Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

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Michael Gecan of the IAF has a searing, sobering piece in the latest Village Voice on the Democratic and Republican elites and the Americans left behind:

They are angry, and they are driven. They are profoundly and passionately clear on what and whom they are against. They intend to vanquish the upstart elite, the progressive establishment. It’s not Osama, Dead or Alive. It’s Dean, Dead or Alive. It’s Clinton, Dead or Alive. They have only one major problem: They don’t know what in the world—in the bigger, broader world where most moderate Americans live and work, play and pray, and try to raise their kids—they are for. Their relationship with their base is better than the Democrats’, but still terribly thin. It is not rooted in the interests of families struggling to survive in a service economy, with few or no benefits, in schools that continue to stumble and decline. It is not based on a foundation of respect for the working American, the struggling American, the vast majority of Americans who lack wealth. Not at all. Like the upstart elite, the new Republicans could care less about these matters. No, their newfound commitment to building a base is an instrument and offshoot of their tribal war with the progressive left. It is as clinical and cynical as the attitudes of some of the anti-war student leaders of the ’60s.

The Democrats lack this depth of passion and focused clarity. They aren’t as heated or as hardworking as the Republicans. They still sip sparkling water and make smug little jokes about Bush’s malaprops. They keep telling themselves how much smarter and slicker they are than the boobs on the right and the bohunks in the middle. They still think that getting straight A’s and appearing on television and having famous friends will dazzle the hoi polloi.

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.

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Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore’s absurd and self-interested defense of the imposition of (21 tons of) the ten commandments on the state’s judicial system was an offense against the best values of this nation. But this poem, which he delivered recently before thousands, is an offense against the English language:

While truth and law were founded on the God of all Creation,
Man now, through law, denies the truth and calls it “separation.”
No longer does man see a need for God when he’s in full control,
For the only truth self-evident is in the latest poll.
But with man as his own master we fail to count the cost,
Our precious freedoms vanish and our liberty is lost.
Children are told they can’t pray and they teach them evolution,
When will they learn the fear of God is the only true solution?
Our schools have become the battleground while all across the land,
Christians shrug their shoulders—afraid to take a stand.

Fortunately, his fellow Justices demonstrated in a ruling today a stronger grip on the law:

Writing that they are “bound by solemn oath to follow the law, whether they agree or disagree with it,” the justices said in a signed statement that the State Supreme Court must abide by a federal court order mandating the removal of the 5,280-pound monument of the Ten Commandments that Justice Moore had installed one night in 2001.

A federal judge had ordered Justice Moore to have the monument removed by midnight last night, saying the granite block, known as Roy’s Rock, violated the separation of church and state.

The associate justices, who acted before Justice Moore arrived for work this morning, ordered their building’s manager to erect a partition to screen the monument from public view in the lobby, which was done. But when Justice Moore arrived, according to people who have been in contact with him today, he ordered the manager to take it down and threatened to jail the other justices.

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From a piece I had published this month in the Irish Ledger and the Democratic Left on the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides:

This fall, workers, families, clergy, and men and women from throughout the greater Philadelphia area will have the opportunity to participate in a historic mobilization for social justice – the immigrant worker freedom rides, which will bring together hundreds of thousands from around the country to defend immigrant rights from fearful and opportunistic politicians and reclaim the historic moment as one for progress and equality. Starting in late September, buses leaving from ten cities – Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston,
Minneapolis, Chicago, Miami, and Boston – will travel across the country to converge in Washington, DC on October 2 to lobby, and in New York, NY on October 4 to rally for equal rights and reclaim the American dream. The rides have four broad policy priorities: a path to legalization and citizenship, family reunification, immigrants’ rights
at work, and civil rights and civil liberties for all. On the way to the capitol, buses will stop at sites dramatizing our national struggle: cemeteries with unmarked graves for men and women who died crossing the border; factories where management has tried to use immigration status to divide workers and keep them from organizing;
sites where civil rights freedom riders of the 1960’s were gunned down while fighting for civil rights.

