Labor

They Should Get a Union

davidswanson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:42:50 -0500

By David Swanson

"If a majority of workers want a union, they should get a union. It's that simple. We need to stand up to the business lobby and pass the Employee Free Choice Act. That's why I've been fighting for it in the Senate and that's why I'll make it the law of the land when I'm president of the United States." --Barack Obama

Nobody is making it the law of the land. Nobody is fighting for it. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) has drifted down to the bottom of the AFL-CIO's website, buried beneath good economic proposals which, however, do nothing to build a labor movement. EFCA is not to be found anywhere on the front page of Change to Win's website at all. The media's not smearing EFCA with U.S. Chamber of Commerce lies anymore. Congress and the White House are silent. Any escalation of pressure on senators from union members has never materialized, the polite letter-writing campaigns having drifted away rather than ramping up into pickets or sit-ins.

In this context, Steve Early's new book "Embedded With Organized Labor" may be an extremely valuable resource, especially part IV on "Workers' Rights and Wrongs." Early is a journalist, an activist, a book reviewer, a historian, and a synthesizer of lessons from the past and present. We should draw on his knowledge, rather than viewing the current vice president's "middle class task force" out of the context of so many recent failed commissions.

The Clinton administration's "Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations" sought to determine how, and whether, unions could benefit management -- as if that were the only good they might accomplish. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich was then able to encourage the commission to question the need for having unions at all: "The jury is still out," Reich wrote, "on whether the traditional union is necessary for the new workplace."

It strikes me that the fundamental error in such endeavors (commissions, task forces) lies in avoiding the real goal. When you push for a living-wage law because it will benefit businesses, you can lose out to the advantages of paying poverty wages. When you push for peace because Americans die in wars, you can lose out to wars carried on by drones and mercenaries. When you reform healthcare with the goal of pleasing the insurance companies, you lose sight of actually reforming healthcare. And when you defend union organizing as good for management, you lose touch with the purpose of union organizing, namely to allow workers to have some control over their lives.

The same mistake can be made when laws ARE passed. The National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act) of 1935 sets up an official body to mediate labor disputes. But when that body delays, stalls, and abuses its power, workers can be left with a weaker right to organize than they had to begin with. Just as the War Powers Act weakened congressional checks on warrior presidents while trying to strengthen them, just as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act weakened Fourth Amendment protections, just as statutory contempt eliminated the Congress's power (or at least habit) of holding people in contempt itself, a law that formalizes something won through eternal struggle cannot replace the struggle and risks creating new impediments.

That doesn't mean better laws aren't part of the solution. The Employee Free Choice Act would give teeth to the right to form new unions, assuming it was enforced after passage -- something which will have to be fought for, not assumed. But what happens when a first contract runs out and new union members go on strike to demand a decent second contract? They can legally be replaced by scabs, and other unions cannot legally strike to support them. Those restrictions on our freedom of assembly must be undone with new laws that go further than EFCA, laws that repeal the Taft-Hartley Act and ban replacement workers. And then enforcement of those new laws will have to be insisted upon through collective action for as long as we hope to have them enforced.

How can this be done? How can we even get to the first step of demanding passage of EFCA? Whether we influence enough key senators to throw out the anti-democratic filibuster rule and then force 50 senators to pass EFCA, or we compel 60 senators to pass EFCA under the current outrageous arrangement, either way we are going to need an aggressive and activist labor movement organized democratically and controlled by its members, working in coalition with other groups, and investing in the long-term future of labor organizing as well as broader national policies that benefit workers and a communications system that benefits workers. This will necessarily mean a labor movement capable of recognizing and acting on the fact that electing Democrats alone accomplishes very little. Our labor movement's leaders need to develop a lot less interest in access to elected officials and a lot more in access to unorganized and organized workers. And that access to workers must be used not merely to build membership from the top down, but rather to facilitate workers' own building of a movement, a movement that includes all of us who work for a living.

David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.

In America, Selfishness and Lack of Solidarity Know No Bounds

dlindorff — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:14:32 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

As the strike by transit workers in Philadelphia enters its fifth
day, it is clear why unions have such a tough time in the United
States, where fewer than one in eight workers is covered by a union
contract.

Although the average pay of transit workers is just $50,000 a year
(that represents take-home pay of less than $35000 take-home after
taxes or about $3000 a month to live on for a typical family of four),
the suburbanites who feel put out because they have to brave huge
traffic jams to get to and from work in the city are grousing that the
transit workers are greedy for holding out for a slightly-less-than 4%
per year pay increase over the three years of their contract.

I just got into a debate at the local YMCA gym with an older guy who
probably makes over $100,000 a year and whose children are already
grown, who was incensed that the "greedy bus and subway drivers" were
asking for a raise at this time "with the economy in such a mess."

But I also noticed, as I drove my son into school this week in the
traffic crush, that these same suburbanites are, for the most part,
continuing to drive to work one to a car. What a lack of creativity!

