Elections. Union leaders squander members money. Fail to put the central issues, jobs, wages, conditions, war, on the agenda.

Union members demonstrating.

We are days from the elections. The campaign has been dominated by the freak shows around people on the right wing of the Republican Party and dry as dust candidates who have nothing much to say except that they are not freaks. So working class people are left looking for the least freak to vote for. Behind this of course is the whip of the corporations and their capitalist system. Everybody has to toe the line and support their agenda. They and their system cannot be questioned. Like the US mass media, the US elections are the object of extremely effective censorship by the US corporations and their capitalist system. No alternative to their system and its demands is ever offered.

The organizers of this blog have always called for a break from the capitalist Democratic Party and for working people to have their own party, a working peoples party. We have also called on the union leaders to stop wasting their members money by handing it to the capitalist Democratic Party and help the working class build a party of its own. A recent report in the New York Times spoke of the American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) holding a camp to train people to run for electoral office. Is this a sign of hope? Are the Union leaders at last getting the message? Are they getting ready to break from the Democratic Party? Unfortunately no.

The AFL-CIO spent about $250,000 on this program. About enough to buy a decent house. With their over 12 million members this is utterly pathetic. But at the same time they and other unions are spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars and they are turning out their full time apparatus and members for the capitalist Party, the Democrats.  This is an utter scandal. Not only that, it is utterly impractical. It will never work. The Democrat Party knows which class it represents. As they always do they will take the union money and help and continue to represent the bosses. The Unions have to break from the bosses Party, the Democrats and build an independent Party of their own. It is the only way that will work.

It is not only a question of money and how much they spend on their training school but it is what they do at their training school. They train their members to run as Democrats and to work the existing system. But this existing system is entirely geared to money and to maintain itself. It is entirely corrupt. The AFL-CIO's training school is just corrupting the people who go through it, training them to work the corrupt political system. It is worse than nothing.

What is necessary is to first of all start with an alternative program.

Total opposition to the capitalist offensive against working people. Not a single reduction in any contract of wages, benefits, conditions or rights. In fact every contract to be based on a program to improve the situation on all these fronts. On this basis a working peoples party can set a new agenda. Not just discuss how to share out the pain of the capitalist offensive but how to share out the wealth in the country. The Wall Street Journal says the country is "awash with cash." Let is take that wealth for working peoples' needs.

So if the AFL-CIO leadership wants to have different politics in this country and politics which represent its members interests, it has to break from the capitalist Democratic Party and build a working peoples party based on a program to improve all peoples lives and to build a democratic socialist society.

Linked to this has to be a campaign to organize the unorganized. The AFL-CIO should close down its little organizing school or transform it into a center to build a new working peoples party and organize the unorganized and take the hundreds of millions of dollars it squanders on the Democrats and put it to this task.