Sounds like the unions are considering Trumka like the libs consider Obama...

Will Trumka or the Steelworkers Push Labor Into Battle?
By JOANN WYPIJEWSKI

http://www.counterpunch.org/jw09212009.html


I was wrong. In my dispatch previewing the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh, on this site last week, I predicted that the grassroots initiative for a resolution to commit the labor federation to a single-payer health care policy would present the convention with one real debate. I should have known better. Except in rare instances and rare unions, conventions are not fora for debate. They are elaborately choreographed events, with any disputation occurring offstage, in the late hours or early morning or, most likely, preceding weeks, and everything compromised out by the time issues reach the convention floor. Success is measured by vote after vote going exactly as the leadership planned. It is the live manifestation of the organizer’s credo: a good meeting is one with no surprises.

So it was in Pittsburgh. You might call it repressive tolerance. The single payer resolution went forward. Vigorous advocates took to the microphones to speak for it. No one challenged them, and the convention voted unanimously to adopt the resolution. Then it took up the AFL leadership’s health care resolution, which no one challenged and also sailed through without opposition. It supports employer-based coverage and a public option, opposes any tax on benefits or on high-cost plans, endorses an insurance market exchange, regulation of the insurance industry, improvements in Medicare and an additional income tax on the top 1 per cent. Gerry MacEntee, president of AFSCME, introduced that resolution with a broadside on Senator Max Baucus’s plan, presenting the most humorous moment in the convention, trying to rouse outrage in the half-filled hall like a borscht belt comedian working for laughs. “C’mon, this is bullshit!” he shouted, his jaw mashing gum, his face livid. He repeated the word several times before the crowd finally joined him in a chorus of “Bullshit,” promising to call their senators because, as MacEntee put it, “we elected Democrats in the Senate, the House and the White House, and they must do better.”
It was a bit of theatrics from one of an old breed of union leaders, vulgar and angry, a performance, however, that would never be repeated in Washington in an open rally of massed workers, in front of real Democrats, or rolling cameras, in back rooms or for broadcast to the wider world where it might actually embarrass those who have benefited so much from organized labor’s money and electoral organization.

Some of my left journalist colleagues at the convention were grousing that the delegates warmly welcomed Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Spector, who said he thought single payer should be on the table even if he didn’t back it (a little political calculation that support for this might grow as Congressional reform efforts become ever-more degraded?) and who called labor law reform legislation “the Employee Choice Act”, somehow omitting the “Free” and telling reporters that all were agreed that card check was dead. But the test isn’t in who gets to be an invited guest or how polite or even enthusiastic delegates might be in greeting them within the confines of a convention. President Obama had only to mention the Employee Free Choice Act and the public option for the delegates, already electrified, to whoop their approval. No, the test is in whether labor would ever upset the President’s polite politics of accommodation and use the club of its money and its troops to threaten Democrats when it counted.

A few days after the convention I was having lunch with Mike Stout, a rank-and-file leader of the first order, a man who back in the 1980s was at the front of the Steel Workers fight against US Steel’s mass shutdowns in Pennsylvania. We were in Homestead, at a place called Mitchell’s Fish Market, which occupies the exact spot where all those years ago once sat the management office of the gargantuan Homestead steel works. In that place where Mike used to file grievances we were now enjoying blackened salmon (him) and a toothsome Asian-style steelhead (me). The restaurant is about midway in a four and a half mile stretch of monuments to the consumer economy, four and a half miles that once held one of the greatest steel-producing operations in the country, the place that made the structural steel for the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center, the Verazanno Narrows Bridge and the Golden Gate, and that was seized by FDR in 1942 to produce armor plating for World War II. Mike now runs Steel Valley Printing a few blocks away, a union shop that was busy turning out fliers and leaflets for the upcoming G-20 protests in Pittsburgh.

