For Obama to even mention the Employee Free Choice Act as anything but a deader-than-dead failure of his administration is an insult to the intelligence of every working person in America. Obama had the opportunity to push through the Employee Free Choice Act between February and April 2009. He let it linger, then let Democrats start sniping at it, and then the ship sailed with Scott Brown’s election. Unions dismantled their Employee Free Choice Act campaign teams in January 2010. It is no longer even close to an option.
Bringing up the Employee Free Choice Act now is worse than being a tease. It’s being a dishonest, two-faced manipulator who is desperately begging for help from the very people who only got out the vote and donated money in 2008 on the promise of fundamental change like the Employee Free Choice Act. For Obama to come back two years later and promise the same thing that’s not even possible is offensive.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Oh, My Sides! Obama Says He’ll Keep Pushing for Employee Free Choice Act | Work in Progress
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
t r u t h o u t | Former San Diego ACORN Employee Files Lawsuit Against Righ-Wing Activists O'Keefe and Giles
As The BRAD BLOG has documented for many months now, the activists edited their tapes to appear as if O'Keefe dressed as and represented himself as a pimp to ACORN workers. He did neither. In fact, he represented himself as Giles boyfriend, hoping to save her from an abusive pimp. Moreover, the highly edited tapes were edited to give the impression that ACORN workers advised the pair on how to break the law. Here's just one example of how O'Keefe and Giles misrepresented what had actually occurred in the meetings and on their deceptively cropped tapes.
The blatantly dishonest hoax, however --- amplified and enabled by a wholly uncritical mainstream media --- was brutally effective and destructive, coming as part of the years-long assault by the GOP and the Right against ACORN, largely for having had the temerity to legally register hundreds of thousands of low and middle-income (read: Democratic-leaning) voters to legally cast a vote and participate in their own democracy.
Vera's complaint goes on to note that the eavesdropping and recording provisions of the Penal Code, Section 632, "defines confidential communication to include "any communication carried on in circumstances as may reasonably indicate that any party to the communication desires it to be confined to the parties thereto."
"Although the Act contains exemptions for particular individuals or circumstances," the complaint reads, "no exemption exists for filmmakers, the media, or journalists."
In his 28-page report [PDF], the CA AG explained that since O'Keefe and Giles received immunity from prosecution after providing the complete tapes, they "did not determine if they violated California's Invasion of Privacy Act when they recorded the ACORN employees. If the circumstances meet the requirements of the Act, the ACORN employees may be able to bring a private suit against O'Keefe and Giles for recording a confidential conversation without consent."
Former San Diego ACORN worker Juan Carlos Vera, has now filed suhch a private suit against O'Keefe and Giles.
In addition to naming O'Keefe and Giles, the suit also specifies unnamed defendants "DOES 1-20 inclusive," allowing for the plaintiff to add additional co-defendants later, as the need arises throughout the discovery phase of the case. As the secret video tapes made in California were the last among a number of such tapes made by O'Keefe and Giles (the others on the East Coast), and as O'Keefe and Giles' employer/pimp Andrew Breitbart lives in Los Angeles --- and has lied about the tapes in the past, as seen in both his newspaper column and on video tape --- it seems quite possible that he would have been aware of the video taping in advance of the California meetings, at the very least.
If so, we'll be neither surprised nor saddened to see Breitbart named as one of those DOES in the not-too-distant future.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
t r u t h o u t | The Politics of Death: Throwing Mumia Abu-Jamal Under the Bus
Because Trots for Romney, Trots for Blago and even, most recently, Trots for Crist, have been active with the Mumia defense histrionics.
By the way, has anybody out there read the memoir of Maureen Faulkner, widow of the police officer Mumia has been convicted of murdering? It's co-authored by Michael Smerconish, a popular fount of "centrist"-ish pablum on Hardball. I'll allow readers to draw their own conclusions about the memoir itself, but here's what one of Lex's Oracles had to say:
"The Bible teaches that the truth will set us free, but Michael Smerconish and Maureen Faulkner teach us that even a powerful truth needs courage as its ally."Fuck that, Chris. What a bunch of swishy drivel. That's probably why Romney, Crist and Blago don't wanna do yr dumb show no more times. It's probably why I, myself, find myself wondering if I wouldn't be better off to allow myself only one hour of daily cable talk, and that talk should be Maddow talk? Probably I should really watch GritTv, huh?
