Labor’s Critical Election Role

This is a piece written by Dick Meister for ZMag.  This is timely since all the candidates, especially the Dems, are courting labor for the next election.  Labor could have a dominate roll in the general, but will they opt for a persoanlity instead of what is best for ALL labor?

Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, one of the best friends organized labor has ever had, has some wise words of political advice for unions and their supporters:

Throw all you’ve got into defeating John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, and unite tightly behind the Democratic candidate, presumably Barrack Obama, even though you may have supported other candidates in the primaries.

You might think Kucinich’s advice is unnecessary since, like virtually all Republicans, McCain has never been a friend of labor - and his policies as president would most certainly not be pro-labor. They’d most likely be as anti-labor as the policies of George W. Bush, one of the most anti-labor presidents in history.

Under Bush, for instance, the Labor Department has become an anti-Labor Department, adopting regulations designed to hamper union organizing and growth. The National Labor Relations Board has become an anti-labor relations board, allowing employers to openly violate the laws governing organizing. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been outrageously lax in enforcing the job safety laws, even as the number of serious on-the-job injuries and deaths has grown steadily. The union rights of federal employees have been seriously curtailed.

That’s just a small part of it. As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says, under Bush “working people have been losing income, good jobs, homes and hope in the future.”

Kucinich says that although working people may respect McCain as a former prisoner-of-war, they have to realize “there is no question that on the economy he is an extension of the Bush administration. We must challenge the economic system that is accelerating wealth upwards.”

A vote for McCain would clearly be a vote for four to eight more years of the same, four to eight more years of anti-labor, anti-working people policies in the White House. There should be absolutely no need for Kucinich or anyone else to urge labor to go all-out to defeat McCain.

Yet polls show that 57 percent of union members support McCain for president. That’s right, more than half of the country’s union members actually support John McCain for president — the highest labor support any Republican presidential candidate has ever had.

That’s surely evidence of a great need to do some heavy-duty political educating among the many union members who obviously should no better than to in effect support four to eight more years of Bush.

There’s also a great need to rebuild the labor movement. But with a Republican president, as Kucinich notes, that would be very difficult - if not impossible.

With a Democratic president, however, labor “will have a major influence on our national policy,” And it goes beyond labor. For labor, Kucinich adds, is “the vanguard of the effort to re-create America, to change the direction of history.”

He says Republican control of the White House has put “our entire way of life under attack. Our jobs are on the line, peace is on the line, our kids’ future is on the line, education, housing, everything. America is on the line.

Labor creates ALL wealth, then they should have a major stake in the election of the people who will lead the country.  The problem is the worker has spent years of giving back most of the progress from 100 years all in the name of retaining their employment.  Now is the perfect time for Labor to become the major player in the direction of the country.

SEIU: The Rest Of The Story

I realized after my last post that many of my readers may not be privy to what is going on within the SEIU, so I found a bit of info to assist all in seeing what is at stake.

As history has repeatedly shown, the rulers of “one party states” rarely concede power gracefully or quietly. When organized opposition emerges, such regimes often resort to a strategy of disinformation and intimidation to maintain their grip on power over a nation state or—in a context closer to home–a national union.

After the Landrum-Griffin Act was passed in 1959, union reform groups—the equivalent of an opposition political party–gained more legal protection for their electoral challenges and issue-oriented campaigning. Yet, in the last forty years, entrenched leaders of major unions have displayed a similar pattern of undemocratic behavior and heavy-handed treatment of internal dissent. In each instance, the incumbent administration focused its most intense attacks on an independent-minded official from its own ranks who “defected” to the cause of reform.

The latest case in point is United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW) and its president Sal Rosselli. Along with a new rank-and-file group called SMART (SEIU Member Activists For Reform Today), UHW has called for direct election of top officers of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and other changes that would give members a greater voice in bargaining. Rosselli’s very principled, even reluctant, break with SEIU President Andy Stern has, nevertheless, elicited a coordinated International Union counter-campaign, replete with personal vilification, legal harassment, threats of trusteeship, and/or dismemberment of 140,000-member UHW, SEIU’s third-largest affiliate.

