Marc Cooper on the unfortunate choice by the LA Country Federation of Labor earlier this year to back incumbent Jim Hahn in today’s Mayoral election, over former union organizer Antonio Villaraigosa, whom it backed in his 2001 challenge:

Villaraigosa, who in the last Los Angeles Times poll was floating eighteen points above the scandal-plagued incumbent, is considered to be the most pro-labor pol west of the Mississippi. The former union organizer and Southern California ACLU president had a perfect union voting record when he served as speaker of the California Assembly. The County Fed poured more than $1 million into his race when he ran against Hahn in 2001, and then supported him again a year later when he won a City Council seat. But this time around, the local federation of more than 350 unions snubbed Villaraigosa and endorsed the more centrist Hahn. The union leadership made the move in exchange for the Mayor’s support of labor’s political wish list and as part of a deal to promote the Mayor’s job-rich $11 billion airport expansion plan (which Villaraigosa opposes). As a quid pro quo Hahn appointed County Fed leader Miguel Contreras and other union allies to important city commissions. The expedient alliance with Hahn, however, is coming back to haunt labor. In the March primary election a plurality of union households ignored their leadership’s endorsement and voted for Villaraigosa. “Part of it is we are a victim of our own success,” Contreras explained to the press. “After all those years of telling people to vote for Antonio, it’s hard to tell them to vote for someone else.” And as the hard-fought runoff goes into the home stretch, things have gotten stickier. With Villaraigosa garnering the endorsement of major Latino, black and environmental leaders, as well as the local Democratic Party, John Kerry, and most of all the other major candidates who were defeated in the primary, just about the only institutional support left for Hahn comes from the labor federation.

…Hahn’s final television ad barrage is expected to focus on intensely negative themes, painting Villaraigosa as pro-gang, anticop and antireligious. With the County Federation of Labor serving as Hahn’s last significant reserve, union money could very well end up financing those attacks. At a minimum, local labor’s political imprimatur is already indelibly stamped on Hahn’s negative campaign. “This would be a good time for us to be taking an extended vacation in Tahiti,” darkly joked one top-level labor official opposed to the Hahn endorsement. “How do you explain to your rank and file that their dues are being used to beat up the guy they want to vote for?” At a time when the national labor movement is going through a highly public internal debate over where to put its emphasis–on organizing or supporting political campaigns–what happens in LA is crucial. Says the labor official: “It doesn’t make much sense to spend all that money on candidates if at a minimum you’re not spending it on the right ones, does it?”

Chertoff wants to take your shirt off (virtually):

The agency in charge of the nation’s air security expects later this year to begin using a controversial X-ray machine that will show airport screeners a clear picture of what’s under passengers’ clothes — whether weapons or just bare skin. Screeners plan to test the “backscatter” machines at several U.S. airports, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) says. The refrigerator-sized machines are considered a breakthrough in scanning technology but have been labeled “a virtual strip search” by the American Civil Liberties Union. Security workers using the machines can see through clothes and peer at whatever may be hidden in undergarments, shirts or pants. The images also paint a revealing picture of a person’s nude body. The devices can potentially be used to screen hundreds of millions of air travelers each year, although TSA says more study is needed to determine how the devices may be used at U.S. airports. The agency declined to say when and where it expects to test the machines…The ACLU says the scanners invade personal privacy. “This leads directly to a surveillance society,” says Barry Steinhardt, who runs the group’s technology program. But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a Senate subcommittee last month that he wants to employ the technology and doesn’t want an “endless debate” over privacy issues.

Zach on Yale’s announced termination of David Graeber for “lack of collegiality“:

So David Graeber, “small-a” anarchist anthropologist and global justice movement ethnographer, was effectively fired by Yale University last week in a climate in which members of his department had refused to speak to him and had already sought to fire him for his (anti)political affiliations and activities. The powderkeg in this most recent development seems to have been Graeber’s support for a GESO organizer (who was in Hazel Carby’s class with me last year) whom some senior faculty were trying to expel for reasons related to her organizing…That he is being targetted not because of his scholarly work, which is beyond reproach, but rather because of his defense of the GESO member and his activist praxis and organizing is admitted even by those seeking to give him the proverbial boot. This is extremely scary and extremely fucked up. Like 1996 all over again. As an anarchist about to enter a PhD candidacy, i’m understandably looking at this fight as self-preservation. If you haven’t done so already, you’d best sign the petition.

