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As is well known, there have been mammoth efforts to recall six Republican state senators in Wisconsin who, earlier this year, voted to end public employee collective bargaining rights; yesterday, ThinkProgress provided as good a backgrounder as any on the specific races involved.

Now, the results are in, and they’re mixed — which is to say, they’re not good enough: two senators were recalled, but that fell one short of what was needed to wrest control of the state Senate from the GOP.

Before going on, let me emphasize: my hat is absolutely off to the many good volunteers who worked in these campaigns.  What they achieved was remarkable.

Having said that, though, the more I read about these elections after the fact, the more I wonder about the strategic wisdom of the whole thing.  The elections the GOP re-won were all in what were more or less GOP strongholds to begin with.  A whole lot of time, money, and effort later, they pretty much still are.  Under these circumstances, to emphasize how much of an uphill struggle it was always going to be (see, e.g., Howie Klein, digby, or the John Nichols interview on Democracy Now!) is not even cold comfort, it’s cause for concern: were frontal assaults on well held positions like these really the best plan?

Of the losing challengers, Clark came closest (lost 52-48%), but that’s still a pretty definite loss, and no one else came close at all. As far as I can tell, the thinking seemed to be (1) everyone who was really mad in February and March would stay mad for 5 months, (2) the GOP would be asleep on Election Day and not turn out their voters, too, all (3) in GOP-leaning districts.  The strategy amounted to absolutely needing three tough away game wins out of six.  Getting two was great, but the overall result was not a win. So it was a loss.

There was an alternative, discussed at the time both by labor leaders in Wisconsin (both AFL-CIO and IWW) and in the national media: a general strike, i.e., a “a strike involving workers across multiple trades or industries that involves enough workers to cause serious economic disruption.”

Yes, that might have lost some kind of ‘high ground’ among independents, conservatives, and even some “liberals” — but nearly anything runs that risk.  Yes, it’s technically illegal (under the Taft-Hartley Act — passed over Harry Truman’s veto in 1947)  — but technically so are other forms of civil disobedience.  When there’s a full-blown emergency, it’s appropriate to take emergency measures — and do so smartly.  One could imagine calling general strike for two days; then quit; then do it again; then quit again. Etc.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, many of the key GOP legislators who voted to end collective bargaining for public unions in Wisconsin planned on coming to DC for a March 16 fundraiser — essentially sneaking into DC to pick up their checks for their sneak vote against labor.  A lot of different groups — AFL-CIO, MoveOn, Public Campaign — started telling their supporters to show up at the site of the fundraiser: the BGR lobbying firm headquarters, at 601 13th St NW in Washington DC.

I was among those who joined the demonstration.  As ever, I brought along my camera and video camera.

At first we just walked up and down in front of the building, I’d guess maybe five or six hundred people all told.  Then all of a sudden a guy standing at the door starts waving people in, so everybody so inclined crowded inside, chanting, blowing whistles, etc.

What greeted us was an all but perfect stage setting for a confrontation with the ruling class, something out of Bertolt Brecht’s wildest dreams: a marble and glass indoor atrium, lined with palm trees below, stretching up for ten stories above, each floor with balconies at which startled denizens of the building gathered to view the impromptu occupation. A heroic statue* stood at the center of a stairway reaching up several stories; a “Respect Workers Rights” banner was quickly hung on the balustrade in front of it. It developed that three or four hundred people can really raise a pretty deafening ruckus if they are so inclined.

The organizers showed a deft touch with the whole thing in that they did *not* stay in any one place for long.  After a few remarks by an AFL-CIO organizers, a Wisconsin teacher, and a Sheet Metal Worker union official, the word was OK, we’re leaving now, clean up, leave it better than you found it.

