I recently attended a webinar sponsored by the Working Families Party, entitled Winning Back the Working Class. Everyone attending seemed to share the view that the working class has drifted away from the Democratic Party and that Democrats must change their messaging in order to win these voters back and prevail against MAGA Republicans.
I'm going to violate a rule here to mention an incident that is typical for not only Trump, but also the ruling class in general. The newsletter of a union I was once in, the IOMMP, had a report on a U.S. strike on a tanker headed to Iran. Three Indian crewmen were killed when a precision missile was sent into the engine room. The ship could have been boarded or disabled without loss of life. No matter what anyone thinks about this war, this was a deliberate murder for no other motive than gratuitous and sadistic of our fellow workers. The union they were in, the Forward Seamens' Union, and the Indian Foreign Minister issued public statements of protest that were reported in the IOMMP newsletter, but without their statements of the ability to stop the ship without the murders. All those with loyalty to the working class should speak up about these acts. It's the least we can do for international solidarity.
Thanks for standing up for us in the basement, the engine room crew. Anyone who has ever worked on a ship, ferry, or towboat knows how much we depend on each other, including people we may not like personally. Not only to make everything run, but for our very lives in dangerous situations. A good metaphor for how econ systems and governments should operate.
Thanks, Rafi. I came up the hawsepipe to the bridge, but my heart was always on deck. Just after I got my 3M license there were no jobs topside or on deck, so when I wiper job came up I took it. My first job after becoming a mate: the rag job. The guys in the black gang were some of the best shipmates I ever worked with. But then, my first job going to sea was as a messman. My unlicensed union was the SUP, which has on its masthead "the Brotherhood of the Sea". I take that seriously. We are all fellow workers, even lubbers ashore.
Yes, and MEBA. I also was a hotel engineer and a building engineer (HERE and Opr Engineers.) I did organizing and political work for the maritime unions, too. For a number of reasons (including being blacklisted and laid off) I went back to school in my 50s. I'd point out I wasn't just another pretty brain--I can fix things! BTW, the slogan for the IUOE is "Labor Omnia Vincit" a play on the Latin poet Virgil's "Omnia Vincit Amor," love conquers all. Hmmm. A love of labor is also a labor of love.
Rafi, if you were in the IBU we have mutual friends! I was also in OE Local 3, but was not politically active there. I'm in Oakland, and have a history in that radical scene around maritime. I knew Don Liddle and a few others, so if you were in that group we should talk more. If you are interested, I could probably make contact off site.
Much appreciated! The "Big Tent" caricature hides who the Party is really of, by, and for. If it's a working class party, everything falls into place. And if not, the old money will come back to deregulate and untax yet again. Oligarchs in the shadows will continue to pull strings, and inequality will be just another election away. We're on the precipice of climate disasters ad nauseum and forever water wars, ecological collapse, and we cannot afford these nice-to-have games.
Democratizing the economy is a survival strategy, an imperative, and the whole gist of why a working class party is not just a nice-to-have but an imperative. Let the big money join in the fun of reclaiming a survivable future, but let public finance lead the way with working families at the helm.
I would keep in mind the strategy of the Nonpartisan League https://substack.com/@laboristmovement/p-160005450 of forming a laborist movement with a laborist platform built by working people, and then decide whether to have that movement field the candidates selected by working people from their own number on a caucus basis through hijacked Democratic or Republican machinery, a new working people's party akin to the Nonpartisan League's Farmer-Labor party offshoot, or as independents, depending on the local situation. You are spot on that the platform objectives and working people's candidate selection comes FIRST. The party envelope should not then be that significant, save as a matter of ballot strategy.
The operative word is "build". Too many people think we can just launch a new party and start winning, being utterly ignorant of the obstacles placed in the way of doing that after the success of the Populists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What we can do now is support as many candidates truly running for the working class financially as we’re able, and volunteer to work for those in our own states.
I’ll just note in passing that the reason there are so many places with no Democrats is that it became DNC policy to not support candidates in "deep red" districts even if there were people willing to run.