My wife, who frequently travels to Rome to do research, has on
several occasions landed in that city during one of its frequent
transit strikes. She reports that the people of this ancient city take
these job actions in stride, getting out their bicycles, taking
leisurely walks to school, or simply going on holiday for the duration.
People don't get mad at the workers. In Italy, it's understood that
when one group of workers fights for better pay or working conditions,
everyone benefits in the end.

This fellow I was arguing with about the Philly transit strike,
said, "It's not like this is the 1920s or '30s, when unions were really
needed because people were being exploited."

"Oh really?" I said. "You don't think the workers at Wal-Mart or in
your local supermarket are being exploited?" The truth is that working
conditions for American workers have been getting progressively worse
in recent years, while pay has actually been falling in real dollars,
because union representation has been falling for several decades from
a high of over 35% back in the early 1950s. Those unions, like the
transit workers union in Philadelphia, which are still fighting the
good fight, are really all that stands between ordinary American
workers and a truly nightmarish return to a Dickensian era.

Does anyone believe that the type of manager that we have seen
pillaging the economy on Wall Street, or stealing jobs and already
earned pay from workers at Republic Window & Door in Chicago, is an
exception to the rule? Hell no. American managers are congenitally
ruthless exploiters of human beings constrained only by unions or their
fear of unions, and by the protective legislation, such as minimum wage
laws, occupational safety and health laws, etc., which Congress has
grudgingly passed because of the pressure from unions and their workers.

We should all be cheering the workers of the Transport Workers Union
Local 234 in Philadelphia for their grit and determination in standing
up to the management of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation
Authority. Their fight is our fight. They like us are struggling to pay
rent or mortgage bills, to buy food for their families, and to pay
their medical bills.

Workers all around the Philadelphia area should be organizing
car-pools, getting their bikes out of the garage, and collectively
telling their own bosses to cut them some slack if they're late to work
or have to stay home for the day because of the strike.

We should also all be writing letters condemning the bias of the
local media in Philadelphia, which have as a group focused entirely on
the hardship to commuters caused by the strike, and not at all on the
issues confronted by the transit workers themselves.

Furthermore, it is not the fault of the SEPTA workers in
Philadelphia that bus and subway fares are too high. Nor is it their
responsibility to accept low wages to subsidize lower fares. It is the
responsibility of the state of Pennsylvania to keep those fares
affordable. Mass transit cannot and should not be self-financing. It is
a social good. It helps protect the environment by reducing air
pollution from cars, reduces wear and tear on roadways, and helps
reduce the nation's dependence upon oil imports.

Instead of complaining about the union for calling a strike, we
should all be cheering them on. America needs more labor militancy, not
less.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Oh Ohio

davidswanson — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:32:29 -0400

By David Swanson

Ohio may be trailing Michigan and a few other states in official unemployment statistics, but in all of these states the truth is worse than we're told, and it's visible. Unemployment rates do not include those who've given up looking for work, those with an insufficient part-time job, those who have figured out that they would pay more for childcare than they would earn working, those in prison, or those working for less than a living wage.

On a book tour in Ohio, I've met people underworked, overworked, and underpaid. I've seen shut down factories and every other sort of building. This is a depression. There are huge areas with nothing new built and nothing old properly maintained. But there are people actively engaged in struggling for economic justice and every other kind of justice, for themselves and for the rest of the world. And that is inspiring.

Mary Nichols Rhodes, Michael Carano, Pat Carano, and other leaders of Progressive Democrats of Ohio are fulltime activists with unrelated fulltime jobs caring for people's health, driving trucks -- when do these people sleep? How do they keep going? They are engaged in constant, varied, overlapping campaigns for local, state, national, and international justice. In Akron, these and lots of other activist leaders last year discovered that the mayor planned to sell off the city's sewers. Rather than taxing wealthy corporations and individuals, why not enrich them further by privatizing sewers? The people said no, put it on the ballot, passed it, and defeated a ballot measure proposed by the mayor. This and other local victories are not heard about nationally, in part because those involved never stop to tell their stories, but push on doing their share in pressuring Washington to end wars and provide healthcare.

Some of them do put their thoughts down on paper. Lee Geisse, a United Steelworkers member from Canton sent me an article today that reads in part:

"As a proud member of the United Steelworkers and a greaser at a plant in Louisville, I help in the production of specialty steel titanium. One of the end-use products for this titanium is a plate frame heat exchange that is exported to less-developed countries and makes nonpotable water potable. It is also used to make the hub for wind turbines. I am extremely proud of the work I do because I know the metal I work with is used to help generate clean, free and renewable energy. And I know that renewable energy and energy efficiency help Ohio families save money on energy bills. In fact, one study showed that comprehensive clean energy and climate policy could save Ohio's working families an average of $810 a year by 2030….

