Has the press treated Dean worse than the rest of the Democratic field? The Center for Media and Public Affairs argues convincingly that it has. Dean, meanwhile, is back in the lead in Iowa polling, albeit a statistically insignificant one. I say he’ll win on Monday because his campaign is the one most effectively organizing voters not only to show support but to do the shlepping it takes to caucus.
Author Archives: Josh Eidelson
This issue of In These Times includes compelling pieces by Andy Stern and Gerald McEntee, Presidents of the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, the two largest unions in the AFL-CIO. SEIU and AFSCME, the leading private and public sector unions respectively in the US, surprised many pundits who view them as rivals when they together endorsed Howard Dean a few months back. Stern argues rightly that the Democratic party cannot survive without the labor movement:
At our best, unions are one of the few institutions with progressive values that have millions of members, multimillion dollar budgets and the ability to do grassroots organizing on a large enough scale to counter the power of today’s corporations.
The 2000 presidential election clearly showed the difference unions can make.
* Bush won in nonunion households by 8 points, but lost in union households by 37 points.
* He won nonunion white men by 41 points, but lost union white men by 24 points.
* He won nonunion gun owners by 39 points, but lost union gun owners by 21 points.
* He did 16 points better among nonunion people of color than among union people of color.
So if more workers in Florida, Missouri, Ohio and other states that went narrowly for Bush had been union members, the past three years in this country would have been very different.
He offers three priorities for organized labor: legal defense of the right to organize as a human right, alliance across movements and communities in fighting for just causes, and prioritizing organizing. The latter two are arguably what accounted for the historic success of the CIO before and during the New Deal period, and are central to the New Unity Partnership Stern is spearheading with the Presidents of HERE, UNITE, the Laborers, and the Carpenters. The decline in the first, from the Taft-Hartley Act (which only Dennis Kucinich among the Democratic candidates has promised to repeal) to Reagan’s crackdown on the Air Traffic Controllers, is at the centerpiece of the counter-revolution against the labor movement over the past decades. And Bush, as McEntee argues, has pushed that counter-revolution further:
Indeed, at no other time during my 44 years in labor have I seen members of my union-the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)-nor the House of Labor, more dedicated to getting one person out of office.
And we all know why. Three million jobs lost in three years-the most since the Great Depression: 66 million Americans with inadequate healthcare coverage or no healthcare coverage at all; a median household income that has fallen for three straight years; 3 million Americans who slipped into poverty in 2001; ergonomic rules scrapped; overtime regulations attacked. The list goes on and on…the Bush administration invoked the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act-an action that hadn’t been taken in 25 years and never in a lockout. President Bush’s shameful use of Taft-Hartley sent a message to other employers: When the going gets rough at the bargaining table, the federal government can always step in-to help the boss.
But McEntee’s central argument, which Stern alludes to as well, is that getting a Democratic President into office is not and never has been enough to protect the rights of working people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed a National Labor Relations Act to bring labor into his coalition and into the Democratic establishment becuase it was clear that otherwise the labor movement could have torn his Presidency apart. Real economic change in this country won’t be accomplished by a Clintonite who sees organized labor as a special interest equivalent to big business to be kept at bay with moderate reforms and kept out of corrupting the political process. As McEntee argues:
It is clear that we must defeat George W. Bush. But we must also grow our unions. And whomever the Democratic Party selects as its nominee-AFSCME hopes it is Howard Dean-we must insist that he support a comprehensive social justice agenda, job creation, quality and affordable healthcare for all, the preservation of Medicare and Social Security, civil rights and much more.
And the House of Labor must insist that the next president support an aggressive agenda for worker rights, including real penalties for violators of labor laws, creating a law that will make employers recognize their workers’ desire to form a union, establishing first contract arbitration and giving the National Labor Relations Board the power to enforce laws that
protect workers.
FAIR asks why some rhetorical comparisons to Nazis are acceptable to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and others are not:
Closer to home for Fox News, on the very same day that Gibson, Hannity and O’Reilly were talking about the Hitler/Bush comparison as evidence of the left’s extremism, a column ran in the New York Post that described Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean as a follower of Josef Goebbels, referred to him as “Herr Howie,” accused him of “looking for his Leni Riefenstahl,” called his supporters “the Internet Gestapo” and compared them to “Hitler’s brownshirts.”