Les, you're exactly right "the 'winning back' framework" is inadequate. Look at any D convention party platform, almost all ignored in practice. Otherwise the Ds would have to do something about the grossly unfair econ system. Promises, promises. What we mere workers see is D support for NAFTA, GATT, the WTO. After '08 bailing out the Wall St. perpetrators while the millions of us who lost jobs, pensions, homes got nothing. Because the D elite still believes in trickle down. When the reality is it's trickle up!
That "win back the working class to the Ds" is indeed inverted! Implies the organizational center doesn't have to change, just re-message. No concern for grassroots participation--the way we old New Deal supporters used to win elections. Given the Ivy D elite's opinions of us ("basket of deplorables," "stupid") why would they talk with us instead of the usual talking down to us? Besides, their professional and managerial class 20%er loyalists have done just fine with the current econ system. Their 1%er and corporate donors even better. That's why they don't want to get serious about pro-worker, pro-majority economics or an actual 'democratic' party. It's also deeply ingrained class prejudice; notice they expect us (lessers) to come to them (the Best and the Brightest.) The strategy is to figure out how by whatever words might work. Sincerity or real inclusion not considered because they know better than we do. Any group claiming to be pro-worker yet can't see the the problem with that...shame on them!
To backers of genteel liberal D elite leadership. A quotation of Jim Hightower, great populist blogger and heir to the farmer side of our old Farmer-Labor Populist Party: "If we'd been liberals, we would have re-trained them for something else. As populists, we changed the market structure that was f*cking them over. That's the difference." From Eugene V. Debs: "I wouldn't lead you into the Promised Land even if I could. If someone could lead you in, someone else would lead you out. Learn to use your own heads as well as your hands." Some of us can read, write, and think. That's why we're populists.
I don't know how I got an email from you as I'm firmly against your radical liberal ideas. I am MAGA all day long and just so you know, I was once a JFK Democrat from Mass. There is no such thing as the Democrat Party any longer, it is now Socialist Democrat i.e. Communist. You have the elites and the working class, and no middle class. The middle class is MAGA Baby, all day long!!!
So, you sound like a troll trying to ragebait your idea of "the libs." Go for it. I hope you have lots of money in the bank, because that's all you need to survive in the MAGA madness.
Here's a point, though - do you know when America was at its greatest? When the top tax rate was above 70%. So maybe we can find a point of agreement after all, if you're truly willing to fight for changes that will *actually* benefit ALL of America. Not just mindless sloganeering for a base of short sighted, narrow minded racists, which by all observations is the majority of MAGA loyalists.
We're NOT Dems, that's the point here! That you can't tell the difference between lib and progressive populist tells us how much you don't know. Middle class?! Are you so young and/or ignorant of history you don't know the working class majority was almost all of the middle class, the rest small business owners and small farmers? The entire group has suffered because of the trickle up economics multinational corporations favor. Why then support the 1%er and corporate R plutocrats? Do you want the decline of the middle class to continue all the way to complete economic collapse? Read a little more carefully. We here not only dislike the Rs, we despise the oligarchical D party. They abandoned us, now representing only the professional and managerial upper middle class. We're saying we need a party for us, the real majority.
True, but if you want to make America Great Again you have to go back to the colonies during the 75 years of prosperity they had due to their government issued debt-free money. Upon learning what was causing the prosperity, the Crown then made the illeagal. The revoluton was fought to win their sovereign right to issue debt-free money. They were betrayed by the American aristocracy, the founding fathers, who handed the money power back to the banks. MAGA seems to be more about making Trump and his gang of thieves richer. https://howardswitzer.substack.com/p/the-infamous-mar-a-lago-gang
Note also that at the turn of the 19th to 20th C. only 14% of Americans were middle class, well-off enough to have servants. But precarious since the intense boom and bust cycles every few years, like the really bad one in 1893, meant they could be wiped out. And often were. Yet also the era of the Robber Barons...trickle up economics was the fave then, too. Fed up with a "choice" between plutocrats or oligarchs, the same de facto uniparty we see currently, we the people formed the Farmer-Labor Populist Party. Which won many different elections all over the country.
