Liz Cheney, the Anti-Fascist Conservative

By

Liz Cheney speaks to a small crowd at the American Legion in Buffalo, Wyoming. October 26, 2013. Creative Commons

Since the recent publication of Liz Cheney’s new book, Wyoming’s former Member of Congress has been making the rounds of our top media outlets and news shows. If you have yet to watch one, do so. It’s well worth it.

Entitled ‘Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning,’ the work takes a deep dive into former President Donald Trump’s attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021. It not only covers that radical rupture with the usual ‘peaceful transfer of power’ in our country’s history, but Cheney also offers us a summary of the events that followed, especially the proceedings of the House of Representatives’s Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

But Cheney is making waves again because she’s delivering more than a history lesson. As her title states, she’s warning us that the battle against Trump and his GOP turned-fascist party is far from over. In fact, her claim is that greater violent battles may occur in the upcoming presidential year, and we would do well to prepare. We learn several things from her book we may not have known before, or at least, as the Bible says, we may have only known ‘through a glass darkly’ (1st Corinthians 13).

1: Team Trump did not act alone.

2: It really was a coup attempt, complete with armed backup. 

3: The attempt is ongoing and is getting worse. 

4: Cheney had to organize her particular media experts and armed self-defense to survive, get the initial story out, and continue her battle today. Let’s go over them.

Team Trump was not alone. The fact that Trump and his staff, with the help of the Secret Service, pulled off a large rally on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, was widely known, including Trump’s online assertion that it ‘will be wild.’ We could have guessed that it would march to the steps of the Capitol and even try to push through police lines. But what we did not know was a solid majority of House Republicans and a few GOP Senators had been organized in a deeper plot, one involving dozens of GOP-dominated state legislators as well. They were all in on it; they all knew it was illegal, fraudulent, or at least ‘extra-legal’ and unconstitutional, and they were willing to use violence to get their way.

Liz Cheney knew the vital technical details. She knew the GOP collaborators would have fake ballots of fake electors, and they would try to stuff them into the traditional mahogany box handed to Vice President Pence for the counting ceremony. Cheney conferred with the Senate and House parliamentarians and the Sergeants-at-Arms on how to thwart it. She succeeded, but barely so. The other technical detail was that with each state count that Pence reported, House GOPers could object, but unless a Senator also objected, there would be no debate. If there were debate, the Joint Session would be suspended until each House debated and voted the ‘objections’ up or down. They would then return to the Joint Session for Pence to continue. This adjourning could be repeated 50 times, possibly taking days or even more, ensuring chaos. In the chaos, Team Trump would try to throw the election to the states, where each state got one vote, and the GOP held the majority of states.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the mob breached the Joint Session after only one vote, Arizona, and one Senator, Josh Hawley, casting a vote to force the end of the session. Cheney saw to it that the mahogany box was secured. She also had seen to her personal security. Her father, Dick Cheney, the former Vice President and Secretary of Defense, had warned her ahead of time to do so, and insisted on it. She used a trusted ex-Secret Service agent who had guarded her as a child to make sure she was always secure and protected as she moved about or in undisclosed places. Dick Cheney also had a hand in getting all former living Secretaries of Defense to sign a widely publicized open letter warning of the necessity for a peaceful transfer of power.

Liz Cheney’s next steps were carried out closely and jointly with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They hardly knew each other before, but both knew exactly what had to be done: The Capitol had to be secured that day, and called back into session, even if in the late wee hours. In that session, they had to complete the Arizona debate and make sure there were no more. Still, even after the violence, 139 House GOPers stuck to the Trump plan and voted objections. But no Senator voted with them, meaning no interruption of the Joint Session. Under armed guard against any disruption, Cheney and Pelosi got it done. Pence finished the count, and the ceremony was completed. Biden would be sworn in on Jan. 20, 2021.

It really was an attempted coup. Trump insisted that his guards at the Jan. 6 rally turn off their weapon detectors because he knew large numbers of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were armed. Luckily, the Secret Service was tactically split. Trump planned to lead the assault himself, but the agents in his limo forcibly restrained him and delivered him back to the White House. The mob who did get into the Capitol, and a trained handful of them knew their several tasks: seize and detain Nancy Pelosi, overwhelm the Sergeants at Arms, get the mahogany box, and seize and detain Mike Pence. Pelosi, working with Liz Cheney, thwarted each tactical move.

But there was more. In the days before Jan. 6, Trump had fired and replaced several top Pentagon officials and replaced them with his hitmen with zero qualifications, other than personal fealty to him, to hold those offices. He was assisted by Gen Micheal Flynn, who he had pardoned earlier. Along with Roger Stone, Flynn was Trump’s liaison with the Oathkeepers and other armed units. Trump also acted to confuse and limit the intervention of the National Guard. Once the Electoral College count was thwarted, the plan was to use the Insurrection Act to put the country under martial law.

The ‘Election Denial’ attempt was, and remains, ongoing. By Jan. 11, even though Trump had only a few days left in office, Democrats introduced Articles of Impeachment. It passed the House but with only 10 Republicans voting for it. The GOP majority, while offering a variety of excuses, still stuck with Trump. Cheney was hopeful that Senator Mitch McConnell would back it in the Senate, but in the end, he wavered, and that meant less than the required two-thirds. In the following weeks, GOP leader Kevin McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago to flip-flop from his panicked Jan. 6 statements and get back on Trump’s side. The reason? His main job in the GOP was raising money. As a result of the coup attempt, many large corporate donors let it be known that funds to the ‘Freedom Caucus’ and its coup-plotting allies were drying up. The only other major source was Trump’s massive small donor lists. The price of access? McCarthy had to kiss ‘the Don’s’ ring and work to bring him back to the White House. Liz Cheney knew the Freedom Caucus were, for the most part, all surrendering and would work to sabotage any future joint investigation. Cheney knew the full truth had to come out, and it wouldn’t be easy.

With the prospect of a bicameral investigation cut off, Nancy Pelosi decided on the next best step: a bipartisan House Committee. She made an offer to McCarthy to name five Republicans to it. He did, but Pelosi objected to two of them as demagogic hacks, Reps Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, and told him to pick two more. Instead, McCarthy withdrew all five, leading her to quip that ‘Kevin won’t take ‘yes’ for an answer.’ But Pelosi was not to be stopped and instead asked Liz Cheney, and while Liz was a bit surprised, she readily agreed and helped pick one more Republican, Rep Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who had stood against all the coup ploys. Pelosi had named Rep Bennie Thompson of Mississippi to chair the Select Committee, but then asked Cheney to be the vice chair. Somewhat surprised, Liz agreed.

From the start, Cheney knew the Select Committee had to be different. The last thing she wanted to see was a typical House hearing with dozens of reporters, glaring TV lights, and prima donna speakers trying to wring all the stage glamour they could out of an allotted five minutes. Average Americans would tune out. So, working closely with her husband, Philip Perry, an experienced trial lawyer, they planned a radical departure from the average hearing. In addition to legal experts, they hired top film and TV directors. They wanted a series of storyboards drawn up, each featuring a key element of the attempted coup. They wanted it to unfold as a dramatic series, with growing insights and suspense, with only the witnesses in the limelight. Moreover, they wanted nearly all the testimony to come from Republicans themselves, especially those who worked close to Trump and had initially supported him inside the Oval Office or his cabinet. And for any fearful for their lives, they had to do the recordings in highly secure facilities—and with no leaks.

As we know, Thompson and Cheney were successful and powerfully so. The Hearings became among the most widely watched and the most credible that anyone could name. Trump and the GOP attacked it as partisan trash, but the claim didn’t fly. All the testimony did indeed come from their own people. It did cause Liz Cheney to be purged from all her posts in Congress and then to be removed from Congress by a Trump diehard who defeated her in the next race in Wyoming. It didn’t matter.

Liz Cheney now probably has more political clout than she ever has had. And we need to note that she is still a solid right-wing conservative with a 95% rating by those who measure such things. The difference is in the remaining five percent: she is an anti fascist who sticks by the Constitution and her oath to defend it. She is not only making the rounds to every media forum she can to promote her book and tell the story behind it, Cheney has also formed a new PAC, The Great Task. Its aim is not simply to keep Trump out of the Oval Office, or any office. It is also organizing Republicans, Democrats, and Independents to take down every Trump enabler, not only in Congress but also in every state legislature. And if it means endorsing progressive Democrats to do so, so be it.

This last point has considerable importance for the left. We are not in a ‘united front’ with Liz Cheney, or any formal grouping along those lines. We know her politics too well, and there are too many points of importance to sweep under any rug. But in the current conjuncture and its terrain, we do share common ground and a common goal: the routing of the MAGA fascists in the upcoming elections at every level and in future rounds as well. We can encourage Republicans we know at the base, people we know who are not likely to join our coalitions and projects but who might join hers.

Things will undoubtedly change in the future, and for that matter, Liz Cheney may change, too. Nothing in the Universe stands still. But for now, work on the great task at hand.

This piece is republished from the substack “Liberation Road”

Six Challenges for the Tough Year Ahead

By

mass slaughter of genocidal proportions backed by the current administration is taking place in Gaza. A candidate espousing US-style fascism has energized his base and makes no secret of his dictatorial day-one agenda. The opposition to MAGA is divided (on Gaza and immigration policy especially) and is not displaying the momentum anti-MAGA displayed at this stage of the 2020 campaign.

The people-power, energy, and savvy exist to regain the initiative. Different parts of the social justice movement will contribute in different ways. Here are six challenges that I think progressives must take on if we are to emerge from 2024 stronger than we are today.

1. Hammer home the danger—and look to what we can gain.

Ignore all the pseudo-scientific polls—they are really just “punditry in disguise.” Instead, follow Michael Podhorzer’s lead and look at the results of the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections to understand the behavior of the Trump-era electorate. The key takeaway is that there is an anti-MAGA majority in this country that wins elections when it is motivated to turn out. 

One part of providing that motivation is hammering home the nature and danger of the MAGA agenda: The GOP “Mandate for Leadership” plan promises to overhaul government policy across the board to serve an agenda of “all wealth to the wealthy”; to-do lines include plans to expand use of fossil fuels, and to use the Justice Department against political opponents (which includes rounding up leftists). It’s not just Trump: Liz Cheney’s new book reports in detail on the depth and breadth of the Republican drive to break laws and overturn what remains of US democracy.  

But fear of MAGA will not be enough. We will also need to convey what can be gained by a Democratic victory over MAGA and the ways defeating MAGA can increase the clout of grassroots-based and progressive organizations. To be effective, this kind of messaging must be focused and specific, sector by sector. For example, for winning workers of all racial backgrounds to vote against MAGA, stressing the pro-worker nature of the current NLRB and the prospect of it becoming an even more powerful defender of union organizing can be an important tool and something for other sectors to learn from.

30 June 2018: San Francisco, CA. In cities all across the across the US demonsrators marched in support of the immigrant rights movement. Photo Robert Gumpert

On some issues, we can only make a strong case that there are gains to be made with a Democratic victory if we can push the Biden team to the left.  Immigration policy, where the administration is considering caving to Republican pressure, and Biden’s “bear hug” backing of Israel (see next section) must be a focal point of progressive attention in the coming days and weeks. These issues are of special concern to constituencies that have made decisive contributions to the anti-MAGA front in the last few elections: Arabs and Muslims, youth and especially Black youth, peace and immigrants’ rights advocates. Only a broad progressive movement that throws down in the spirit of “an injury to one is an injury to all” can move the Democratic leadership on these issues, and thus help bring the energy of these too-often-marginalized sectors into the high-stakes 2024 electoral battle.

2. Ceasefire now!

Intensifying pressure on Biden to join the rest of the world in demanding that Israel halt all military operations—with consequences if they don’t—is imperative. The pro-ceasefire movement continues to shift public opinion,  and new initiatives such as the January 12-13 Emergency Summit for Gaza initiated by Jesse Jackson will squeeze the administration further.

Stepping up for elected officials who have come out for a ceasefire will be an essential piece of this fight. As of this writing, 56 representatives and four senators—all Democrats—have defied the administration and embraced the ceasefire demand.  AIPAC and other Israel Lobby organizations, fearful that they are losing the “bipartisan consensus” that has long sustained blank-check-for-Israel policies, plan to spend over $100 million to defeat the most outspoken of these (Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, Ilhan Omar) in Democratic primaries. As primary season comes closer, we can expect other pro-ceasefire representatives to be targeted too.

These primary battles will be the next major test of strength for the Palestine solidarity movement. If AIPAC’s assault can be beaten back, it will undermine the “fear factor” that is largely responsible for the big disconnect between sentiment at the base of the Democratic Party and the majority of its congress members. Such a victory would not just defend the foothold pro-Palestine sentiment already has in Congress, but provide a springboard to taking the offensive.

Gains in this battle would also bolster the case being made by this writer and others that our chances of beating MAGA are diminished unless Biden either changes course or steps aside in favor of a nominee not complicit in Israel’s genocide.

3. Don’t cede the fight against anti-Semitism.

Apologists for Israel—realizing that defending the country’s actions is a losing proposition—are steadily amplifying charges of anti-Semitism against the Palestine solidarity movement. In beating back those attacks, the Left has necessarily spent a lot of time and energy debunking the charge that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic. In doing so, however, we have too often let ourselves get locked into purely defensive posture, which has made it easier for the apologists to advance the false charge that anti-Zionists care about what happens to Palestinians but don’t care about what happens to Jews.

We need to break this dynamic and go over to the offensive, making the case that the forces who are backing Israel today include the most diehard and dangerous anti-Semites: Christian Zionists who see Israel as prelude to a “rapture” when Evangelicals will go to heaven and Jews to hell, and white nationalists who see Jews as part of a “globalist” conspiracy to destroy America via “great replacement” through immigration. Further, the program of even the most liberal elements in the Zionist camp—a state in which Jews have special privileges and exclusive control the military and police—is inherently flawed.

