Reply #48: Curiouser and curiouser: WSWS "owner" had $25 million in revenue from slave labor of party cult

[HamdenRice]

Google is a terrible thing for con artists with the public profile of even the cult leader of a small Trotskite party.

Disgruntled party members have been coming forward about the owner of WSWS -- David North. He is the wealthy owner of a printing company, with revenue of $25 million. Hence the anti-union stance.

According to insiders, "David North" is also "David Green." North/Green purchased printing presses in the pre-internet days to produce party literature. The money to buy the equipment came from donations of party workers.

When North/Green went on line with WSWS about 10 years ago, he devoted the printing presses to corporate printing jobs.

In essence he "privatized" the printing presses of the Trotskyite party for his own use and profit. He uses cult members to work the presses:

http://community.livejournal.com/trotskyism/3890.html

A Tale of Two Men
A Tale of Two Men
By Joe Hargrave

Here is a story you might find interesting:

I know of two men. One of them is the leader of a small Trotskyist political party in the United States. He is known as David North. The other is the CEO of Grand River Printing & Imaging, a company that earns 25 million dollars a year according to its website. They call him David W. Green.

For nearly 30 years, Mr. North ran his political party and Mr. Green ran his business. Mr. North gave speeches about the exploitation of the working class. Mr. Green exploited his workers, deriving surplus value from their unpaid labor. Mr. North thundered against the corporations that dominate American political life. Mr. Green sought those corporations out as clients, and probably did lunch with some of their executives. Mr. North would talk about the disgusting climate of corporate greed that pervaded the American cultural atmosphere. Mr. Green helped actualize that corporate greed by printing advertisements to help them push their products on consumers.
...
Unless, of course, they were the same man.

Could it be a case of multipule personality disorder? Not exactly. You see, David Green, alias David North, is a fraud. He is the biggest fraud to hit the socialist movement since James Robertson of the Sparticist Leauge or "Chairman" Bob Avakian of the Revolutionary Communist Party. He owns a multi-million dollar corporation, and the upper echelons of his political cult and members of their family occupy key executive positions.

The rank and file members of the party are completely unaware of the existence of North/Green's corporate empire, which includes Grand River Printing, Merhing Books, and who knows what else. They assume that the party sustains itself through the donations that it begs for on its website and at its conferences, as well as the regular contributions that members are expected to "pledge" every month. I was exempt from this particular requirement only after I reminded one of its leaders of the considerable amounts of money I had invested in my own local branch. How nice of them. I can only imagine the giddy internal glee that North/Green must have felt every time some naive sucker wrote the SEP a check for a few thousand dollars. To North/Green, and the other party leaders, such donations were in fact chump change.

I can also only begin to imagine the difficult decisions that had to be made on a daily basis, such as, "how little can we put into this whole socialist thing to keep it viable while we live in the lap of luxury?", and, "should I use a 50 dollar bill or a 100 dollar bill to do this next line of cocaine?" All kidding aside, anyone who is serious about building a revolutionary movement, and who also happened to own a multi-million dollar company, would invest the maximum amount of profits into the former.

What I mean to say is, I could accept the fact that North/Green exploits the labor-power of his workers if the surplus value created by their unpaid labor was being used to build a movement that would one day end all exploitation. The ends, as I generally believe, justify the means if the ends themselves are justified. But this is obviously not taking place. The SEP has full branches in three cities - LA, NY, and Detroit. With the profit margins we can assume a 25 million a year company is capable of, there should be a fully-staffed branch in every major city in the United States. There should be an SEP radio station, a public access program on television, etc., etc., etc. Those profits, in sum, should be used to promote the movement, to expose not tens of thousands but millions of people to socialism.

What could possibly account for a failure to do these things? There is only one inescapable conclusion - that North/Green and his cronies enjoy the good life more than they do the revolutionary life. And they enjoy that life at the expense of the wage-laborers they employ. To dance around these uncomfortable realities they invent all sorts of paternalistic schemes where they provide top quality education and training for their workers - while, of course, "keeping wages competitive". To read the website of Grand River Publishing & Imaging is to be sickened. Every line is infused with phony corporate enthusiasm and politeness, in order to impress the equally phony corporate clients looking to get their ads published and printed. Contrast that to what you normally read on the WSWS. How can these people sleep at night? They might respond like the fictional Renier Wolfcastle: "On top of piles of money with lots of beautiful ladies".


http://squirrelcommunism.blogspot.com/2007/03/red-squirrels-lair-faq.html

Thanks for keeping this blog. I found it while trying to find out about David North and the Secoiliast Equality Party and his7their relation to David Green and Grand River Printing and Imaging. I was a member of the Workers League in the early 1970's. We raised a lot of money to buy printing presses, which I would bet were the original presses used to get Grand River Printing going. Most of that money came out of the pockets of workers, and some pretty oor people. So I would say that David Green is not your ordinary, hard working capitalist pig. He is a vampire who sucks blood from workers. I have my doubts about the place really being a good place to work. when the Workers League ran a print shop in New York City, the workers were all party members who worked 18 hours a day. It was a union shop on paper, but the reality was that all work rules and over time pay were ignored for the sake of the revolutionary cause. That system was used before North took over the Workers League under the prevous sleader, Tim Wohlforth, who in turn copied it from the Gerry Healy operation in England, who may have copied it from the print shop of the SWP for all I know. North/Green seems to have taken that system to a "higher" level". I wonder how many grand River employees are also members of the SEQ.