If you have personal stories or info, please feel free to share with others, we all want to know what is the “real” story.

SEIU: Democracy At Work?

Very soon the SEIU will be having their convention in Puerto Rico and some say it will be a fight for control of the union.

For the first time in a generation or more, SEIU is facing a substantial movement by internal dissidents seeking to push through democratic reforms. This push has a two-fold character.

One prong is the very public resignation by Sal Roselli, the head of United Healthcare Workers — West (UHW), the third largest local in SEIU, from his position on SEIU’s national Executive Committee. When he resigned, and since, he raised issues about the course that is being pursued by national SEIU. With the backing of the UHW executive board, the local has created a highly visible web site, paid for an ad in the New York Times and ads on prominent blogs, and is putting the issue of democracy on the agenda for the SEIU convention. The other prong is SMART (SEIU Member Activists for Reform Today), a rank-and-file movement with the potential to create an on-going TDU-like internal opposition in SEIU.

National SEIU leaders insist that they too “are committed to unity, strength, and respect for democracy in our union.” A letter, signed by 70 local leaders who together represent more than 80 percent of all SEIU members, insists:

Constructive discussion about how to strengthen our union is absolutely essential. But it also carries with it a very serious responsibility to respect decisions made by democratic majority, whether they have to do with strategy, resources, structure, or local union jurisdiction. No local union leader, no matter what their individual objectives may be, should try to jeopardize the strategies developed and democratically approved.

“Democracy,” however, can be a slippery concept. Employers insist that the only “democratic” way to bring in a union is through an NLRB election — one where union organizers are forbidden to set foot on the premises, employers force members to attend captive audience meetings, supervisors interrogate employees, and pro-union activists often get fired. Union activists regard these elections as a totally undemocratic sham, and SEIU has pioneered alternatives to the NLRB election.

Union democracy can be a similarly contested concept. It’s worth considering some of the national SEIU practices that trouble dissidents. Central to the debate is the many ways the national SEIU leadership can intervene in the activities of an existing local, together with the creation of mega-locals. Everyone agrees that if a local is outright corrupt, or mob dominated, the national union needs to intervene to clean up the mess and restore democracy.

However, national SEIU leaders intervene in union locals for many other reasons. If a local is ineffective, and fails to organize new members, it might be put into trusteeship. If nearby locals have overlapping jurisdictions, with each local containing both building service and hospital workers, new locals may be created to bring together all the hospital workers in one local and all the building service workers in another local. In practice, however, both the criteria for such actions and the ways they should be carried out are neither clear nor straightforward. What workers have a community of interest? When does it make sense to move workers from one local to another? Which locals are ineffective, and by what criteria? To what extent do the answers to those questions depend on an assessment of the local leadership — and in making that assessment, is it possible to separate out considerations of the extent to which the local leaders support national SEIU leaders’ policies?

There are a variety of ways in which elected local leaders can be replaced by “interim” leaders appointed by the national SEIU leadership. The most straightforward is if the local is placed into trusteeship. According to the provisions of the Landrum-Griffin Act, when a local is placed in trusteeship there must be an election within 18 months. However, if there is a more thoroughgoing reorganization, with substantially new locals created, then the appointed interim leader may stay in office for three years prior to holding an election. And if the local is simply merged out of existence, it may be that no new leadership election is necessary.

The convention should prove to be very interesting and I will attempt to keep all my readers informed on the  antics and positions of all the players.

Professor’s Political Classroom

I am really weary of the term being used…..just what is an elitist?

Elitist! Elitist? Who Is The Elitist? (A History Lesson)

Have you heard this term used recently? Oh yeah, Clinton and McCain have thrown it around like Mardi Gras beads. But what does it, the term, really mean? That will depend on who you are and where you are. Right now, the use of the term elitist is nothing more than a media buzzword or a political talking point. No where do any of these so-called people of the people bother to explain what they are talking about. I will attempt to give the reader a little background on the term, elitist.