It is the anti-Zionist Left—we who fight for equal rights for all in racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse societies—who are the most consistent opponents of anti-Semitism. It is our program, not theirs, that in actual practice as well as in theory means more safety for Jews. The Israeli ethno-state —supposedly a guarantee of Jewish safety—provides no such thing, as its dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians is a recipe for constant violence and war. Diverse societies where fights for racial, gender, and religious equality have made even incomplete breakthroughs are safest for Jews. And it is these very gains that are now under attack in the US by white Christian nationalists who boast of how pro-Israel they are, as if this immunized them from being anti-Semitic

A lot more work is required to turn these thoughts into a coherent program and, more important, an action strategy. But now is the time to get serious about it.

4. Build internationalism.

The unprecedented upsurge of pro-ceasefire activism does even more than create conditions for a major leap forward in building a more unified and broad-based Palestine solidarity movement.

As the first sustained movement at scale with internationalism at its center in more than a decade, it underscores both the need and the potential to make an internationalist vision and practice integral to the life of progressive groups focused on domestic issues. It also has thrust the militarist and anti-human rights character of US foreign policy in general into the spotlight, spurring discussions of how to revitalize peace and anti-militarist activism in general.

Again, a lot of thought and work will be required to take advantage of these opportunities. But the door is open at this moment in a way that it has not been for many years.

5. Seize history to explain our present and light our future.

21 January 2017: Washington DC. A reported 500,00 march in protest to Donal Trump at the Women’s March on the mall. Photo: Robert Gumpert

The capacity to “shape people’s conscious and unconscious understandings of the world, of what is politically possible, and of their own place in the world” is integral to the fight for political power. Developing and popularizing a compelling narrative about this country’s past, present and future—one that “makes meaning” out of people’s disparate experiences and points in a liberatory direction—is imperative for a Left that aims to lead a coalition that can govern the country.

The rise of MAGA has led to new experiments in crafting such a narrative, often building on W.E.B. DuBois’ work centering the experience of the post-Civil War Reconstruction, and on lessons from the Second Reconstruction embodied in the 1950s-‘60s Civil Rights breakthroughs. Peniel Joseph’s book, The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century, makes a major contribution. A new effort directly tied to grassroots activism, Two Americas on Contested Terrain: Constructing a White Supremacist Nation vs. Reconstructing a Rainbow Democracy, comes from Carl Davidson.

As we work towards strategic clarity and engage in the battle over the story of this country and its future, work in this direction has a lot to offer.

6. Keep hope alive: courage is contagious!

It will be difficult to meet all the challenges flagged here as well as others that face us in the tough year ahead. We will have to be real about the power of our enemies while remaining confident that appealing to the majority’s “better angels” can create a force that overcomes that power. In this effort, stories of what individuals can do in the face of adversity tend to have more power than even the most insightful analysis of each side’s strengths and weaknesses. We are in a moment when such stories abound:

  • Palestinian journalists working in Gaza are paying “a staggeringly high price these last two months for the twin perils of being Palestinian and covering the war. Those who have dedicated their lives to uncovering and sharing the stories of people who have suffered a 16-year blockade and have seen their Western and Palestinian colleagues killed, maimed, and imprisoned by the Israeli military and censored by its tech allies…‘It’s time for Gaza’s Journalists to be treated like the heroes they are.’”
  • “A young Israeli man was sentenced Tuesday to 30 days behind bars for refusing to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces as it wages a genocidal assault on Gaza, a war the teen condemned as ‘a revenge campaign… not only against Hamas, but against all Palestinian people.’“
  • “Black mother-daughter Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss stood strong against the most vile life-threatening danger” after Trump toady Rudy Giuliani and a host of right-wing media outlets falsely accused them of ballot tampering. “People called for the two to be hung at the Capitol where witnesses could ‘hear their necks snap.’” They may never receive any of the $148 million the jury awarded them, but they faced down their defamers and won.

These stories gain even more power in the context of the collective courage being displayed week after week by people standing up, sitting in, speaking out, risking their comfort and careers—and in Gaza simply struggling to keep their families, neighbors and themselves alive.  All these stories bring our inspiration and hope. Let’s lift them up.

This piece originally ran in Convergence

How Can Workers Organize Against Capital Today?

By

US Steel’s ET Works. Braddock, PA. 1992 Photo: Robert Gumpert
Port of Long Beach, containers waiting distribution, in many cases warehouses inland. 2000. Photo: Robert Gumpert

Labor Power and Strategy, the new book edited by Peter Olney and Glenn Perušek, officially aims to provide “rational, radical, experience-based perspectives that help target and run smart, strategic, effective campaigns in the working class.” But by the end of it, it is difficult to avoid the sneaking suspicion that Olney and Perušek have a different goal: to make clear just how far organized labor is from having a strategic conversation about its present impasse.

The book is organized around an interview with economist and historian John Womack about the twin needs for an analysis of the weak points (or “choke points”) in contemporary industrial technologies and for the labor movement to exploit that analysis to cause disruption and gain leverage. Womack supports the struggles of all workers to organize for better conditions, but he also believes the labor movement should focus not on raising the floor for the “most oppressed” groups of workers but rather on workers and industries where it is possible to gain the kind of leverage to bring the capitalist class to heel. In his words, labor “needs to know where the crucial industrial and technical connections are, the junctions, the intersections in space and time, to see how much workers in supply or transformation can interrupt, disrupt, where and when in their struggles they can stop the most capitalist expropriation of surplus value.” To do this effectively, he urges continual network analysis, or “grubbing,” to reveal the vulnerable seams in the fabric of modern supply chains — the places where ports and rail and warehouses meet, and thus where production and distribution can be effectively blocked.

Union power before the 1930s was drawn mainly from skill, or certain groups of workers’ specific position within the economy and the leverage it offered. The American Federation of Labor was thus a self-limiting organization at the time, and it took the challenge of the Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to overcome its commitment to that limitation. In the common understanding, instead of leverage through skill, the CIO sought and gained leverage at the “point of production.” For Womack, this idea was “a mistake then, but now ignorantly, thoughtlessly used.”

At large in a nationally defined economy, in any industry, in any plant where there are technical divisions of labor there’s not one point of production, but several, multiple points, connected, coordinated in place and time to make production, not a point, but as Dunlop [John Dunlop, whose Industrial Relations Systems heavily influenced Womack’s views] called it a “web,” or as we had better call it now for the sake of analysis, a network.

For Womack, key CIO organizers like Wyndham Mortimer understood well that there was no single “point” at which power could be gained. The CIO knew it had to figure out where things connect, “where they’re materially weakest, maybe politically, legally, commercially, culturally strong, protected, defended, but technically weakest,” and the challenge today is to do the same for a deindustrialized, logistical economy.

Womack is engaging and nimble in conversation, which makes the interview a fun read, but his basic points are often ones that the labor left of previous generations would have found straightforward and uncontroversial. Here’s Womack discussing leverage:

No matter what workers are mad about, unhappy about, indignant about, feel abused about, it doesn’t matter until they can actually get real leverage over production, the leverage to make their struggle effective. You don’t get this leverage just by feelings. You get it by holding the power to cut off the capitalists’ revenue. And without that material power your struggle won’t get you very far for long.

To which I imagine leaders of the CIO responding, “Yeah, obviously.”

The interview is then followed by ten responses from leading lights of the labor movement that make Womack’s claims seem anything but obvious. Rather than think alongside Womack or extend his claims in various directions, most of the responses take issue with the priority he accords to “technically strategic power” and the kinds of workers who are in a position to wield it.

Katy Fox-Hodess, Jack Metzgar, Joel Ochoa, and Melissa Shetler all take exception in different ways to Womack’s prioritization of strategic power over the “forms of power that accrue to workers as a result of their collective organization in trade unions, works councils, and the like” — in sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s terms, his emphasis on “structural power” over “associational power.” Fox-Hodess asserts that “strategic power (or structural power) is deeply rooted in associational power”; Metzgar that Womack misses “the impracticality of focusing strictly on strategic positions that can upend capitalist power relations.” All four agree that the labor movement cannot in any way deprioritize the cultivation of associational power.

Bill Fletcher Jr and Jane McAlevey lodge a related but slightly different complaint: that Womack’s focus on strategic industries does a disservice to workers in supposedly nonstrategic industries. Fletcher, in a contribution tellingly titled “Should Spartacus Have Organized the Roman Citizenry Rather Than the Slaves?,” believes those sectors of society that are already in struggle must be supported, rather than the ones that are ostensibly more strategic. McAlevey meanwhile asserts that only “the gendered bias that power is exercised by mostly men in the dated conception of the male-dominant private sector” keeps us focused on logistics, when it is in fact “women, often if not mostly women of color” in health care and education who have shown themselves most capable of “exercising strategic power that deftly harnesses economic and social power that can’t easily be pulled apart.”

Regarding the first criticism, that Womack unjustly prioritizes structural over associational power, it should be said first that he in no way practically deprioritizes associational power. Without collective organization and the exercise of associational power at the necessary moments, he asserts, workers simply are not going to be able to take advantage of any disruptive position they hold. Metzgar points to the example of the failed 1919 steel strike, where workers “had insufficient associational power to take advantage of their structural power,” to show that you cannot have one without the other, but here he’s knocking on an open door. Womack is clear that workers cannot effectively use strategic power without associational power.

The latter should nonetheless be considered secondary, in Womack’s view, because true solidarity flows from an understanding of strategic power. Most workers, most of the time, are not going to put their own material interest on the line just to be good comrades. A culture of solidarity can and should be built within any union, but that culture is only going to attract so many; if they don’t think they can win by seizing the necessary leverage over the company, most workers are not going to engage in the requisite struggle, and if they don’t see their technical and industrial dependence on other workers, they are not going to be convinced of the urgent need for solidarity. As Womack says,

You can’t count on ding-dong lectures or jingles or pamphlets, “I’m my brother’s, I’m my sister’s keeper.” Sweet idea, but within hours at work you’ve got dirty jokes about it. But once you see the technical connections of one job with another, who can foul or ruin or stop whose work, who can in fact endanger whom, high and low, back and forth, like a team sport, a firefighter company, the armed forces, I think you get real attention to how much mutual dependence means, technical interdependence, the practice value and real advantage of comradeship at work.

The bigger objection raised by Womack’s critics, however, is that his technical emphasis privileges some groups of workers over others. Indeed, underlying the objection to his prioritization of structural over associational power is a worry that workers without the former are just being written off. Thus Metzgar’s claim that workers “cannot be counseled to simply give up because they are not strategic” and Ochoa’s hope that “organized labor can create momentum by organizing in nonstrategic sectors.”

Once again, the critics are tackling a straw man: at no point does Womack say that “nonstrategic” workers simply shouldn’t organize. When he asserts that the focus should not be on the “most oppressed” workers but rather on workers’ ability to disrupt production and distribution, his point is twofold.

First, in any economic situation, there are always going to be industries that, if left unorganized, will hurt organized labor as a whole. John L. Lewis did not start the CIO because he privileged rubber workers over carpenters; he did it because he understood that organized labor would never exert any influence in society until General Motors, Goodyear, U.S. Steel, and the other major corporations of the period came to the table. The situation is similar today with Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc.: until these companies are organized, labor as a whole is going to suffer.

Second, it is less that Womack urges the narrow organization of strategic workers than that he wants workers’ power as a whole to be more strategically exercised. Sometimes this means seeing some workers as more proximate to the nodes of disruption than others, but mainly it means viewing all workers’ power through the lens of their capacity for that disruption. This is where his central challenge to the labor movement lies, and what I want to focus on for the remainder of this review. Curiously, the challenge is relatively unexplored by his interlocutors.

Dan DiMaggio, Carey Dall, Rand Wilson, and Gene Bruskin provide more sympathetic reads of Womack than the other six respondents, but it is not clear that even these readers really want to go where he is pointing. DiMaggio sees “the bigger context for thinking about Womack’s points [to be] that any revival of the US labor movement will require the revival of the strike,” though withholding labor per se is hardly Womack’s focus. Wilson thinks “workers are almost always the most knowledgeable source of information about who is in the best position to disrupt the production processes or services and where management’s weaknesses lie,” though Womack is at pains to show that the highly complex distributional flows of the present require something like a labor institute of industrial technology to understand them.

In many ways, the essential reticence to accept Womack’s basic orientation is a function of the fact that labor and the Left are still both focused on the need, in Wilson’s words, “to realize labor’s potential power in the workplace.” This is a fine position to hold if power really flows through the workplace, as it did when there were tremendous amounts of fixed capital invested in gigantic factories. But today, points of leverage are very often outside workplaces, at those distributional nodes far from the shop floor, between companies, workers, and union jurisdictions.

One might say then that, for the labor left, Womack offends the basic imperative to descend into the hidden abode of production. For him, it is not the workplace as such that is important but the kinds of connections that the workplace makes possible. Some of those connections will be in the workplace, but many will not.

Wherever you put things together, there’s a seam or a zipper or a hub or a joint or a node or a link, the more technologies together, the more links, the places where it’s not integral. It is parts put together, and where the parts go together, like at a dock, at a warehouse, between the trucks and the inside, between transformers and servers and coolers, there can be a bottleneck, a choke point.

Womack challenges jurisdictional boundaries (he even suggests at one point the creation of a “US Transport and General Workers’ Union” combining the ILWU, ILA, IBT, and IAM), but more generally he questions the very basics of unions’ organizing orientation (insofar as they still organize). To be very simple about it, we might see Womack as wanting to replace the model of the strike with that of the blockade. Unions, of course, are not unpracticed in the latter, but it is not the organizing fulcrum that the former is typically made out to be.

Once we get here, a whole set of fascinating questions emerge: first and foremost, if many (though not all) of the strategic disruption points have moved outside of the workplace, is it possible to mobilize workers not simply to band together and withhold their labor but to seize these choke points in coordinated action? This would mean, for instance, turning one’s attention away from organizing particular stores to getting smaller cadres of employees to occupy key distributional nodes and getting masses of other workers to support them. Right off the bat, we can see that the distinction between supposedly strategic and nonstrategic workers begins to fade: longshoremen and rail engineers are not necessarily the only ones with access to the seams in industrial technologies.

Still, they’d need to be supported by research departments that have up-to-date and sophisticated analyses of particular supply chains. Is the labor movement up for such a task? What would it need to approximate something like Womack’s proposed labor institute of industrial technology? Somehow the “Freedom Convoy” found the one bridge where 25 percent of all trade between the United States and Canada is conducted. Why wasn’t it the labor movement that took advantage of this situation?

