I forgot to mention earlier that the Undergraduate Organizing Committee’s revamped and expanded website is up at www.yaleuoc.com – check it out.
Also, tomorrow marks the National March on New Haven, led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, so wherever (nationally or, for that matter, internationally) you are, that’s where you should be. One of the few things going on on (American) Labor Day empowering workers rather than bosses. Also, quite possibly the largest march this city has ever seen.
Arnold on campaign donations:
Speaking on the “Eric Hogue Show” on radio station KTKZ in Sacramento, the Republican movie actor drew a distinction between contributions from organized labor and Indian gambling tribes — traditionally Democratic givers he called “real big, powerful special interests” — and corporate donors. “Any of those kinds of real big, powerful special interests, if you take money from them, you owe them something,” he said. Any corporate money he takes is irrelevant, Schwarzenegger said, because he wouldn’t be influenced by it.
“There are maybe corporations and companies that maybe the press identifies and says, ‘Well that is a big company, they want certain things,’ ” he said, adding, “I don’t promise anyone anything. There’s no strings attached to anything.”
The simplest of many refutations of this silly and self-serving argument: Unions and tribes, unlike corporations, donate money to only one candidate per race. On a related note, it’s interesting how having worked for non-profit organizations devoted to, say, advancing economic justice or civil liberties is tainting in an election, while having worked for corporations, that, say named the oil tanker Condoleeza Rice after you is not.
A few personal experiences and impressions of the past 72 hours:
The eight Yale retirees (three of whom had to leave for medical reasons, five of whom held out for the full 24 hours) are real heroes whose perseverance is a model to all of us and whose victory presses the movement forward and raises the bar for everyone within it – and within this community. Their victory demonstrates the combination of strategically savvy and symbolically appropriate tactics, solidarity of workers, clergy, students and community, media scrutiny, organizing strength, sheer numbers, and iron will necessary for a victory like hasn’t been seen here since the ’84 strike. The whole episode, from the moment the eight declared that they weren’t leaving David Swenson’s office without a meeting to the moment that – poised to arrest them – Yale announced that it would instead grant their request, also dramatized both the shameful lengths to which Yale will go to perpetuate injustice and the potential and urgency to save Yale University from the Yale Corporation. The three times I was turned away and/or threatened with arrest by Yale police for trying to enter the Investment Building with hoagies for the retirees – who’d been hold up in the office for hours without food or use of the bathroom for several hours at this point – spoke volumes, as did the necessity for New Haven police to take jurisdiction because my University refused to allow food or bathroom facilities to a few elderly employees who showed up after decades of service to the University to confront the man who’s been quietly investing their pension fund in insider trading rather than in decent pension offers for the next generation of Yale workers. It was the sight of fifteen riot police entering the building to drag out five senior citizens, however, that was most deeply infuriating, and Yale’s last-minute realization that to have them do so would shame Yale’s leadership such that it would become more difficult to carry forward its regressive agenda was small comfort. It’s shameful that when light and truth rear their heads at Yale, Yale tries to lock out the light and starve out the truth.
The TV media did a better-than-usual job of covering the sit-in, in part because it was visual and in part because of Rev. Jackson’s presence. The most salient facts – why the retirees went in, that they won, and that Yale was poised to have riot police drag them out – came across on pretty much all the channels. The print media, including the YDN, was unfortunately dismissive of the drama, giving on average a sentence at the end of an article contextualizing the strike about a successful sit-in calling for a meeting but giving no sense of how or why it happened – or that it lasted 24 hours.
As in the last strike, few experiences are more powerful than walking the lines and talking to workers about why they’re out and what they’re fighting for. There are few ways someone in this city of any political perspective (including, perhaps, readers of this site) could be doing with an hour on a weekday morning than talking to the men and women who, yet again, Yale has forced to the point of challenge and personal sacrifice for lux and veritas. I met a fourth grader who’s walking the picket lines for the fourth time because, he explained, of a very greedy man who isn’t very good at sharing his toys.
