The Next Battle Against Wall Street? Los Angeles…

Will The Occupy LA protestors, from October 2011, return to the steps of Los Angeles City Hall in this new battle against Wall Street? (Photo: Los Angeles Times, 2011).

By Tom Hayden

Progressive America Rising

The next battle against Wall Street may be brewing and this one is in Los Angeles City Hall.

If it erupts, the soldiers will be a scrappy, wonky, and sophisticated phalanx of labor, neighborhood, and religious activists. Their research has exposed the fact that Wall Street banks were paid $200 million in fees alone last year by the City of Los Angeles; many millions more than the city spent on fixing its streets.

The comparison between City Hall and our streets makes City Hall officials wince; claiming it mixes apples with oranges. But there's more than catchiness in the comparison. The new report, Fix LA, shows that at least $106 billion in public money overall, from airports, seaports, utilities and pension funds, goes to private financial institutions that profit from fees, lending and leveraging those funds.

Citizens and elected officials often are overwhelmed and under-qualified to understand the weird and complicated transactions – debt swaps and derivative trades, for example - that Wall Street employs to extract maximum profit from all that public capital. There is no single Los Angeles official mandated to bargain with Wall Street. No official consumer watchdog, no fledgling Elizabeth Warren or Ralph Nader. No inspector-general to investigate financial industry fraud. No mainstream investigative reporters on the case, not so far anyway. While insiders and advocates will pore over the city's multi-billion annual budget this month, no single monitor is minding the hundreds of millions funneled to Wall Street's predatory care, as the report charges.

City officials will have their chance to respond in public hearings over the next several weeks, based on a motion being introduced by Councilman Paul Koretz this Friday; one seconded by Councilmember Gil Cedillo. Budget and Finance Committee chair Paul Krekorian, waiving the report, promised thorough public scrutiny of its data and claims.

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WORKERS' MEMORIAL DAY, 2014: WHAT WORKERS NEED

By Harry Targ

Progressive America Rising via Diary of a Heartland Radical

The stench is vomit-making as never before. The fat and plucks, the bladders and kidneys and bungs and guts, gone soft and spongy in the heat, perversely resist being trimmed, separated, deslimed; demand closer concentration than ever, more speed. A helpless, hysterical laughter starts up. Indeed, they are in hell; indeed they are the damned. Steamed, boiled, broiled, fried, cooked. Geared, meshed.

In the hog room,108 degrees. Kerchiefs, bound around their foreheads to keep the sweat from running down into eyes and blinding, become saturated; each works in a rain of stinging sweat. Almost the steam from the vats seems cloud-cool, pure, by contrast. Marsalek falls. A heart attack. (Is carried away, docked, charged for the company ambulance.) Other hearts pound near to bursting. Relentless, the conveyor paces on.

Slow it, we got to slow it. (Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties, 1974)

American workplaces from the dawn of the industrial revolution to the recent past were living hells for workers.

Novelist and essayist Tillie Olsen described working conditions in meat-packing plants in the 1930s. Others have written about auto assembly lines, mines, textile assembly plants, and food-processing plants. Analysts such as Harry Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), pointed out that employers have usually sought to control the minds and motions of workers. Profit-making has been seen as tied to controlling every movement of workers, the speed-up of production, and cutting costs for health and safety. After years of labor mobilization, the Occupational Safety and Health Act passed in 1970 to begin to address the problem of how dangerous it was to go to work each day.

Every April 28, workers across North America assemble to remember those workers who died or were injured on the job. Workers’ Memorial Day, initiated in the United States by the AFL-CIO in April, 1989, celebrates the inauguration of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (1970). Workers’ Memorial Day is about remembrances, reviews of progress toward safety and health, and re-commitment to making the workplace safer.

In April, 2013 the AFL-CIO issued its annual data-based report, “Death on the Job: the Toll of Neglect,” to review the current state of worker health and safety, given the administration of OSHA rules initiated over forty years ago. “Since that time, workplace safety and health conditions have improved. But too many workers remain at serious risk of injury, illness or death as workplace tragedies continue to remind us.” These tragedies have occurred in mines, oil refineries, fertilizer plants, meat-packing plants, manufacturing facilities, and on construction sites.

The AFL-CIO report indicated that 4,693 workers were killed on the job in 2011 (13 workers per day). Over 3.8 million work-related injuries were reported with unofficial estimates of such injuries doubling or tripling that total. Particular sub-groups, such as Latino workers and those born outside the United States, experienced excessively high injury rates, presumably because of their fears of raising safety concerns within the workplace.

The report indicated that workplace inspections had decreased over the years because of budget constraints limiting the hiring of inspectors. Given the numbers, federal OSHA employees could be expected to investigate a workplace once every 131 years and state OSHA inspections can be expected every 76 years. Penalties for workplace violations also are inadequate to deter violations.

The Report indicated that budget allocations for OSHA must be dramatically increased, more laws must be passed to regulate the complex reality of workplace dangers, and worker rights to protest dangerous conditions at the workplace must be strengthened.

This year, Workers’ Memorial Day events will highlight demands to address contemporary issues of concern such as

-defending the OSHA process from political campaigns to reduce workplace regulations.

-requiring employers to establish work-site safety and health programs with worker participation to address enduring hazards.

-adding safeguards against respiratory diseases from silica, combustible dust, and Black Lung.

-protecting workers who seek to challenge workplace safety hazards, particularly for immigrant workers.

-passing more legislation such as the Protecting America’s Workers Act to expand protection for workers not yet covered by OSHA rules.

-increasing worker voices on the job including creating an environment that would allow workers to freely choose to form unions.

Earl Cox, Community Services Liaison, Northwest Central Labor Council, Indiana AFL-CIO, concluded as he announced the 2014 event that legislators must be made aware of workplace health and safety “…so when a vote comes up to slash funding for OSHA, they vote to protect workers and not corporate interests.” The AFL-CIO believes that “safety laws and regulations don’t kill jobs—but unsafe jobs kill workers.”

(For those living in Tippecanoe County, Indiana Workers’ Memorial Day events will occur April 28, Inside the Depot, Riehle Plaza, Lafayette at 5:15 p.m.)

www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com

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The Right Wants Workers on Their Knees

'They're Not Dead Yet': Planning The Demise Of Labor Unions At CPAC

By David Jamieson

Progressive America Rising via Huffington Post

March 8, 2014 - NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. -- Any right-wing confab probing the power of "big labor" suffers from an inherent contradiction: The ranks of unionized workers in the U.S. have never been so thinned, with less than 7 percent of the private sector now belonging to a labor union. A successful anti-union discussion therefore needs to strike a delicate balance, celebrating unions' diminished state while simultaneously insisting they pose as grave a threat as ever.

This rhetorical needle was ably threaded on Saturday morning by anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, who moderated a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference entitled "On Wisconsin! Turning Blue States Red." The panel sought to answer a strategic question for the right: "After Wisconsin and beyond right-to-work laws, what’s possible now to free workers and students from unionism?"

While acknowledging that union membership has fallen to a historic low, Norquist began the discussion by claiming that unions are the greatest political force in America at the moment.

"They're not dead yet -- they're in decline," Norquist said. "They raise maybe $7 billion a year in dues. Imagine how much they spend of that on politics. They are the largest political player in American politics and will be for some time. What can we do about it?"

Better known for his tax work, Norquist has quickly become a major figure among anti-union activists through the Center for Worker Freedom, an arm of his group Americans for Tax Reform. Norquist's crew bankrolled the anti-union billboards plastered throughout the Chattanooga, Tenn., area in the runup to the United Auto Workers' ill-fated union vote at a Volkswagen plant there last month.

The UAW's narrow loss, by a 53 to 47 margin, was a stinging defeat for organized labor and a major setback for the union's plans in the South. The UAW has accused Norquist and a host of Republican politicians -- including Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.) -- of unfairly meddling in the election as third parties and possibly tainting the results.

Many UAW opponents on the right said they were concerned the union's presence would hurt the plant's expansion plans or make it harder to attract new businesses to Tennessee. But one of Norquist's panelists, Terry Scanlon, president of the Capital Research Center, seemed to acknowledge Saturday that the true fight in Chattanooga was a political one. This was the "unmentionable" that Scanlon nonetheless mentioned.