Then there’s the question of how to support workers at such critical junctures, when historically company and state violence have been exerted. If smartphones are recording every second of a blockade, will that prevent bloodshed? What does community support look like at warehousing sites far from any affected community? Consumer boycotts? Can they be timed effectively? Would such occupations only work if multiple nodes in a supply chain were seized?

There are also further questions around internal organizing that Dall raises in his helpful response. For Dall, activating already unionized workers at ports and in rail can help set the conditions for organizing other workers: “To organize Amazon workers, we must first internally organize union transportation workers whose labor on the seams enables Amazon to get cargo of Asian origin to their hellish warehouses and finally to the consumer’s door.” In the case of rail and airline workers, there is a particular law, the Railway Labor Act, that protects these transportation workers in some ways but heavily incentivizes them not to disrupt things in others. What are those ways? How can these unions be won over to the idea that they might need to break the law, or how can particular workers be convinced not to follow their unions’ dictates?

Finally, the basics of breaking the law — how, when, where, and why to do it — must be foregrounded in any execution of a Womackian vision. From roughly the 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act until the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, labor had access to tools that are now off limits: recognition strikes, sit-downs, secondary boycotts. The postwar compromise was predicated on tolerating collective bargaining, provided those tools were put down for good. Experimenting with disruptive tactics again is likely to bring about forms of repression the likes of which we have not seen for a few generations. The possible benefits are enormous, but any action for which people might be put under the jail must obviously be undertaken with extreme caution.

At present, the Left is rent between those who emphasize the importance of disruption, rioting, sabotage, etc., and those who encourage us to stay the democratic course. The more anarchistic emphasis on dramatic disruption can often be fantastical, but given the constraints of modern labor law, where many ways of gaining leverage are straightforwardly illegal, it does seem necessary to start some conversation about the forms of strategic illegality that labor activists might want to take up. Womack allows us to begin to broach this question in ways that move beyond the dichotomy of blowing it all up versus working within the present institutions.

These questions, difficult and speculative as they can be, all follow from Womack’s analysis, and it’s notable they receive such little discussion in the responses. I have tried to get at the substantive reason for avoidance — that Womack moves us away from thinking about workplace organizing in the typical ways — but perhaps there are more personal and institutional reasons there as well. Some of what Womack articulates bears a resemblance to the vision behind SEIU’s “comprehensive campaigns,” which produced some impressive wins but fell far short of their stated goals. Some on the labor left still bristle at the “smart” strategizing of SEIU luminaries, and maybe Womack’s speculative hipshots are too reminiscent of former president Andy Stern’s thought.

But the stakes for labor today are too high for past grudges to lead to a dismissal of the need for broad strategic reconsiderations. At root, Womack’s labor philosophy is quite basic: “You have to wound capital to make it yield anything. And you wound it painfully, grabbing its attention, when you take direct material action to stop its production, cut its profit.” But how to make good on this idea, with a stolid labor movement in a deindustrialized, logistical economy, is a tremendously complicated matter. Operationalizing Womack would take not just a set of short responses but a research team with real resources. I cannot speak at present to the feasibility of many of Womack’s proposals or the possibilities latent in his thinking, but those proposals and possibilities should at least be recognized for what they are: a massive challenge to the usual ways we think about labor organizing.

What exactly would it take to wound capital today? Womack doesn’t provide all the answers, but he should at the very least get us thinking outside the typical boxes.

First published in Catalyst

Labor Power and Strategy is available from PM Press

About the author

Benjamin Y. Fong

Benjamin Y. Fong is Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, the Honors College and Associate Director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University. He is the author of Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge (Verso 2023). He is also the co-editor (with Craig Calhoun) of The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (Columbia, 2022) and the author of Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia, 2016). View all posts by Benjamin Y. Fong →

Comment on How Can Workers Organize Against Capital Today?

Share your opinion, leave a reply.

Posted in Mic check | Tagged: , , , ,

The Teamster Connection: Apartheid Israel and the IBT

By

TM June 1973

At the December 17 monthly membership of Teamsters Local 705 in Chicago, a resolution was put forward by several members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. I was told by several people present that while the resolution was voted down decisively, it was not overwhelming. They estimated on a voice vote that around 65% to 70% percent voted against it, while 35% to 40% voted for it. 

While I was heartened to see that a sizable minority of the meeting was for a ceasefire, I was also saddened that my old local union couldn’t a make the smallest gesture towards opposing genocide. In sharp contrast, two decades ago, Teamsters 705 pioneered labor opposition to the Iraq War, when it passed a resolution condemning President George W. Bush’s war drive. I’ve written about this recently here

The Teamsters 705 vote followed the tabling of a ceasefire resolution at the Teamsters for a Democratic (TDU) convention in early November, and many activists are wondering what comes next for Palestine solidarity in the Teamsters? Israel’s ongoing genocidal war shows no sign of abating. Opposition to the U.S. backed war is growing but also faces determined resistance from the Democratic and Republican Party establishments and slander from the media.

Many U.S. unions have longstanding ties to the State of Israel. What is the Teamster connection?

Jimmy Hoffa: “Critical support to a struggling Jewish state.”

Jimmy Hoffa with Golda Meir in Israel, 1956.

One of the least known aspects of Teamster history is its long relationship with the State of Israel, right from its very origins. Something I was surprised to discover until I started looking into it over the past few weeks. During a 2008 fundraiser held in Washington, D.C. organized by the American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported:

“A little-known chapter in the life of the legendary Teamsters leader [Jimmy Hoffa] is about to come to light in a tribute planned for Feb. 13, when the American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center will have a commemorative dinner. Former President Bill Clinton will address the gathering.”

What was this little known chapter? General President James P. Hoffa, Jr, son of Jimmy, told the JTA: 

“They were not only fighting for working people but fighting for independence,” adding that his father was influenced by Israel’s struggle against the British and the Arabs. “He became involved in that and in facilitating arms for the struggle.”

The JTA straightforwardly commented, “Facilitating” in this case is a euphemism for “smuggling.” Stuart Davidson, of the American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center, said that Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters “provided critical support to a struggling Jewish state rising from the ashes of the Holocaust.”

Hoffa in the late 1940s was president of Local 299 in Detroit, as well as  a prominent Michigan Teamster leader well-known for his political ambitions. He was still a decade away from becoming the union’s national leader, and two decades away from going to federal prison. Yet, he already had extensive ties to organized crime in Detroit, that were well documented in the 1950s by the Senate Rackets Committee, and later popularized by Dan Moldea for a younger generation of Teamster activists in his classic book The Hoffa Wars published in the late 1970s.

It was these connections to organized crime that most likely explain how Hoffa smuggled American weapons illegally into the hands of Zionist militias and nascent Israeli military. If these claims are true, they are disturbing because they mean that Hoffa smuggled weapons to Zionist militias involved in ethnic cleansingagainst Palestinians, during what Palestinians’ call the “Nakba,” meaning catastrophe. Over 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their ancestral homes during this period of time.

Jimmy Hoffa also helped burnish Israel’s image internationally as a caring society during the 1950s, while Palestinians were struggling for their very existence in Gaza and other territories.  The JTA reported:

“In 1955, Hoffa held a dinner that raised $300,000 – a phenomenal sum at the time – for an orphanage in Ein Kerem, a Jerusalem suburb. He visited Israel in 1956 to dedicate the orphanage; a year later he became Teamsters president.”

Hoffa visited the orphanage that during his 1956 visit to Israel he had his picture taken with then Minister of Labor and soon to be appointed Foreign Minister of Israel Gold Meier. Meir was a hardened Labor Zionist, who was later quoted as saying, “They [Palestinians] did not exist.” He also met with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, considered one of the “Founding Fathers” of Israel.

The Rabin Center: “Breaking the bones of Palestinians”

Hoffa Senior’s contributions to the creation of the Zionist state were honored in Washington by the American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center. Soon after the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, Teamster General President James P. Hoffa traveled to Israel. According to the Jerusalem Post:

The Younger Hoffa raised $2.5 million for the Yitzhak Rabin Center. During his visit, a room at the center will be dedicated to the Teamsters. Hoffa said he had been looking for a way to strengthen his ties to Israel, and began to work for the Rabin Center on the advice of friends. During his time here, he plans to visit the Histadrut-run Alumim Youth Village in Kfar Saba, whose original Jerusalem facility was built by a $300,000 donation from his father.

 The Rabin Center, created by an act of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, is a favorite of American trade union leaders, including the Teamsters. What makes it possible for U.S. trade union leaders to so enthusiastically embrace the Rabin Center? Along with their general subservience to U.S. foreign policy, it also has to do the with Rabin’s affiliation with the Israeli Labor Party and the thinning gloss of  “Labor Zionism” covering some of Israel’s institutions, notably the Histadrut, Israelis racist trade union federation. 

John T. Coli, the former head of the Teamsters in Chicago, soon to be released from federal prison, led one union delegation to the Rabin Center in 2013, where he enthused:

“There wasn’t a nation here. Now it’s totally different. [Tel Aviv] is a modern city. People have access to health care, to education. That’s what we want to build everywhere.”

Add to this Rabin’s image as a fallen hero for peace. He was assassinated in 1995 following the signing of the now discredited Oslo Accords. J. David Cox, the president  of American Federation of Government Employees, who led another union delegation in 2013, couldn’t say enough about Rabin the peace maker, his “commitment to peace in not just Israel but the world is amazing.” 

However, the image and reality of Rabin the peacemaker are two different things. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, in The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestinewrote of Rabin’s military and political career:

“Yitzhak Rabin who, as a young officer, had taken an active part in the 1948 cleansing [Nakba] but who had now been elected [1992] as prime minister on a platform that promised the resumption of the peace effort. Rabin’s death came too soon for anyone to assess how much he had really changed from his 1948 days; as recently as 1987, as minister of defense, he had ordered his troops to break the bones of Palestinians who confronted his tanks with stones in the first intifada ; he had deported hundreds of Palestinians as prime minister prior to the Oslo agreement, and he had also pushed for the 1994 Oslo B agreement that effectively caged the Palestinians in the West Bank into several Bantustans.”

Bantustans are a reference to one of the methods that the old Apartheid regime in South Africa used to divide and disenfranchise the majority Black population. As one online South Africa history website puts it succinctly, “Bantustans were established for the permanent removal of the Black population in White South Africa.” This was a model for the type of “peace” that Rabin offered the Palestinians.

The Times of Israel reported  in 2013 that, “Members of U.S. labor unions raised $1.4 million for the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv last year, 45 percent of the center’s total 2012 fundraising. Since 2005, American unions have raised $12 million for the center.” It also reported, “Cox’s group met with Arab-Israeli union members, but did not meet with Palestinians despite visiting religious sites in Bethlehem, a Palestinian city in the West Bank. Coli’s delegation did not have any meetings with Palestinians or Arab-Israelis.”

A dinner in honor of Coli raised $700,000 for the Rabin Center in 2012, alone. He returned to Israel in 2015, with injury lawyer Michael Goldberg, who referred to “as a guest of the Teamsters union.” Goldberg’s firm donated a $750,00 to the Rabin Center. It should be noted that John Coli was sentenced to federal prison for extortion in 2019, and in the following year, J. David Cox resigned from office charged with misuse of unions funds and sexual harassment. 

Teamster General President James P. Hoffa apparently screened a showing of a film made by Yitzhak Rabin’s daughter Dalia Rabin-Pelossof about her father to the union’s General Executive Board . He told the JTA that , “People were visibly moved by the story and the connection of the Teamsters” to the Zionist movement. At the end of the day, Hoffa’s gun running to Zionist militias may turn out to be exaggerated boasts from the Hoffa family or flattery from Israeli officials eager to curry favor, but Jimmy Hoffa established a connection that has continued for decades.

Israel Bonds: “Great PR value”

Teamster magazine June 1973, Internet archive.

The purchase of Israel bonds have been an important method for financing construction projects, and more importantly demonstrating political support for the State of Israel. As the Israel Bonds website reports:

For 72 years, Israel Bonds has generated $50 billion worldwide. Additionally, Israel Bonds has doubled its annual global bond sales for 2023, surpassing $2 billion. Israel bonds are a smart investment, with strong rates, and are meaningful investments, serving as a symbolic connection with Israel and the people of Israel for Jews worldwide.

The Teamsters saw a big public relations value for themselves with purchases and selling Israel bonds beginning in the 1970s. In May 1973, then Teamster General President Frank Fitzsimmons accepted the 25th Anniversary Medal of the State of Israel on behalf of the Teamsters. The Black tie event in Washington, D.C. drew members of President Richard Nixon’s cabinet and the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Simcha Dinitz, who presented the award to Fitzsimmons. Messages of  tribute from Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to Frank Fitzsimmons were read.

The following month, Fitzsimmons boasted in his column in the June 1973 Teamster magazine:

“In conjunction with the dinner, $26 million in Israeli Bonds were sold. The money is an Investment in Israel’s ability to defend its freedom, and it is an investment that provides a secure return in interest paid on the bonds.”

Jackie Presser, the mobbed-up leader of the Cleveland Teamsters and future General President, was placed in charge of a public relations campaign by Teamsters to combat its negative image in the media with Israel Bonds. Steve Brill in his classic book The Teamsters recounted a 1975 dinner in Cleveland, Ohio, 

“honoring Jackie Presser for his extraordinary work in selling Israel bonds. Supporting Israel had been a favorite, if not the only, Teamsters public relation strategy since the night in 1956 when [St. Louis Teamster leader] Harold Gibbons convinced Hoffa that $265,000 collected at a testimonial dinner should be donated for the construction of a children’s home in Israel. Since then [Brill’s book was published in 1978] the Teamsters have been the biggest union buyers of Israel bonds. By 1977, they had bought $26,000,000 worth out of a total of  American union purchases of $100,000,000.”

Meyer Steinglass, an Israel Bonds spokesperson, said, the bonds had “great PR value…these people [the Teamsters] are looking for respectability and this is one way to get it…And, in this union the guys at the top can make the locals buy the bonds. I mean, you know what they say, ‘You can find yourself under a truck if you don’t obey.’” 

