Let Them Eat Ballots: Unions’ Obsession With Political Action

California’s Proposition 32, on the November ballot, has been dubbed the Stop Special Interests initiative. In reality, it is targeted at the state’s unions, with the goal of preventing them from using payroll deductions to fund their political campaigns and lobbying. The bill would have virtually no effect on private businesses or corporate lobbying, as private businesses do not raise political funds through payroll deductions.

The campaign in support of 32, not surprisingly, has been heavily funded by corporate interests that hope to stifle unions’ political involvement, which is already miniscule compared with theirs. Yet even their small involvement in politics is unacceptable to the wealthy, who would like to see the unions, as well as any workplace and environmental protections, disappear completely.

One of the major funders of Prop 32 is the American Future Fund, a Super PAC affiliated with the Koch Brothers and Karl Rove, which recently contributed $4 million from secret donors to the campaign. Prop 32 is also backed by Democrats for Education Reform (DfER), an anti-union and anti-teacher organization that is funded by hedge fund managers and Wall Street brokers.

While the backers of 32 have been very deceptive in their promotion of this legislation, inaccurately suggesting that the bill would stop all special interests from influencing politics, the unions themselves have engaged in a deceptive, top down and undemocratic campaign to defend themselves. For example, representatives of the California Teachers Association (CTA) have told members the bill would end collective bargaining rights for them. However, Prop 32 says nothing about unions’ right to collectively bargain and if it passes it would have no direct effect on collective bargaining. Nevertheless, it is safe to assume that the bill’s backers would like to end collective bargaining, and that passage of the bill would facilitate this goal by stifling unions’ ability to lobby in defense of collective bargaining.

It is also probably safe to assume that most union members would oppose 32 if educated about it and that they would support their unions’ efforts to resist it. However, the CTA’s decision to prioritize the anti-32 campaign (and the pro-30 tax increase campaign) over virtually all other activities was essentially made from the top-down, with very little input from the rank and file. This approach has the potential to alienate and anger members, rather than encourage their support and participation.

Furthermore, the way the CTA engaged the locals to participate in their campaigns has been autocratic and coercive. In my local, for example, our CTA representative told us we “had to” participate in the CTA activities around these two initiatives and we “did not” have a choice in the matter. To make matters worse, we were expected to carry out some of these activities during the same week we had to vote on a new contract, adding an unnecessary degree of confusion, anxiety and frustration to our members, who were already overburdened with their normal teaching responsibilities, and to our organizers and representatives responsible for carrying out these two unrelated union duties.

Of course it will be devastating to students and teachers if 30 loses and 32 wins. K12 and higher education will lose $6 billion in funding, while the corporate education reform movement will gain considerably more political power to further gut public education. Yet one the reasons why corporate interests have gained so much political power in recent years is that unions have relinquished their most powerful weapon—direct action—in favor of going toe to toe with the wealthy in the political arena. Even without Citizens United, corporations were able to outspend unions by large margins. And even without outspending them, policy will almost always come down in favor of the wealthy and their businesses because the politicians are members of the same class and their economic interests lie more with their corporate friends and allies than with the rest of us.

The unions argue that their funding of political campaigns and lobbying have led to important gains for teachers and this is partly true. However, this does not mean that political action is the only or even most effective tactic. And despite these gains, real wages and benefits have been declining steadily for decades. Class sizes have been soaring. Programs continue to be cut. Working hours have increased. And perhaps most devastating to teachers’ living conditions, the unions have completely failed to do anything substantive about rising health care costs, with the result that workers must pay more and more out of pocket for health coverage each year, a cost that further erodes take home pay.

Workers’ real power lies in their ability to withhold their labor, and this is only effective when workers are well-educated and organized. Ironically, a well-organized and educated membership can also easily be mobilized to engage in canvassing, phone banking, letter writing, fundraising and other political activities, potentially with greater effectiveness than can be achieved through union-hired lobbyists and campaign managers. However, the ultimate goal should always be job actions, including General Strikes, as these have the greatest potential to force bosses and politicians to buckle to workers’ demands. This sort of organizing  needs to be initiated from the bottom up and, to be effective, must empower workers, not make them feel like minions of their unions.

School Choice or Just Another Koch Bros Scam?

National School Choice Week, a pet project of big corporations and conservative billionaires like the Koch brothers, kicked off Monday with celebratory forums throughout the country. Billing itself as a social justice movement committed to “ensuring effective education options for every child,” “school choice” has actually become a deeply divisive wedge issue for the right. But the folks at School Choice Week would prefer that you didn’t know that.

To read the rest, go to The ugly truth about “school choice” at Salon.com.

