United Farm Workers

It should come as no surprise that the United Farm Workers have announced their endorsement of Barack Obama. The United Farm Workers are a great example of the large business unions and their disregard for their rank and file, as well as the working class as a whole, most of whom are not union members.

The UFW are slightly worse than other working class gravediggers like SEIU because while the latter is a huge union and has influence, United Farm Workers is very small, with numbers far lower than the attention they deserve (they’ve reported about 5,000 members to the Dept. of Labor every year since 2002). With membership numbers almost as small as independent unions like the IWW, the UFW primarily exists today as an identity-politics group, exploiting their past to encourage Latinos to vote for Democratic Party politicians. Not that their past is something to be proud of, their late leader Cesar Chavez was a noted anti-communist who used his union members almost as a pre-Minuteman organization against undocumented immigrants. Class struggle knows no borders, and to have a union leader pitting worker against worker in such a way is nearly as bad as the tactics of the early 20th-century AFL.

Former UFW figure Dolores Huerta is still active with Democratic Socialists of America, but she’s more of a Democratic Party partisan than a “socialist”. Besides strongly campaigning for Hillary Clinton in 2008, she attempted to derail the 2011 May Day march in Sacramento by using the tried-and-true Democrat “look at the scary Republicans!” tactic. The crowd saw past the blatant opportunism and shouted her down.

With approximately one million farm workers in the United States, the “contracts” the 5,000-strong UFW manages don’t mean much, if anything at all, to farm workers as a whole. Sure, even a small gain is better than nothing, but with farm workers still living in terrible conditions with poor pay, which the UFW seems to take perverse pride in (see their “Take Our Jobs” campaign of 2010 where they challenged unemployed Americans to do field work to see how bad farmworker conditions are), do they really mean anything?

Update: PDF leaflet of this post

Police forcibly vacate second tent city

It’s enough of a disgrace that in a metropolitan area full of vacant buildings, much of the homeless population was relegated to camping on the periphery of the city, but last week their tent city (the second one in recent history in Sacramento) was raided by police and vacated from the land. At least one homeless camper, Brother Eli, chose to get arrested and deal with the brutal conditions of jail rather than be left by the city to fend for himself. With cold winter temperatures, Sacramento police may have effectively signed the death warrants of several homeless campers; the recent death of a homeless woman in Fresno who was forced to sleep on a sidewalk in 30°F (-1°C) weather might not be an isolated incident.

All activists, whether activists by choice or activists by necessity like Brother Eli, must get over the false idea that police are just doing their “job”, as if that excuses their actions. If harassment, brutality, serving the interests of the rich and powerful, and criminalizing poverty is a job, it’s one that deserves to be eliminated as a career choice.

Sacramento pastors are raising their political voices

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/01/02/4157217/sacramento-pastors-are-raising.html

The old IWW pyramid of the capitalist system shows religious clergy under the banner “We fool you”, and as this article shows, that proud tradition continues. If the pastors telling their parishioners how to vote isn’t troubling enough, what they’re advocating clearly reveals where their true interests lie.

The pastors are putting their support behind Kevin Johnson, a pro-business pro-corporate mayor who is emblematic of Democratic Party hostility toward the poor and working class, and they’re also supporting Allen Warren, CEO of a development company, in his run against council member Sandy Sheedy, who challenged the mayor earlier this year when she initiated a public opinion poll on financing for a sports arena. Johnson, furious that an official might attempt to get the input of the public on his term-long lust for a new arena, will no doubt do whatever he can to replace Sheedy with someone less likely to question his decisions. Who might be more supportive of a new sports arena than the CEO of a development company?