Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

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A couple thoughts about the State of the Union Address:

Glad to see so many Democrats clapping when Bush announced that the PATRIOT Act was set to expire next year and before he had called for it to be renewed. Nice to see glimmers of resistance from the Dems – maybe this time they’ll vote against the damn thing.

Have to say I’m not quite sure what Bush meant by “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities” – but I guess that’s the idea. Were the Iraqis hosting academic conferences about WMD?

If Bush believes that alluding to a constitutional marriage denying homosexual couples the right to marriage without explicitly calling for it with mollify both the “religious right” and the “soccer moms,” he’s got another think coming.

Giving gay couples the same legal protections as heterosexual ones? Not, contrary to conservative dogma, “special rights.” Giving religious groups a free pass to ignore anti-discrimination law and still receive federal funding on account of being religious? There are your special rights.

Howard Dean’s primal scream Monday night I think we can agree didn’t make him new friends. But how many people actually found the Daschle-Pelosi fireside chat to be a more effective response to a speech that was a paen to the radical right?

The Center for American Progress offers some line-by-line parshanut (commentary).

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Thanks go to Zach for pointing me to SEIU President Andy Stern’s new blog. On last night’s State of the Union Address, Stern writes:

I like the view from his house. I always preferred ET to reality TV…

I just really wish it was true for our under-staffed nurses taking care of our kids in the hospitals; the underpaid nursing home workers taking care of our parents; the document-seeking, hard working, tax paying immigrant janitors; our kids in budget-strapped overcrowded schools; our child welfare workers in revenue-drained states; our homecare workers caring for the disabled being Terminatored in California.

Our members view is of a country that, since the President’s election, has lost more jobs than during any president’s term since Herbert Hoover. All through the Midwest, they see factories shuttered, Wal-Mart forcing out small business, goods pouring in from China, and now learn those new-age jobs in software and telecommunications, engineering and architecture (3 million more) are on their way to India.

Every new collective bargaining agreement is about health care. They watch the strike of Safeway workers in LA for their health care and wages and wonder when they are next. They know some of the 43 million Americans without health care, and face rising health care costs that are up nearly 40 percent in just the past two years, while the President sat idly by.

Their state and local taxes are up, while their federal taxes are going to those who need it least. Those hard-earned taxes dollars are being spent like druken sailors for tax breaks for wealthy people, and big corporations and their kids are going to be left with a $500 billion a year debt on their parents’ credit cards.

They wonder why are we going to spend more money to rebuild Iraq or go to Mars than to rebuild New York City or our health care system.

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Interesting, over at The (“Dean is more dangerous Bush”) New Republic, Jonathan Cohn, who endorsed Dean, worries that last night’s results spell doom for him, while Jonathan Chait, who operates a blog called “Diary of a Dean-o-Phobe,” worries that they will help Dean to last longer. Guess it’s a gloomy day for Jonathans over there.

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The AFL-CIO is stepping in and stepping up the local and national campaign to win victory for locked-out California supermarket workers:

The plan is to pressure the supermarket companies by hounding executives and directors with phone calls and visits, staging demonstrations across the country – including a pray-in outside the Northern California home of the chief executive of Safeway Inc. – and persuading major grocery-company shareholders, such as pension funds, to take stands in the union’s favor.

Let’s hope so.

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Gephardt just wrote to his supporters:

I will continue to work for universal healthcare, pension reform, more teachers in the classroom, energy independence from Persian Gulf oil, and a trade policy that doesn’t sacrifice American jobs in pursuit of trade with countries that have no respect for the environment, or the living conditions of their own people.

Let’s hope so.

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The Hartford Courant slams Yale – New Haven Hospital:

Yale-New Haven contends it is obliged to collect unpaid bills. That’s true. It’s also undoubtedly true, as the hospital maintains, that some people with means shirk their obligations.

But that’s no reason for a prestigious hospital with millions of dollars set aside for poor patients to aggressively pursue them as if they were criminals.

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Yale Ph.D. candidate Dorian Worren distills some of the lessons of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride and the triumphs of labor and community organizing in New Haven for the project of building a revitalized and progressive labor movement:

The multiple social, political and communal networks in which workers are embedded on the shop floor and outside the workplace are all shaped by race, gender and nationality, and are critical resources that unions can tap. For example, successful HERE locals in Chicago (Local 1) and New Haven, Connecticut (Yale Unions), have used their members’ and leaders’ social networks—including churches and community organizations—to enhance their struggles and build enduring alliances…It’s one thing for a union president to approach a minister to ask for help; it’s quite another when a member or members of a union approach their own minister and congregation and ask for help in their fight for justice. By recognizing the multiple identities of their memberships during an organizing campaign, unions can expand their struggles from being a fight between the union and employer to being a fight between an entire community and an employer.

…Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. illustrated the interconnections between racial and economic injustices in a 1961 speech to the AFL-CIO, “…the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.”

…Unions should not mimic corporate America’s dumbed-down “sensitivity trainings” and adopt a superficial celebration of “differences.” Instead, there are three lessons we can draw when unions take seriously the maxim “an injury to one is an injury to all”.

First, and most important, recognizing the multiple identities of workers—and the varied and overlapping injustices the face as a result—brings valuable and often underused resources to a union.

Second, when the tough issues of racism, nativism or sexism are addressed internally and head-on, it can increase strength and solidarity. Doing so allows unions to put these issues on the table before the boss uses them as ways to divide and conquer.

And third, the most innovative and successful models of unionism, especially during periods of resurgence and rejuvenation, historically involved the active recruitment of previously excluded workers and the infusion of these workers’ other solidarities—race, ethnicity, gender, religion and even neighborhood—into the movement.

The labor movement at its best has been connected to an organized left that has had a broader vision of democratic citizenship and social justice. From the abolitionist, socialist, women’s, and civil rights movements, to current campaigns for global justice and immigrant rights, the labor movement has been only as strong as the broader left, and the left has only been as strong as a powerful labor movement.\