The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a new and damning report on the rise in income inequality, and the multi-tiered nature of economic growth, over the past decades. Meanwhile, Israel’s Center Bureau of Statistics is reporting a troubling increase in economic inequality over the past year. Needless to say, neither comes as a surprise, and neither is good news.
Author Archives: Josh Eidelson
Sam Smith of the Progressive Review offers a “history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies” – consisting entirely of quotes from senior administration officials. It’s haunting.
Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of civilization itself. September 11 signaled the arrival of an entirely different era. We faced perils we had never thought about, perils we had never seen before. For decades, terrorists had waged war against this country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America would wage war against them. It was a struggle between good and it was a struggle between evil.
It was absolutely clear that the number-one threat facing America was from Saddam Hussein. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts that went back a decade. We learned that Iraq had trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and deadly gases. The regime had long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations. Iraq and Al Qaeda had discussed safe-haven opportunities in Iraq…
We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. And we found more weapons as time went on. I never believed that we’d just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. But for those who said we hadn’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they were wrong, we found them. We knew where they were.
Speaking of people who get it, this English Professor, calling the YDN on failing to identify by name the dining hall worker in its front-page photo:
Would a Yale Daily News photo of an instructor in mid-lecture be identified only as “a Yale professor”? That young woman is not a piece of furniture; she is a member of the Davenport community.
A while back I linked to a brilliant piece by Michael Gecan about power and class at Yale. As he wrote:
Both parties are led by women and men who believe it’s their God-given right to make more messes—from the Yale Commons, to blighted cities, to White House sleeping arrangements, to failed health reform, to bankrupt companies, to gutted industries, to post-war Iraq. They count on a wide and appreciative following in the media to report their antics and a silent servant class to clean up the wreckage.
The Nation gets it, in a way that, say, the YDN fundamentally doesn’t:
How did the Yale workers win? Through militant picket lines and community support. The strike began with six retirees engaging in a twenty-nine-hour sit-in in the investment office. Thousands of union workers came to the region to protest Yale. Hundreds of graduate student teachers and faculty honored the picket lines and moved their classes off campus. Negotiations were held in the offices of the New Haven mayor. The city began to charge Yale for the overtime of police officers who were spending weekends and evenings arresting demonstrators. Yale, after all, is a corporation that does not pay any taxes, is run by a board of trustees that includes millionaire venture capitalists and the president of Pepsico, and that will pay its own president (Richard Levin) a pension of $42,000 a month. Shipping in hundreds of strikebreakers–which the university was beginning to do as the strike went on–did not go over well in the impoverished city of New Haven.
Most fundamentally, though, the unions won because they have cultivated a deep culture of organizing and solidarity and a willingness to take risks and challenge power. The victory at Yale was only possible because of countless individuals who gained the courage, through the union, to defy powerful authorities to seek greater security and freedom in their own lives. Today it is hard–even for unions and progressive activists–to escape the market mantra telling us we can’t ever win anything corporations don’t give us out of the goodness of their hearts. But in this broader context of political defeat, the victory of a few thousand workers at Yale should remind us all that through unity and the bravery that comes from it, we still can win.
Today the ACLU announced a major lawsuit against secret service limitations on protests at Bush appearances. I saw this in person with the PA ACLU when Bush came to town this summer. The most aggregious and obvious violation is the pattern of allowing pro-Bush activists closer to Bush than anti-Bush activists. This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with imagery. At risk of sounding subversive, I have to wonder, kind reader, if you were trying to shoot the President, which crowd would you be trying to infiltrate?
ZKSW shares the latest news on and a succinct and and useful contextualization of the ongoing Yale – New Haven Hospital scandal. As SEIU’s ad in the Times said, “There’s a sickness at Yale – New Haven Hospital – and it’s spreading.”
A surreal moment, courtesy of the Badger-Herald:
For Yale sophomore Josh Eidelson, who has worked with the Undergraduate Organization Committees to educate fellow students about the strikes, the new contracts represent progress on various fronts, something the campus community is gladly accepting.
“Decent contracts are vital to create a university community I want to live in. It’s safe to say there is a tremendous sense of relief on both sides” he said. “Everybody that I know is glad to have a sense of peace in the immediate sense.”
Nonetheless, Eidelson feels that for labor relations to improve, the New Haven community, administrators and union members must all take progressive steps together.
Although he feels Local 34 and 35 could have been handed more benefits, he still sees the contracts as “a positive show of greater faith in a foundation of future progress.”
Conroy also sees the settlements in a similar light.