Jesse Jackson, Emelio Hernandez, David Lee, and others have brought home over the past few days a point that cannot be emphasized enough: the civil rights movement cannot be separated from the movement for economic justice without destroying the integriy of the movement and insulting the dignity of those who compose it. On day after the anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, this point has a particular urgency. It’s strange how much more easily middle class Americans tend to believe that the liberty of bosses is contingent on their right to private property than that the freedom of workers is contingent on their right to wages. A classmate once accused me of disgracing the memory of MLK by wearing a pin with a photo of him at an SEIU 1199 rally (the union he often described as his “favorite union”). When I asked how it was inappropriate to celebrate a photo of an event that actually happened he suggested that MLK must have been caught by coincidence standing in front of an SEIU podium. To say that where a woman can sit on a bus is a moral issue but whether she can raise enough money to feed her family is merely a political question is a convenient but fundamentally unjust contention.
Today was one of the most intense freshman move-in days Yale has seen. The civil disobedience was of a much more serious and more dramatic character than last September, and the picket lines were some of the thickest and loudest I’ve seen here. The UOC gave out several hundred copies of our new pamphlet to freshmen and families, most of whom came off understandably as mostly overwhelmed, confused, anxious, and eager to get more information. Yale forced our table off of Old Campus on the grounds that, in the words of Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg, we were there “to bias freshmen, not to orient them.” Meanwhile, the Office of New Haven and State Affairs had three tables set up trying to get students on board with their agenda of condescension and division by giving our lollipops and tape measures. And the crew team had a thirty foot boat in the middle of campus. Yale police also stopped us from entering dorms to poster; one man told me I wasn’t allowed to enter with the poster I had and when I asked whether I could go in to put up, say, a capella posters, he referred me to his boss, who told me no one was allowed to enter with any kind of poster and then asked to see my posters. When I confronted Dean Brodhead about this he told me that I wasn’t being forced off of Old Campus myself, and so democracy was intact.
As we already knew, Scott Marks is a much better speaker than Jesse Jackson; John Wilhelm is a much better speaker than John Sweeney; Howard Dean is a much better speaker than Joe Lieberman.
Yale’s last minute decision to postpone tomorrow’s freshman invocation, an event which to my knowledge has never been cancelled in the University’s history (including during, say, World War), on the grounds of “the threat posed by our unions,” represents a resounding acknowledgement by Yale that contrary to their publicity, business is not going on as usual here, and the crisis is not under control. John Wilhelm was right to say, of of Yale’s prior claims that hardly anyone was out on strike and there was no disruption, “That’s exactly the problem – you do all the work here, and Yale can’t see you.” He also added that – as Yale’s contract offer makes clear – Yale can’t count. This was abundantly clear when Yale produced statistics purporting to show that strike turnout was low which left out 800 Yale workers – guess where they were? Perhaps one of them was Associate VP for New Haven and State Affairs Mike Morand’s secretary, who despite getting ample exposure to Yale’s side – which Conroy et al claim the union leadership is blinding the workers to – is out on strike.
Eight Yale retirees are sitting in in the investment office demanding to know what Yale’s done with the overfunded pension fund instead of offering decent pensions to Yale workers. Doesn’t look like they’re leaving anytime soon. More on this as it develops.
Yale President Levin recently sent out another letter to the Yale community. There’s little new there – Levin has an old habit of borrowing not only ideas but phrases and even sentences him old speeches (this is part of what made reading his book this summer such a dull experience). Rather than putting together a line-by-line critique, at this point I’ll just suggest places to look for refutations of various parts of his argument:
FHUE on Pensions
YaleInsider on Job security
FHUE on Local 34 wages and benefits in comparative perspective
UOC critique of Culver’s similar March letter
FHUE on their proposal of last Tuesday, on Yale’s response, and on rolling advance threats by Yale
I should add that Levin repeats here the same disingenous, paternalistic message on retroactivity espoused in his explanation at a Master’s Tea in the spring that retroactivity was taken off the table because he doesn’t “believe in rewarding bad behavior”:
In the spring of 2002 the University offered to make salary increases fully retroactive if negotiations were completed by June 30, 2002. We also indicated at the time that if the deadline passed, we would not subsequently offer full retroactivity. Instead, we are offering an immediate bonus of $1,500 when contracts are signed to all workers who were employed when the previous contracts expired in January 2002. More recently hired workers would receive $500.
