>http://www.counterpunch.org/allen03112006.html
>
>March 11 / 12, 2006
>
>Bob Fitch's Hatchet Job
>Smearing Ron Carey and the TDU
Here's Fitch's response.
Doug
----
Instead of a review of Solidarity for Sale, Joe Allen has expressed what amounts to a howl of anger. Instead of arguments refuting my criticisms of Teamster President Ron Carey's leadership and Teamsters for a Democratic Union's politics he's offered a series of logical fallacies.
Allen's arguments mostly take this form: bad people with an agenda say "X"; therefore it's false. Fitch says what they say, so he's wrong too.
But just because the evil ones assert something doesn't make the opposite true. If Hitler says water runs downhill, that doesn't mean it runs uphill. Because the capitalist press criticized the Soviet Union, it didn't make Trotsky's criticisms of Stalin false. Whether someone has answered a question truly or falsely depends on its correspondence with the truth; not who is giving the answer.
Here are seven questions for Joe Allen:
1. As IBT president, did Ron Carey appoint a top Lucchese crime family associate to run the Lucchese controlled "Goodfellas" Local 295 at JFK airport?
2. As Local 804 president, did Ron Carey serve as a character witness for a Lucchese crime family associate?
3. When Ron Carey was president of Local 804, were the union's funds used in mob-controlled loan sharking operations?
4. In the Federal prosecution of the loan sharking case, did Ron Carey get immunity for his testimony and agree to cooperate with U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani and the FBI?
5. Did the Carey administration replace indicted Gambino crime family associates in Local 282 with their relatives - who were subsequently all indicted?
6. Did Ron Carey's brother marry into the Colombo crime family?
7. In Ron Carey's 1996 re-election battle for Teamsters' presidency, were $885,000 in treasury funds laundered into Carey's campaign coffers?
Ron Carey -not just Jr. Hoffa or the establishment press -- has answered every one of these questions "yes." Contrary to what Joe Allen would have his readers believe, the issue has never been - did these things happen? But whether Ron Carey bears any responsibility for them. And Carey's consistent answer - echoed by his loyalists -- has always been "no way." He either didn't know what was going on; or subordinates acted against his wishes.
And because Carey had pledged to carry out Teamster reform, and perhaps more directly because he was supported by TDU -- the main force for Teamster reform -- many Leftists were inclined to ignore the charges. I certainly was.
But as the weight of evidence began to pile up in court records and in Internal Review Board Reports -evidence that Joe Allen shows no sign of having read - it became hard to take Carey's explanations seriously. More and more he began to resemble the Teamster Mr. Magoo. Like the stumbling cartoon character, Carey would navigate one disaster after another, miraculously passing through, but somehow never truly aware of the disasters he escaped.
What was really at stake though, was not just the issue of Carey's personal integrity but whether cosmetic reform would supplant a real cost-to-coast rooting out of Teamster corruption. Carey was willing to trustee Hoffa supporters in the Midwest. But he appeared reluctant to go after corruption in his eastern base. So here in New York the old question of whose side you were on arose in a particularly sharp way. Did you support former TDU members like Leon Olsen and Teddy Katsaros in local 282 who'd vainly begged Carey to rid their union of its Gambino-controlled rulers. Or did you support Carey?
TDU chose Carey. And it did so, I think, for reasons that go to the heart of the argument in Solidarity for Sale. American unions, I try to show, have rarely gotten beyond a 19th c. boss-client model of labor unionism.
U.S. unions resemble fiefdoms. The ordinary members are like the serfs who pay compulsory dues and come with the territory. The union bosses control jobs - staff jobs or hiring hall jobs -- the coin of the political realm. Those who get the jobs - the clients -- give back their unconditional loyalty. The politics of loyalty produces systematically, poles of corruption and apathy. The privileged minority who turn the union into their personal business. And the vast majority who ignore the union as none of their business.
The fiefdom model also drives out genuine politics. Unlike unions in other countries, American unions offer little in the way of programs, platforms, ideology. The main struggle - when there is one -- takes place between the ins vs. the outs. And when the outs win, they become the ins pretty fast.
For over a century socialists like Ken Paff and the founders of TDU have tried to "bore from within" the system, crusading against corruption and advocating power to the rank-and-file. But the local dynamics of the fiefdom system always seem to prove more powerful than the agency of leftists. To move up and gain influence, you wind up playing by boss-client rules. I call it the Roach Motel syndrome: the Leftists go in but they don't come out.
TDU's model Local 138 illustrates just how badly rank-and-file reform can misfire. Billed as a bottom up rebellion against Colombo crime family control, Local 138 wound a criminal enterprise itself with three of its top TDU-affiliated officials going to jail. At first meeting, the newly elected officers discussed how to take over the Colombo rackets.
Of course Ken Paff and TDU in Detroit knew nothing of the New York conspiracy. Yet what finally proved most damaging to the cause of reform was not that crimes were committed or even that the local was destroyed and the jobs shifted to a corrupt local in New Jersey under mob control. But that no-one ever publicly admitted responsibility.
These stories of failed reform are painful to red. (They were painful to have to write.) And the human-all-too human reaction is to denounce them as boss talk. But unless we face up to the limits of our past work, the U.S. labor movement, with its promise of liberation, could soon disappear.