Parting Shot
Winpisinger, William W.
Parting Shot A labor leader blasts the Democrats BY WILLIAM W. WINPISINGER There was a time when Ronald Reagan was considered a right-wing extremist. By the time he left office he'd become a...
...We don't need to spend a lot of time on the Republican Party...
...To rebuild America, we may have to take the labor-party route just as the unions in our NATO allies and most other free-world industrialized countries did long ago...
...Compromise became outright collusion with the corporate and monied interests that have always opposed the path of economic and social justice to which the Democratic Party, on paper at least, and the trade unions are committed...
...We know what its values are: that property is more important than people, that the business of government is to make the world safe for monopolistic corporations and the rest of the Fortune 500, and that the Government should regulate the lives of the poor and working people but never restrict the abusive power of Corporate America...
...We're farmers and working people, caught up in the machinations of private interests in a global economy...
...Trying to act and talk like a conservative didn't work for Jimmy Carter in 1980...
...In other words, to hell with the merits of the issue...
...Dukakis's belated effort to pick up the Jackson campaign themes did spark his final drive, and stands as testimony that a progressive liberal constituency—a democratic socialist constituency—is out there, waiting to be called into action...
...Labor has supplied the backbone and muscle the Democrats have asked for, whether the candidate was a dog, a dead horse, or a winner...
...Today, we have many Democrats who think they ought to represent corporations and those perched on top of the economic pyramid...
...What ever happened to those candidates who took their philosophy and principles seriously and went out to preach the gospel and create the issues and lead the public-opinion polls rather than follow them...
...Twenty or thirty years ago, the Democratic Party thought of itself as the party of the New Deal and the Fair Deal, the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman...
...We're tired of lesser-of-evils, tired of business-as-usual, and tired of those at the top of the economic pyramid calling the shots...
...We've always produced, even when the going was rough...
...to hell with ethics and morality...
...Democrats not only dressed and lived like Republicans, they began talking like Republicans...
...But the Party has changed...
...Our mission is not simply to change riders on political horses...
...We've had enough of the politics of deceit...
...They quarreled with Reagan only over details of his policies instead of fighting tooth and nail against the whole disastrous program...
...Former Iowa Democratic Chairman Lex Hawkins used to say, "Vote Democratic so you can live like a Republican...
...But in Minnesota and North Dakota, between 90 and 95 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls...
...The retreat to the right, at first by slow and stubborn compromise, became a rout...
...That is what a majority of voters across the country are doing, because no one is articulating their viewpoint, which I believe is left of center...
...It is dead wrong to advocate the ideals of the banking community...
...Don't take the majority of Americans for turkeys...
...The free labor market means you are free to stand in long unemployment lines...
...Outside the esoteric confines of Congressional committees and the special-interest politics of Washington, compromise, centrism, and middle-of-the-roaders have little coin of credibility...
...Go with the flow...
...And now they tell us, "Let them eat cake...
...We watch what they do, not what they say...
...These alternative-party movements gave voters a clear choice...
...Nor does the oil and gas industry...
...Hard times forced farmers and trade unions to form the Greenback Party in the 1870s and 1880s, William Jennings Bryan's Populist Party in the 1890s, Eugene Debs's Socialist Party in the early 1900s, and North Dakota's Nonpartisan Political League, Wisconsin's Progressive Party, and Minnesota's Farmer Labor Party in the 1920s...
...We are realists...
...It was devastated by its Presidential defeats in the 1970s and 1980s...
...William W. Winpisinger retires July 1 as president of the International Association of Machinists (AFL-CIO...
...We've had enough of the so-called free market...
...That appealed to many people...
...There was none of that masquerading, where conservatives wrapped themselves in Democratic garb and mouthed "radical" rhetoric, while preserving the status quo...
...The median income of delegates to recent Democratic national conventions was just a little under the income of delegates to Republican conventions...
...It's when their lips move...
...Those groups were not tiny, sectarian splinter parties...
...It is precisely for this reason that the Democratic Party must now decide whether it will make the trade unions and working people the core of its constituency, and hence its beneficiaries, or continue to play to the rich...
