First, congratulations to Christian Smalls and the independent Amazon Labor Union for their successful organizing drive to unionize the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island. It’s a terrific accomplishment, and hopefully the beginning of a real national labor movement.
Smalls himself was fired by, demonized, and degraded by Amazon, which is owned by one of the wealthiest plutocrats on the planet, Jeff Bezos, who had so much money he could spend damned near a billion bucks on a short tourist jaunt into space.
A few months ago, according to Smalls himself, he approached Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mondaire Jones, and Cori Bush, all progressive Democrats, and asked for their help. All were positive. AOC even promised to attend a rally but then canceled at the last minute due to “security concerns.” Two weeks later, she appeared at the Met Gala in a designer dress that set the liberal class all aswoon:
In fact, AOC didn’t even bother to send out a single tweet in support of these workers until it became clear they were going to win, and then jumped in and seemingly tried to take some credit for their success. Krystal Ball, to her credit, called AOC out on Twitter and was met with really lame gaslighting responses from AOC. Smalls himself appeared on Breaking Points and said the union got no support whatsoever from any of these posing champions of the working class called progressive Democrats.
So who did help them? Not the Democrats. Not the Democratic Socialists of America. Not any celebrities whatsoever. From what I could learn on Twitter, the Gravel Institute supported them, and the CPUSA showed up on the ground to help them out.
That’s right. The Communist Party of the United States of America. They showed up. I don’t know exactly what they did, but at least they were there. The new union itself has workers’ committees. In Russia they would be called soviets. This sort of ground-up control was what Lenin and Trotsky were talking about in 1917 when their slogan was All power to the soviets!
Now, these committees won’t actually control the means of production or determine policy in the Amazon warehouse, but at least they will be in control of their own union, which is a lot more than I can say about any AFL-CIO or Teamsters-affiliated union. It’s a big step in the right direction.
All of this jogged my memory. Do you remember back in 2008 when Barack Obama promised to put on his walking shoes and support workers in labor struggles? I sure do. One of his major campaign promises was card-check legislation, a proposed federal law that would legally recognize a union’s right to collectively bargain with an employer once a majority of employees signed union cards.
The idea was to change the law so that once a majority signed the cards, it was a done deal, instead of having an election where the employer has the chance to misinform, propagandize, and intimidate workers into voting against the union. The record shows that Amazon is one of the worst employers when it comes to that.
The Obama Administration never proposed the legislation, and as far as I know, the Democrats never even introduced such a bill. If one or two of them did, it never made it out of committee, never made it to a floor vote. Obama did nothing, because he was lying the whole time and never had any intention whatsoever of delivering on that campaign promise. My evidence for this contention is Obama’s abysmal record on labor rights for eight years.
Like Obama, AOC campaigned on workers’ rights and supporting unions, but what has she actually done since she was elected to deliver on that promise? Other than tweets or a speech here and there between constant appeals for campaign donations, the answer is diddly-squat.
The same can be said for Medicare-for-All, raising the federal minimum wage to a still-inadequate $15 an hour, ending imperial wars, curbing police brutality, forgiving student loan debt, or just about anything else considered “progressive.”
Instead, she has sent campaign donations to her to openly corporatist Democrats such as Conor Lamb, refused to withhold her vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House in exchange for a floor vote on M4A, and gone along with separating all of the good things in Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure plan from all of the stuff Joe Manchin agreed upon so they could die in the Senate.
She does not handle criticism from the left well at all. Just like Obama, she loves positive attention and hero-worship but either gaslights her critics or tells them they are unrealistic or just don’t understand how hard she has it. Just like Obama, she has deliberately failed to use what power she has to advance the causes she says she holds so dear.
Just like Obama, she’s another narcissistic fraud of a Democrat, and a loyal servant of the ruling oligarchy when the rubber meets the road. Her Obamafication is now complete.
Yup. She was fully assimilated into the neoshitlib blob well before she wore that stupid lie of a dress.