He was recalling the phone banking and other political apparatus that labor set up in Allegheny County for last year’s election. It was very elaborate, very well funded and organized. It is what labor does extremely well, hence, as one union official told me, why the political program was front and center in almost every discussion at the convention. “You’re always going to highlight what you do well at a convention,” the official said. “We don’t do a lot of other things nearly so well.” Obama probably won Pennsylvania and Ohio because of that apparatus. There are a lot of old white union people in both states, and as the now-president of the AFL-CIO Rich Trumka said from the podium, old white labor people supported Obama by more than 70 per cent, as opposed to old white non-labor people who supported McCain by almost the same margin. You would think, Mike Stout said, that all that organization and proven expertise could be leveraged for favorable policy on key issues, yet today even progressive Democrats have complained to him and other local supporters of single payer that they wished labor would organize something besides letter-writing campaigns and phone-ins to counteract the army of industry lobbyists who pound the halls of Congress every single day.

At the convention there were long hushed moments when all the delegates were busy phoning their representatives, calling or texting Congress to push for labor law reform, to push for health care reform. There were no appeals from the stage to take to the street or even to clog Congressional halls with bodies of workers. There were no demands or even apparent inclination to mobilize workers to march. While the front page of the local papers carried pictures of tens of thousands of right-wingers massing in Washington, the proceedings in the hall were abstracted from any version of what the AFL used to call Street Heat.

“I wish they’d at least threaten to get militant”, Mike Stout said. “At least they could say, if you don’t do a, b and c you don’t get this political operation, you don’t get one cent; you get opposition. Organized labor still has a club, but if they don’t use it soon they’re going to be like the old-timers reminiscing about the old times in the back of a bar.”

The hope of using a club, defined as making labor’s case to the wider public, activating the membership and punishing Democrats for betrayal, is what delegate after delegate to the convention, from union presidents to rank-and-file leaders of small labor councils, told me they saw in the coronation of Trumka. It became almost a prayer: his very presence and style will animate the unions; his eagerness to be seen and heard might change the way Americans think about unions; “he may just be the shock therapy needed to shock the employers,” as Teachers union president Randi Weingarten put it to the convention. The pageant before Trumka’s formal pronouncement as president was full of sentimentality and tears. The great Pittston strike of 1989-90 was given a passing mention, but over

all, as Jon Flanders, an alternate delegate from Troy said, the message was of “the worker as iconic victim, and the great leader who will raise them up.”

For all the expressed hope, and Trumka’s occasional sabre rattling, there is no sign yet that a Trumka-led AFL will be different from its predecessors, and without a heightened political energy and organization coming from the ranks—the club that Mike Stout was referring to more than the will or bluster of a single individual at the top—it can’t be different. For all the money poured into elections—possibly as much as $350 million counting all of organized labor—unions don’t have the stroke in Congress and the White House that money is supposed to buy. For labor, the calculus of power is not the same as it is for business: organization, numbers, the ability to gum up the works, should pay off more. People wonder why unions don’t hold the Democrats’ feet to the fire, but the belief that money must necessarily buy influence misses the harder point.


As CWA president Larry Cohen put it, “We have expectations that come from an earlier time. I inherited a political culture based on a strong labor movement. We don’t have that. What it means to win an election in Brazil, even with the huge problems they have there, is different for unions than it is for us here. Brazil is 30 per cent organized [the US is 12 per cent, including the public sector]. They have a different kind of alliance building. So they get different results [from a favorable election result] than we’re going to get here.” Cohen was at the convention focusing on labor law reform and labor unity. Reform is vital, he stressed, to combat the most antiworker environment in the Western world and even much of the Third World. But even with dwindling percentages, unions (whether in the AFL or not) represent 16 million people. That many people, if educated, animated, organized at the shop level, and unified in strategic alliances, have at least the possibility of presenting a formidable force.