Over the past few months, a Philadelphia steering committee has begun planning our city’s role in this incredible project and historic opportunity. Our Philadelphia mobilization will be integral to the national mobilization, and will call attention to the American dream born in our city, to the immigrant legacy of our neighborhoods, and to
the modern struggle of immigrant workers throughout our state. We’re planning a powerful event for September 30, when freedom riders from Boston will be coming through our city, and we’ve already confirmed Mayor Street for the day. We’ll also be sending Philadelphians on buses to lobby in the capital on Thursday October 2, and many more for a several hundred thousand person rally in Flushing Meadow Park in Queens, New York on Saturday the 4th. These freedom rides, modeled on the freedom rides of the 1960’s, present us with a historical opportunity to change national policy and shift the national consensus. On the national level, these rides are the most dramatic
evidence of the historic change in AFL-CIO policy on immigration, from decades of seeing immigrant workers as a threat to jobs to a modern realization that immigrant workers are the natural allies of all working Americans, and that immigration status remains a powerful wedge in the hands of employers only as long as workers allow themselves to be divided. The rides are sponsored by a broad coalition which includes the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, and the National Interfaith Committee for Interfaith Justice. We’re eager
for you to participate, both by getting involved in planning with us and by showing up this fall to take part in making history.

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Zach reports on the demonstration today by Locals 34 and 35 in response to Yale’s “signing bonus” sham:

Today at noon, hundreds ( Jay Driskell and i estimated somewhere between 300 and 500) of workers in Local 35 and Local 34 gathered in front of woodbridge hall to present president levin with invoices for the retro pay Yale’s stealing from them. The invoices are stamped “past due” and read “Please immediately remit payment of my retroactive salary increase in the amount of $[insert amount here]. This amount represents payment due to me for my loyal, dedicated service to yale… Your offer of $1500 is unnacceptable and insufficient to cover the services rendered. Failure to remit full payment as due will result in further serious action. Levin didn’t have enough respect for the workers – or evidently didn’t feel that the crisis was serious enough – to warrant coming out and talking to people. Instead, he made Nina Glickson stand outside the front steps and collect the invoices of several hundred workers…In the next few hours hundreds more invoices will be faxed in. Negotiations resume at 3pm.

The Yale Daily News (hereafter YDN) is back in business with a, in all fairness, relatively balanced piece on negotiations and the upcoming strike. As is often the case, the biggest fault is in the information that’s missing – this time, first, that while negotiations didn’t restart until August 12, the unions have been calling for intensive negotiations to begin for months; second, that while Yale tripled it’s “signing bonus,” that bonus still represents between 0 and 40%, depending on the worker, of the retroactive pay that Yale removed from the table. Fortunately, the men and women who work at Yale know better than to go by what they read in the YDN. The rest of us in the Yale community should all as well.

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To those of you sent here when you googled…

aclu supports internment camps
Sorry, but no. Zinn argues that in the 50s the ACLU “withered” and muffled its criticism of McCarthyism to remain politically viable – heavy charges that I don’t have the background to support or refute. But the ACLU was one of the few groups to visibly and stridently condemn the Japanese interment – raising the contemporary ire of Ann Coulter, who argues that it’s hypocritical for a left organization to support J. Edgar Hoover’s left stances (opposition to internment) and not his right ones (opposition to privacy and democratic oversight). I should apologize for already having given her argument too much ink back in July when she wrote it – as well as her equally silly one that since Democratic FDR shamefully caved to conservative animus towards Japanese-Americans in supporting internment, Conservative Republicans must be the real defenders of civil liberties. For anyone who still believes Coulter that FDR and the ACLU (and, for that matter, everyone from Bill Clinton to Cynthia McKinney) get their marching orders from the same playbook (care of Karl Marx), I should perhaps also clarify that the ACLU also opposes HOLC red-lining and the racial segregation of blood donations.

Kissinger the war crimminal

That about says it right there. That, and lemme know if you want to take a trip with me to look through his archives after his death for some tidbits about the full depravity of the man.

IBEW chatroom

Is there one? Hot. Sign me up.

Ed Rendell hoagie photo

Populism is not about eating a hoagie better than John Kerry (although I don’t know who eats a hoagie worse than John Kerry). Populism is about wanting to see the Democratic Leadership Council go the way of the AFL-CIO’s CIA-tool the AIFLD. Populism is most certainly not having the DLC choose Philadelphia for its annual celebration of prostitution to big business and scorn towards the American people to celebrate you as the kind of Democratic candidate that will reassure the bosses that they have nothing to worry about from the Democrats. Oh yeah – and the Philly soft pretzel is the real icon, not the hoagie or the cheesesteak.

