Is Socialism Stick Ball

Arieh,

Barack Obama can pog mo hoin (That is Irish Gaelic for kiss my ass!). He is the second most loathsome individual with a chance to be elected president of the United States of America. The Social Democrats, USA-Socialist Party of America did not endorse Obama for Obama's benefit.

We know that Obama is plenty capable of taking care of his own ambitions at any cost to others. He was friendly with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhine who gave up bombing the Ladies' Rooms of government and corporate buildings, but never gave up their commitment to far-left politics after their wealth prevented their prosecutions. At the same time Obama palled around with the faculty of the University of Chicago's pro-fascist business and economics departments. Obama's other known associates included the Richard Daley, Jr's Chicago political machine and Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. Of course Obama can dispense with a friend as easily as make one. He treated the Rev Jeremiah Wright as a pariah. This is the man he claimed "brought me to God" and he married Obama and his wife and baptized their children. Wright's speech had some very intemperate language, but in other regards was little different than the address given by Dr. Martin Luther King to the Riversides Church during the Vietnam conflict. Arieh, you make an excellant point about the Social Democrats page at Obama website. Thirteen people raised more than $9,000 for Obama (This is nearly as much as the 500 members of the Socialist Party of the United States of America raised for their presidential candidate nationally.)

Obama's election will continue the progress of a broad tradition of liberal Democratic tradition that has always been extremely flawed. FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Humphrey, were all tainted by the excesses of war. Most of them also reneged on commitments to Labor, minorities, and the poor. I certainly do not believe that blacks are voting for Obama, they are voting for themselves as a further step on the march to equality. Obama is the descendant of Muslim slave masters not of blacks brought to the Americas as unpaid stoop labor. Conversations with blacks of all ages, economic strata across 12 states last month convinced me that few blacks see Obama as a "messiah".

As to the blog, the Progressives for Obama listserv publishes many posts by people who have never explained or repented their connections to very far left organizations. For instance, four years before he ran for the U.S. Senate Tom Hayden gave a speech holding a rifle over his head and calling for the creation of "liberated" zones where the police would fear to go, modeled on the "no go areas" of Northern Ireland then engulfed in sectarian turmoil. There are actually two pictures on the blog. For anyone who does not recognize the other figures in the second photo, they are Barack and Michelle Obama. I had not planned on doing all the layout and all the posts myself. However, as most democratic socialists and social democrats are busy emailing articles to each other about the economic meltdown apparently no one else as time to write on election. Even most of posts on progressives for Obama are forwarded articles. If folks don't get my humor, well I seem to be writing for myself.

Obama will either win or loose on his own merits not my efforts. Locally, and nationally if possible, I want everyone that works as open socialist or social democrat on Obama's campaign to begin preparing rallies demanding that the incoming Democratic congress and president prepare public works, green jobs, infrastructure rebuilding programs, and mortgage restructuring. This means we must demand that Obama abandon many of his irrational promises. An expansion of the war in Afganistan is not only economically prohibitive, it is militarily fool hearty. The Macedonians, Mongols, Moguls, Tartars, British, and Soviets all failed to conquer the Afghans as their terrain is the most inaccessible habitable on earth. Obama actually wants to sanction an expansion of civilian nuclear power industry. This is an invitation to a catastrophe. The clean coal that Obama supports is more global warming and environmental degradation in the making. The bailout Obama championed needs complete retooling. Obama may be as contary to the Labor Movement as Bill Clinton was. Clinton also came to power with majorities in both houses.

I support Obama for just one reason, the Employee Free Choice Act that may begin to rebuild the Labor movement. It certainly will not do it quickly. However, a vibrant trade union movement is the foundation of a social democratic movement. Perhaps in a decade it will be possible to build an organization of the size that DSA was in the late 1980's i.e. about 1,200. With so few people on trade union payrolls these days and the unions having no money to give to social democratic groups are size for the time will be limited. There is no one to pay for the activities of a socialist organization and certainly no one to pay someone to be a professional social democrat which accounts for the flight of the previous leadership of the SD, USA and to some degree that of DSA as well. Actually as of Saturday, the SD-SP had 27 members so you were very close. This does not count the 12 who did not renew or the 2 who resigned. With 20 activists we are about equal in active members with DSA and the SP of the USA. Arieh, DSA took the road you suggest and kept the discussion very academic and in house and lost 10,000 members.

So we do it the old way. We run candidates for local offices where they can explain what social democracy means to their neighbors and friends. Arieh, I know you prefer a generic term like progressive. Our mutual friend Rabbi Miller wants to redefine social democracy as a non-socialist ideology.It is ashame that Wikipedia does not see it that way. I do not know how people react in and around New York City. In Western Pennsylvania, if you put forward a program which is obviously democratic socialism they recognize it as such. In the late 1970's Tom Hayden brought his Campaign for Economic Democracy program to Pittsburgh. Hayden hoped to take his organization national. During the Q&A I asked Hayden if his "economic democracy" was not just Western European social democracy in disguise. Hayden did a tap dance about Stalinism. The next questioner, whom I had never met,asked Hayden why he was ducking my question. Hayden tried more malarkey (That Irish for bullshit) Then a local reporter told Hayden he was being deliberately disingenuous. The crowd turned hostile and Tom with Jane Fonda in tow beat a quick retreat without Fonda signing autographs, which was the reason many were there.(The China Syndrome was released that year).