All of this enhanced the reputation of Jackie Presser. “Just about everyone who was anyone in Cleveland politics or business turned out,” Brill wrote. “At the dinner, Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz inducted the guest of honor into the Prime Minister’s Club, a group made up of people who personally (or in Presser’s case, through his union) bought more than $25,000 worth of bonds.” At one point, the Teamsters owned more than a quarter of all Israel bonds held by U.S. unions. 

Today

There is a lot we don’t know about the current relationship between the Teamsters and the State of Israel. Educating the Teamster membership on the long relationship between the U.S. labor movement, including the Teamsters, and Israel will be vitally important. Researching the financial investments that the Teamsters and its many pension funds may hold in U.S. based corporations and State of Israel Bonds that support Israeli Apartheid will also be crucial. There will be further opportunities to put forward for ceasefire resolutions in local union meetings in the months to come across the country.

This piece originally ran in Counter Punch

Senate Hearings On the U.S. and Israel

By

Among major nations, only the U.S. and Israel voted against a UN General Assembly vote criticizing Israel’s action in Gaza.  The U.S. is alone among major nations in its one-sided actual (as distinct from rhetorical) support for Israel, no matter what it does.  U.S. policy now threatens regional and perhaps wider war.  In some circles in the U.S. now, to be critical of Israel is to be anti-Semitic. This charge, once enough to silence many critics, is losing  its impact.

AIPAC is gearing up its formidable fundraising apparatus to raise money for primary challengers to Democrats who are critical of Israel’s present war against Hamas and its unwillingness to come to terms with Palestine.  These primaries will be an important test of whether there is a shift in American public opinion on this conflict—both viewpoint and salience to the voter of the issue.

On October 27, 2023, the Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a resolution offered by an Arab group of nations. The 193-member world body adopted the resolution by a vote of 120-14 with 45 abstentions after rejecting a Canadian amendment backed by the United States to unequivocally condemn the Oct. 7 “terrorist attacks” by Hamas and demand the immediate release of hostages taken by Hamas.

Then on December 12, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to demand a humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza.

The U.S. had to veto the UN Security Council resolution condemning all violence against civilians in the Israel-Hamas war. This is not the first time our country has used its veto power to support Israel.

What is now different is that the almost-automatic favoring of Israel in the U.S. is shaken.  Remembering the Holocaust and supporting Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people is not the same as uncritical support for Israel no matter what it does.  Netanyahu’s disproportionate violence in response to the horrible Hamas attack of October 7 is leading to second thoughts on the part of many Americans.

Only the U.S. is in a position to effectively put pressure on Israel’s policymakers by placing a hold on arms funding and shipments until a cease-fire takes place.  Following that, the U.S., along with others, must then play an honest broker role in bringing about negotiations between the parties that ends in a solution supported by each.

The question is whether those supporting a just settlement to the conflict between Israel and Palestine will develop a focus on what U.S. foreign policy toward that conflict will be, or will continue to argue about the attack of October 7 and Israel’s response to it.  That is a no-win argument.  People on either side of it can endlessly draw upon history going back to pre-Christian times to support Israel or Palestine.

Here’s the Official Senate Report on the periodic Fulbright hearings on the Vietnam War.

Early in 1966, a journalist who had interviewed more than 200 U.S. troops in Vietnam wrote to Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright. The reporter explained, “The war is not going well. The situation is worse than reported in the press and worse, I believe, than indicated in intelligence reports.” A recent military buildup seemed to be having little effect. One officer told the reporter, “If there is a God, and he is very kind to us, and given a million men, and five years, and a miracle in making the South Vietnamese people like us, we stand an outside chance—of a stalemate.”

On January 24, 1966, Secretary of State Dean Rusk appeared before a closed hearing of Fulbright’s committee. His assessment: “If the U.S. and its allies remained firm, the communists would eventually give up in Vietnam.” Rusk’s testimony convinced Fulbright that the administration of President Lyndon Johnson was blinded by its “anticommunist assumptions.”

Attempting to forestall a buildup of American forces, Fulbright launched a high-profile series of widely televised public “educational” hearings in February 1966. The all-star cast of witnesses included retired generals and respected foreign policy analyst George Kennan.

Kennan advised that the United States withdraw “as soon as this could be done without inordinate damage to our prestige or stability in the area” to avoid risking war with China. His testimony prompted an angry President Johnson to order FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate whether Fulbright was “either a communist agent or a dupe of the communists.”

Conducted in the Senate Caucus Room, the hearings reached their most dramatic phase when Secretary Rusk and General Maxwell Taylor arrived to lay out the administration’s case. Fulbright shifted from his earlier role as a benign questioner of supportive witnesses to a grim prosecutor, his dark glasses set resolutely against the glare of television lights.

The February hearings did not immediately erode Senate support for Johnson’s war policies. They did, however, begin a significant shift in public opinion. In the four weeks that spanned the hearings, the president’s ratings for handling the war dropped from 63 percent to 49 percent. The testimony of George Kennan and other establishment figures had made it respectable to question the war.

Fulbright’s biographer concludes that the hearings “opened a psychological door for the great American middle class. It was Fulbright’s ability to relate to this group, as well as his capacity for building bridges to conservative Senate opponents of the war, such as Richard Russell, that would make him important to the antiwar movement.

Now is the time for a broadly-based group of labor, professional, religious, political, business and civic leaders, joined by notables, scholars, athletes and celebrities, to call for hearings on the efficacy of American foreign policy.  A statement they sign could read something like this:

The United States Senate should hold hearings on the efficacy of United States post-Cold War and post-9/11 foreign policy.  Having defeated the Communist bloc and its allies in the Cold war, U.S. political leaders promised an era of peace, freedom and economic development.  We have seen little to fulfill that promise.

The United States is the single-most militarily powerful nation in the world.  Our war and peace policy may outweigh in its consequences the policies of the rest of the world put together.  It is time for a public review, discussion and debate on those policies.

We, the undersigned, call upon the US Senate to initiate such hearings, asking the question, “Is It time for a New American Foreign Policy?”

The first round of hearings could be on Israel-Hamas-Palestine.  But the broader question now has an opportunity to be raised as left, right and center critics of our role in both Ukraine and Palestine, are now challenging the post-9/11 foreign policy consensus.

Olney Odyssey #20

By

“We’re leaving”, and moving west. Jamaica Plain, Boston to Santa Monica, California.
Photo Ed Warshauer March 1983.

In Olney Odyssey number 19, I met the beautiful Christina L. Pérez in San Francisco on Labor Day Weekend in 1982. I returned home to Boston and potential normalcy. 

Olney Odyssey #20 traces the story of how Christina came to temporarily relocate to Boston in the winter of 1982-83 and how I decided to permanently relocate to Santa Monica, California in the spring of 1983. Writing about exciting developments in the labor movement and the urgency of fighting MAGA fascism has meant a delay in this memoir. Fortunately my dear friend and accomplished writer, Byron Laursen has rescued me from my inertia and helped me to proceed with this tale. Byron has written before for the Stansbury Forum, and he has ably captured my voice and sentiments in OO#20.

.

Kitchen of the house in Jamaica Plain, Boston. Winter of ‘82. Photo Peter Olney

I met Christina on Friday, September 3rd, 1982, in a magical moment, which I described in Olney Odyssey number 19, but I had to return to Boston on Sunday, the fifth, and get back to work. 

On the flight back I thought, “That was wonderful, but I’ve got to settle down and get to business here.” 

Nonetheless, I told my roommate, Ed Warshauer, about this incredible woman I had met and what an amazing connection had happened. 

But when I also told him that I thought the work I had in front of me took precedence over exploring a romance, he flipped. “What?” he said, “Are you kidding? Do you think something like that comes along so often that you can just let it go? You’ve got to think about pursuing this!” 

He was right! Fortunately, while I thought things over, Christina lit a fire under me on Wednesday the 8th.  when she called from out in California to ask, “Do you want to go to a Mexican wedding?” 

“What?”

“My cousin is getting married on September 18th. Why don’t you come? I bet you’ve never been to a REAL Mexican wedding?”

I hesitated and hemmed and hawed and finally said, “I’ll think about it, I’ll think about it.” As I hemmed and hawed Christina sensed my hesitation and blurted out “ I’ll pay half your ticket!” Charmed and embarrassed, I repeated, “I’ll think about it.”  Before hanging up, she said, “you won’t be disappointed.” 

As soon as I got off the phone, Ed said “Are you nuts? Get your ass out there. This lady’s obviously very special!” 

After a few back and forth calls I decided to catch a flight back to the Golden State, in time to be her date for her cousin’s wedding. It took place at Quiet Cannon, a beautiful venue east of Los Angeles in Monterey Park. It was a huge, extremely festive Mexican wedding – the whole extended family, hundreds of people, and mariachi musicians in their sombreros and regalia, and trumpets, guitars and guitarrones. To this day I don’t know the names of all the relatives who were there – cousins, aunts and uncles and so on – and how all their relationships intertwine.

Her parents were very pleasant to me, but I could also tell they were feeling skeptical and bemused. “Who is this Yanqui?” I imagined them thinking. “What’s he doing here? We’ve seen a lot of boyfriends. This is probably just another one.”

The whole weekend was a tremendously special time spent together, a quantum leap from the first visit, which itself had been fantastic. We went from Friday to Sunday evening, staying at her studio apartment in Santa Monica, 11th and Washington, in the Voss Conti Apartments, a Streamline Moderne building from 1937, with all the apartments overlooking a central courtyard. It’s now on the National Register of Historic Places. 

By the time she saw me off at LAX I had invited her to Boston for a long weekend during Oktoberfest where she could enjoy one of her passions at the time, long-distance running, and run the Bonnie Bell 10K race. And, I could introduce her to MY family! Not to be outdone, I stepped up to the plate and offered to pay half her ticket and she didn’t hesitate one bit. Christina was coming to visit Boston. It was another era in terms of travel in 1982. Family and friends could meet each other at the airline gate and that is what I did. Unbeknownst to Christina, the actor and Boston native Ray Bolger – the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz – was on her flight so there was a bit of pandemonium when she was exiting the plane that added a touch more excitement to her arrival. If she was nervous there were no outward signs. 

I filled her in on the plans for the weekend: hooking up with good friends, the Bonnie Bell, meeting my parents and siblings and a trip with good friends to Northampton where more family including my grandmother were hosting a late lunch. As planned, she ran the Bonnie Bell and literally ran into a rude welcome by a young boy standing at the sidelines who pointed at Christina and yelled in apparent disbelief “Look mommy, an Indian!”  She was aware of Boston’s racist reputation, but this was a kid, wow! Of course, she had to chalk it up to ‘out of the mouth of babes’ and ignorant parenting.  Her own large extended family had often proudly praised her indigenous features as being like those of her maternal grandmother from Mexico. This kid’s comment felt weird. “Where was she?” she asked.  

I’ve always told Christina that she was an exotic sight in Boston because pale-faced people like me were most of what there was to see. Whereas her gene pool features, and dramatic cheekbones are pretty common in L.A.  Still, she rolls her eyes.

All in all, it was a great weekend. As it was winding down it became obvious that our feelings for each other had escalated. We knew we wanted to make it as a couple. But one of us would have move so we could be together. We devised our plan the day before Christina was to return to Los Angeles. 

It was as we drove back from Northampton with our friends Ilene Handler and Bruce Fleischer that we decided, with their help, that it made more sense for Christina to move to Boston. My heating and air conditioning training program was finishing the following April, and because Christina had interstate reciprocity with her nursing license there were many job opportunities open to her. We reasoned I could finish my training and be more marketable if I decided I wanted to try living in Los Angeles. There was always the possibility, she would remind me, “we’re crazy about each other now, but maybe our relationship won’t work out.” 

Up to then we had only been with each other a total of eight days across three months. Now we were to move in together across the country, and across cultures. But she would hold onto her Santa Monica apartment. “Just in case.” 

I flew out to L.A. approximately four weeks later on World Airways. It was the cheapest flight across country and a nightmare! I guessed that they only had one plane that flew back and forth from Boston to L.A. In any case, there were flight delays. I was scheduled to arrive in LA at six PM but didn’t arrive until just before midnight! 

Unbeknownst to me Rita, Christina’s older sister and her husband, Bahman, had at least 25 friends and family members waiting to meet me. They hung around eating dinner as the night got late! Later, Rita told me, laughing, that she had to discourage one of Christina’s ex-boyfriends from waiting around for me to arrive from LAX. It seems he got more nervous about meeting me as the hours ticked by. 

When she and I finally got to Rita’s house it was the Mexican wedding all over again. with lots of people who cheered as Christina ushered me in. I didn’t know what to expect but it was clear I was the main event! Welcome to the Perez Family!

Early the next morning it took no time to load Christina’s belongings into her two-door Toyota Celica. She had gotten the dark brown beauty tuned up recently and because it was only three years old, we didn’t expect any trouble crossing the US of A. We had one stop however before heading East on Route 66, and that was to have a quick breakfast with her mother and father, Ramona and David, in El Monte. We received the traditional “despedida,” the Mexican blessing, which I would learn to appreciate culturally as I grew to understand Christina and her family. 

After a couple of hours, we were east bound on Interstate 10, heading for Boston through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and beyond. We had to get me back in time for me to go to work early Monday at Boston City Hospital, where I was a refrigeration mechanic.  We crossed North America in three days, almost non-stop, only staying in a motel for five hours in New Mexico and another in Maryland for six hours. We took turns catnapping on long stretches. We kept each other awake by talking and listening to the radio waves of the southwest. Sports, news and music kept us focused. 

I was exhausted but ready to clock in at “City.” We also arrived in time for Christina to experience the crisp November Boston weather and to see her first morning snowfall. She moved into my third-floor attic room in a friend’s house on Perkins Street in Jamaica Plain, right down the street from the beautiful Jamaica Pond and Way, part of the “Emerald Necklace”, a 7-mile-long network of parks and parkways that civic visionary Frederick Law Olmsted laid out for the Boston Parks Department between 1878 and 1896.

Christina expected to eventually find a similar job as a nurse practitioner in women’s’ health, the work she had in L.A. But when she went looking she got a surprise: there was an unofficial, unstated hiring freeze for nurses throughout all of Boston’s hospitals and clinics. 

