Millionaire Celebrities Urge Workers to Vote. Who For I Wonder?

Bourgeois love. They know the importance of class solidarity.

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

Editor, Facts For WorkingPeople Blog

"Brethren we conjure you...not to believe a word of what is being said about your interests and those of your employers being the same. Your interests and theirs are in a nature of things, hostile and irreconcilable.  Then do not look to them for relief...Our salvation must, through the blessing of God, come from ourselves.  It is useless to expect it from those whom our labors enrich." (1)

I just received this appeal to sign a MoveOn.org petition:

“It's Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, and we need your help to make sure all our voices are heard in November. Along with our friend Michelle Obama, we're co-chairs of When We All Vote, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to closing the race and age voting gap."

They are asking me to support their petition aimed at the US Congress to support the, Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act of 2020.

Hanks and Wilson are two millionaires, Hanks is worth about $400 million, Rita Wilson the poor woman, only $100 million or so, and their friend Michelle Obama is, along with her husband former president Barak Obama, worth $40 million, 30 times more than they were worth in 2008 according to Business Insider. Bourgeois politics is a lucrative game indeed.

Bill Clinton, the imbecile George W Bush and Barack Obama as former presidents, and Hilary Clinton and Michelle Obama as wives of former presidents, can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars giving 45 minute speeches to foreign and domestic businessmen and women who want to get their snouts in to the US taxpayers’ public trough.

MoveOn.org was founded by a couple of liberal entrepreneurs, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, people who want to make capitalism nice. It promotes liberal causes and candidates. It has supported Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the past.

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson.

In the US there is a powerful disdain of politics and political representatives. This mood has strengthened over the decades as the living standards of U.S. workers declined under both Democratic and Republican administrations alike and massive corruption and graft is common to both parties. In the 2016 election, close to 100 million decided to opt out of the electoral process altogether.

Each election period I have heard the same story from the labor hierarchy. We have to vote for Carter over Reagan, Mondale over Reagan, Dukakis over Bush, Clinton over Bush and so on. In each election the world was going to end if we didn’t support the Democrats the heads of organized labor told us.  My union supplied 40,000 volunteers and lots of cash for Walter Mondale in 1984 and for Dukakis in 88.

"...People who work on Wall Street are good citizens who want their country to change...I want to generate a lot of millionaires...” Bill Clinton in BusinessWeek Magazine, 3-23-92

I recall during the early to mid nineties there was a shift in the approach to elections by the trade union hierarchy, traditional supporters of the Democratic Party. This party has betrayed the US worker for so long it was not easy to call for supporting it, let alone asking members for money, and we have given hundreds of millions to it over decades. The problem is that the capitalists have two parties and it has been up to now, the only other game in town. 

I remember being at a national convention of my union, AFSCME, and there was a lot of talk from the leadership and their army of staff, of supporting candidates “that support working families” and that it’s not about “the party” but the politics of the individual candidate, more of this and less blatant calls to vote Democratic. In my view, and I attended most conventions from the early 80’s to 98, this was due to the fact that the hatred and disgust in both political parties of Wall Street had reached such a pitch that it was not useful to call for open support for the Democrats. The governor of Minnesota, Perpich, was a Democrat during that heroic strike there. The mayor of Philadelphia, Wilson Goode was a Democrat who, a year after dropping a bomb on a house full of men women and children threatened to fire Afscme members if they didn't end their strike. The list of Democratic Party betrayals is a long one.

And here we are in 2020 and the AFL-CIO General Board will no doubt endorse the Democrats once again, telling us we must vote blue no matter who, because it will be the end of the world if the serial sexual abuser Trump gets another four years.
(Blue is Democratic-----the Republicans are red,)

I cannot say what will happen. We live in volatile times. I never thought Trump would get elected in the first place. There are some former co-workers of mine, all white males, who support this racist and misogynistic character yet they have and had what are German, social democratic type jobs; jobs Trump will eliminate in a heartbeat.

Part of the problem is the extreme low level of class-consciousness in this country. The rich, militant history of the US working class has been driven deep in to the recesses of the mind. Few workers know of the Seattle General Strike or the three general strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco in 1934 or the great 44-day Flint sit down that should be labor’s Fourth of July. The strikes in the copper mines, the coal strikes, the huge textile strikes, the IWW. The Lawrence strike and the free speech movement. This is not on the radar for most workers.

