We host a debate on Big Labor’s endorsement of President Obama’s re-election between labor reporter Mike Elk and Arthur Cheliotes, president of Communications Workers of America Local 1180, a union that has pledged support of President Obama. This week the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor organization, endorsed Obama following earlier statements of support from several unions, including the Service Employees International Union; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the American Federation of Teachers; and the Communications Workers of America. “Despite the talk of political independence that many in organized labor have been talking about for the last year, organized labor is still stuck in this Stockholm Syndrome of President Obama,” Elk argues. “We live in this real world not a theoretical world and we don’t have the luxury of standing on the sidelines,” Cheliotes counters. “We have to engage.”
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We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
It will be a long fight ahead. And as nonprofit movement media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
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