She also realized competition was stiff for nursing jobs. HR people at the places she applied told her the competition for the jobs had bachelors, masters and PhD’s in nursing! She had none of the above, just a state license and national certificate in Women’s Health. She saw the writing on the wall, after practicing for 17 years without a bachelor’s degree it was time to go back to school. 

One day, walking back from a job interview, she happened to walk into the Boston Indian Council (B.I.C.) near our home. She casually asked the friendly woman sitting at the front desk “What is the Boston Indian Council?’ An hour or so later, after a friendly exchange of information, Christina was offered a job there as a nurse. The woman at the desk turned out to be the director, and their friendly conversation had turned into a job interview. She was to be Nurse Case Manager for the Native American patient population of the B.I.C. 

It was a very satisfying job, though she had some interesting encounters along the way. At one point a very elderly woman tried sizing her up over morning coffee and donuts and she asked Christina, 

“Where are you from?” 
“Los Angeles, California.”
“No,” the woman repeated, WHERE ARE YOU FROM?”

Realizing the elder woman was wanting to know the name of her ‘tribe, ’ Christina said,

“Chichimeca, Aztec.”

Without skipping a beat, the women looked at Christina with her good eye and said,

“Never heard of them!” End of conversation.

Christina was really impressed by the cold weather of Boston. In fact, she still hates it to this day. Among Christina’s friends I met at Rita’s gathering was her close friend Theresa Laursen, a film costumer. Theresa had spent her first two college years at Endicott College, in Beverly, Massachusetts, so she knew about winters in the Boston area. As a gift she mailed Christina a pair of electrified socks, designed for hunters and fishermen. She had to stow its batteries in her jacket pocket and run the wires down her trouser legs, and she had to endure merciless teasing. But on days when even the native Beantowners were complaining about their feet being cold, Christina had her secret weapon. Before long, people started asking her where they could get a pair. 

When Thanksgiving came around, we went out to Andover, to my old family home, where my parents were still living. Not only did Christina get to meet my extended family, she played in our annual touch football game.  As New Englanders we aspired to be at least a little bit like the Kennedys. She caught a couple of passes and made a great impression. Though I did find out later that some of my relatives were concerned that she might be a gold digger.

Not only was this as far as possible from the truth, it also begged some follow-up questions, such as: “What gold?” “Where is it?” 

As a Californian, she had never dealt with a real winter. When the winter of ‘82-83 arrived,

she not only made use of her electric socks, but also began cooking up a storm. It was a great way to keep warm, and her fame began spreading for doing great things in the kitchen. 

One of the people who benefitted was a newly acquired friend named Ginny Zanger, whom Christina met through a mutual friend. Ginny was the wife of Mark Zanger, the model for Megaphone Mark in the Doonesbury comic strip.  Mark had gone to Yale and had been a frequent, prominent protestor and campus radical. 

At the time we met the Zangers, Mark was working as a food writer for the Hearst paper in Boston, The Boston Herald. The Herald is a tabloid format paper you can conveniently read on the subway. With Ginny’s encouragement, Christina cooked a Mexican meal for Ginny, Mark and me. The Herald ended up running a centerfold feature on Christina with a stunning photo of her and some recipes, which she attributed to cooking skills learned from her father. 

As soon as the Herald ran the feature, Mark alerted Christina that he got a phone call from a guy who wanted to know who this woman was and how they could get in touch with her because he was interested in putting her face on his can of products! Needless to say, Mark thankfully batted those types of calls away.

I have a wonderful picture of her standing over a hot stove and wearing a sizable woolen knit hat and a wool scarf which was her ruse for staying warm.

She also put a myth she had heard about shots of whiskey to the test. She was surprised to see that neighbors helped shovel snow out of each other’s driveways before heading off to work. The first morning she jumped in to assist the bone-chilling cold froze her brain. She had to run back into the house. Then she remembered hearing that people sometimes took a shot of whiskey to feel warm, so she drank a shot of whiskey and returned to the cold. Of course that didn’t work! 

It was a demanding experience, but she got through the adversities of a Boston winter. However, we agreed that more such winters would be overdoing it. So I told her, “Since you’ve shown you’re willing to undergo hardship, I can face the challenge of being in Santa Monica.” 

In April of 1983 we again packed up her Celica, this time with my belongings included. I didn’t have many. In fact, if there was a gold digger in the relationship, it probably had to be me. 

We again made near-record time because she was due to go back to one of her jobs at a women’s’ health clinic in Santa Monica.

When we got past the Arizona border and were officially in California, Christina was so happy that she stopped the car so she could kneel down and kiss the pavement. 

The way things worked out for both of us in the years since, there were no more Boston winters. I moved in with her at her little studio apartment on 11th Street, and then began wondering what I was going to do for work. I had worked as a refrigeration mechanic for a couple of years, using the skill set I’d learned in a technical school. But, frankly, I was a total klutz and I knew I was not going to make a career out of that trade. For starters, I never really got proficient at one of the baseline skills any refrigeration mechanic needs to have: soldering copper pipes. 

I understood the science behind refrigeration, the heat and the pressure, but the touch required for soldering a joint was something that I couldn’t ever master. 

Even so, I tried for work in that line, and put in applications at places like La Boulangerie in Westwood, as well as other restaurants in Santa Monica and Venice.  Luckily for everyone’s sake, I didn’t get any of those jobs. 

Instead, I met up with an old friend whom I’d known in Boston. David had worked in a machine shop that was organized by the United Electrical Workers, the union that I had organized into at Mass Machine shop. He’d relocated to L.A. a few years earlier. He knew my history of working at factories in Cambridge and Boston that had closed down and moved to New Hampshire. He knew that I had experience fighting against these factory closures.          

“Peter,” he said, “there’s a job as the organizer with the Los Angeles Coalition Against Plant Shut-Downs (LACAPS). They’re fighting the closure of the General Motors plant in South Gate, the General Electric plant in Ontario, and the UniRoyal Tires plant on the 5 Freeway, and they need an organizer. 

The Coalition was involved in various communities to fight these closures, so I interviewed for the job, and they hired me. I’d done plenty of protesting before, but this was my invitation to be a professional. The Coalition set me on the career path that has remained my focus ever since. 

The office I reported to was at the First Unitarian Church on 8th street at Vermont. I met several union leaders and all these community leaders all at once. I made some lifelong friends as a result, including our friends Gary Phillips and Gilda Hass. She was on the board of the LACAPS. 

On top of being a kick-start into a labor movement career, this job took me all over the Los Angeles Basin. It was how I learned up close about a city that was the polar opposite of Boston. 

I was fascinated by Los Angeles. In terms of size, scope and layout, I don’t think you could find a city anywhere in the USA that’s more different than where I had grown up. In Boston, an historical house might be from 1683. In Los Angeles it might be 50 years old or less, and designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Richard Schindler or any of the other numerous architects who evolved the modernism of Southern California, which spread around the world. 

Because the history of Los Angeles was more recent, in some ways it was more compelling, and more part of the national discourse because of Hollywood and all the other media that radiate from L.A. 

I was fascinated. I read everything Carey McWilliams wrote about California politics and culture and the history of the state’s labor movement. 

I was so happy to be plugged into all this energy. I don’t think I would’ve ever gotten so deeply into the labor movement if I’d stayed in Boston. So that’s one more reason that my old roommate Ed was right when he said “Are you nuts? Get your ass out there.” 

This is the story I tell to illustrate how the two places, Beantown and Shaky Town, are so different. As an organizer with this Coalition Against Plant Shut-Downs, I got involved in fighting the closure of a community hospital in Long Beach. I think it was called Long Beach County Hospital. Residents of Long Beach were doing all they could to keep it open. I was invited to come to one of their meetings. I came with a proposal I’d sketched out on how to fight this closure. They gave me the floor and they let me present what I had in mind. The chair said, “What do some of you feel about what he said?” 

People said, “Those are great ideas. I think we should do that.” 

I almost fell out of my chair. In Boston the reaction would have been “Who are you, anyway” and “which parish were you baptized in?” 

Two months later I was invited back to a meeting. The chair was a wonderful man who was a retired pharmacist from New York, a Jewish-American guy who had helped found one of the great unions of America, 1199, a very progressive health care union based in New York City. He announced, “My wife Emma and I are leaving to go on vacation in Europe for a month and we need an interim chair for this group. What are we going to do?”

A woman raised her hand and pointed at me. “He’s got a lot of good ideas. Let’s make him the chair!”

For a second time I came close to actually falling out of my seat. Because again, coming from a parochial, small, insulated place like Boston, I found the openness of L.A. very liberating. As for Christina, she got back to her prior working life with ease, and our relationship – even in a small apartment – kept growing too. 

In W. Va. and Nebraska: Can Two Working Class Candidates Crash a Multi-Millionaire’s Club in Washington, DC?

By

Both major parties on Capitol Hill like to boast about how much more “representative” their Congressional delegations have become in recent years. But that’s only in the most discussed categories of diversity—such as race, age, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Working class Americans rarely end up in the halls of Congress.  Fewer than two percent of Congress members had working class jobs at the time they were elected. 

Two working class candidates hope to improve those numbers next year, by winning U.S. Senate seats in Nebraska and West Virginia, states currently represented by anti-labor politicians, but which were once bastions of a more populist, pro-worker politics. 

Dan Osborn, an Independent, is challenging two-term Republican Deb Fischer. Osborn is a steamfitter from Omaha who helped lead a successful strike by 1,500  Kellogg’s workers. Photo from the Osborn campaign

In Nebraska, Dan Osborn is challenging two-term Republican Deb Fischer. Osborn is a steamfitter from Omaha who helped lead a successful strike by 1,500  Kellogg’s workers. They shut down plants in four states for 11 weeks in 2021.  

Zach Shrewsbury is a military veteran (as is Osborn), a community organizer, and the grandson of a coal miner.  Shrewsbury hopes prevent governor Jim Justice, a billionaire coal baron, from replacing the retired Joe Manchin

In West Virginia, Zach Shrewsbury is also running for Senate.  He’s a military veteran (as is Osborn) and a community organizer, and the grandson of a coal miner.  Shrewsbury hopes to replace multi-millionaire Joe Manchin and prevent governor Jim Justice, a billionaire coal baron, from claiming the seat that the corporate Democrat is vacating.

In their respective campaign launches this fall, both candidates sounded themes once familiar to voters in their home states in the heyday of progressive populism, but not heard much lately. 

While picketing with General Motors workers in Martinsburg in October, Shrewsbury explained that he’s “running to win and show that working class people can run for office, even high office. We can’t be ruled by the wealthy elite who don’t understand everyday American life.” 

At a campaign kick-off event in late September, Osborn denounced “the monopolistic corporations… that actually run this country” and pledged to “bring together workers, farmers, ranchers and small business owners across Nebraska around bread-and-butter issues that appeal across party lines.”

Unlike Shrewsbury, who plans to compete next year’s Democratic primary, Osborn is currently collecting the 4,000 signatures necessary to get on the November 2024 ballot as an independent. He hopes to avoid unhelpful association with the national Democratic Party in a state which chose Donald Trump over Joe Biden by 19 points in 2020 (and Trump over Hillary Clinton by an even larger margin four years earlier).

Osborn admirers in Nebraska unions, and even the state Democratic Party, believe his non-partisan stance may be helpful. According to Jeff Cooley, a railroad union official who leads the Midwest Nebraska Central Labor Council, Osborn’s focus on issues like rail safety and the PRO Act, paid leave time, minimum wage increases and misclassification of workers as independent contractors “offers hope to all workers in Nebraska regardless of political party.” Osborn’s platform also highlights the need to curb corporate misbehavior ranging from routine consumer rip-offs to Big Pharma price gouging and monopolistic practices in the meat-packing industry which favor big agriculture over small family farmers and ranchers.

Jane Kleeb, a past Bernie Sanders delegate who chairs the Nebraska Democratic Party and serves as an Our Revolution board member, told the local media “it would be very interesting for Democrats, Libertarians, and Independents to all come together with the one goal of breaking up the one-party rule at the top of the tickets in our state.” She acknowledged to Labor Notes that, at the moment, “the brand of the Democrats is not the best when it comes to working class and communities of color voters.” Meanwhile, in rural communities like her own, “people think Democrats are wimpy, just want to tax us, and take away our guns.” 

Neither Osborn nor Shrewsbury look or sound very wimpy. Before going to work for Kellogg’s as an industrial mechanic and becoming president of Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 50G, Osborn served in the Navy and two state national guard units. Shrewsbury was in the Marine Corps for five years. After his discharge, he joined Common Defense to rally fellow veterans against what that group calls “Trump’s corrupt agenda of hate” and “the entrenched power of greedy billionaires who have rigged our economy.”

Shrewsbury has been an organizer for Citizen Action and the New Jobs Coalition, where he met retired AFL-CIO organizing director Steward Acuff, now a resident of West Virginia. Acuff hopes to enlist national union backing for Shrewsbury’s campaign. The two of them bonded while canvassing to build grassroots support for federally-funded green jobs, environmental clean-ups, and infrastructure projects employing union labor. Acuff believes that Shrewsbury is uniquely equipped to challenge the “corporate colonialism that is still robbing a people and their state of much-needed resources.” 

Shrewsbury wants to use his campaign “to help revitalize labor here and everywhere, like Bernie did.” Like Sanders, who won West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary in 2016, Shrewsbury isn’t afraid of being red-baited either. “If caring about working-class people, caring about people having bodily autonomy, water rights, workers’ rights, makes you a socialist, then call me whatever you want. Doesn’t bother me,” he told The Guardian recently.

Osborn has raised more than $100,000 in small donations so far.  Next November, Nebraska voters will also consider a ballot measure backed the Nebraska State Education Association. It  would repeal the Republican-dominated state legislature’s authorization of a tax scheme that threatens financing of public education and aids private schools instead.  

Osborn favors repeal, further illustrating what Kleeb calls “a real contrast between Dan and Deb Fischer,” who has built a $2.7 million re-election campaign war-chest. According to Fischer’s website, her top donors include “fellow Senate Republicans, the American Israeli PAC, the construction industry and defense contractors.” 