"What is really good here is the unmentionable: There will be so much less money without all these dues, 90-some percent in most cases, going to Democrats," Scanlon said during the panel. "Without the money there, it's not going to happen. This is great news. It's great news."

Norquist didn't dwell on his Tennessee victory, instead steering the discussion toward a larger picture: how the right can fundamentally weaken unions through state legislation. That includes collective bargaining rollbacks like the monumental one carried out by Gov. Scott Walker (R) in Wisconsin in 2011, as well as right-to-work laws like those recently passed in Michigan and Indiana. Right-to-work laws forbid contracts between companies and unions that require all workers to pay the union for bargaining on their behalf, thereby diminishing unions' clout.

The panelists agreed that after seeing Michigan, the cradle of the U.S. auto industry, go right-to-work in 2012, almost anything seemed possible.

"The good news is you have 24 states today with a Republican governor and both houses of the legislature who are Republican," Scanlon said. "You have a shot at right-to-work in any of these states. ... It can be done. It takes time, and you have to set the mechanism up even if you don't have a majority of Republicans."

F. Vincent Vernuccio, director of labor policy at the free-market think tank Mackinac Center for Public Policy, said Republican governors and state lawmakers needn't worry about political repercussions from fast-tracking a right-to-work law through the legislature. Republicans are still standing in places like Indiana, he said.

"When a politician says right-to-work is simply unattainable and they're worried about their job, look at the states that passed right-to-work," Vernuccio said.

Public-sector union membership remains robust, at 35 percent, but anti-union conservatives smell vulnerability. As Norquist noted, the prevailing attitude used to be that "you can't do anything about the public sector." That's no longer the case, particularly after Wisconsin, where most public-sector workers have lost their collective bargaining rights (and where public-sector unions have since lost many of their dues-paying members).

Panelist Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said that the key to gutting public-sector bargaining rights in Wisconsin was deference to the cause throughout Wisconsin's right flank. It was agreed that they would all share mutually in the glory, Priebus said.

"Americans for Prosperity, Tea Party groups, the GrandSons of Liberty, the 9-12'ers were involved -- it was a total and complete agreement that nobody cared who got the credit, that everyone was going to run down the tracks together and help each other where we could," Priebus said.

Despite such victories, Norquist warned that Obama "owed" something to unions after failing to shepherd through Congress the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would have made it easier for workers to unionize. Norquist said it was a political mistake for Obama to prioritize the Affordable Care Act before EFCA, since he could have helped grow the ranks of organized labor to Democrats' benefit. But that failure has left him with a debt to unions, Norquist argued.

"That's why you're seeing the National Labor Relations Board out there putting their thumbs on the scale, and that's going to be a big problem for us in the next three years," Norquist said of the independent agency that enforces labor law. Obama has "stacked" the five-member board, in Norquist's words. (He has appointed three members of his own party and two from the opposition, in keeping with tradition.)

With Democrats holding a majority in the Senate and Obama in the White House, there's little chance of any anti-union laws coming out of Washington anytime soon. But the panelists said they see plenty more opportunity at the state level. When Norquist asked Vernuccio to rattle off some right-to-work targets, he didn't hesitate.

"We're looking at Ohio. We're looking at Missouri. We're looking at Kentucky," Vernuccio said. "The fire of worker freedom is shining brightly, and it is spreading."

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UAW: Unions Need New Strategy

Reflections on the defeat suffered by the TN workers in Volkswagen

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

Progressive America Rising via BillFletcherJr.com

Feb 18 , 2014 · The election loss at the Chattanooga plant of VW was, first and foremost, a loss suffered by the workers.  Secondarily it was a loss suffered by the United Auto Workers.  The workers at that facility lost the chance to bargain collectively and to obtain a voice in their workplace.  This was a loss that was mainly the result of the all-out right-wing offensive that took place in TN against the workers and their–the workers’–decision to seek representation. And, as is the case for all workers who lack collective bargaining (or the even rarer personal contract), they remain in a free-fire zone where they can be removed from their job for any reason or no reason as long as the reason does not violate statute.   I am sorry; i just needed to cut to the chase.

Yet, we cannot stop there with our reflections on what transpired.  This was a situation where the company–VW–agreed to be neutral and, in many ways, seemed to welcome the union.  Nevertheless, by a relatively slim majority, the proponents of workers’ rights did not prevail.   This reality emphasizes the point that employer neutrality, while important, is insufficient.  There are larger factors at stake when workers must make a decision on union representation, particularly in a period where labor unions have been under such vicious assault.  The decision, in this case, of the Republican Party and others on the political Right to draw a line in the sand and go all out to intimidate the workforce is a case-in-point.  The workers, their families and friends had to decide whether the threats coming from the political Right were genuine or just rhetoric.  Given the history of anti-worker repression in the South, along with the on-going racist efforts to secure a ‘white bloc’ against progress, the messages of the political Right came through loud and clear.

At the same time there was another factor that i found particularly striking.   It was mentioned in an article on the election in the Washington Post yesterday (Monday).  They indicated that within the anti-union vote there were those who were angered by the UAW’s willingness to keep the wages and benefits of VW workers in TN ‘competitive.’  This was particularly interesting because herein lay a critique of the UAW that may have surprised many people.  The workers were saying that they did not want to guarantee to VW that their wages would stay below those of Chrysler, Ford or GM workers.

The UAW finds itself in a bind.  For more than thirty years it has engaged in concessionary bargaining with employers under the banner of “jointness.”  Only a few years ago it approved a two-tier agreement by which the wage and benefit package for incoming workers would differ from veteran workers.  Two-tier systems are by their very nature demoralizing and undermine any real sense of solidarity.  They are also a poison pill that can kill the patient over time as the newer workers come to resent the benefits that they do not have, but which are held by the veteran workers.  Jointness, two tier concessions and a failure–until relatively recently–to develop innovative approaches toward organizing auto “transplants” and auto parts manufacturers in the South have come back to bite the UAW, and to bite with fangs of steel.

The defeat in TN will lead some commentators to suggest that organizing in the South, or in any hostile environment, is pointless short of changes in labor law.  Such conclusions, which we hear periodically, are ahistoric and defeatest.   Yet there are sobering conclusions, or at least suggestions that must be considered.  With all due respect, let me propose a few.

One, the UAW needs to build a local union in that TN plant.  The fact that the election was lost should not mean that the union disappears.  Rather, there is the notion that has become increasingly popular over the last 20 years of what are called “non-majority unions,” that is, unions that are organized in a situation where they have not won majority status and, therefore, cannot bargain collectively, but where they can organize the workers and build alternative forms of representation.   The UAW needs to make that commitment and flip the script.

Two, as is being attempted by the UAW in Mississippi, organizing must look very differently than in the past.  The battle is not simply, only and some cases, mainly between the workers and the employer.  In the case of Chattanooga, VW was not opposed to the union, for example.  Yet in organizing a labor union we must be clear that this is and always has been about power–who has it and who does not.  Thus, organizing a union really must be a community affair.  It must be a matter that involves and engages not only the directly affected workers but also their families, friends and neighbors.  The community must see in unionization an economic development strategy that makes sense. They must also see in unionization a strategy to fight back against the gross injustices that workers feel every day.

Three, grass roots political education and political action is key.  The political Right mobilized its various forces against this unionization effort.  Workers and their unions cannot sit back and await a Democratic Party response to such a travesty.  Workers need locally-based political associations and organizations that can mobilize in order to both advance a progressive project but to also move against the political Right.  Champions of workers rights must create a bit of mischief thereby destabilizing our opponents.  That ranges from an active presence in the media to legislative initiatives that advance workers’ rights to electoral campaigns against the demons who wish to keep the workers in bondage.

Four, and this is a difficult one, the UAW will need to look at itself.  The UAW is not by itself in this challenge, i might add.  Today’s unions were constructed in a very different environment.  In many cases they are led–at the national and local levels–by very sincere individuals who continue to fight the ‘last war.’  In the case of the UAW, the leaders and members probably need to seize this time to reflect on the strategy of jointness; on two-tier systems; on their failure to take an aggressive approach to organizing the auto parts industry; and why it has taken so long to make a serious and on-going effort to unionize the South.  Such a discussion will be complicated and painful, but in the absence of such an examination, the UAW will continue to die the death of a thousand cuts.  And, more importantly, workers in this country who so desperately need unionization, will continue to feel the boot of corporate America and their right-wing allies on our collective necks.