Remember ancient Greece, the birthplace of democracy? Back in the early days of Greek political discussions, the Sophists, most notably Thrasymachus termed those who were the strongest in society as elitists—the rulers—who control education and socialization through legislation and enforcement. But, like everyone else, they are self-interested. Hence they make laws and conventions that are in their own interests, not those of their weaker subjects. It is these conventions that largely determine their subject’s conceptions of justice and other virtues. By being trained, through civics class, to follow and obey, subjects are unwittingly adopting an ideology, a code of values and behavior that serves not their own interests but rather those of their rulers.

To put this more simply, The state is nothing more than an organ of a ruling minority. That the majority (meaning you) is permanently incapable of governing themselves because they lack the capacity to govern. The masses are manipulated by the power elite, because they are passive. Why the people are considered passive? Easy one—1) they do not have a clear concept of what they want from the state, 2) the people are incapable of objectively assessing and interpreting facts, 3) the people are irrational in their reasoning process.

A political inequality is a mechanism by which society ensures that the important positions are filled by most qualified people. And those positions are filled by an uninformed public that votes these elitists into position of power, never to see them relinquish it. These people live by a code that says that their needs to be a certain amount of social, economic and political inequality for the society to function properly. These beliefs make truly participatory democracy impossibility. Why? Power should never be diffused to the will of the people.

Now, Clinton and McCain have called Obama an elitist……thinking……an elitist calling an elitist an elitist…how silly! Clinton is an elitist, after 35 years of power and control, she could be nothing else. McCain is the same story. Now for Obama, he cannot be considered an all out elitist but when a leader emerges from the masses, then he will do any and everything to avoid returning to that position. He will most likely, once transformed into an elitist, become transformed into a jealous guardian of his own privilege once he obtains power.

Someone once called this election season as “the silly season” and on that point I agree. I hope that this short history lesson helps you to understand what an elitist is and that everyone involved in politics is just that. They are from the get go or the morph into one after they attain power and influence. The American voter has no real choice when voting…..they vote for elitist A or elitist B…that is one reason that very little changes from one elected president to another.

I just wanted to let my readers know just what is meant by the use of the term elitist….I await your comments…..

Editorial: Hypocrisy On Veterans

I found this editorial while surfing this morning and thought I would post it here for all my readers to see.  It was posted on the website for the People’s Weekly World.

This Memorial Day, we think about the more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead and the tens of thousands wounded in body and mind in a war based on lies, pushed by a clique of right-wing militarists and their corporate backers.

After 9/11, many Americans signed up for military service, wanting to serve their country and defend it from terrorism. Instead, they were sent to invade Iraq, to serve a right-wing/corporate agenda.

So it’s shocking to look at the congressional vote May 15 on a “Post-9/11 GI Bill” — a World War II-style GI Bill for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Republicans pushed the Iraq war and now refuse to end it. Yet only 32 of them voted for the GI Bill. One hundred and fifty-nine GOP House members, including their entire leadership, voted against the bill, which would substantially increase educational benefits for post-9/11 veterans. The bill is backed by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and every leading veterans organization.
Perhaps the Republicans objected to the fact that the bill also extends unemployment benefits for jobless workers who have used up their current benefits? Or maybe the warhawks didn’t like funding New Orleans levees? We’d like to point out that most veterans are workers, and many are jobless too. And building and repairing levees, and other parts of our nation’s crumbling infrastructure, would provide a lot of good jobs.

President Bush has threatened to veto the bill, especially complaining that the GI benefits would be funded by a tiny tax hike for the rich.

Despite the Republicans, the measure passed the House and is now before the Senate. Veterans are demanding that veteran Sen. John McCain vote for the new GI Bill. McCain, who hopes his military service will propel him into the White House, has wrapped himself in Bush’s disastrous war and economic policies.

A good way to mark Memorial Day would be to get this bill passed and signed into law.