The petition is here, and the website supporting Graeber is here.

The pressure on Larry Summers yields substantive results:

Lawrence H. Summers, the embattled president of Harvard University, announced yesterday that the university would spend at least $50 million over the next decade to recruit, support and promote women and members of underrepresented minority groups on its faculty. Dr. Summers said the money would be spent on a range of initiatives, including the creation of a new senior vice provost post to focus on diversity issues, improved recruitment, subsidies for salaries, mentoring of junior faculty members and extending the clock on tenure for professors who go on maternity or parental leave. Dr. Summers has been under siege since making remarks in January suggesting that “intrinsic aptitude” might be a factor behind the low number of women in science and engineering.

With his presidency threatened, he issued repeated apologies and appointed two committees to make recommendations on how to increase the presence of women on Harvard’s faculty, particularly in science and engineering. In making his proposals, Dr. Summers adopted the recommendations of reports released yesterday by those committees. The reports made clear that Harvard, arguably the most prestigious university in the nation, lagged behind the most aggressive universities in attracting and retaining a diverse faculty. Last year, only 4 of 32 professors offered tenure in the faculty of arts and science were women. Many of the proposals in the new reports were inspired by programs already in place at universities around the country. “In spite of more than three decades of concern, Harvard has made only limited progress in its efforts to create a genuinely diverse faculty,” the committee members said. “Women and minorities remain significantly underrepresented in relation not just to their proportions in the broader population.

Let’s hope Richard Levin, who’s done a better job than Larry Summers of keeping out of the press but not much better in hiring women, feels some heat to compete with this.

A Chorus of Apes offers some constructive criticism for the authors of CAJE’s latest Jewish Education News:

If you are introducing an issue dedicated to the young creative vibrant Jews of America, DO NOT start with the survivalism discourse. We are fleeing from the organized Jewish community because we reject the notion that Jewish identity in itself is a value. We have to much exposure to the rich pallet of American diversity for that. Rather, we want to participate in meaningful communities, Jewish or otherwise. So, bringing up empty Jewish identity, survival for its own sake, is not a good way to begin…We are not “your young people”. We are people, we are young, and we may be “your” children, but “you” do not own us. I know that sounds like a high school antiauthority rant. However, I don’t think the point is as juvenile. I object to being owned because I am in the process of forging my own communities of meaning. If we join synagogues or JCCs we are not doing it for you, nor out of some debt to our grandparents, but because we find it meaningful…I will stand up for Jews because they are human beings, and because their experience is implicated to my own. Likewise I will stand up for Palestinians, because they are human beings, and because their experience is implicated in my own.

…I was younger I didn’t care about intermarriage, because I didn’t see the value in Jewish life. At this point I don’t think that marrying a Jew is important for the Jewish people. However It is important for me, because I find Jewish life valuable. If I didn’t, and its very easy to find it to be vapid and parochial, I would not care what the religion of my partner would be. Another reason the whole intermarriage discourse is not going to win any friends is that it excludes queer folk and those who are choosing to priorities other than pumping out kids. My generation is getting married later because they are creating careers and lives before they have kids. Telling them not to follow their dreams in order to repopulate the Jewish people is not going to endear you to this demographic…I don’t want to be marketed to. I don’t want to hear “your” message. I want to be given opportunities to participate in creating meaningful experiences for myself and my peers. Selling Judaism as “cool” is certainly going to backfire…Do not refer to us as being in second puberty. I had never heard the term till I read this article. Are other people referring to 20-somethings as repubescent? What an awful title. It makes us sound like we have a disease, or at least like we are awkward naive creatures.

Newsweek retracts what appears to have been a reckless report:

After a drumbeat of criticism from the Bush administration and others, Newsweek magazine yesterday went beyond an apology it issued Sunday and retracted an article published May 1 that stated that American interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had tried to rattle Muslim detainees by flushing a Koran down a toilet. The original article was blamed for inciting widespread protests and riots in the Muslim world, where desecration of the Koran is viewed as an incendiary act, and where at least 17 people were killed in the ensuing violence. “Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guantánamo Bay,” the statement from Newsweek said. The carefully worded retraction came after the White House said the Newsweek article had damaged the image of the United States abroad. It reflected the severity of consequences that even one sentence in a brief news item can have at a time of intense anti-American sentiment overseas and political polarization, as well as extreme distrust of the mainstream media at home. Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek, said in an interview that the magazine was retracting the part of the article saying sources told Newsweek that a coming military report would say interrogators had flushed a holy book down the toilet to unnerve detainees. As it turned out, Newsweek now says, there was one source. And Mr. Whitaker said that because that source had “backed away” from his original account, the magazine could “no longer stand by” it. “I did not want to be in the position of splitting hairs,” Mr. Whitaker said, “to look like we were being evasive or not fully forthcoming.”