Arieh, call socialism stick ball if people in your area will buy it. Here call socialism stick ball the charitable ones will consider you delusional, the less charitable will call you a liar to your face. Especially, in a time when the rich are moving heaven and earth to get socialism for themselves, it strikes me foolish to tell workers they are not entitled to it as well. I try to find out which of the the founders of the Socialist Party of America spoke in this area. If Mother Jones, James Connolly, Helen Gurley Flynn Gene Debs, Phil Randolph all spoke within 25 miles and not only needed to wonder how their message was going over, but were in fear for their lives. I'll take being viewed as eccentric any time. Without these people there would not have been an industrial union movement, black civil rights movement, or the the ideas that made the New Deal what it was.

Rick,

I could not agree more. Not only is Powell a war criminal, he is a repeat offender. First, he tried to cover up the Mi Lai massacre. Then he was responsible for the "highway of death" in the first gulf war. Finally, he presents the lies at the United Nations that precedes a the U.S. attacks that begin the senseless genocidal war in Iraq.

It would be a great idea if we could publish social democratic ratings, as Americans for Democratic Action publish liberal ratings. We might be able to do it not only for congress members but for local races as well. If that forces the the Democrats, to defend their positions so much the better. It will certainly draw distinctions with third party candidates. If we add a democracy scale it will demonstrate how far of the mark the the totalitarians that pretend to be socialists are. After all if the endorsement of socialists was not important, then Obama would have rejected the endorsement of Chicago DSA when he ran for the state house and much of this discussion would not be happening.


In Solidarity,

Gabe McCloskey-Ross




Rick Kisséll Wrote:

Translation: Get your asses back in the closet! NOW!

And what does it tell you that Obama would be embarrassed to have your endorsement, but not those of Colin Powell and Ken Adelman?

http://counterpunch .org/mowrey10242 008.html

Arieh Lebowitz wrote:

Lookit.

Notwithstanding that apparently many if not most of the social democrats in some way associated with the "SociaLDemocracy_ USA" email discussion list support him and want him to be the next president of the USA, Barack Obama needs the visible, public support of such a group right now like a lukh in kup {Yiddish for a hole in the head.}

I mean, really. That Democratic Socialists for Obama blog: http://democraticso cialistsforobama .blogspot. com/ that you are soliciting material for has only one photo - of Stalin and Lenin. Notwithstanding that the photo's caption says "The individuals above represent the anti-thesis of our paradigm," I mean, really - you are just giving a small bottle of kerosene to the McCain people. Granted that most people under 25 would neither recognize the people, and might have a bit of trouble understnding the caption ... but hey.

As for the "Social Democrats for Obama page at the Obama / Biden website," which you say is at http://my.barackoba ma.com/page/ group/SocialDemo cratsforObama. , it doesn't exist: when I hit the link I was told it was an "Invalid Group" - I would not at all be surprised if some people at the Obama campaign saw it and almost sprained his wrist deleting it.

We can discuss other matters at another time, but it seems to me that if you want to help Obama win, leave out any reference to socialist, social democrat, social democracy ... even in your signature. If and when he is elected, then do what you will.

But not until then, at the earliest.

That your group is the only socialist grouping to endorse Barack Obama is interesting, but to the outside world, of limited significance, esp. if it is a group - or group of overlapping groups? - of under 10,000, and more like under 30 {I am guessing}, individuals. Or am I wrong? No disrespect, but, well ... so what? As noted above - and what seems to me commonsensical - Obama neither needs nor wants the explicit public endorsement of any left group, even if it has the word "democrat" or "democracy" somewhere in it, even if "the individuals above represent the anti-thesis of [y]our paradigm."

Comparing what you have said or done vis-a-vis the Communist Party USA is ... meaningless. Simply meaningless. Or am I missing something? That your group has made an endorsement of Obama, vs. the CPUSA, which "has written many good things about Obama, but has made no formal endorsement, " well, who ... should be impressed?

You should not be - but seem to think that you are - are in the same universe as either the CPUSA. Same for the the Committees of Corespondence for Democratic Socialism. That the latter is split over whether or not to support Obama I am certai n is keeping Obama strategists up at night. I mean, seriously. I was never near the carroll at NYC's City College in its heyday, and I never really discussed politics with others at the rad publication stand at Eighth Street Books near Cooper Union here in New York, but if this is your universe, or even the exhibition hall at what used to be called the Socialist Schiolars Conference, we're on different pages. Simple as that. And that the Socialist Party of the United States of America "is running its own rather pitiful third-party effort," I can't see the clear difference between that and the "Social Democrats USA for Obama." I mean hey, what are the News & Letters Committees position on these matters. Now that's important!

I leave it to others to compare how the Social Democrats, USA--Socialist Party of America views Obama's candidacy vis-a-vis the Democratic Socialists of America. More to the point, I would like to see what real value exists in such vis-a-vis's.

I may come back to this another time, but I believe it was Pete Hamill who summed it up when asked about the prospects for socialism in America - `don't call it socialism: call it stickball,' or something to that effect.

Your real audience is not or should not be the small universe of people who are all tied up within the sd-ds dsa-dsoc catnam which period was max schachtman really on the top of his form and all that mishegas {Yiddish for ... mishegas} not the small world of people who remember intimately when such and such a caucus was not expelled but became the nucleus of the new whoziwatzis, which totalled a grand 387 people in its heyday, but the really large universe of many hundreds of thousands if not millions of "normal" people in the U.S., who speak plainly and simply, know that their jobs are less secure, their pensions fading, their lives are not as good as their parents' and their kids' lives will be tougher than theirs. They understand bread, and they need roses, too, but not the overwhelming majority of the baggage - expressions, and often constructs, and for sure much of the organizational memorabilia {one might say inscrutabilia} of last century, or even the one before that. They need ... stickball.

