The Supreme Court Gives Trump The Green Light. Are You Really Surprised?

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED 

"If you're going to strive to motivate workers through autonomy and empowerment, it's important to remember that the primary burden is to make sure employees believe what you say.  Don't tell them you want them to be empowered to increase the company's profits.  Tell them you want them to be empowered because it's the best way to remain competitive and guarantee everyone their jobs."  Carl Robinson, Vice President, Organizational Psychologists

 

I was in my Supervisors office one day discussing an issue a co-worker had. He left for a few minutes and I noticed a book he was reading so I took the opportunity to glance at it. It was a book about managing workers and developing strong managerial leadership. The name of the book escapes me but I took the above quote from it and the author was Carl Robinson, President, Organizational Psychologists.

 

This particular Supervisor had his weaknesses but he was not a nasty, aggressive guy. He was once called into an arbitration the union had filed on my behalf. Management disciplined me for creating a “hostile work environment” by distributing a flier attacking another worker’s pro-management actions that undermined our unity. His testimony actually supported me and the union position prevailed. I don’t know how he kept his job after that. I am sure had he been in the private sector he wouldn’t have.

 

In my union activity, including writing for the local newsletter and eventually editing a national opposition newsletter in AFSCME called the AFSCME Activist, I always made it clear that it was a disaster for working people to buy in to the Team Concept philosophy being pushed by the trade union hierarchy, neither in the workplace, through joint labor management committees, or in the political arena through support for the Democratic Party. We can only rely on our own strength, working class unity, and our collective ability to prevent the economy from functioning. 

While we can use the courts up to a point, we cannot rely on the justice system of the ruling class, of capitalism, to defend our rights or our material well-being. Unions and any gains we made over the years were won through mass action and mass violation of anti-worker laws. History is clear evidence of this. The social legislation that came out of the 1930’s New Deal was the employers and their state codifying what had already been won in the streets, factories, and workplaces of the United States. The same applies to the legislation that was brought about by the Black Revolt and Civil Rights movement that followed.

 

U.S. President Trump wants the government to be more efficient and intends to cut millions of jobs and eliminate vital departments (not the offense budget) to accomplish that. But Trump’s efficiency means the elimination of millions of federal jobs and agencies, cuts so severe, they will even have a disastrous effect on business, especially small businesses as well. But efficiency, no matter which party raises it, always means helping the private sector bosses and their rapacious quest for profits, not the worker and our social and economic needs. 

 

In the mid 1990’s, when Clinton kicked women off welfare during his efficiency program called “welfare to work”, and AFSCME officials in New York City’s DC37 were caught stuffing ballot boxes to ensure Rudolph Giuliani’s cost cutting contract was passed over the objection of the membership, Al Gore spoke to Business Week. Here’s an interesting answer to a question about making government more efficient:

 

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

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

 

AG: 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. (My added emphasis.)

 

BW: What's next for the REGO drive?

 

AG: Round Two is going to focus on whether certain government activities are

necessary at all. Each agency and department is being confronted with a

basic challenge: reinvention or elimination.

 

Getting Smaller With Al. Business Week, 01-23-1995.

 

With friends like this who needs enemies.

 

The Supreme Court

 

There are some very important lessons being learned thanks to the Trump Administration. Many workers have drawn them partially as they have abandoned the electoral process and the two parties of capital in their millions. But Trump and his menagerie of sycophants, religious lunatics, crooks, and billionaires have completely pulled the mask off the pretense.

 

The U.S. Supreme Court, has been presented as this almost divine body that Americans must look to as the highest and most honorable power in the land. A politburo of the capitalist class is what it really is; a panel of old lawyers, defenders of the free market, and the laws and edicts that govern it. Each national election is a contest between the two parties of capital for which section of the ruling class will govern U.S. society for four years. Each one will try to get one of its supporters on to the bench and on the benches of the lower courts as well. The entire judicial system, despite differences in its ranks, represents not the seller of labor power, the workers, but the buyers of it, the capitalists. We can’t rely on either in a pinch and that has been made abundantly clear with Trump.

 

In response, after unions and other groups filed a lawsuit claiming the Trump Administration needs the approval of the U.S. Congress to make such changes, a district judge in California ruled in favor of the unions. Subsequently, an appeals court allowed that ruling to remain in place. 