This offer is consistent with the agreement reached between Yale and the unions in 1996, when all employees received a $500 signing bonus eleven months after the expiration of contracts. We did not offer full retroactivity in 1996 for the same reason that it would be imprudent to do so now: to suggest that there are no consequences to extending contract negotiations far longer than necessary would only encourage protracted bargaining when the next contracts expire.
Never mind that (as Zach has pointed out), taking retroactivity off the table gives Yale an incentive to drag out negotiations, while leaving it on the table gives the unions no incentive to do so. I’d say the remarks above – from the President of the University – demonstrate exactly the attitude towards working people (former Reagan Administration Labor Department Staffer) John Stepp described in his RAI Report – a few months before Yale fired him:
Repeatedly in the assessment interviews, union members expressed their loyalty to the Yale institution. They understand their role as suppliers to, and enablers of, academic life at Yale. Unfortunately, existing management systems, policies and practices have marginalized their services, disincenting and often preventing them from contributing to Yale’s growth and improvement.
“Yale is an elitist institution with disdain for working people.”
“Yale’s ethos of excellence stops at the academic door.”
“I want to scream, ‘This is what I do, ask me! I can help you do it better!'”
“There is very little vertical mixing. Inclusivity, involvement, democracy are foreign to worklife at Yale.”
“Collaborative decision-making, even its mildest form, would be met with an uproar.”
Back in New Haven for the year, and ready to bring some light and some truth to the Yale Corporation. Two and a half days until the strike deadline, and there’s little in the way of signs of movement on Yale’s end. Tomorrow morning at 10:30 will be a press conference calling on Yale to settle or submit to binding arbitration to avert a strike; it’ll be headlined by Connecticut’s own Joe Lieberman. I’ve never wasted many kind words on Joe Lieberman – I think his political record overall demonstrates a lack of courage masked in the rhetoric of bipartisanship and a disturbing conservatism masquerading as “moral clarity.” One of my first posts on this site was a somewhat rambling but earnest criticism of Joe as he prepared to announce his candidacy for President of the United States. One of hte few virtues of a (happily, quite unlikely) Lieberman primary win would be a tremendous organizing spike for the Green party; it would, however, represent the final kiss and death for the Democratic party’s organizing among its base (read: everyone to the left of the DLC), which – as much as some posts here might suggest otherwise – is not something I want to see. All of that said, it should be noted to Lieberman’s credit that while he pursues an agenda in Congress generally deaf to the interests of the American people – including those of us in the Connecticut – he’s frequently lended his symbolic support to much more progressive initiatives here on the local level. Damning by faint praise? Yes (also damning by harsh but deserved criticism). But Lieberman’s support for David Lee’s Yale Corporation candidacy, ECCO’s sustainable housing work, and organized labor in New Haven – while deeply inadequate on the scale of the damage done by his work on the national level – should be noted among the few progessive moves for which he can be credited. Not coincidentally, these symbolic moves at home cost him very little with his neoconservative/ neoliberal sponsors and supporters on the national level.
Not only did Fox News lose its “copyright infringement” lawsuit against Al Franken for subtitling his book “A Fair and Balanced Look at the American Right,” it looks like the presiding Judge gave the suit exactly the reception it deserved:
Calling the motion “wholly without merit, both factually and legally,” the judge, Denny Chin of United States District Court, said that a person would have to be “completely dense” not to realize the cover was a joke, and that trademark protection for the phrase “Fair and Balanced” was unrealistic because the words are so commonly used.
One round of laughter was prompted when Judge Chin asked, “Do you think that the reasonable consumer, seeing the word `lies’ over Mr. O’Reilly’s face would believe Mr. O’Reilly is endorsing this book?” The giggling continued as Dori Ann Hanswirth, a lawyer for Fox, replied, “To me, it’s quite ambiguous as to what the message is here.” She continued, “It does not say `parody’ or `satire.’ ”
Ms. Hanswirth said Fox’s “signature slogan” was also blurred, because people who were not associated with the network, which owns the Fox News Channel, also appear on the cover with Mr. O’Reilly. Judge Chin said, “The president and the vice president are also on the cover. Is someone going to consider that they are affiliated with Fox?” The courtroom broke into laughter again.