And here you thought Yale’s PR team and I couldn’t see eye to eye on anything…
One of the benefits of the constant Yale strike coverage on this site, no doubt, has been the lack of discussion of (or fictional narratives built around) the California Recall. It is worth noting, however, that Darell Issa, whose sowed the recall with his personal cash, is now reaping what he’s afraid will be a trainwreck. Now he’s urging Californians to vote against – yes, against – the recall unless Schwarzenegger or McClintock follows Issa and Uberoth and drops out to leave a single major Republican contender. Whether McClintock would still consider it is an open question; whether the ideological stalwarts (I use that phrase generally approvingly) planning to vote for him and draw votes away from Arnold with the Governorship of the largest state at stake would vote for the socially-liberal Arnold even if McClintock took himself out of the race is another.
Joshua Micah Marshall assesses how one Republican lied about another Republican and the story became evidence of the mendacity of a Democrat. Nothing new here, I guess.
Alyssa Rosenberg has a great piece in today’s YDN sharing her experience of the support she and her coalition, Project Orange, received from Ward One Alderman Ben Healey and her critique of his challenger, who’s running against him in the general election as an independant. Alyssa demonstrates what Ben attested to in last Tuesday’s debate: that Ben motivates and mobilizes students in our ward not through mass e-mail or newsletters – as Dan is saying he should – but by working with and empowering students on the grassroots level to fight for change in the city which is our home.
A few other moments which stood out from the debate:
Dan maintained, at various points, that
1. Ben imposes needs on students rather than finding out what they want, whereas Dan’s agenda is based on what’s really important to students.
2. Students need Tweed – New Haven Airport to get jet service.
3. If you asked most students “what Tweed – New Haven airport was, they wouldn’t have any idea.”
It seems to me only any two of these assertions, logically, can be true.
Dan tried to demonstrate his devotion to poor kids in New Haven by discussing his work as a gym teacher in one of their schools and joked that “They gave me a run for my money – literally and figuratively.” Many of Dan’s supporters in the room laughed. I guess those of us supporting Ben didn’t get it.
Dan said the New Havener he most looks forward to working with should he be elected is Yale’s own Vice President Bruce Alexander, and tried to smear Ben based on a derrogatory comment made by a supporter of Ben’s, who isn’t in his ward and doesn’t work on his campaign, on his website (not mine) criticizing Alexander. Ben sensibly replied that he doesn’t take responsibility for every comment on a website of someone who supports him, and challenged Dan to explain an e-mail sent to Dan’s supporters by his campaign manager which read, in part:
the incumbent guy is a tool of the unions, he gets a ton of money from them, and he consistently votes against yale on everything. he thinks that the workers should get whatever they want, and he is a HUGE supporter of the strike…
the problem is this: because he is a union supporter, we’re afraid he’s going to have a bunch of strikers at the debate tomorrow and that they will drown out Dan and generally be jerks…
i’m just trying to ensure that it doesn’t turn into a big picket inside. Second floor, Slifka, bring your friends/suitmates, go yale!
Besides the misunderstanding of the way Yale’s union work (the debate was held in a neutral, non-struck space) and classist assumptions behind them, and the unwarranted and nasty attack on Ben’s integrity, the e-mail includes a flat lie: that Ben’s received money from organized labor. When asked to respond, Kruger suggested that he had no responsibility for the words or actions of his Campaign Manager.
As has been noted, Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs didn’t do well on primary day. It has a lot invested, it would seem, in the November election, which pits an incumbent who’s a strong ally of the growing movement throughout this city for just partnership between Yale and New Haven against a challenger who argues that rather than paying taxes on its for-profit properties, Yale should simply make donations to support projects New Haven suggests to it that Yale approves of. Should be an interesting race.
Tonight marks a huge Ecumenical Mass in LA because the first of the buses of the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides heads out. Buses will leave from ten cities over the next week calling for a path to citizenship, family reunification, and civil and workplace rights. Hundreds of thousands of people will converge in New York on October 4 to meet them there – find the nearest contact here.
Today marked my first time back in Yale’s dining halls this semester. It was a triumphant, emotional experience. I shared hugs with several of the workers in my residential college, and I wasn’t the only one. And the food, despite Aramark’s cut backs since they took over, is real, real good. Anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
I won’t rant here about the settlement, since I already linked a (long) piece I wrote on it today. I’ll just write here that a settlement which doubles pensions and protects job security (and, in one of many less-noted improvements, undoes Yale’s silly and elitist policy of only granting tuition assistance for four-year universities) is a win for everybody here, a tremendous victory won by a tremendous movement despite tremendous opposition. And there’s much, much more ahead.
Josh Eidelson 