INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISTS ORGANIZATION ORGANIZED D.C. RALLY
- Posted on February 25, 2011 at 5:18pm by
Meredith Jessup
Excerpt From This Article: Here in Washington, D.C., leftist activists at MoveOn.org are co-hosting a rally Saturday with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). But behind the scenes, The Blaze has exclusively learned the rally has actually been organized by the International Socialist Organization.
Last fall, leftist ideological groups of socialists and communists teamed up with American labor unions to march together for “One Nation.” Now, as labor leaders struggle to maintain a stranglehold on collective bargaining privileges in Wisconsin, the same groups are once again marching together under a banner claiming unions are the heart of the American dream.
As we’ve reported, former White House green jobs czar Van Jones this week issued a rallying call for the progressive movement to “renew itself and become again a national force with which to be reckoned.” On Saturday, progressive groups and labor unions are reportedly planning to hold marches of solidarity in all 50 states.
Here in Washington, D.C., leftist activists at MoveOn.org are co-hosting a rally Saturday with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). But behind the scenes, The Blaze has exclusively learned the rally has actually been organized by the International Socialist Organization.
According to MoveOn.org’s website, the rally is meant to fight back against Congress which has “been taken over by corporate lackeys who want to destroy the American dream.”
“The American dream,” MoveOn organizer Bill Boteler says, “is about fairness and equal opportunity… We’re standing up for the American Dream and saying that now is not the time to start slashing middle-class jobs in the middle of a recession, in Wisconsin, or anywhere in America. Be there to tell the politicians: Before you shut down the government and punish middle-class working Americans, why not first make the richest of the rich pay their fair share in taxes, just like everyone else.”
Despite MoveOn.org and SEIU taking a leading role — along with a number of other sponsors including the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, George Soros’ Media Matters, the Apollo Alliance and the Sierra Club — the National Park Service has confirmed that the Saturday rally’s permit was requested by and issued to the International Socialist Organization, a group committed to building a “future socialist society.”
A number of sponsors for Saturday’s protests are noted at MoveOn.org, however the ISO is not listed.
How many unionized American workers consider the “American dream” to be a “future socialist society”?
According to their own website, the ISO admits its branches across the country are “helping to build a number of struggles,“ including ”standing up for workers’ rights”:
The misery that millions of people around the world face is rooted in the society we live in–capitalism, where the few who rule profit from the labor of the vast majority of the population.
In the U.S., a tiny proportion of the population enjoys fantastic wealth, while millions of people live in desperate poverty, and many more live paycheck to paycheck. Yet we have the resources to feed, clothe and educate everyone on the planet.
A world free of exploitation–socialism–is not only possible but worth fighting for. The ISO stands in the tradition of revolutionary socialists Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky in the belief that workers themselves–the vast majority of the population–are the only force that can lead the fight to win a socialist society. Socialism can’t be brought about from above, but has to be won by workers themselves. …
We see our task as building an independent socialist organization with members organizing in our workplaces, our schools and our neighborhoods to bring socialist ideas to the struggles we are involved in today, and the vision of a socialist world in the future.
In addition to working with liberal activists and national labor unions behind the scenes, the ISO is just one of many socialist/Marxist/communist groups organizing their members to support Van Jones’ new “American dream” initiative.
The Daily Caller noted Friday that a number of radical groups — including the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, the Communist Party USA, Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and the Democratic Socialists of America — are taking up the labor unions’ talking points and encouraging Egypt-like unrest in the United States.
The Socialist Workers Party has labeled Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker “an enemy of the people.”
“Egypt, whose revolution has been a constant source of inspiration here, reflected in signs and chants — and Walker’s new nickname, Gov. Mubarak,” an ISO article reads. In addition, the article labels the current budget debates in Wisconsin as “class war” and as an affront to “the standard of living of working people.”
“Using the deficit as a scare tactic, the right-wing corporate Republicans are on a fast track to defeat every initiative of the Obama administration, to destroy unions and public services at the federal, state and municipal level, and at the same time protect tax breaks for the richest few,” writes Joelle Fishman, chair of the Communist Party USA’s Political Action Commission. A “broad alliance of forces for social change (labor, racially oppressed, women, youth)” need to step forward to re-frame the nation’s political debate for the 2012 elections, she insists.
While many skeptics claim these radical leftist groups may agree with the unions on a number of issues, the fact that these groups are actually working in conjunction with unions to orchestrate the ongoing protests says a lot about American unions’ modern-day political orientation — far to the left and antithetical to the real American dream.
