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Chris Hedges on: The Failure of Labor and the Liberal Class...An Incredible Watch! Pt. 5 of 7!
Last edited Sun Jul 28, 2013, 08:48 PM - Edit history (3)
Chris Hedges: The Liberal Elite has Betrayed the People They Claim to Defend - Pt 5 of 7
On Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay, Chris Hedges says The Democratic Party used to watch out for the interests of labor and even for the poor. But that all changed under Bill Clinton. Although Clinton, like Obama, continues to speak in that feel-your-pain language of traditional liberalism, they've completely betrayed the very people that they purport to represent and defend. - July 24, 13
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10468
Included is: Democrats & The Unions...WE Are Fighting Both Parties...The Paralyzed Liberal Center and NSA Spys on all Movements...(creating a State of Perpetual Fear).
There is a TRANSCRIPT of THIS at the SITE...for those who Perfer Transcripts to You Tube Videos.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10468
SAMPLE TRANSCRIPT:
JAY: Millions of people unemployed, millions of people have lost their houses, and for a long time the left was saying the crash is coming, the crash is coming, the people will rise up. Well, the crash came, and some people rose up, but not in the kind of critical numbers that would have shaken or, as in the previous episode you said, terrified the elites. Why?
HEDGES: Because the traditional liberal elite divorced itself from the issue of justice to embrace for the last few decades issues such as gender equality, multiculturalism, identity politics, all of which I support. But while they busied themselves with these activities, the working class was being destroyed through NAFTA and the outsourcing of jobs, the stagnation, in essence reduction of the minimum wage.
The Democratic Party used to watch out for the interests of labor and even for the poor. But that all changed under Bill Clinton. Although Clinton, like Obama, continues to speak in that feel-your-pain language of traditional liberalism, they've completely betrayed the very people that they purport to represent and defend.
JAY: And even the previous ones, I mean, Truman on, they had a chance many times, for example, to undo Taft-Hartley, you know, terrible anti-labor legislation, and they never undid it.
HEDGES: They never did, although Truman did try to push through universal health care.
JAY: The union movement and union leadership, you know, at times during Democratic administrations can get critical, but when push comes to the shove they never threaten the Democrats in any way. And maybe the worst example of it has been with the Obama administration where in the leadup to the election Obama promises them EFCA, the Employee Free Choice Act, which was going to make it easier to organize unorganized workers. In the first two years, where they control both houses, it doesn't come forward, and of course afterwards you never see it, and now we don't even hear it again. And I interviewed John Sweeney at the time, head of the AFL-CIO, and I said, what are you going to do if President Obama doesn't pass this? He's going to pass it. He's going to pass it. He's never going to betray us. And, of course, he did betray them, and the union movement was out again in the next election just as if nothing had happened.
HEDGES: Right. Well, these people, I mean, the heads of these unions pull down salaries that are five times what the rank and file pulls down. They negotiate deals, such as they did with the auto bailout, where their most senior unionized workers have their wages reduced and the auto companies are allowed to hire new workers at $14 an hour without benefits. So they sell out the younger workers to protect, to an extent, older workers. They have no kind of vision of what kind of a country they want to create, i.e. one that would actually respond to the needs of the working class. And, you know, I think they're pretty bankrupt. I mean, they have become part of the establishment. And rhetorically they can get up and say all the right things in the same way that Barack Obama can get up and say all the right things, but in the end, you know, it's Wall Street and the corporations that are pulling the strings on the puppets.
JAY: I talked to a behind-the-scenes organizer for the unions. He advises them on policy and things. And I asked him, why do you guys not contend for some kind of leadership of the Democratic Party? And his answer was: well, Wall Street is the only one--pro-Democratic Party Wall Street is the only one with enough cash to beat the Republicans, so we can't take them on.
HEDGES: Right. And the unions don't--I mean, the Democrats will still take their money, but, you know, it's a fraction of the money that fills the coffers of the Democratic Party. Most of the money comes from, you know, these massive Wall Street firms and corporations that can dwarf anything that the union can provide.
JAY: And perhaps it goes back to something you were saying before as well about how the liberal elites, you said, kind of got disassociated from working-class issues. So the fight within the unions for what kind of leadership, for what kind of union, it kind of was going on somewhere over here, and the left was somewhere over there. And not that there weren't activists in the unions fighting, but they were kind of on their own.