Chris Matthews - Host of Hardball with Chris Matthews and The Chris Matthews Show
What news videos do you people watch? I could use some ideas.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Connecting Dots | Democratic Strategist
It's reasonably clear by now that by sheer repetition, the claim that the president has fumbled the BP oil spill in some significant way has sunk into media and public perceptions. Some of this, of course, is coming from people who are lifelong cheerleaders for offshore oil drilling, and who idolize Dick Cheney, who is probably more responsible for the policies that enabled this disaster than anyone else. But presidents do get blamed for things they didn't do, so appearing large and in charge in the present and future must accompany any Obama effort to assign responsibility for why this happened in the first place.
Aside from that difficult task, the president must also connect the dots between the disaster and the path he wants the country to take on energy policy. While it may seem obvious to some of us why a carbon cap or tax of some sort is an appropriate response to yet another calamity associated with fossil fuel production, it's not at all obvious to the public generally. And this is the same public, moreover, that never much bought the president's arguments that health care reform was essential to the country's economic future. So while it might not be that hard for Obama to rally support for tougher regulation of offshore drilling, it will be a much heavier lift to connect the disaster to the need for climate change legislation.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Alvin Greene Interview with CNN Must See! 6-12-2010
Gather Your Armies
This would be what I'd call taking it to the next level ca. 2010.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
DSCC: Unions, Netroots are “Special Interests in Washington” | Work in Progress
Senator Robert Menendez, leader of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, sent out a memo deriding labor unions who supported Bill Halter as “special interests in Washington.”
Tonight Arkansas Democrats nominated Blanche Lincoln, a proven independent voice for her state. In this race Blanche took on powerful special interests in Washington and won. In the Senate, she fights those same fights everyday, supporting home-state farmers, strengthening programs for childhood nutrition, and bolstering rural economic development. As Chairwoman of the Agriculture Committee, Blanche has stood-up and delivered for every region of Arkansas.
And if you aren’t sure this is an isolated incident from the DSCC, they posted this article from The Hill on the DSCC website. The editorial by Hill editor A.B. Stoddard, as posted on the DSCC’s website, congratulates Lincoln for:
fending off Lt. Gov. Bill Halter and the unions and the netroots and the punishment the left promised to exact for her opposition to a public option in healthcare reform and to legislation, favored by unions, known as “card-check.”
Ernesto Laclau in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left
I have argued that class antagonism is not inherent to capitalist relations of production, but that it takes place between those relations and the identity of the worker outside them. Various aspects must be carefully distinguished. First, we have to distinguish the contradiction between forces and relations of production - which, I have maintained, is a contradiction without antagonism - from class struggle - which is an antagonism without contradiction. So if we concentrate on the latter, where is the antagonism located? Certainly not within the relations of production. The capitalists extract surplus-value from the workers, but both capital and labor should be conceived of, as far as the logic of capitalism is concerned, not as actual people but as economic categories. So if we are going to maintain that class antagonism is inherent to the relations of production, we would have to prove that from the abstract categories 'capital' and 'wage labor' we can logically derive the antagonism between both - and such a demonstration is impossible. It does not logically follow from the fact that the surplus-value is extracted from the worker that the latter will resist such extraction. So if there is going to be antagonism, its source cannot be internal to the capitalist relations of production, but has to be sought in something that the worker is outside those relations, something which is threatened by them: the fact that below a certain level of wages the worker cannot live a decent life, and so on. Now, unless we are confronted with a situation of extreme exploitation, the worker's attidue vis-a-vis capitalism will depend entirely on how his or her identity is constituted - as socialists knew a long time ago, when they were confronted by reformist tendencies in the trade-union movement.
Could we perhaps say that these demands have priority over those of other groups because they are closer to the economy, and thus at the heart of the functioning of the capitalist system? This argument does not fare any better. Marxists have known for a long time tat capitalism is a world system, structured as an imperialist chain, so crises at one point in the system create dislocations at many other points. This means that many sectors are threatened by the capitalist logic, and that the resulting antagonisms are not necessarily related to particular locations in the relations of production. As a result the notion of class struggle is totally insufficient to explain the identity of the agents involved in anti-capitalist struggles.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Ark. fight fuels W.H.-labor family feud - Glenn Thrush and Ben Smith - POLITICO.com
Emanuel has a good relationship with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. Stern, the former SEIU president, is close to White House Political Director Patrick Gaspard, who once worked for him. Both Trumka and Stern reportedly are on good terms with Emanuel’s deputy Jim Messina.
But the departure of Stern, Obama’s highest-profile labor backer, has robbed the administration of an important emissary, and Emanuel’s relationship with labor has been strained over his willingness to scrap the public option to pass health care reform.
Emanuel, who engineered Democrats’ majority in the House by recruiting conservatives during his tenure as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, remains obsessed with reelecting endangered freshmen and sophomore members.
