Labor's Sell-Out and the Sanders Campaign

MAY 23, 2016
Labor’s Sell-Out and the Sanders Campaign
by PAUL BUHLE
Counterpunch

Early last Fall, I received a surprising circular email from a high union officer and erstwhile leader of SDS, way back in the early 1960s. It contained an urgent appeal: get behind Hillary, because this is an era for defensive struggles. The letter-writer had also been an early and articulate opponent of the US invasion of Vietnam. I puzzled at his conversion to the War Candidate. I winced, some months later, as his union staffers crossed the border from my own Wisconsin to work feverishly in Iowa against….the labor candidate, Bernie Sanders, who lost by a hair (perhaps a hair that did not exist!). And again back in Wisconsin, where the best or worst efforts of his union, joined to the purported idealists of the labor movement, SEIU, failed somehow to keep the state in line for Hillary. They could not carry the working class vote.

Echoes of 2011, the year of the great conflict in Wisconsin. Shortly before the occupation of the capitol building, setting off months of intense struggle, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (the earliest of unions to support Hillary and oppose Bernie in 2015) came to town to warn AFT members on campus against rash action. The AFT, whose pet Shanker Institute functionary was the union’s attack dog against opponents of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, could not act otherwise. It has been dominated in every respect by the New York affiliate, UFT, where Shankerism is never out of style, and where domestic reform demands, never be aimed seriously at prestigious neoliberal Democratic officials like Rahm Emanuel, takes second place or last place to the hawkish global agenda. Which is to say: war, war, war, Albert Shanker’s favorite subject as he urged the US on and on toward an elusive Victory in Vietnam. He could not accept the loss, and it troubled him to his last days, when his allies had been driven from AFL leadership and he devolved personally into a symbol of hawkery and of opposition to Affirmative Action within the labor movement. (All credit goes to the AFT membership at the grass roots, especially but not only in Chicago, which has resisted Command Central.) It is easy to imagine that Hillary Clinton channels his ghost, howling for victory in all the next Vietnams, at whatever loss of civilian blood and tax-payer treasure. ...

continued at http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/23/labors-sell-out-and-the-sanders-campaign/