HEDGES: Well, and meanwhile the working class was being decimated, so that now our working class is largely enveloped within the service sector, where, you know, couples will have two or three different jobs with no kind of benefits, no kind of [incompr.] Walmart nation. There is no force within either of the established political parties that are willing to stand up and defend the interests, even on the issue of minimum wage. That's only going to, again, come by stepping outside the formal mechanisms of power and beginning to build movements, as we saw with the Chicago teachers strike. I mean, let's remember that the Chicago teachers strike was fighting against a Democratic mayor, not just any mayor, but one of the pillars of the Democratic establishment, Rahm Emanuel, that they had to essentially remove the traditional leadership. And that's really going to be the future, that we're going to be fighting--we're fighting both parties. We're not fighting one party.
JAY: And the teachers were willing to make the sacrifice to fight when they had a leadership that wanted to go there.
HEDGES: That's right.
JAY: In the beginning of the interview, I asked you why the left hasn't been able to take more advantage of this moment, and you talked a bit about the failure of the liberal elite. But why should a people's movement, why should a working-class movement, why should it matter what the liberal elite does or doesn't do? I mean, one would assume the liberal elite, when push comes to shove, are a part of the elite.
HEDGES: Yes, they are. That is, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the role of the liberal establishment, to act as a kind of safety valve, to ameliorate the suffering and respond to some of the grievances of the underclass to right the system, which is again, going back to the New Deal, precisely what happened. Roosevelt and Henry Wallace functioned as traditional liberal leaders functioned. And they keep the system afloat.
Now, the problem is that the radical movements that were able to push the liberal elites to respond have been destroyed. We don't have any anymore. In the long war against our internal and external enemies in the name of anti-communism, they've been utterly decimated, culminating in the 1950s with these huge purges. Ellen Schrecker has written two good books about this. You know, thousands, thousands of high school teachers, social workers, artists, directors, journalists like I. F. Stone were pushed out. I. F. Stone--.
JAY: And particularly trade unionists.
HEDGES: And trade unionists. So you end up with these distortions like, in the 1960s, Meany and Kirkland, who support Nixon's war in Indochina, denounce the hippies in the street. I mean, when Joe Sacco and I did our book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, one of the chapters is out of southern West Virginia. Now, pre-World War I, Mother Jones was a hero to the miners, like John Lewis and all of these radical figures. Now it's Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.
Why is that? It's because there's been a divorce of radical movements from the working class and radical ideologies from the working class. And the way that divorce came about is that those who had these kind of broad social visions which challenged the primacy of corporate capitalism got pushed out of the system. They're not there anymore. And so now at a moment of crisis--and we are certainly in a moment of crisis--we lack the movements which can give expression to the suffering of our underclass, and our liberal elites which once responded to those movements have been eviscerated and essentially are corporate stooges.
HEDGES: Because the traditional liberal elite divorced itself from the issue of justice to embrace for the last few decades issues such as gender equality, multiculturalism, identity politics, all of which I support. But while they busied themselves with these activities, the working class was being destroyed through NAFTA and the outsourcing of jobs, the stagnation, in essence reduction of the minimum wage.
The Democratic Party used to watch out for the interests of labor and even for the poor. But that all changed under Bill Clinton. Although Clinton, like Obama, continues to speak in that feel-your-pain language of traditional liberalism, they've completely betrayed the very people that they purport to represent and defend.
JAY: And even the previous ones, I mean, Truman on, they had a chance many times, for example, to undo Taft-Hartley, you know, terrible anti-labor legislation, and they never undid it.
HEDGES: They never did, although Truman did try to push through universal health care.
JAY: The union movement and union leadership, you know, at times during Democratic administrations can get critical, but when push comes to the shove they never threaten the Democrats in any way. And maybe the worst example of it has been with the Obama administration where in the leadup to the election Obama promises them EFCA, the Employee Free Choice Act, which was going to make it easier to organize unorganized workers. In the first two years, where they control both houses, it doesn't come forward, and of course afterwards you never see it, and now we don't even hear it again. And I interviewed John Sweeney at the time, head of the AFL-CIO, and I said, what are you going to do if President Obama doesn't pass this? He's going to pass it. He's going to pass it. He's never going to betray us. And, of course, he did betray them, and the union movement was out again in the next election just as if nothing had happened.
