The author(s) underestimate the extent of dissent within the AFL for the consultation policy. The manufacturing unions and IBT are all against it, given the existing quid-pro-quo.
Calling the labor inaction a "betrayal" is overheated. There was no prior commitment to do anything else. I do agree that the AFL should have done more than they did (apparently nothing) to show support for those assaulted by the cops. It would have been in their own interest, which is a tip-off that what was going on was not betrayal so much as basic conservatism and lack of imagination.
mbs
-----Original Message----- From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Doug Henwood Sent: Saturday, December 04, 1999 7:25 PM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: two views on Seattle
Jeffrey St. Clair wrote:
>Fuck you, Doug. You know damn well that I was in Seattle, on the streets
>every day, at nearly every violent confrontation between the cops, national
>guard and the police: at the McDonalds on Monday, at 6th and Union, 6th and
>University, 4th and Pine on Tuesady, on Wed. at Pike Place Market, Capitol
>Hill and, at 7 in the morning, right outside your Travelodge hotel, when
the
>cops were beating an 83 year-old grandmother. I was gassed and whacked
across
>the back with riot clubs. By Thursday, I was coughing blood, like many who
>had breathed CS gas for two days straight. I put Alex's Nation piece (based
>largely on my reporting in the AVA) on our website (now slightly updated)
>because the Nation wouldn't post it on theirs and because I'm sick as a dog
>haven't been able to finish my war journal.--jsc
Yeah, well the Nation byline says Alexander Cockburn, doesn't it? Why "Cockburn," who can overlook the many faults of Ron Paul and Larry Pratt, can't cut the AFL-CIO any slack at all is beyond me.
My sympathies on being gassed and cracked. The cops were pretty damn brutal. But I really think to focus on some great "betrayal" by the AFL-CIO is a pretty bad misreading of the situation. For at least three reasons. First that the unions were only part of the story; there were lots of other kinds of people here too. Second, to expect the leadership of the AFL-CIO to take on the cops is pretty ridiculous; that would mark a pre-revolutionary situation, which we're not by any means in. That they were here at all, and that they've taken as tough a stance as they have is the news. That they've shed their nationalism for at least a rhetorical/gestural internationalism is news too. And hearing a Democratic apologist like McEntee denouncing "corporate capitalism" is pretty newsy too. Third, lots of rank and file unionists were marching with the kids and denouncing corporate capitalism in terms bolder than McEntee. This was a major political event, a victory of a sort that the left, whatever that is, hasn't seen in a long time.
By the way, I'd still like to hear someone from Counterpunch answer Josh Mason's responses to your articles. That seems a conversation worth having.
Doug