The John Birch Society’s “labor” websites

The annual labor website of the year competition — which the IWW won four years ago — has led me to discover many strange and wonderful websites. Some of these are more strange than wonderful. And some of the strangest of all have got to be the websites of the ultra-right wing John Birch Society.
I should begin by explaining that while there are “officially nominated” sites in the annual competition, anyone with an email address can vote for any site they want. This has led to some anti-union websites getting votes, though never more than a handful of votes. Companies sometimes create the web equivalent of a company union, websites which tout the advantages to employees of not organizing. But this year, I discovered something far more dangerous.


It began with a single vote cast for a site called RescueAmericanJobs.org. I decided to have a look at the site. One’s initial impression is that this is just another union website — and that impression is deliberately cultivated. There’s a banner with the slogan “One person can make a difference”. There’s an appeal to buy American-made products. There’s even a quaint story behind the site, apparently — one which is designed to make a person think there couldn’t possibly be an racist motive behind the campaign. “The founders of Rescue American Jobs are a unique pair of patriots – an American-born citizen from the rural South and her husband, a Chinese-Singaporean immigrant who is in the process of becoming a naturalized citizen,” we are told. So there you go, we’re not racists at all. One of us isn’t even white.
One has to dig deeper, however. Rescue American Jobs is part of something called the Coalition for the Future American Worker which unites, it claims, some 100,000 people in a wide range of organizations — none of which I can honestly say I have ever heard of. These include a number with very innocent sounding names, such as the National Association for the Employment of Americans, American Jobs Coalition, and American Labor First. No mention yet of anything as nasty as the John Birch Society, but hang on a minute.
On the site’s news page, you’ll find a link to two stories from The New American, the magazine of the John Birch Society. The articles are both by William F. Jasper, the magazine’s senior editor, and are both from 2003.
One of them concludes with these words: “. . . more and more Americans are feeling the harsh reality of the planned ‘new world order’ or are beginning to see the writing on the wall concerning their own jobs, businesses, and professions . . . These newly awakened Americans can be reached and organized into a formidable force to upset the subversive globalist agenda and preserve our independence. But we have no time to waste.”
A visit to John Birch Society’s own home page reveals that its main campaign is now to “Stop the FTAA”. It’s even more prominent than its efforts to get the US out of the United Nations, or get the Panama Canal returned to US control. And they’ve created a special website at www.stoptheftaa.org.
The Birchers are clearly trying to tap into two genuine concerns of the labor movement in the US — job loss and opposition to globalization. They’re working on fertile ground. Their sites are virtually indistinguishable from genuine left wing and trade union sites, with their fluttering American flags on the one hand and opposition to the capitalist “new world order” on the other. They are trying — with some success — to blend in.
All the various anti-immigration/anti-globalization sites in this network link to one another — but they also link to sites which are part of the mainstream labor movement. For example, follow a couple of links from the Coalition for the Future American Worker site and you’re on the “How Americans Can Buy American” website. This site promotes “Union Jeans and Apparel”, a company which appears on the “Union Mall” together with a number of union-backed shops. There are also links to genuine union sites, such as the Communications Workers of America, or WashTech, the union organizing high-tech workers in the Pacific Northwest.
On the web, one can quickly throw together a website, creating what appears to be a genuine grassroots organization in a matter of minutes. The Birchers and their allies seem to have done this over and over again. Front organizations of this kind were invented by twentieth century totalitarians of both the Communist and Nazi variants to make it easier to recruit and organize. These websites are net-based versions of the old front organizations.
Unions which engage in over-the-top patriotism and flag waving, which don’t know the difference between “buy union” and “buy American”, are making it easier for the ultra-rightists to get a foot in the door. And left-wing anti-globalization protestors who substitute xenophobia for international solidarity are also setting themselves up for Bircher’s “stop the new world order” propaganda. Only an informed, critical approach to these issues — and a commitment to genuine internationalism — can protect us from this danger.

11 Comments on "The John Birch Society’s “labor” websites"

  1. This is old hat for the JBS. Funny, I’ve been reading back issues of The Baffler and just got done reading an article (can’t remember the title, but I think it had “Birchismo” in the title) about the JBS. They basically took what they perceived to be the secretive methods of the international Communist conspiracy and did the same things — reminds of the sectarian red groups that set up lots of “front” organizations like the International Action Center/International ANSWER (aka the Worker’s World Party) and the pro-Affirmative Action BAMN group in Michigan and Cali (the Revolutionary Workers League) … same variety of nutjob, different politics.
    You do make a great point that the unthinking, over-the-top patriotism of unions feeds the trolls… nice article.