If Bush and Company could direct some of the ire they reserved for a poorly-sourced report of a desecrated Koran towards those in his Cabinet responsible for the desecrations of the values of every faith tradition which we know took place under our flag, we might see real change in this country’s image in the Middle East.

More deaths in Iraq:

Five suicide attacks in three cities in Iraq killed more than 60 people Wednesday. In the deadliest, a man with hidden explosives set them off in a line of people outside a police and army recruitment center in northern Iraq, killing 30 and wounding 35, police said. In Tikrit, meanwhile, a suicide car bomb exploded in a small market near a police station, killing at least 27 people and wounding 75, police said. Three car bombs also exploded in Baghdad, killing at least four, police said. Police first thought the powerful blast in Hawija, a small town 150 miles north of Baghdad, was caused by a car bomb, but police Maj. Sarhad Qadir later said they later found it was an attacker waiting in a line of about 150 recruits.

Yesterday was an exciting and unexpected road trip from New Jersey to Maryland…Back in New Haven now, but starting early tomorrow posting is likely to be sparse or non-existent over the next week while I’m in Puerto Rico. Still unclear what it will look like once I get to Mexico on the 20th, although hopefully there’ll be at least a little intermittent coverage of the election there…

Broken promises:

United Airlines won its bid to terminate its four employee pension plans this evening, clearing the way for the largest pension default in corporate history. The airline’s unions denounced the decision by a federal bankruptcy court and vowed they could go on strike against United over the move. After a lengthy hearing in a Chicago courtroom packed with company employees and retirees, Judge Eugene Wedoff of the United States Bankruptcy Court sided with United in its contention that it could not emerge from bankruptcy protection with its pension plans in place. United has been operating in Chapter 11 bankruptcy since December 2002. The ruling potentially will save United billions of dollars a year in pension contributions. The airline plans to switch from conventional retirement programs, called defined benefit plans, to defined contribution programs like 401(k) plans…

Late last month, the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation, a federal agency, agreed to assume control of United’s four union pension plans. The agency said the plans, covering pilots, flight attendants, mechanics and other workers, were underfunded by $9.8 billion, an even bigger deficit than the airline estimated at the end of 2004. For United’s retirees, the takeover will mean reductions in payments, because the government’s insurance has limits. The government estimated last month that the pension agency would cover about $6.6 billion of United’s shortfall. The remainder, about $3.2 billion, will be borne by United’s retirees, in the form of benefit reductions…The four pension plans cover about 121,500 employees and retirees.

The reformers in the AFL-CIO who were once the New Unity Partnership meet tomorrow to discuss whether running John Wilhelm against John Sweeney is the way to push forward their vision for the future of the federation:

Adding to the discord, the presidents of five unions – the service employees; the Teamsters; the laborers; the food and commercial workers; and the hotel, restaurant and apparel workers – plan to gather in Las Vegas on Monday to discuss whether to back a challenger to John J. Sweeney, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s president, in his bid for a new four-year term…Mr. Sweeney has raised the federation’s outlays on union organizing to $22.5 million, a $10 million increase. Mr. Stern and his allies had called for the federation to spend $65 million a year on organizing, and several of them complained that Mr. Sweeney’s changes did not go far enough. “There’s a chasm between what Sweeney proposed on organizing and what we’ve been pushing for,” said John W. Wilhelm, president of the hospitality division of Unite Here, which represents hotel, restaurant and apparel workers. “What Sweeney is doing is rhetoric, not substance.” The five union presidents who intend to meet in Las Vegas plan to discuss strategies to revive organized labor, and having Mr. Wilhelm run against Mr. Sweeney is one move they are considering. Several Wilhelm allies said that he would like to run, but that a big obstacle is that his support, at least for now, appears limited to unions representing less than 40 percent of the federation’s membership. The vote will take place in July at a convention in Chicago. Mr. Sweeney has said he has the race locked up, claiming support from unions with more than half the membership. Another factor likely to affect Mr. Wilhelm’s decision to run is whether the service employees leave the federation, a move that would greatly weaken his support.