TGIF: LABOR’S WAR WITH CORPORATE POWER, MLADIC NABBED AT LAST

May 27th, 2011 - by: danny

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SOLIDARITY FOREVER?

We have all been reading about the resurgence of class warfare in America, especially in Wisconsin, where unions are fighting for their lives. The focus is on public employees and the battle has been a fierce one, with Republican Governor Scott Walker citing financial pressures as a cover to impose the political final solution on labor, the backbone of the Democratic Party, by stripping them of their right to bargain collectively.

Yesterday, the Gov and his backers, including the billionaire Koch brothers, suffered a setback in their war on workers— AP reported “Wisconsin’s law taking away nearly all collective bargaining rights from most public workers was struck down Thursday by a circuit court judge but the ruling will not be the final say in the union fight that brought tens of thousands of protesters to the Capitol earlier this year.”

Zealot Scotty, the Gov of all cheeseheads, had no comment.

Related: Questionable Highway Projects Escape Budget Scrutiny in Wisconsin

A $125 million “road to nowhere.” Another $100+ million for a bypass around a town of 2,711. Welcome to the era of “fiscal austerity” in Gov. Scott Walker’s Wisconsin.

And then there’s this: State to phase out Wisconsin Covenant aid program

The state’s highest bipartisan budget committee approved a plan from the governor to begin phasing out a program aimed at encouraging students from low-income backgrounds to begin planning for college before entering high school.

Members of the Joint Finance Committee voted to support Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to end the Wisconsin Covenant program, despite objections from Democratic representatives.

The program, which enrolls eighth graders from across the state, ensures that students that follow the covenant’s guidelines and maintain a B average in high school will be able to attend a University of Wisconsin System, private or technical college campus in the state.

Labor’s Challenge

This issue is hardly all that labor has to worry about, as its membership declines amidst sustained unemployment. The AFL-CIO has been reduced to talking tough but not doing much to lead a serious fight back. This week they are suggesting that the Democrats not take their money for granted but as the election approaches, that tune is, judging by the past, likely to change.

On Thursday, I had an expected lunch with Chris Townsend, the political director of the United Electrical Workers (UE), the union that I was part of and served as a shop steward for when I worked at WBCN in Boston. Thanks to our UE membership and the solidarity in the ranks, we were able to fight back against the company that bought the station and fired most of us. A three week strike back in 1979 showed them we would not be bullied and we won the strike and all our people were reinstated. Support from listeners and advertisers help us save the station that meant so much to so many.

Since then, the UE and most of the old-line industrial unions have taken major hits but are holding on. The union earned its spurs battling red-baiting by the likes of Ronald Reagan at General Electric but now confronts a different environment with outsourcing claiming so many good jobs and a structured corporate reality. GE and the UE, and other unions like IUE and the UAW are locked into negotiations here in New York, with the company led by Jeffrey R. Immelt, known as an outsourcer extraordinaire, but who is also the head of President Obama’s Jobs and Competitive Council at the White House. His annual salary is a mere $15.2 million. Being competitive seems to be a term only applied to workers, who are being told to reduce wages and benefits.

GE is a tough company to go up against. Their lawyers trot out Power Point presentations to show how much they pay in taxes, not the $68 billion they were holding onto in cash or their plans to buy back $11 billion in stock and raise dividends and change the health care plan so that workers will have to pay more for less in the name of “choice,” or lower pensions etc. etc.

On the pension front, the companies start by seeking to “freeze” current employees, then cut off new hires, freeze everyone else, and ultimately terminate the plan.

Alas, very few people — including those in progressive and partisan media — pay attention to the dirty details that are destroying what’s left of the middle class.

Few credit the unions who are fighting back. Michael Moore’s film on Capitalism, which I liked, covered a UE sit-in and strike in Chicago, but didn’t even mention the union by name.

