“Politics makes strange bedfellows,” a nineteenth century essayist named Charles Dudley Warner once wrote. As I ponder those words, I feel as if he were talking about the current Democratic contest to be the party’s Presidential nominee. The Nevada caucuses are over and Hillary Rodham Clinton has the state’s labor unions to thank for her narrow four point victory. Unions, which once opposed capital for the working man, served as a firewall for a candidate who once served as a board member of the nation’s most anti-union corporation,Walmart. A candidate who helped to craft anti-teachers union education “reform” in Arkansas, a candidate who supported NAFTA, TPP, welfare reform, and the notorious bankruptcy bill. Labor unions saved the day for the candidate of Goldman Sachs. Let me repeat, “Labor unions saved the day for the candidate of Goldman Sachs.” Strange bedfellows indeed.
Annie Karni of Politico filed a story about the Nevada caucuses which has been flown under the radar because of a controversy over what members of a caucus may have said over the use of an unbiased Spanish speaking translator. Karni wrote:
Ahead of Nevada's Democratic caucuses, the Service Employees International Union is distributing literature to members touting Hillary Clinton's support for a $15 hourly wage for workers. But Clinton, who won SEIU's endorsement in November, has not actually endorsed a federal $15 minimum wage. Clinton has said since the beginning of her campaign that she backs a federal minimum wage of $12 an hour.
“Hillary Clinton supports our fight for $15 and a union,” read the SEIU fliers, which were distributed in English and Spanish. The literature also featured quotes from Clinton supporting New York’s proposal to raise wages for fast-food workers to $15 an hour.
Examine the links to the flyers in the Politico piece and then watch this video of Hillary Clinton in Iowa. The money quote begins at the 1m 30s mark.
Now a case could me made, and Brian Shepard of SEIU is quoted in the Politico piece, that the claims in the flyers are not misleading. But the union spent, time, money, and manpower to campaign against another candidate, Bernie Sanders who has unequivocally supported a $15 an hour minimum wage. So why would a union which has already spent over $30 million on promoting the “Fight for Fifteen” settle for a candidate who will only fight for less?
Last November, Ted Fertik, a PhD candidate at Yale where he has served in the Graduate Employees and Students organization and was also an organizer with the Working Families Party, wrote an excellent analysis and assessment of why SEIU would choose Hillary Rodham Clinton over Bernie Sanders. In Jacobin magazine he wrote:
The best way to understand SEIU’s decision is to work backwards from what it considers an absolute imperative: electing a Democratic president in 2016. For the labor movement, it is now a question of survival. Union membership represents barely 11 percent of the American workforce, and that number drops nearly every year. A Republican chief executive means a Republican majority on the National Labor Relations Board, and perhaps decades more of a right-wing Supreme Court, which has already shown itself willing to disrupt generations-old norms in workplace representation.
Even though there is no evidence that Sanders can’t win in the general election, and Fertik does an admirable job of debunking the various myths concerning the electability of Sanders or Clinton in the general election. He does show how faulty conventional wisdom leads to an inexorable logic requiring that the deck be stacked to ensure that Hillary Clinton wins the nomination as quickly as possible in order to begin campaigning for the general. Fertik also does an admirable job illustrating some of the structural impediments that would have to be overcome the Clinton bias.
At the same time, given that the default position was always going to be a Clinton endorsement, there would have had to be a bigger rank-and-file upsurge for Sanders. In its mega-locals, SEIU is an inhospitable place for bottom-up movements looking to challenge leadership on political strategy; nevertheless had there been a visible demand for Sanders from large numbers of members it could have at least slowed SEIU’s endorsement timeline and given Sanders more of an opportunity to make his case to the membership.
I wish I could quote more of the piece, I recommend you read the entire piece and whichever candidate one prefers, one should seriously ponder the implications of the final three paragraphs of that article.
Turning away from Fertik’s tale of defensiveness and myopia, it might also be fruitful to examine how the thumb of the party establishment may have tilted the playing field.
John Ralston has written a piece over at USA Today entitled, “Henry Reid Delivers for Hillary Clinton.“ The thesis of Ralston’s piece is that the invincible lead that Hillary Clinton once was rapidly vanishing, and Harry Reid made some phone calls. The reporting is chilling. Harry Reid made some phone calls.
In the middle of last week, Reid made a phone call, first reported by The New York Times’ Amy Chozick, to D. Taylor, the head of the parent of the Culinary Workers Union local in Las Vegas. Before that call, the union, facing difficult contract negotiations and seeing no advantage in enmeshing itself in a bloody internecine fight, had declared it was more Swiss than Hispanic. With the culinary union not endorsing and unwilling to even engage in the caucuses, employee turnout at six casino sites on the Las Vegas Strip was forecast at a combined 100 or so. That is, insignificant.
What does an establishment politician do next?
But Reid did not stop there. He also called casino executives, Democratic insiders confirm, with a simple message: “Let your people go.”
That is, he wanted to ensure the workers would be allowed time off from work to caucus. No one said no to Prince Harry.
In case you can’t or won’t connect the dots . . .we have the leader of the Nevada Democratic party, one of the most powerful men in Washington D.C. getting union representatives and billionaire casino moguls to work together because a Sanders nomination would just be awful. Without the billionaires letting their people off work to caucus, Hillary Clinton might have lost the Nevada caucus.
Now to pivot to a book of “pessimism porn” written by “noted sourpuss socialist“ Chris Hedges. The Death of the Liberal Class was written in 2010. Its thesis was that the existence of the “liberal class” allowed for incremental reform which acted as a safety valve preventing violent revolution. According Hedges the five pillars of the “liberal class” are the liberal churches, universities, the free press, the labor movement, and the Democratic Party. According to Hedges, each of these five pillars no longer in any way, shape, or manner can no longer be considered to be remotely democratic working for the common good. Our liberal religious institutions are drowned out by the reactionary faiths, and out institution have been compromised by corporate money and are citadels of neoliberalism. In the face of corporate cutbacks, our press and media function more like the propaganda arms of our governing elites than the ideals preached in our nation’s journalism schools. I think for organized labor “having a place at the table” means not fighting for the forgotten man, but for gorging on the goodies provided by the donor class. As for the Democratic Party, instead of welcoming the hatred of the economic royalists in this era of unprecedented income inequality, we seem resigned to hitching to the wagon of someone who sounds “more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.”
What happens to a society when the “liberal class” ceases to function? Hedges writes:
The ineffectiveness of the liberal class, as I saw in the former Yugoslavia and as was true in Weimar Germany, perpetuates a dangerous political paralysis. The longer the paralysis continues, the longer systems of power are unable to address the suffering and grievances of the masses, the more the formal mechanisms of power are reviled. The liberal establishment’s inability to defy corporate power, to stand up for its supposed liberal beliefs, means its inevitable disappearance, along with the disappearance of traditional liberal values. This, as history has amply pointed out, is the road to despotism. And we are further down that road than many care to admit.