Chicago's working class given no serious alternative to anti-worker mayoral candidate Rahm Emmanuel

Emmanuel and Obama

What an extreme crisis of leadership exists in the organized Labor movement in the US. Look at the situation in Chicago. Richard M Daley, the son of Richard J Daley, has decided not to run for re-election for mayor. This Daley family has held the mayor’s position for 43 of the last 55 years. What sort of democracy is that?

The Daley’s are Democrats, not that that matters to working people as we lose out whether Democrats or Republicans are in power. Democrats, along with their Republican colleagues, are savaging living standards and social services in order to solve a crisis they, as representatives of the bankers and the few thousand unelected people that run this country, have caused.

This dynasty, this nepotism, as there are other Daley’s in the politics of the area, has ruled despite Chicago being a strong Union town and having a tremendous working class history. The IWW was founded there in 1905. Chicago was at the center of the founding of Mayday and the struggle for an 8-hour day in 1886. I was stunned when I first came to this country and many US workers I met thought Mayday was a Russian holiday. It reflects the degeneration of the leadership of the working class over the years. The Haymarket martyrs are buried in a Chicago cemetery, I remember going to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s grave when I visited there once.

So Richard M Daley is leaving office and the baton will be passed to Rahm Emmanuel, another Democratic crony and loyal representative of the swindlers who orchestrated the economic crisis; Rahm’s role is to make sure workers pay for it. He was Barak Obama’s former Chief of Staff and is no friend of working people. Emmanuel, like Bush and Blair, has the blood of a million or more Iraq’s on his hands as an ardent supporter of the invasion of that country by US imperialism, a country and people that never threatened the US or its people.

Emmanuel is also an ardent Zionist and volunteered with the Israel Defense Forces during the Iraq war calling for a "muscular projection of force" in Iraq. Like all of them, it’s easy to be tough when others are doing the dying and others are doing the killing. His Zionist philosophy would have a significant influence on his decisions in these areas of concern. Speaking at a pro-Israel rally in Chicago, he said that Israel was ready for peace but would not get there until Palestinians "turn away from the path of terror". (1) The British state apparatus used to say this about the IRA, but the British state was never accused of terrorism.  Emmanuel has condemned the Palestinians in Gaza for acts of violence. This is a people that reside in the largest concentration camp in the world held there by one of the world’s most powerful and well equipped militaries funded by the US. They have no ships, no planes, no army, no tanks and no country. The Palestinians can expect no help from Emmanuel.

According to reports, Emmanuel earned $16.2 million in his two and a half year employment with an investment firm and "was the top House recipient in the 2008 election cycle of contributions from hedge funds, private equity firms and the larger securities/investment industry" Receiving, “more money from individuals and PACs in the securities and investment business than any other industry.” according to Open Secrets. (2)

The well-oiled machine that ensures the same pro-business, free market crooks hold sway over society and our communities will almost certainly ensure that the their trusted friend Rahm Emmanuel will be the next mayor of Chicago.

In anticipation of victory, Emmanuel has put the workers of Chicago on notice that he is coming after them. “We can’t continue to do what we’re doing and hope for different results” he said last week. “This is a union town. I’m not union bashing but I’m being honest with everybody about the scale of the problem and the level of change I want to bring to help us get out of the fix we’re in.” (3)

Monument to Haymarket Martyrs Chicago

Now, the Chicago Federation of Labor is an arm of the AFL-CIO comprised of 300 Unions with 500,000 members. This is no small body. If the workers in the Change To Win Coalition, the group that split from the AFL-CIO, (4) were included, the Unionized workforce would be greater still. On top of this, there are the hundreds of thousands of non-union workers, low waged, most of them, who would like to be in a Union if they saw that it would benefit them materially.

There is tremendous potential power here. in a major US city, indeed, a global urban center. This body and its allies could run independent candidates on a program based not on concessions but around people’s needs, jobs, health care, housing, transportation and against discrimination in all its forms. Most workers are opposed to these costly wars, Obama won votes based on opposition to them. It is criminal that the leadership of this body has offered no alternative for decades and offers no alternative in the upcoming election. This is at a time when workers are more open to political issues and ideas and in the aftermath of an economic crisis that has severely weakened people’s faith in the so called free market, the bankers and speculators that prop it up and the political parties that represent them. Then, the leaders of these bodies wonder why working people can be attracted to right wing ideas and groups. The right wing have tapped in to the anger that people feel, and where there’s a vacuum something will fill it.

Along with the leaders of the Chicago Federation of Labor is the left as we have pointed out many times on this blog. There are thousands of people in Chicago who consider themselves socialists or anti-capitalists of one type or another. How is it possible that the left as it is called cannot put forward alternative candidates at a time like this? Win or not, and I believe we could win, it would open debate up, it would be a conduit for the anger that lies beneath the surface in US society to reach a wider audience. Such a development would also shake the confidence of the capitalist class and their representatives like Rahm Emmanuel, as it is right now, they have no fear.

We on this blog have argued that the reason for this failure of the left to unite and offer a genuine alternative to workers as well as its failure to build a genuine left current in the workers’ movement is left sectarianism; putting the interests of a particular group above the interests of the class as a whole; placing the building of a workers’ movement secondary to building the so-called and misnamed “vanguard”.

This scenario is played out in urban centers throughout the US again and again at election time, a time when most workers are paying a little more attention to politics than normal. But the only side we get is the capitalist’s program. In response to Emmanuel’s call for Union givebacks, his opponents in the race are flabbergasted and have “lambasted” him says the WSJ; they call instead for “reduced benefits for new hires only.”

Some alternative and a the same "divide and rule" strategy from the more liberal wing of the bourgeois. 

It’s designed to drive people from politics and activity. The refusal of the leaders of the Chicago Labor Federation to provide an alternative to this is a disgrace, it is more as I have said, it is criminal. I went to the Federation’s website, go look at it. http://www.chicagolabor.org/ What worker would be inspired by it? No worker would, that’s the plan. The Labor leaders are terrified of a victory because of the effect it would have on the morale and activity level of the US working class after decades of defeats.
It would do for us what the uprisings in North Africa have done for the Arab masses and place tremendous demands on the Labor hierarchy to break their pact with the capitalists that is based on Labor peace.

The consequences of this situation are catastrophic for workers and our families. At the moment there is no working class "left" in this country; only a middle class left. The thousands of left and anti-capitalist activists throughout the country also have to share some responsibility for this state of affairs and it is something that must be brought out in to the open and discussed if we are serious about building a genuine left current among the working class that will play an important role in the movement rising out of the struggles ahead.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rahm_emmanuel
(2) Open Secrets: http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/11/obamas-pick-for-chief-of-staff.html
(3) Emmanuel Will Seek Labor Givebacks: Wall Street Journal, 2-05/06-20011
(4) These splits are actually division within a bureaucracy. The average member is totally divorced from them as the issues are never to do with economic issues affecting the members as the entire leadership of organized Labor supports concessions. They are divisions between leaders over how to maintain power and the privileges that accompany it.