When Political Action Trumps Direct Action Working People Lose

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

A GOP- and venture capitalist-backed initiative to limit union spending on elections has collected sufficient signatures to make next year’s November ballot in California, according to the Sacramento Bee. The bill would prevent unions and corporations from using automatic payroll deductions for funding candidate-controlled committees. However, the bill primarily targets public sector unions, leaving large loopholes for corporations, which outspent unions by a ratio of 15 to 1 over the past decade, even without this new law.

California Teachers Association President Dean Vogel complained that the new law would only worsen the political spending gap between Wall Street and unions. “We can’t create a better future for our students and our state by silencing the voices of California’s working class—especially teachers, firefighters, police and nurses.”

The problem is that working people need far more than a voice—they need real power, something they already have through their ability to withhold their labor. Direct Action (e.g., strikes, slow-downs, work-to-rule, boycotts) is far more powerful than campaign contributions as it puts pressure directly on employers, rather than indirectly through legislators. Unfortunately, this power is largely ignored by the unions, which rarely strike anymore, devoting far more resources to political campaigns than to organizing, educating and mobilizing their members. Yet these are the key building blocks necessary for successful job actions.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 While it could be argued that preserving the automatic payroll deduction is better than losing it, as it gives unions a “fighting chance” against the corporations, this is hardly an inspiring or compelling argument, as it merely ensures that workers’ voices remain 15 times less audible than their bosses’ because of the campaign spending gap. It is also pretty convoluted, as it is a de facto acceptance of a system in which union members are compelled to “donate” money from their paychecks whether or not they want to, so that union representatives for whom they did not necessarily vote can give money to political campaigns they do not necessarily support, in order to elect political representatives who may (or most likely will not) vote for legislation that might or might not help them. And even then, the legislation might not even pass.

Workers are much more likely to get their interests met by going directly to their bosses and backing their demands with the threat of a strike. This method has fewer middle men and steps and it directly empowers workers.

Political Action is a Dead End for Working People

While labor can sometimes get “their guy” elected, they will never be able to get enough of “their guys” into office to make any significant impact. In the long term, labor can never win the campaign financing game. The corporations and the wealthy have far bigger war chests, and always will, so long as an economic system persists that allows the few to get rich by paying their employees a fraction of the value of their labor.

Ironically, and against their own economic interests, workers indirectly help fund the same political campaigns supported by their bosses, since their bosses’ ability to fund campaigns comes from underpaying their employees. Employees of Koch Industries, for example, contributed to the campaign of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker simply by working for the Koch brothers, who used their profits to help get Walker elected and push his union-busting legislation.

Union activists have argued that this is exactly why they must use their members’ dues to support pro-labor candidates, that this is the only foil to the union-busting efforts of the right. This simply is not true. The best foil to union busting is a strong labor movement that is willing and able to quickly mobilize direct actions that halt profits and force the bosses and/or politicians to back down. This can only happen through organizing, not through political action. At the same time, this argument—that the union bosses must take a cut of workers’ paychecks without their consent in order to counter the political effects of the money stolen from their paychecks by the bosses—is completely irrational and does not inspire much trust or faith in the union and probably contributes to the declining public support for trade unionism.

Campaign funding by unions can be alienating and divisive. Many workers do not want their dues spent in this way at all. Others may support different campaigns and candidates than their unions. And the decisions on which campaigns and initiatives to support are generally made from the top down, without rank and file input. All of these factors have the potential to weaken workers’ support for their unions, thus undermining future efforts to mobilize them for protests, pickets and strikes. This is one of the reasons why the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) eschewed political action not long after its founding, emphasizing direct action instead.

Campaign funding is also a phenomenal drain on union resources for an incredibly indirect and fickle goal: getting someone elected who might propose and vote for a modest reform that might not even pass. If unions spent the same time and money on organizing, educating and mobilizing their members, strikes and other direct action tactics would be far more common and far more effective, not only at winning grievances against specific employers, but also at influencing public policy, potentially even leading to the prevention or termination of wars.

The biggest problem with unions’ obsession with political action, however, is their incorrect presumption that the political system truly is “of, for and by the people,” and that they merely need to get “their guys” elected in order to achieve the American Dream. According to this logic, if we get enough of “our guys” elected, the laws will be changed to benefit us and everyone will become a member of the middle class, with material security, home ownership and access to the good things in life for all.

However, even if a majority of Congress was pro-labor—which could never happen because the capitalist class would never permit it—inequality would still persist because the fundamental relations between bosses and workers would remain unchanged. Workers would continue to have to sell their labor to the bosses at whatever price bosses were willing to pay. Bosses would continue to make huge profits by selling their goods and services for far more than they paid their workers. The wealthy would retain control over the machinery of production, with the power to hire and fire. Workers would therefore have to continue prostrating themselves out of fear of being fired, leaving them without any control or influence over their working and living conditions. The fundamental laws of the land would remain unchanged, thus ensuring that private property and profits remain sacrosanct in the courts and Congress, and dominant over human needs.

