO is incontrovertible evidence of the revolutionary tendencies within the working masses. Indicative and noteworthy in the highest degree, however, is the fact that the new “leftist” trade union organization was no sooner founded than it fell into the steel embrace of the imperialist state. The struggle among the tops between the old federation and the new is reducible in large measure to the struggle for the sympathy and support of Roosevelt and his cabinet. No less graphic, although in a different sense, is the picture of the development or the degeneration of the trade union movement in Spain. In the socialist trade unions all those leading elements which to any degree represented the independence of the trade union movement were pushed out. As regards the anarcho-syndicalist unions, they were transformed into the instrument of the bourgeois republicans; the anarcho-syndicalist leaders became conservative bourgeois ministers. The fact that this metamorphosis took place in conditions of civil war does not weaken its significance. War is the continuation of the self-same policies. It speeds up processes, exposes their basic features, destroys all that is rotten, false, equivocal and lays bare all that is essential. The shift of the trade unions to the right was due to the sharpening of class and international contradictions. The leaders of the trade union movement sensed or understood, or were given to understand, that now was no time to play the game of opposition. Every oppositional movement within the trade union movement, especially among the tops, threatens to provoke a stormy movement of the masses and to create difficulties for national imperialism. Hence flows the swing of the trade unions to the right, and the suppression of workers’ democracy within the unions. The basic feature, the swing towards the totalitarian regime, passes through the labor movement of the whole world. We should also recall Holland, where the reformist and the trade union movement was not only a reliable prop of imperialist capitalism, but where the so-called anarcho-syndicalist organization also was actually under the control of the imperialist government. The secretary of this organization, Sneevliet, in spite of his Platonic sympathies for the Fourth International was as deputy in the Dutch Parliament most concerned lest the wrath of the government descend upon his trade union organization. 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. — Leon Trotsky, Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay

Labor/Boss ‘Partnership’After I retired as a business agent for Painters Local #4 in 1997, I wrote The Fall of the Trade Union Movement in 1998.:

I was elected, in 1994, by the membership, who were very much aware that I was a Socialist I instantly became a part of the Trade Union Bureaucracy. Being inside the body of beast. I saw how corrupt they were.

Though the Democratic Party and the Cliton Administration Labor Secretary, they had become openly and contractually in a Declared a Partnership with the Boss! I also learned that the Building Trades Internationals had made such a promise in 1983 and pledged to take care of any local areas, that might oppose such a partnership. (The NLRB helped them in this process.) For a more in-depth analysis of this process read The Fall of the Trade Union Movement in 1998. One result of this ‘Partnership’ Was the Complete Betrayal of the Working Class. The Betrayal has led to the unions assisting the employers to drastically cut the standard of living of the entire Working Class! In 2007 I updated my essay, The Fall of the Trade Union Movement in 1998, with these three paragraphs:

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.”

But the mass response to a local call for a general strike in Minneapolis to the ICE muddlers was an expression of the working class saying enough! But it was also a demonstration of the collective power of the working class! The city was shut down!

It could be the start of mass awakening of the working class!

Stateification of the United States Trade Unions

Labor/Boss ‘Partnership’After I retired as a business agent for Painters Local #4 in 1997, I wrote The Fall of the Trade Union Movement in 1998.:

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 Default of the Labor Union Bureaucracy Set the Stage for Trump!

From My essay The State of Today’s Trade Union Movement (1998): 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 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.
For the last 50 years the bureaucracy has blamed affrimative action, minorities, illegal aliens,and gains in women’s rights, for the decline in the standard of living due to their partnship with the boss. In the election, Trump used the same arguments The Labor bureuacracy have scapegoated minorities and immigrants for the cuts to working clas standard of living to hide their misleadership and paving the way for Tump’s arguments to ‘Make America Great Again!

The Result of This ‘Partnership’ Was the Complete Betrayal of the Working Class!

The Betrayal has led to the unions assisting the employers to drastically cut the standard of living of the entire Working Class!

This Process has been going on for over 50 years and consequential demoralization of the working class.

The last 4 decades, in the United States, have been the largest transference of wealth From the Poor, the Working class, and the Middle class, to the rich, the 1%, in the history of the world!

This has been done thorugh ‘normal exploitation’ of the working class, and through Austerity Programs (Cutting the social wages of the working class.), through Government Lies and Statistics, Usury, and with the full Compliance and Silence/Support of the United States Trade Union Bureaucracy!

Minneapolis General Strike Against ICE

But the mass response to a local call for a general stike in Minneapolis to the ICE muders was an expression of the working class saying enough! But it was also a demonstration of the collective power of the working class! The city was shut down!

It could be the start of mass awakening of the working class!