Gunter Grass on the sixty years since May 8, 1945:

We all are witnesses to the fact that production is being demolished worldwide, that so-called hostile and friendly takeovers are destroying thousands of jobs, that the mere announcement of measures like the dismissal of workers and employees makes share prices rise, and this is regarded unthinkingly as the price to be paid for “living in freedom.” The consequences of this development disguised as globalization are clearly coming to light and can be read from the statistics. With the consistently high number of jobless, which in Germany has now reached five million, and the equally constant refusal of industry to create jobs, despite demonstrably higher earnings, especially from exports, the hope of full employment has evaporated. Older employees, who still had years of work left in them, are pushed into early retirement. Young people are denied the skills for entering the world of work. Even worse, with complaints that an aging population is a threat and simultaneous demands, repeated parrot-fashion, to do more for young people and education, the Federal Republic – still a rich country – is permitting, to a shameful extent, the growth of what is called “child poverty.” All this is now accepted as if divinely ordained, accompanied at most by the customary national grumbles. Worse, those who point to this state of affairs and to the people forced into social oblivion are at best ridiculed by slick young journalists as “social romantics,” but usually vilified as “do-gooders.” Questions about the reasons for the growing gap between rich and poor are dismissed as “the politics of envy.” The desire for justice is ridiculed as utopian. The concept of “solidarity” is relegated to the dictionary’s list of foreign words…

When the German Reich unconditionally surrendered 60 years ago, a system of power and terror was thereby defeated. This system, which had caused fear throughout Europe for 12 years, still casts its shadow today. We Germans have repeatedly faced up to this inherited shame and have been forced to do so if we hesitated. The memory of the suffering that we caused others and ourselves has been kept alive through the generations. Compared with other nations which have to live with shame acquired elsewhere – I’m thinking of Japan, Turkey, the former European colonial powers – we have not shaken off the burden of our past. It will remain part of our history as a challenge. We can only hope we will be able to cope with today’s risk of a new totalitarianism, backed as it is by the world’s last remaining ideology. As conscious democrats, we should freely resist the power of capital, which sees mankind as nothing more than something which consumes and produces. Those who treat their donated freedom as a stock market profit have failed to understand what May 8 teaches us every year.

As expected, Tony Blair won a third term, but with a smaller parliamentary majority. Some of those seats were lost to the Liberal Democrats, who had their best election night in seventy-five years. As Patrcik Wintour and Anne Perkins observe in the Guardian, that should mean more challenges to Blair’s “Third Way” agenda from his left:

Tony Blair will have to overcome a newly influential leftwing in the Commons as he battles to legislate for identity cards, welfare reform and tightening of asylum laws, as he returns to power today with a reduced majority…Even with a majority of around 80 it takes only 40 Labour MPs to rebel, a commonplace in the second parliament, for the legislation to be thrown out. If the prime minister had had a smaller majority in the last parliament, according to the academic Philip Cowley, who monitors parliamentary revolts, Mr Blair would not have been able to push through university top-up fees (Labour rebellion 72) or foundation hospitals (rebellion 65). A fear of being held hostage by the Labour left in 1997 was one of the factors that prompted Mr Blair to have lengthy discussions about cooperation with the then Liberal Democrat leader, Paddy Ashdown. In the new parliament the option of a Lib Dem safety net, courtesy of Charles Kennedy, is not available.

…Leading leftwingers warned yesterday that they would not just oppose controversial New Labour policies, but also demand a new style of government. Some will also demand a rapid change of leader. Lynne Jones, the Labour candidate in Birmingham Selly Oak, said: “There’s been no time to talk, but there was some discussion at the end of the last parliament about launching a challenge.”…”No more privatisation in the public services,” said the former chairman of the Campaign Group, Alan Simpson. “We would push to bring troops back from Iraq when the UN mandate expires at the end of this year. There’ll be big opposition to any move to update Trident. And ID cards will divide people very, very substantially.”