"I am so excited about the clean energy possibilities for our country's workers that I've traveled across the state to educate my union brothers and sisters about the jobs available in the new clean energy economy. The Toledo-based Willard & Kelsey Solar Group LLC manufactures solar panels for residential and commercial use at its manufacturing plant in Perrysburg. The company plans to expand from one line to as many as 16, potentially employing more than 3,500 workers. These are exactly the types of opportunities our workers need in these tough economic times."

I also met a math teacher named Victoria Lovegren. She, like everyone else I've met here, is not purely focused on local issues, no matter how grim the immediate situation. She and other U.S. academics traveled to Iraq in January 2003, two months before the bombing. She met with Sa'doon Hammadi, Speaker of the National Assembly of the Republic of Iraq, who read aloud and handed to her a letter. It had been sent in August 2002 to the United States Congress by the government of Iraq. The letter denounced the lies about "weapons of mass destruction" as well as the earlier lies about babies removed from incubators that had been used to launch the first Gulf War. The letter was a plea for communication, but our corporatized US communications system had something other than communication on its mind. Lovegren later hosted an Iraqi exchange student, who then obtained asylum, and whom Lovegren calls her son. The people of the United States may have troubles, yet they know that others have it worse and that our own government is responsible. And our people, unable to sway our government, do what they can on their own scale.

I spoke with a young man named Ian Charnas who is working on plans for a 1.5 acre farm in the city of Cleveland, to produce local jobs and grow local vegetables for local sale. The potential for such projects in places like Cleveland or Detroit is enormous. And Washington cannot easily stop it. However, if it were up to Cleveland, Congress would be a force for good in the world. Congressman Dennis Kucinich represents Cleveland. If the rest of Congress acted like him, we would have peace, healthcare, and economic justice. The people of this place must be given credit for electing and re-electing this man despite the concerted efforts of Cleveland's corporate media and wealthy elite. But I'm unable to identify how the people of Cleveland perform as citizens and voters so drastically better than most other places as to account for Kucinich. Ultimately, credit has to go to the congressman himself for resisting corrupting forces and leading the way.

If you need a jolt of joy in Cleveland, and the existence of Dennis Kucinich is not enough, I strongly recommend the contribution of another unique benefactor, the architect Frank Gehry. A city with a Gehry building as stunning as the business school, of all things, at Case Western Reserve University must have some capacity for envisioning positive change.

David Swanson on Labor Day in Kent, Ohio

davidswanson — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 22:19:43 -0400

There Are Really Two Questions: 1) Which Side are the Democrats on? and 2) Which Side are the Labor Unions on?

dlindorff — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:03:30 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

It is refreshing to hear the new head of the AFL-CIO, former
mineworker and Mineworkers President Richard Trumka, get mad at
sell-out Democrats and make a threat not to “support” them next year.

As Trumka pointed out in a talk to the Center for American Progress
this week, for years, Democratic politicians, and the Democrats as a
Party, have counted on the labor movement to get out the vote of its
membership on Election Day, only to turn on workers after getting to
Washington, on the issues that really matter, like jobs-killing free
trade agreements, the gutting of bankruptcy law and credit law
protections, and, most recently, the undermining of needed labor law
reform.

Trumka, quoting from a famous Florence Reece mineworkers song popularized by Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, said that going
forward, Democrats will have to make it clear to labor “Which side are
you on?”

But really, that’s only half the question. Reece, in her song,
was asking that question of workers themselves. And indeed, the reason
Democrats have become such traitors to working class interests in
recent decades is that the labor movement itself has not answered Reece’s musical question resolutely or honestly.

The hard reality is that, despite years of betrayal by Democratic
politicians and by the Democratic Party, labor unions have continued
year after year to answer the call to rally their ever diminishing
members during campaign seasons to go door to door doing the hard work
of rallying voters for ever more treacherous candidates, and to do
massive “get-out-the-vote” campaigns on Election Day, as they did this
past November to assure the election of solid Democratic majorities in
both houses of Congress and the election of President Barack Obama.
Labor has also donated princely sums collected from members to
Democratic candidates and to the Democratic National Committee.

And just as predictably, Congressional Democrats, and the new
president, have been betraying their labor base. After vowing to pass
the Employee Free Choice Act this year, which as written would have
ended years of weakening of labor’s right to organize unions by ending
the cumbersome requirement for “secret ballot” elections to establish
union representation, in favor of just obtaining signed cards
supporting a union from a majority of workers, Obama and the Democrats
in Congress caved in to pressure from the business lobby, and trashed
the bill. If it passes at all in its present form (which is pretty
iffy), it will leave secret ballot elections in place—a process which
managements have long ago figured out how to delay endlessly, and to
subvert, to the point that it is now next to impossible to unionize new
workplaces.

