New Labor Beat Video... 'Done with Democrats' released in a timely manner after Springfield vote against public worker pensions
Done with the Democrats is a new Labor Beat video on On YouTube at: http://youtu.be/u8bSkYhmk74. It is also archived at:. laborbeat.org. After the recent vote in Springfield against teacher and other public worker pensions, the narrative becomes even more important.
Michael Madigan, speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives and most powerful politician in Illinois, was credited with crafting the legislation called by teachers "pension theft." December 3, 2013, the day the legislation passed, will be remembered in Illinois as the day the Democrat Party ceased receiving the support of the state's teachers. Already by that day, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, by choosing the odious Paul Vallas to be his running mate, had begun his own political suicide. This last year of fighting against the full-spectrum assault on the working class in Chicago had a kind of 'taking stock' event on October 15, 2013. The Take Back Chicago Town Hall rally of some 2,000 brought together a variety of community and labor organizations vowing to launch a city-wide counter-offensive against corporate bulldozing of public sector human services, schools and unions.
In the words of one of the event's co-moderators, Brandon Johnson, "For far too long we've seen a corporate agenda that has worked to destroy public education at the hands of Rahm Emanuel and the politicians that are linked to him. There's a new day in Chicago, that longer are we going to allow the corporate groups to dictate what our city looks like."
Building upon Take Back Chicago as a starting point, two Chicago activists -- Lauren Fleer and Marilena Marchetti -- challenge some political assumptions. The big town hall meeting in mid-October seemed to imply that the default strategy would remain that of pressuring and cajoling some Democratic Party politicians to adopt the movement's program of resistance. Several aldermen, state legislators, and even Governor Quinn were invited to the meeting.
But Marchetti observed: "That event brought a lot of different forces together...we felt our agreement and we felt the potential for our collective power. That being said, I felt there was yet more betrayal within the event that has the potential to wake people up and say 'these politicians are a joke. They don't really care about us'."
Evidence proving the historic exhaustion of the labor-Democratic Party relationship was out in the open. N'Dana Carter, a Mental Health activist, called out the entire [Democrat] Chicago City Council (a handful of whom were present on the stage) for voting to close 6 public mental health clinics in 2011, a decision that inflicted great pain on affected communities.
And, later during the meeting, the aldermen present all said they would vote "Yes" for the TIF Surplus Ordinance, which would free millions of dollars of tax revenues to be used for struggling neighborhoods. But, it turns out, three of the aldermen present who said "Yes" on the stage turned around and said "No" in mid-November at the City Council meeting, thus keeping the reform ordinance buried in the Rules Committee.
Democrat Governor Pat Quinn showed up (late) at the meeting and made a canned speech. Marchetti noted: "We booed him, because Pat Quinn wants to cut our pensions...He says: 'unions give me your campaign contributions and I promise I'll do whatever I can'. And 'whatever he can' is cut our pensions...The Democratic Party is the only party that is putting itself out as representing our interests. But the reality is that they have a conflict. They also represent billionaires...they represent those who want us to work more for less."
Fleer looked at the big question of how do we create a political party that represents only our interests: "Always there's the temptation to say not now, later, we have to wait, we have to take the pragmatic choice, that it's just not credible to run a third party candidate, we'll never win. But at some point we have to stake out our own political position. At some point we have to make the break." Length - 19:27
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By: Bob Busch
Historical lessons -- a New Party?
Third parties are usually absorbed by the two existing parties. The narrow positions associated with a third party get included into the platform of one or the other.
What we need is a New Party not a third one. Who would ever think that a group of people forming a new party in 1854 would capture the White House in 1860. Even more unbelievable was the fact they did it with an uneducated hick from a dink water town in Illinois called New Salem.
The difference was that new Republican party included office holders and people of integrity who left the Whig and Democratic parties and joined the new party over a specific issue, slavery.
Thank God that one is settled. But today a lot of people feel disenfranchised -- like gun owners, or people being crushed by economic pressures they did not cause and feel powerless to correct...
-- Like public employees.
The second amendment is there for a reason, but that doesn�t give them the right to shoot someone.
Public employees on the other hand thought they had a deal for a decent retirement only to see their pensions being blamed for everything from potholes to bad schools.
Done correctly a New Party could succeed .