This issue, your Capitol Hill Shop Steward
would like to take you on a short tour.
It is a tour of the final days and hours of
the Clinton administration. Our tour will include a close-up
view of the real Washington, D.C. We will also visit a small
town in West Virginia. And as with all good tours, our brief
journey will include some very interesting ruins.
Let’s begin during the final days of the
Clinton White House, when every lawyer and fixer on the east
coast was busy pulling strings, sending e-mails, and making
calls to get someone pardoned before Clinton headed off into
retirement. (Republicans practice this ritual when they leave
office too, of course.)
Two people seen hanging around the White House
in those waning days were Beth Dozoretz and Denise Rich, close
friends of the President. Beth, as you might remember, is the
frighteningly rich woman who fell into the job of chief
fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee a few years
ago. Her only qualification was that she was very, very rich,
and apparently enjoyed calling up other very, very rich people
to ask them for very, very large donations to the Democratic
Party and its subsidiaries. If you want more, dig out your
copy of the July 1999 Labor Party Press for my
report on Beth Dozoretz.
By now you have heard of the second woman,
Denise Rich, the ex-wife of fugitive billionaire commodities
trader Marc Rich. Denise is also obscenely wealthy, and she
too enjoys dumping huge quantities of cash into just about
anything associated with the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton.
Denise and Beth are good friends. Lately they’ve been
excited about raising money for Clinton’s presidential
library.
EXTRAORDINARY
ACCOMPLISHMENT
What these two women accomplished in the
dwindling light of the Clinton presidency was extraordinary:
They managed to buy a pardon for the man who committed the
largest tax fraud in U.S. history, a man who also happens to
be one of the past decade’s most notorious unionbusters.
Marc Rich was the mystery-man-in-exile who
controlled the Ravenswood Aluminum Company (RAC) in
Ravenswood, West Virginia. In the middle of the night back in
October 1991, Rich’s private army of goons physically
ejected hundreds of Steelworkers from their jobs and declared
all 1,700 USWA Local 5668 members locked out. Rich’s
underlings turned the plant into an armed bunker. Barbed-wire
fences, boarded-up windows, an armored train full of hundreds
of scabs, stormtroopers with attack dogs, and everything in
sight illuminated with searchlights and covered with
bullet-proof steel casing. Workers called it Fort RAC.
I visited Fort RAC the morning after the
lockout began, as I was on union assignment just up the road.
I have never before, or since, witnessed a company so violent,
anti-union, and brazen. It was after several visits to the
Ravenswood picketline that I first heard the name "Marc
Rich."
It took the members and families of USWA Local
5668, the national Steelworkers Union, the AFL-CIO Industrial
Union Department, and the support of the entire world labor
movement to bring an end to that lockout. It lasted 20 months.
The toll exacted on the union families of Ravenswood was, of
course, enormous. And it all fell at the doorstep of Marc
Rich. In the end, the locked out union members entered the
plant with a full-blown parade, having won against all odds.
If you have not purchased and read a copy of Ravenswood: The
Steelworkers’ Victory and the Revival of American Labor by
Tom Juravich and Kate Bronfenbrenner, you should. It’s
published by Cornell and available in paperback from www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.
On his very last day in office, Bill Clinton
pardoned Marc Rich and his partner-in-crime Pincus
"Pinky" Green. But Denise, Beth, Marc, and Pinky
were already celebrating. Ten days earlier, Clinton had phoned
Beth and Denise to give them word of his decision to "do
it" as they were sunning themselves on the ski slopes of
Aspen, Colorado.
SCHEMERS SWEATING
When she appeared before a congressional
committee investigating the pardons on March 1, Beth Dozoretz
refused to answer any questions on the grounds that it might
incriminate her. Denise Rich is expected to do the same. A
grand jury has been selected to do a little digging into the
Rich pardon. It looks like everyone involved in this scheme is
going to need lots of legal advice and antiperspirant.
A whole lot of Democrats just want the whole
episode to pass. And a whole lot of Republicans are not sure
how much to investigate the Rich affair, since many prominent
Republicans have been on the Rich payroll themselves. This
includes a former Rich attorney who now works for Vice
President Dick Cheney — this guy even telephoned Rich
recently to congratulate him!
That’s the tour, my friends. And the ruins I
promised? I’m afraid I’m referring to the reputation of
the labor movement in the wake of Bill Clinton. Think about
it: As virtually his last act in office, the man that labor
put — and kept — in the White House pardons the most
notorious unionbuster of the decade.
Our standing is so low in this city that Rich’s
unionbusting record is not even viewed as a problem. The
newspapers won’t talk about it. The Democrats won’t
either. And as best I can tell, even the labor movement —
with the exception of the Steelworkers — has been silent
too. For Clinton’s biggest promoters, the Rich episode is
better left to fade from memory. This one can’t be explained
away.
I therefore propose a fitting response to this
final Clinton insult to the labor movement. I will be donating
$100 out of my own pocket to the Labor Party in honor of this
great presidential act. Will you join me? Please make your
checks payable to "Labor Party," and mail them to
P.O. Box 53177, Washington, D.C. 20009. I’ll be checking the
mail.
Donate to the Marc Rich Pardon/Labor Party
Fund Drive in honor of President Clinton’s final insult to
organized labor:
___ $25 Surprised by the pardon
___ $50 Shocked by the pardon
___ $75 Disgusted by the pardon
___ $100 Not surprised at all by the pardon
Chris Townsend is political action director
of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of
America (UE).