It’s fine to say, as Trumka is doing, that labor will no longer
support politicians who sell-out labor on its issues, but what good is
that really, if those politicians simply replace labor with more money
from business interests? It doesn’t help things that once the sell-outs
get elected, instead of attacking their betrayals, labor gets sucked
into compromises. Just look at health care “reform.” For decades, the
labor movement has advocated a single-payer approach, yet when
President Obama and the Democrats began putting together a health
“reform” package this spring, most of organized labor started backing
the pathetic “public option” plan, buying into Obama’s pre-emptive
compromise approach. Now health care reform appears to be pretty much a
dead letter. The same thing is happening to labor law reform, with
labor caving in and backing a weakened version of the EFCA.

The only way to really make Democrats stop these kinds of betrayals
is for labor to decide “which side it is on” and to actively oppose those who sell labor out.

Trumka, as head of the AFL-CIO, is in a position to make a
fundamental change in labor’s relationship with the Democratic Party.
He should announce plans to encourage the formation of a new labor
party, which would run its own candidates for office in key districts.
Labor, uniquely, is in a position to do this. It has the money and the
numbers to be able to easily get on the ballot in every state even by
as early as next year.

In some states, like New York, parties are able to cross list
candidates, so instead of just endorsing a Democratic candidate who
seemed to be supportive, a labor party could nominate that person as
its own candidate. Votes for the candidate could be made either on the
Democratic line, or the labor party line. But to get on the labor party
line, a candidate would have to be a genuine labor party candidate.
Failure to back labor once in office would mean no more labor party
line.

And in states where there is not such cross listing allowed,
running candidates on a labor party ticket would be a much bigger
threat to sell-out Democrats than just running candidates in the
Democratic Primary. And with good candidates, some labor party
candidates would certainly win their races, becoming a third force in
Congress.

The time is ripe for a labor party. Polls report that more and more
people are quitting the Republican and Democratic Parties in disgust.
They have no home at this point, and labor party would offer them that
home, which would accelerate the decline of the two major
parties—basically hollowed out husks that only manage to stand up
because they are stuffed with corporate swag.

So what’s the answer President Trumka? Which side are you on?
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and long-time
labor writer and activist. A founder of the National Writers Union, he
also organized a labor union of food service workers at Sarah Lawrence
College and worked on the United Farmworkers Union grape boycott in New
York City. He is author of “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s
Press, 2006) and his work can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Clinton and Obama: The Worst and Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

dlindorff — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:20:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because
he has taken the concept of selling out to corporate interests and
compromising with Republicans to such remarkable heights that
progressives hopefully can no longer be confused about the
irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

On virtually every issue of importance, President Obama has sided with corporate interests and the wealthy.

On the issue of war and peace, he has sided with the
military-industrial complex, with a policy of permanent occupation of
Iraq and endless war in Afghanistan, as well as continued funding of
the country’s colossal armory of death, from strategic missiles and
submarines to aircraft-carrier-group armadas to high-tech fighter
squadrons and space weaponry.

On civil liberties, he has sided with the police state, supporting
continuation of the Bush/Cheney administration’s insidious National
Security Agency spying program, defended military spying within the US,
and refused to prosecute obvious abuses by the prior administration.

On torture, the Obama administration is continuing the imprisonment
and torture of captives in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world
at Bagram Air Base and, probably, at other secret sites, and instead of
closing Guantanamo as promised, is looking into transferring that
hellhole of torture and abuse to one or several sites in the mainland
US.

Health care reform has become a sad joke, with the emerging
“reform” bill looking for all the world like the Rube Goldberg creation
of the Clinton era that properly went down in flames. Instead of taking
on the insurance industry, the hospital companies and the
pharmaceutical industry and other parts of the profit-making
medical-industrial complex, Obama cut deals with all of them behind
closed doors, assuring that their profits would be left untouched, and
that they could essentially write their own “reform” bill through the
offices of bought-and-paid members of Congress like Senator Max Baucus.
Obama and his congressional allies carefully kept any discussion of the
single-payer idea—essentially Medicare for all, and the approach that
even Obama himself admits would be cheaper and more universal—out of
sight and off the table.

Climate change action, too, has been sold out, with Obama adopting
the approach favored by the energy industry—“cap and trade.” That
concept is a gold mine for Wall Street trading firms, which will be
doing trades next in pollution credits instead of subprime mortgages,
and for energy companies which will get free credits to sell, courtesy
of the taxpayer. And because it’s a system so easy to game, it will do
nothing or next to nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

Finally, there’s economy and banking reform. Here Obama didn’t even
make a pretense of taking a progressive approach. There is a stimulus
program, but half of it was in the form of tax cuts—token for the poor
and middle class and significant for the rich and for businesses, and
half in the form of federal grants, often for unneeded projects like
roads and road repair which go to some of the higher paid members of
the working class, leaving the poor and the ununionized with no job
help. Meanwhile, bankers were the recipients of trillions of dollars in
bailout assistance, while nothing was done to break up the huge
mega-bank holding companies that brought on the financial and economic
crisis in the first place. Instead of picking economic advisers and
bank regulators from the many talented system critics like Nobelists
Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Obama picked veterans of the
Bush/Cheney administration, and Wall Street shills like Larry Summers
and Timothy Geithner.