Osborn believes that his Senate race could be “the most viable independent campaign in America” next year, particularly if Nebraska’s Democratic primary produces no serious competition for Fischer’s seat. Meanwhile, he is spending 40 hours a week doing boiler maintenance and repair work at Boys Town in Omaha, as a member of Steamfitters and Plumbers Local 464. 

Osborn hopes to take more time off, from his day job soon to campaign around the state, with backers like Nebraska Railroaders for Public Safety. This advocacy group just conducted a favorable poll and then endorsed him.

Their survey of 1,048 likely voters revealed considerable discontent with Fischer, who promised to serve only two terms but is now seeking a third. Despite Osborn’s lack of name recognition, he had a slight lead over Fischer, which grew larger when survey participants were informed about the biographies and positions of both candidates. 

The Nebraska Railroaders are taking that as an encouraging sign that their state still has an independent streak that could help “elect a next-generation representative of the working class instead of continuing to send out-of-touch millionaires back to Washington to fail us.”

Shewbury has put out a statement regarding the war being waged in Gaza between Hamas and Israel – it is included below.

“Hear me out. This email will be a bit long, but I need to share this with you.

I did not grow up in an environment where conversations about Israel and Palestine were commonplace. We were a working-class family in a small community, and foreign policy issues were not frequently discussed. We were neither Jews nor Arabs. My family has been in West Virginia for centuries, and our world was insulated. I didn’t have access to the kind of liberal arts education where history is examined from different perspectives. In the Marines, my training did not include a deep dive into the events that led to Nakba in 1948, which, by the way, means “the catastrophe” in Arabic.

I am from the same cloth as most Americans; I am a working West Virginian.

As a future U.S. Senator, I’m dedicated to deepening my knowledge and understanding of current events’ historical and legal context because the responsibility to and the influence this country has over millions of people in faraway lands is enormous. I don’t take this power lightly.

Our media industry often sensationalizes terms like war, self-defense, and human shields to mold public opinion toward the monied interests of their advertisers and influential stakeholders and the system that allows them to rake in incredible profit at the expense of truth and balanced reporting. As I broaden my context, I’m learning what these terms mean under the International Human Rights Law that we as a country claim to support and yet so rarely honor.

·      The term “war” is used intentionally to create the impression that what is going on between Israel and Palestinians is a conflict between two autonomous states. That cannot be further from the truth, as Israel is the occupier, and Hamas is the governing body of the occupied territory but not a sovereign government.

·      Israel has obligations under international law to provide services and ensure the safety of its occupied population. On October 7th, when Hamas attacked, they had the right to use police powers to apprehend the criminals and prosecute them but not to use their massive military might against an essentially defenseless people. We cannot use the “right to defense” language describing Israel’s revenge that has so far killed approximately 18,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of whom are women and children.

·      In the context of international law, using human shields means actually putting a civilian in front of a military vehicle or combatants while advancing on the enemy. It doesn’t mean having combatants living or even operating in the areas civilians occupy. Using human shields is a war crime. Israel uses the human shield argument to justify their illegal, immoral, massive-scale attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. Israel wants to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza.”

About the author

Steve Early

Steve Early is a NewsGuild/CWA member who supports Sara Steffens’ campaign for CWA president. He is a former CWA staff member in New England and also served as Administrative Assistant to the Vice-President of CWA District One, the union’s largest region. He is the author of five books about labor and politics, including Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress (MRP, 2013) which reports on efforts to revitalize CWA and other unions. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com View all posts by Steve Early →

Comment on In W. Va. and Nebraska: Can Two Working Class Candidates Crash a Multi-Millionaire’s Club in Washington, DC?

Share your opinion, leave a reply.

Posted in Mic check | Tagged: , , ,

Who Are These Nice People Who Want Me to Get a Raise?

By

New York, New York Photo: Robert Gumpert 18 Sept 2014

One day, I received a very nice card in the mail. It had a picture of Uncle Sam pointing out at me over the words “Give yourself a raise,” and included a tear-off mailer addressed to “UESF Membership Specialist.” It read, “Effective immediately, I resign any membership I may have in all levels of United Educators of San Francisco (UESF).” All I needed to do to get my raise was sign it and send it back to that membership specialist, c/o Freedom Foundation in Orange, California.

Just who were these nice people, I wondered, who were looking out for my financial well-being—and even had a specialist devoted to my local union? The answer turned out to be quite the story.

Heading to the Freedom Foundation website, I found a prominently placed video telling how “Los Angeles high school teacher, Glenn Laird, reached his breaking point after his teacher (UTLA) demanded we defund the police.” Given that Glenn is a teacher himself, I gathered that the questionable grammar and the mistake of referring to United Teachers of Los Angeles as a “teacher” rather than a union were likely typos on the part of the freedom folks. Odd though, I thought, that such an obviously well-funded organization would not employ the services of a proofreader, but then the website quickly makes it quite clear that it’s not the education business that these folks are in.

The business they are in is union-busting. In their words: “The Freedom Foundation is more than a think tank. We’re more than an action tank. We’re a battle tank that’s battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses who represent a permanent lobby for bigger government, higher taxes, and radical social agendas.”

“Why We Fight,” the organization’s statement of purpose, proclaims that “government unions are a root cause of every growing national dysfunction in America.” (Every one of them!) And the mailing I had received, I learned, was part of the organization’s Nationwide Opt Out Project, aimed at “taking on government union bosses and defunding their radical unconstitutional agenda” because “GOVERNMENT UNIONS ARE THE SINGLE GREATEST OBSTACLE TO A FREE AMERICA” (All caps on the website) that “REPRESENT NOTHING LESS THAN A LOBBY FOR NATIONAL DECLINE AND DESTRUCTION. WE MUST DEFEAT THEM FIRST BEFORE THEY DESTROY OUR COUNTRY.” The website’s interactive 50-state map will allow you to locate the specific local union that the foundation would like you to leave, and its “dues calculator” allows you to compute how much you will have saved in union dues—compounded at 6%—by the time of your retirement.

While government employee unions are the organization’s particular bugbear, they’re not really too keen on unions of any sort. While conceding that “organized labor began as a way for workers to improve their standing in our country,” the foundation believes that “slowly it transformed into a weapon to destroy it.” And then there’s those darned “Liberal state governments” that are “like cockroaches eking out survival amid the fallout of a nuclear war.”

The freedom folks find evidence of this “national decline” pervasive throughout American society, extending to the “fiscal crisis” that “has forced government to take increasingly perverse actions to keep the system afloat, including multi-trillion bailouts of state government in the form of ‘Covid Emergency’ funds that were airdropped across America in 2020 at the height of mass hysteria over the virus.” For their part, they look forward to “a day when opportunity, responsible self-governance, and free markets flourish in America because its citizens understand and defend the principles from which freedom is derived.” As far as the foundation itself goes, “We accept no government support.”

What never? Well, hardly ever. It would appear that even these hardcore free marketeers were not immune to the Covid “mass hysteria.” Noting that at the time “unions specifically weren’t eligible for the paycheck protection program, so they were left to fend for themselves,” the July 8, 2020, Seattle Times reported, “Not so the Freedom Foundation, though—it got between $350,000 to $1 million from the federal relief fund, records show.” ProPublica reports the exact figure was a $644,125 Paycheck Protection Program loan given to protect the jobs of 82 campaigners against excess government spending. (The amount subsequently forgiven the resolutely anti-government bailout organization was $651,157, the difference representing accrued interest.)

To be fair, though, this government “airdrop” by no means represents the core of the organization’s funding. The June 28, 2018, Los Angeles Times reported that although the group’s labor policy director “declined to identify any of the group’s donors, which he said include businesses, foundations, and individuals ‘from all different walks of life,’” the group’s “tax filings reveal a who’s-who of wealthy conservative groups. Among them are the Sarah Scaife Foundation, backed by the estate of right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife; Donors Trust, which has gotten millions of dollars from a charity backed by conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch; from the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, backed by the family of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos; and the State Policy Network, which has received funding from Donors Trust and is chaired by a vice president of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.”

Who are these individuals and organizations? According to SourceWatch, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy, the Sarah Scaife Foundation gives “tens of millions of dollars annually to fund right-wing organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, and anti-immigrant and islamophobic organizations such as the Center for Immigration Studies and the David Horowitz Freedom Center.”

In her August 23, 2010, New Yorker article “Covert Operations,” Jane Mayer described the billionaire Koch brothers as “longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation.” DeVos, of course, we know from the Trump administration, as well by association with her brother Eric Prince, who founded the mercenary organization formerly known as Blackwater. SourceWatch says that “Harry Bradley was one of the original charter members of the far right-wing John Birch Society, along with another Birch Society board member, Fred Koch, the father of Koch Industries’ billionaire brothers and owners, Charles and David Koch.”

In other words, the Freedom Foundation is hardwired to hard-right money. In a 2016 fundraising letter, Tracy Sharp, president and CEO of the State Policy Network—which counts the Freedom Foundation as an affiliate—was quite clear as to the orientation and policy goals of these organizations: “The Big Government unions are the #1 obstacle to freedom in the states” because, among other things, they support “a universal $15 minimum wage” and “defend Obamacare at all costs,” and—here we cut to the prime motivation behind the expenditure of all this hard right money—“They want to redistribute wealth.” She concludes, “And yes, they are the funding arm of the Progressive Left.”

The letter also touts the network’s victories in defunding the left in a number of states including Wisconsin and Michigan. Close followers of the Electoral College map will remember that in 2016 Donald Trump won Wisconsin by 23,000 votes and Michigan by 11,000, as well as the fact that his failure to repeat those narrow wins caused his eviction from the White House four years later. (State Policy Network donors include Philip Morris, Kraft Foods, Facebook, Microsoft, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, and Comcast. Its Indiana affiliate was once headed by former Vice President Mike Pence.)

Although the Freedom Foundation operates as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charitable organization, a status requiring abstention from partisan politics, it’s not shy about expressing its views in the political arena. The 2018 Supreme Court decision in the case of Janus v. AFSCME ended the ability of public sector unions to collect “agency fees” from non-members, a practice designed to reimburse a union for the costs accrued in their representation of non-members as part of the bargaining unit. This decision, long sought by right-wing organizations, would not have happened had Donald Trump not recently appointed Neil Gorsuch to the court, an appointment with a specific political history.

As the foundation recounts on its website, “the liberal Judge Merrick Garland—who would later serve as attorney general under President Biden—was handpicked by President Obama to succeed Scalia” (Antonin Scalia, the Justice whose sudden February 13, 2016, death opened a seat on the court) but “conservatives stood and fought—and it made all the difference. The U.S. Senate, under the leadership of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, refused to debate the Garland nomination until after the 2016 presidential election. As we all know, that fateful election ultimately put Donald Trump in the White House. And it ended any chance of Judge Garland moving to the high court. Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, Judge Neil Gorsuch ultimately was confirmed as a conservative successor to Justice Scalia.”

But the foundation cannot be accused of Trump loyalism, in that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his opponent in the bitterly contested Republican presidential nomination race, also came in for high praise when he signed legislation further restricting the ability of his state’s public employee unions to collect dues. Rusty Brown, the foundation’s southern director, thanked him for “standing up for government employees who have been held hostage by their unions,” declaring that “The Freedom Foundation applauds… Gov. DeSantis for ending this government union charade against public employees.”

So, back to the question of who those nice people who want me to get a pay raise actually are. They are people who oppose a $15 an hour minimum wage, expanded publicly funded health insurance coverage, and the redistribution of wealth. They are people who admire Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, and Ron DeSantis. They are people funded by right-wing, dark money networks. They are people whose job is specifically to reduce the resources available to support economic equity campaigns, and to reduce the resources available to oppose the careers of rich men’s friends in government.

Should you decide to help them on their way by opting out of your union, you’ll probably want to avail yourself of their “dues calculator,” because if they have their way, the gap between their major funders and the rest of us is going to just keep growing.

This piece originally ran in Common Dreams

About the author

Tom Gallagher

Tom Gallagher – native of Hunts Point section of the Bronx – but a lifelong Dodger fan, which he can explain if he chooses to! Anti-war activist and community organizer in Boston. He represented Allston Brighton neighborhood of Boston in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. First socialist state representative since the Sacco and Vanzetti era in Massachusetts. In 1986 he ran in the Democratic primary in a very crowded field to succeed Tip O’Neil. Subsequently chaired the Boston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Later relocated to SF where he lives on Bernal Heights, is a substitute teacher in SFUSD and has written about his experiences in a book called Sub. Elected as a Bernie Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic Presidential Nominating Convention. (Also served in same capacity for George McGovern in 1984.) He is a member of the Bernal Heights Democratic Club, the Progressive Democrats of America, and the Democratic Socialists of America. View all posts by Tom Gallagher →

Comment on Who Are These Nice People Who Want Me to Get a Raise?

Share your opinion, leave a reply.

Posted in Mic check | Tagged: , , ,

Press power of the Long 1960s: Liberation through duplication

By

“Amerika is devouring its children” screenprint by Jay Belloli, 1970, UC Berkeley poster workshop

Social justice printing history in the United States during the “long 1960s” – describing the period from the early 1960s through the later 1970s – is not one of skilled craft or precious publications. It’s a history of young, passionate amateurs learning new skills and new technologies as a means to an end.  

Several factors converged to produce a massive outpouring of printed documents. First, there was the baby boom – by 1969, 19 percent of the U.S. population was between 14 and 25 years old – an increase of 44 percent over this age group in 1960.[i] Young people were finding their voice and had something to say. The civil rights movement here was being matched by vigorous national independence movements around the world. The period was intoxicating and full of optimism.

But how to get the word out? Most standard print shops were either too expensive for broke students or simply wouldn’t touch the radical materials that were brought in. Some of the content could draw the unwanted attention of authorities. So activists learned to print for themselves. Here’s how the mainstream media described it:

The information officers of the New American Left have rediscovered an ancient political ally: print power.  All over the country, radical and “movement” organizations have spawned their own print shops run by their own pressmen to churn out an increasing number of posters, pamphlets, handbills, and flyers. Whether it’s to mobilize a march on Washington, explain the advantages of “Free Speech” for GIs, or advertise courses at an alternative university, the rebel presses are rolling. By the thousands, their folded-and-stapled brochures, decorated with crude graphics, are being given away at hastily set up campus tables or sold in the standard subculture outlets.[1]

The equipment included small offset presses (Multilith 1250s and AB Dick 360s were ubiquitous) that were simple to learn and operate. Silkscreen printing saw a renaissance, using hand-cut lacquer-based stencils and oil-based inks. And one new technology, the electric stencil-burning Gestefax, was transformative in supporting community-based communications.