...and the progressive/populist movements formed political parties and at the top of their platfroms was to not alllow banks to create the money supply and have the government issue money as an asset, Greenbacks. Boom/bust cycles are a feasture of a debt-money system. When loan payments (money deleted) exceed loans being made (money created) the system crashes for lack of money, and loan defaults allow the real wealth collateral to be picked up for pennies on the dollar by those with money.
Sounds mostly right to me. MMT is clear about govt fiat $ as sound. My fave alt. economist is Steve Keen, who differs from MMT on a few details. He has sound stats and computer programs, empirical evidence. Unlike the now dominant neoclassicals (the Chicago School) and their arguments by assertion based on assumptions. Keen predicted the '07-''08 Great Recession (GFC) because he pays attention to private debt, which the neoclassicals ignore. BTW, it's steeply rising again, has been for awhile. He also points out govt debt, say spending to build a highway, becomes assets to the construction company and (hopefully) to union workers. Modelling the process as if accounting ledgers. Yet the dogmatic economists ignore that, too.
Banks create money out of nothing by loans, now basically unregulated since Clinton repealed New Deal regs. Result? The increasing financialization of the econ system, parasitic on what's called the real economy, physical production and workers. It fuels speculation, like what's happened in housing. Or the CDS "toxic assets" => '08. And the stock mkt; unless an IPO is not investing, it's like buying a used car--the $$ don't go to the maker. So it's gambling for rich boys, not an indicator of econ health. Yet corporations justify their greedy, short focus behavior as their duty to stockholders. Scam, scam, scam. Heads they win, tails we lose.
I'm going to violate a rule here to mention an incident that is typical for not only Trump, but also the ruling class in general. The newsletter of a union I was once in, the IOMMP, had a report on a U.S. strike on a tanker headed to Iran. Three Indian crewmen were killed when a precision missile was sent into the engine room. The ship could have been boarded or disabled without loss of life. No matter what anyone thinks about this war, this was a deliberate murder for no other motive than gratuitous and sadistic of our fellow workers. The union they were in, the Forward Seamens' Union, and the Indian Foreign Minister issued public statements of protest that were reported in the IOMMP newsletter, but without their statements of the ability to stop the ship without the murders. All those with loyalty to the working class should speak up about these acts. It's the least we can do for international solidarity.
Thanks for standing up for us in the basement, the engine room crew. Anyone who has ever worked on a ship, ferry, or towboat knows how much we depend on each other, including people we may not like personally. Not only to make everything run, but for our very lives in dangerous situations. A good metaphor for how econ systems and governments should operate.
Thanks, Rafi. I came up the hawsepipe to the bridge, but my heart was always on deck. Just after I got my 3M license there were no jobs topside or on deck, so when I wiper job came up I took it. My first job after becoming a mate: the rag job. The guys in the black gang were some of the best shipmates I ever worked with. But then, my first job going to sea was as a messman. My unlicensed union was the SUP, which has on its masthead "the Brotherhood of the Sea". I take that seriously. We are all fellow workers, even lubbers ashore.
By the way, Rafi: I noticed the specifics of what you wrote, and it occurred to me: Are you in the IBU?
Yes, and MEBA. I also was a hotel engineer and a building engineer (HERE and Opr Engineers.) I did organizing and political work for the maritime unions, too. For a number of reasons (including being blacklisted and laid off) I went back to school in my 50s. I'd point out I wasn't just another pretty brain--I can fix things! BTW, the slogan for the IUOE is "Labor Omnia Vincit" a play on the Latin poet Virgil's "Omnia Vincit Amor," love conquers all. Hmmm. A love of labor is also a labor of love.
Rafi, if you were in the IBU we have mutual friends! I was also in OE Local 3, but was not politically active there. I'm in Oakland, and have a history in that radical scene around maritime. I knew Don Liddle and a few others, so if you were in that group we should talk more. If you are interested, I could probably make contact off site.