>> Arieh

Helping Obama

-- On Sun, 10/26/08, Arieh Lebowitz wrote:

David:

Is there a serious concern that a significant number of the folks associated with the new Social Democrats USA will NOT vote for Barack Obama? Or, more specifically, that they will cast their votes to third party candidates? Please clarify.

I am being deluged - as many people with email are - with such material. However, it appears to be prepared and dissemianted by people who are already sure how they will vote to others who are equally if not more sure how they would vote. [This is a not uncommon problem with folks of an idealogical or partisan bent.]

In addition to sending such things out to me and others, let me suggest a different approach: make ten copies {or more} and leave them near the copies of People, Us, Cosmo, etc... in laundromats. You will have a larger audience of undecided working people in laundromats than in email discussion lists such as this one. Of course, the thing you sent would have to be edited a bit, as it is NOT aimed at the laundromat crowd, but the "I'm on the democratic left, and everyone in my addressbook is similarly on the demleft" crowd.

>> Arieh

Dear Arieh,

We are the only socialist grouping to endorse Barack Obama. The Communist Party USA has written many good things about Obama, but has made no formal endorsement. The Committees of Corespondence for Democratic Socialism is split over whether or not to support Obama. The Socialist Party of the United States of America is running its own rather pitiful third-party effort. Now let's look at how the Social Democrats, USA--Socialist Party of America view Obama's candidacy vis-a-vis the Democratic Socialists of America.

From the Social Democrats, USA . org website:

Now we are engaged, not in a new struggle, but in the next phase of that same struggle[the civil rights struggle of the 1960s]. Public discrimination on the basis of color and gender is illegal, but private racism and sexism remain virulent. Barack Obama and that of Senator Hilary Clinton are proud to be the beneficiaries of the appropriate use of executive authority. However, the last eight years has seen a woeful usurpation of authority by the White House. The George W. Bush administration used the first foreign attack in more than a half century against Americans, upon their own soil, to govern by executive fiat. The administration lied about the dangers of one regime and ignored the actual perpetrators. Bush led a war, not against the terrorists of 9-11, but against the American working class. Using tax breaks for corporations and the rich, wealth has been redistributed from the average wage earner to the economic elites. Never has the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us been so wide. Those supporting George Bush and John McCain count on American workers being divided. These financial elites are literally banking on Americans remaining preoccupied by differences in race, color, creed, gender, national origin, and life style. By concentrating on what makes us different, we allow our government to fail us. We must make our government again “uphold, support, and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic”.

We are the Social Democrats, USA. We are the only legitimate heir to the Socialist Party of America. Our heritage includes Eugene Debs, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Helen Keller, Norman Thomas, A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin. It was Randolph and Rustin who planned and brought together the 1963 March for Jobs and Justice. Dr. King might have had a very small audience if not for Randolph and Rustin. Randolph, a life long member of the social democratic movement, organized the first predominantly black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rustin, a long time peace and human rights activist, counseled Dr. King, and his colleagues as they developed their plans for nonviolent resistance to “Jim Crow” Randolph and Rustin were able to unite the struggle of workers with the struggles of minorities, hence the March for JOBS and JUSTICE. The Labor Movement supported the March with both finances and numbers. Many other members of the SPA helped make the march a watershed moment. This included the individual Dr. King called “the bravest man I ever knew”, socialist elder statesman, Norman Thomas. Young People's Socialist League members Rochelle Horowitz and Tom Kahn wrote speeches for John Lewis, among others. The SD,USA enthusiastically embraces the candidacies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. They are part of our own broad, pro-labor, anti-totalitarian, liberal tradition as were Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, Harry Truman, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, Hubert Humphrey, and Michael Harrington. Obama and Biden are THE candidates to continue the dream of Jobs and Freedom for all.

From the Democratic Socialists of America website:
The campaign has 18 more days to run, and progressives have to continue to work hard to elect the Obama/Biden ticket along with as many progressive Democrats as possible. We say this not because we think Obama is particularly progressive. We don't. But Obama in office will have to respond to the pressure of progressive constituencies while McCain in office will not. The goals that progressives are fighting for - passage of national health care legislation, passage of the Employee Free Choice Act - can only be achieved if a president is elected who will sign them into law. And as we saw in the last debate McCain wants to appoint Supreme Court Justices who will overturn Roe v Wade. And who really thinks that McCain will remove troops from Iraq faster than Obama?

Like our comrades in DSA, we are not convinced that Obama is not a corporate Democrat after the model of Bill Clinton. Even if Obama has the temperament to be another FDR, he now lacks the resources. The bank bailout has left the United States treasury in its own credit crisis. Rather than expanding social programs, it is likely that the next president will need to re-trench on entitlements. This will put him at odds with Labor, minority groups, and community organizations. Capitalism simply can no longer export its contradictions. In addition, Obama has discussed a widening of the war in Afghanistan to include areas of Pakistan. All serious military analysts regard this as a fool's errand. It is likely that the Obama administration's new energy technologies will consist of more privately owned nuclear facilities and the oxymoronically named clean coal technology.

We in the SD-SP will do everything possible to see Obama elected. Then on November 5th, we will begin working with unions, community organizations, and ethnic rights groups to hold the feet of the elected Democratic House, Senate, and White House residents to the fire. I recently had a chance to travel through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. In discussing the election, I could not find any great support for the Democrats, particularly among blacks. Many blacks will vote to break the color barrier for the presidency, but few regard Barack Obama as representative of black America. Perhaps as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post points out, it is necessary for Obama to be the whitest black president ever.

