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Lincoln Attacks Arkansas Working Families; Families Don’t Blanche
Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) who this week launched a television ad slamming working families as “outside interests” is continuing her descent into “yet another hypocritical, flip-flopping D.C., politician,” says Arkansas AFL-CIO President Alan Hughes.
Lincoln in recent months has piled up a Senate record opposing working families–including voting to send jobs overseas via bad trade deals, reversing her initial support for the Employee Free Choice Act and opposing health care reform legislation with a public health insurance option. Arkansas unions now have endorsed Lt. Gov. Bill Halter (D.) in the upcoming U.S. Senate primary. Says Hughes:
Lincoln has ignored the interests of working people in Arkansas too many times. It’s easy for her to try to paint opponents as outsiders, but working-class voters in Arkansas can see as well as anybody that she has turned her back on us.
Although she’s attacking working families and their unions today, Lincoln sang quite a different tune in 2004 when she was grateful for the backing of the Arkansas AFL-CIO, along with more than $260,000 in working families’ PAC donations. Said Lincoln at the time:
I’m honored to receive the endorsement today from the Arkansas AFL-CIO for my work in the Senate to improve the lives of Arkansas working families.
Her strong support for Wal-Mart, headquartered in Fayetteville, and her silence about the company’s virulent anti-unionism and labor law violations, has earned her the nickname “the senator from Wal-Mart.”
Lincoln was also just one of two Democrats who voted to block President Obama’s nomination of respected attorney Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board. Says Hughes:
Only someone who has become a career politician in Washington, D.C., could spend 10 years asking for our support, take hundreds of thousands of dollars from blue-collar workers, then turn around and attack us as outsiders because we wouldn’t help her this time around. Those are not the values people in Arkansas believe in.
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4 Comments
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Is the AFL-CIO actually surprised that Democrats are opposed to the interests of organized labor and working people?
Kucinch today, under intense pressure from Obama, and bowing to the inevitable “discipline” of the Democratic Party and Nancy Pelosi, has announced he will vote for the disgusting “Health Care Reform”. Representative Kucinich must now “put up” or he will be “shut up” in November.
With corporate money and agendas controlling both Republican and Democratic Parties, what can Kucinich or so-called “Progressive” Democrats do?
The AFL-CIO President Trumka and the Executive Board must be so happy. Meanwhile, the working people of this country will continue down the road of impoverishment, destroyed public education, unaffordable health care, and with college doors shutting for all the and with no jobs, the future is terrible for all working people, organized and unorganized. Hopefully Obama can provoke more wars to reduce our children and grandchildren to cannon fodder.
This November the AFL-CIO should not automatically fork over tens of millions of dollars to the Democrats as usual. Where there are cases when both Republican and Democratic Parties are proven anti-labor, candidates should be sought after among union leaders, school teachers, and in general working class candidates who have a pro-labor, anti-corporate and socialist agenda.
The time to lay the ground-work for a new mass party of working people is today. The November 2010 election could be a start to organizing and establishing the party nationally to be ready for the 2012 election.
The year 2012 will indeed be the “end of the world” for working people if again the AFL-CIO and organized labor continues “doing the same thing over and over (supporting the Democrats) but insanely expecting different results “.
To a post on the “Progressive” CommonDreams I posted this piece regarding the Kucinich capitulation.
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The bankruptcy of “Progressive” politics is once again demonstrated.
The last several years of the Bush administration and now Obama has finally put to rest these these basic “Progressive” principles:
1. Reform of the corporate controlled Democratic Party is impossible.
2. Individuals, like Kucinich, working within the Democratic Party are, in the end, are forced by Democratic party discipline to eventually capitulate on their essential principles.
3. Even organized efforts within the Democratic Party, such as the Progressive Democrats of America, despite all their rhetoric, effectively maintain the corporate controlled two-party system.
4. Progressives, individually or in groups or third parties, cannot possibly change or reform the many crises intrinsic with run-amok gangster Capitalism. Thus the bankruptcy of Progressive Green parties or the individuals like Ralph Nader in providing adequate leadership or understanding about the need to end capitalism to secure basic change.
5. Organized labor continues to decline into powerlessness, as it’s leaders like AFL-CIO President Trumka, have supported Obama and the Democrats and “Health Care Reform”. Despite the huge expense of this bill (to satisfy corporate greed), even though the delegates to the Pittsburgh Convention voted unanimously for “Medicare for All”, the labor movement, continues to be a “business partner” in support of corporate interests and against the economic interests of working people, organized and unorganized.
6. Thus it is imperative for change for working people, for the AFL-CIO to support a call for the creation of a new anti-corporate socialist “second party”.
The new party, in opposition to both corporate controlled Republican and Democratic parties, will accept no funding or agendas from corporate interests.
To solve the many economic crises facing working people today, it is necessary to organize and fight to move the economy away from capitalism and transition to a socialist economy. That is, an economy designed to fill the economic needs of the vast majority of people, the working people of this country and globally.
7. In California, at this time, without such a mass pro-worker political party, voters should change their voter registration to the only socialist party on the ballot in California, the Peace and Freedom Party.
8. Abandon “Progressive” media and pundits to understand what is happening. Read daily the World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org
Once safely elected to office, the only constituents that elected officials take seriously are the ones who are heard from on a regular basis. Every million dollars or so that Wall Street uses to bribe or blackmail our elected officials can be offset by 15 or 20 working class people who aren’t afraid to make their voces heard. If there is one issue that is as critical to the survival of the working class as healthcare reform, it is anti-sweatshop legislature.
Representative Peter DeFazio of Oregon had introduced a bill to Congress back in April of ‘09 called “H.R. 1875 Emergency Commission to End The Trade Deficit” which would, among other things, actually enforce all of the rules in the existing trade agreements, thereby making it much more difficult for American companies to pay substandard wages to workers overseas. The bill was submitted to the House Ways and Means Committee in April of 2009 and not much has been done about it since. So my suggestion to the readers of this blog is to contact The House Ways and Means Comittee and/or their elected representative and urge them to get moving on this bill and others like it.
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/singlepages.aspx?NewsID=10470
Or, if you would prefer to contact your elected representative directly:
http://www.contactingthecongress.org/
Lincoln is one of many with a (D) behind their names that need to be phased out. When they no longer represent the working class, they serve no purpose in office, only to the special interests. So long farewell…
it is amazing how people that you thought you could trust, can stab you in the back & it doesn’t bother them at all.