Ms. Hanswirth replied, “It’s more blurring, your honor.”
So you can now refer to this site as “Little Wild Fair and Balanced Bouquet” with impunity…
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…
In a stunning subplot to the fiscal crises roiling the states, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley (R) – who for three terms in Congress boasted that he never voted for a tax increase and was elected governor on a promise not to raise taxes – is proposing to raise state taxes by a record $1.2 billion, eight times the largest previous increase and almost twice what is needed to close a $675 million budget deficit.
Seizing Alabama’s crisis as an opportunity to right historic wrongs, he says the state should act to improve schools funded at the nation’s lowest level per child and to lift the tax burden from poor people, who pay income taxes starting at $4,600 a year for a family of four while out-of-state timber companies pay $1.25 an acre in property taxes. The changes would move Alabama from 50th to 44th in total state and local taxes per capita, he says.
“I’m tired of Alabama being first in things that are bad and last in things that are good,” an impassioned Riley told a Rotary Club . . . The born-again Baptist governor is telling voters in this Bible Belt state that their tax system, which imposes an effective rate of 3 percent on the wealthiest Alabamians and 12 percent on the poorest, is “immoral” and needs repair. “When I read the New Testament, there are three things we’re asked to do: That’s love God, love each other and take care of the least among us,” Riley said in his office in the antebellum state Capitol.
The Chairman of the state Republican party, is somewhat disturbed by this Pinochet-like conversion on the way to Damascus – and by Governor Riley’s plan to rely on Black turnout to carry it out. Nice to hear the Biblical imperative of economic justice – rather than the social norms set forth in the literal text – getting some play in the press for a change…
Two weeks ago I suggested that the number and variety of candidates in the California recall made a dramatic case for instant run-off voting. I suggested how IRV might play out in a race between eight of the 100+ gubernatorial candidates (a hundred year old woman from Long Beach, a busty porno star, a cross-dresser in pink, a soul food restaurateur, an angry car salesman, a techno geek, a student too young for whiskers, and a structural engineer worried about earthquakes, as described in a piece in the Times). I was gunning for the cross-dresser, a real radical with a progressive vision for California’s future, who lasted four rounds before being eliminated. My second choice, the unreconstructed liberal Democrat with the soul food restaurant (let’s note for those following along at home that these politics are only my projections onto the candidates based on the aforementioned NYT sentence – wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s chances by endorsing them), made it all the way to the last round, where he lost to the busty pornographic film star – one assumes it was because of the breadth of her policy platform.
Now it turns out someone else – several someone elses actually – had the same idea, and the patience and talent to follow through with it. Go visit the folks at RecallSanity and vote for Governor the way it should be done here here. Yeah – you can rank all the candidate’s from 1st through 135th choice. And who said the internet wasn’t any fun? And yes, the eight described in my little demo are on the list – but since the Times didn’t list their names, your guess is as good as mine as to who’s who. After you try it (or, better yet – there are 135 names to get through), e-mail or call CA Secretary of State Kevin Shelley and show him what democracy looks like. And if you go through with the on-line vote, e-mail me to let me know how you ranked them. Or, Dad, just to say hi…
Speaking of conservative slurs against leftists for California Governor, this Susan Estrich column has achieved a popularity online completely out of proportion with its substance. Estrich’s essential argument: Being a good female politician means being a good woman, being a good woman means being a good mother, and being a good mother means not running for public office if your family doesn’t want you to. Estrich throws a few more classic gender-tinged insults at her for good measure – Huffington is a manipulative siren seducing liberal men; Huffington is a heartless social climber and political chameleon who only cares about using others for power; Huffington is a neglectful mother who cares too much about her career.