 

Trump responded by issuing an executive order, continuing with the call for mass layoffs, and appealing the California Court’s decision. The Supreme Court majority responded with a stay on the original injunction. There was only one dissenting voice, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson who accused the court of circumventing Congress and that the Trump Administrations actions will lead to:

"…..mass employee terminations, widespread cancellation of federal programs and services, and the dismantling of much of the federal government as Congress has created it," adding, "While the president no doubt has the authority to manage the executive branch, our system does not allow the president to rewrite laws on his own under the guise of that authority." 

 

In response to the Supreme Court becoming an agent of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government (hint: it always has been) Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif. throws down the gauntlet, "Oversight Democrats will not sit back as Trump turns the Court into a political weapon. We will keep fighting to protect the American people and prevent the destruction of our federal agencies.”

 

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said the fight would continue,  "In Congress, in the courts, and in our communities." 

 

The days when comments like that would have meant something to the American workers are long gone.

 

Some of my liberal middle class friends whose faith in the Supreme Court is quite extraordinary, have admonished me in the past for being too negative with regards to the Court’s power or interests when it comes to a real assault on workers’ rights, whether in the economic or social field. While millions of Americans have drawn the same conclusion through experience; they might not see the way forward at this point but they certainly have determined that the Democratic Party is not it. This absence of leadership has led to a growth of right-wing ideas and organizations in the US and throughout the world. 

 

As Marx once pointed out, “The emancipation of the working class is an act of the working class itself.”  Putting it another way, the liberation of the working class from Capital can only be achieved through our own collective action and struggle, not through the actions of another class or external forces. 

 

The New York City Democratic Primaries

 

Zohran Mamdani’s success in the NYC primaries is extremely important as it reflects the mood for change that exists in US society. He was able to build an army of 50,000 volunteers during the campaign around a fairly modest program of reform This is not a minor detail. But Sanders also had an opportunity to build a genuine political opposition to the status quo as far back as 2016, and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the so-called “Squad” have had the same opportunity. All have been co-opted by the Democratic Party machine and AOC appears to be a rising start in the Party and a potential candidate for President in 2028. Sanders just keeps ranting about billionaires and how the two parties are controlled by them then urges his supporters to vote for one of them. I’m tired of him.

 

Mamdani will suffer the same fate as a candidate of the Democratic Party.  I commented on his campaign victory here.  Mamdani’s economic platform is not radical by any means, yet it has brought the wrath of the US ruling class down on him along with accusations of antisemitism and support for Islamic fundamentalist views. Trump has called him a “communist lunatic” despite having no idea what communism is. All of this is nonsense. 

But this is the standard response when any politician raises policies that are seen as an alternative to the free market. Musk has earned billions from public ventures, as have those investors in defense industry, But, hypocritically, they want no discussion about regulation that protects the consumer or any curbs on the private sector.

Already, the New York real estate moguls, (land pimps I call them) the enemies of all working people, and the reason housing and rent costs are so high, are offering to spend millions of dollars to defeat Mamdani in November as he has a real chance of becoming New York City’s next mayor.

 

If Mamdani does win in November he will face an even more powerful combination of the employers, their mass media, the courts, and all the institutions of capital, not to mention the Democratic Party machine. 

 

His only defense in the face of this class offensive is to appeal to and root his campaign in the working class, our organizations, and our communities. This would mean exiting the Democratic Party at some point.

 

But more importantly, he needs to make an appeal to the rank and file of organized labor in NYC. If he hasn’t already, he should set up a labor section of the campaign to draw in more workers, both inside and outside organized labor. Mamdani could encourage rank and file union members to take his campaign into their locals and fight for their locals to endorse it, other members to join it and to help finance it. The first Amazon workers' union was won at a plant in Staten Island if my memory serves me right. 

 

New York City is a strong union town. Mamdani should offer his support if he becomes mayor in helping existing unions to begin strong union drives to organize the unorganized and bring them in to the organized working class. A break from the black hole that the Democratic Party is for reform movements, and a victory for this campaign, will have a huge positive influence on the working class as a whole.

It will take a mass movement based on direct action and violating anti-worker laws that will drive back this offensive of capital. It's how unions were built and how workers and all oppressed people made progress.