You lose the ability to seriously analyze this by dismissing it as one man's idiocy. In fact, he has accomplished much more than almost anyone on today's left you believe to be smart. Just different goals. At the end of the day, their strategy of gaining organizing rights etc has led to a 1.8million member organization. That's 1.7,999,000 more members than the IWW, solidarity, UE, lbo, frso, etc combined. So what is to be done, man? Embrace the iranian regime? Excoriate the lumpenproletariat? Join labor notes and play autoworker for the five more years thats still possible? Become a liberal studies professor or lawyer or computer programmer and make a hobby of critique in one's spare time? Some people have some ideas, but it is difficult, because no one is successfully doing mass organizing on a major scale with traditional left ideology, let alone marxism specifically. There are some endeavors of moderate success on a smaller, localized basis, for organizations more classically left-wing that organize real people workers and build some power institutionally (La's BRU, CIW, DARE in providence, countless numbers proliferating as one descends down the scale size-wise).
Stern's results speak for themselves. These results are not all negative, I can say from years of closeup experience. Workers are organized, unite and fight, individuals change political consciousness, battles are won. NY and CA are better places and have less horrid politics than SC and AZ, in part because of pragmatic victories like this. I (and you) do not agree with the goals he pursues with them, and reasonable leftists can have differences of opinions about the usefulness of the overall strategy for rebuilding the labor movement. But it is an intellectual cop out to imagine he pursues these goals because of stupidity. I challenge you: if he is stupid, and you and other leftists are smart, than illustrate this to me by describing an organization of those smart leftists whose results today speak for themselves.
As you say, it is easy to win mass support for single payer, so tell me about the mass organization of millions and which state it is going to start by winning single payer in. Other have decried seiu's support of the compromise immigration bill, and so I presume someone can point to the mass organization going to win total amnesty and free movement of labor across borders, and how they are going to win such.
Stern thinks the left cannot win a pot to piss in. So tell me about the pot and who's won one.
> Stern wants desperately to be taken seriously by CEOs and the
> business press. No doubt Scott and Dach understand this and saw him
> as a big fat sitting duck with a target painted on his back.
>
> What does labor get out of this alliance? Not much, I'd guess. Stern
> is not approach WMT from anything like a position of strength (see
> sitting duck reference, above). WMT has lots of power, a huge PR
> budget, and very skilled flacks. In his interview with The American
> Prospect Online that I posted here yesterday, Stern admitted that he
> had no idea what WMT wanted as a health insurance program - he may be
> lying about that because you can imagine that it's some version of
> the Massachusetts plan. (He praised ArnieCare in the interview, which
> is a crock.) His claim that we can all just get together and solve
> the problem pragmatically is Perot-like in its idiocy.
>
>
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