Contrary to popular belief, the political system never really was “ours” to take back. It is and always has existed to serve the interests of the wealthy and promote the profitability of their businesses. On the rare occasions in which laws have been passed that seemed to benefit working people, as has been claimed for the National Labor Relations Act, these laws were merely social bandages designed to mollify the working class and get them back to work after periods of protracted strikes and unrest. They were not the result of “our guys” being elected and acting in our interests, and certainly not a solution to inequality and exploitation. Unemployment, poverty, homelessness and other social ills continued to plague society.

As the Wobblies noted in the preamble to their constitution back in 1904:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life . . . [The] struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class [and prepare] not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, [but] take possession of the means of production [and] abolish the wage system.

America’s Billionaires’ Coup Part II

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Yesterday, in America’s Billionaires’ Coup Part I, I examined an article in Der Spiegel, claiming that the U.S. was becoming a banana republic and that it should no longer be considered part of the West. Today I examine an article by George Monbiot, in the Guardian, UK, on the billionaire’s coup in the U.S.

While Monbiot’s piece makes a much better analysis than the one in Der Spiegel, it suffers from the same faulty premise that things today are substantively different than they were in a romanticized past. A coup implies an illegal or extrajudicial takeover of the state, which is not at all what has happened. The wealthy have (as they always have) used their wealth and power to influence policy in their favor. While there are a few billionaire politicians, most are mere millionaires and humble one-hundred-thousandaires.

Regardless, all three classes of individuals are members of the same ruling class. They are bosses, bankers, financiers, corporate attorneys and entrepreneurs. They share the same interests and they rule to protect those interests. What is different today is that they have become more aggressive and overt in their attacks on the rest of us than they have in several generations.

You can read Monbiot’s article below, with my comments in italics.

Anger, Deceit and a Billionaires’ Coup

 By George Monbiot/ Guardian UK (Britain) / August 2, 2011

Anger and deceit has led the US into a billionaires’ coup. The debt deal will hurt the poorest Americans, convinced by Fox and the Tea Party to act against their own welfare.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

 True—the deal will hurt the poor the most and Americans have been convinced to act against their own welfare. However, there has not been a coup. American politics is functioning the way it always has—as an instrument of capital.

There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor. Not in all cases of course: some taxation is regressive; some state spending takes money from ordinary citizens and gives it to banks, arms companies, oil barons and farmers. But in most cases the state transfers wealth from rich to poor, while tax cuts shift it from poor to rich.

A point of clarification: Income taxes theoretically harm the wealthy more than the rest of us as they have higher incomes and more money to lose. However, relative to overall wealth, they can also afford to lose much more and still come out on top. Furthermore, the marginal tax rate is at its lowest level in decades, with the result that the wealthy get to keep much more of their bloated incomes than they have in the past. In the 1930s, the marginal rate was 64%. From 1940 until 1963 it ranged from 80-92% and never dropped below 50% until 1986, during Reagan’s second term. Nevertheless, the wealthy believe they shouldn’t have to pay any taxes. Emboldened by Reagan and then George W. Bush, they have been screaming and hollering for greater and greater tax cuts. And they have received these cuts in numerous forms, including cuts to the other taxes that primarily affect the rich (e.g., corporate taxes, capital gains taxes and inheritance taxes). The corporate taxe rate, for example, has declined from 52%, in 1952, to 35% today, and most companies pay much less after taking advantage of loopholes. GE, for example, only paid 7.4% last year. Capital gains and inheritance tax rates are also at historical lows.

Government spending benefits the rich and the poor. Spending on the military and on subsidies to oil companies, Big Pharma and Big Ag all benefit the wealthy and amount to transfers of wealth from the working and middle classes to CEOs. The rich by and large support this kind of spending and never refer to it with disparaging terms like “entitlements,” which is reserved for spending that has little or no benefit to them at all (e.g., education, Medicare, social security).

So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99% to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.

All democracies are essentially systems that allow the rabble to vote for their rulers and encourage them to vote against their own interests. The entire basis of the state is to create and defend the conditions necessary for capitalists to increase their profits. The only difference between the U.S. today and whatever alternative that Monbiot is comparing it to, is the severity and intensity (and perhaps transparency).

Partly as a result of the Bush tax cuts of 2001, 2003 and 2005 (shamefully extended by Barack Obama), taxation of the wealthy, in Obama’s words, “is at its lowest level in half a century.” The consequence of such regressive policies is a level of inequality unknown in other developed nations. As the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the past 10 years the income of the top 1% has risen by 18%, while that of blue-collar male workers has fallen by 12%.

