Biden/Trump 2024. It's Déjà vu Again.

This is it folks. Francis Fukuyama's Triumph of Liberal Democracy Source

 

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444 retired

HEO/GED

7-4-24

Here we go again. It’s another national election for US President that takes place every four years and costs hundreds of billions of dollars. As I pointed out on this blog a few weeks ago, here in the US we have the best democracy money can buy and even a former functionary in the Obama Administration admits (in the pages of Foreign Affairs that few workers will read) that, “…the most important thing that America can do in the world is detoxify its own democracy” He knows the mood out there and feels the need to tap in to it,  but doesn’t want to broadcast his dissent too widely----give people the wrong ideas.

 

A comment like that from a prominent US bureaucrat reveals just how deep the crisis is when it comes to US foreign policy.

 

The same could be said of domestic politics. The Democratic Party is in disarray as its candidate for president is the incumbent Joe Biden, AKA Genocide Joe, Butcher Joe, or the somewhat less offensive but a name only Joe himself could dream up, Worker Joe. The degenerate sexual predator Trump is his opponent. Biden’s performance in the last debate was so poor, major Democratic Party donors have called for him to step down. He certainly gave credence to the accusations that he has dementia and is unfit to govern.

 

Welcome to US politics at its worst.

 

For most of us, particularly union activists or retired union activists and socialists like this writer, we are experiencing an acute attack of déjà vu again. My English grammar is not the best but I don’t think following déjà vu with again is superfluous in this instance. The trade union leaders donating hundreds of millions of their members hard earned dues money to a major capitalist party is the norm, is repeated each election cycle, and it is one of the reasons so many US workers are so disillusioned with politics and draw the wrong but understandable conclusion that all politicians and politics in general is corrupt.

 

I read today that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is launching  a massive drive and spending, “$200 million to help President Biden win re-election.”

“This election, workers are going to vote for candidates up and down the ballot who’ve got their back,” says SEIU Vice President Rocio Sáenz.

 

And UNITE/HERE is attempting to repeat a successful 2020 campaign that provided,1,700 volunteers to canvass for Biden in swing states. “Our convention delegates are marching through Midtown Manhattan, on their way to Trump Tower with a message: We're ready to do whatever it takes to defeat Donald Trump!” Unite/HERE posted on X, formerly Twitter.

 

Swing states are those states that can go either way. The US election cycle is such that Democrats have some states wrapped up and Republicans have others wrapped up which is very good as they don’t have to spend resources campaigning there and they concentrate on the few states that will decide who the next president will be.

 

Neither party appeals to the millions of registered voters that are so disgusted with the political situation and the two capitalist parties that they have abandoned the electoral system completely.

 

Over the decades literally billions of dollars have been given to candidates and parties that represent Wall Street and US big business by the trade union leadership. It’s important to recognize though, that Michael Bloomberg, one of the world’s richest men who spent $1 billion----described as “his own money”-----trying to get the Democratic Party nomination in 2020 donated $20 million to Biden in June of this year.

 

The top Democratic Party Superpac, Future Forward has put aside $250 million for advertising according to the New York Times,  “$140 million on television and $110 million on digital and streaming platforms…”

 

This massive infusion of money from big business dwarfs labor’s contributions and is the norm; it has been going on for a long time. After all, the Democratic Party, as Nancy Pelosi once reminded one naïve young DSA member who was a little carried away by the rise of Bernie Sanders, is a capitalist party and “we are capitalists”. His question though was an appropriate one, simply asking Pelosi if the Democrats could adopt a more "populist" approach like the right have. Good question and he got his answer.

While we may not grasp as yet what we can do about it, abstaining from the electoral process is in itself a protest vote. My view is that many workers voted for Trump in 2016 as a protest as sickened as they are by the whole affair and also as a F you to the process in general, but, as I said, almost 100 million refused to vote for any of them. Also, the absence of any serious left or reformist opposition or alternative along with the extreme wokeness, in a negative sense of being woke, of the Democratic left, has pushed many workers to the right. If a genuine working class left opposition in the form of a party of our own does not fill the void; the right will and that’s what’s happening.

