National

In the run-up to their convention in Los Angeles Sept. 8-11, top AFL-CIO officials have welcomed closer ties with non-labor groups and associations of workers’ who lack bargaining rights. In an interview with USA Today this summer, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka claimed that formal partnerships with the Sierra Club and NAACP would soon be forthcoming.

Lesser evil or Left alternative? In fact, this is not a true either/or. Our task is by definition to build a Left alternative. But this does not mean that we can ignore aspects of the existing framework that may facilitate or obstruct this effort. Whether or not this entails identifying and voting for a “lesser evil” depends on the immediate circumstances.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has given our timorous, unimaginative, and politically ambivalent unions a much-needed ideological dope slap. Some might describe this, more diplomatically, as a second injection of “outside-the-box” thinking and new organizational blood.

Like many others of Italian-American heritage, I experienced some discomfort when in 1951 Senator Estes Kefauver, a Democrat from Tennessee, launched his highly publicized investigation into the organized rackets, uncovering scores of thugs with Italian surnames. Subsequent decades produced an endless parade of such rogues whose mugs were repeatedly splashed across the print and broadcast media.