That is a crime and a disgusting act of gratuitous violence. Screw the bastards. Solidarity Forever.
May those Seamen's Souls Rest in Peace.
Thanks, Syd.
Much appreciated! The "Big Tent" caricature hides who the Party is really of, by, and for. If it's a working class party, everything falls into place. And if not, the old money will come back to deregulate and untax yet again. Oligarchs in the shadows will continue to pull strings, and inequality will be just another election away. We're on the precipice of climate disasters ad nauseum and forever water wars, ecological collapse, and we cannot afford these nice-to-have games.
Democratizing the economy is a survival strategy, an imperative, and the whole gist of why a working class party is not just a nice-to-have but an imperative. Let the big money join in the fun of reclaiming a survivable future, but let public finance lead the way with working families at the helm.
Yes, Democrats are the left hand fist of the uniparty, the Republicans the right. Both fists are beating us to death. We need a transpartisan movement to change the system. What system? The privately controlled for profit monetary system that enslaves the people with money issued as interest-bearing debt. https://howardswitzer.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/199197821?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts%2Fpublished
I would keep in mind the strategy of the Nonpartisan League https://substack.com/@laboristmovement/p-160005450 of forming a laborist movement with a laborist platform built by working people, and then decide whether to have that movement field the candidates selected by working people from their own number on a caucus basis through hijacked Democratic or Republican machinery, a new working people's party akin to the Nonpartisan League's Farmer-Labor party offshoot, or as independents, depending on the local situation. You are spot on that the platform objectives and working people's candidate selection comes FIRST. The party envelope should not then be that significant, save as a matter of ballot strategy.
The operative word is "build". Too many people think we can just launch a new party and start winning, being utterly ignorant of the obstacles placed in the way of doing that after the success of the Populists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What we can do now is support as many candidates truly running for the working class financially as we’re able, and volunteer to work for those in our own states.
I’ll just note in passing that the reason there are so many places with no Democrats is that it became DNC policy to not support candidates in "deep red" districts even if there were people willing to run.
Les, you're exactly right "the 'winning back' framework" is inadequate. Look at any D convention party platform, almost all ignored in practice. Otherwise the Ds would have to do something about the grossly unfair econ system. Promises, promises. What we mere workers see is D support for NAFTA, GATT, the WTO. After '08 bailing out the Wall St. perpetrators while the millions of us who lost jobs, pensions, homes got nothing. Because the D elite still believes in trickle down. When the reality is it's trickle up!
That "win back the working class to the Ds" is indeed inverted! Implies the organizational center doesn't have to change, just re-message. No concern for grassroots participation--the way we old New Deal supporters used to win elections. Given the Ivy D elite's opinions of us ("basket of deplorables," "stupid") why would they talk with us instead of the usual talking down to us? Besides, their professional and managerial class 20%er loyalists have done just fine with the current econ system. Their 1%er and corporate donors even better. That's why they don't want to get serious about pro-worker, pro-majority economics or an actual 'democratic' party. It's also deeply ingrained class prejudice; notice they expect us (lessers) to come to them (the Best and the Brightest.) The strategy is to figure out how by whatever words might work. Sincerity or real inclusion not considered because they know better than we do. Any group claiming to be pro-worker yet can't see the the problem with that...shame on them!
To backers of genteel liberal D elite leadership. A quotation of Jim Hightower, great populist blogger and heir to the farmer side of our old Farmer-Labor Populist Party: "If we'd been liberals, we would have re-trained them for something else. As populists, we changed the market structure that was f*cking them over. That's the difference." From Eugene V. Debs: "I wouldn't lead you into the Promised Land even if I could. If someone could lead you in, someone else would lead you out. Learn to use your own heads as well as your hands." Some of us can read, write, and think. That's why we're populists.