Michael Huffington says she is very seductive. I guess. He’s admitted to being bisexual, and she got him to marry her…
But when it costs you your kids, when the kids ask you not to do it, when they move out . . . whew. If you don’t get that right, Jackie Kennedy used to say, what difference does anything else make? You’re only as happy as your least happy kid, one of my friends always says.
I guess that’s not true of Arianna Huffington. She looks pretty happy these days.
There’s a strong argument that with the Democratic party uniting behind Cruz Bustamante – a man who for all his faults is well to the left of Gray Davis and could be the first Latino governor of the nation’s largest state – Arianna’s stated goal to represent a real left alternative in the vacuum left by the refusal of Democrats to run no longer applies, and her promise not to be “a spoiler” in the race rings empty. While I agree with more of Arianna’s politics, were I a California voter my vote at this point would go to Bustamante. But the “madonna/whore” type of attack Estrich makes is simply absurd.
On her new campaign blog, Arianna writes:
Leaving aside her completely inaccurate description of my relationship with my children – based on nothing other than my ex-husband’s one-note rants – it was like reading a piece written in 1903, not 2003. Or even 1973. I guess we haven’t come as long a way, baby as we thought.
I assumed we were long past the argument over whether you could be a woman, a leader, and a mother without having the powers-that-be shaking their heads and pulling out the slime.
My thoughts exactly.
Faced with Bustamante’s edge over libertarian wonder boy Schwarzenegger, Bustamante’s potential to mobilize Latino voters as the first Latino to lead the nation’s largest state, and the nagging problem of Arnold’s coziness with Nazis, some on the right have been grasping for their reverse Kurt Waldheim scandal. What they’ve come up with is Bustamante’s membership as a college student in MEChA, Movimiento Estudantil Chicana/o de Aztlan. And they’ve had the audacity to suggest that membership in the national Latino student organization occupies the same moral space as close friendship with Nazis, and that the media only displays more concern about the latter than about the former because of – you guessed it – liberal bias. This argument rests on an idea that the right has spent significant effort trying to infiltrate into the American consciousness: that the nationalism and solidarity of the oppressed and the minority is morally equivalent to the nationalism and solidarity of the oppressor and the majority. This idea is a keystone of the far (and not so far) right and far left argument that identification with an in-group is always an obstacle to identification with a larger group and never a path towards it. I think I stand with the majority of Americans in maintaining unequivocally and without contradiction both that blind nationalism, uncompromising sectarianism, and subtle racism pose and have historically been dangerous threats to the construction of a human community and that identification with a small group – be it a neighborhood or one of Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” – can serve both the advancement of marginalized groups and the building of human empathy. But an intentionally divisive fringe, with much of the mainstream media in tow, is steadilly working to build in the minds of Americans a conception of the NAACP as the KKK. This, ironically, echoes the apologia of the hate groups themselves: ” has their organizations looking out for their interests, so shouldn’t have one looking out for ours?”
Michelle Malkin, in her attack on MEChA, quotes an early document of the organization from several decades ago, which reads in part:
“We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent. Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggles against the foreigner ‘gabacho’ who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture.”
In other words, Latinos have been oppressed and persecuted by an illegitimate campaign of white violence, and should work together to beat back a continuing assault on the opportunities, communities, and culture of Latinos. And the homeland of Latinos belongs to them, and not to the United States that used war to occupy it.
Malkin says of the piece she quotes:
Substitute “Aryan” for “mestizo” and “white” for “bronze.” Not much difference between the nutty philosophy of Bustamante’s MEChA and Papa Schwarzenegger’s evil Nazi Party.
One difference would be that to be Aryan is to be racially “pure,” whereas to be mestizo is, by definition, to share a mixed heritage. The other major difference would be that the Nazi party engaged in a campaign of systematic genocide against oppressed minorities on the grounds that ensuring the purity of the Aryan nation by eliminating the groups secretly responsible for the decline of Germany was a historical imperative. MEChA engages in political and educational work directed towards improving the role of an oppressed minority within a dominant society that incorporated it through violence. That’s the difference.
Nathan Newman explores the issue here:
So what this statement says is that celebration of race mixing is the same as racial purity. Yes, Orwell rides high in the saddle when the rightwing guns for MEChA.