Last fall, I and many progressives urged voters to elect Obama, not
because we thought he was a progressive, but because we hoped that his
background—community organizer, raised by a single mother, experience
living in a third world country (Indonesia), multi-racial—would lead
him to make at least some right decisions. We, or certainly I, hoped
too that the energized young and working class electorate that came out
for him in the fall would continue to press him aggressively to do the
right thing on war, environment, civil liberties and the economy.

I was wrong on the first count: Obama has been a corporatist
through and through on all the major issues that matter. And I was
wrong on the second. Most of the left in the US, from the labor
movement to the environmentalist movement to the anti-war movement, has
to date remained glumly quiescent as Obama has sold them out on each of
their key issues.

But here is the silver lining: The sell-out this time is so much
more blatant, and so much more serious, than it was with Clinton, and
for all the talk about Obama’s ability to string words together, he is
so much less of a charismatic figure than the gregarious Bill Clinton,
that he is unlikely to hang on to the ardent support that propelled him
to his victory last November. The disappointment and sense of betrayal
among progressives this time is palpable, especially because, while
Clinton, by 1994, had the excuse that he was working with a Republican,
or partially Republican Congress, Obama has solid control of both
houses, but refuses to use it. If, as I expect, the recession continues
to deepen, with more and more people losing jobs and homes, if, as I
predict, health care continues to be unaffordable and inaccessible, if,
as I know will happen, evidence of deadly climate change continues to
pile up, and if, as I am equally certain, Iraq explodes and the war in
Afghanistan continue to worsen, the left is going to see Obama and the
Democrats in Congress as the failures and corrupt frauds they are, and
will abandon them.

That leaves the question of what to do, and where those frustrated progressives will turn.

I don’t claim to have the answer to that. Clearly the labor movement
needs to recognize that hitching its fortunes to the Democratic Party
has been and will continue to be a dismal failure. It needs to pull all
its political money back and only support those who are 100% allies in
the struggle for the rights of workers. No money for the party as a
whole. It should also go back to the pioneering work of people like the
late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil and Chemical and Atomic Workers Union,
who before his death was tirelessly working to establish an American
labor party.

Other third parties on the left need to drop their individual
agendas and work towards unity, especially with the labor movement, in
order to create a broad-based left party that doesn’t have litmus tests
for inclusion—just broad principles like steeply progressive taxation,
an end to NAFTA and the WTO, democratization of the Federal Reserve
Bank, national health care, a wholesale slashing of the military
budget, by perhaps two-thirds or more, free education through four
years of college for all, and a crisis plan to attack climate change.

If the ever fractious US left, and the somnolent labor movement,
cannot come together as one, there is little hope of political change
in America. At that point the alternative would be an increasing
militancy over these critical issues, outside of the electoral
arena—something that has to happen anyhow, regardless of whether a real
third party force can be put together. We know that simply organizing
occasional polite marches in Washington, or in key cities, accomplishes
nothing. We have learned that email campaigns to deluge members of
Congress with canned opinions don’t work. What has worked, and will
always work, is massive campaigns of civil disobedience, tent cities in
Washington, organized disruption of war preparations, and door-to-door
organizing. The corrupt hacks who inhabit the halls of Congress and the
White House will not do the right thing just because it is the right
thing, or because we ask them nicely. They may, if we make them fear
that they will actually lose our votes in the next election. For the
most part, incumbent Democrats know that the people who peacefully
march down Connecticut Avenue are still likely to vote for them come
the next election. They’re not going to be so sure about people who are
being hit by tear gas and water cannons and who are being hauled off en
masse to jail at protests.

We may need to start sending that stronger message.
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net www.thiscantbehappening.net

Stop Complaining About Right-Wing Protests! The Left Should Be (Re)Learning How It's Done

dlindorff — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:50:54 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

OMG! Those protesters showing up at Democratic “town meetings” to
promote the president’s health care “reform” program are being bused in
from out of town?

Scandal! Que horrible! (Gasp)

But wait! That’s exactly what we on the left always did when we
held demonstrations—at least if we could. Who in the trade union
movement hasn’t called on fellow workers in other unions to join them
in rallies during struggles with an employer, or asked them to join
sparse picket-lines? Who hasn’t pulled out the stops trying to get
people from other cities to attend a local protest?

Okay, if it were shown that the Republicans were hiring
fake protesters to go to those Democratic pep rallies to mess them up,
as was done during the 2000 Florida vote recount, there’d be a good
investigative story, but from the righteous if ignorant anger that is
being expressed by the tea-baggers and anti-government types that I’ve
seen in news reports, these seem like legitimate right-wing cranks, who
are willing to be rallied to the cause of opposing what they see as a
socialist plot. Never mind that you’ve got ignorant numbskulls
demanding that Democrats in Congress “Keep your government hands off my
Medicare!” or that you’ve got right-wing protesters in their 70’s who
are all on Medicare irrationally shouting “Keep government out of
health care!” The point is that confused and ignorant or not, these
people are willing to make the effort to travel fair distances to make
their voices heard, and they’re willing to stand up, shout, and even
scuffle for the chance to make their point.