 

So back to déjà vu. The mobilization for Biden, who broke a strike last year by introducing legislation that made a legal strike illegal overnight, forcing workers to accept a contract they had already rejected, is based on the slogan, “Anyone but Trump”. That in itself is a reflection of the acute crisis in US politics, not just the sorry state of the two candidates, but that we choose a candidate primarily to keep the other out.

 

My national union, AFSCME provided 40,000 volunteers for Mondale back in the 1980’s. The union hierarchy urge us to vote for every Democrat, with rare exceptions just to keep the Republican out and that has led to this present situation where we continue to lose ground, we continue to lose interest in the process and so on.

 

We cannot beat big business and Wall Street at the lobbying game, they have more money than us and both parties represent the interests of capital not labor.  What we do have is numbers and we occupy key roles in the economy, in the production of society’s needs, the cogs that make society run. The potential rail strike last year scared the crap out of them and they used their political power to stop it.

 

It’s not just cash that the labor hierarchy gives to their friends and our enemies.

There are the thousands of volunteers, the precinct walking, the phone banking and so on. We have the resources, the labor hierarchy controls them at this point, to provide an alternative to this status quo. An alternative to the two parties that are both the same when it comes to the basics, jobs, housing, health care, transportation, the environment and think Palestine Ohio or the BP spill that devastated life in the Gulf of Mexico.

 

And we have the structure in place. I don’t have the time or space but check it out. There are thousands of union locals and union District Councils and other union offices throughout the country.  There are Central Labor Councils in most if not all states. The Alameda Central Labor Council here in Oakland ran the 1946 Oakland General Strike. The SF Labor Council the 1934 San Francisco one.

 

In a recent Gallup Poll,  Seventy-one percent of Americans now approve of labor unions. The highest Gallup has recorded on this measure since 1965. With figures like this, it is clear a real offensive by organized labor fighting for real gains that considerably improved workers' lives, would draw in the millions of workers outside organized labor and kick off a movement that could transform the balance of class forces, and therefor e the mood in US society.

 

Here in California some 2 million workers are affiliated to the California State Labor Federation, there are 800,000 workers in the LA Labor Federation alone and 300,000 teachers in the California Teachers Association which is affiliated to the National Education Association, the largest union in the US with 3 million members. This is real potential power. We are not weak, we just need to overcome the obstacle of our own leadership and take control of our organizations that workers died building. It is the leaderships’ world view and their strategy that flows from it that holds us back, that prevents the potential of 14 million organized workers from bringing its weight to the game.

 

While I sympathize with those that do not vote, and it’s important to recognize we’ve won, precious little through the ballot box,  we must defend that right as we won it from these bastards. I will not vote for Biden (I couldn’t look a Palestinian in the face if I did) and certainly not the sexual deviant and con man Trump. I will likely vote Green and Jill Stein. But write in anything, I used to write in labor Party. Write your own name whatever. Don’t let them drive you out of the game.

 

Lastly I feel the need to mention this. Of course there are differences with the two capitalist parties and they have changed over the past period as the unravelling of US capitalism hastens; but not on the basics, food shelter, housing etc. I was admonished for abandoning women as the assault on women, which occurs though various approaches of both parties is more acute with Republicans. But I would argue this, I’ll bet there are more women and children that die through inadequate or no health care. And pregnancies that fail due for the same reason.  There are more black folks die due to lack of health care than are shot by police and so on. They kill us in many ways.

 

I am convinced that whether it be Trump or Biden and as the capitalist offensive continues under both of them, that their increased efforts to drive us back 150 years will be met with a ferocious resistance; read labor history. Unions weren’t build by lawyers. The gains of the Black Revolt came from the streets not the courts, the courts derailed them.

 

The anti-working class propaganda in the US is intense. The trade union leaders refuse to combat it and many workers still refer to ourselves as middle class. But this will change. I used to say at work that our greatest organizer is the bosses; they won’t stop their assault on working people.

 

And, if history is anything to go by working people won’t put up with it forever. We can only rely on our own strength on the job and politically through our own political party, which I think will inevitably arise in the period ahead as a movement will seek to find organized political expression.