Franken wins DFL endorsement

You must be joking! This loser is the best the DFL can come up with? Heaven help us!

I don’t think the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party could have picked a more worthless duo to support for President and United States Senate going into this important election.

Obama talks about “change;” but, he has never defined or articulated what kind of change he wants.

Franken talks about “standing up” for us when he has never stood up for anything in his life except perhaps to get his check from Playboy Magazine.

It is pathetic that the MN DFL and its endorsed candidates like Franken and Obama refuse to take a stand in support of saving the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant, while Coleman, the Democrat turned Republican, has picked up on the tremendous popular support to save this plant and the hundreds of jobs provided all of which, like the hydro dam providing free, clean, green energy to power the operation, has been subsidized by tax-payers who, like Ford workers, have been frozen out of the decision-making process as Ford goes in quest of “greener” pastures… money green.

Talk about Al Franken and women’s rights. Thousands of women, many of child-bearing age, go to work in smoke-filled casinos at poverty wages and without any rights under state or federal labor laws. The MN Democratic-Farmer Labor Party and its so-called “Feminist Caucus” which represents women to the same extent that Ray Waldron and the Minnesota AFL-CIO represents workers, have never lifted a finger or raised their voice to insist that this injustice come to an end.

Koryne Horbal states she will not support Obama… good for her for standing up for something. But, I wouldn’t bother walking across the street to vote for Obama, Clinton or Al Franken… not because of some demeaning, sexist, sleazy, arrogant, pathetic, obnoxious drivel he wrote in Playboy Magazine, but because, like Clinton and Obama he doesn’t have the political or moral courage to “stand up” for anything.

The time has come for the Democratic Party and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party to once again go their separate ways… the Democratic Party to its corrupt and stand-for-nothing ways… and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party needs to get back to its working class, socialist roots best exemplified by the “Red” Finns of the Iron Range who weren’t afraid to stand up to the mining bosses and the bankers and courageous fighters like Floyd Olson, Elmer Benson and John Bernard.

For now, I’m going to be voting for the best Democrat running for President—- Cynthia McKinney… a real progressive voice, for real progressive change, who has demonstrated the moral and political courage to “take a stand” for what is right; it is unfortunate she was driven out of the Democratic Party by political hacks and has to run on the Green Party ticket.

Betty Folliard and other blue-dog Democrats should be as concerned about the plight of Minnesota’s thirty-thousand casino workers, and as concerned about funding shelters for battered women as she is with the money from the well-heeled Summit Hill crowd and those living in the gated communities of suburbia… however, quite typical for one who has supported the move by the MN DFL into nicely framed sound bites for television commercials while opposing bringing forward any real solutions to the many problems confronting working people—- with women getting battered the worst in every conceivable way, from being beat up to losing their homes to foreclosures to having their hearts broken as the merchants of death and destruction send their children off to fight an illegal, immoral and unjust war predicated on lies and deceit by the same oil barons who are gouging us at the pumps an article Al Franken wrote in Playboy trumps real day-to-day problems working women are experiencing.

These Democrats can’t even stand up for making the minimum wage a real living wage… again, women suffer the most.

In order for working people to “stand up” for real “change” we will have to organize powerful rank-and-file movements where ever we work and strong grassroots organizations in our communities. Then, like in the 1930’s when this rotten capitalist system was on the skids to oblivion, just like it is now; we will have the power needed to win real change.

Alan L. Maki
Director of Organizing,
Midwest Casino Workers Organizing Council

Clearly the best senate candidate the DFL had in a long time lost the endorsement Saturday. As a delegate for the first time, I left wondering how a candidate who clearly represented the best in policy, values and hope, could have lost on the first ballot. Many had said they felt committed to vote for Franken on the first ballot since they caucused as a Franken delegate, but had intended to change their votes on the second ballot. Well, they never had the chance and as a consequence, the candidate who won, was not the best choice. I am now left wondering if the system really works.