It’s not as if Democrats haven’t gone to great length to fill those same halls with earnest supporters.

The real question is why is the left in the US so goddamned polite
and domesticated that these Right Wing cranks look positively rowdy.

Back in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement
wasn’t polite and domesticated. It brought activists to events in the
Deep South all the way from New York and Boston. Its members rallied in
the thousands to shut down segregated public and even private
institutions. Its activists occupied buildings on university campuses,
boldly confronting police and police dogs and armed men in white robes.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, anti-war protesters in turn shut
down recruiting and induction centers, destroyed draft board records,
tried to close down Washington, DC, got arrested in the hundreds,
incited soldiers to desert and then helped hide them from the law,
exposed the 1968 Democratic Convention as a farce, and faced down armed
police and soldiers repeatedly, at one point in 1970 closing down the
nation’s campuses in a national student strike when soldiers shot and
killed four unarmed students at Kent State University.

Years earlier, when workers were being abused, they occupied
factories, forcibly shutting them down with sit-down strikes, battled
Pinkerton detectives and armed National Guard forces, and set up tent
cities in Washington to make themselves heard.

And they won great victories.

Where is that passion today? For the most part, the left, in all its
various guises—environmentalists, labor unions, civil rights advocates,
health care reform advocates, anti-war activists—have become neutered
office-chair potatoes, sending canned emails to their elected
representatives or to the White House, occasionally marching politely
inside of pre-approved, permitted and police-prescribed routes, and
attending sponsored events like the current round of town meetings,
perhaps to raise polite objections to aspects of a proposed piece of
legislation.

The agenda of the left in today’s America is being written not by
uncompromising radicals in the street as in earlier decades of
struggle, but by the bought-and-paid Democrats in Washington. The left,
such as it is, has become simply a reactive force, trying to make
discrete little improvements in the truly horrible legislation—health
care “reform,” cap-and-trade, the Employee Not-So-Free Choice Act,
continued Iraq and Afghanistan War funding bills--that is being offered
by a wholly corrupt Washington in thrall to corporate lobbyists.

We all need to take a lesson from the Right, and from those lusty,
cantankerous folks who are raising hell at those pathetic “town
meetings.”

How can it be that 10 percent of American workers don’t have a job,
and that the government is expecting that number to keep rising for
another year or more, or that another 7 percent have either given up
even trying to find a job, or have taken part-time work in desperation,
and yet we have not had one mass protest in Washington demanding public
jobs for the jobless!

How can it be that the country has been mired in two wars now for
eight years, and we haven’t had a million people storming the Pentagon
to shut it down (or at least levitate it)!

How can it be that we have 49 million Americans who can’t even
afford to see a doctor when they’re sick, and we’re talking about a
health care “reform” plan that not only won’t fix the problem, but will
actually end up costing us all $600 billion over 10 years without
solving it! And we just write letters to Congress! Why aren’t we
liberating hospitals and opening them up to the uninsured?

How can it be that the ice cap at the North Pole is actually
disappearing, and the whole arctic tundra across Canada, Alaska and
Siberia is starting to boil with the release of prehistoric methane
trapped under now-melting permafrost, threatening the very lives of our
grandchildren, and we’re calmly watching as even the Obama
administration’s pathetic “cap-and-trade” legislation gets stalled by
coal-state Democrats! Why aren’t we on the left lying down on the
tracks to block the coal trains, or tearing up those tracks!

Where is the passion and commitment we once had?

It all seems to be on the Right these days.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Dark Days But a Ray of Hope for Embattled Workers

dlindorff — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:29:33 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The Democrats in Congress have sold out their supporters in the
labor movement by giving up the so-called “card-check” feature of the
embattled Employee Free Choice Act, which makes the “reform”
legislation that has been billed as labor’s “number one issue” much
less of a reform. Instead of being hammered into line on this issue by
party leaders and by President Obama, who has long pledged to back
EFCA, conservative Democrats in the House and Senate were allowed to
join Republicans in opposing the measure, leading to its replacement
with a vague plan to require quicker secret-ballot elections in
union-organizing drives.

But largely unnoticed by the corporate media, there has been some
really important good news for working people and the labor movement:
the appointment of three people to fill the long-vacant empty seats on
the five-member National Labor Relations Board, which has the ultimate
job of adjudicating issues under the National Labor Relations Act.

The Bush administration had basically gutted the NLRA by simply
failing, since 2007, to fill the three seats that had been emptied as
prior board members’ five-year terms had expired. This had left the
NLRB with only two members, one a Democratic, pro-labor appointee, and
one a Republican pro-management appointee. Since these two members
would vote on opposite sides of most issues, the only issues they ended
up issuing decisions on were 400 particularly egregious cases, where
they could both agree—and most of those are still in legal limbo since
they have been challenged in court on the basis that board rules
require a three-member quorum.