The New York Post, like Fox News Channel, is part of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media empire. And this piece wasn’t just put up on the Post’s website as part of a contest–it was written by a right-wing commentator who frequently appears in the Post’s pages, Ralph Peters, and selected for the op-ed page by the Post’s own editors. So it’s more than a little embarrassing that these blatant Nazi comparisons were being made in the Post while the paper’s corporate sibling was denouncing such comparisons as a sign of derangement.
Mark Fiore pays respects to “one team that never rests.”
The Columbia Journalism Review’s new blog assesses how Matt Drudge brazenly misrepresented Wes Clark’s 2002 testimony on Iraq, and how the Republican National Committee, Joe Lieberman, and Associated Press took it “as gospel.” That liberal media, at it again…
SEIU Local 1199 is bringing a class action law-suit against against Yale – New Haven and Bridgeport Hospitals for aggressively dogging low-income sick people for medical bills while failing to inform them of their right to access to the state-funded free-bed fund designed to help ensure access to healthcare for the unemployed and working poor. The YDN headline calls the suit the “latest indicator of ongoing tension.” The source of tension, of course, is Yale – New Haven’s continued refusal to deal justly with the New Haven Community, be it its unionized workers still laboring without a contract, its non-union workers struggling to organize in an environment which spawned multiple NLRB settlements, or the working-class patients it aims to serve.
The leadership of Yale – New Haven Hospital is also the driving force behind the New Haven Savings Bank conversion plot, and the main beneficiary should their get-rich-quick scheme succeed. This week depositors also filed a class action lawsuit against the conversion, which would rob New Haven of its communal bank without a vote by its depositor-owners. As 1199 spokesman Bill Meyerson told the YDN:
The same group of individuals that are denying depositors a vote on what happens to their bank — denying them a right of the profits and surpluses of the bank through this conversion plan — sit on the hospital board of trustees, and are making the decisions about suing patients with inadequate insurance for the so-called crime of being sick and uninsured…it’s about the accountability of a select powerful group who run vital institutions in this community.
Britain’s Defence Secretary now says he’s “extremely sorry” for the death of a British tank commander after his government ordered him to return his body amor due to low supply. Sergeant Roberts’ widow, who yesterday released tapes from her husband protesting the lack of suitable equipment, says an apology is not enough. Looks like the US government isn’t the only one in the “coalition of the willing” with a narrow view of what it means to “support the troops.”
What thousands represented by the Greater New Haven Central Labor Council will receive by mail if the New Haven Savings Bank pushes forward with its scheme to circumvent a depositors’ vote and go public:
NHSB was founded in 1838 to give working people a place to save and borrow. As a mutual savings bank, it is owned by its depositors, and should be a community institution. But under the current leadership, it has lost its way.
Please show that you don’t support institutions that fail to serve the working families whose hard-earned money created the bank’s wealth. Please withdraw your money from NewAlliance Bancshares (the bank’s proposed new name), and encourage your friends and families to do the same.
The grave of Dr. King, who mobilized thousands for social protest against the injustice of the powerful, was blocked from sight while Bush was laying his wreath, obscuring the cameras’ view – but not the vocal cries – of the hundreds exercising their right to protest on the other side of the street. What was the crowd of Blacks and Whites blocked off with? Buses.
Are you an employer hoping to avoid providing more jobs to Americans seeking them or paying overtime benefits to ones who work for you? Not to worry. As if gutting overtime protections wasn’t enough, now the Bush Administration is offering advice to bosses looking to beat the system.
Let’s say you’re the Secretary of Health and Human Services and your scientists’ research concludes that there’s a “national problem” of “pervasive” racial disparities in access to affordable health care with a crippling “personal and societal price.” What do you do? Rewrite the report, apparently. Looks like the Ranking Democrat on the Committee on the House Government Reform Committee and the chairs of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Black Caucus, Asian Pacific Amrican Caucus, and Native American Caucus are less than pleased.
In today’s YDN, Benita Singh recounts a disturbing experience with the State Department:
Last December, I received an internship at the Embassy in San Salvador. Yet in May, four weeks before my internship was to begin, I received phone messages regarding my “foreign-born relatives” and “extensive travel overseas.” When I told my parents about the calls, they were impressed by what they perceived as my friends’ witty pranks. “Foreign-born relatives?” my mother said incredulously, “people from the government don’t talk like that.”
Unfortunately, my mother was wrong. The calls were from an actual State Department investigator who I met outside of Au Bon Pain last May. After asking about my grandparents’ places of birth, the dates they left Pakistan during the Partition, my parents’ U.S. citizenship, and my own “extensive travels,” he told me that my security clearance would be rescinded, and that I should arrange alternate plans for the summer.
Josh Eidelson 