Will they? The convention offered no sign that labor as a whole was interested in its membership’s potential power outside elections. Here amid the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression it was almost as if that wider crisis didn’t exist. The Machinists were handing out T-shirts saying “Jobs Now” and had a room upstairs from the hall with close-up photographs of some of its 30,000 members who have lost their jobs in the past eight months. It also had a forbidding map showing the spread of joblessness across the country. A resolution approved by the convention reminded everyone that real unemployment, affecting some 31 million people, was the worst in US history and a second stimulus of job creation, modeled on the WPA, is necessary. Otherwise, you would not have known there is disaster spreading in the working class.

The Steel Workers handed out a flier urging people to “March for Jobs” in Pittsburgh on September 20. “If you don’t have a job, fight to get one”, it proclaimed. “If you have one – fight to keep it.” Among all of organized labor only the United Steel Workers are supporting a march calling for jobs for all; a moratorium on layoffs, foreclosures and eviction; health care for all; no cuts in social services, and funds “for peoples needs, not war and greed.” It was easy to miss, and I didn’t hear any call at the convention for workers to rally, just as I didn’t hear any evocation of labor’s fighting history to inspire a renewed fight today. Mike Stout and a comrade Charles McCollester had suggested that the convention might want to do a cultural program for delegates built around McCollester’s terrific new book, The Point of Pittsburgh, about the way in which the working classes of Pittsburgh paved what became the future not just with their sweat but their intelligence and militancy. That never happened. At least Michael Moore was asked to premier his fierce new documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, some delegates said. At least that one attack on capitalism as a system, as opposed to the usual railing against corporate greed, got through.

People said there was no sign at the convention of what Trumka’s program might be (other than belt-tightening at the financially strapped federation) because John Sweeney was in the hall. It would have been unseemly, as if a criticism of the outgoing leadership. So there was rhetoric and a promise of unity and the capper of UNITE HERE marching into the hall on the last day to announce their reaffiliation. Four years ago, it had been the right thing to walk out of the federation, UNITE HERE president John Wilhelm told the press; “no regrets”. What prompted his return now was not his union’s need for money, support, a home in its ongoing war with SEIU, he added, but rather President Obama’s election, and the new opportunities that presents for a unified labor movement. MacEntee and the rest could have risen in another chorus of “Bullshit” had Wilhelm said that in front of them, but the excitement of the hotel workers who had accompanied their union chief into the hall and onto the stage appeared genuine. And so did the expressed hopes of other low-tier unionists that a change is going to come.

One of Trumka’s first acts as president was to tour Ohio drumming up the support for jobs, health care and financial reform, then travel to Atlanta to condemn predatory financial practices at a rally outside Wachovia Bank, and from there head to New York to hold a press conference at Wall Street calling on Congress to reregulate the financial system and reign in executive pay. The AFL’s press release said, “This tour is just the beginning of a long campaign to rebuild the American labor movement and lead a broad progressive social movement to Turn America Around and restore hope to America's working families and future generations.” Maybe. Meanwhile, the Steel Workers will be the only union marching before the G-20, demanding jobs and proclaiming that “The unemployed, the homeless, the hungry and the poor must no longer be invisible & silent.”


JoAnn Wypijewski writes for CounterPunch, The Nation and other publications. She can be reached at jwyp@earthlink.net

10:35 PM (10 hours ago)


Can Trumka deliver?
Lee Sustar asks whether the change in the AFL-CIO will be a step forward
for labor.

September 22, 2009

THE U.S. labor movement has a new leader at a time of great peril--but
does it have a new strategy that can meet the challenges of the worst
economic crisis since the 1930s?

Richard Trumka's ascension to the presidency of the AFL-CIO will likely
give the labor federation--still weakened from a split in 2005--a more
assertive voice. Significantly, AFL-CIO convention delegates voted to
approve a resolution calling for a Medicare-for-all, "single-payer"
system, and also reaffirmed antiwar positions taken at the 2005
convention.