...The free market doesn't set interest-rate levels in this country...
...These are gentrified Democrats—dandies who chase fads, trends, and corporate PAC money...
...This article is adapted from his book, "Reclaiming Our Future: An Agenda for American Labor," edited by John Logue and published in July by West-view Press...
...That means capital is always free to pull up stakes, shut down the plant, pack up its bags, transfer investments and technology overseas, and move out on us, leaving workers and whole communities stranded in the wake...
...Here's the way Representative Douglas Bosco, Democrat of California, stated it for The Wall Street Journal in 1985, after the plant-closing bill was defeated: "Members are broadening their views about where they can get contributions, and both Republicans and Democrats sometimes feel it's worthwhile to be amenable to both sides...
...Those campaigns left it short of money and woefully short of ideas...
...We can stay home on election day and boycott the electoral process...
...We resent being told we have to support the Democratic Party because there's no place else to go...
...There is a simple, powerful message in that experience for today's Democratic Party: Be honest...
...Through political action committees (PACs) and political contributions, Corporate America has bought the only major political party it didn't already own...
...It was the working people's party, striving for a fairer deal for all Americans regardless of race and sex, a party that tried to achieve basic economic rights for all...
...It wasn't the free market that bailed out the Chrysler Corporation, and it isn't the free market that is bailing out mismanaged savings-and-loan associations...
...Go with Big Money...
...The working people of this country inside and outside the trade unions are fully entitled to an open discussion of the issues...
...they were realistic alternatives to the bipartisan two-headed calf...
...We could live with that...
...And it didn't work for Michael Dukakis in 1988...
...That's what the Democratic Party needs right now: leaders, not followers...
...Even liberal Democrats have moved to embrace or be embraced by the pro-business lucre and succor...
...We want no more Democrats with Republican spots—liberals practicing fiscal conservatism...
...They accept the myths of Corporate America as if they were the gospel...
...Hard times were the incubator of alliances between farmers and union workers...
...Someone must speak for that half of the American electorate that has chosen to boycott the last five elections...
...The importance of that early Farmer-Labor honesty was seen in voter participation: Throughout the 1920s, during Harding, Coolidge and Hoover "prosperity," voter participation nationwide fell below 50 per cent...
...We do have some place to go...
...Democrats used to offer us half a loaf rather than a whole loaf...
...If ERA, gun control, abortion, redbaiting, and other moral-majority issues are all that distinguishes Republicans from Democrats, the time has arrived for progressives and trade unions either to take over the Democratic Party or to form an alternative party...
...The time is ripe for the Democratic Party to reassert its traditional values, regroup its coalition, and reassert its traditional populism and progressivism...
...If we in the trade unions are going to achieve our goals in politics, we have to ask Democratic candidates who talk and think and vote like corporate Republicans why we should answer their call for help...
...The only markets that are "free" are those for capital and labor...
...In the 1988 Presidential ordeal, only Jesse Jackson addressed the real issues, stirred the common people's enthusiasm, and played to traditional Democratic Party values...
...We've stuck by the Democratic Party through thick and thin...
...People simply aren't a bunch of illiterate political nerds, as conventional wisdom too often implies...
...We all know Reagan's program could not have passed without their votes...
...And we've had enough of those Democrats who join their erstwhile Republican opponents in promoting the free-market rip-off...
...Year in and year out, for as long as I can remember, the Democrats have been coming to the unions— usually after they picked the Party's national chair, the state chair, and the candidates for public office—to ask for our money, our votes, and our workers...
...We must tell our pinto Democrats with the spreading conservative spots that if they want to think and act and vote like Republicans, they should move over to the Republican side of the aisle...
...principles, not public-relations posturing...
...The Democratic Party no longer speaks for them because it has mortgaged its vision and its ideals apparently for a handful of corporate cash...
...There can be no doubt that the major stockholder in both major parties is Corporate America...
...Then it became a slice of bread...
...By the time he left office he'd become a mainstream moderate...
...The capital-gains crowd is calling the shots in both camps...