Matt Naclerio

Should run for Mayor of New Haven.

Katie Krauss

Should’ve gone for Ari Fleischer’s job while it was still open.

Schwarzengger and antisemitism

The most thorough and judicious article-length discussion of Schwarzenegger’s relationship with Kurt Waldheim I’d say is Timothy Noah’s here. Schwarzenegger’s refusal to condemn a member of the Wehrmacht “honor list” for the Kozara massacre – or even his actions – raises troubling questions about his political courage and his sense of justice. Although on the question of how he’d govern the state of California, this is more disturbing.

auth cartoon philadelphia inquirer israel, auth antisemitism, etc.

I think I spilled enough (virtual) ink on this here. Josh Cherniss’ thoughts to which I was responding (a response to my original piece here), are here. If he posts a response to mine, it’ll be posted here – I suspect we’ve both exhausted the topic for now however. If you’re one of the several who entered one of the searches above and you want to talk more about it, lemme know.

Al Franken and Arianna Huffington’s political show in bed

It’s been too long. Bring it back. Maybe we could get Arianna Huffington, Cruz Bustamante, Peter Camoje, Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Simon, and Gary Coleman in bed together on TV – who says the American people don’t have the patience for substantive political coverage?

verizon cwa strike

Read about smart tactics, support from Senators, and what you can do to help.

arianna huffington verizon

Know something I don’t?

Lynda-Obst Bitch

Now I don’t know the woman personally, but that’s just not nice.

Interfaith religious symbol

I have been known on occasion to refer to James Baldwin as God…But I have to say Jim Lawson really wowed me this weekend. So he may be my nominee. Unless you found this site thinking it was an interfaith religious symbol, in which case sorry to disappoint…

And for all of you who came here searching for

wild bouquet

If you’re looking for a gift, get something here. Trust me – it’ll make him/her swoon. Or buy me something and make me swoon…

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Greg Palast’s column on the Blackout is a must-read – as is his book, which, ironically, I finished while trapped on a train for 11 hours outside of New Rochelle during the blackout. A selection:

Is tonight’s black-out a surprise? Heck, no, not to us in the field who’ve watched Bush’s buddies flick the switches across the globe. In Brazil, Houston Industries seized ownership of Rio de Janeiro’s electric company. The Texans (aided by their French partners) fired workers, raised prices, cut maintenance expenditures and, CLICK! the juice went out so often the locals now call it, “Rio Dark.”

So too the free-market cowboys of Niagara Mohawk raised prices, slashed staff, cut maintenance and CLICK! — New York joins Brazil in the Dark Ages.

Californians have found the solution to the deregulation disaster: re-call the only governor in the nation with the cojones to stand up to the electricity price fixers. And unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gov. Gray Davis stood alone against the bad guys without using a body double. Davis called Reliant Corp of Houston a pack of “pirates” –and now he’ll walk the plank for daring to stand up to the Texas marauders.

So where’s the President? Just before he landed on the deck of the Abe Lincoln, the White House was so concerned about our brave troops facing the foe that they used the cover of war for a new push in Congress for yet more electricity deregulation. This has a certain logic: there’s no sense defeating Iraq if a hostile regime remains in California.

Sitting in the dark, as my laptop battery runs low, I don’t know if the truth about deregulation will ever see the light –until we change the dim bulb in the White House.