Emanuel also has told Trumka and other labor leaders in no uncertain terms that their strategy is counterproductive, according to individuals familiar with the situation.
But despite that admonition, anti-Lincoln Democrats say the union assault on the Agriculture Committee chairwoman has paid real-world dividends — in the form of tough new derivatives reforms championed by Lincoln after it became clear she would face a challenge from the left.
“I don’t understand how the White House can say that all this pressure on Lincoln hasn’t helped,” said one Democratic political consultant. “They would have a much weaker financial reform bill if labor hadn’t gotten behind Bill Halter.”
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Can’t Stop The Bleeding » Fellow Taxpayers / GM Owners – You Just Bought Galarraga A Corvette
“Until G.M. has repaid the taxpayers in full for the money they have borrowed, every action that G.M. takes should advance them in that direction,” said Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican of California who is a visible G.M. second-guesser.
Last month, Mr. Issa was among a multitude of critics who took issue with another G.M. marketing effort — the running of self-congratulatory advertisements about having repaid a government loan. (Taxpayers still own $2.1 billion in preferred stock of G.M. and 61 percent of its common equity.)
“The leadership thought it (awarding Galarraga the car) was an excellent opportunity,” Chevrolet spokesman Klaus-Peter Martin said. “We looked into the cost-benefit ratio and decided to go for it.”
Mr. Bardella, the spokesman for the congressman, said he hoped that was true and noted that many people would be watching.
“If you were to ask the majority of taxpayers — outside of the city of Detroit, probably — if they thought that giving a $50,000 car away for free was a good use of money, I’m sure that most people would say no,” he said. “If it creates the perception of good will and a solvent company and encourages people to buy their cars, then great. Is it something they should do every day? Probably not.”
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Unions Support Halter to Defeat Senator Lincoln in Arkansas Runoff - NYTimes.com
“We go out and support these Blue Dogs all over the place,” said Mr. McEntee, the union leader. “We give them all kinds of ground support, radio support, and then they get in there and they’ve lost our phone number. For God’s sake, what’s the use of having them in there?”
Monday, May 24, 2010
Did The Postwar System Fail? - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com
Did The Postwar System Fail?
I’ve been posting about the contrast between the popular perception on the right that America had slow growth until Reagan came along, and the reality that we did fine pre-Reagan, in fact better; see here, here, and here. And what I’m getting as a common response — including from liberals — is something along the lines of, “That’s all very well, but by 1980 the postwar system was clearly failing, so what would you have done instead of Reaganomics?”
Which all goes to show just how thoroughly almost everyone has been indoctrinated by the current orthodoxy.
How do we know that the postwar system was failing? Yes, there were some bad years — largely due to oil shocks — and there was stagflation. But stagflation was not, as far as I know — and as far as standard textbook economics says — the result of high taxes and/or excessive regulation; it was a problem of monetary policy. It’s a testimony to the strength of supply-side propaganda that so many people think they know differently.
And how bad were those bad years, anyway? Well, let’s look at real median family income over two 8-year stretches, 1973 to 1981 and 2000 to 2008, in each case with income in the first year set to 100:
Census Funny, isn’t it? The Ford-Carter years look no worse — in fact, somewhat better — than the Bush years, especially if you look from business cycle peak to business cycle peak. And that was in the face of two very severe oil shocks. So a question for all the people who say that the economic troubles under Jimmy Carter discredited postwar economic policies: why don’t the troubles under Bush similarly discredit post-Reagan policies? Funny how that works.
Here’s what I think: inflation did have to be brought down — and Paul Volcker, not Reagan, did what was necessary. But the rest — slashing taxes on the rich, breaking the unions, letting inflation erode the minimum wage — wasn’t necessary at all. We could have gone on with a more progressive tax system, a stronger labor movement, and so on.
In the modern vision, the old US economy is seen as an absurd, unworkable thing. Where were the incentives to grow super-rich? How did you manage with all those well-paid, organized workers? But I’m old enough to remember that system, and it was no more unworkable than what we have now. Radical change happened because a powerful political movement wanted it, not out of economic necessity.
Link: Is economic freedom another way of saying we need to build more prisons?
My favorite statistic from that paper linked above, Garrison America: "By 2012, the Department of Labor predicts, the United States will have more private security guards than high school teachers."
Fantastic.