Funny isn’t it, how these negotiations are not really being covered in the press either, perhaps because the economic conditions for most workers are so desperate that a strike would be a disaster. If you want more info on what the UE is up against and how its fighting back check out their website. http://www.ueunion.org/unity2011.html

Richard Wolff, Portside, The Crisis Enters Year Five

The current capitalist global crisis began with the severe
contraction in the housing markets in mid-2007. Therefore
welcome to Year Five. This inventory of where things stand
may begin with the good news: the major banks, the stock
market, and corporate profits have largely or completely
“recovered” from the lows they reached early in 2009. The US
dollar has fallen sharply against many currencies of
countries with which the US trades and that has enabled US
exports to rebound from their crisis lows.

However, the bad news is what prevails notwithstanding the
political and media hypes about “recovery.” The most widely
cited unemployment rate remains at 9 % for workers without
jobs but looking. If instead we use the more indicative U-6
unemployment statistic of the US Labor Department’s Bureau
of Labor Statistics, then the rate is 15%.

NYT: Illegal Workers: Court Upholds Faulting Hirers

A 5-to-3 ruling appeared to endorse vigorous state efforts to punish employers who intentionally hire illegal workers.

Secret 2008 Fed Loans Uncovered Ã¢â‚¬Â¦ So should we come down on the Fed, too?

NakedCapitalism.com reports on McClatchey Report on a Wikileaks Disclosure: Speculators Drove Oil Prices

Kevin Hall of McClatchy wrote about Wikileaks releases showing that the Saudis were concerned about oil market speculation leading to unduly high prices in 2007 and 2008. In 2008, we wrote that the Saudis said they did not see tightness in the market, and they also warned that prices were excessive. The Wikileaks thus confirm that these statements were not just PR, to shift blame from them as the historical swing producer, but were consistent with their private communications.

Newt Gingrich and Tiffanys

OTHER NEWS OF NOTE

AlJazeera reports: Ratko Mladic, Europe’s most wanted man and the former head of the Bosnian Serb army during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, was arrested in Serbia on charges of genocide and other crimes against humanity.

Mladic was indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in 1995 and charged with the killing, deportation and forcible transfer of non-Serbs as part of a wider ethnic cleansing campaign in Bosnia in 1992-3. The indictment against him charges that he was the mastermind behind Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II. In the Srebrenica massacre, more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered.

He was one of two remaining fugitives still wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The other is Goran Hadzic, a former leader of ethnic Serbs in Croatia, believed to be hiding in Serbia.

CIA GOING BACK IN

WP: CIA to search bin Laden compound

The arrangement would allow the CIA for the first time to enter a complex that it had previously scrutinized only from a distance.

Query: Will they also be able to clean up a crime scene?

House Passes Bill Authorizing Worldwide War As Momentum Builds Against It

Sherwood Ross: Prison Overcrowding is Not Just A California Problem

“Monday’s Supreme Court decision ordering California to reduce its overcrowded prisons by 30,000 inmates is as welcome as a ray of sunlight streaming through prison bars. State officials have known for decades of the horrific, if not criminal, neglect of prisoners. Five years ago, then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called their plight an “emergency.” Some “emergency!” Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 ruling, may have been swayed by photographs of inmates jammed into “telephone booth-sized cages without toilets”—conditions so dreadful that a lower court that earlier heard the case found it to be “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.” This, according to The New York Times, which supported the court’s ruling in an editorial.

“It’s just another day in the Incarceration Society. In California alone, 33 adult jails warehouse 143,000 inmates. The U.S. has the dubious distinction of ranking first in prison population, ahead of all other nations with 2.3-million convicts behind bars. USA has more mentally ill in its jails where they are not getting proper treatment than in its asylums, where they might be restored to health. As in California, everywhere one sees States slashing funds for the rehabilitation of prisoners—whether it’s for their education, mental health, retraining, drug counseling, job search, or eventual readmission into society. Prisons make inmates worse by tossing ever more of them into isolation cells where, if they were not mentally distressed before incarceration, they almost surely will be driven mad during it. It was in this way that President Obama allowed Bradley Manning to be abused for nearly a year in solitary over the findings and advice of Army psychiatrists.