I don't believe their is hope for a new, New Deal because military Keysenism is no longer a pump primer. Too many military parts are made abroad to seriously effect the American economy with military spending. However, a serious concerted action by progressives may force the Democrats to provide a true economic stimulus package that includes infrastructure repair and a certain amount of green technology. This will take more than online patitions and calling members of Congress. It will take direct-action style demonstations at both the Washinton and district offices of Congressional members.

Arieh, your suggestions are very well taken and tomorrow I will work on a flyer that we can distibute in public places like laundromats, coffee houses, etc. Very sound advice! I would appreciate your comments on the proposed flyer when you see it tomorow evening. The same is true for everyone else reading this message. Also, I would point out there is now a Social Democrats for Obama page at the Obama / Biden website: http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/SocialDemocratsforObama. Also, I am still soliciting material for the Democratic Socialists for Obama blog: http://democraticsocialistsforobama.blogspot.com/ .

In Solidarity and Friendship,
'Red' Gabe McCloskey-Ross, acting executive director, Social Democrats, USA--Socialist Party of America

Obama/ Biden and South Western PA

Way back when I was an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, I took every class Dr. Yates taught. I was also fortunate enough to be part of a multi-part independent study on first volume of Marx's Capital. It was through Mike that I got a job with the United Farm Workers boycott organization which led to a master's in Labor relations and a job with the United Auto Workers union.

There have already been some replies to the article below on Portside and other left lists that claim Yates is sanctioning the racism he discusses, Nonsense. Observing a phenomena does not suggest support. We both watched the 1977 Johnstown flood and the way that area businesses used that catastrophe to radically downsize and do many times the damage to the local economy that the flood waters did. Neither of us supported the true disaster of the summer of 1977 simply by noticing it.

Mike is right about the attitude of the working class locally. No one has spoken to the workers of the Altoona, Johnstown, Greensburg, Pittsburgh area to give them hope that something better awaits. It did not happen in '77 and it is not happening now. Given a fairly desolate view of the further, area people are becoming more clannish. That does not mean that there is mass organized racist activity like KKK of the 1930's. It does mean that people are more likely to vote their perceived group interests and their group is becoming more narrowly defined. Call it "bitterly clinging to their God and their guns" if you like. However, writing off these people means writing off the presidential election in this area.

Senator Clinton carried this area easily. Clinton was a big hit with blue and pink collar women. Now we have Sarah Palin, you was custom designed to campaign in this area. She is pro-life and one out every one hundred of the people who attend the 100, 000 member March for Life each January come from the Altoona-Johnstown Catholic diocese. She likes guns. Nearly everybody I know in this area owns at least one. Her family problems make her seem like one of gang, while Obama and Biden come off as what they are, a pair of very slick lawyers.

Obama can win in this area. However, that will take re-toooling his message to sound more like FDR and less like the "post liberal" message of his primary campaign. "Your jobs are gone and that's a shame" is not going to cut it. The racism I see most acutely is not name calling or threats, it is the lack of local Democratic Party officials and union members being involved in Obama's campaign in any meaningful way. What is needed here is a massive voter registration program and GOTV effort that is well beyond the capacity of any presidential campaign. This will not be as hazardous as Mississippi in 1964, but it will not be easy either.

Several people have told me to relax. The unions will take care of the voter registration problem soon. Where Labor will get the foot soldiers is beyond me. They simply don't exist locally. No matter how many new and innovative programs the unions develop to address electoral politics, it still takes boots on ground, or sneakers on ground more precisely. We need to fine away to involve young people particularly students in a systematized voter registration program in this area and all the battleground states. We can't wait for the cavalry that we hope is coming. There is less than two months until voter registration for the November election closes in PA.

More on the nuts and bolts of this as we work them out. Now I will let, an old friend give his take.

Obama and the Working Class

By MICHAEL D. YATES

A recent New York Times article ('Rural Swath of Big State Tests Obama,' August 21, 2008) described life in the dead mill towns of western Pennsylvania and asked why Barack Obama’s presidential bid was not catching fire there. The article mentioned Beaver Falls, Aliquippa, Raccoon Township, Hopewell, Hookstown. It might have named dozens more. These are devastated places, where, the article points out, 'Decades of job loss have created a youthful diaspora—you can knock on many doors without finding anyone under age 45. Declining enrollments forced Raccoon Township to close its elementary and middle schools.' Barack Obama should find fertile ground there for his presidential bid. But he hasn’t. Hillary Clinton defeated him badly here, and his campaign has failed to gain traction since he sewed up the nomination. It seems that the white working class voters of western Pennsylvania are divided between their economic interests and their prejudice.

This account interested me. I am from Western Pennsylvania; I was born in a mining village and grew up in what is now a very dead mill town. I taught for thirty-two years in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which while not quite in the western part of the state, has all of the demographic and social characteristics of Beaver Falls and Ambridge. For thirteen years, I lived in Pittsburgh, the mother of all mill towns.
In my book, Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: an Economist's Travelogue, I say this about Johnstown and Pittsburgh:

The distance between Pittsburgh and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is about seventy-five miles. Most of the trip is on Route 22, a dismal and depressing stretch of highway that perfectly mirrors the drab ugliness of much of western Pennsylvania. Gene & Boots Candy shop, Dick’s Diner, Dean’s Diner, Zoila’s Western Diner, Country Kitchen (with 'broasted' chicken), Dairy Queens, Crest Nursing Home, Spahr Nursing Home, 7-11s, car dealerships, a strip mine, the Cheese House, motels, strip malls, two adult video stores (a clerk was murdered in one of them, but the killer was never found), the country’s only drive-thru 'Gentlemen’s Club' (aptly named Climax), the smallest house I have ever seen, feed stores, Long’s Taxidermy, Monroeville, Murraysville, New Alexandria, Blairsville, Dilltown, Armagh, Clyde, Seward, Charles, bad curves, black ice, fallen trees, wrecked big rigs, school buses stopping on the highway, kids walking slowly to the trailer
parks and country shacks, mobile homes for sale, a power plant belching smoke and steam in the distance—not an eye-pleasing scene until you get to the Conemaugh Gap, where the waters raged in the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889.