The Obama administration, in April, announced three new
appointments to fill the vacant seats...

For the rest of this story, please go to:
www.thiscantbehappening.net
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Using the Economic Crisis to Attack Workers: Employers Undermine Stimulus Program

dlindorff — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:21:47 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Reports are starting to appear suggesting that laid-off or
underemployed Americans, and the long-term unemployed, are losing
patience with the Obama administration’s and Congress’ economic
stimulus plan, which thus far has not done anything to arrest the
growth of unemployment, now at close to 20 percent of the US workforce,
at least as unemployment used to honestly be counted in the 1970s and
early 1980s.

While millions of jobs have been lost since the beginning of this
year alone, the number of jobs that have been created as a result of
the Obama administration’s signature $780-billion stimulus spending
package is under 150,000—a far cry from the 3.5 million that were
promised when the bill was being put before Congress.

There has been a lot of hype from Washington sources, dutifully
reported with little analysis or criticism in the corporate media,
suggesting that the recession is bottoming out. One example was a
report last week that the number of people receiving unemployment had,
for the first time in six months, dropped slightly. Unmentioned was the
hard reality that the reason for this drop was that many laid-off
workers are now reaching the end of their 26 weeks of unemployment
benefits in states that do not offer any extended benefits program. On
inspection, that is hardly good news.

There is also a mantra, trotted out regularly by administration
officials, that unemployment figures are a “lagging indicator,” and
thus are no indication that the recession is continuing to worsen. The
problem with this sleight-of-hand is that unemployment itself, when it
is rising rapidly as it has been now for a year, is a cause of
deepening recession. When one in five workers is unemployed or
unwillingly underemployed, that represents not only a huge drop in
consumer demand for everything from basic necessities to luxuries, but
also a huge dark cloud of anxiety that hangs over most of the rest of
the public, leading everyone to cut back on their spending, thus
dragging down the economy further.

But there is another factor at work, which is not getting much
attention, and that is the negative role being played by employers,
both public and private, in worsening the recession and undermining the
stimulus effort, such as it is, by actually using economic crisis as an
excuse to further attack and undermine workers and their incomes.

Take Temple University, where I live. The university, a largely
publicly-funded institution, has received $10 million in federal
stimulus funds, largely replacing the state funding that it lost when
the state cut back on its educational budget, and though those funds
were specifically intended by Congress to be used to improve student
achievement and to put people to work quickly, Temple, which has also
seen student admissions and tuition revenues increase during the
recession, has done the opposite—laying off staff, including
departmental staff and other personnel. The university for the past
year has also been engaged in a classic union-busting campaign against
one of its staff unions, which has been working 0n an expired contract
for a year, and its faculty union, which has been working on an expired
contract since last October. The school last year hired an outside law
firm, Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, that on its website touts
its expertise in “union avoidance,” to handle the school’s “bargaining”
with faculty.

In this, Temple is hardly alone. Across the country, companies and
public institutions have been taking brutal advantage of the economic
crisis as an opportunity to attack their workers, slashing employment,
demanding pay cuts (the New York Times, for example, has cut
employee paychecks by 5%), reducing long-held benefits, and generally
contributing to the impoverishment and insecurity of the broader
American workforce. According to a recent report, 29 percent of
employers who had historically been offering their employees a match
for their own contributions to 401(k) retirement plans have eliminated
that matching money over the last year.

These cutbacks and layoffs are bad enough when made by private
firms, many of which are still quite profitable and which have
benefited over the years and recently from tax incentives aimed at boosting
employment, but they are particularly obscene when they are made by
institutions that are receiving public stimulus money, like schools,
public transit agencies, and state and local governments. Indeed, it’s
probably the case that much of the potential stimulus of the
taxpayer-funded stimulus plan has been negated by job cuts and pay cuts
being made by the state and local entities that have received the bulk
of that money. If a state, for example, uses $50 million in stimulus
funds to repair a bridge, in the process providing jobs to perhaps 100
construction workers, and then lays off 200 state workers, that
stimulus money is completely wasted in terms of boosting the economy.

So far, most of the frustration and anger over this undermining of
the economic stimulus program is coming from the unemployed. Taxpayers,
who will end up paying for this stimulus (all of which was borrowed
money) in future years, have so far not raised a fuss, perhaps because
they have not gotten the news that employers are busy undermining the
program. That could change if unemployment, as expected, keeps rising
inexorably. Maybe at that point people will start demanding that their
taxes be used by the federal government to directly employ people,
instead of trusting employers to pass it through to their workers, or
that at a minimum, organizations receiving stimulus program funds be
barred from laying workers off or cutting their pay.

