Labor for a Ceasefire/ Trump's Cult of Personality

Ralph is joined by labor activist Gene Bruskin to discuss how labor leaders are joining with Progressive lawmakers to demand a ceasefire in Gaza, and the true meaning of solidarity. Then Ralph welcomes Rick Perlstein— historian, chronicler of American conservativism, and author of Nixonland—to explain Donald Trump's iron grip on the Republican Party.

Gene Bruskin is a veteran of the labor movement as a local union president, organizer, and campaign coordinator for numerous local and national unions.  He has done extensive international labor solidarity work, including with Iraqi workers and unions, and is a founder of US Labor Against the War. He is also a member of the National Labor Network for a Ceasefire. 

Never in the 140 year history of the labor movement—starting with the A.F.L. formation in 1885—has there been such a broad-scale resistance to U.S. government policy in the middle of a conflict like this. It's just never happened before.

Gene Bruskin

The labor movement has to understand that there's a lot of contradictions in the Democratic Party and we cannot allow the party to define our interests. And on foreign policy, the idea has been long time proposed in the labor movement that our national interests require us to do “this” kind of foreign policy or “this” war… But really what we did in our organization U.S. Labor Against the War during the Iraq War—where we actually built real solidarity with Iraqi workers and brought them all over the country here—was we said the national interest of the corporations is not the same as the national interest of the average worker. 

Gene Bruskin

Someday we will see that when unions endorse Democratic presidents, they make demands in return. They should not have simply endorsed Biden—as the U.A.W. did, and others—without demanding a public commitment.

Ralph Nader

Rick Perlstein is a historian and chronicler of American conservativism. He is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, and Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980.

These feelings of dispossession, of vulnerability, of weakness really get at the darkest and most easily-manipulated parts of the human mind that are based on the most primal fears. Stuff like fears of snakes, fear of cockroaches, fear of dark things that go bump in the night. And those are there in our brains, they're in the lowest parts of our brains. And what the Republican Party has been doing for decades… is they're exploiting that animal part of the brain in order to aggrandize their own power. And it's really, really scary. And one of the things that makes it, again, so scary is it is precisely not amenable to rational persuasion.

Rick Perlstein

The Democratic Party is not the kind of party that says, “Wow, we can use this and sustain these things that we were able to put in during an emergency to shore up our power forever.” Instead, as soon as they had the chance, they took them away.

Rick Perlstein

In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis

News 2/14/24

1. On Monday, the Senate voted through a mammoth $95 billion foreign aid package furnishing American assistance to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. Beyond arming Israel however, this bill also bans funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, one of the key agencies providing relief to Palestinians in Gaza – even as starvation in Gaza deepens to lethal levels – and removes previous requirements that the president inform Congress of additional weapons transfers to Israel. Voting against the bill, Senator Merkley of Oregon said “The campaign conducted by the Netanyahu government is at odds with our American values & American law…I cannot vote to send more bombs & shells to Israel when they are using them in an indiscriminate manner against Palestinian civilians.” In another speech, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said “Kids in Gaza are now dying from the deliberate withholding of food. In addition to the horror of that news, one other thing is true, that is a war crime. It is a textbook war crime. And that makes those who orchestrate it war criminals.” Yet, despite correctly identifying the Israeli starvation campaign as a war crime, Van Hollen voted in favor of the arms package. The bill now moves to the House, which failed to advance it just last week. House Speaker Mike Johnson has gone on record saying he opposes the package because it does not address immigration at the southern border.

2. In Michigan, a movement is underway to deny Joe Biden the state’s delegates, by encouraging voters to check the box for “uncommitted” in the upcoming Democratic primary. So far, over 30 Democratic elected officials in the state have cosigned this movement, including Mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud of Dearborn and Representative Abraham Aiyash, Majority Leader in the Michigan House. This list is expected to grow as Biden’s untempered support for Israel puts Michigan Democrats on increasingly perilous footing. More information is available at ListentoMichigan.com.

