How not to fight terror:

The MTA’s move to stop the shooting of unauthorized pictures or video has pissed-off everyone from photobloggers to subway advocates and free-speech activists. To show their opposition to the ban, a group of photographers plan to gather at the main information kiosk in Grand Central station this Sunday, June 6, at 1 p.m. They’ll fan out across several train lines, shooting photos throughout the system in a peaceful demonstration.

The demonstration will start mere yards from an MTA-sponsored photography show called “The New York Subway: A Centennial Celebration.” Most of the 16 subway-themed prints were taken during an earlier photo ban, which was taken off the books in 1994. The work includes work from such giants of the form as Bruce Davidson and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The MTA isn’t slated to vote on the measure until at least mid June, when a 45-day public comment period ends…Ostensibly designed to counter terrorist attacks, the new rules clearly extend to ordinary—and artistic—activity.

Iraqi workers continue to struggle for the right to organize, with little help from the United States:

“Workers are in urgent need to build strong and broad-based organizations which are not based on language or religion,” says Aso Jabbar, international spokesperson for the Union of Unemployed Iraqis, one of several worker-based groups organized in the aftermath of the recent US invasion. This June marks the second year in a row that international labor groups are gathering in support of Jabbar and other Iraqi labor organizers as the United Nations convenes its annual meeting of the International Labor Organization (ILO). Next Friday, Iraqi labor representatives plan to deliver formal complaints to the ILO, protesting the labor policies of provisional authorities in Iraq. In effect, Iraqi labor organizers accuse US-backed authorities of setting up the national equivalent of a company union, ignoring the rights of workers to organize their own shops and elect their own leaders.

According to materials posted at reputable labor sources, such as Eric Lee’s LaborStart, Iraqi labor organizers waded right into the chaos of war and began organizing unions as early as March 2003. At a decisive March 16 conference (in 2003), a dissident labor movement, WDTUM, that had been opposing Saddam Hussein’s labor practices since 1980, was folded into an exploratory organization called the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) with newly elected officers. From May to December, 2003, numerous independent unions were organized under the IFTU umbrella. The organizing campaign was formally announced on May 10, 2003. One of the independent unions that emerged was UUI. “UUI is a strong organisation of unemployed people that raises the banner of jobs or unemployed insurance to confront the massive unemployment,” says Jabbar.

Yale – New Haven Hospital tries to dodge the community’s push for a community benefits agreement in its new expansion by splitting it into phases:

State Sen. Martin M. Looney, D-10, said he realized there is a need for a cancer center at the hospital, which now has to shuttle patients from building to building for services. But he said considering the plan in two steps amounts to asking OHCA to approve an incomplete proposal and could undermine OCHA’s ability “to determine the public need for capital expenditures and ensure that changes in services will provide a benefit prior to health care facilities spending money on major changes.”

Dan Livingston, an attorney who represented the Hospital Debt Justice Project, took issue with Vogel’s ruling limiting the group’s intervenor status. She would not consider testimony on the effect of the project on the ability of poor patients to pay for health care. “Unfortunately there is not an easy way to get the voice of uninsured before this agency. . They tend to hear almost exclusively from hospitals, radiologists, doctors,” Livingston said.

For some perspective on job growth:

Despite recent good news on employment growth, the current economic recovery, now approaching its third year, remains the most unbalanced on record in respect to the distribution of income gains between corporate profits and labor compensation. Essentially, rapid gains in productivity have been translating into higher corporate profits without increasing the wage and salary income of American workers.

The National Labor Relations Board validates HERE Local 217’s charge against Sodhexo:

The National Labor Relations Board has issued a complaint against Sodexho Inc., the food service contractor at the University of Connecticut Health Center. The labor board, responding to a complaint from Local 217 of the Hotel & Restaurant Employees & Bartenders Union, found merit to the union’s charge that employee Pedro Maldonado improperly received a written warning for circulating a petition seeking more job security. Union officials said Maldonado was not working at the time he was circulating the petition. “We found merit to the charge,” said John Cotter, assistant regional director for the board’s Hartford office. “Our initial finding is the individual named, Mr. Pedro Maldonado, was improperly issued a warning for union activities which are protected under our law.” The matter now will go to a hearing before an administrative law judge, unless Sodexho chooses to settle the matter first.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming likelihood is that the NLRB will now settle with Sodhexo on 217’s behalf for a pittance.

A University of Massachusetts economist testifies about the tremendous potential of a ballot proposal increasing Florida’s minimum wage to raise wages and grow the economy:

Boosting the minimum wage in Florida by a buck could put several hundred dollars more in the wallets of thousands of workers while costing consumers just pennies, an economist said Thursday. “A $10 meal at a restaurant … would be $10.10,” Robert Pollin told a dozen Florida analysts…The minimum wage proposal would create a state minimum wage of $6.15 – $1 higher than the federal minimum wage – and require annual increases to cover inflation.