...Then it was crumbs...
...We watch your hands, not your lips...
...The figures put the leadership of both major parties in the top 4 per cent of the nation's income-receivers...
...When the Republicans are giving the country away to the corporate bankrollers, it is not enough that Democrats promote a few cosmetic liberal reforms to provide temporary solutions to old grievances and problems, but do nothing to restructure and change the fundamental causes which created the problems in the first place...
...They do it even when events and reality force them to abandon it, as happens regularly...
...feeling and reason united, not smooth-mouthed economic jargon and social gob-bledygook...
...it is to change our system of political economy itself...
...It is no service to democracy to have two major parties spouting the same line, serving the same corporate masters...
...opinion molders— academics, corporate chiefs, media pundits, and political party leadership at the national level...
...We never asked for a 100 per cent voting record or even, in most cases, consultation prior to a vote...
...Clearly, his message and values delivered a clarion call to Democrats and nonvoters to join their hearts and minds in an effort to throw off the yoke of right-wing conservatism that still presses so heavily on so many...
...to hell with economic and social justice...
...Farmers and workers—those who actually produce in our society—have repeatedly formed third parties to press their demands when the two old parties became sclerotic...
...But for racism, Jackson would have been the people's choice in 1988...
...It didn't work for Walter Mondale in 1984...
...And when the corporate PACs were unleashed in 1974 by a Democratic Congress, their conservative spots began to get bigger and bigger...
...We've had enough of the politics of sameness...
...It is perhaps all right to have a wealthy banking lawyer as head of the Democratic National Committee...
...This country doesn't need two Republican parties...
...But a funny thing started happening in the 1970s...
...That didn't mean Reagan had moved to the left, but it does demonstrate that there was a massive shift to the right by U.S...
...But, damn it, he said live like a Republican, not think like one, not believe like one, not vote like one...
...Every time Democrats try to win elections by talking and acting like conservative Republicans, they make chumps of us in the trade-union movement...
...The Pentagon, of course, hardly operates on the principles of the free market...
...It is time to do our level best to restore the Democratic Party to its role as the workers' party, as the party of the people, a party of peace and prosperity, not war and poverty...
...In fact, I don't know what's holding up the merger that usually follows this sort of corporate acquisition...
...the Federal Reserve and a tight little band of big bankers control the supply of money and credit and determine interest rates...
...We are not getting it from the Democrats...
...At the top, the Democrats demonstrated how far they had moved to the right by their determination to compete for the same 26 per cent of the electorate that the Republicans represent...
...There are still plenty of Democrats who believe in those traditions...
...There is a large progressive constituency, with a trade-union and worker core, if Democratic candidates at all levels would only appeal to it...
...Copyright © 1989, Westview Press...
...Or we can begin to build our own progressive party with a hard-core trade-union constituency...
...The fundamental fact of our political system today is that there is little or no difference between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to matters of economic policy...
...It is my belief that a progressive candidate from the Left, who doesn't waffle and doesn't break out with conservative spots of fiscal fever or militarism, could keep faith with the Democratic Party faithful and could attract a majority of the biggest party of all—the nonvoters' party— in 1992 and beyond...
...I'm one...
...Someone must speak for the other 74 per cent...
...All we asked in return was that the Party, its candidates, and elected officials and office holders represent at least some of our interests on some of the issues...
...But we did expect that in a crunch, when an issue was up that could literally mean life or death to trade unions as viable institutions in a democratic society, when an issue was so clearly drawn that our enemies on the right and our employers presented a united axis against us, Democrats would line up on our side and give us that critical vote we sorely needed...
...That may be right if it is restricted to areas such as fund-raising, organization, candidate schools, direct-mail lists, and other tools of the political trade, but it is dead wrong if it extends to principles and ideology...
...Both parties continue to blab a blind and babbling faith in the free-market mythology...
...We can usually tell when establishment politicians and middle-of-the-roaders—fence straddlers—are lying...
...We are at that watershed...
...Its inability to stand up to Republicans has led many Democrats to ape the Republicans...
Vol. 53 • July 1989 • No. 7