SEX SCANDAL DOMINATES NEWS

The Strauss-Kahn Affair is still going hot and heavy in the press as he moved into a luxury town house New York’s Tribeca and NY added more heavyweight prosecutors to the team that will try to incarcerate him. Feminists are organizing a petition to support the alleged victim in his case, and another French politician is being accused of sexual crimes.

MEDIA TENOR CALLS IT THE “PERFECT SCANDAL”

Zurich, May 24, 2011. The prosecution of Dominique Strauss-Kahn has brought extraordinary awareness to an issue which, until now, has played out primarily only on the domestic media stage. According to international TV analysis by Media Tenor International, in the first four weeks of May coverage of rape and sexual harassment reached a new peak, surpassing coverage of other aspects of sexual violence by a wide margin.

Strauss-Kahn’s arrest fascinated TV journalists all over the world. Commentators and politicians declared themselves to be shocked at the successful head of the International Monetary Fund and front-runner for the French presidency in 2012 being accused of such a lack of self-control. Strauss-Kahn, of course, has escaped media scrutiny in the past, particularly in regard to an “improper relationship” with an IMF staffer in 2008; this may have contributed to a feeling of invincibility on the part of Strauss-Kahn.

The combination of celebrity and political implications made this topic much more salient than revelations of mass rape in war zones in the Congo. “In general, crime news looks more at domestic cases,” says Dr. Christian Kolmer, head of political research at Media Tenor International. Between January 2010 and May 2011 only 28.9% of all news on rape and sexual harassment looked beyond domestic borders in international TV news.

“The sexual abuse of children in Catholic institutions was covered much more intensively in Germany and the UK than in US news, although the impact on the Catholic Church has been even more marked in the States,” explains Dr. Kolmer. Italian news devoted the highest share of reporting towards sexual crimes, but here again 94% of this Italian TV news about rape dealt with instances within the nation’s borders.

As the trial of JÃƒÂ¶rg Kachelmann in Germany shows, Strauss-Kahn will be making headlines for a long time to come. Kachelmann, a Swiss weatherman, was arrested on rape charges in March 2010, although the final verdict has not yet come in from the German court. However, a whole arsenal of unflattering details has been made public over the last 14 months. The alleged victim and the defendant have suffered severe damage to their reputations, which bodes ill for the former head of the IMF.

Related: ‘N.Y. Official to Ex-IMF Chief: Welcome – Now Pay Up’

AS THE G8 CONVENES IN FRANCE

FT: Arab democracies win G8 aid pledge … The world’s richest countries have agreed a multibillion-dollar aid package for Tunisia and Egypt, the two countries at the forefront of toppling autocratic regimes in the Arab spring. Members of the Group of Eight economic powers, led by the US, pledged at their summit in Deauville, France, to provide a combination of debt relief, aid and assistance…

FT: Internet entrepreneurs confronted their would-be regulators in Deauville on Thursday as the leaders of Facebook, Google, and other technology companies warned the G8 leaders to tread carefully in attempting to police the web.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, and Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, said that mooted rules on copyright or privacy could stymie innovation and inhibit the free expression that fueled the recent Arab uprisings.

Usually fierce competitors, the two groups joined forces to resist proposed new rules to “civilise” the internet, championed by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the meeting’s host.
In response, Mr Sarkozy told the executives to support greater rule of law on the web in such a way that innovation would not be harmed.

Earlier in the week he warned of the “anarchy” of the internet in its current form, telling the e-G8 Forum in Paris on Tuesday: “You cannot escape a minimum set of rules.”

The discussion – the first time the technology sector has been represented at the meeting of the G8 group of leading nations – comes as governments in the US and UK consider new schemes to force internet companies to block websites that facilitate online piracy.

Mr Zuckerberg sought to explain to national leaders that measures to combat perceived pitfalls of the online world, such as illegal downloading of copyrighted material, could have unintended consequences.