There were other notable changes: Liz Shuler takes over from Trumka as
Secretary-Treasurer--at 39, she is the youngest-ever to hold that post.
Arlene Holt Baker was elected Executive Vice President, the first
African American woman to gain that position. And Trumka is pushing an
initiative to organize young workers--an effort critical to labor's
renewal.

So Trumka takes over with a new look for a federation often called
"pale, male and stale."

It should be recalled, though, Trumka has been around for 14 years--time
enough to have had an impact on the direction of the labor federation.
His ascension was long expected--and long overdue, given outgoing
president John Sweeney's broken promise to retire years ago.

Trumka, the former president of the United Mine Workers of America, was
known for aggressive tactics in the 1989 Pittston coal strike. Many in
the labor movement believed--or at least hoped--that he would propel the
agenda that Sweeney outlined when he took over the AFL-CIO in 1995.

In fact, there was a brief moment in the '90s when it looked like
Sweeney's AFL-CIO would offer a tougher response to the employers'
anti-labor onslaught. During the victorious 1997 UPS strike, Sweeney
stood on the picket line beside then-Teamsters President Ron Carey, a
reformer who had ousted the federation's old guard. The Teamsters won a
resounding victory--and labor appeared poised to surge forward.

There were some other important strike victories in the months
afterward. But an employer-sponsored witch-hunt of Carey led to his
ouster on charges of corruption--and AFL-CIO leaders did nothing.
Prosecutors alleged that Trumka himself participated in a
money-laundering effort to help Carey's re-election effort in the
Teamsters, but Trumka was never prosecuted. It was clearly an effort to
intimidate Trumka, Sweeney and any other labor leader who stood up to
employers or the government.

While Sweeney's rhetoric was more militant than his conservative
predecessor, Lane Kirkland, the New Voices leadership was always
interested in union-management partnership.

Sweeney sought a return to the 1950s and 1960s, when leaders of Big
Labor and Big Business hashed out national contracts covering millions
of workers, and Big Government acted as referee. In reality, labor was
always a junior partner--and employers only tolerated unions. Beginning
in the early 1970s, Corporate America launched a war on unions that
continues unabated to this day.

Thus, the Sweeney years saw labor's continued slide in the percentage of
workers represented by unions, even though stronger organizing efforts
did boost the total number of workers in unions in recent years. Today,
unions--which once represented about a third of workers in the 1950s,
almost all at private employers--represent just 7.6 percent of workers
in the private sector and 12.4 percent overall. The job losses in the
current recession will drive that number still lower.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

GIVEN THE rhetoric of the New Voices team in 1995, one might have
expected labor to respond to these attacks with protests and action.

Instead, Sweeney kept a fairly low profile and focused on gearing up
labor's political operation, even as the federation blew through
millions of dollars and was hammered financially by the 2005 breakaway
of Change to Win, a union coalition that took away some of the AFL-CIO's
biggest affiliates, including the Service Employees International Union,
the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers union (another
union, UNITE HERE, has since re-affiliated).

One of the chief complaints of the Change to Win unions was that the
AFL-CIO was spending too much on politics and not enough on
organizing--although the SEIU itself went all-out for the 2008 elections
and the breakaway unions have had little success in organizing, either.

For the AFL-CIO, the consequences have been grim. As journalist JoAnn
Wypijewski put it:

[The balance sheet] is steeped in red now. The numbers aren't fully
known, but the federation's debt is said by one union leader to be in
the neighborhood of $24 million. The money gained from royalties on the
Union Plus card, which once accounted for something like 30 percent of
the federation's revenue, has been blown, as have most of the operating
reserves. What had been a $66 million surplus in 2000 has vanished, to
the point where the Machinists' Tom Buffenbarger warned earlier in the
year that "insolvency might be right around the corner."

None of this, however, impeded the federation's spending on politics:
$40 million on the 2006 elections, $7.5 million lobbying in 2007 and
2008 combined, $54 million on the 2008 elections. That in turn is
dwarfed by the $250 million spent in the last election by all the AFL's
affiliated unions.