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‘The Common Good’, Dirty Words to Today’s GOP

Progressives Must Stand Up Against the Right Wing War on Public Employees

By Robert Creamer

Progressive America Rising via Huffington Post

Dec 9, 2013 - For many years the American Right -- and many of the most powerful elements of corporate and Wall Street elite -- have conducted a war on public employees.

Their campaign has taken many forms. They have tried to slash the number of public sector jobs, cut the pay and benefits of public sector workers, and do away with public employee rights to collective bargaining. They have discredited the value of the work performed by public employees -- like teachers, police and firefighters -- going so far as to argue that "real jobs" are created only by the private sector.

Last week a conservative court ruled that by going through bankruptcy the city of Detroit could rid itself of its obligation under the state constitution to make good on its pension commitments to its retirees.

It should surprise no one that the Republican Chairman of the U.S. House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, is demanding that a budget deal with the Democrats include a 350 percent increase in pension contribution by all civilian federal employees. That would effectively mean a pay cut of about 2 percent for every federal worker. And that cut would come after a three-year pay freeze and multiple furloughs caused by the Republican "sequester."

Unbelievably, in Illinois the right wing Chicago Tribune and the state's corporate elite snookered the Democratic-controlled legislature into passing changes in that state's pension laws that slashed the pensions of its public employees. The changes affected all state employees and many of Illinois' teachers. All of them had faithfully made their required contributions to the state's pension funds for years, even though the legislature regularly failed to make its required payments so it could avoid raising taxes on the state's wealthiest citizens.

Illinois cut teacher pensions, even though many do not participate in the Social Security system and the state pension is their only source of retirement income.

All of these attacks on public employees -- and cuts in public sector expenditures in general -- are premised on two myths that are simply untrue.

Myth number one. The Right claims we live in a period of scarcity that requires extreme public sector austerity. They claim "we just can't afford" to pay people like teachers the pensions that we had agreed to in the past, because "America is broke."

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The Case for More Trade Unions and a Popular Front vs Finance Capital – If you Needed One…

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Big Lie: America Doesn't Have #1 Richest Middle-Class in the World...We're Ranked 27th!

By Les Leopold

Progressive America Rising via Alternet.org

June 18, 2013 - America is the richest country on Earth. We have the most millionaires, the most billionaires and our wealthiest citizens have garnered more of the planet's riches than any other group in the world. We even have hedge fund managers who make in one hour as much as the average family makes in 21 years! 

This opulence is supposed to trickle down to the rest of us, improving the lives of everyday Americans. At least that's what free-market cheerleaders repeatedly promise us.

Unfortunately, it's a lie, one of the biggest ever perpetrated on the American people.

Our middle class is falling further and further behind in comparison to the rest of the world. We keep hearing that America is number one. Well, when it comes to middle-class wealth, we're number 27. 

The most telling comparative measurement is median wealth (per adult). It describes the amount of wealth accumulated by the person precisely in the middle of the wealth distribution—50 percent of the adult population has more wealth, while 50 percent has less. You can't get more middle than that.

Wealth is measured by the total sum of all our assets (homes, bank accounts, stocks, bonds etc.) minus our liabilities (outstanding loans and other debts). It the best indicator we have for individual and family prosperity. While the never-ending accumulation of wealth may be wrecking the planet, wealth also provides basic security, especially in a country like ours with such skimpy social programs. Wealth allows us to survive periods of economic turmoil. Wealth allows our children to go to college without incurring crippling debts, or to get help for the down payment on their first homes. As Billie Holiday sings, "God bless the child that's got his own." 

Well, it's a sad song. As the chart below shows, there are 26 other countries with a median wealth higher than ours (and the relative reduction of U.S. median wealth has done nothing to make our economy more sustainable).

Why?

Here's a starter list:

• We don't have real universal healthcare. We pay more and still have poorer health outcomes than all other industrialized countries. Should a serious illness strike, we also can become impoverished.

• Weak labor laws undermine unions and give large corporations more power to keep wages and benefits down. Unions now represent less than 7 percent of all private sector workers, the lowest ever recorded.

• Our minimum wage is pathetic, especially in comparison to other developed nations [3]. (We're # 13.) Nobody can live decently on $7.25 an hour. Our poverty-level minimum wage puts downward pressure on the wages of all working people. And while we secure important victories for a few unpaid sick days, most other developed nations provide a month of guaranteed paid vacations as well as many paid sick days.

• Wall Street is out of control. Once deregulation started 30 years ago, money has gushed to the top as Wall Street was free to find more and more unethical ways to fleece us. 

• Higher education puts our kids into debt. In most other countries higher education is practically tuition-free. Indebted students are not likely to accumulate wealth anytime soon. 

• It's hard to improve your station in life if you're in prison, often due to drug-related charges that don't even exist in other developed nations. In fact, we have the largest prison population in the entire world, and we have the highest percentage of minorities imprisoned. “In major cities across the country, 80% of young African Americans now have criminal records” (from Michelle Alexander's 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness).

• Our tax structures favor the rich and their corporations that no longer pay their fair share. They move money to foreign tax havens, they create and use tax loopholes, and they fight to make sure the source of most of their wealth—capital gains—is taxed at low rates. Meanwhile the rest of us are pressed to make up the difference or suffer deteriorating public services.

• The wealthy dominate politics. Nowhere else in the developed world are the rich and their corporations able to buy elections with such impunity.

• Big Money dominates the media. The real story about how we're getting ripped off is hidden in a blizzard of BS that comes from all the major media outlets...brought to you by....

• America encourages globalization of production so that workers here are in constant competition with the lower-wage workers all over the world as well as with highly automated techonologies.

Is there one cause of the middle-class collapse that rises above all others?

Yes. The International Labor organization produced a remarkable study (Global Wage Report 2012-13) [4] that sorts out the causes of why wages have remained stagnant while elite incomes have soared. The report compares key causal explanations like declining bargaining power of unions, porous social safety nets, globalization, new technologies and financialization. 

Guess which one had the biggest impact on the growing split between the 1 percent and the 99 percent?

Financialization!  

What is that? Economist Gerald Epstein offers us a working definition [5]:

"Financialization means the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies."

This includes such trends as:

• The corporate change during the 1980s to make shareholder value the ultimate goal.

• The deregulation of Wall Street that allowed for the creation of a vast array of new financial instruments for gambling.

• Allowing private equity firm to buy companies, load them up with debt, extract enormous returns, and then kiss them goodbye.

• The growth of hedge funds that suck productive wealth out of the economy.

• The myriad of barely regulated world financial markets that finance the globalization of production, combined with so-called "free trade" agreements.

• The increased share of all corporate profits that go to the financial sector.

• The ever increasing size of too-big-to-fail banks.

• The fact that many of our best students rush to Wall Street instead of careers in science, medicine or education.

In short, financialization is when making money from money becomes more important that providing real goods and services. Here's a chart that says it all. Once we unleashed Wall Street, their salaries shot up, while everyone else's stood still.

Do we still know how to fight!

The carefully researched ILO study provides further proof that Occupy Wall Street was right on the money. OWS succeeded (temporarily), in large part, because it tapped into the deep reservoir of anger toward Wall Street felt by people all over the world. We all know the financiers are screwing us.

Then why didn't OWS turn into a sustained, mass movement to take on Wall Street?

One reason it didn't grow was that the rest of us stood back in deference to the original protestors instead of making the movement our own. As a result, we didn't build a larger movement with the structures needed to take on our financial oligarchs. And until we figure out how to do just that, our nation's wealth will continue to be siphoned away. 

Our hope, I believe, lies in the young people who are engaged each day in fighting for the basic human rights for all manner of working people—temp workers, immigrants, unionized, non-union, gays, lesbians, transgender—as well as those who are fighting to save the planet from environmental destruction. It's all connected.

At some point these deeply committed activists also will understand that financialization both here and abroad stands in the way of justice and puts our planet at risk. When they see the beast clearly, I am confident they will figure out how to slay it. 