______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Where's the Anger as the Wheels Come Off Obama's and the Democrats' Recovery Program?

dlindorff — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:05:35 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

My bank, a small regional institution that was not involved in sub-prime lending, and that was not a recipient of any TARP bailout money, cut off my home equity line of credit two weeks ago. They did it abruptly, with no notice—I only discovered it had happened when I tried to get a $500 advance from it to cover a payment I was making on my credit card. When I asked what was going on, the local branch manager informed me that “we are closing out a lot of credit lines while we reassess the value of houses in this region, which have been falling.”

Now, in my particular case this was ridiculous. First of all, in our county, just north of Philadelphia, property prices have been static, but not falling. Furthermore, I had taken out a $160,000 mortgage 12 years ago, and it was now paid down to $60,000, and my balance on the home equity credit line was pretty small, so there was no way that we were in any way “under water”—in fact our equity in our home is much higher than it was 12 years ago.

The bank informed me that it was no problem. I could simply take out a new credit line, at no charge, and transfer the balance on the current line over to the new one. The only hitch: Instead of paying one percent over prime as I had been, I would be paying nearly 4 percent over prime on that balance, effectively doubling the cost of borrowing money.

This kind of thing is going on all across America, as banks that once spread around credit like a Philadelphia Democratic Party ward captain on Election Day, start tightening the screws on individuals and on small businesses.

While the Obama administration and the Treasury and the Fed are bulldozing funds into the coffers of the big banks, allegedly to get them to lend, the banks, from the largest to the smallest, are pulling back, afraid that borrowers will end up going bust on them. So much for economic stimulus efforts.

Not that borrowers have been lining up to get credit. Rather, most people, if they aren’t simply going bankrupt or letting collection agents harass them for nonpayment, are trying to pay off credit card balances, and to cut expenses. With official unemployment approaching 10%--a level it may hit this month—and real unemployment, as measured the way it used to be back in 1980, at closer to 20 percent, the majority of Americans not only have friends and family members who are unemployed or working part-time or at odd jobs involuntarily, but are worried about getting the axe themselves.

Meanwhile, the short-lived but incredibly expensive Obama rescue program, like a stagecoach at the end of a spaghetti western chase scene, is about to have the wheels fall off and go sliding over a cliff.

Bond yields and commodity prices are spiking as investors are waking up to the reality that massive borrowing by the US Treasury and massive printing of money by the Federal Reserve are going to lead to serious, perhaps even hyper inflation of the dollar. That in turn will force the Fed at some point, probably fairly soon, to raise interest rates, choking off not only those so-called economic “green shoots” that the cheerleading media have been citing as evidence that the recession is “bottoming out,” but also even the recent stock market rise, which was being touted as one of those signs of economic “spring.” On Tuesday, the interest rate or “yield” on the benchmark 10-year Treasury Bill jumped from 3.86% to 3.98 percent, and at one point went over 4%. Meanwhile, crude oil prices rose to over $70/barrel—an odd thing given the significant decline in demand caused by the global recession, but evidence that investors are anticipating a dollar slump and aren’t interested in supply and demand issues. Other commodity prices are also jumping for the same reason.

News that the big banks that were recipients of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal TARP loans were paying some of that money back to the government in order to be able to go back to their old ways was hardly reassuring. Those banks, like Bank of America and Citibank and Goldman Sachs, are not suddenly healthy. They have used accounting gimmicks to disguise the fact that they are what some economists have dubbed “zombies,” with bad debts far in excess of their assets. And they will stay that way, while enriching their top managers with bloated salaries and “bonus” payments, while keeping credit tight and available only to the absolutely best corporate borrowers.

Obama’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going from bad to worse. There is no savings coming out of Iraq, as he had claimed would happen during last year’s presidential campaign, and even if there were, it’s all simply being transferred over to Iraq, where the US war effort is morphing from a small special forces operation into a full-scale war, destined to rival or even surpass the one in Iraq in terms of human and financial costs.

It’s all coming unglued, just as the president puts forward his signature program—a health care reform scheme that is supposed to guarantee health care for everyone in the country.

Fat chance that one has. When America’s economic house of cards finally really collapses, which looks to be starting to happen now, there simply won’t be any cash in the till for health care.

So far, most Americans remain unaware of the scale of this crisis. The news media continue to tout shamelessly whatever signs of recovery they can detect, leaving all those whose personal finances are falling apart to feel like it’s just their problem. Astonishingly, given the extent of the joblessness, there has been no national jobs march on Washington, no mass protests over the inadequacy of unemployment benefits, which reach only a minority of workers and are at levels far below what they were in prior recessions, no sit-down strikes at companies that are laying workers off or cutting salaries. The labor movement, such as it is at this point, is so wedded to Obama and the ruling Democrats, and so narrowly focused on trying to win passage of the seemingly doomed Employee Free Choice labor law reform bill, that the unions aren’t trying to organize any mass actions to demand economic justice.

Maybe this public passivity in the face of rampant corporate welfare and corporate pillage will come to an end as unemployment benefits begin to run out and unemployment rates continue to climb.

The coach is heading for the cliff, but there is still time for people to jump out.

_____________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and available on my website in signed collector edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net