Workers can’t expect the ruling class or its political representatives to teach us our history, their job is to obscure it, undermine it. But when you add to this the complete failure of the heads of organized labor to counter it, then we end up where we are now, with Trump, a narcissistic, racist, a spoiled child like some figure from a Star Trek series, at the helm.

This will change and I think that this pandemic, when the dust settles a little bit, has ushered in a new era. It has laid bare the inability of the so-called free market to provide even the basic necessities of life. It never has, even for millions of people in the US, the most powerful economic and military force the world has ever known. And we are seeing in the Trump era a return to the racist murders that were so common in the 50’s and throughout the Jim Crow era.  We are witnessing who is valuable in society and who is not. The mindless media stories of millionaire sports figures or the sex lives of the Kardashians and other parasitic figures are nowhere. Instead, we deal every day with those workers who make our lives livable. 

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson’s emphasis on voting, or their approach to it is a lie. They are being disingenuous which is the polite way so-called cultured, educated people call each other liars. I support defending the right to vote because we took it form them, they never gave it to us. They never gave us anything. I support it even though we have never won any serious reforms through the ballot box. They are deceptive because they want to be seen as non-partisan or that they are not telling people who to vote for which is what they are actually doing.

The social legislation in the 1930’s simply codified what workers had already taken in the workplaces and streets of America. The legislation curbing or reigning in the most open and brutal racial practices were also won by the black revolt in the south.  The women’s movement in the 60’s brought gains for them. Just because we are collectively strong and force power to concede us some reforms doesn’t make them champions of democracy. What Hanks and Wilson and MoveOn are really asking is that we vote for their party, the Democrats but they consciously avoid saying it. It's a lie by omission.  The hatred of the two parties is so intense they just can’t push it that way. They have to pretend they are defending the right to vote that workers won from these bastards. That’s a supportable cause.

But workers know that’s what it means. That is why the right wing can draw workers to their banner. Hanks, Wilson, the Democratic Party, have no credibility; the Republicans along with them. The 100 million no shows prove it.

The ruling class know about class solidarity, about sticking together to advance their interests. Michelle Obama has proudly put her arm around the war criminal and mass murder George Bush and called him her friend. She has gone even further, he is her “partner in crime” she tells us. This will be ignored by the pundits in the interests of partisanship just as the sexual violence committed by rich powerful men is ignored.

It is this situation that has contributed to the rise of Trump. The labor hierarchy that has refused to offer an alternative-------that has forced concessions on their members, that stays collectively silent on all matters of the deepest concern to workers, poverty, jobs, health care, racism, sexism and so on-----bear a considerable amount of responsibility for the present situation. Yet they will continue to take the road that got us here because for them, to mobilize the potential power of the 14 million union members can only lead to chaos. In the last analysis they have the same worldview as the boss, as Pelosi, Biden and Warren Buffet, the market is the answer to all things.

There will be some serious class battles after this. US capitalism will not be able to return to the status quo and they will face resistance when they try and they will try. They will attempt to make permanent the repressive measures that have been necessary for the most part in the face of a global health crisis.

I have learned that it is not possible to say for certain how this will play out. I can say for certain that out of the coming struggles an independent working class political alternative, a party of our own will be built as movements of this nature will inevitably find political expression. But it won’t be pretty. 

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Al Gore showed his true colors when he was interviewed by Business Week back in 1995. He wanted to show the business community they could depend on the Democratic Party to outdo the Republicans and look after their interests. Think workers don't notice this and draw conclusions from it?

Q: “Republicans want to kill five Cabinet agencies. You still seem to be

tinkering at the edges. Can't you find one department to eliminate?”

A: “Cabinet departments don't get created by accident. Below that level,

there are many agencies that we have eliminated. In one year, we downsized

by 100,000 employees. We have locked in place plans to eliminate another

200,000 workers. That's a bold start.”

Vice President All Gore in Business Week Magazine. Getting Smarter With Al  01-23-1995.

(1) 1840's appeal from New England laborers to their fellows to abandon the idea that the employers/capitalists could solve working people's problems.  Philip Foner History of the Labor Movement Vol. 1 p192