The sooner, the better.

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/americas-middle-class-27th-richest

Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/les-leopold
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country
[4] http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_194843.pdf
[5] http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/programs/globalization/financialization/chapter1.pdf
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/middle-class
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

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Want to Bust a Recession? Create More Jobs, Organize More Unions…

Organizing McDonald's and Wal-mart, and Why Austerity Economics Hurts Low-Wage Workers the Most

By Robert Reich
Beaver County Blue via HuffPost

Nov 30, 2012 - What does the drama in Washington over the "fiscal cliff" have to do with strikes and work stoppages among America's lowest-paid workers at Walmart, McDonald's, Burger King, and Domino's Pizza?

Everything.

Jobs are slowly returning to America, but most of them pay lousy wages and low if non-existent benefits. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that seven out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade will be low-wage -- like serving customers at big-box retailers and fast-food chains. That's why the median wage keeps dropping, especially for the 80 percent of the workforce that's paid by the hour.

It also part of the reason why the percent of Americans living below the poverty line has been increasing even as the economy has started to recover -- from 12.3 percent in 2006 to 15 percent in 2011. More than 46 million Americans now live below the poverty line.

Many of them have jobs. The problem is these jobs just don't pay enough to lift their families out of poverty.

So, encouraged by the economic recovery and perhaps also by the election returns, low-wage workers have started to organize.

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President Obama's Six Keys to Victory

Inside the multicultural, center-left coalition that ensured four more years

By Tim Dickinson
Progressive America Rising via Rolling Stone

President Barack Obama has won re-election – his lease on the White House renewed by a multicultural, center-left coalition that ought to give GOP consultants nightmares, producing an electoral college landslide that surprised everyone not named Nate Silver. (The Five Thirty Eight guru's reputation is as golden this morning as SuperPAC kingpin Karl Rove's is tarnished.)

With four more years, Obama can now cement his historic legacy, fully implementing Obamacare, the most ambitious renegotiation of the American social contract since the 1960s. The president broke ground on his second term with an electrifying acceptance speech that recalled the best of 2008's candidate Obama, and 2004's convention Obama. He hit again on the touchstone of his presidency, his belief "that while each of us will pursue our own individual dreams, we are an American family and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people."

This race wasn't close. Obama secured a convincing win of the popular vote. And from his 2008 state-by-state haul, he surrendered only Indiana (which was never truly in play) and North Carolina (a surprise squeaker) to Mitt Romney. Every other swing state – Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and New Hampshire – tipped again into Obama's victory column. When counting is complete, Florida, too, appears poised to go blue.

In the end, Obama's dedicated campaign volunteers proved themselves worth far more than anything the GOP's moneymen could buy. Voters rebuked the mendacious Romney and his villainous platform to lard the rich and destroy the social safety net.

How did team Obama defeat Romney? Here, the six keys to victory:

1) The Turnout Machine I reported on Obama's re-vamped get-out-the-vote machine this spring, previewing the technology that would enable the campaign to network its GOTV operations far beyond campaign offices and into the garages and dorm rooms of its supporters.

At the time, campaign manager Jim Messina and field director Jeremy Bird were making an early, unprecedented investment in the ground game – and that bet paid off like gangbusters. In a contest that couldn't compare to 2008's electricity, the 2012 Obama campaign reproduced – through brute force, dedication and will – a turnout in the swing states that in some cases bested the campaign's remarkable performance of four years ago. Yes, Obama lost North Carolina. But his final tally there was actually 35,000 votes greater than when he won the state in 2008.

2) Younger Voters Sorry, Boomer Nation: President Obama owes his second term to Generation Y. Voters under 30 turned out in greater numbers than senior citizens and broke for Obama over Romney 60-37. Gen X wasn't too shabby, either: Voters 30 to 44 gave Obama a 7 point edge. (Romney, on the other hand, won convincingly among voters 45 and older.) The numbers in Florida are particularly striking. According to exit polling, the Obama campaign not only improved turnout among the under-30 set there, it ran up the margin, too: Young Floridians broke 67-31 for Obama, better than the 61-37 margin over McCain in 2008.

3) The Latino Vote With 4 million more registered voters in 2012 than in 2008, Latinos accounted for one in every ten voters in 2012, and these voters broke for Obama by an epic 71-27 split nationally. That is almost exactly the margin Bill Clinton hung on Bob Dole in 1996, when there were only half as many Hispanic votes. Messina told me earlier in the campaign that he was "obsessed" with the Latino vote, and that reproducing Clinton's numbers against Romney this year would mean Game Over for the Republican. He was absolutely right – particularly in Colorado, where the split was even more lopsided: 75-23, up from 61-38.

4) African-Americans The historic turnout of African-Americans from 2008 held steady in 2012 at 13 percent of the electorate, nationwide. And the Obama campaign actually managed to increase black turnout in pivotal states like Virginia, where one in five voters was African American. Romney earned only 5 percent of that vote, compared to the 8 percent won by John McCain.

5) Ohio Working Stiffs Call it the "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" factor. In Ohio, where the auto industry employs one in eight workers, Obama actually gained ground – 2 points – among high-school educated voters without college degrees, about a quarter of the state's electorate. Compare that to Wisconsin, where Obama lost 6 points among this cohort. Or North Carolina, where the dropoff was 11 points.

6) All the Single Ladies Romney was haunted by a yawning gender gap, particularly among unmarried women, who accounted for 23 percent of voters (up three points from 2008). While Romney himself took awkward pains to reach out to female voters, he was yoked to his running mate's moves to redefine rape, and to the GOP's broader agenda to limit access to not only abortion but birth control. Obama took this voting bloc by a 67-31 margin, nationally, and by nearly identical tallies in Ohio and Paul Ryan's home state of Wisconsin. The intersection of race and gender was especially powerful for the president in states like North Carolina, where black women accounted for 14 percent of the electorate – and 99 out of 100 voted to defeat Mitt Romney.

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A Wider Look at the Chicago Teacher's Strike:

Most Important School Issues are 'Off the Table'

BY JESSE JACKSON
Progressive America Rising via Chicago Sun-Times

September 17, 2012 - The Chicago teachers strike has gotten national attention, much of it presuming that the biggest issues are pay and evaluation. But the Chicago Teachers Union has stated that the two sides have been very close on pay.

And union members have no objection to evaluation; they just want a system not so skewed to standardized, high-stakes testing. These tests aren't particularly good ways to measure teacher performance and, even worse, have the perverse effect of forcing teachers to teach kids to take tests rather than to love learning.

But the big issues for these schools and for the teachers aren't talked about because they are officially "off the table." CTU teachers are most concerned about class size, about adequate facilities, about wraparound services from social workers to nurses, about well-rounded curricula including art and music and languages, about early childhood education that helps children come to school ready to learn.

This isn't fancy stuff. One concern is classrooms that reach temperatures of up to 98 degrees in summer; only 29 percent of schools are air-conditioned. Another is about textbooks for the first day of school. Many of Chicago's elementary and middle schools have no safe place for recess, and few have age-appropriate playground equipment. There are 160 elementary schools without a library; 140 are in the poorer South Side of the city. Even though a staggering 80 percent of inner-city teen boys are exposed to violence, 675 schools share about 205 social workers. Schools often must choose between art and music, if they are lucky enough to have either.

Too often, Chicago is not providing the basics in public education for its most needy children. The CTU published a report detailing these concerns. But under state law, they can't negotiate about them unless their employer agrees -- and neither Mayor Rahm Emanuel nor school officials will consent to enter into negotiations about these crucial conditions.

When the teachers strike ends and children return to class, teachers will get the blame for the performance of the students. But they can't negotiate about crushing poverty, broken families and hard streets that impact the hearts, souls and minds of the children they teach. And teachers can't even negotiate about the quality of the facilities and the educational opportunities provided by the schools where they teach.

It's not surprising that teachers react when a contractually agreed 4 percent pay raise is revoked or the school day and school year are lengthened without negotiations. They are frustrated at the lack of respect paid to the needs of the children they teach. And they are bound to be frustrated at the lack of respect paid to their own contracts.

