Ralph Nader wants Labor Day to mean more than bargains and sales. He wants a day that truly celebrates and champions the American worker. The AFL-CIO said "Yes" but then bowed to the Democratic Party's "No".

(Ralph Nader)
 

Legendary consumer activist Ralph Nader believes Labor Day should live up to its name. It should be a day that celebrates working people in the United States and their right to organize and speak in a united voice.

 

Instead of being a day extolling capitalism with shopping bargains and discount offers, this coming Labor Day on Monday, September 2, could feature a variety of community gatherings, including “assemblies, rallies, voter registration drives, marches, demonstrations and even agenda-driven parades,” Nader said.

 

“We can have all kinds of events at the local level,” Nader told me in a recent telephone interview. “A compact for American workers.”

 

The events would help promote important issues such as raising the minimum wage, repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, greater protections for workers at the workplace, and more security for their pensions, all doubly important given the presidential election in November.

 

You’d think the AFL-CIO would love the idea. They did. Nader proposed it to AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and other labor leaders and got an enthusiastic response.  Several major labor leaders were ready to act as soon as they got the green light from the AFL-CIO. They included Baldemar Velasquez of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, and former Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen.

 

“We thought, `This is great! We finally woke up that giant on 16^th Street (AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C.) from their slumber,” Nader said.

 

Then the Democratic Party stepped in. “On anything remotely touching on elections, they pass it by the Democratic Party apparatus,” Nader said. “The Democratic Party shut it down. `We won’t be able to control it. Don’t rock the boat.’”

 

Attempts to contact Shuler national Democratic Party Chair Jaime Harrison were unsuccessful.

 

“She doesn’t even call us,” Nader said. “It completely goes dark. They’re so corrupt and so tied to the hip of the Democratic Party they can’t even put the works in on Labor Day.”

 

As for the Democratic Party, Nader said, “they’re controlled by corporate consultant media groups. They’d rather do puff pieces like what kind of coach was (Democratic vice presidential candidate) Tim Walz.”

 

Labor Day was even at its founding something of a contentious event. It ought to be on May 1, the day it is celebrated elsewhere in the world. May 1, 1886, was the day of the founding of the “Eight Hour Work Day” in Chicago and what is considered the world’s first May Day parade. However, the subsequent deadly police confrontation and bombing known as the “Haymarket Affair” and continued labor unrest in later years rattled President Grover Cleveland enough in 1894 to proclaim a “Labor Day” holiday but to make it the first Monday in September rather than May 1.  

 

A recent Gallup Poll showed that 70 percent of Americans view labor unions favorably, the second highest level in six decades. A poll in 2022 showed 71 percent viewed unions favorably.

 

The polls indicate Americans are ready for a more robust Labor Day, one that does more than ask them to reach into their pockets and spend, one that recognizes the contributions of the working class to American society and declares a commitment to make their lives better.

 

Harris supports Israel, NATO, and the war in Ukraine while Trump backs Israel and praises the firing of workers who are on strike. Why don't we have a major party peace candidate who supports workers?

(Kamala Harris)
 

(Below is a revised version of my initial post from a few days ago, sharpening the focus on Harris, the Democratic Party, and the issue of war) 

A Democratic Party loyalist here in Oxford told me recently he was at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago and the “joy” and “unity” among delegates was palpable. Even when Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, accepting her party’s nomination, talked war the smiles and applause were nearly universal.

 

Yes, Harris stood strong for the military-industrial complex, pledging support for NATO and its brutal war in Ukraine. “I helped mobilize a global response—over 50 countries—to defend against Putin’s aggression,” she boasted. As for Israel, Harris said, “I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.”

 

Furthermore, Harris said she is going to make sure “America—not China—wins the competition for the 21^st century. And that we strengthen—not abdicate—our global leadership.”

 

Is the Democratic Party the party of war? Despite Republican Richard Nixon’s role in continuing the Vietnam War after his election as president in 1968, let’s not forget it was Democrats John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who got that war started. Today Joe Biden will go down in history as perhaps finally ending the 20-year war in Afghanistan but then turning around and funding the U.S.-pushed war in Ukraine, funding Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and threatening war with China simply because China poses a challenge to the United States’ economic dominance of the world.

 

In her speech to the Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris firmly established she’ll be no less a warmonger than Joe Biden.

 

“As commander-in-chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” she told the fawning crowd in Chicago.

 

Actually her comments were among the few that even addressed war during the convention. This is despite the fact that the U.S.-and-NATO-funded war in Ukraine escalates daily with U.S.-armed Ukrainian soldiers now in Russia while Russian soldiers make steady gains in eastern Ukraine. Israel’s wholesale murdering of Gaza civilians has been made possible by the U.S. providing Israel with nearly 70 percent of all its arms imports—including an estimated $12.5 billion in weapons since October 2023.

 

In fact, Palestinian Americans were denied an opportunity to speak on the DNC stage in Chicago, and news coverage of pro-Palestinians protests outside the convention hall was minimal at best.