The Gestefax, introduced in 1959, was the first device that allowed consumers to scan original art to run on a Gestetner. This was a mechanical duplicator on which a stencil master mounted on an ink-filled drum printed pages up to 8 ½ x 14”. Instead of needing a typewriter to pound out a stencil, any art – even a photo – could be scanned on the dual rotating drums of the Gestefax, one with an electric eye skimming the original and the second burning the stencil with an electric spark. It was so simple to use that ads noted “it can be operated by your office girl, without any training.”[ii]

This scanner, coupled with the fact that by swapping or cleaning the ink drums one could print multiple colors in subsequent passes, offered some of the earliest opportunities for grassroots artists and organizers to make colorful flyers and newsletters. It may be hard to believe in this day and age, when “color separation” isn’t even a conscious act and photographs can be effortlessly published on a Web page, but this clunky technology was a breakthrough aesthetic boon to democratic media.

One of the first to experiment with the artistic possibilities of these machines was the Communication Company (or “Comm Co”), founded in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district by Chester Anderson and Claude Hayward in January of 1967. This was the epicenter of the new counterculture, and every movement needs a medium. The Communication Company cranked out an endless stream of flyers and handbills for community groups such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Diggers as well as scores of events. As their promotional flyer stated, they planned to “Provide quick & inexpensive printing services for the hip community.” They also aspired to “Produce occasional incredibilities out of an unnatural fondness for either outrage or profit, as the case may be” and to “Do what we damn well please.” Years later one Comm Co participant described the chutzpah of this printing adventure:

We took [samples of our] sheets to the Gestetner company. They had no idea that their machines were capable of doing what we did. Like we put a peacock feather on the Gestetner and put the top down and Xeroxed it in color. And they were amazed. They were very beautiful sheets. We asked the Gestetner company to let us keep their machine, which hadn’t been paid for in full, and they said, No. So we liberated it.[2]

With an unsustainable business model and run by at-the-edge artists, the Communication Company lasted less than a year, but its flyers set the bar for artistry in street propaganda. Ten years later, another Gestetner art movement blossomed in the Bay Area. In the late 1970s, a critical mass of neighborhood arts organizations and community-based artists were prolifically making murals, posters, theater, and other cultural forms. A report produced about the S.F. Neighborhood Arts Program noted: “Uncontestedly, NAP’s design and printing of colorful flyers for community arts activities is the program’s best-known service…An average day’s output includes design of two to four flyers and printing of eight editions, many designed by the requesting group, of from 500 to 1000 each. They run through about 120,000 pages monthly.”[iii]  Once again, the lowly Gestetner and Gestefax came to the rescue in helping spread the word, and in some cases, be the word. 

Screen printing was quickly adopted by activists as a simple and effective way to create large and colorful posters. When Paris art students wanted to support the workers’ general strike in 1968, they quickly abandoned the clunky lithography they were taught in school and began screenprinting after one participant shared the “American printing” process he’d learned at a gallery job.[3] Like Gestetner, screenprinting is a stencil process but is printed by hand using a squeegee to push the ink through a framed stretched fabric that supports the image. Stencils can be hand cut with no machinery required. The resultant huge body of simple and strong street posters inspired artists around the world.

After the antiwar student demonstrations and killings at Kent State, Ohio (May 4, 1970) and Jackson State, Mississippi (May 14, 1970) there was a massive upswelling of resistance culture in the United States. Political poster workshops blossomed all over the country to express public outrage. At the University of California, Berkeley, faculty at the College of Environmental Design encouraged the use of campus facilities for a short-lived workshop that created an estimated 50,000 copies of hundreds of works. Many of these were screenprinted on distinctive discarded tractor-feed computer paper from the computer labs.

Conventional offset printing was a key tool of political movements as well. Occasionally older radicals in the trade would share their skills and equipment, but more often than not activists simply learned on the job and did the best they could.

The first glimmer of the new generation of activist print shops started in 1964 in the heat of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement (FSM). Their newsletter was first printed on a 14” x 20” Multilith 2066 by in the basement of a home later demolished to make People’s Park. The press was owned by Dunbar Aitken, publisher of the occasional science journal Particle, but Dunbar was evicted by his landlord for printing “communist papers.” When FSM activist Barbara Garson got involved, the shop was being managed by an old Trotskyist printer. Barbara describes the scene:

Deward Hastings, a speed freak who was handy with equipment, got [the old press] running… We printed five or six issues of the FSM newsletter. The press did movement printing at cost.  That was in the day of marches and demos with huge print runs of leaflets.  We also took in commercial business at normal prices. But it was understood that in a political emergency the political jobs would come first.

The first generation of shops blossomed in 1967. In addition to Peace Press in Los Angeles, several other printers dedicated to social change began inking their cylinders.

Glad Day Press was founded in Ithaca, New York as a spin-off from the local peace center. The name was from William Blake’s 1795 painting, where Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” is liberated from his constraining circle and square, beaming with an inner energy – an apt metaphor for the transformative feeling of the mid-1960s. They bought used equipment, learned to print, and served as a model for an independent activist shop. Although their initial priority was opposing the war in Viet Nam, they weathered shifts within the movement, including the disintegration of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the end of the war in 1973, and continued to produce materials for a wide range of issues including Cuba solidarity, Native American occupations, and support for liberation movements in Southern Africa. They charged a sliding scale and produced many self-published projects, including posters and books. As they began to take on more commercial printing to sustain the shop, they relied less on volunteers and cross-trained a core group of skilled collective members, and proudly displayed the militant union label of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Also in 1967 Madison, Wisconsin, publisher Morris Edelson donated the profits from his production of Barbara Garson’s satirical play MacBird for the purchase of a used Multilith 1250 duplicator. This became the first movement press in the area.

Sometimes political organizations chose to handle their own printing. The Black Panther Party operated an offset press in San Francisco and Oakland from 1968 to 1978. Although primarily used for printing BPP flyers and posters (except for their newspaper), this shop did handle occasional work for other progressive causes. The first BPP printing operation was at the national distribution office in San Francisco, which was set up by young Panther Benny Harris. Benny had recently restored an industrial shoe stitcher and was invited to help out at the print shop, where the equipment needed mechanical attention. He described the scene:

After arriving at the SF distribution office, I saw two old and incomplete Chief 20 printing presses sitting side by side on the concrete floor. After examining them and discussing what was required to rebuild them, I decided to take on the challenge. I did not have any knowledge of the printing process but I did have the required mechanical skills to do a rebuild of the presses. A few months later with one machine used for spare parts, the rebuild was complete. One functional Chief 14×20” printing press was up and running. After receiving a few lessons on the basics of printing, I was left on my own to develop my printing skills. Emory Douglas [“Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture” for the BPP] also provided me with valuable artistic guidance and proper artistic layout etiquette. My printing skills gradually developed over time as the press was used to print flyers, posters, pamphlets, restaurant menus, and business cards.[4]

More movement shops sprang up in almost every major city. Madison’s second shop, RPM (Revolutions Per Minute) Print Co-op, got its start in 1970 with a grant from the Wisconsin Student Association to buy out an existing commercial printer. Salsedo Press incorporated in Chicago in 1973 (and lasted until 2021). The next year saw the triple birth of Red Sun in the Boston area, Resistance Press in Philadelphia, and Inkworks Press in Oakland (later Berkeley). Other shops of this vintage include New York City’s Come!Unity Press (a 24-hour open access print shop run by a gay anarchist collective), Fanshen in San Diego, People’s Press in San Francisco, and Northwest Working Press in Eugene, Oregon.

Most of these shops embraced a distinct set of qualities:

●      An articulated political position;

●      A sliding scale for fees and specific mechanisms for donated work;

●      A commitment to hiring people not usually in the trade (women and people of color);

●      Membership in a trade union;

●      Organization in a non-hierarchical form, such as a collective or co-op.

Berkeley’s Inkworks Press was formed in 1974 by several members who had been learning offset printing at an alternative school and wanted to create a movement print shop. From the beginning, the shop planned to be self-sufficient, which would be accomplished with a blend of commercial and political work charged on a sliding scale. As a mechanism to institutionalize revolutionary politics, the shop became a non-profit (though not tax-exempt) corporation with a collective structure in which everyone owned it together – no one owned any individual share, as is the case with co-ops. As a way to assure reasonable working conditions and align with the labor movement, Inkworks became a union shop (International Printing and Graphic Communications Union, later Teamsters) in 1978. One of the long-lasting movement press giants, Inkworks closed down in 2015 – it had become hard to recruit new members willing to take on collective responsibilities and the rapidly-changing printing trade had become more competitive..

After the military draft ended and the Viet Nam War collapsed, much of the wind was taken out of the sails for movement printing. But American capitalism and imperialism lumbered on, and a whole new set of issues – among them, women’s liberation, gay rights, U.S. proxy wars in Latin America, South African apartheid – emerged that also required printing. Artists and activists continued to learn the various technologies for generating effective propaganda. Current social justice print shops include Community Printers in Santa Cruz (California) and Radix Media in Brooklyn.

The radical printing of the “long 1960s,” ragged and chaotic though it may have been, was a powerful testament to the importance of document duplication in support of liberation. Long live the power of the press!

Images:

“Karma repair kit” Gestetner flyer by Richard Brautigan, printed by the Communication Company, circa 1967

.

“My name is Assata Shakur and I am a Black revolutionary” Gestetner flyer by Miranda Bergman, 1977 (printed by Jane Norling).

.

“Amerika is devouring its children” screenprint by Jay Belloli, 1970, UC Berkeley poster workshop

.

Article on Glad Day Press, Liberation Support Movement newsletter Winter 1978; scan from photocopy by Lincoln Cushing

“[Al] Ferrari making ink fountain adjustment on Glad Day’s biggest press, a Chief 126” in “Left profile: Glad Day Press” Liberation Support Movement Newsletter, Winter 1978

.

Bennie Harris at Black Panther Party print shop, San Francisco, circa 1969

.

First published in Printing History Number 33, Summer 2023, the journal of the American Printing History Association

[1] “Young Radicals Rediscover and Use the Power of the Press,” Associated Press, July 8, 1970

[2] “A University Of The Streets” Jay Babcock  interview with Judy Goldhaft of the San Francisco Diggers, September 9, 2021, Digger Docs

[3] “Anti-Nazism and the Ateliers Populaires: The Memory of Nazi Collaboration in the Posters of Mai ’68”
Gene M. Tempest, thesis prepared for the B.A. in History, U.C. Berkeley, 2006. https://www.docspopuli.org/articles/Paris1968_Tempest/AfficheParis1968_Tempest.html 

[4] e-mail from to Benny Harris, 2/2/2011

[i] “Characteristics of American Youth,” United States Census report P23-30, February 6, 1970.

[ii] “George Stuart Stocks Newest in Equipment,” Orlando Evening Star July 9, 1970, p. 11

[iii] “The San Francisco Neighborhood Arts Program,” Interviews Conducted by Suzanne B. Riess for The Bancroft Library in 1978, p. 212

Harry Bridges and the ILWU – Then and Now

By

Loading loose cargo into the hold Port of Los Angeles. Los Angeles, California. Photo: Robert Gumpert 2000

Soon after I finished writing my review for Social Policy magazine of the new Robert Cherny biography of Harry Bridges, I read in an October 1 memo to all International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) members that the union had gone into court on September 30 and filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. A ten-day trial in Portland Oregon in 2019 determined that the ILWU had engaged in illegal tactics that operationally disrupted ICTSI and the Port of Portland. The jury awarded a Philippine owned stevedoring company, International Container Services Inc. (ICTSI), $93.6 million in damages. The union challenged that amount and in March of 2020, a judge determined the maximum amount owed by the union was just over $19 million. The ILWU was prepared to accept that amount but ICTSI rejected the ruling and a new trial was set in which the terminal operator was seeking between $48 million and $142 million in damages.

The dispute arose out of ICTSI’s refusal almost ten years earlier to bring two electrician jobs; plugging and unplugging refrigerated containers, under the ILWU master contract. For years the two jobs had been represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) with excellent wages and benefits.

As my review points out, there are thousands of non-union trucking, warehousing and information technology jobs in the maritime supply chain that need organization. Such organization will require the cooperation of multiple unions. Could financial bankruptcy lead to rethinking bankrupt strategy? As longshore workers like to ponder: “What would Harry Bridges say?”

The cranes wait for a ship – when it arrives it will be loaded/unloaded in short order with port layovers as short as a day or two. Port of Long Beach, California. Photo: Robert Gumpert 19 Nov. 08

In 2005, I accompanied the International Officers of the ILWU to Teamster HQ in Washington DC. We were to meet with Teamster President James Hoffa Jr. to discuss issues of jurisdiction and cooperation in organizing. We were admitted into the “Marble Palace” of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) and ushered into a stately board room that featured portraits of past IBT Presidents most of whom had been indicted and/or served time in jail for various and sundry corrupt activities. When Hoffa Jr. joined us, he immediately greeted our President Jim Spinosa and stated: “You know my father, James Hoffa Sr., and Harry Bridges were good friends. I remember as a young boy watching them on their hands and knees in our living room maneuvering Manhattan sized phone books around to indicate the links in the logistics supply chain between trucking, warehousing and dock work.” Not what I expected to hear from the son of the infamous Teamster leader.  I thought at the time: Wow: A Red and a Racketeer, nevertheless they were both brilliant strategic thinkers pondering how to increase working class power!

Robert Cherny, a retired Professor from San Francisco State, has written a new detailed biography of the iconic ILWU leader. He starts with Bridges’ early formative years in Melbourne Australia, his time at sea, and then his arrival in San Francisco where he takes up working “Alongshore” and participates in leading the organizing over 10 years that leads up to the great West Coast maritime strike of 1934 and the San Francisco General Strike. All these were seminal events that led to the victory of West Coast dockworkers and the establishment of one of the most powerful and progressive unions in the United States and western Canada. Much of the book is taken up with the ceaseless efforts of the employers and their state agents in the FBI, Justice Department, and Immigration to deport Bridges, over his alleged membership in the Communist Party USA. Cherny, who had access in the nineties to Comintern records in Moscow, concludes that it was not clear that Bridges was a member of the Party, although his politics where often consonant with the CP.