No one likes teachers strikes. But teachers are on the front line. In a time of spreading poverty and rising hunger, with harsh exploitation of the poor by landlords and payday lenders, poor children too often come to impoverished schools.

Teachers take the rap for poor student performance without having the power to change what gets in the way of learning. Grading teachers on the basis of a machine-graded test cannot substitute for schools with playgrounds and social workers, classes with manageable numbers, or roofs that don't leak.

Poverty, inequality, violence, race and investment matter.

They must be a part of any long-term solution. Keep up with Rev. Jackson and the work of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition at www.rainbowpush.org.

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Elections and the Emerging Popular Front

Victories in Ohio, Mississippi, Maine and Arizona Provide Seven Key Lessons for 2012

By Robert Creamer
Progressive America Rising via Huffington Post

Nov. 9, 2011 - A year ago the Empire struck back. Right Wing money capitalized on anger at the economic stagnation that their own policies caused just two years before. They brought a halt to the hard-won progressive victories that marked the first two years of Barack Obama's presidency.

Last night the progressive forces tested some of the weapons and tactics they will use in next year's full-blown counter offensive. They worked very, very well.

Progressives won key elections in Ohio, Maine, Mississippi, and Arizona.

The importance of yesterday's labor victory in Ohio cannot be overstated. It could well mark a major turning point in the history of the American labor movement -and the future of the American middle class.

The people of Ohio rejected right wing attempts to destroy public sector unions by an astounding 61% to 39%. Progressives in Ohio won 82 out of 88 counties.

In his "concession," the author of the union-stripping bill, Governor John Kasich, looked like a whipped dog. He was.

Last night's victory will have a direct and immediate impact on the livelihoods of thousands of middle class state employees in Ohio. It will stall similar attempts to destroy unions in other states. It will turbo-charge the campaign to oust Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker who jammed a union-stripping measure through his own legislature. And it will massively weaken Kasich and other Republicans in Ohio.

But last night's victory also carried critical lessons for the progressive forces throughout America as we prepare for the crossroads, defining battle of 2012.

Lesson #1: Creating a Movement. The industrial state labor battles that culminated in last night's overwhelming Ohio success transformed the image of unions from a large bureaucratic "special interest" that negotiates for workers and are part of the "establishment" -- into a movement to protect the interests of the American Middle Class.

The Republican Governors who began these battles hoped to make a bold move to destroy union power. In fact, they have succeeded in creating their worst nightmare -- the rebirth of a labor movement.

That is critically important for the future of unions - which by any measure provide the foundation of progressive political power in the United States. It also provides an important lesson for every element of the Progressive community.

These battles put the "movement" back in "labor movement."

And the importance of "movement" can't be overstated. Particularly at a time when people are unhappy with the direction of the country and desperately want change -- they don't want leaders who appear to be embedded parts of the status quo. They want to be part of movements for change.

Movements have three critical characteristics:

They make people feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves.

They make people feel that they themselves can play a significant role in bringing about that larger goal.

They involve "chain reactions" -- they go viral. You don't have to only engage people in movements one by one or one or group by group. They begin to engage each other.

Because they make people feel that they are part of something larger than themselves -- and that they can personally be a part of achieving that larger goal -- movements inspire and empower. And for that reason they give people hope.

To win, Progressives must turn the anger and dissatisfaction with the present into inspiration and hope for the future.

The labor movement turned the battle in Ohio into a fight for the future of America's middle class. It turned the battle into a fight over the dignity of everyday working people -- and their right to have a say in their future. Instead of being about "contracts," it was about "freedom."

Lesson #2: It's much easier to mobilize people to protect what they have than to fight for something to which they aspire.

Every one of the big victories yesterday involved battles that had been framed as attempts by the Right -- or their allies on Wall Street - to take away the rights of everyday Americans.

In Ohio, it was the right to collectively bargain about their future. In Maine, it was the right to same-day voter registration. In Mississippi it was the right to use contraceptives -- once it became clear that the so-called "personhood" amendment was not just about abortion, but ultimately about a woman's right to use birth control. In Arizona, it was the rights of Latino Americans.

And of course, that's why the Republicans' plan to privatize Social Security and eliminate Medicare are so toxic for them in the election next year.

Among referenda yesterday, the one progressive setback came in the largely symbolic vote -- once again in Ohio -- against the Health Care Reform Act's mandate to buy insurance. The very same people who had voted against taking away the rights of their neighbors to join a union -- also voted against being "forced" to buy health insurance.

The whole issue of the "mandate" is the major card the Right has played against the critically important Health Care Reform Act. Of course the whole issue could have been framed differently. The "mandate" to start paying Medicare premiums when you're sixty-five isn't framed as a "mandate." People do it, both because they really want to get on Medicare, and because if they wait to pay premiums until they need it, their premiums go way up.

That's why a Public Option was so popular with the voters. You got to choose to join something you wanted. But it's also the way we should have framed the overall "mandate" to get insurance -- with premium penalties if you fail to "opt in."

Once the health care law becomes a fact on the ground that benefits ordinary people, every day, it will certainly become very popular. But that will wait until 2014 when most of its provisions go into effect. Once it does goes into effect, if they try to take away those benefits and the Right will run into a firestorm of opposition.

Of course if Romney is the Republican candidate next year, we don't have to worry about the "mandate" issue at all. In fact, our attitude should be "go ahead, make my day." It will be simple to neutralize any attack by Romney or Super-Pacs on Democrats about "mandates" by simply pointing out that the entire question is just one more example of how Romney has no core values -- since he authored and passed the Massachusetts health care law built around "mandates." In the end, Romney's lack of core values is a much more powerful message than anything having to do with "mandates."

Lesson #3: Framing the battle is key. In every one of these issue referenda, Progressives won the framing battle.

In Ohio, Progressives made the fight into a battle for the rights of the middle class -- part of the overarching battle between the 99% and the 1%.

In Maine, Progressives made the battle into a fight over the right to register to vote. Of course the right wing frame was that eliminating same-day registration provided protection against "voter fraud." That was pretty hard to sustain given the fact that there had been exactly two instances of "voter fraud" involving same-day registration in 28 years.

The Mississippi "personhood amendment" was framed as a battle over the rights of women to use birth control - not to make "miscarriage" a crime.

Lesson #4: Turnout is king. In Virginia, a Republican candidate leads his Democratic opponent by only 86 votes, so a recount will determine whether the Republicans there take control of the State Senate.

Turnout in the Virginia contests was low.

In Ohio, by contrast, 400,000 more voters went to the polls yesterday than in the elections in 2010. That's one big reason why Progressives won.

And it wasn't just inspiration and great messaging that turned them out. Rank and file union members and Progressives of all sorts conducted massive get out the vote efforts in every corner of the state.

After all, victory isn't just about great strategy, mostly it's about nuts and bolts -- it's about great execution. In Ohio they had both.

In Arizona, the Latino community mobilized to defeat the author of Arizona's "papers please" law, State Senator Russell Pearce. He lost a recall election, by seven points, 52.4% to 45.4%. The Pearce defeat is just one more example of how the Republicans play the "immigration" card at their peril -- and how important the Latino vote will be to the outcome next year in critical states like New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Florida -- and Arizona.

Pearce didn't count on Latinos going out to vote. They did.

Lesson #5: Progressives win when we stand up straight. We won last night where we stood proudly for progressive values -- planted the flag -- mobilized our forces and took the offensive.

People in America are not looking for leaders who apologize for their progressive beliefs or are willing to compromise those principles even before they enter the fight. They want leaders who will fight for the middle class, and fight for change; who stand up against the big Wall Street banks and the CEO class that they believe - correctly - have siphoned off the nation's wealth, and whose greed has caused the economy to collapse.

People are willing to compromise when it seems to advance the common good -- but only after their leaders have done everything in their power to defend their interests -- and have mobilized them to defend their own interests.

Lesson #6: The face of the battle in Ohio was your neighbor.

The Republicans bet that they could make public employees the "Welfare Queens" of our time. They bet that they could make public employees the scapegoats for all that has gone wrong with the American economy -- that they could divide the middle class against itself.

They bet wrong.

Turned out to be impossible to convince everyday Americans that firefighters, cops, and teachers were greedy villains. Normal voters recognized them as their neighbors -- as people just like themselves.