“On the one hand you have the internet which is this really powerful force for giving people a voice,” he said. “Now it’s tempting to say that on security or privacy you can go towards the most extreme [regulatory] option and maintain all the value that we currently recognise. I’m worried personally that’s not true,” said the 27-year-old entrepreneur.

“The industry as a whole is concerned that premature regulation … can shut off whole new industries, whole new opportunities, whole new innovations,” Mr Schmidt said.

The proposals put to the G8 were based on discussions in Paris earlier this week at the e-G8, a gathering of internet entrepreneurs and policymakers convened by Mr Sarkozy.

Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA): G8, European Austerity and Protests

Campaign For America’s Future, TERRANCE HEATH: Too Big To Tell: An Epic Without Heroes

I won’t watch a movie if I’ve missed the beginning, and I hate missing endings so much that I won’t start watching a movie I can’t see through to the end. As a writer, the beginning and end are two of the most important parts of the story to me. They answer two important important questions in any story: “How did we get into this?” and “How do we get out of this?” Monday night, I watched Too Big To Fail – HBO’s eponymous adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book – from start to finish. Yet, I still ended up feeling like I’d missed the two most important parts of the story: the beginning and the end. Thus, I never got answers to those important questions: How did we get into this mess? How do we get out of this mess?

Comments: Bernie Sanders on Extension of Patriot Act

“I voted against extending the Patriot Act today for the same reason I voted against enacting it in 2001: it gives the government far too much power to spy on innocent United States citizens and provides for very little oversight or disclosure. While we must aggressively pursue international terrorists and all of those who would do us harm, we must do it in a way that protects the Constitution and the civil liberties which make us proud to be Americans.”

“As a result of a partisan impasse, no amendments to improve the bill were allowed. Sanders intended to offer an amendment supported by the American Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Booksellers which would have protected the rights of Americans who use libraries and bookstores. The amendment would have prevented the government from gaining access to Americans’ reading records in libraries and bookstores without a traditional search warrant.”

David Rovics sends along the lyrics of a new song, “Israeli Geography 101″

Israeli Geography 101

Netanyahu is in a tizzy, his eyes are filled with hate
He said the problem with those Arabs is they won’t recognize a Jewish state
He said those Palestinians just won’t come around
To accepting Jewish rule on their holy ground
He said the Arabs don’t accept their new neighbors in the ‘hood
Those ungrateful regimes don’t respect us as they should
Well I don’t want to upset anyone or to unduly take to task
But if a state wants recognition it seems reasonable to ask
Where are your borders drawn in black and white?
Do they include the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights?

I heard him speaking to the Congress, getting his 29th standing o
He said we need our security from those terrorists, don’t you know
If you want security, I wonder if you’d say it’s true
That the Palestinians should have security too
‘Cause if you want security it seems only fair
That you should also grant it to the people over there
And maybe you could answer, though the question is a sin
Just where your country ends and your neighbors’ lands begin
Tell me, where are your borders drawn in black and white?
Do they include the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights?

Media

EJC: Huffington Post launches Canadian edition

The Huffington Post launched a Canadian edition of the popular news and opinion website on Thursday in its first international expansion. Huffington said HuffPost Canada, which is located at huffingtonpost.ca, will feature Canadian politics and business, Canadian issues and perspectives and bloggers “sharing their opinions on all things Canadian.” The Huffington Post attracts more than 25 million unique visitors a month and received 1.5 million Canadian visitors in March. The Huffington Post offers a lively mix of news, entertainment, opinion and blogs submitted by academics, entertainment figures, politicians and others. The Huffington Post, which was purchased by AOL in February for $315 million, plans to launch a British edition, HuffPost United Kingdom, on July 7. (AFP)

Letter

Michael Oakland writes:

Daniel,

…thank you thank you for this great article and for keeping the heat up on these master thieves, who will only do it again and again, teaching their offspring the same. They need be jailed and counseled as “Greeeedaholics”. The latest rampant social disease.

I remember you from the early Boston days.

Your comments welcome: write Dissector@mediachannel.org

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