COLUMN LEFT : A Fast Track to Doom for Working Class : The ugly fate of real workers collides with the rhetorical mush of the ‘new’ Democrats.

I was in Iowa in early May and the devastation to the election industry was visible on every side. Barbershop savants listlessly recited rustic apothegms into the mirror. One farmer told me that his milk yields were up 30% from the same period in the spring of 1987, when the networks had installed TV lights in his dairy to save the bother of day-to-day set-ups for visiting Democratic candidates.

This season of peace is nearing its end and once again “Democratic hopefuls” are setting about their quadrennial task of deluding Americans into the belief that we inhabit a two-party democratic system. Paul Tsongas is already in the field. People mutter that Tom Harkin may run. Soon the pundits will be rating Harkin’s chances against Jay Rockefeller’s.

Of course, the serious Democratic power brokers think President Bush is certain to win and would prefer someone like Lloyd Bentsen, hoping that a conservative Democrat would not sufficiently offend the voters as to cause the Democrats to be engulfed in a Bush landslide and lose control at least of the Senate.

These are the sort of Democrats whose hearts beat faster at the proceedings of the Democratic Leadership Council, the avowedly “business-oriented” crew who magically combine the worst features of both Democrats and Republicans and who recently held a convention in Cleveland. They presented their political credo, “The New Choice in American Politics,” a familiar blend of opportunism and flagwaggery held together by prose with all the sinew of Kleenex: “The old politics often seemed to reward failure. The new choice has built-in incentives to reward success. . . . Our purpose is not to seek the middle of the road but to build a new road that leads beyond right and left.”

Whenever one hits substance amid this mush it turns out to be deeply wrong-headed. Amid the platform pledges came this: “The United States must use its enormous market power to expand fair and free trade around the world. We urge Congress to extend ‘fast track’ negotiating authority for a free trade pact with Mexico that will lead to higher incomes and employment in both countries.”

At the moment that the Democratic Leadership Council was adopting this posture, another meeting was taking place in Cleveland, this one organized by the AFL-CIO to listen to a group of people who recapitulate almost every horror facing the American working class.

These were non-unionized Proctor Silex workers from North Carolina, whose parent company, NACCO Industries of Cleveland, recently announced it was moving 800 jobs to a maquiladora in Juarez, Mexico. The consequences are bleakly described in the Detroit monthly, Labor Notes. Those thrown out of work by the move are without severance pay, without health care, without retraining or placement help of any kind. The state of North Carolina has exhausted its federal fund for dislocated workers, and in a straitened local economy the workers face bleak prospects once their meager unemployment runs out.

This familiar portrait of displacement coincides with an equally familiar demography. Of the workers, 90% are women, 50% are black, 20% are Lumbee Indian. The picture painted by the unions is of workers who made coffee machines and other household appliances in a factory partly built on a contaminated dump site--that five years ago the company buried toxic wastes and paved over the area for a plant extension and parking lot--an environmental hazard that is replicated across the country in areas heavily populated by low-wage blacks, Latinos and Native Americans. Since the plant opened, the workers say, at least 50 of their number have died of cancer and 12 more are sick with it. Plant officials have denied any wrongdoing, saying that if there’s a problem, previous owners of the plant are to blame.

NACCO’s appalling behavior seems not to have unduly distressed at least two of its directors, Nature Conservancy President John Sawhill and Frank Taplin, a trustee of the Environmental Defense Fund, neither of whom, according to Labor Notes, has made any public response to the workers’ calls for environmental accountability.

Last month, the House agreed to give President Bush the “fast track” ability to conduct trade negotiations with Mexico and other nations without detailed scrutiny. Ninety-one Democrats helped the President to this victory. The Democratic-controlled Senate immediately followed suit. Having sold out working America, Democratic candidates will now freight their rhetoric from Iowa to New Hampshire and beyond, braying the slick nonsense mouthed in the Democratic Leadership Council as it ignored the NACCO workers across town.