The 99% versus the 1% frame is critical to making clear that the problem with our economy has nothing to do with how much teachers, or firefighters, or steel workers, or home care workers, or Social Security recipients make for a living. It has everything to do with growing economic inequality, the exploding financial sector, and an unproductive class of speculators and gamblers who don't make anything of value but siphon off all of our increased productivity.

Lesson #7: Progressives win when we frame the issue as a moral choice.

In Ohio, Progressives did not frame the debate as a choice between two sets of policies and programs. They posed the question as a choice between two different visions of the future.

It was a choice between an America with a strong, vibrant, empowered middle class, where every generation can look forward to more opportunity than the one that went before - or, a society with a tiny wealthy elite and a massive population of powerless workers who do their bidding.

It was posed as a choice between a society where we're all in this together -- where we look out for each other and take responsibility for our future as a country -- or as a society where we're all in this alone -- where only the strong, or the clever, or the ruthless can thrive.

If given a clear, compelling choice, Americans will chose a progressive vision of the future every time.

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com. He is a partner in Democracy Partners and a Senior Strategist for Americans United for Change. Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer.

Follow Robert Creamer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rbcreamer

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Growing Roots ‘From Below and to the Left’

Staughton Lynd Links 'Occupy'

with 'Solidarity of Time' in Ohio

From 'The Business Journal’, 
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio, Oct 17, 2011

If there is one constant in the last 40 years of political activism in the Mahoning Valley, it's the presence of attorney and historian Staughton Lynd and his wife Alice.

The Lynds marched with civil rights leaders in the 1960s and were among the anti-war protesters gathered outside the Democratic Party's 1968 convention in Chicago. The couple moved to the Mahoning Valley in the 1970s and were front-and-center in the worker ownership movement that attempted to reopen the area's shuttered steel mills. In the years that followed steel's exodus, they became active in the Solidarity USA movement that focused on the loss of steel retirees' benefits, and then began studying the area's new prison industry and advocating for death-row inmates.

Both addressed the crowd assembled Saturday for the Occupy Youngstown protest downtown Staughton Lynd read from a seven-page speech he prepared.

Here is the full text of his remarks:

I want to say a few words about three things: 1. Solidarity; 2. Demands; 3. Life among the 99 PerCent.

1. SOLIDARITY

We feel solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, and rejoice that they maintain their physical presence at their chosen park.

We feel solidarity with the many, many Occupy This Town and Occupy That Town that have sprung up, spontaneously, all over the United States: all over this land that suddenly seems more like We feel solidarity with the occupation protests taking place today all over the world.

There is also solidarity over time. As a representative of Survivors Of the Sixties -- acronym, SOS -- I feel this kind of solidarity strongly.

Many of you have heard of Abbie Hoffman. He was in Mississippi, in 1967 he promoted the levitation of the Pentagon, and together with Jerry Rubin he started the Yippies.

I met Abbie twice. The first time was during the Chicago Democratic Party Convention, when I saw him wearing a black T shirt, lying face down on a cot, in a Chicago city jail. The second time, more than twenty years later, was in a Franciscan church in Managua, Nicaragua. There is a part of the Catholic liturgy known as the "peace of God" when each congregant greets every other. At the church of St. Mary of the Angels one circled the floor, greeting elderly women, small of stature, many holding photographs of their sons who had been killed in the contra war.

Suddenly a bearded figure bounded across the floor from the other side of the church and embraced me. It was Abbie.

Not long afterwards he committed suicide. Tom Hayden commented: "We are all waiting for the new Movement. I guess Abbie couldn't wait any longer."

Try to imagine what the past three weeks, this moment of awakening, this vista of new hope, would have meant to the trailblazers of the Sixties, to Dave Dellinger and Howard Zinn, to Stokely Carmichael and Jim Forman, to Barbara Deming.

Think also of Youngstown, Ohio, in the 1970s and 1980s, and the men and women who fought to substitute worker-community ownership for capitalist greed. Think of Bishop James Malone, of Ed Mann who led us down the hill to occupy the US Steel administration building, and his comrade, John Barbero. Think of Delores Hrycyk, wife of an LTV Steel retiree. Long before facebook and twitter, when LTV declared bankruptcy Delores called all the local radio stations and said there would be a retiree rally, here in Federal plaza, just as today at noon on Saturday. A thousand people came. A retiree direct action movement, Solidarity USA, was born.

Think of Bob Vasquez, president of Steelworkers local union 1330 at US Steel. Bob said: We lost, but my members told me over and over again that we fought, and because we fought, we preserved our dignity.

Finally, in the 1990s there came, first, the Zapatista insurrection in Chiapas, and then, from 1999 to 2001, what Naomi Klein has described as "the last time a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power." Back then I felt that our protest activity was "summit-hopping." Two young men stayed overnight in our basement who had been in Seattle, went back to Chicago but were unsure what to do next, and were on their way to Quebec.

Speaking to the general assembly at Occupy Wall Street, Naomi Klein described how the new movement is different:

"Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, has chosen a fixed target. And you have put no end date on your presence here. This is wise. Only when you stay put can you grow roots. This is crucial. It is a fact of the information age that too many movements spring up like beautiful flowers but quickly die off. It's because they don't have roots. And they don't have long term plans for how they are going to sustain themselves. So when storms come, they get washed away.

"Being horizontal and deeply democratic is wonderful. But these principles are compatible with the hard work of building structures and institutions that are sturdy enough to weather the storms ahead. I have great faith that this will happen."

II. DEMANDS

As of course you know, the pundits, the commentators, the talking heads, have one fundamental criticism of Occupy Wall Street: What are its demands? How can you have a Movement without a specific program of things you are demanding?

They know not what they ask! Speaking for myself, I don't demand a list of specifics, I demand a qualitatively different kind of society. I seek the Kingdom of God on earth. I want to go back to the Book of Leviticus, Chapter 25, declare a Year of Jubilee and wipe out all debts. But since I am a practical, moderate sort of fellow, I say: Let's begin by declaring an end to student indebtedness, so that young people can pursue their dreams rather than go to work for corporate law firms in order to pay down their loans.

I think Jubilee is a practical program. Twenty years ago, my wife Alice and I were in some of the few Syrian villages that remain in the Golan Heights, occupied in 1967 by the State of Israel. People there make a living by growing apples. And the villagers told us: "We don't understand this idea of fixed property boundaries. Families vary in size from one generation to the next, and therefore, we adjust the amount of land allotted to a particular family, depending on the number of mouths to be fed."

At present, although few of us live in gated communities, this whole society lives with gated imaginations. Each of us is encouraged to build a little island of personal financial security surrounded by an electrified fence. The fence keeps others out and keeps each of us imprisoned.

But OK, we might agree to postpone the Kingdom of God for a little while longer. It's already been delayed 2000 years. And there are a couple of things that need to be done right now, in Ohio, that we should demand.

The first, of course, is to vote No on Issue 2 and repeal Senate Bill 5.

The second is to abolish the death penalty. Friends, the ice is breaking. Not long ago, Ohio executed more men every year than any other state except Texas. In 2010, Ohio was the only state in the nation that deliberately killed more human beings than it had murdered the year before. Presently, with to be sure a pause for Christmas, executions in Ohio are scheduled every month or two into the year 2013.

But the ice is breaking. Paul Pfeifer, the senior judge on the Ohio Supreme Court who helped to draft Ohio's capital punishment statute, has come out for abolishing the death penalty. Terry Collins, who as head of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction witnessed more than thirty executions, has come out for abolishing the death penalty. Former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro and his wife have written a book about miscarriages of justice in Ohio courts. There has been introduced in the Ohio House of Representatives a bill, H.B. 160, to abolish the death penalty and substitute life imprisonment without parole. I can only say: Come, Lord, quickly come.

These are objectives of highest priority: repeal Senate Bill 5, abolish the death penalty.

But I want to make a final observation about demands. When our critics use the word "demands," they mean: Tell some legislator or administrator what you want him or her to do for you. Gather your own initiative, your self-activity, and your righteous outrage into a bundle, and give it to someone else to act in your place. Tell somebody else what you want them to do for you.