Well, what about the “bronze nation” nationalism? What a shock– an exploited group talking about its ethnic solidarity. The Irish never engaged in such rhetoric or engaged in political cronyism based on ethnic ties — or if they did, they were all Nazis? The Jews never speak of international solidarity with other Jews in say a small country in the Middle East?
The only difference between MEChA-style ethnic nationalism and most historic white ethnic groups, is that the latinos have a clearer grievance by historical standards. It was racist white nationalism that fueled “Manifest Destiny” to take over the whole southwest in a series of wars. Sorry– the only thing that looks like Nazism is the “white mans burden” conceit of America backed by military invasion that allowed it to attack Mexico and annex its land to the United States.
David Neiwert debunks the associations made between Bustamante and a few real racists who are also connected to MEChA here.
And I don’t think Colorado Luis is off the mark when he suggests that
…in a significant way, white Democrats are the target audience for these attacks. Not necessarily just to make them think twice about voting for Bustamante on the recall, but in the longer term, to promote the fear that when Democrats run minority candidates, they will lose…Meanwhile, Republicans gear up to run their own candidates of color — Condi Rice for California governor is a popular one I’ve seen mentioned. Republicans would love it if Democrats were too afraid to nominate people of color for important jobs, while Republicans go ahead and do it. So it is important for the GOP not only that Bustamante lose, but that white Democrats see race as part of the reason for his defeat. That’s why we’re seeing the MEChA smear instead of, oh, say, an examination of Bustamante’s voting record in the California legislature.
The most important site to check out, however, for anyone interested in making a thoughtful informed evaluation of MEChA, is its own website – funny how none of the conservative bloggers I’ve run across touting this counter-Waldheim discovery have bothered to link there (I would be dangerously remiss if I didn’t also link here to MECha de Yale). As MEChA’s current philosophy reads:
The Chicano and Chicana student movement has been plagued by opportunists that have sought to rechannel the energies of our people and divert us from our struggle for self-determination. The educational plight of Chicana and Chicano students continues to be ignored by insensitive administrators. Overall, Chicano and Chicana junior high, high school and college push-out rates have risen since 1969, forcing many Chicanos and Chicanas to a life of poverty. These factors along with a growing right wing trend in the nation are combing to work greater hardships on Chicanos and Chicanas. New repressive and racist immigration laws are continuously directed at our Gente. The Federal government is campaigning to pacify and assimilate our Gente by labeling us “Hispanic.” The term “Hispanic” seeks to anglicize and deny our indigenous heritage by ignoring our unique socioeconomic and historical aspect of our Gente. These factors have made it necessary for Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán to affirm our philosophy of liberation (i.e. educational, socioeconomic, and political empowerment) for our Chicano and Chicana nation.
Joining with other community-based Chicano and Chicana nationalist organizations, M.E.Ch.A. is committed to ending the cultural tyranny suffered at the hands of institutional and systematic discrimination that holds our Gente captive. We seek an end to oppression and exploitation of the Chicano and Chicana Community
Yesterday, Yale cancelled negotiations at the last minute, supposedly in order to take their time reviewing the proposal from Locals 34 and 35 Tuesday, which significantly decreased wage demands, scaled back the Local 34 job security language, and dropped proposals on a range of auxillary issues, as well as codifying at the table what was already (especially since they offered binding arbitration) abundantly clear: that 34 (Clerical and Technical Workers) and 35 (Food Service and Maintenance Workers) will settle without GESO (Graduate Student Teaching Assistants and Researchers) or 1199 (Yale – New Haven Hospital Workers). This is after the unions reduced their proposed pension modifier by about seven times Yale’s increase in its pension proposal. This morning, after building up suspense, what did Yale’s negotiators bring to the table? A minor job security improvement that would compensate a select group of workers with a week’s severance pay for every year of work and extend by a few months the time that another subset of the Local remains in the hiring pool after being fired. Yale continues to insist, as it has for months, that it doesn’t want a strike. As the 27th draws forward, those words only become more hollow.
Josh Eidelson 