At one level, this was a success: Democrats again control both houses of
Congress and the White House after 14 years dominated by the
Republicans. The question is, what will labor get for its efforts?

The unions' top legislative priority, the Employee Free Choice Act
(EFCA), which would simplify the process of union organizing, has been
gutted and set aside in Congress and ignored by the White House.

Nevertheless, President Barack Obama got a hero's welcome at the AFL-CIO
convention. The president declared that he "stands behind" EFCA, and
touted the federal government's bailout of General Motors as saving
jobs--even though the terms of the government's loans to the company
involved the elimination of thousands of union jobs.

Shortly before the convention, the Obama administration did throw labor
a bone in the form of a 35 percent duty on tires imported from China--in
response to a request from the United Steelworkers union, which claims
that 7,000 jobs in the U.S. have been lost due to unfair competition.
This set the stage for repeated China-bashing at the convention, as
several keynote speakers sounded old-school "Buy American" themes as the
solution to job losses and the downward slide of living standards.

For example, a resolution passed calling for a "National Strategy for
Economic Recovery and Sustained Growth" reads:

We urge Congress to introduce and pass a comprehensive trade bill
giving our government the tools it needs to address the Chinese
government's currency manipulation and illegal subsidies, strengthening
our trade laws and their enforcement, ensuring the safety of our imports
and protecting intellectual property rights. The Obama administr

ation
must address all these issues, as well as systematic workers' rights
violations, in its bilateral dialogue with the Chinese government.

Certainly China's violation of workers and human rights should be a
concern of labor organizations everywhere.

But targeting China for protectionist measures inevitably undercuts
what's really needed--international solidarity with Chinese workers,
who, by the way, could teach U.S. labor leaders a lesson or two about
how to conduct protests against rapacious employers.

And China isn't responsible for public sector workers' pay cuts,
furloughs and layoffs from coast to coast. It isn't Chinese bureaucrats
who are to blame for an economic stimulus plan that puts rebuilding
highway on-ramps ahead of constructing schools or hiring more teachers,
let alone stopping layoffs.

China isn't funneling trillions of dollars to bail out banks and paying
bankers' bonuses with U.S. taxpayer money. It isn't Chinese bureaucrats
who are pouring millions into lobbying efforts to keep U.S. workers from
organizing. And it was--to repeat the point--Barack Obama, not Chinese
officials, who imposed a "rescue" of the U.S. auto industry that
required United Auto Workers not only to eliminate jobs, but also
eliminate decades of work rules and gut benefits.

At its worst, the China-bashing recalls labor's terrible Cold War
history, when top labor leaders were integral parts of the U.S. foreign
policy establishment, helping to smash left-wing labor dissidents in
U.S. allies in the Third World and promoting stooge unions in their
place.

While these "AFL-CIA" operations were given a makeover in the Sweeney
years as the labor federation supported more progressive figures
internationally, they've never been abandoned--and labor's foreign
policy operations are funded almost entirely by government money.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

IF TRUMKA is going to revive U.S. labor, he'll have to do it with the
kind of grassroots organizing seen by AFL-CIO leaders as irrelevant or
unwelcome. While its unrealistic to expect the AFL-CIO to transform
itself entirely--it is, after all, a bureaucracy on top of a
bureaucracy--the federation could give important struggles a high
profile and promote solidarity.

That's exactly why workers in the Illinois "War Zone" struggles of
1994-1995 looked to Trumka when he took over as AFL-CIO Secretary
Treasurer. The locked-out workers at the A.E. Staley food processing
plant and the strikers at Bridgestone-Firestone and Caterpillar hoped
Trumka could mobilize national support for the struggle.

But the promised support never materialized, and these important
struggles ended in defeat. And during eight years of George W. Bush's
relentlessly anti-union reign, the AFL-CIO never once called a national
protest in Washington.

Now that Trumka is calling the shots, will labor be willing to take the
streets of the capital and demand change?