But I say: Yes, we should vote. Yes, we should support this bill and oppose that one. Yes, we should give President Obama some pressure from what Subcomandante Marcos calls "below and to the Left," and thereby give the President some excuse to do what, But this is not our highest priority. Our most urgent objective is not to give someone else the authority to act on our behalf. Our greatest need is not to hand over to somebody other than ourselves the responsibility to remake the world.

No, we need to remake the world ourselves, right now, from below and to the Left. I am appalled at the poverty of imagination that has been shown in the last thirty years in the Mahoning Valley regarding what is to be done. A "shrinking city"? What kind of development strategy is that for a community that is already losing its young people? Tearing down buildings without knowing what to put in their place? Give me a break. A bulldozer can do that. It is not a plan of action, a vision, worthy of human beings.

The Chamber of Commerce, besides sponsoring Senate Bill 5 without a democratic vote of its membership, is anxious to obliterate the memory of Youngstown's militant labor history. There used to be a plaque, right here in Federal plaza, commemorating the Little Steel Strike of 1937. When the streets through downtown were reconfigured for the fifth or sixth time, the plaque disappeared. Don't worry Staughton, I am told, it's in a museum. Yeah, I answer, and that's precisely the problem.

The fact is that new ideas are up and about in the Mahoning Valley but not in corporate boardrooms or in the corridors of power. Quickly, one example of a program that needs to be supported and developed is the idea of providing much of the Valley's food with produce grown locally. Let me be blunt: This is a wonderful idea. But it must become an activity that offers full-time employment to young people trying to grow up and survive in the inner city, or it will remain a middle-class fad, and those young people will leave the area in desperation or wind up behind bars.

III. LIFE AMONG THE 99 PERCENT

I am running out of time so I will just say this one more thing. In the late 1960s it was the thing to do to call police officers "pigs." I objected at the time, and I strongly object now. When I visit the state's first supermaximum security prison on Youngstown-Hubbard Road, often a correctional officer will call out: "Hello, Staughton! Remember me? I used to be your client." Steelworkers and truck drivers who have been unable to find work wind up in the Valley's many new prisons.

If we wish truly to be the 99 percent, we cannot call each other names. Nurses, teachers, and firemen want to repeal Senate Bill 5, but so do policemen and correctional officers.

Barbara Deming had a good way of putting it. She said: "Nature gives us two hands. With one of them, we must hold up a barrier to those we perceive as oppressors, and say: No further, or only over my body. With the other hand we must reach out to those same persons and say: Join us."

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‘Occupy!’ Wave Hits the Windy City

Thousands in Chicago

Protest Financial Industry

 By Mary Wisniewski and Ann Saphir

CHICAGO, Oct. 10, 2011 (Reuters) — Thousands of people including teachers, religious leaders and union workers marched in downtown Chicago on Monday to voice mounting anger over joblessness and income inequality in protests that snarled rush-hour traffic.

Chanting "We are the 99 percent" and "Tax, tax, tax the rich," some demonstrators marched on Michigan Avenue and gathered outside the Chicago Art Institute where a U.S. futures industry trade group was holding an evening cocktail reception.

Others marched outside a luxury hotel near to where the American Mortgage Bankers Association was holding a meeting downtown.

Five separate "feeder marches" -- which converged into one giant march up Michigan Ave -- were inspired by, but not formally affiliated with, the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in New York last month and sparked smaller protests nationwide.

Police estimated a crowd of around 3,000 protesters at the events, organized by the "Stand Up Chicago" coalition with the stated goal of reclaiming "our jobs, our homes and our schools," according to the group's website.

"We really want to highlight the role the financial industry has played," said Adam Kader of Arise Chicago, an interfaith workers' rights group and part of the coalition.

"They're here in our backyard, so this is the time to send a message about how we're really hurting," he added, saying the demonstration would focus on foreclosures, unemployment and lack of municipal funding for key services.

Police arrested 26 demonstrators, many wearing Chicago Teachers Union T-shirts, who linked arms and sat down in Monroe Street as they chanted "Save our schools, save our homes!" They were ticketed and released. Another demonstrator was arrested and faces a charge of battery on a police officer.

Nearby, a crowd chanted "Shame on you!" to members of the Futures Industry Association who peered out from a balcony of the Chicago Art Institute, where they attended a party.

Several protesters paid $2,245 per badge to gain admission to the Mortgage Bankers Association event, organizers said.

One protester, dressed in a suit, got to a microphone during a panel discussion and asked Michael Heid, president of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, a top national mortgage lender: "How do you sleep at night?"

The man asked Heid how could he even visit the Chicago area since so many been affected by foreclosures locally.

Heid answered that he felt like he was before a congressional panel with such a tough line of questioning.

Mortgage Bankers Association CEO David Stevens had advised conference attendees in the morning not to "engage or confront" the protesters, and to use pedestrian tunnels and other means to leave the building if needed.

"We all recognize that our industry faces a trust deficit with policymakers and the public, and that people in our industry contributed to the events that led to the financial crisis," the Association said in a statement.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, speaking at an evening event on social trends, said the anti-Wall Street protests were tied to a lack of attention on jobs by Washington politicians.

"It grows out of the anger people feel. People want focus and attention and passion on jobs," Reed said.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, at the same event, said: "There is a major economic restructuring going on where the middle class in this country are feeling an angst they haven't felt."

ARRIVING BY THE BUSLOAD

On the streets, despite mostly orderly marching and chants, anger was the common element among the crowds of protesters.

"I've got loads of loans," said Wedad Yassin, a student at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois, who was among the protesters. She said she wanted a fairer tax system that "stops putting our taxes towards war" and invests in education.

"Obama talks about there's going to be some answers to the education problem, but I don't see it," Yassin said.

Protesters arrived by the busload, including many Chicago Teachers Union members who climbed off yellow school buses that parked near police barricades.

Andromachi Koumbis, an elementary school teacher, said she showed up because she was unhappy with what she termed "tampering" with the Chicago teachers labor contract that will add hours to the school day. "I don't mind longer hours if it's done right," she said. "It's funny that they say kids first, and then they bail out big corporations."

Cary Bunnett, a 52-year-old Chicago electrician, was at the Mortgage Bankers protest and she claimed Bank of America had mishandled her mortgage modification on her $2,500-a-month home loan. She said she was laid off due to a lack of building activity, which cut her income in half.

"You don't see any cranes around downtown Chicago anymore," she said. "There's no work for me. What am I supposed to do?"

"I've stopped making my house payment because I just can't do it anymore, but they won't give me the modification they say I qualify for," Bunnett said.

The protests included lighter moments. At the corner of Monroe Street and Michigan Ave, horseback-mounted police smiled when demonstrators chanted "Police need a raise!"

More demonstrations were planned for the next three days.

Roderick Drew, spokesman for the city's law department, said protesters had worked with police, who aimed to allow free speech without impairing people's ability to get around.

Chicago has already several weeks of daily protests outside the Federal Reserve Bank by "Occupy Chicago," an echo of the larger Wall Street protests. Occupy Chicago demonstrators participated with the Stand Up Chicago marchers on Monday.

(Writing by Mary Wisniewski and Matthew Lewis; Reporting by Ann Saphir, Margaret Chadbourn, Joseph Rauch, Karin Matz, Jonathan Spicer and Eric Johnson; Editing by Greg McCune and Peter Bohan)

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Class Justice: One Cartoon, 1000 Words

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AFL-CIO to Obama: This Is What a Real Jobs Plan Looks Like

By Mike Hall

AFL-CIO Blog via Progressive America Rising

The nation’s ailing economy needs a prescription powerful enough to heal the jobs crisis and America’s working families need an independent political voice that’s not beholden to parties or politicians, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

At a Labor Day press conference this afternoon, Trumka unveiled a six-point “America Wants to Work” jobs and economy initiative “that is serious and reflects the scale of the crisis we face.”  The plan includes:

    Rebuilding the nation’s transportation and energy infrastructure;
     Reviving U.S. manufacturing and ending the exportation of U.S. jobs;
     --  Putting people to work in local communities;
    Helping states and local governments to prevent layoffs and cuts to public services;
    Extending unemployment insurance (UI) benefits and helping homeowners keep their homes; and
    Reforming Wall Street so it helps Main Street create jobs.