The story of Bridges is the not uncommon tale in the annals of labor history of a labor leader of the left who remains beloved by the members regardless of his/her political leanings. The bottom line for the member is: “He may be a red, but he has steered my union in a good direction, and my living standards are proof of it.” The famous case of the United Electrical Workers (UE) District 8 leader William Sentner in Iowa is a similar story. Sentner was an open Communist who weathered vicious red baiting because of his leadership prowess and because he delivered for his members.[1]

Bridges is extolled in ILWU lore as a believer in the wisdom of the rank and file. “Bridges shared leadership with others, as well as sharing decision making with rank-and-file members through such institutions as the longshore caucus and frequent membership referenda.”[2] He is also credited with fighting to break down barriers to the entrance and equal standing of African Americans in the union. This was certainly true in the Bay Area and San Francisco based Local 10, his home local. Local 10 is a majority African American (A-A) local today and led by A-A officers. “He was most successful in his own local in San Francisco, less so with Local 8 – Portland and Local 13 – Los Angeles, where his commitment to racial justice ran up against his commitment to local autonomy.”[3]  This history with respect to Los Angeles Local 13 is well documented in Jake A. Wilson’s powerful history, “Solidarity Forever? Race, Gender, and Unionism in the Ports of Southern California”[4] 

But Bridges and his cohort who built the union were much more than principled ideological warriors who stood for racial unity and rank and file control. They were serious students of class forces, the industries they worked in and the concrete conditions that confronted them. In fact, this ability to make a concrete analysis of conditions and proceed to develop strategies to advance working class power is a key attribute of successful left labor actors. In other words, they needed to know the industry better than their class nemeses, their employers. And often times they were able to anticipate the class interests and needs of those employers better that the employers themselves! Being a practicing Marxist materialist means that you do the careful industry studies that Marx and particularly Engels engaged in. [5]

In an essay written in 1874, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche takes aim at The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” He criticizes those that would engage in monumental history: Monumental history rejects the disappointments and pressures of the present by taking safe harbor in the imagined company of great figures of the past.”[6] Therefore, the important thing to search for in the Cherny biography is some clues as to how the ILWU can take on the challenges it faces today. What does Harry’s analysis and social practice have to guide us in dealing with the union’s mammoth challenge of automation and the integrated supply chain? Chapters 15 and 17 respectively of Cherny’s work sketch the approach of Bridges to the containerization of waterfront work and its impact on warehouse work off dock.

A container (cans) loading dock. Massive cranes moving containers on and off ships, allowing for ships remaining in port for only one or two days. Port of Long Beach, California. Photo: Robert Gumpert 19 Nov. 08

As Cherny points out by the late 1950’s the ILWU was facing the challenge of mechanization: “By then Bridges, other ILWU officers and many longshore workers were focused on a new, transformative, and potentially disruptive technology: containerization, the most important development in ocean shipping since the steam engine”[7] Previously cargo was loaded onto ships and stowed in pieces. Often loading a ship could take two weeks. Now the product was being stowed in containers for loading, the process of loading (or unloading) a ship was made much simpler and less labor intensive. Often a ship could be unloaded and loaded in a 24-hour period. Employment numbers changed dramatically up and down the West Coast. In 1960 at the advent of containers there were about 26,000 dockworkers in California, Oregon and Washington. In 1980, when containerization had been established as the dominant mode of ocean shipping, the employment number was about 11,000. By 2020 that number rose by 47% to about 15,000, but cargo volumes had increased by almost 700%! [8]

A longshore caucus, purposefully assembled to deal with looming mechanization, met for three days in October of 1957. It issued a special report that stated: “It is not a good public position, whether before an arbitrator or in a strike, to be fighting to retain what the employer will label ‘unnecessary men” and “featherbedding.” Further the report stated: “Do we want to stick with our present policy of guerrilla warfare resistance or do we want to adopt a more flexible policy in order to buy specific benefits in return?” Cherny states that, “The report advocated for more flexibility.” [9]

Today’s technology challenge is the introduction of robots. In the 2008 negotiations with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), the ILWU agreed to the introduction of robots on the terminals. And several terminals in Los Angeles Long Beach – COSCO and TraPac – have mechanized. When Maersk, the largest ocean carrier in the world announced in 2019 its intentions to robotize Pier 400 in Los Angeles, Local 13 ILWU mobilized thousands of its members to engage in militant street demonstrations targeting the LA Harbor Commission and the LA City Council in an attempt to block the regulatory approvals for the project. While ultimately unsuccessful, the protest did place the matter of automation front and center again in the recently concluded coastwise negotiations with the PMA for a new labor agreement. One outcome of the agreement is stiffer penalties for employers who do not assign maintenance and repair work to ILWU mechanics, and an agreement to build automation training centers in the three principal port zones: LA, Bay Area, and Seattle Puget Sound.

In a convention that preceded the aforementioned longshore caucus in 1957, Martin Callaghan from Local 10 commented, “I’d like to see them install all of this machinery and equipment to do the work, to make it easier for us guys around here. But lets bear in mind this: lets make these machines work for us guys, not for the employers.” Robert Rohatch also from Local 10 added, “Pensions and shorter working hours are the only answer to mechanization.”[10]Enhancing the pension means that more senior workers retire and clear the field for younger workers. Reducing the workday, but maintaining the same compensation, helps to deal with job attrition that inevitably follows the substitution of machines for human labor. But there is a larger question of the changing structure and character of the employers that requires the leadership and vision of union officers schooled in a materialist analysis of the industry.

Tank cars and containers: Rail yard east of the Port of Long Beach. Long Beach, California. Photo: Robert Gumpert 18 November 2008

Cherny’s Chapter 17 touches on the issue of Container Freight Stations and the supplement negotiated by the union to deal with the impact of containerization of cargo handling hours for ILWU members. The stuffing and stripping of containers was most efficiently done either at the point of production of the goods, or at the point of delivery. In the early days of containerization many containers had less than full loads (“shippers load”) and therefore multiple consignees. The work of loading (stuffing) and unloading (stripping) containers was considered by the union to be work traditionally done on or near dock. In 1969 the union negotiated a Container Freight Station Supplement (CFSS) in an attempt to capture this work, often in conflict with the Teamsters. [11] This CFSS language had a provision that specified that work within a 50-mile radius had to be done under the supplement’s conditions by ILWU labor. This was similar to language won by the International Longshore Association (ILA) on the East Coast. This attempt on both coasts to deal with the impact of technology on freight handling of maritime cargo ran afoul of both the National Labor Relations Act and the Federal Maritime Commission. Both bodies ruled that the language was unenforceable.

But there is a bigger problem. Cherny describes the problem by citing an engineer that he talked to: “one engineer described to me such an ideal situation: a container is filled with athletic shoes at a factory in Pakistan and unloaded in a big-box store in the Midwest. Such long-haul containers constituted more that 80 percent of all container shipping and were not at issue” In other words such “shippers load” were exempted from coverage under the CFSS. This is a critical issue for the future of the union and points to its mission as a maritime logistics chain union not an isolated dockworkers club. Today it is clearer than ever that 95% of goods flowing into the ports, bound for giant retailers like Wal-Mart, Amazon, Target etc., are full-load containers being unstuffed by employees of those retailers, in their warehouses or in third party logistics providers, that they employ.[12]

The most stunning fact is that the giant ocean going carriers are all adapting their business models to the changing retail landscape and building or acquiring inland logistics capacity: In a fascinating 2019 Wall Street Journal article, Maersk reveals its plans to achieve a company makeover from 80% of their earnings coming from container shipping to “Hopefully a couple of years from now will be much closer to a 50-50 scenario between ocean and non-ocean services,” Chief Executive Soren Skou said.[13] Maersk already runs twenty warehousing and distribution centers in California, New Jersey, Texas, and Georgia. Five of them operate in the Southern California basin.

Maersk and other giant ocean carriers are all integrating their operations inland to respond to the specter of Amazon, the giant e-commerce retailer that is becoming a logistics powerhouse. Amazon employs 850,000 warehouse employees in the US alone. It has air hubs and owns a fleet of air cargo planes. Every major port on the West Coast has a dedicated container yard for Amazon imports.  There is speculation that the company will soon buy a fleet of ships. It is already a Non-Vessel Operating Common Carrier (NVOCC), chartering and brokering space on container ships.

Cherny’s Bridges bio pays homage to another great ILWU leader, long time Secretary Treasurer Louis Goldblatt who was part of the March Inland, organizing warehousing on the mainland and one of the architects of the union’s dramatic growth in Hawaii. While Bridges and Goldblatt often had a contentious relationship, Cherny cites Goldblatt’s genius in analyzing the Hawaii situation: “After studying the economic situation in Hawai’i, he (Goldblatt) realized that virtually all economic activity was directly or indirectly controlled by the Big Five (Sugar and Pineapple co.’s). Goldblatt concluded that the ILWU could not win in longshore” until the heart of economic power in those islands, namely the sugar industry had been organized.” [14]The ILWU proceeded to launch huge organizing drives on the sugar and pineapple plantations that made the union the largest and most powerful union on the islands. Consequently, for today’s ILWU, part of securing its future lies in working with other unions like the Teamsters to make sure that Amazon is organized, a mammoth task that requires the best hearts and minds of the whole labor movement.

No union is an island and there is no long-term solution in fortress unionism. The ILWU cannot continue to ensure the wages and benefits of its members without securing unionization for the growth areas in the logistics supply chain. The employment numbers on the West Coast tell this tale in stark relief. In the period between 1980 and 2019 here is the breakdown:

On Dock Employment:

Total employment for (a) registered ILWU members (including Class A/B longshore, clerks and foremen) was 10,245 in 1980. In 2019 the same group of registered employees numbered 15,044. [15] Combined, this is a 47% increase in registered ILWU members, and a 46% increase in working registered ILWU members.

Trends in Off Dock Transport Logistics Employment[16]:

A triple trailer rig on I80 in Utah. Photo: Robert Gumpert 30 November 2015

The most dramatic increases in transport logistics have occurred in three off-dock sectors: Logistics Information Services/Freight Transport Arrangements (FTA), Warehousing and Trucking:

The future for the ILWU does not lie in building a sand castle on the docks that is being eroded by the shift of cargo handling to work inland. The future lies in marching inland following the containers and using the power and leverage the union still has to organize a whole new group of workers, largely immigrants and people of color. These workers are the future of a new and reimagined ILWU, just as the super exploited workers “alongshore” who shaped up on the docks of San Francisco and the West Coast became the soldiers in the battle to transform labor relations on the docks and beyond. Ensuring a solid future requires working with other unions to secure the supply chain. The recently settled coastwise longshore agreement’s principal triumph was ensuring that maintenance and repair mechanic’s work is ILWU and not the jurisdiction of the International Association of Machinists (IAM). This will result in a few hundred jobs on the waterfront, but the vast unorganized workforce of warehouse workers, truckers and information technology workers remain unorganized, and no one union can organize this maritime logistics workforce alone. During the Cold War attacks on left-led labor unions, the ILWU convention of 1953 ratified “ten cardinal rules” that became the Ten Guiding Principles” of the ILWU.[19] Three of those principles stand in stark contrast with recent practice:

Would Harry have been up to the task? Hard to know, but longshore leaders could truly honor his name and memory by making new history and not doting on past glories. I hearken back to my visit to the Marble Palace in 2005. Wouldn’t it be in keeping with Harry’s legacy to have the President of the ILWU and the President of Teamsters and the President of the IAM get down on the boardroom floor and discuss the strategic linkages in the supply chain and plan a multi-union collaborative process in organizing Amazon and the vast logistics industry?

Time to follow the containers and march inland and organize! Time to build a multi-union organizing project. Read Cherny, Strategize and Organize!

Footnotes:

[1] Celebrating Labor Day with the Sentner Papers

[2] Cherny Page 340

[3] Cherny Page 341

[4] Jake A. Wilson 2016 Lexington Books

[5] A neglected aspect of Friedrich Engels’s life: his work at his family’s textile firm, Ermen & Engels, in Manchester, the hub of the cotton industry in the mid-nineteenth century. Engels was a merchant and an intelligencer with a detailed, comprehensive understanding of products and the movements of goods, orders, and prices in the global cotton trade. The statistical insights Engels gleaned on matters such as machinery depreciation and reinvestment, his contextualization of capitalism within a unified world market, and his recognition of the tendencies toward overproduction that threatened economic crisis, all contributed to shaping key ideas and themes of Karl Marx’s Capital Volumes I and II, leaving a lasting imprint on Marxist political economy.

[6] Nietzsche’s Quarrel with History, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen The Hedgehog Review 24.2 (Summer 2002)

[7] Cherny Page 279

[8] . In 1980, 2.1 million loaded TEU’s were handled in the ports of the West Coast. In 2019, 16.5 million loaded units were handled. This is a 695% increase. Peter V. Hall Simon Fraser University 2023

[9] Cherny Page 281

[10] Cherny Page 280

[11] Cherny Page 316

[12] On the Waterfront and Beyond: Technology and the Changing Nature of Cargo-Related Employment on the West Coast   University of California Institute for Labor and Employment Final Report to the ILWU Longshore Caucus 2004

[13] https://www.wsj.com/articles/maersk-ceo-wants-half-its-earnings-to-come-from-inland-logistics-11561580963

[14] Cherny  Page 217

[15] Some registered longshore workers do not work in a given year. In 2019, there were 14,012 “registered and working” longshore workers. “Registered and working” numbers are reported in Graph 3.

[16] Off dock (and non-ILWU Other Marine Cargo) employment numbers are from the County Business Patterns data series from the Census Bureau for the three West Coast States. Analysis of the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data series from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the same trends.

[17] In order to create comparable data over 39 years, trucking includes local and long haul trucking, messenger/courier and waste collection.

[18] PV Hall Research 2023

[19] Cherny Page 261

[20] ibid.