If it means challenging Barack Obama directly, the answer is almost
certainly "no." For all the talk of a tougher union leadership under
Trumka, Democratic control of the White House and Congress means that
the AFL-CIO will continue to be drawn into the Washington insiders'
game--which means labor's agenda will be an adjunct to the Democrats,
and set aside whenever it gets in the way of White House priorities.

The irony is striking: Under Republican rule, labor leaders claimed that
all resources must be put into electing Democrats, rather than
mobilizing or demonstrating. But under Democrats, labor must work with
its allies--which means no mobilizing or demonstrating.

Perhaps the scale of the crisis will force the AFL-CIO to do more, and
Trumka will prove more open to action than Sweeney. But that's only
going to happen if there's a big push from below--both within the unions
and from workers outside them who press ahead with organizing on their
own.

The U.S. working class needs a fighting labor movement now more than
ever. But the initiative to build one is going to have to come from the
grassroots.

http://socialistworker.org/2009/09/22/can-trumka-deliver

Where's the grassroots? Here???

Missed Trumka at the Steelworkers meeting this morning. Did catch the President of the USW twice today. Will right more later I am too fucking worn out to rant right now.

"Where's the grassroots? Here???"

What if it is just us. Then what?

I think it is. I think we underestimate how important we are, and what we could do.

In the middle of the article Mary quoted, it talks about China bashing and the USWs successful attempt to get import duties or tariffs or whatever on Chinese tires. There is ALOT of anti-Chinese product sentiment there. It is borderline whether it is "China bashing" because they paper it over with talk of "fair trade". I found it offputting because it beaks so sharply from some of their other talk and it is VERY real and VERY pronounced.

In other less consequential news the Steelworkers president Leo Gerard prounces the word "film" FIL-UM. At first I thought he was saying phylum..not so bad except he said the word about 20 times..

...and it is VERY real and VERY pronounced.


That is how I "hear" the stuff people write about Israel and about 911 and other issues. It is "papered over" with various leftie sounding stuff, but in the context - no passion whatsoever, or even interest in class analysis or anything left wing, and then completely obsessed over Israel or 911 and posting about it again and again and again, as though THIS is what really matters - it is very pronounced.

Should we not be in solidarity with the workers in China? Is it not the same capitalists controlling things whether something is manufactured in China or here?

In the middle of the article Mary quoted, it talks about China bashing and the USWs successful attempt to get import duties or tariffs or whatever on Chinese tires. There is ALOT of anti-Chinese product sentiment there. It is borderline whether it is "China bashing" because they paper it over with talk of "fair trade". I found it offputting because it beaks so sharply from some of their other talk and it is VERY real and VERY pronounced.

In other less consequential news the Steelworkers president Leo Gerard prounces the word "film" FIL-UM. At first I thought he was saying phylum..not so bad except he said the word about 20 times..


The article prompted these comments directly related to this on the discussion group from which I got the article:


The hope for raising prices on Chinese tires is that the demand for US
> made tires will increase. So, do we still have an opportunity to get
> these manufacturing workers organized into strong unions or it the
> competition from China going to keep wages down and union members
> afraid?


This tariff is a concession to the leaders of organized labor.
Unfortunately this sort of thing leads to trade wars of retaliation,
which in the thirties only made the depression worse.

Economic nationalism is not the answer for workers. International
solidarity is.

There is an abundance of "Clean Jobs" and "Climate Change" talk going around, much more of that than people vocally talking about jobs and housing and healthcare (seriously, what people put on signs and what they actually talk about are way different)

Most of whats said is pretty terrible IMO -- like Al Gore+Green Jobs is going to save the world.

There is an abundance of "Clean Jobs" and "Climate Change" talk going around, much more of that than people vocally talking about jobs and housing and healthcare (seriously, what people put on signs and what they actually talk about are way different)

Most of whats said is pretty terrible IMO -- like Al Gore+Green Jobs is going to save the world.


