Activists/trade Unionists should condemn "smear campaign" against Richmond CA mayor by police and Firefighter's Union leadership

Left: Chevron in Richmond CA, the real power we have to defeat

Last week, the Richmond (CA) Local 188 of the International Association of Firefighters, in conjunction with the Richmond Police Association released a scathing attack on the city’s Mayor, Gayle McLaughlin. Richmond is the largest US city with a Green Party mayor. The Firefighters’ Union paid a research firm $15,000 to dig up some dirt on the mayor and published it.

What the research disclosed was not “dirt” but facts about someone’s personal life, their health and their finances. They describe an individual who was struggling to pay off student loans and declared bankruptcy, issues that millions of working people in this country are dealing with every day. As one phone company worker said to me on reading the details, “Oh, so she’s human.”

The Mayor’s response has been a principled one, “Some years in my earlier life were extremely challenging,” she said, “I was the victim of multiple crimes and have experienced a host of personal losses, including debilitating illnesses and deaths within my family. My health and personal finances suffered as well.” “It’s not the adversity one faces, but how they emerge from that adversity that defines them,” she said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle.

With regard to her past debts, one police spokesperson, a Sgt Andre Hill, tells the media that, "If you can't pay your debts, it shows you're irresponsible,". "We think she should be transparent with the voters of Richmond." Another commented that the Mayor also supported a resolution opposing the Iraq war, “This is not Berkeley, it’s Richmond” he says.

We are in some real danger with a person with this mentality walking around with a gun and the license to kill. By his criterion, just about the entire population of the US is “irresponsible” because people are bogged down by debt, their homes, their cars------- people have been reduced to buying groceries or paying for medical care on credit. And expenses due to medical necessity are the leading cause of bankruptcies in the US, with some 60% of them medical related. “Bankruptcies due to medical bills increased by nearly 50 percent in a six-year period, from 46 percent in 2001 to 62 percent in 2007, and most of those who filed for bankruptcy were middle-class, well-educated homeowners.” (CNN)

We can only imagine where we are now as the recession began in 2007.

"Unless you're a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, you're one illness away from financial ruin in this country," says Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., of the Harvard Medical School, in Cambridge, Mass. "If an illness is long enough and expensive enough, private insurance offers very little protection against medical bankruptcy…”

Workers and Union members are the real victims of the Firefighter’s Union leadership replacing politics with gossipmongering
If you go to the special website set up by the Police and Firefighter’s Union there is nothing political about it. There might be many reasons to oppose the mayor politically, there have been layoffs and furloughs and attacks on social services. Public sector workers are under assault throughout the country not only in Richmond, mostly by Democrats or Republicans I might add. And the response from the top officials of organized Labor is to go along with these attacks,  to support concessions. They have refused to mobilized the potential power of their 14 million members, or to explain to their members and workers as a whole that the cause of the crisis is the system itself rather than the actions of selfish or even corrupt individuals.

The police association, whose members will be helping break strikes more and more as resistance to the employers’ offensive moves out of the courtroom and in to the streets, are concerned about jobs like anyone else but for them it means more officers in working class communities who will be used to suppress any serious attempts by the youth in particular to change the conditions that nurture crime; they don’t arrest the oil company executives. More jobs and a $15 per hour minimum wage would go a long way to eliminating crime, not more prisons; we already have two million people in prison in this country. At one time, Washington DC, had more cops than any other US city and still had the highest crime rate. Historically, increased police presence is not what has made the lives of working people safer

Jim Russey, president of Richmond Firefighters Local 188, told a news conference that the Unions launched the media campaign against McLaughlin because she had failed to “address concerns….during her first term, including the proposed hiring of three new firefighters that would "bring the city back up to safe levels."

This is a reason to oppose not only McLaughlin, but she's not alone Politicians and Union leaders are participating in the dismantling of wages, benefits and conditions that took us decades of struggle to win. I don’t know enough about Richmond politics but I have been following the struggle there over the proposed construction of a casino. There is strong community opposition including the mayor’s but I know from experience that the building trades leaders would support this; it used to be said they’d support building jails for their own members as long as they were built Union and in fact this is what has happened with the boom in the prison industrial complex.

This is the leadership’s answer to the crisis of capitalism and it’s failure to provide a decent job and a decent future for an increasing number of US workers, build casinos that hire low waged workers; a catastrophe for future generations.

This personal attack on Richmond’s Green Party mayor by the leadership of the Firefighter’s Union discredit’s the trade Union movement and contributes to the de-politicization of working people that is the trademark of the two capitalists parties and the US political system in general. Most workers will sympathize with the mayor as most workers have been in or are in a similar situation.

Trade Unionists, activists and anti-capitalists of all types should condemn it; it will only hurt us by driving away potential allies in our struggle for a better future.  If we want to oppose Mayor McLaughlin lets do it for the right reasons and put forward an alternative.