 

Even Republican Donald Trump and his running made J.D. Vance have indicated they’re sick and tired of the U.S funding the war in Ukraine, a needless war that the U.S. helped create by playing a key role in the overthrow of an elected, Russia-leaning government in Ukraine in 2014 and willful dismissal of rightful Russian desires not to have a hostile NATO partner on its borders.

 

However, Trump is as devoted to Israel’s warmongering as Biden-Harris, and if elected he’ll likely continue to feed the bloated military-industrial complex, with its funding now at an estimated $1.5 trillion.

 

Harris is enjoying a boost in polls since the convention, and the Trump team still hasn’t figured out quite how to deal with her. Trump is his own worse enemy. After rallying blue-collar workers and even many union members with his choice of Vance as a running mate and the party’s willingness to hear Teamsters President Sean O’Brien speak at the GOP Convention in July, the former president joined multi-billionaire Elon Musk on the X social media platform and praised the Tesla CEO for firing striking workers.

 

“I mean, look at what you do,” Trump said in absolute admiration, “You walk in, you just say, `You want to quit?’ They go on strike … and you say, `That’s okay, you’re all gone.’”

 

In 2022, Musk fired unionized workers at Tesla’s San Francisco headquarters and workers at its Buffalo, New York, factory who were organizing a union.

 

The United Auto Workers got so incensed about those comments that the union filed federal labor charges against Trump and Musk for making illegal threats against striking workers who are protected by federal law from such intimidation. O’Brien called Trump’s comments to Musk “economic terrorism.” 

 

Working class people, abandoned by the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton corporatized it in the 1990s and largely ignored by the Republican Party for a century or more, have nowhere really to turn. They’ll fight the wars that the politicians wage, and those same politicians could car less about the economic duress in their lives.

 

Worker class people—a term, by the way, that neither party likes very much--hope against hope each election. Unions dutifully endorse a Democratic Party that stopped listening decades ago. Third Party candidates like war opponent Jill Stein of the Green Party offer a breath of fresh air, but they can't get media attention and the major parties (particularly the Democratic Party) do everything possible to skuttle their campaigns.

 

Apologies for sounding pessimistic, but it seems the saber-rattling and warmongering are going to among the winners in the November election.

What divides America is not race but rich and poor, the old preacher J. Vernon McGee once said. He might have added war.

 

(J. Vernon McGee)
 

The late J. Vernon McGee, famous radio preacher and pastor of the Church of the Open Door in downtown Los Angeles, once had this to say about divisions in the United States. “It’s not race that ultimately will divide this country. It’s rich and poor.”

 

My very religious mother used to listen to McGee regularly, and I always enjoyed hearing what he had to say in that thick Southern accent of his. He told the truth when he talked about the rich and poor in America but he might have also added war. War is itself an issue of the rich and poor.

 

You’d think you would hear a lot about the plight of the working class in the current presidential election and the growing divide between them and the 1 percent who rule the corporatocracy that the United States has become.

 

On the Democratic side, Kamala Harris raised hopes in the working class with her choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. A plainspoken champion of a handful of labor and other left-leaning issues as governor, Walz would seem to broaden the appeal for Harris, whose record features few challenges to corporate rule. Yet Walz as a congressman was quite centrist, and he is as staunch a supporter of Israel as much of the rest of the Democratic Party leadership, even as Israel continues its genocide in the Gaza Strip and suppression of Palestinians in the West Bank.

 

War is an issue for the working class. They fight the wars that the nation wages, and if not on the battlefield they are forced to support those wars with their tax dollars.

 

You’d think war is hardly an issue in this year’s election if you simply read or listened to mainstream media. Yet both Democrats and Republicans have wedded this nation to Israel’s rapacious behavior by sending the weapons it uses to kill Palestinians. They’ve done the same in Ukraine, continuing the bloody destruction of that nation in an effort to weaken Russia and bring about the regime change they so desperately want. The same motivations prompt all the talk against China, a nation that poses no military threat to the U.S. but one that poses for them an unacceptable economic challenge.

 

In other words, Harris thus far has helped feed Wall Street and a military-industrial complex that thrive while Main Street suffers. There’s little indication so far that Harris-Walz would be any different than Biden-Harris.

 

When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, he promised to clear “the swamp” that is the Deep State in Washington, D.C. Instead he brought bankers and warmongers into his cabinet and did little other than bluster about how great he was making America again. Would another Trump Administration be different?

 

Trump’s choice for VP, J.D. Vance, brought some promise of working class sympathies as a result of his own Appalachian background and his book, Hillbilly Elegy. However, let’s not forget he went on to Yale Law School and an early career as a corporate lawyer and venture capitalist. To his credit, he does oppose further U.S. funding for the war in Ukraine. However, both he and Trump remain strong supporters of Israel, and Vance has strongly condemned pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses.

 

For the time being, the Trump campaign is floundering. It misses easy target Joe Biden badly and hasn’t yet found the message to successfully counter Harris-Walz.

 

What the working class of America want are leaders who truly represent their interests, who aren’t utterly beholden to Wall Street and the war machine, who mean what they say and say what they mean. It has been so long since they had such a leader they have to wonder whether one exists.