Shameful, but expected. After all, Obama is the president. His job is to help the rich help themselves to whatever they want. What is truly shameful is the unions’ acceptance of this. The CTA, for example, not only accepted Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to close the California budget gap with regressive taxes, they actively organized their members to fight for it, rather than demanding that the rich pay higher taxes, something that could not only close the budget gap, but provide a sufficient surplus to raise wages and lower class sizes.

The deal being thrashed out in Congress as this article goes to press seeks only to cut state spending. As the former Republican senator Alan Simpson says: “The little guy is going to be cremated.” That means more economic decline, which means a bigger deficit. It’s insane. But how did it happen?

More decline, bigger deficit and more hysteria on Wall Street. It is ironic that the ruling class insists on stuffing their pockets even at the risk of bringing the economy crashing down and despite the fact that this terrifies them to the point that they liquidate their stock holdings.

The immediate reason is that Republican members of Congress supported by the Tea Party movement won’t budge. But this explains nothing. The Tea Party movement mostly consists of people who have been harmed by tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor and middle. Why would they mobilise against their own welfare? You can understand what is happening in Washington only if you remember what everyone seems to have forgotten: how this movement began.

On Sunday the Observer claimed that “the Tea Party rose out of anger over the scale of federal spending, and in particular in bailing out the banks.” This is what its members claim. It’s nonsense.

The movement started with Rick Santelli’s call on CNBC for a tea party of city traders to dump securities in Lake Michigan, in protest at Obama’s plan to “subsidise the losers.” In other words, it was a demand for a financiers’ mobilisation against the bailout of their victims: people losing their homes. On the same day, a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP) set up a Tea Party Facebook page and started organising Tea Party events. The movement, whose programme is still lavishly supported by AFP, took off from there.

So who or what is Americans for Prosperity? It was founded and is funded by Charles and David Koch. They run what they call “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”, and between them they are worth $43 billion. Koch Industries is a massive oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals company. In the past 15 years the brothers have poured at least $85 million into lobby groups arguing for lower taxes for the rich and weaker regulations for industry. The groups and politicians the Kochs fund also lobby to destroy collective bargaining, to stop laws reducing carbon emissions, to stymie healthcare reform and to hobble attempts to control the banks. During the 2010 election cycle, AFP spent $45m supporting its favoured candidates.

But the Kochs’ greatest political triumph is the creation of the Tea Party movement. Taki Oldham’s film (Astro)Turf Wars shows Tea Party organisers reporting back to David Koch at their 2009 Defending the Dream summit, explaining the events and protests they’ve started with AFP help. “Five years ago,” he tells them, “my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity. It’s beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organisation.”

AFP mobilised the anger of people who found their conditions of life declining, and channelled it into a campaign to make them worse. Tea Party campaigners take to the streets to demand less tax for billionaires and worse health, education and social insurance for themselves.

Are they stupid? No. They have been misled by another instrument of corporate power: the media. The movement has been relentlessly promoted by Fox News, which belongs to a more familiar billionaire. Like the Kochs, Rupert Murdoch aims to misrepresent the democratic choices we face, in order to persuade us to vote against our own interests and in favour of his.

What’s taking place in Congress right now is a kind of political coup. A handful of billionaires have shoved a spanner into the legislative process. Through the candidates they have bought and the movement that supports them, they are now breaking and reshaping the system to serve their interests. We knew this once, but now we’ve forgotten. What hope do we have of resisting a force we won’t even see?

This history of the Tea Party and the influence of the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch is interesting and relevant, but also an incomplete picture. The non-Tea Party Republicans and Democrats have been going along with the Tea Party agenda, and not because of the Tea Party’s strength. The Tea Party is still a minority in Congress. They’ve been going along with it because the Tea Party agenda serves their interests and the interests of their funders and allies.

The Tea Party has identified an historic opening in American politics, with an extremely weak labor movement and left, considerable fear and uncertainty among the populace, and the opportunity to essentially do whatever they wish without fear of resistance. They are taking advantage of this opportunity to massively transfer wealth from taxpayers to the rich, privatize the public sector and crush the labor movement and the left, in general—all things that the rule elite have dreamed about for decades, but have been unable to accomplish, in part because of resistance by labor.

The Democrats and even some liberals in Congress, with no threat of backlash by their traditional constituents, are hedging their bets and going along with the program, thinking this will give them the most leverage in upcoming elections. Sure, many are crying out against the gutting of Medicare or social security, but few are doing anything substantive to defend these and other social programs. They have almost all bought into the hysteria that the deficit must be closed now and are supporting a shrinking of government at precisely the time that government spending must be expanded, not just to extend the safety net to the millions who are still suffering from the recession, but to stimulate the economy sufficiently to end the recession. A reduction in spending will likely prolong the agony or cause a deterioration into a deeper recession.