I can hardly understand this "clean Jobs" bullshit, it is such obvious hype, as though this initiative will be of the scale to do a damn bit of good. Rather I see a job program for the middleclass all guilt free and noble, who could argue against it? But who could believe it either? Self absorbed suburbanites is my only guess.

I don't care if they are green, purple, or orange jobs - as long as jobs come soon. For all skill levels. Cut defense and do away with all the capital gains freebies that Reagan Bush et al provided to the uber-wealthy would be a start to fund some make-work projects. And they do need to make work of some sort, people are getting antsy. It makes me very nervous and if the Obama supporters had brains in their heads they would be nervous too. As I've mentioned before, I live down here in red land (and not the good red). These folks actually like Glenn Beck, and they are buying up guns and ammunition so fast that the manufacturers can't keep up. Really not the kind of "change" we need, and they are serious.

Should we not be in solidarity with the workers in China? Is it not the same capitalists controlling things whether something is manufactured in China or here?


Absolutely critical point.

You might call it repressive tolerance.

That is what we are up against everywhere. Left wing points of view are tolerated - at DU, in "free speech zones" - provided things are set up so that they can never have any effect or go anywhere.


Success is measured by vote after vote going exactly as the leadership planned.

Exactly the way every organization is run, and how all left wing politics are blocked. Left wing politics are "just ideas" - opinions - and have no other value. Many liberals will say "sure left wing ideas are popular with 'people' (the unwashed mob, the extras in our grand production), that goes without saying - freedom, liberty, equality and all of that sentimental stuff. But that doesn't mean anything, because we - the smart people in charge - have to be practical."

Isn't this fascinating? The entire membership could support something - single-payer for example - and that doesn't matter. Few say "hey wait a minute. If the membership supports single-payer, then why doesn't the organization?"

Two imaginary realms are created with an impassable iron wall between them. There is "what we want" and then there is "reality." What people desperately need is to be seen as merely what they want and is automatically therefore not legitimate, is impractical.

"Oh sure you can rally the mob with these visions of health care for all, and decent jobs etc. Sure they would want those things. Who wouldn't? They are just greedy to get more like everyone else."

In other words, the people don't have the power, and since they don't have the power they don't have any power, so they don't have any power. Power is all that matters. Our adversaries know that, but are not honest about it. PH will never say "hey this is all about kissing ass to those in power, and I have no interest in challenging that." But they predicate all of their thinking on power - we must compromise with, give in to, accept the rule of those with power - that is called "practical" and "realistic" and is necessary if we "want to get things done."

No activism, no rallying of the people, no changing of people's belief systems can ever have any effect on anything. Even when you are able to persuade most of the people, the very fact that most of the people are persuaded means that the idea will fail. By definition, if the mob wants it, it cannot be a good thing and it will not happen. Why? Because those in power - everywhere - see the people as the enemy, and it serves them for us to see what is popular as suspect, to also see the people as the enemy.

The voice of any person in any position of power is to be seen as a thousand times, ten thousand times, a hundred thousand times more important than the voice of a person not in a position of power.

It doesn't matter if you convert a hundred thousand people to support single-payer so long as those one hundred thousand people are not equal to the one person in a position of power.

Until and unless we challenge that, nothing can change, and that - the few dictating to the many, and everyone rolling over for that - happens everywhere all of the time.

I am stating the obvious here, yet we never talk or act as though it were true, let alone obvious.

Why is our response to this "we need to lobby harder for single payer" rather than "hey wait a minute. No matter what we lobby for, no matter how successful we are, it doesn't have any effect. The real problem here is the few having more power than the many, everywhere, at all times, in every organization, with every activity, and on every subject, and they use that power to promote the agenda of the welthy and powerful few at all times - for the sake of their own access to power. We are being sold out again and again. The better we do, the worse we do. We are continually being suckered into a losing proposition, a rigged game."

On edit, Don't quit, keep talking Mike...