-- One theory I'm thinking through these days, and I'll be using as a guide in watching dialogue on the right unfold into the 2010 election: We tend to see two distinct political projects. One is a "neoliberal" project that, in the words of Wendy Brown, is a project of “extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action … the production of all human and institutional action as rational entrepreneurial action, conducted according to a calculus of utility, benefit or satisfaction." There is also a more familiar "neoconservative" project of dismantling the welfare state, reversing progressive taxation,
Christianizing the state, reversing civil liberties, projecting military strength abroad, etc.I'm curious as to how the two interplay. The way that the neoliberal dream of growing the pie blurs into the neoconservative dream of punishing the wicked, parasitic unproductive class and rewarding the rich who make the world into what it is. In some ways they tend to repeal each other ("I'm socially liberal, but fiscally conservative"). But in some ways, I wonder whether there is a synthesis that has been happening between the two. And if so, we may see some additional avatars of this cross-dream in the 2010 election.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
After Andy
The distinguished sociologist Daniel Bell wrote this in 1995 about the alliance between intellectuals and organized labor that flourished in the aftermath of Sweeney’s rise to power: “For the intellectuals it’s a lot of wishful thinking; I don’t mean that in an invidious way. The real test will be whether labor has the ability to expand its numbers. Simply becoming more rhetorical and becoming more active politically is not in and of itself enough.” The same can be said about Andy Stern and his creation of [Change to Win.] It was indeed a lot of wishful thinking.
Monday, April 12, 2010
I wanna look at things this way, it's just that I don't
Edmund Andrews writes:
I am tempted to think that the revulsion expressed Crittenden is part of a bigger ferment among Republicans. I’d like to think that there is a group of young Turks or moderates who agree with Frum that the GOP health-care rejectionism will turn out to be the party’s Waterloo. I’d like to think that there is a new generation GOP that is ready to take a chance on constructive engagement.
But my good friend Bruce Bartlett is skeptical. Republican leaders think their strategy since the 2008 election has been a great success. If they win back House and Senate seats this fall — as they almost certainly will — they’ll argue that their strategy has been vindicated. And the truth is, the Young Turks are among the most fervent of the hard-liners — the Jeb Hensarlings, Paul Ryans. The moderates are disappearing faster than ever, and the ones who stay are disdained.
I think that to understand what’s wrong with the conservative movement today, you need to think about Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Presidential campaign. In ‘64, the GOP establishment felt that Goldwater was too radical. They said that nominating a hard-rightist like Goldwater would be counterproductive. But conservative activists worked hard, and they did it. Goldwater got the nod. And, just as the establishment predicted, Goldwater got crushed. And just as the established predicted, it proved to be counterproductive. The 1964 landslide led directly to Medicare, Medicaid, Title I education spending, and the “war on poverty.” In the 45 years since that fateful campaign, the conservative movement managed to gain total control over the Republican Party and to sporadically govern the country. But it’s only very partially rolled back one aspect of the Johnson administration’s domestic policy.
Which is just to say that the conservative movement from 1964-2009 was a giant failure. By nominating Goldwater, it invited a massive progressive win that all the subsequent conservative wins were unable to undue. But the orthodox conservative tradition of ‘64 is that it was a great success that laid the groundwork for the triumphs to come.
Which is to say that it’s not just a movement incapable of thinking seriously about the interests of the country, it can’t think rigorously about its own goals. 2009-2010 has already seen the greatest flowering of progressive policy since 1965-66. No matter how well Republicans do in the 2010 midterms, the right will never fully roll back what the 111th Congress has done. And yet, as Andrews suggests, if they win seats in 2010, conservatives will consider their behavior during 2009-10 to have been very successful.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Getting Tuff Means Puffing Tuff? Major "State of Labor" article in the Major Labor-Liberal Mag
Harold Meyerson writes a big and overdue article about the State of US Labor, 2010 for the American Prospect that's well worth reading whether you are one of the OG's laborite readers, or whether you are the kind of OG reader who feels hopelessly behind on the inner world of trade unionism that we so often evoke herein. Here's a money blurb:In 2008, unions had worked tirelessly for Obama's election in the hope that a Democratic president backed up by a heavily Democratic Congress could change the law that made organizing American workers so difficult. With the upset victory of Republican Scott Brown in the race for the vacant Senate seat from Massachusetts, however, those hopes were definitively dispelled. The failure to reform labor law almost certainly means that that the half-century decline of unions in America -- from representing nearly 40 percent of private-sector workers at the midpoint of the 20th century to representing just 7 percent today -- will continue apace. It means that the corresponding stagnation -- and periodic decline -- in the incomes of working- and middle-class Americans will likely continue as well.