Nathan on the Bush administration’s tough talk opposing union pensioners’ shareholder democracy:

The Bush DOL is threatening to take AFL-CIO unions to court for telling financial firms that they could lose union pension business if they support Bush’s social security privatization campaign. Two firms in the pro-Bush Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, Edward Jones and Waddell & Reed, dropped out of the lobbying group due to the union-led campaign, leading to this attack on union free speech. Coming from an administration massively misusing taxpayer money for partisan lobbying, the threat is Orwellian, but it highlights a broader issue– the general silliness of pension “fiduciary” law which states that worker representatives should only maximize market returns, as if workers have no other interests in use of their money. Capital is power in society and the rich corporations use shareholder money every day to lobby for pro-corporate policies that harm the interests of workers. Yet unions are strung up by various rules to try to bar them from mobilizing the capital they control to fight for alternative investment strategies and political results that are important to the broad interests of working families.

Pensions don’t thrive just by maximizing investment returns. Much or most of their income each year comes from new contributions from existing employees through the companies they work at. If political changes undermine union strength, those contributions fall and benefits for existing retirees may be cut back as well — as has happened with airline workers, for example, who have seen their pensions gutted due to Bush government action. And of course, all retirees have an interest in preserving income from social security, but by Bush administration arguments about the state of pension law, union administrators should ignore the interests of those retirees and stay on the political sidelines — even as corporations use their capital to mobilize to stomp on political rights. The problem in politics is not just that those with money get a disproportionately large voice. Even when workers have money to speak, the corporate right seeks to silence them through legal assault.

British voters go to the polls:

Party activists were trying this evening to persuade supporters to go to the polling stations before they close at 10pm, as the UK general election nears it close. The parties’ knocking up comes after a Guardian/ICM opinion poll predicted that Labour would win a historic third term tonight, possibly with a majority of more than 100. The poll, taken last night, found no evidence that Tony Blair might be denied a majority by a late swing. It gave Labour 38%, the Conservatives 32%, and the Liberal Democrats 22%. In a uniform national swing, those figures would translate into a Labour majority of 130, although it is expected the much closer contests in the marginal constituencies could shrink its majority to 90 or lower. Labour won the 2001 election with a 165 majority…Labour had 410 MPs in the last parliament, with the Tories and Liberal Democrats with 164 and 54 respectively. Though neither opposition party believes it can deny Mr Blair a majority, they hope to cut it down to double figures. Mr Howard’s future as Tory leader depends on increasing his party’s parliamentary contingent to at least 200 MPs, but evidence from polls that Labour has lengthened its lead over the last month makes that look an increasingly unlikely scenario. The Tories, however, insist that the result will be much closer than the national polls suggest, with their candidates neck-and-neck with Labour’s in many of the key marginal constituencies. The Liberal Democrats also believe that tonight’s results will bring them good news, with the unpopularity of Mr Blair and their opposition to the Iraq war delivering them big gains. The 22% share of the vote predicted by ICM would be their best performance since 1983.

Wal-Mart Watch: Wal-Mart watchdogs connect Maryland Governor Bob Erlich’s planned veto of pro-healthcare legislation to his contributions from Wal-Mart:

A group formed to monitor Wal-Mart’s business practices is calling on Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. to return a $4,000 political donation from the retailing giant as well as proceeds from a $1,000-per-person fundraiser the company held for Ehrlich in December. Ehrlich (R) has promised to veto a bill that would effectively force Wal-Mart to boost spending on employee health benefits or make a contribution to the state’s insurance program for the poor. “If Governor Ehrlich is intent to vetoing this bill, he could at least reduce the appearance of being bought by the company,” said Wal-Mart Watch spokeswoman Tracy Sefl.

All done. Time to do some laundry…

A tangled web indeed:

Newly disclosed documents from an American territory in the Pacific show that the powerful Washington lobbyist at the center of federal corruption investigations here paid directly for travel to the islands by several members of Congress, Democrat and Republican, as well as two senior aides to Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, despite House rules that bar such payments. The lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, submitted bills to his law firm for more than $350,000 in expenses for several trips to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in 1996 and 1997 on behalf of the congressmen, as well as several others including Edwin Buckham, Mr. DeLay’s former chief of staff, and Tony Rudy, his former deputy chief of staff. In letters and e-mail messages to the Marianas, Mr. Abramoff acknowledged that he had paid for the trips and asked the island government, which had hired him to lobby against proposed labor measures that would have affected the islands, to send him checks. House travel rules bar lobbyists from paying for Congressional travel, even if the lobbyist is reimbursed by a group or government agency that is allowed to pay for travel. Mr. DeLay also visited the Marianas in late 1997 on a trip arranged by Mr. Abramoff. The documents, obtained by The New York Times under a Freedom of Information request, do not include information about how Mr. DeLay’s expenses were covered.

