A comparison of Huey Long and Donald Trump. Both challenged establishment politics, but only one delivered.

(Huey Long)
 

Back in the 1930s, Huey Long, Louisiana’s flamboyant governor and later U.S. senator, explained himself this way to reporters. “I am sui generis (one of a kind), just leave it at that.”

 

Indeed, Long was a one-man revolution in Louisiana politics, wresting control from the ruling oil barons and other so-called Bourbons, upending their arch-conservative dominance and giving the common man and woman finally a piece of the pie in their oil-rich state.

 

Long taxed the oil companies, gave the people free textbooks for their children in school, paved countless miles of roads in their dirt-patch state, built bridges, and erected a new skyscraper state capitol in Baton Rouge. And he made a lot of enemies along the way—the patrician press, the ensconced rich, and finally a doctor who assassinated Long in 1935.

 

Huey Long remains today perhaps the best-known challenge to establishment politics in American history. His is a long lineage that includes fellow left-wing Louisiana populists like his own brother and three-time governor Earl Long and later four-time governor Edwin Edwards. He’s often compared to other Southern demagogues like Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Gene Talmadge of Georgia, but unlike them Long didn’t rule from the right or even more importantly race bait.

 

(Donald Trump)
 

With Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance making a strong bid for the White House in a few weeks, taking a look at politicians like Huey Long and their appeal might be instructive.

 

Like Long in his day, Trump today is generally dismissed by an equally patrician mainstream media as a dangerous demagogue who threatens the nation’s very democratic foundation. Certainly the national Democratic Party and even some politicians in the national Republican Party despise him and desperately hope for his failure in November.

 

Like Long, Trump looks beyond party leaders and their subservient press to what they scorn as “the deplorables” (what used to be known as “the great unwashed”), people who get dirty at the workplace, who struggle to pay for a roof over their head, who wince at their grocery bills. Most of them would agree that Trump is a big mouth whose delivery often doesn’t match his wind-up, but at least he acknowledges their pain. “Brie and Chablis” Democrats are too busy touting “Bidenomics” to even see the pain.

 

Still, the comparison only goes so far. Yes, like Trump, Huey Long indeed craved power, and he ran roughshod over his political enemies. However, he also delivered the goods to the people. He gave them hope as well as a true share in the economy. In contrast, Trump peopled his administration with the same kind of Wall Street types who helped create the “Swamp” in Washington, D.C., that he decried on the campaign trail.

 

Trump tried to gut the National Labor Relations Board and more recently praised Elon Musk for firing union workers. So much for standing up for the working stiff.

 

Joe Biden proudly proclaimed himself the nation’s most pro-union president even as he continually diverted the nation’s resources into wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Plus he betrayed railway workers who simply wanted basic rights like sick leave.  Kamala Harris struggles to find an issue in which she disagrees with Biden.

 

Regular working class folks don’t have much of a choice when they go to cast their ballots in November. Mine is going to Jill Stein, a third-party candidate with no chance to win but at least one who stands strong against Harris and Trump warmongering (Trump is as blindly pro-Israel as Biden and Harris) and she seems to have a genuine care for the well-being of average Americans.

 

This is one voter who is tired of voting for the lesser evil.        

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.

 

Teamsters president preaches but not to the choir at the Republican national convention. Meanwhile Democrats pray for a miracle.

 Don’t preach to the choir, the old saying goes. You preach to the sinners in hopes to save their souls.

 

It’s the kind of message I used to hear in my youth from my Uncle Eb at the Macedonian Pentecostal Holiness Church in rural central North Carolina. Uncle Eb was a fiery presence behind his wooden pulpit, his blazing eyes, hooked nose, and gravelly voice. “You not too young to go to hell,” he once warned my brother John and me when we declined joining everyone else kneeling at the front aisle at the end of one of his sermons.

(Teamsters President Sean O'Brien)

 

Teamsters union president Sean O’Brien was definitely not preaching to the choir when he made his pro-union speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this past Monday night.

 

“I see American workers being taken for granted, workers being sold out to big banks, big tech corporations, the elite,” O’Brien said in his amazing stem-winder. America needs a “long-term investment in the American worker.”

 

O’Brien took a lot of heat for accepting Republican nominee Donald Trump’s invitation to speak at the Republican convention. His union even donated $45,000 to the Republican cause. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain blasted Trump as a “scab” who’d “be a company man trying to squeeze the American worker” if he ever worked in a plant.

 

(Donald Trump)

 

Unlike most unions with their unwavering support for the national Democratic Party, the Teamsters have flirted before with the Republican Party. It’s a serious flirtation when you consider the Teamsters is the nation’s largest private-sector union with 1.4 million members.

 

O’Brien’s speech wasn’t the only stereotype-defying element in the Republican National Convention. Trump’s choice of U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice president running mate was another. Vance has built his career—if not always his vote--on support for the common man, the blue-collar worker, against the corporate elite in this country. He’s also taken a strong stand against U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine, much to the chagrin of the party’s most rabid warmongers, such as U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina.