  2. Greg Bates | 05/02/2004 at 12:09 |

    I would like to contact eric lee personally about his class virus article. Greg Bates, Publisher, Common Courage Press

  3. Charley Conrod | 17/02/2004 at 15:51 |

    As a Ph.D. economist (Harvard BA, Northwestern U. Ph.D.) and accountant (CMA, Canada)I began teaching and working in China last fall. The experience was an eye opener. Here are some of my tentative conclusions:
    1) It is a myth that China’s goods are cheaper than the US because of low wages, exploitation of labour, etc. Chinese wages are low, but the cost of living is also about 1/10 of the US after adjusting for the difference of prices and the exchange rate. To clarify, the Chinese “dollar”, the Yuan (Y), is pegged to the US dollar at about $0.083 = Y1. So Chinese wages look low when translated into USD, but so are Chinese prices.
    2)The Chinese produce for world markets so their economies of scale are huge. In contrast, the US is a relatively self-contained economy. Only about 10% of US GDP originates from exports. So as Ricardo stated, “economies of scale are limited by the extent of the market.” By this theory, and empirical evidence, US production is relatively inefficient because it does not trade into the global market.
    3) US production has specialized in hi-tech military goods which have no market other than the US military and foreign dictatorships. For example, Boeing is specialized in producing the best supersonic military aircraft in the world designed to fight WW III. Meanwhile its commercial jets are losing big time to Aerobus. Boeing hasn’t produced a new, competitive commercial jet for years. Why should it: it has a hammer on the Pentagon where it has little or no competition.
    Meanwhile China produces useful consumer goods. It is no wonder that most of the consumer goods sold in North America come from China. Who wants to buy an F-111? Besides, you can’t unless you are Rumsfeld or a foreign dictator buying it with AID money.
    3)The wrong question is “Why can Chinese produce goods so cheap?” The right question is “Why are those goods, when sold in US, so expensive?” For example, Nike has a factory in Hangzhou, where I lived, that produces Michael Jordan $200 (USD) basketball shoes. You can buy them at the factory gate for $9.50. What is the difference? Huge costs of endorsements to Jordan, Tiger Woods, etc., and huge profits to Phil Knight.
    Tentative conclusion: the US can produce goods that are competitive. It has the best educated labour force in the world, the best R&D, and with modern production techniques is very competitive. For example: all Honda Accords are produced in the US and exported to Japan. Economies of scale dictate producing all of the world’s supply from one plant, and the productivity of US workers is on a par with Japan (of course tax breaks and govt. bribes help too–but those exist in all countries when soliciting for businesses to locate plants).
    I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Would you be interested in other materials from me?

  4. It’s true. I’m not white, and if I were any more closed minded, I would not have married Dawn.
    🙂

  5. Why accuse someone of being guilty by association, such as you do because of a few news links indirectly associated with organizations like John Birch. When you are an activist, you don’t have time to check out every link and every source and what their exact platform/mission/etc. is.
    Saying what you did about Rescue American Jobs is akin to me saying you are a racist because whoever you work for has a sister who donated to John Birch, or whatever tool you used for your web site design was also used by John Birch also. That is, it does not mean you endorse John Birch.
    Fortunately, your more intelligent readers know these types of associations you “muckrakings” can be dug up by anyone about anything and anyone. It takes quite a limited and mean-spirited mind to jump to the conclusions you did. Just who is racist here?
    Next we’ll hear about how http://www.TexasLaborChampions.org is right wing because George Bush was governor here (we are bi-partisan, politically independent). Give me a break! Start doing some meaningful analysis.
    I happen to know the effort and work being done by Dawn and Adrian and James Pace and you are doing them an injustice by disparaging them in such a fallacious and pathetic way.
    Oh, by the way: did the thought ever occur to you to kindly suggest to Dawn or Andrian that it would be in their best interest to remove those links? Shudder the thought of one pro-labor person helping another. It was much easier for you to write a long and lengthy disparagement first to amuse your readers.
    You should consider removing such tripe from your site.
    Cheers

