Plane crashes, car crashes and progressives.

      How some progressives die


         This is a story about mostly American plane crashes, car crashes and progressives.
          Walter Reuther was one of the U.S. of A's great labour leaders. He put his life on the line when he helped organize auto workers in the 1930's and 1940's. Once someone shot and wounded him in his house in Detroit. Reuther's union, the United Auto Workers was a progressive force in the United States.
     The UAW supported the civil rights movement, opposed the war in Vietnam, and helped liberals. A large part of these actions were due to Reuther himself. Buzz Hargrove the former head of the Canadian Auto Workers, an outgrowth of the UAW, said that Reuther was one of the greatest labour leaders he'd known.
    "The labour movement is about changing society," Reuther said in 1969. "What good is another $100 pension if the world goes up in smoke."
     Eight months later in May 1970, Reuther was dead. He, his wife May, and four others died in a plane crash in May 1970.
     By then many powerful people disliked and even loathed Reuther. His list of enemies included U.S. President Richard Nixon, F.B.I. head J. Edgar Hoover and the right-wing head of America's main labour organization, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. George Meany.
   In fact, Reuther and the U.A.W. had just pulled out of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. to form a new labour organization called the American Labour Alliance. Reuther's death hit the American labour movement hard. In the 1970's and after., the U.S. movement shrunk in size and power. To-day less than 15 per cent of the American workforce belong to unions. In Reuther's heday that number stood at 30 per cent.
      "I go to parts of America these days where there are no unions," said political scientist Michael Parenti in effect. Parenti has charged that someone meddled with Reuther's plane and caused the crash. Reuther's not the only American progressive to die in a plane crash.
      Paul Wellstone was one of the foremost American progressives in the American Senate. He was a Democrat and a member of the Democratic Farmer Labour Party of Minnesota. Wellstone supported trade unions, women's rights, opressed ethnic groups and the rights of poor people.
     He died in October 2002 when the plane he was in crashed in Minnesota. Wellstone strongly opposed U.S. president George H. Bush's plans to invade Iraq, a project many Democratic senators like Hillary Clinton supported. After Wellstone's death, some critics claimed the plane he was in, was shot down by a directed energy weapon.
     Mel Carnahan was the governor of Missouri in the 1990's. In 2000 he was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Carnahan died along with his son Randy who piloted the plane. Cranahan was running against the hard-nosed Republican John Ashcroft. Ashcroft lost the race to Carnahan's wife who took her husband's place after he died. Ashcroft went on to be president George W. Bush's Attorney-General.
    No one has claimed that Carnahan's plane was tampered with. Nor was he the liberal that Wellstone was. Still it was another death of a somewhat liberal Democrat.
     In Alberta Canada, Grant Notley was a very hard working New Democratic Party Member of the Legislature. In fact he was the only N.D.P.'er in the Albertan legislature which was dominated completely by Progressive Conservatives from the early 1970's down to to-day. Notley died in a plane crash in October 1984 along with five other people.
     No one I know has claimed that the plane was sabotaged or meddled with. Yet in this case another progressive died in a plane crash.
      Next time I'll look at other people who were lefties and progressives who died either in plane or car crashes.