…To reach voters, sponsors of the two proposals must get nearly half a million signatures verified by Aug. 3 and persuade the state Supreme Court that their provisions deal with a single subject and are fairly explained in ballot title and summary. The wage amendment, which is backed by the advocacy group ACORN, has nearly 116,000 signatures. Although frequently cautioning that his research wasn’t complete, Pollin predicted that Florida’s economy would be able to absorb the slight increase in costs caused by the proposal without layoffs. The impact will be greater in some sectors, such as the hotel and restaurant industry, he said. However, even there the effect won’t be great enough to change consumer behavior, he said. Essentially, Pollin said, “low-wage workers (will be) getting a $500 wage increase at the expense of consumers spending 10 cents more when to go to the restaurant.”

Those workers, in turn, are exactly the ones who (unlike Bush Campaign donors) are more likely to increase their spending habits with an increase in income. This ballot initiative is also crucial as a means of bringing low-income voters to the polls in November, a cause I’ll be setting off on Sunday to work on under the auspices of 2004ward in Tampa.

Seeking majority support for his Gaza disengagement plan within his own cabinet, Ariel Sharon fires two of its farthest right-wing members:

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon fired National Union ministers Avigdor Lieberman and Benny Elon on Friday morning in a bid get the revised disengagement plan passed in the cabinet Sunday. However, Elon said he would do everything he could to avoid accepting the dismissal notice, so that Sharon would not have a majority in favor of the plan. According to Army Radio, Elon was in the Gaza Strip settlement of Netzarim. Speaking on Israel Radio, Elon said Sharon had called him to tell him he was fired, but that the dismissal was not official until he received the letter. In any case, he said, he could not verify the phone call was actually from Sharon. “I will do everything I can so that there won’t be a majority,” Elon said. Lieberman received his dismissal notice around 11 A.M. Friday. Couriers were sent to hand-deliver the dismissal letters to the rightist ministers after they failed to show up at the Prime Minister’s Office at 9 A.M. as summoned. The dismissals take effect 48 hours after Lieberman and Elon receive them.

Bob Herbert on the man I’ve taken to uncharacteristically optimistically calling “Senate Majority Leader Obama”:

He told me he believes strongly that while there are powerful and persistent differences at work in society, there is also “a set of core values that bind us together as Americans.” He said the basic idea of his campaign, which he described as “an experiment,” was to see whether “we could recast politics” in a way that responded to his assumption “that people want to hear an expression of those common values.” “I give the same speech,” he said, “in the inner city, in rural, all-white farming communities, or up in the North Shore in well-to-do suburbs.”

…So far, at least, the voters of Illinois seem to be responding. A Chicago Tribune poll released this week showed Mr. Obama with a huge lead, 52 percent to 30 percent, over his Republican rival, Jack Ryan. Mr. Obama has not ducked the issues. He has opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning, and he delivered a stirring antiwar speech at a rally in October 2002. He supports the war in Afghanistan. He believes the Bush tax cuts went too far, and he makes that clear even in appearances before wealthy audiences. He said: “I tell them, `Look, I think we need to roll back those tax cuts that benefited you. You don’t need them. Let’s talk about what we could do with that money.'”

Looks like the voters of Illinois are overwhelmingly showing the good sense to make this man their senator. Whether the Democratic party will show the good sense to make him their standard-bearer remains to be seen.

This is fun.

Stanley Greenberg on Bush’s problem with what’s ostensibly his base:

The problem for Republicans is rooted in their base. Greenberg’s analysis shows that Rove’s base strategy is in trouble–President Bush is falling roughly 4 points short of his 2000 vote in nearly every group in the Republican loyalist world. If Bush was depending on the white evangelicals, white rural and Deep South voters, and older blue-collar men, he’s got a problem to address. He will have to play an even stronger cultural politics to stay in the game. These changes are illustrated by trends among rural voters, one of the core Republican groups discussed in The Two Americas. These rural voters, referred to as “Country Folk,” represent 21 percent of the electorate. In 2000, 63 percent of Country Folk backed Bush. Yet today, only 58 percent support him and only 51 percent want to continue in Bush’s direction; 47 percent want to go in a “significantly different direction.”

Andrew Sullivan, himself a somewhat-disillusioned (if unrepentant) Bush supporter, conjectures why:

My own hunch is that these voters do not like a massive increase in government spending, a huge jump in public debt, and a post-war policy in Iraq that seemed blindsided by reality. But here’s my other belief, and it’s about Abu Ghraib. The images from that prison shamed America in deep and inchoate ways. Traditional conservative patriots in particular were appalled. The awful truth is that this president presided over one of the most damaging blows to American prestige and self-understanding in recent history. He may not have been directly responsible; but it was on his watch. And he ensured that no one high up in his administration took the fall for the horror. I think traditional patriots were saddened, shocked and horrified by the abuse and, to a lesser extent, the Bush administration’s self-protective response to it. For me, at least, even though I am fully committed to the war, the images from Abu Ghraib are indelibly part of my memories of the Bush administration. I can move on in my head; but my conscience will be forever troubled.