Here’s  detailed look:

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Time to Get Serious About Full Employment

Yes, We Need a Jobs Program, But One

That Doesn't Tinker Around the Edges

 

By Carl Davidson
Keep On Keepin' On

Our regional daily newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, to its credit, came out with an editorial today, Aug. 22, 2011, urging President Obama to push for a substantial jobs program over Republican opposition.

"Action on jobs: Obama must push hard to get people back to work" is the headline, and a key point stresses "Mr. Obama now needs to offer proposals equal to the size of the problem. That means bold strokes, not half-measures. If his Republican antagonists in Congress are determined to stand in the way of getting Americans back to work, the president must say so publicly -- and then go over their heads to enlist the nation in his effort."

Terrific, a good framing of the question. Unfortunately, however, once you get into the substance of the piece, it turns into a muddle. The Post-Gazette offers up a hodgepodge of proposals that tinker around the edges of the problem-more tax cuts and credits for jobs created, more unemployment benefits, and oddly, more trade deals, even though these deals mostly result in net job losses.

Here's the heart of the matter. In a down economy, jobs are created by increasing demand, by more customers with bigger orders coming to a firm's doors. The problem is that consumer demand has taken a nose dive when the credit bubble burst. People don't have money to spend. They're cutting back on everything, and trying to unload their debt. This means business-to-business orders shrink as well. Companies may be cash-rich and have high profits, but with no increase in orders or customers at their door, they aren't likely to hire people to do nothing just to get a tax credit.

This is where government has to become the key customer. It has to make huge productive purchases for local work and local materials to build productive infrastructure-county-owned green energy plants, new and improved schools, modernized locks and dams, Medicare for all, investment in young students and veterans like we did with the GI Bill, investment in research in new industries, and so on.

Most important, to work well, it can't be nickel-and-dimed to death. It has to be on the scale of the expenditures for World War 2. That's when the 'multiplier effect' can kick in, and related growth in manufacturing can take off in turn. And it has to be paid for by going to where the most appropriate money is, imposing a financial transaction tax on unproductive and destabilizing speculation by Wall Street.

The best the P-G does on this matter is to support Obama's proposal for an 'Infrastructure Bank,' but urges him to find a way to bypass a GOP roadblock in Congress.

But even that is too passive. It says, in effect, here's a small pot of money. If you want to repair some roads, come and get some.

What we really need is something like the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority and Works Progress Administration, but on steroids, a TVA-WPA-CCC 2.0. We need to pass John Conyer's HR 870 Full employment Bill. We need the Dept. of Energy and the Dept. of Labor to go to every county in the country with a fully funded proposal to build new green energy wind farms and solar power arrays as public energy utilities, hiring local workers at union scale, with no obstacles to a union election. And that's just for starters.

Yes, we need a serious jobs program. But it's time for everyone who utters that phrase to get serious themselves. Why? Because it's going to take a massive upsurge in class struggle to get it by removing those standing in the way.

[Carl Davidson is a Steelworker Associate and a retired computer technician living in Beaver County.  His 'Keep On Keepin' On' column appears in Beaver County Blue, website of the 4th CD Progressive Democrats of America.]

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‘My City of Ruins’ from Bruce Springsteen, Telling It Like It Is…Pass it on!

 

It's time for a Main Street Contract for the American People. National Nurses United has embarked on a campaign to reverse national priorities and policies that have placed the interests of Wall Street over the crisis facing American families today. The goal is to chart a new contract for the American people — for a better life today and a more secure future for our children and future generations. www.mainstreetcontract.org

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Fighting for Our Future & Honoring Martin Luther King With Solidarity

April 4 'We Are One' Events:

Uniting Labor and Community

For an Upsurge in Class War

By Carl Davidson
Beaver County Blue

Working-class solidarity actions involving thousands of workers were among the lead news items in the headlines in nearly 1200 cities and town around the country over the April 4 weekend. The Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Eastern Ohio 'rust belt' region was no exception.

The occasion commemorated the anniversary of the April 4, 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during his effort to help striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee win union recognition. The entire U.S. labor movement seized the time to organize public protest against the outrageous rightwing attacks on worker rights in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio. The AFL-CIO knows full well that more attacks are coming, and its 'We Are One' campaign for the day was a grassroots dress rehearsal and consciousness-raising effort to prepare both its troops and its community-based allies for more battles to come.

"We are one! We are one!' and 'What's Disgusting? Union busting!' were among the chants echoing off the concrete and glass walls of downtown Pittsburgh. Somewhere between 500 and 1000 marchers waved V-signs at passersby in cars and buses--but more often than in a long time, one saw a sea of the more militant clenched fist salutes as well. As usual, different contingents of workers wore their color coded T-Shirts for the day-camouflage for the UMWA, dark blue for the Steelworkers, red for Unite Here! hotel workers, and purple for SEIU service workers.

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Street Heat Dept: Our Egypt Is Beginning

Wisconsin Students and

Professors Join Thousands

Rallying Vs, Governor's Plan

Andy Manis, AP Images

U. of Wisconsin employees and students were among the state workers who thronged the State Capitol in Madison on Tuesday to protest legislation that would end or curtail their collective-bargaining rights and increase the share workers pay for benefits.

By Jack Stripling

Progressive America Rising via Chronicle of Higher Education

Madison, Feb 15, 2011 - Thousands of protesters gathered on the steps of the Wisconsin State Capitol here on Tuesday to voice their opposition to a fast-moving proposal that would strip the union bargaining rights for University of Wisconsin faculty and staff members, while almost eliminating bargaining rights for nearly all other state workers, including graduate students.

Chanting "We're not gonna take it," throngs of state employees and their supporters rallied for more than two hours on snow-covered grounds, before moving their protests inside the Capitol, in defiance of Gov. Scott Walker's "budget repair" bill. Apart from undoing hard-fought 2009 legislation that gave university faculty authorization to unionize, the bill would cut employee retirement and health benefits.

The Republican governor and his supporters say the sweeping proposal will close the state's current $137-million budget shortfall, while beginning to shrink a projected $3.6-billion gap for the next biennium. Opponents, however, describe the plan as an unabashed ideological effort to cripple unions in a state with a strong history of organized labor.

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Brit Students Turn up the Street Heat

 

Police tactics at tuition fees protest

questioned after further angry clashes

By Esther Addley, Adam Gabbatt and Vikram Dodd

From The Guardian, UK

Protesters clashed with police in London tonight after the coalition won the vote to increase tuition fees for students in England to up to £9,000 per year.

The plans faced bitter criticism not only from Labour MPs but from Lib Dem and Tory backbenchers, but the move was carried by 323 votes to 302 in what has proved to be the most testing parliamentary vote to date for the coalition government.

The result narrowed the coalition government's notional majority of 84 to 21, in a vote which took place as thousands of protesters opposed to the rise in fees clashed with police in the streets outside parliament.

Police entered Parliament Square tonight to stop protesting students from vandalising the Treasury building. A number of students started using concrete blocks and metal poles to smash windows of the building on Great George Street while being contained inside the square.

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Leo Gerard on The GOP 'No!' Party: Kissing the Rich, Dissing the Jobless

Republicans Kiss the Rich; Diss the Jobless

Leo W. Gerard

International President, United Steelworkers

Posted: July 19, 2010 11:09 AM

A brutal competition pits worker against worker continually now in this country. Five unemployed people vie with each other for each available job. It's like a cruel game of musical chairs, with five desperate competitors for one seat.

Workers who've lost cars to repossession and homes to foreclosure run around frantically trying to get that one job. When the music stops, four disheartened, still-unemployed people move to other viscous cycles of five struggling to win one available job.

Republicans watching this blame the 14.6 million unemployed Americans for the inadequate number of chairs. They've called the unemployed lazy and refused to extend unemployment compensation. Meanwhile, the GOP is demanding an extension of Bush's tax cuts for the rich.

To the GOP, the rich are deserving. Republicans see the unemployed as leeches -- not as victims of filthy-rich, banksters who destroyed the economy, not as the stalwart citizens whose tax money Bush used to bail out Wall Street. To Republicans, the unemployed - along with the un-rich - deserve only disrespect.

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