Promises of Hundreds of Thousands More Jobs For Californians by the Democrats Nothing But An Election Gimmick.

I’ve received another extremely expensive glossy mailing from my former Union, AFSCME. This one has at the top the message, “Important AFSCME Message”. This time it’s telling me not to vote for Carly Fiorina and has a picture of a white-collar worker, a woman. She’s standing by a copy machine and it says alongside her, “Carly Fiorina said she’s against saving public jobs. That really burns me. She made millions off of copy machines and printers but I have to work to feed my family.”

The 8 by 10 glossy leaflet warns us that Fiorina, a Republican would allow massive job cuts, ship more jobs overseas and oppose funding for jobs at home. It points out that Congress passed legislation to “save thousands of public sector jobs” but Fiorina opposed it.

What AFSCME is referring to is the legislation passed last week in Congress that allows for a federal stimulus injection of $2.5 billion for California. Many reports on the California budget passed in the state legislature Thursday refer to these (and other) funds as “presumed” as it is simply another stimulus, a shot in the arm, and the state of the US government’s finances is such that no one is certain what will happen. “Two-thirds of the budget solutions signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday afternoon are based on one-time or temporary money - some of which may never materialize.”, writes Judy Lin in the Fresno Bee. In fact, it seems likely that the Republicans will make considerable gains in November and as most of the money has not been authorized by Congress, it could well disappear pretty quick as the election gimmick that it is.

Prior to the glossy piece on Fiorina, I received similar glossy piece attacking another Republican woman candidate, Meg Whitman, the former CEO of e  Bay. These are nasty characters for sure, no friends of working class people, but what are our alternatives? AFSCME doesn’t tell us who we might vote for, it just tells us to “Vote on November 2nd." There is an interesting backdrop to this.

In the mid nineties I think it was, I recall a definite shift from the past in the approach of the AFSCME line on electoral politics. I was a delegate at one of the biannual International conventions and there was a workshop on political education or something like this. The emphasis was shifting from a more direct association with the Democrats to supporting candidates that were "our friends" no matter what party they were in. This reflected the officialdom bowing to the growing discontent among workers with both parties.  The facilitator proudly announced that AFSCME doesn’t tell members who they should vote for, or what party more accurately. “We don’t tell you what to do” was the gist of the Union's message stressing its democratic credentials. It stressed the individual rather than party affiliation, strengthening the mistaken conclusion that workers draw that “all” politics is bad so disgusted they are with the US political system and the two capitalist parties that dominate it.

Basically, the climate is such that the Union leadership didn’t feel so comfortable championing the Democrats, a party that was even referred to as “Labor” in some Union publications, “Vote Labor, vote Democrat”

I get so annoyed when I get these propaganda pieces because it is millions of dollars of our hard earned dues money used as a gift to a Democratic Party election race. “Vote November 2nd” means vote for the Democratic candidate and every worker knows this. More and more, the leadership of our organizations, who could offer an independent alternative in the form of a working people’s party, campaign for a Wall Street party in a political process that more and more workers are abandoning, or in some cases, fleeing to right wing alternatives.

Workers have no confidence in the Democratic opponents of Fiorina and Whitman. We do not believe all the talk of hundreds of thousands of jobs being saved; we’ve heard it all before and the reality is, we are continuing to lose what took decades of struggle to win. The national debt has grown to $13.6 trillion - more than the nation's gross domestic product, and there seems to be no end to it. We’ll just lose what we have slightly more slowly with the Democrats hopefully. One of the major obstacles activists have to overcome is this view that we cannot win. We must show that if we are united and prepared to abandon the old business as usual model we can have some victories and victories attract others.

One thing is certain, we cannot sit idly by and hope things will get better. Most people don’t believe this anymore anyway. How things will develop is not easy to determine. There are numerous small struggles occurring throughout the country that the heavily censored US media refuses to cover. The movement against foreclosures, the environment, the wars abroad and the recent FBI raids on anti-war activists, not to mention the student struggle to defend education are all areas with explosive potential. The weakened but still potentially powerful trade Union movement will also be engulfed by the development of any serious resistance to this offensive of capital against workers and the middle class.

We can be optimistic that the working class will fight; we should do what we can to speed that process up and be part of it.