HEDGES: Right. Well, these people, I mean, the heads of these unions pull down salaries that are five times what the rank and file pulls down. They negotiate deals, such as they did with the auto bailout, where their most senior unionized workers have their wages reduced and the auto companies are allowed to hire new workers at $14 an hour without benefits. So they sell out the younger workers to protect, to an extent, older workers. They have no kind of vision of what kind of a country they want to create, i.e. one that would actually respond to the needs of the working class. And, you know, I think they're pretty bankrupt. I mean, they have become part of the establishment. And rhetorically they can get up and say all the right things in the same way that Barack Obama can get up and say all the right things, but in the end, you know, it's Wall Street and the corporations that are pulling the strings on the puppets.
JAY: I talked to a behind-the-scenes organizer for the unions. He advises them on policy and things. And I asked him, why do you guys not contend for some kind of leadership of the Democratic Party? And his answer was: well, Wall Street is the only one--pro-Democratic Party Wall Street is the only one with enough cash to beat the Republicans, so we can't take them on.
HEDGES: Right. And the unions don't--I mean, the Democrats will still take their money, but, you know, it's a fraction of the money that fills the coffers of the Democratic Party. Most of the money comes from, you know, these massive Wall Street firms and corporations that can dwarf anything that the union can provide.
JAY: And perhaps it goes back to something you were saying before as well about how the liberal elites, you said, kind of got disassociated from working-class issues. So the fight within the unions for what kind of leadership, for what kind of union, it kind of was going on somewhere over here, and the left was somewhere over there. And not that there weren't activists in the unions fighting, but they were kind of on their own.
HEDGES: Well, and meanwhile the working class was being decimated, so that now our working class is largely enveloped within the service sector, where, you know, couples will have two or three different jobs with no kind of benefits, no kind of [incompr.] Walmart nation. There is no force within either of the established political parties that are willing to stand up and defend the interests, even on the issue of minimum wage. That's only going to, again, come by stepping outside the formal mechanisms of power and beginning to build movements, as we saw with the Chicago teachers strike. I mean, let's remember that the Chicago teachers strike was fighting against a Democratic mayor, not just any mayor, but one of the pillars of the Democratic establishment, Rahm Emanuel, that they had to essentially remove the traditional leadership. And that's really going to be the future, that we're going to be fighting--we're fighting both parties. We're not fighting one party.
JAY: And the teachers were willing to make the sacrifice to fight when they had a leadership that wanted to go there.
HEDGES: That's right.
JAY: In the beginning of the interview, I asked you why the left hasn't been able to take more advantage of this moment, and you talked a bit about the failure of the liberal elite. But why should a people's movement, why should a working-class movement, why should it matter what the liberal elite does or doesn't do? I mean, one would assume the liberal elite, when push comes to shove, are a part of the elite.
HEDGES: Yes, they are. That is, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the role of the liberal establishment, to act as a kind of safety valve, to ameliorate the suffering and respond to some of the grievances of the underclass to right the system, which is again, going back to the New Deal, precisely what happened. Roosevelt and Henry Wallace functioned as traditional liberal leaders functioned. And they keep the system afloat.
Now, the problem is that the radical movements that were able to push the liberal elites to respond have been destroyed. We don't have any anymore. In the long war against our internal and external enemies in the name of anti-communism, they've been utterly decimated, culminating in the 1950s with these huge purges. Ellen Schrecker has written two good books about this. You know, thousands, thousands of high school teachers, social workers, artists, directors, journalists like I. F. Stone were pushed out. I. F. Stone--.
JAY: And particularly trade unionists.
HEDGES: And trade unionists. So you end up with these distortions like, in the 1960s, Meany and Kirkland, who support Nixon's war in Indochina, denounce the hippies in the street. I mean, when Joe Sacco and I did our book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, one of the chapters is out of southern West Virginia. Now, pre-World War I, Mother Jones was a hero to the miners, like John Lewis and all of these radical figures. Now it's Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.
Why is that? It's because there's been a divorce of radical movements from the working class and radical ideologies from the working class. And the way that divorce came about is that those who had these kind of broad social visions which challenged the primacy of corporate capitalism got pushed out of the system. They're not there anymore. And so now at a moment of crisis--and we are certainly in a moment of crisis--we lack the movements which can give expression to the suffering of our underclass, and our liberal elites which once responded to those movements have been eviscerated and essentially are corporate stooges.
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