A Democratic Political Society

Progressive States is committed to a society where all are equal both under the law and in our economic institutions. Fair Elections are one key to that goal where:

• Everyone should have equal Voting Rights and we should implement systems like mail-in voting or same day registration to lower the barriers to participation.
• Elections should be publicly financed through Clean Elections where individual preferences, not economic resources, determine the victor, and where companies are barred from financing elections one day and receiving government contracts the next.
• Ballot Initiative Reforms should promote citizen participation not corporate special pleading in initiatives and referenda.

Beyond election day, we need a society that promotes robust debate and protects individual rights and liberties:

• Every person should be secure that their Civil Liberties, including freedom of speech and a right to a fair trial, will be protected.
• People who suffer harm by either government or private economic actors should have full and effective Access to the Courts to achieve a just resolution
• We should promote a more diverse and robust Democratic Media, including promoting greater access to the new technologies for all citizens, in order to assure that alternative voices have a greater chance to be heard.
• Every person should have a Public Right to Know government and corporate information critical to democratic participation and to their family’s health and safety.

This commitment to democracy should extend to creating greater Economic Democracy where:

• Workers should have a greater voice in their workplaces.
• Communities should have a greater voice in controlling their economic destinies.
• Individuals through their pensions and other investment vehicles should have greater democratic control of corporate decision-making.

All these democratic commitments should extend from city hall to the federal government in a system of Progressive Federalism where the national government creates strong minimum standards to protect individuals, while giving state and local government the flexibility to create innovative solutions locally.

It is time for Americans to demand more voice in their government and their lives.

US Middle East Policy Influence

Short answer–there is no influence thanks to the Bush Admin and their arrogance.

The governments of the Middle East, from Iran to Israel and beyond, are increasingly ignoring the wishes of a U.S. administration which has only eight months left in office, going their own way in regional diplomacy.

U.S. President George W. Bush’s latest speech on Middle East policy, made in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh last week, shows how the gap has grown between what Washington would like and what is happening in the region.

It is part of a wider picture of Washington’s declining clout, accelerated by its debilitating deployment of more than 100,000 troops to Iraq for the past five years.

France has had contacts with the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, for example, and Israel has had indirect talks with Syria, which Washington is trying to isolate.

Bush said in Sharm el-Sheikh that all nations in the region should stand together against Hamas, a group which he said was attempting to undermine efforts at making peace.

But the Egyptian government, his host and a longstanding friend of the United States, was simultaneously, and with U.S. consent, trying to mediate a truce between Gaza and Israel.

The Bush policies are becoming stale, there comes a time when a fresh perspective is needed, and that time is now, or the best we can hope for is another 60 years of death and destruction.

Troops Told To Stay Out Of Politics

Back in the day, when I was a trooper in Vietnam, it became a major issue that we not involve ourselves in politics. That came about because of the growing anti-war attitude within the armed forces. Some things never change.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has written an unusual open letter to all those in uniform, warning them to stay out of politics as the nation approaches a presidential election in which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be a central, and certainly divisive, issue.

“The U.S. military must remain apolitical at all times and in all ways,” wrote the chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, the nation’s highest-ranking officer. “It is and must always be a neutral instrument of the state, no matter which party holds sway.”

“As the nation prepares to elect a new president,” Admiral Mullen wrote, “we would all do well to remember the promises we made: to obey civilian authority, to support and defend the Constitution and to do our duty at all times.”

“Keeping our politics private is a good first step,” he added. “The only things we should be wearing on our sleeves are our military insignia.”

Admiral Mullen said he was inspired to write the essay after receiving a constant stream of legitimate, if troubling, questions while visiting military personnel around the world. He said their questions included, “What if a Democrat wins?” and, “What will that do to the mission in Iraq?” and, “Do you think it’s better for one party or another to have the White House?”

IMO, there is a growing resentment within the ranks over the war, this is the first salvo against any anti-war movement that may be smoldering. If so, then here is the chink in the military armor and should be exploited by the movement.