Harry Reid puts Labor's Top Dogs to Shame.

Richard Mellor

This video is not about Harry Reid

I posted this on Facebook a few days ago. It is a short clip (misnamed) that I made in a hurry after reading the papers Thursday.  People that follow this blog on FB will have already seen it maybe but I never got it up here so here it is for those that haven't.

But I am adding these comments because in the video I explain that it sickened me listening to Donald Trump talk about healing in his victory speech. He says it again in his first interview since the election that, "I want a country that loves each other". When he is asked if he thought his racist and misogynistic language, what they call rhetoric, "had gone too far." This degenerate human being, who has never worked in his life responds with, "No, I won." 

There you have it. I can say what I like, lie, slander, abuse, admit that I can grope women's crotches because I have money and can get away with it and as long as the "rigged system" lets me in, it's OK. I say rigged because if we leave out that US politics is money dominated making our democracy the best democracy money can buy, and there are only capitalist candidates in capitalist parties to choose from, the person who won the most votes lost.

It's not that the whole bunch of them are not degenerate in one way or another and a fair few of them, Madeline Albright, Clinton, Rumsfeld, Bush, Obama, war criminals by any definition of the term. In that sense one might say that Trump is among the more honest of them.

But at least there was some pretense of normal behavior, a shroud of etiquette. when it came to the body politic. Even among bourgeois politicians, there are those that have a sense of decency, are opposed to racism and sexual predators like Trump.

In the aftermath of the charade we see them closing ranks (read my previous piece) and as is the normal case among a den of thieves, they shake hands and swear allegiance to protocol and their collective class interests.

Even more nauseating are the responses form the heads of organized labor as they settle back and also pledge cooperation. They respect the office you see. By all these accounts we can't complain about Hitler's tirades against the Jews in the early thirties as, after all in the 1934 elections, "he won".

How shameful the heads of organized labor are when a bourgeois politician in a major capitalist party has the guts to stand up and tell the truth. I am not talking about Trump. The US expression, "Telling it like it is" doesn't necessarily means that "it is" is the way it is being told. Trump is a liar and a con man. Immigrants aren't hurting US workers, undocumented or not. The poor aren't, the unemployed aren't. The Muslims of Arabia aren't nor the Iranians (they're not Arabs by the way). 

I am talking about Nevada's Harry Reid.  Here is what Reid said:
"If this is going to be a time of healing," Reid says, "we must first put the responsibility for healing where it belongs: at the feet of Donald Trump, a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate. Winning the electoral college does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans. Donald Trump may not possess the capacity to assuage those fears, but he owes it to this nation to try."

And the top leaders of the organizations of the working class say nothing, they are truly, the dog that doesn't bark. I was going to say the Bazenji crowd but I don't want to insult the Bazenji, a proud and ancient breed.

The 14 million workers in the unions must shake off their fears and their apathy and also, to use Trumps words, "drain the swamp" that is occupied by the present leadership. They must return to the roots of US working class politics and wage a struggle inside our organizations and turn them in to organizations we can be proud of. Don't betray your ancestors by supporting right to work laws, that's no answer. It's what appears to be an easy way out but it is the road to hell. It is always better to fight. Read labor history, the rise of the CIO, the early IWW, the great railroad strikes and steel, auto etc. The ruling class will not teach working class history white or otherwise. And when they make concessions to the black revolt and create black history months and introduce ethnic studies it will always leave out the role of the working class of these specially oppressed communities or distort the reality of working class struggles.

Unions were once illegal and were built by honest working men and women.  Despite the racism and bigotry that also permeated these organizations our lives, the lives of all workers would be worse without them. They are our organizations, let's liberate them from the present clique that control them.  Rotten fruit hanging in a tree and seemingly stable can fall at the slightest breeze. We will see some major storms ahead and heads will roll in organized labor but we can make that happen sooner than later.

Meanwhile, thanks to Harry Reid for not letting Trump off the hook as so many others have.  They shouldn't work with rapists and sexual predators. No supporter of the KKK, Nazis and white nationalists should be president of a country any worker lives in.

I do not support Trump or Clinton. I am a Green Party member and voted for Stein. But to be honest, I'm ashamed and embarrassed that this country that I have lived in most of my life and that has given me a decent living as a public sector unionized worker has elected this degenerate its leader.

Read the original story and Reid's entire comments in Mother Jones.