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Back from an amazing couple days hearing from and meeting with the Reverend Jim Lawson – and others involved in Yale’s intensifying labor fight – in New Haven. As Lawson preached, “President Levin, it’s time to grow up and become a human being.” Meanwhile, Yale is touting it’s new contract offer, two major highlights of which are offers to partially undo decisions to worsen their proposals since the beginning of negotiations – in other words, when Helaine Klasky says that Yale has “improved our already generous offer in the hopes that this will be the foundation for a settlement,” she must mean that Yale’s new “generous offer” is an improvement on its “already generous offer” insofar as it is more like Yale’s original “generous offer” than Yale’s recent “already generous offer.” Confusing? By design more than by accident I think. The unions have been calling from the beginning for a 4-year contract, and Yale was calling for a 6-year contract until March, when Levin, after the week-long strike, decided that the best compromise between 4 year and 6 years would be 10 years (must be Yale math…). Yale’s new-and-improved offer as of this week? An 8 year contract. In a similar vein, Yale came into negotiations nearly two years ago with a commitment to retroactive pay – annual raises for the period during which the contract was expired and was being renegotiated – after signing. After a year, Yale revoked its agreement to retroactive pay. When confronted about that decision by students, President Levin responded in top form that he doesn’t “believe in rewarding bad behavior.” Yale’s new and improved offer? A “signing bonus” that would represent the equivalent of at most 40% of retroactivity for some workers, and much less for others. The last major pieces of Yale’s new offer – and the only ones that represents an improvement over Yale’s paltry offer of nearly two years back – were a slight increase in its second year wage proposal and an increase in its pension offer, which the unions matched in their counter-proposal by reducing their proposed pension multiplier from 2.1 to 1.95%, a decrease in their pension offer seven times the increase in Yale’s. These three components, together, represent the additional $9 million which Yale announced in June it had budgeted for the contracts and was going to be offering – at that time, Yale’s negotiators also said that as far as they were concerned, that was the sum for the contracts and they weren’t prepared to negotiate beyond there. FHUE has a more extensive brekdown here. It’s good to see Yale making movement at the table. But if the administration wants to avert a strike ten days from now, they have much more work ahead of them – and not in the form of glossy ads or Orwellian pickets.

Thanks to YaleInsider for the intrepid blogging, and for the new link to this “Little Wild Fair and Balanced Bouquet” on the revamped site.

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From the Times:

Traffic jams grew to dozens of miles long, stranding buses and even emergency vehicles, as police officers and platoons of well-meaning citizens tried to control the streets with hand-lettered stop-and-go signs. Hundreds of subway and commuter trains were paralyzed, some in tunnels, including a Long Island Rail Road train that was trapped beneath the East River with no air-conditioning for almost two hours…Amtrak service rolled to a halt along almost the entire Northeast corridor, stranding as many as 18,000 travelers, according to Clifford Black, a spokesman, who added that trains from Washington and other parts south could go no farther north than Newark.

Eleven hours on the train from Philadelphia to New Haven yesterday. Oy.

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From the Times:

A federal appeals court has upheld Alaska’s curbs on soft-money political donations to candidates for state office, holding that the State Legislature had a right to enact the restrictions in 1996 to restore the public’s faith in government.

The 3-to-0 ruling on Tuesday by a panel of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, sitting in Seattle, overturned a federal district court that had found the curbs unconstitutional. The latest ruling comes as the United States Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments on Sept. 8 on the McCain-Feingold law barring political parties from raising soft money for federal candidates.

Glad to see this court reject the twisted conception of political bribery as protected speech. I once had a classmate suggest to me that a laissez-faire campaign finance system was democratic because the winner was the candidate who the most people wanted in office – this echoes Ari Fleischer’s take on Bush’s fundraising a few months back. Someone should remind the Bush administration that we already have – in theory – a system for figuring out whom the most people would like to see elected: the vote. And ideally, everyone gets the same number of those. There are some troubling provisions in McCain-Feingold regulating speech (i.e., not money) in the period before elections, deserving of critical review, but I’m yet to understand on what grounds my donating money to every viable candidate in understood exchange for largesse in office is protected symbolic speech but my paying money to a prostitute for sex or a dealer for drugs is not. That said, McCain-Feingold remains a largely ineffective (and sometimes – as in the case of the doubled individual contribution limit – dangerously counterproductive) stab at the problem. Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres suggest one alternative here.

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Negotiators from Yale and from HERE Locals 34 and 35 came back to the table again yesterday, over a week after the unions had been hoping Yale would be willing to restart negotiations. As the unions report, Yale showed little change of heart:

Negotiations with Yale resumed Tuesday afternoon at the Omni Hotel. Despite headlines about Yale’s “new faces” at the bargaining table (after the recent departure of several key administrators), there were no new faces to be seen on Yale’s team. Neither were there any major new proposals from Yale. This was not unexpected for our first session back at the bargaining table but, on behalf of our negotiating committees, Local 35 President Bob Proto made our intentions clear: we are ready to meet all day, every day of the week and all night, if necessary to achieve a fair contract. To make that work, however, Yale must be prepared to engage in the real give-and-take of actual negotiation and compromise on wages, pensions, job security and training and advancement.