(J.D. Vance)

 

What’s happening here? Is the Trump-led Republican Party trying to become the “Big Tent” party the Democrats have always claimed to be? Indeed, this week’s convention featured a row of black politicians and a major black influencer as well as a “common man” hero in wrestler Hulk Hogan.

 

 When the Democrats convene for their own convention in Chicago August 19, they’ll likely enter the arena a deeply divided party, uncertain who their leader will be now that incumbent President Joe Biden has bowed out. Will it be Vice President Kamala Harris, or some other choice who may somehow salvage the party’s sinking chances in November?

 

Of course, the Democrats will have loyalists on board such as the UAW’s Shawn Fain, an early endorser of Biden despite Biden’s dismal failure in late 2022 to support a railroad workers strike to secure better working conditions and decent sick leave policies.

 

 The recent--and now successful--push to get rid of Joe Biden in the wake of his disastrous debate performance against Trump has exposed the traditional “Big Tent” party to be essentially run by “Big Donors” from Hollywood and Wall Street. They may claim to be Diversity-Equity-Inclusion liberals but in essence they are just as disdainful of unions as a Walton or as many of those in that Milwaukee convention hall listening to O’Brien rail against billionaires.

 

(Franklin D. Roosevelt with Labor Secretary Frances Perkins)
 

Decades ago Bill and Hillary Clinton gutted the “Big Tent” soul of what was left of FDR’s old Democratic Party, deregulating the financial markets, repealing the Glass-Steagal Act that restricted monopolizing mergers. Bill's later successor, Barack Obama, would give a rousing pro-union speech at the 2005 AFL-CIO convention in Chicago—I was there and applauded it!—but he filled his cabinet with Wall Streeters once he got elected president.

 

Many workers—and likely a lot of Teamsters—are turning toward Trump and the Republicans because they feel abandoned by the modern-day Democratic Party with its obsessive focus on identity politics and general refusal to even use the term “working class”. They’re sadly bound to be disappointed, however, because Trump may sound populist and working class, but in his heart of hearts he’s a corporate billionaire who peopled his first administration with bankers and industrialists.

 

Working class people in America need a party of their own, a labor party, that is truly going to serve them, not just pay lip service during campaigns. They had such a party 120 years ago in the so-called People’s Party, better known as the Populists. The Democratic Party of that day, however, appropriated many of their issues, and the Populists gradually faded from the scene after becoming the largest third party movement in the country’s history.

 

Quo vadis, today’s America? I wish I had an answer.

 

A doddering old president and bulldog former president debate the nation's future while Democrats worry about their party's future

The whole world was watching—literally—as U.S. President Joe Biden stumbled and mumbled his way through a 90-minute debate with former president Donald Trump last night. For much of his presidency, Biden has been protected by a coterie of loyalists--and their media sycophants--who’ve insisted he is in full control of his faculties and his job as the most powerful man in the world.

 

Don’t believe your lying eyes, they told the world. Last night the world saw who was lying.

 

Democrats today (and Washington’s Deep State) are in either shell shock or panic mode as they look down through the remaining months before the election and wonder if their man can ever restore Americans’ confidence that he can lead them another four years. If he’s as doddering today as he appeared to be at the CNN debate last night, how will he be when he’s 86 years old and still in charge of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal?

 

Speculation is already circling among Democrats as to who would or could replace Biden as the head of the Democratic ticket. Vice President Kamala Harris? She’s even more unpopular than Biden. And if the party wants someone else, it cannot tell Kamala there’s a glass ceiling after all! Still, all the speculation is a waste of time. The presidency has been Joe Biden’s lifelong dream, and he’s not going to simply slip off into the night now that it is in his grip. Joe Biden’s ego may be the one remaining strength of his mental capacities.

 

For his part, Donald Trump probably bristled at the debate rules that prevented him from roughshodding Biden like he did Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and fellow Republicans during the 2016 presidential race. Yet, ironically, those rules actually helped him, keeping him on target, making him even look, dare I say, almost normal in his relative restraint. Of course, a plethora of lies poured from his mouth, but he at least held back from taking full mocking advantage of Biden’s disintegration.

 

Biden’s handlers over the past week obviously pumped him full of statistics. He seemed programmed as he recited them even if some of them were patently false. Biden told lies, too, lies that CNN commentators totally ignored. Russia, for example, has shown absolutely no inclination to take over all of Ukraine, much less Poland and other Eastern European countries, as Biden claimed again and again.

 

Biden was best when he pointed to Trump’s utter allegiance to the nation’s top 1 percent—the tax cuts to the wealthy, the suppression of organized labor and worker rights, the judges and justices he appointed to reward the rich and punish everyone else. However, viewers were watching Biden’s facial and body movements, listening to the raspy, uncertain voice, not really listening to the words.

 

The Democratic National Committee has become an extremely insular organization ever since Bill and Hillary Clinton excised the party’s soul and replaced it with unprincipled (and largely unsuccessful) formulas and algorithms to raise lots of money (Wall Street) and hopefully win elections. Just as the DNC worked to undermine Bernie Sanders’ candidacy eight years ago, it made sure this campaign that Biden was unchallenged in the primaries.