  6. Keith Welch | 26/02/2004 at 04:26 |

    Guys,
    I remember when the RescueAmericanJobs (RAJ)site and organization was started. Dawn – who could find no worthwhile organization to further her beliefs that offshoring and H-1b/L-1 were destroying the American economy, and middle class – decided to start here own. I remember her researching and starting her site – very much on her own.
    The mega-organization that RAJ may have been mentioned with is probably the VERY loose coalition of organizations that are arrayed with some common interests on the topic. This is a very RELUCTANT coalition, that comes from a lot of different viewpoints, and wouldn’t eat in the same room, if it weren’t for their single common interest.
    If there are any serious right-wing elements to that coalition, you are making too much out of it. As we say here, “Politics makes for strange bedfellows”. As for if her or her husband (who sounds like a real star in his field) are white, I surely don’t care. I have spoken to Dawn a couple of times. Frankly, people who are trying to stop offshoring are all so glad to find allies, they wouldn’t care if she had horns and a tail.
    They are on the level. There is no real racist thread in that movement. Frankly, why would I care about the color of the person who is taking my job? Do you think that I’d like it if he were white? Actually, he might be. Not all H-1b’s are from the third world.
    RKW

  7. I’m delighted to have prompted some discussion on this one and wanted to make a few quick comments.
    First of all, I’m not the one who brought up the race or nationality of the people involved in this websites. They did so themselves, on their own sites — presumably to ‘prove’ that they could not be racists.
    Second, when I visit a website that links to organizations which I consider appalling (for example, websites which link to Holocaust-denial sites) I generally make it a rule not to write to the site owners trying to persuade them that the sites they are linking to are beyond the pale. Instead, I usually ignore them and move on. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone linking to the John Birch Society is not aware of what they are linking to.
    More important, perhaps, is this. If you are linking to articles which appeared on the John Birch Society’s website, you are doing so because you are in agreement with their IDEAS. That’s the main point. And if you agree with the ideas of an organization which is synonymous with the far Right in the United States, and which has been so for more than a generation, you are either very naive or you have a hidden agenda.

  8. Oh get over yourself, EXCUSES EXCUSES. You were wrong, and you don’t even have the gumption to admit it.
    Out of more than 1,000 articles, you noticed two that we written by the John Birch Society, but you didn’t notice the couple hundred that told the story of our opposition. And that is your EXCUSE for accusing us of being a front for the John Birch Society.
    Now, I don’t know much about the John Birch Society except that they are conspiracy theorists. Call me naive if you want, but most Americans pretty much ignore the conspiracy theorists and their theories. Sure does seem silly to me for the conspiracy theorists to fear the conspiracy theories and people like you to fear the conspiracy theorists. An awful lot of fear about nothing if you ask me.
    And while I’m pointing out the fallacies of your arguement, let me also point out that Mussolini wanted trains to run on time, and I also want trains to run on time. Does that mean I’m in agreement with Mussolini’s ideals too?
    Get over it buddy, you were wrong about us. Next time, do a little research. You are no different than the conspiracy theorists — just like them, you connect dots wherever you can to form a conspiracy.
    In case you still don’t get it, let me spell it out for you: There is no conspiracy between the Rescue American Jobs Foundation the the John Birch Society, except in your own small mind.

  9. Note: in the first line of my last post, there is a typo that could construe the wrong meaning.
    “two that we written” should have said “two that were written”

  10. I’ve just re-read my article. I read it twice. I can’t find the point where I said that Rescue American Jobs is part of the John Birch Society or is in a conspiracy with the John Birch Society, or is even a front of the John Birch Society.
    Maybe you will point out to me where I wrote that.
    What I wrote is that the website linked to two articles on the John Birch Society website, which you have confirmed. You linked to those articles because you share the views of the Birchers on this question.
    The question I might remind you is not about getting the trains to run on time. The Birchers do not write about that. They write from the perspective of an ultra-nationalist, far Right organization. Their views on immigrant workers are part and parcel of their worldview, which we in the labour movement do not share.
    In my article, I then went on to discuss what one finds on the Birch Society website and its fronts (such as the stop the FTAA website). My visit to Rescue American Jobs led me to the Birch websites.
    I may indeed suffer from having a small mind, as Dawn writes, but I do not lie.
    Oh, and by the way. Now that Dawn and her friends have learned that John Birch Society is a far Right organization that is not at all friendly to American unions (something that 99.9% of the population apparently realized before they did), presumably they are now removing the links from their site.

  11. Eric, you are extremely biased to presume that anyone linking to some particular organisation must automatically be part of some dastardly plot.
    As a labouor activist, you should try to be much more tolerant.

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