I don't know how I got an email from you as I'm firmly against your radical liberal ideas. I am MAGA all day long and just so you know, I was once a JFK Democrat from Mass. There is no such thing as the Democrat Party any longer, it is now Socialist Democrat i.e. Communist. You have the elites and the working class, and no middle class. The middle class is MAGA Baby, all day long!!!
So, you sound like a troll trying to ragebait your idea of "the libs." Go for it. I hope you have lots of money in the bank, because that's all you need to survive in the MAGA madness.
Here's a point, though - do you know when America was at its greatest? When the top tax rate was above 70%. So maybe we can find a point of agreement after all, if you're truly willing to fight for changes that will *actually* benefit ALL of America. Not just mindless sloganeering for a base of short sighted, narrow minded racists, which by all observations is the majority of MAGA loyalists.
Welcome to the struggle, comrade!
If you are not working class, your fascistic expressions come as no surprise. Don't let the door slap you in your ass on the way out.
We're NOT Dems, that's the point here! That you can't tell the difference between lib and progressive populist tells us how much you don't know. Middle class?! Are you so young and/or ignorant of history you don't know the working class majority was almost all of the middle class, the rest small business owners and small farmers? The entire group has suffered because of the trickle up economics multinational corporations favor. Why then support the 1%er and corporate R plutocrats? Do you want the decline of the middle class to continue all the way to complete economic collapse? Read a little more carefully. We here not only dislike the Rs, we despise the oligarchical D party. They abandoned us, now representing only the professional and managerial upper middle class. We're saying we need a party for us, the real majority.
True, but if you want to make America Great Again you have to go back to the colonies during the 75 years of prosperity they had due to their government issued debt-free money. Upon learning what was causing the prosperity, the Crown then made the illeagal. The revoluton was fought to win their sovereign right to issue debt-free money. They were betrayed by the American aristocracy, the founding fathers, who handed the money power back to the banks. MAGA seems to be more about making Trump and his gang of thieves richer. https://howardswitzer.substack.com/p/the-infamous-mar-a-lago-gang
Note also that at the turn of the 19th to 20th C. only 14% of Americans were middle class, well-off enough to have servants. But precarious since the intense boom and bust cycles every few years, like the really bad one in 1893, meant they could be wiped out. And often were. Yet also the era of the Robber Barons...trickle up economics was the fave then, too. Fed up with a "choice" between plutocrats or oligarchs, the same de facto uniparty we see currently, we the people formed the Farmer-Labor Populist Party. Which won many different elections all over the country.
...and the progressive/populist movements formed political parties and at the top of their platfroms was to not alllow banks to create the money supply and have the government issue money as an asset, Greenbacks. Boom/bust cycles are a feasture of a debt-money system. When loan payments (money deleted) exceed loans being made (money created) the system crashes for lack of money, and loan defaults allow the real wealth collateral to be picked up for pennies on the dollar by those with money.
Sounds mostly right to me. MMT is clear about govt fiat $ as sound. My fave alt. economist is Steve Keen, who differs from MMT on a few details. He has sound stats and computer programs, empirical evidence. Unlike the now dominant neoclassicals (the Chicago School) and their arguments by assertion based on assumptions. Keen predicted the '07-''08 Great Recession (GFC) because he pays attention to private debt, which the neoclassicals ignore. BTW, it's steeply rising again, has been for awhile. He also points out govt debt, say spending to build a highway, becomes assets to the construction company and (hopefully) to union workers. Modelling the process as if accounting ledgers. Yet the dogmatic economists ignore that, too.
Banks create money out of nothing by loans, now basically unregulated since Clinton repealed New Deal regs. Result? The increasing financialization of the econ system, parasitic on what's called the real economy, physical production and workers. It fuels speculation, like what's happened in housing. Or the CDS "toxic assets" => '08. And the stock mkt; unless an IPO is not investing, it's like buying a used car--the $$ don't go to the maker. So it's gambling for rich boys, not an indicator of econ health. Yet corporations justify their greedy, short focus behavior as their duty to stockholders. Scam, scam, scam. Heads they win, tails we lose.