 

They got their man. Now what are they doing to do with him?

 

And how is the nation going to fare over the next four years? That’s the real concern that emerged from last night’s debate.

A pro-union worker school in North Carolina attracts 200, and 27,000 teachers and school workers get a union in Fairfax County, Virginia, while a judge, cops, and even some union leaders push against student anti-genocide protests

(Ella May Wiggins, a martyr of the Southern labor movement who was murdered during textile mill protests in North Carolina in 1929)
 

Some 200 pro-labor activists and workers attend a Southern Worker School in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a majority of voters of a 27,000-member teacher core in Fairfax County, Virginia, vote to join a union. Meanwhile, police and the courts crack down on protesters across the country, and Ford and Stellantis violate the spirit of recent union agreements by laying off hundreds of workers.

 

In this latest Labor South round-up, the lines are clearly being drawn between the American people and the political-financial forces that continue to try to dominate their lives.

 

A push to get workers into key industries across the South so they can organize and push pro-union ideas

 

An historic gathering of some 200 pro-union rank-and-filers took place in Charlotte, North Carolina, May 17 through 19, the largest worker school ever organized by the Southern Workers Assembly. A key topic of discussion was the SWA recently launched program to recruit pro-labor workers to enter key industries in the Southern economy.

 

The worker school “felt like a new beginning of the labor movement to me,” International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1414, Savannah, Georgia, Vice President Jamie Muhammad told the SWA, “a room filled with people organizing to achieve justice in the workplace, from all walks of life.”

 

Delegates came from across the South representing a wide array of unions, including locals with the United Campus Workers, United Auto Workers, Union of Southern Service Workers, National Nurses United, Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity & Empowerment, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

 

Inspired by the recent union victory by the UAW at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the Daimler Truck Company agreement in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia providing workers a 25 percent raise, and earlier UAW victories at General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, the worker school participants acknowledged the tough labor battleground the South has always been. Clear indication of this was the UAW’s recent failure in a union election at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama.

 

“The Southern auto industry will not be organized one election at a time, nor will the hospital industry or logistics or any industry,” SWA Coordinating Committee member Ed Bruno told participants. “The UAW founding in the 1930s was based on sit-down strikes that were multi-corporation, multi-location efforts to organize the entire auto industry. That’s the way the modern labor movement was formed. And that’s the way the South will be organized.”

 

Teachers and school workers overwhelmingly vote union in densely populated Fairfax County, Virginia, a historic vote largely ignored by mainstream media

 

A stunning union victory for the 27,000 teachers and school staff took place this week in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. The vote by teachers was 97 percent to unionize, while the vote by support staff was 81 percent pro-union.

 

“I think people are realizing that they are not respected and want to be able to have the American dream,” Fairfax Education Association President Leslie Houston told the labor report Payday, one of the few news organizations to cover the election.

 

 Claiming the victory is Virginia Education Unions, a coalition of locals with the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association. Fairfax County is the fifth richest county in the nation, but also one where many public employees struggle to afford a living and are forced to have second jobs.

 

A shift toward the Democratic Party in Virginia in recent years allowed the 2020 passage of a law giving municipalities the right to allow collective bargaining agreements for public employees, something heretofore outlawed. This week’s union victory marked the culmination of a 47-year campaign for pro-union forces in Fairfax County’s schools.

 

Unions join student protesters opposing Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza’s Palestinian citizens, and the courts and the police and some union bosses don’t like it

 

At the above-mentioned Southern Workers Assembly Worker School in Charlotte, participants expressed solidarity with university students across the country who are protesting the United States’ complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza being waged by the Israeli military. They also condemned the anti-First Amendment crackdown on those protests by university leaders and local police.

 

A particular bone of contention has been at the University of California, where a strike by United Auto Workers academic workers recently broadened to include as many as 30,000 of the 48,000 UAW members in California’s institutes of higher learning.

 

The expansion of the strike led Orange County Superior Court Judge Randall J. Sherman to issue a strike-breaking order forcing workers to return to work at least until June 27 when final exams are taking place. The UAW leadership told workers to obey the judge’s order.

 

A violent attack by Zionist extremists on protesters prompted the strike on May 20.  Police did little to nothing to protect protesters from the extremists.

 

“The strikebreaking intervention by the courts … demonstrates that the defense of democratic rights will be not be protected by any government agency but only through a movement of the working class,” writes Dan Conway of the World Socialist Web Site. “The fight for this requires a struggle against the UAW bureaucracy.”

 

The WSWS contends the UAW bureaucracy has tried to contain the strike from the very beginning, something in line with UAW President Shawn Fain’s leadership and endorsement of President Joe Biden in his re-election campaign despite Biden’s pro-Zionist policies. Even victories Fain has claimed for the UAW, such as at Ford and Stellantis, are marred given the layoffs and mass firings, many or most of them supplemental or temporary employees, at those companies, the WSWS has argued.