Jordan Barab blasts downsizing at the AFL-CIO:

AFL-CIO staff wore black to work today, and for good reason. Coming only a few days after Workers Memorial Day, 169 positions were eliminated, including half of the four-person Health and Safety Department’s professional staff. Deborah Weinstock and Rob McGarrah have been given notice that their positions will no longer be funded, although it is unclear when these changes will take place. What’s left of the department will be merged into the newly-created Government Affairs Department. 52 new positions will be created at the federation.

This is a sad day for workers, for the labor movement and for all those who care about the health, safety and working conditions of American workers. Workers in this country are faced with going to work every day knowing that the government agency mandated to watch over their lives in the workplace is becoming increasingly irrelevant, the tort system (the ability of people to sue corporations that harm them) is under fierce attack, the advocates of reducing compensation for injured workers are winning in state after state, chemicals continue to pour into the workplaces that destroy workers’ health with no government agency able to do anything about it, an asbestos compensation bill that promises to ensure that thousands of workers with asbestos disease don’t get compensated is moving through the Senate, “new” issues like ergonomics, longer working hours, speed-ups, stress, work organization changes are being ignored — and the only voice standing up to this mess — or even recognizing that all is not well for the health and safety of American workers — is being dismantled by its own family. And as I asked before, how can working people and individual unions working alone be any match for the well funded combined power of the Chamber of Commerce, NAM, NFIB and individual industry associations who have the ability to hire high-priced attorneys, scientists – and legislators? Indeed, champagne corks must be popping in corporate suites all across America.

The state of Florida is once again in the news with an object lesson in how the so-called “Culture of Life” makes agonizing personal situations that much more painful by attempting to strip the already marginalized of whatever power they may have over their lives:

After first resisting a judge’s order to allow a 13-year-old in state custody to get an abortion, Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration changed course today and said it would abandon the legal fight. The reversal came a week after state lawyers sought an emergency injunction in Palm Beach County Circuit Court to stop the girl, identified as L. G., from having an abortion later that day. Judge Ronald Alvarez agreed to delay the procedure while he weighed the case, but ruled Monday that the girl was competent to make decisions about her pregnancy and free to do so under the state’s Constitution…The girl is about 14 weeks pregnant and had planned to undergo the procedure last Tuesday, the day that the state stepped in and said she was too young to make such a decision. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County are representing the girl, who became pregnant after she ran away from a state home in January. She told her caseworker that she wanted an abortion last month, according to court records. The caseworker, who works for a private nonprofit agency that contracts with the state, helped her schedule an abortion. In seeking to block the abortion, the Department of Children and Families cited a state law that forbids the agency to consent to “sterilization, abortion or termination of life support.” “The Department of Children and Families has the custodial responsibility to do what is in the best interest of the child,” the agency said in a statement, “as state law requires.”…Gov. Jeb Bush, who opposes abortion, unsuccessfully asked the courts in 2003 to appoint a guardian for the fetus of a severely disabled woman who had been raped in a group home.

The children’s agency has come under heavy criticism in recent years for losing track of those in its care. In a hearing last week, Judge Alvarez said he was angry that the state had not done more to prevent L. G.’s pregnancy in the first place. “Where are our priorities in life?” he said, according to The Associated Press. Karen Gievers, a lawyer in Tallahassee who has sued the state on behalf of foster children, questioned why the state had not found an adoptive home for L. G. and why it would spend resources fighting her abortion when it had so many urgent priorities. Typically, Ms. Gievers said, the state might put up “passive resistance” – for example, by refusing to transport a foster child to an abortion clinic. But she and other advocates said that to their knowledge, this was the first time Florida actively tried to keep a minor in its custody from having an abortion.