When I was young, parts of this highway were three lanes, and you could pass in the middle lane from either direction. If you were traveling east and started to pass a car, you never knew when someone going west might have the same idea. After many accidents, the third lane was converted into a turning lane or a fourth lane added. Progress! Back then, Pittsburgh and Johnstown were steel cities, dirty, yes, but there was work at high wages. And a little pride too. Now both towns are in the rust belt. The famous Homestead Works of U.S. Steel, built by Andrew Carnegie and site of the Homestead strike, where the picketers set the barges filled with Pinkerton strikebreakers on fire with flaming arrows, have been torn down, replaced by an upscale shopping complex. Johnstown’s Bethlehem Steel plant, once the center of the industry’s technological advances, has been sold piecemeal. Train wheels, steel rods, and wire are still made there, but the size of
the workforce is a tiny fraction of what it was when I started work in the 'flood city.' Hard times have become a way of life. I would wager that there are more drug addicts and alcoholics in Pittsburgh and Johnstown than there are steelworkers. A lot more.

I say much the same about my hometown, Ford City, once the plate-glass- producing capital of the world.

It is true that there is abundant racism in these parts. Hillary Clinton knew this, and she, her husband, and governor Ed Rendell subtly played the race card in the primary election. Rendell said that there were whites in the state who would not vote for a black man. Hillary Clinton said that Obama would have a hard time winning support from 'white Americans.' In my fifty-five years in the region, I heard thousands of racist remarks—in bars, bowling alleys, on basketball courts, in college classrooms, in worker education classes, and in the faculty dining room. More than once, someone threatened to beat me up when I challenged such comments. A few weeks ago, my sister was doing voter registration and campaigning for Obama in our hometown. A group of teenagers standing across the street from her spewed out racial epithets.

There is no doubt that a not insignificant number of white working class voters will not vote for a black man for president under any circumstances. Some may vote for McCain, although those interviewed in the Times story had little use for him or for the war in Iraq. Some may go for the Libertarian candidate. Some may not vote at all.
But there is more to the antipathy that some in the white working class in the rust belt have for Obama.

What exactly does Obama have to say to them? Is he going to fight for their lost pensions? Make sure that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation has adequate funds? Is he going to do battle for their health care? Is he going to get the unemployment insurance system fixed? Is it possible to believe that he will go afer all those anti-worker trade agreements? Will he ensure that social security is never privatized? That it be made more generous, as it easily could be? Is he going to reverse the Bush administration’s draconian labor policies? Put people on the National Labor Relations Board who take the purpose of the labor laws—to promote collective bargaining—seriously?

Will he make the Occupational Safety and Health Act a real law and not the dead letter it is now? Will he engineer a public works program that rebuilds the infrastructures of these forgotten towns and puts their citizens to work? Will he look for creative ways to bring these places back to life? Will he do something about public education and get rid of the corporate-inspired and ultra authoritarian No Child Left Behind legislation? Will he fight for college grants for those with little income? Will he bring home the working class wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters from Iraq and Afghanistan? Stop wasting billions of dollars on these criminal wars? Demand that unions be made legal in Iraq?

Obama has failed to say anything meaningful about these matters, and as the campaign drags on, he moves ever further to the right. And if he doesn’t speak to the white working class, how could it be said that he speaks to the black or Hispanic working class either? What about the more than one million black men and women in prison? The gutted and ruined inner cities? The lost manufacturing jobs? The millions of immigrants now being treated as criminals, imprisoned and sometimes tortured before being shipped off to their native lands?

I doubt that we will get much from Obama to inspire working men and women, of whatever part of the country, of whatever age, race, or ethnicity. Now he has chosen a pathetic old hack, Joe Biden, to be his running mate. What exactly has Biden done for workers in his more than thirty years in the Senate? That a man who has been in this elite body (whose members’ stock portfolios have performed better than almost anyone else’s) this long can be called 'working class' by Obama himself tell us just how lame U.S. politics are.

It is a shame that some white workers are racist. I chalk most of this up to the abject failure of the labor movement to attack the race issue head on many years ago. But Obama might have won over the voters Hillary Clinton got by pretending she was still a working class woman from Scranton, while she slugged down shots and a beers in local bars. He could have intertwined his hand with the hand of a white worker, like in the emblem of the old Packinghouse Workers union, and gone out on the stump and told the truth about the class struggle. A lot of white workers would have eaten this up.

Between 1980 and 2001, I taught over 1,000 workers in labor education classes held throughout western Pennsylvania—in Johnstown, Greensburg, Pittsburgh, Beaver. Most students were white. Some were racist. Some were xenophobic. Some believed their country could do no wrong. I taught them about labor markets, collective bargaining, labor law, labor history, even Marxist economics. We didn’t pull any punches—on race, on war, on capitalism. Most came away enlightened. Would that Obama could have enlightened them too. If his lead over McCain slips further or disappears altogether, we can expect to hear some populist rhetoric from Obama, as we heard from John Kerry as his disastrous bid for the presidency crashed and burned in 2004. But who will believe it now?

Michael D. Yates is Associate Editor of Monthly review magazine.He is the author of Cheap Motels and Hot Plates: an Economist's Travelogue and Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy. Yates can be reached at mikedjyates@ msn.com

Beer Nuts and Politics

Beer nuts yum !