3. If you’re a Hulu subscriber, you may have seen the pro-Israel propaganda the streamer has been running. Put simply, the ad – created by Israel’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate – begins like a tourist ad for Gaza – using AI-generated images – and then shifts to showing the reality on the ground there, ascribing all blame for conditions in Gaza to Hamas, with no mention of the fact that Israel has blockaded Gaza and turned it into what major human rights groups call “the world’s largest open air prison.” With this ad running constantly, locals in Los Angeles have mobilized to protest Hulu’s offices, a rare escalation that the company would be wise not to ignore. This from Vice.

4. Two stunning stories on Boeing: in an LA Times article, Ed Pierson – a former Boeing senior manager – is quoted saying “I would absolutely not fly a Max airplane...I’ve worked in the factory where they were built, and I saw the pressure employees were under to rush the planes out the door. I tried to get them to shut down before the first crash.” Joe Jacobsen, a former engineer at Boeing and the FAA, said “I would tell my family to avoid the Max. I would tell everyone, really.” Meanwhile, the American Prospect reports that the lawyer who exposed Epstein’s sweetheart deal with Alex Acosta has sued the Department of Justice, in an attempt to force disclosure of what is in the Deferred Prosecution Agreement reached by Boeing and the Trump administration following the 737 MAX crashes. We hope this recidivist corporation finally gets its comeuppance.

5. The Federal Communications Commission has issued a rule banning AI-generated voices in robocalls. Specifically, the commission expressed grave concern about the potential for manipulation of voters in the upcoming presidential election. AI-generated voices in these calls would likely be capable of deceiving voters into thinking that public figures had endorsed a particular candidate when they have not.

6. Gothamist reports at least 70 current and former employees of the New York City Housing Authority have been arrested on bribery and corruption charges. According to the report, “superintendents, assistant superintendents and other NYCHA officials accepted more than $2 million in kickbacks from contractors in exchange for over $13 million in NYCHA business across at least 100 developments.” These corrupt bureaucrats manipulated no-bid contracts in a “pay-to-play” scheme to grant these contracts to contractors that paid them off. Federal prosecutors are calling this “the largest single-day bribery takedown in the history of the justice department.”

7. According to More Perfect Union, “Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont says his state will purchase $1 billion of residents' medical debt for just $6.5 million. Then he will cancel it all, abolishing medical debt for 250,000 people. This is the first time a state has forgiven medical debt at a massive scale.” This demonstrates what is possible for Democrats at the state and federal level. No excuses.

8. UFCW Local 400 reports that the FRESHFARM workers have ratified their first contract. This marks the culmination of the first-in-the-nation successful farmer’s market unionization effort. Among other provisions, this contract includes “Higher wages…Vacation time…Improved workplace conditions and safety standards…[and] Grievance and arbitration procedures.” Yuval Lev, a market operator who was on the union’s bargaining committee said “We’re proud to codify these hard-fought gains in this historic contract and continue doing the work we love to serve the community.”

9. VOX reports the U.S. has been pressuring Mexican President AMLO to help stem the flow of migrants across their northern border. But, signaling that Mexico will no longer blindly do the bidding of the United States, AMLO has demanded certain conditions from the U.S. if they want his help. These include “suspending the US blockade of Cuba, dropping all sanctions against Venezuela, and giving work permits and protection from deportation to at least 10 million Hispanic people living in the US.” Yet, this eminently reasonable set of demands is considered a non-starter within the Washington foreign policy consensus.

10. Finally, Pope Francis has responded to conservative critics blasting him for allowing the church to bless same-sex marriages. Speaking to Italian newspaper La Stampa, Pope Francis said “No one is scandalized if I give my blessing to an entrepreneur who perhaps exploits people: and this is a very serious sin. But they get scandalized if I give it to a homosexual….This is hypocrisy!”

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.

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