The fight over the future of the AFL-CIO heats up:

Four dissident union presidents have demanded that their members’ names be removed from the AFL-CIO’s master list of 13 million households, attacking what many consider to be organized labor’s most important tool to influence political campaigns and legislative proceedings on Capitol Hill…The action by the presidents of the Service Employees International Union, Teamsters, Laborers and Unite Here is the most serious attack on Sweeney’s administration. The membership of the four unions exceeds 4 million, a third of the AFL-CIO total. John Wilhelm, who runs the hospitality industry division of Unite Here, is considering challenging Sweeney for the presidency of the federation when the AFL-CIO meets in Chicago in July. In addition, SEIU President Andrew Stern has threatened to pull out of the AFL-CIO unless major policy and program changes are made.

In sharply written letters, the presidents demanded that the names of their members be pulled. “Within 5 days of the date of this letter please provide to me a notarized letter stating that the file has been deleted in its entirety and all membership files of this union be deleted as well,” Teamsters President James P. Hoffa wrote in a letter to Karen Ackerman, the AFL-CIO’s political director. All four unions wrote that they would be willing to provide the AFL-CIO with their membership lists “when appropriate” on a case-by-case basis after receiving a request. Officials of the unions said that each would be willing, for example, to turn lists over to help out in the coming New Jersey race for governor. The letters to the AFL-CIO did not spell out reasons for the requests to delete the names. In comments not for attribution, aides to the union presidents complained that the AFL-CIO has compiled detailed information on their members, from gun ownership to identifying single mothers, that has not been provided to the unions. In addition, they contended that the AFL-CIO has used its control of the lists to become the exclusive representative of labor to Democratic officials, preventing presentation of differing views.

And Andy Stern’s response to Sweeney’s proposal for the federation doesn’t leave much to the imagination:

…the fact is that the union movement has continued to decline to the point that only 1 in 12 private sector workers has a union. Yet the AFL-CIO officers’ proposal doesn’t contain the bold, dramatic steps it will take to start turning that around or a coordinated strategy for growing stronger based on the experience of the unions that have been helping workers organize. Sweeney, Trumka, and Chavez-Thompson correctly say that most of labor’s resources are in the individual unions and that if those unions were meeting standards for organizing and had real strategies, it would make a real difference in workers’ lives. But they do not support real standards, strategies, and accountability – or even apply standards to themselves, like the 30 percent for organizing to grow stronger that they preach to the affiliates. After years of discussion at meeting after meeting, and after six months of intense debate, their rehash of the status quo is too little, too late. Under their proposal, working people in America would still not have strong unions with the strategy, focus, and resources to unite everyone in an industry.

What is crystal clear is that even if unions representing a majority of members ultimately agree on a new strategy and structure that will help millions more workers unite with us, this AFL-CIO leadership team would not be the right group to carry it out. When this debate intensified after the 2004 elections, our union hoped that the AFL-CIO would lead the change and pull together a strong majority committed to growing stronger, not smaller. Instead, the AFL-CIO leadership has tried to build a slim majority for the status quo — a program built on the same approaches, structures, and priorities that have failed for decades. Now it is up to all those committed to new strength for working people to chart a course that could really win for working families.

Paul Krugman explains just how regressive Bush’s “progressive indexing” would be:

Workers earning 60 percent more than average, the equivalent of $58,000 today, would see benefit cuts equal to almost 13 percent of their income before retirement. But above that level, the cuts would become less and less significant. Workers earning three times the average wage would face cuts equal to only 9 percent of their income before retirement. Someone earning the equivalent of $1 million today would see benefit cuts equal to only 1 percent of pre-retirement income…

It’s an adage that programs for the poor always turn into poor programs. That is, once a program is defined as welfare, it becomes a target for budget cuts. You can see this happening right now to Medicaid, the nation’s most important means-tested program. Last week Congress agreed on a budget that cuts funds for Medicaid (and food stamps), even while extending tax cuts on dividends and capital gains. States are cutting back, denying health insurance to hundreds of thousands of people with low incomes. Missouri is poised to eliminate Medicaid completely by 2008. If the Bush scheme goes through, the same thing will eventually happen to Social Security. As Mr. Furman points out, the Bush plan wouldn’t just cut benefits. Workers would be encouraged to divert a large fraction of their payroll taxes into private accounts – but this would in effect amount to borrowing against their future benefits, which would be reduced accordingly. As a result, Social Security as we know it would be phased out for the middle class.