The late Abby Hoffman once observed that,"smoking dope and hanging up Che's picture has as much to do with the revolution as drinking milk and collecting postage stamps". I often think that sending email to left wing list-servs and blogging have as much to do with progressive politics as eating beer nuts and watching ESPN. This comes from someone who maintains three blogs and moderates 5 yahoo groups. I don't flatter myself that my writings or those that I help to disseminate are political action. Hopefully they are a call to political action. If you are reading this and instead of leafleting, marching, or registering people to vote, please, turn off the computer and GO DO SOMETHING!

Gabe

Who Are We?

The Social Democrats, USA--Socialist Party of America is what remains of the legacy of the socialist party of Debs, Thomas, Randolph, Zeidler, Harrington, and Rustin. Anyone can claim this heritage, or some part of it, but the SDUSA--SPA is the only group actually running candidates as socialists / social democrats who intend to win and hence to govern as socialists. For too long socialist political activity consisted of running candidates for positions they had no hope of winning, just to raise the "red flag". This is not our socialist tradition. The Socialist Party of America of the early part of the twentieth century included twelve thousand office holders. In 1916, when Debs' health prevented him from running for president he made a serious bid to be elected to the US Congress. it should be remembered that Norman Thomas relieved nearly a million votes in 1932. This had a major influence on New Deal legislation as the Socialists continued to pose a serious challenge to the capitalist parties.

Even after the Party began to work within the Democratic Party in did not abandon independent political activity. Witness the candidacy of Richard Parrish for Manhattan Council. Parrish was a black trade-unionist. His nominating petitions were hand-carried to city hall by Norman Thomas and Bayard Rustin. This was in 1964. The year before, Bayard Rustin had been the lead organizer for the March for Jobs and Justice. The March is best remembered for Dr. King's "I have a Dream" speech. It was the Socialist Party in the form of A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Tom Kahn, and Rochelle Horowitz who made the March happen.

The March for Jobs and Justice lead to the 1964 Voting Rights Act and the 1965 Civil Rights Act. These were the first steps in eliminating discrimination in the United States. We now are engaged in another step. Barack Obama's candidacy will test how far we as a nation have come as regards private racism and discrimination. I believe Obama made a terrible error in not choosing Hilary Clinton as his vice-presidential partner. This error may well cost him the election. It reminds me a great deal of Fredrick Douglas' refusal to demand that the fourteenth amendment enfranchise women as well as black men. Women, of course, did receive the national franchise, fifty-five years later! Many women are justifiably upset that they worked so hard to nominate a women who may have a real shot at becoming president. Senator Clinton, for reasons I don't understand, also became the candidate of many working-class whites. I am not sure that Joe Bidden can capture that same vote for the Democrats.

That being said, as the party of Randolph and Rustin, we are bound to join this new struggle for jobs and justice, understanding that the election of Obama will bring no utopia. It is not clear that the Democrats will even support single-payer health care. We must respond as the Party of Thomas, Randolph and Rustin and embrace this new civil rights struggle. At the same time we need to remember that the Obama campaign is only a portion of the struggle. We need to use the Obama campaign to spread our message of social democracy within a broader Liberal-Labor coalition.

We need to remember that the Socialist Party was part of a broader Liberal Labor coalition. It was Socialist Party member Reinhold Neibhur who founded the Union for Democratic Action which became American's for Democratic Action. ADA was a self-defined, "anti-Communist, liberal" group. It was this liberal tradition of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt that produced the Universal Charter of Human Rights. This fundamental document of the United Nations will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary this year. This is our tradition and we should proudly embrace it. We should also call upon the Democratic Party to embrace it. In the article I have attached to this message Michael Lind demonstrates that when the Democratic Party has stuck to the New Deal message it has won the presidency. Every time it wanders off this message it loses.

This makes Obama's candidacy problematic. While I believe it is clear to any serious observer that Obama was not influenced by the Communist Party USA nor the Maoist wing of Students for a Democratic Society, the Republicans will beat him with this dirty stick often and hard. The Republicans have already run messages on television connecting Obama to William Ayers, failed urban guerrilla. it is only a matter of time until the Republican Party or some scurrilous right-wing committee attempts to tie Obama directly to the CPUSA. As perhaps the only remaining ant-Communist left wing group we can have role in attempting to separate the Democratic ticket from the old Stalinist heritage of the CP and the new Stalinist heritage of the Maoist wing of SDS. We should remember that the old SDS began as the student wing of the League for Industrial Democracy, a group connected closely to the Socialist Party. Because SDS refused to adopt the anti-Communism of the Socialist Party it was easy for small Maoist sects to gain control of the organization. It is highly unlikely that a majority of members of SDS ever supported Maoism or urban terrorism yet that is the image with which SDS will be remembered. There is now a new SDS, those its connections to students is somewhat doubtful. Again a majority of members are likely to be anti-totalitarian. yet the organization could easily be captured if not by Maoist elements this time, certainly by non-democratic elements.

The Obama campaign allows SDUSA--SPA to spread our message of anti-totalitarian democratic socialism to a wide audience. We have a chance to reach out to the black community in a way socialists have not done in decades. In the same way we have a chance to reach out to disaffected youth and Organized Labor in a way socialists have not done in decades. Therefore, we should grasp this chance to reinvigorate the democratic left.

We invite your comments at http://democraticsocialistsforobama.blogspot.com/

Or message us at info@socialdemocratsusa.org or you can call us at (814) 410-2542, weekday afternoons.