But the failure of labor-law reform was hardly the only disaster that befell unions in 2009. Amid the greatest economic downturn since the 1930s, many thousands of unionized manufacturing, construction, and public employees lost their jobs, sending the percentage of unionized workers to record lows. Public support for unions also plunged, with both the Gallup and Pew polls showing a decline in public support of between 15 percent and 20 percent over the past several years. (In the Pew poll, those who had a favorable view of unions declined from 58 percent in 2007 to 41 percent in 2010.) Two developments fueled that decline: first, the travails of the Big Three automobile companies, for which one of the most prevalent explanations was the excessive labor costs that the United Auto Workers had inflicted on those companies (an explanation that relied on mislabeling the companies' obligations to their millions of retirees as existing wage costs). The second development, which bodes ill for the future of public-employee unions, is the rising backlash within a largely nonunion private sector against a still substantially unionized public sector, which has managed to retain the kinds of benefits (such as defined-benefit pensions) that were once routine in the private sector but that vanished as private-sector unions declined in size and clout.
Yep. Yep. What is to be done, though? Realistically, what is to be done?
If nothing else, the experiences of 2009 seem to have taught most unions that the Democratic Party is their good friend during campaigns when the candidates need their help but isn't always there when the time comes to reciprocate -- and that sometimes they need to play hardball with Democrats. That's the lesson of Trumka's meeting with Obama and of the unions' support for Arkansas Lt. Governor Bill Halter's primary challenge to Wal-Mart's own senator, Blanche Lincoln. Unions need a supportive government to help them organize and create a thriving working class. If that requires getting tougher with their allies than they've customarily been -- well, it's about time.Absolutely, fine. But can "getting tough" -or getting tuff- also mean some form of participation outside of Democratic primary and caucus action? Could we get tuff somewhere besides the District of Columbia? Those who know me know that I have a large crush on the District of Columbia, but not because I think that's where labor needs to be doubling down on its tuffness. D.C. is a good place for Dischord Records to get tuff, but a good place for unions to help pass health care and work in coalition with other folks to advance a progressive course towards economic security that legitimizes social democratic government in the minds of voters. There's gotta be a venue where labor can get tuff - some workplace, say - besides the District of Columbia, and there's gotta be a day besides Election Day when democracy in general, and the workplace democracy of our union movement in particular, is made to matter.
Monday, April 5, 2010
A 2010 Census Message from Karl Rove
Because Karl Rove coming out on behalf of the ACORN-friendly, socialistic (and social scientistic) institution known as the US Census merits OG attention.
[Anybody out there, by the way?]
Friday, February 19, 2010
So. Many. Commas
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Regrets? I'm having some right now.
And yet here we sit today, with a Democratic president that seems determined to be just as center-right as Bill Clinton ever was. To be fair to Barack, he ran as a centrist. Maybe it was too much to hope that a candidate that had achieved little other than getting elected would do anything other than seek to be re-elected. And, unfortunately, a politician gets re-elected by being as timid as possible.
Back in the old days of computing, there was a game that let you be a South American dictator. Your goal was to stay in power until you died. I quickly figured out that the only way to achieve this goal was by caving to whichever pressure group happened to be pressuring you at the time. Teachers on strike? Give 'em a raise. American-backed corporations want a military crackdown on rebels? Crack down. The people want land reform? Nationalize! Landowners want their land back? Denationalize! You get the gist.
After a while it became mindless, but I can see where it might be entertaining to play in real life. How do you stay popular with a populace that simultaneously demands an economic recovery (solution: massive government spending, deficits, tax increases) while demanding less government spending, deficit reduction, and tax cuts? We want health care reform, but not any kind of health care reform that might one day affect what I have right now! Could be fun. Or addictive, anyway.
So here we sit today with a president determined to drive down the middle of the road only dipping to the right every now and again. Here we are, again, with we on the left realizing that it will be another eight years of getting exactly nothing of what we want. We will be told to be grateful it's not worse. That's where we live in American politics, fighting a rear-guard action against things getting worse. We were kings of the world in 1935, it's been mostly downhill since then. Our successes since then - civil rights, women's rights, gay rights - have been hard fought and achieved by the people, with the politics lagging way the hell behind.
Don't mourn, organize!
Yes. Maybe what it will take is for all of us who are looking around for a third party to get out there and get involved. No one hates saying this more than me, as I love my couch and tv, but if I can drag myself out to knock on doors for mainstream, better than the alternative Democratic candidates, then I can certainly do it for someone or some cause that might actually make a fucking difference in this world.
Fuck, looks like I have to actually do something. I'll have to get my pleasure from telling my labor union 'no' when they ask me to go knocking on doors for whatever fuckstick the Democrats nominate.