While Yale had no serious new proposals for us yesterday, Chief Negotiator Brian Tunney reiterated his assertion that Yale is “prepared to move on pensions, wages and retroactivity.” While that may sound promising, we have heard those words too often before without any actual results. As Local 34 President Laura Smith responded, “It’s time to stop preparing to move and start actually moving.”

…Despite the reference to retroactivity, Tunney was quick to say that what he meant by retroactivity was actually a discussion of a “signing bonus”–a far cry from the full retroactivity that Yale should agree to after we accepted their first-year wage proposal. Tunney also confirmed that when the newly-renovated Sprague Hall reopens next week, the building will be cleaned and serviced by low-wage subcontracted workers, not by Local 35…Yale’s one “new proposal” was a suggestion that Local 34 workers who are laid off due to subcontracting to a Yale affiliate (like YNHH) be given an “extra” three months in the Interim Employment Pool–hardly reassuring in light of the enormous potential, particularly in the Medical Area, for shifting University to Hospital work…

As the AP reports:

Yale spokesman Tom Conroy said it is impossible to know whether a deal would be reached. “We’re always hopeful, but certainly we’re far apart and they have some unrealistic proposals,” Conroy said.

Union spokeswoman Deborah Chernoff said the unions are waiting for Yale to come forward with new proposals for wages and pensions. “We’re prepared to meet every day. We’re prepared to meet all day, and we’re prepared to meet on the weekends, but we have to have something to talk about,” she said.

Meanwhile, as the Register reports, Mayor DeStefano is also keen to the irony of Bruce Alexander serving, in the wake of Bob Culver’s departure, as Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs and for Finance and Administration at once:

DeStefano said Alexander “potentially is going to be serving the community agenda at the same time they are presiding over the biggest walkout and longest walkout of Yale workers in over a decade.” He feels this presents an “inherent conflict. Why run the risk of confusing the agendas?”

Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky responded that the assignment is a temporary one for Alexander who was named to the post because “Bruce is the officer with business and financial expertise.”

As YaleInsider observes, “If there were ever any doubt about the ultimate reason for Yale’s VP position for community relations, created in the wake of the 1996 strike, let that doubt be dispelled.”

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In hopes of stirring up controversy by inspiring a Fox News lawsuit, reader(s) of this site are encouraged to refer to it as “Little Wild Fair and Balanced Bouquet” from here on out. Many apologies to Leonard Cohen – none to Rupert Murdoch.

(Inspired by Matthew Yglesias: A Fair and Balanced Weblog)

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Thom Hartmann has an interesting piece on the potential and prospects for talk radio on the left, and the role that organized labor can play in such projects:

KKBJ-AM Talk Radio 1360 discovered the union-owned network’s liberal programming on a stormy night back in June when one of the Minnesota talk station’s satellite receivers died. To avoid dead air, the station flipped to the program stream coming down on a second satellite receiver, tuned in to i.e. America Radio Network’s 9 pm-midnight host, Mike Malloy. Malloy was in fine form, ranting about the “Bush crime family.”

The next day, KKBJ’s Chuck Sebastian got some feedback from listeners who had just heard their first bit of liberal programming on a station that otherwise carries mostly right-wingers. “One guy said that it was a breath of fresh air to finally get somebody who knows what he’s talking about,” Sebastian said. He added, “Another said it was ‘nice to hear somebody with an opinion the opposite of Michael Savage’s ranting and raving.'”

We have two union radio shows broadcasting weekly in Philadelphia: Talking Unions on WHAT 1340 AM from 10 to 12 AM Saturdays, and Labor to Neighbor on WURD 900 AM from 1 to 4 PM Mondays. Both shows are focusing this month on immigration, building momentum for the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride this fall. I was lucky to be in the booth when the National Chairperson for the rides, Maria Elena Durazo was on last month; the Reverend James Lawson will be on Talking Unions in a few weeks. The Labor Heritage Center has a useful, though slightly out of date, table of union shows nationally.