In Solidarity,

Jaime Johnston, secretary Young Social Democrats, Young Peoples' Socialist League

Gabriel McCloskey-Ross, executive director, Social Democrats, USA-Socialist Party of America


The Newer Deal: The path to a Democratic supermajority How Democrats can win big in 2010
and beyond -- by doing the opposite of what they're doing now. Think FDR-style
liberalism, not McGovern.
By Michael Lind
Aug. 15, 2008 | Virginia Woolf was wrong when she wrote, in her 1924 essay
"Character in Fiction," that "on or around December 10, 1910, human nature
changed." But there is no doubt that at some point between 2004 and 2008
American politics changed. It is clear to everyone, not least conservatives,
that the era of right-wing hegemony that began with Richard Nixon's election in
1968 has come to an end. But this does not mean the triumph of post-1968
liberalism by default. If we are really in a new era, then the next Democratic
Party will be as different and unfamiliar as the next Republican Party. Or so
Democrats should hope, if they're looking beyond the favorable circumstances of
this November -- if they want a lasting super majority and not just a bare
majority.
Both of the national parties today claim roots in the older eras of Roosevelt
and Lincoln. But I am 46 years old, and today's Democratic Party and Republican
Party are younger than I am. What happened beginning in 1968 was that one
two-party system -- let us call it the Roosevelt Party versus the Hoover Party
-- gave way to the present two-party system, which pits the Nixon Party versus
the McGovern Party.
Today's Democrats and Republicans bear little resemblance to the pre-1968
groups of the same name. The pre-1968 Republican Party was based in the
Northeast, Midwest and West Coast -- the very areas that are the base of today's
"blue state" Democrats. The pre-1968 Democrats were the old Jefferson-Jackson
alliance of white Southern Protestants and Northern urban Catholics, plus a big
chunk of Northern Progressives, many of them former Republicans. Today the
Republicans are a white working-class party based in the South and much of the
West with a libertarian Wall Street wing. The Democrats since the 1970s have
been an alliance of college-educated white professionals from the North and West
with blacks and Latinos.
Between 1932 and 1964, the Roosevelt Party won seven of nine presidential
elections, losing only in 1952 and 1956. Between 1968 and 2004, the Nixon Party
won seven out of 10 presidential elections, losing only three times, to Jimmy
Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Was this because red-state
Rooseveltians were won over to supply-side economics, while blue-state
blue-bloods suddenly became enamored of abortion rights and separation of church
and state? No. Today's red-state Republican children of New Deal Democrats still
like Social Security, and the Republican grandparents of today's blue-state
Protestant Democrats were in favor of birth control -- for the Catholics, in
particular. The values of these voting blocs didn't change. The issues that
defined national politics changed.
The Roosevelt Party ran on economic issues, and didn't care whether voters
were in favor of sex or against it on principle as long as they supported the
New Deal. The McGovern Party, by contrast, has made social issues its litmus
test. Economic conservatives have had a home in the McGovern Party, as long as
they support abortion rights and affirmative action, but social democrats and
populists who are pro-life or anti-affirmative action are not made nearly as
welcome.
Beginning with its namesake, George McGovern, in 1972, the McGovern Party has
been trounced repeatedly by the Nixon Party, not because of its economic agenda,
which the public actually prefers to the alternative, but because of its
unpopular stands on issues like race-based affirmative action, illegal
immigration, crime and punishment, and national security. Progressives are
fooling themselves when they dismiss these as insignificant "wedge issues." What
can be more important than whether civil rights laws apply equally to everyone
-- even those wicked "white males" -- regardless of race and gender, or whether,
in an age of terrorism, the nation's border and immigration laws are enforced?
There is no democracy in the world today where a party that stood for ethnic
quotas that excluded the national majority or welfare benefits for illegal
immigrants would not be in political danger. (As I write, all of the major
European democracies except Britain are governed by parties of the right that
are more nationalist and populist than the left parties they have defeated. And
Gordon Brown isn't looking too hale either.)
Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic majority, despite defections by Southern
segregationists, wobbled on until 1968, 23 years after his death. FDR was able
to assemble his coalition only because social issues did not divide his voters.
Nobody ever asked FDR or Harry Truman or John F. Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson their
views on contraception, or abortion, or censorship. Not only were those issues
not central to the message of the New Deal Democrats, they were not even
national issues. Before the Supreme Court federalized them, they were fought out
in state legislatures and city councils by the very same people who came
together on Election Day to send Democrats to Congress and the White House.
FDR's followers disagreed about Prohibition, but they agreed about the New Deal.

