Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!): AFL-CIO and Destablizing of Venezuela

[Jack Rabbit]

From Democracy Now!
Broadcast Tuesday July 26

Unholy Alliance? The AFL-CIO and the National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela
By Amy Goodman

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined now in Chicago by two guests. Kim Scipes is a labor journalist, Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. Also, we’re joined by Fred Hirsch. He’s vice president of the plumbers union, a long-time activist in the Latin America Solidarity Coalition. Let’s go first to Kim Scipes. Talk about why you held this protest on Sunday.

KIM SCIPES: Okay. We have been examining AFL-CIO foreign policy for a long time, and their foreign policy goes back to the early 1900s with the AFL. They had helped intervene in the Mexican revolution. They had tried to push the U.S. into World War I. And they played a key role in setting U.S. foreign policy towards the Soviet revolution in 1917. More recently, they have been involved in overthrowing elected governments, such as Guatemala in 1954, Brazil 1964, and Chile in 1973. We thought things would change under john Sweeney, but as we examine the situation, things are going back to the bad old days, and we're protesting that. And we are – there has been a resolution by the California state AFL-CIO that was unanimously passed that condemned the top level foreign policy leaders for their operations, and we have a resolution at the convention. We are trying to build public support to get this resolution through the resolutions committee to keep it from being blocked up and get it to the floor of the convention. That's why we were out there . . . .

AMY GOODMAN: Fred Hirsch, also in the Chicago studio, vice president of the plumbers and pipefitters union in San Jose, longtime activist in the Latin America Solidarity Coalition. You have done particular historical research on the AFL -- the National Endowment for Democracy and Chile. Can you talk about that?

FRED HIRSCH: Yes, I first got involved with this issue in 1973, when we all had great hopes for the success of the democratically elected government and program of Salvador Allende in Chile, and when his government was overthrown. In San Jose, California, we put together an organization to defend democracy in Chile, and our labor part of the organization, labor task force, came up with some research showing how deeply involved the AFL-CIO had been through the American Institute for Free Labor Development and through use of ORIT, the InterAmerican -- InterAmerican Workers Organization, part of the ICFTU, and through use of the international labor secretariats of the ICFTU, which is the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. And it became quite evident that the coup in Chile, which cost lives of well over 3,000 people, most of them trade unionists and militants, progressive people, could not have taken place without the contribution made by the AFL-CIO and, in fact, in the last words of Salvador Allende just moments before he was killed when the Pinochet coup took place, he put responsibility for what occurred in Chile that day on the leaders of the professional unions, those very unions which we later saw were under -- were receiving funds and resources through AIFLD and its international network.

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[tnlefty]

1. I just caught part of that on LinkTV and I felt sick.

Just sick.

[bemildred]

2. Big labor is not all that different from big business.

Hasn't been for a long time now.

[KoKo]

3. All this Union Bashing is very convenient, though, isn't it. Notice how

the splits are all over the airwaves. And, Karl Rove had the Unions on his list as the last item to bust up because of their support for the Democratic Party in the past.

I think we need to be careful and wonder what's going on and are the "reformists" who they say they are, or are they "agitators" brought in for the Repugs. :shrug:

Strong Unions were fought for in America and for decades (even when they became corrupted like our American Corporations are now) they at least provided a living wage and kept the Dem Party to it's foundations.


I'd just be careful Even as much as I love Amy Goodman... Today one never knows what anyone's agenda is...even if it's pro Dem it might be "misguided" by even our allies. :shrug:

[Jack Rabbit]

4. I agree that we need strong labor unions

Therein lays the problem. We haven't had strong union in about thirty-five years.

That is why we had a split in the union movement this last week. We can argue whether it's a good or bad thing all day. However, it is born of frustration with the present impotency of unions,

Bush is no friend of organized labor, but he really hasn't done much to tear the union movement apart. The decline of organized labor started long before Bush entered the White House.