In fact, the majority of Americans, including many social conservatives,
never ceased to support New Deal policies, which from Social Security and
Medicare to the G.I. Bill have remained popular with the public throughout the
entire Nixon-to-Bush era. Consider the results of a June 17, 2008, Rockefeller
Foundation/Time poll. When "favor strongly" and "favor somewhat" are combined,
one gets the following percentages for policies favored by overwhelming
majorities: increase the minimum wage to keep up with the cost of living (88
percent); increase government spending on things like public-works projects to
create jobs (86 percent); put stricter limits on pollution we put into the
atmosphere (85 percent); limit rate increases on adjustable rate mortgages (82
percent); provide quality healthcare to all, regardless of ability to pay (81
percent); impose higher tax incentives for alternative energy (81 percent);
provide government-funded childcare to all parents so they can work (77
percent); provide more paid maternity/dependent care leave (76 percent); make it
less profitable for companies to outsource jobs to foreign countries (76
percent); expand unemployment benefits (76 percent).
Note that almost all of the policy proposals that excite the American public
are exactly the sort of old-fashioned, "paleoliberal" spending programs or
systems of government regulation that are supposed to be obsolete in this era of
privatization, deregulation and free-market globalization, according to
neoliberals and libertarians. Bill Clinton to the contrary, the public clearly
does not think that "the era of big government is over." Nor does the public
show any interest in the laundry lists of teeny-weeny tax credits for this and
that that neoliberals love to propose, to appear compassionate without spending
real money. The public wants the middle-class welfare state to be rounded out by
a few major additions -- chiefly, healthcare and childcare -- and the public
also wants the government to grow the economy by investing in public works and
favoring companies that locate their production facilities inside the U.S.
There, in a sentence, is a program for a neo-Rooseveltian party that could
effect an epochal realignment in American politics.
A Newer Deal party that ran on this economic agenda could attract Southern
Baptist creationists as well as Marin County agnostics. I hear the riposte
already: "I'd rather move to Canada than share the Democratic Party with
those people!" But across the country there are lots of potential
Democratic congressional and senatorial candidates who would like to move to
Washington -- and might be able to, if social conservatives were welcomed to a
big-tent party defined almost exclusively by economic liberalism.
What's the alternative? The Cato Institute's Brink Lindsey has mused about a
"liberaltarian" coalition uniting social-issue liberals with free-market
anti-statists. Down with drug and sodomy laws -- and welfare and Social
Security, too! The problem with this as a Democratic strategy is that Mike
Huckabee conservatives who might be attracted to a Newer Deal greatly outnumber
Ron Paul libertarians in the electorate, if not on college campuses and in
editorial offices.
Anyway, the Democrats have already tried "liberaltarianism." That's what was
promoted by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the only two presidents elected by
the McGovern Party. Both Carter and Clinton ran as New Deal-style liberal
populists, then, once in office, reneged on their campaign rhetoric and promoted
a mix of economic conservatism -- deregulation, balanced budgets -- and social
liberalism. Had Clinton been interested in restoring the Roosevelt coalition, he
would have veered left on economics and right on cultural issues. Instead, under
the influence of Robert Rubin, Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial
Services Modernization Act of 1999, which dismantled many firewalls between
investment banks, securities firms and commercial banks that the New Deal
Congress had put in place, inadvertently contributing to the economic disaster
we are now experiencing. Instead of opposing race-based affirmative action in
favor of universal programs open to economically disadvantaged whites, Clinton
said he would "mend it, not end it" and then forgot even to mend it. The 1990s
neoliberal synthesis of Rubinomics and racial preferences, a version of
"liberaltarianism," is popular in corporate boardrooms and newspaper editorial
offices -- but deeply unpopular in Main Street America.
Under pressure from the voters, today's Democrats, including Hillary Clinton,
have recently and in some cases reluctantly repudiated Rubinomics for more
popular ideas about public investment and expanding the safety net. That's a
step in the right direction. A big reason that the Democrats won back Congress
in 2006 and are likely to keep it in 2008 is nominating and electing socially
conservative economic populists like Heath Shuler. More progress. But to create
an updated version of the New Deal, the Democrats have to treat economically
liberal social conservatives as equal partners, with their own spokesmen and
leadership roles in the party, not just as a handful of swing voters brought on
reluctantly at the last moment. Conversely, Rubin Democrats and other economic
conservatives should be invited to join Grover Norquist and the Club for Growth
in a free-market deficit hawk party, which no doubt would prove to be as
ineffectual and isolated as the Herbert Hoover Republicans during the New Deal
era.
If Democrats don't create a new Roosevelt Party, the Republicans over time
just might. In their recent insightful manifesto "Grand New Party," Reihan Salam
and Ross Douthat call for the GOP to adopt activist government on behalf of the
working class, while remaining a socially traditional party. That formula --
more Gaullist than Thatcherite -- has worked recently in Germany, France and
Italy. It might work here, unless Democrats forestall the possibility by
reaching out to Sam's Club Republicans.
Unfortunately, the upper-middle-class left, with its unerring instinct for
political suicide, is probably incapable of seizing the moment and bringing more
Baptists and Catholics into the Democratic Party, because it has developed an
almost superstitious distaste for religious conservatives. This might make sense
if the religious right were still a menace, as it was a generation ago. But with
the exception of state referenda and constitutional amendments banning gay
marriage, religious conservatives have lost one battle after another, from
failed attempts to promote creationism on school boards to the doomed effort to
repeal Roe v. Wade.
There would have been no Progressive Era without the followers of William
Jennings Bryan and no New Deal without the support of ancestors of many of
today's Protestant evangelicals and traditionalist Catholics. Social
conservatives, having lost the culture war, should be offered not only a truce
but also an opportunity to join a broad economic campaign for a middle-class
America, as many of them did between 1932 and 1968. When pro-choicers and
pro-lifers unite in cheering the public investment and living wage planks at the
convention of the neo-Roosevelt party, we will know that the political era that
began in 1968 is truly and finally over.
If Barack Obama is elected in November, he will have a choice. It would be
easy for a President Obama to be the third president of the McGovern Party,
following the examples of Carter and Clinton once in office by rejecting
expensive New Deal-style public investment and middle-class entitlement
expansion in favor of a neoliberal program of deficit reduction, dinky feel-good
tax credits, equally symbolic Green initiatives and robust defenses of
affirmative action for amnestied illegal immigrants. Or he could try to be the
first president of a new party that is also called the Democrats, a party that
would combine post-racial universalism in public policy with intelligent
government activism to promote technology-driven economic growth and
middle-class economic security.
If he were elected and made the right choice, there would be no need to call
the successor to the McGovern Party the neo-Roosevelt Party. It would have a
name of its own: the Obama Party.