At this point many hundred more had gathered outside, and the DC police decided to just cordon off the block and give it over to the protest.  So that’s what happened — but after a few minutes the crowd proceeded away from that as well, heading straight to the White House.  We got there in about ten minutes, stood there doing many of the same chants — “What’s disgusting? Union busting” etc. — and then left *again* along a diagonal path through Lafayette Park, away from the White House.  I had no idea where they were headed and tagged along.  But when they got to H Street they doubled back heading east — towards the US Chamber of Commerce.  And by golly if they didn’t head straight in there too!  So I did as well.

This time the place was smaller, a regular lobby maybe forty feet by forty feet, with several dozen of us inside, one guy banging a drum for all he was worth, everyone else chanting “hey hey ho ho” and “people united will never be defeated” and whatnot.

One security guy was apparently steamed about it all — and decided he’d pull a fast one on us and close and lock the doors with us still on the inside.  I started to leave, but he blocked me — and he was a *big* guy, bound and determined to keep me from leaving and on bottling up everyone else behind me.   At no time did I hear him or anyone else request that we leave, though I may have missed that part, I was maybe the 30th person to go in.

By the time he was trying to shut the doors, there were about three or four dozen of us inside.  One guy ducked under his arm, he tried to stop that (so he wasn’t just trying to block further entrants). A bunch of us started to press out, me in the lead (I didn’t want to get trapped in there).  A bit of a nonviolent scrum ensued, him and one or two security guards on the outside trying to close the doors on us, 4 or 5 of us pushing out, me getting pushed from both sides — kind of the cork in the bottle — thinking hmm, this is the proverbial tight squeeze.  But our push won, the door stayed open.  On the outside, people began chanting “let them out,” and as far as I know everyone did stream out — and dispersed, this time for good.

In just a few minutes my friend Tim and I had left as well.  We headed over to a bar, and celebrated the day with some beers and fish and chips.  I gave away my “We Are One” ATU sign — which someone else had given to me — to some tourists who asked me for it.

I’ll post some videos below.  The first two are fairly raw footage — i.e., sometimes I forgot the camcorder was on and you’ll see the bag or my feet or the world turned upside down.  But in a way, it was, and the topsy turvy videography almost gets across the spirit of the moment as well as anything else.  Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Other accounts of the protest:

• Wisconsin Republicans Get Special Welcome in Washington (Hall, AFL-CIO)
• Large, dynamic solidarity protest in DC outside Wisconsin GOP fundraiser (Chris Bowers, DailyKos)
• DC protesters help Wisconsin GOP feel at home by occupying atrium of the Homer Building (Dane101)
• Hundreds of Wisconsin Protesters Crash GOP Fundraiser (Loudis, Slatest)
• Union Protesters March Through DC Streets, Storm Wisconsin Republican Fundraiser (Cohan, FOX5)

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* The statue in the center really was magnificent, it seemed all but designed for the occasion. It turns out it’s called “Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves,” by Donald De Lue; perhaps sadly, the original is at the Normandy American military cemetery in France. I like to think this was its happiest day in many a year.

These are the leaders of America, not bought and paid for pols - not Walker, not Boehner. Not Reid or Schumer. Not Gingrich. Not Palin. And not Obama either, so carefully running behind this uprising, at a distance seemingly calibrated to the nearest sixteenth of an inch.

These people are the leaders of America. Tell me I’m wrong. You can not. I will not believe you.

Wisconsin “Budget Repair Bill” Protest from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

Wisconsin “Budget Repair Bill” Protest Pt 2 from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

WI “Budget Repair Bill” Protest (Feb 20-24?) Pt. 3 from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

Films by UW media specialist Matt Wisniewski; backstory here and here. Meanwhile, a simple joke is making the rounds on Facebook:

“A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, ‘Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.’”

Over the weekend, unions and progressive organizations mobilized “Save the American Dream” events across the country to show support for Wisconsin public unions in their fight with Governor Walker.  On Saturday, I joined the rally at Dupont Circle in downtown Washington DC.

Plenty has been written about the confrontation in Wisconsin, and I’ll take up some of that below.

But this post is mainly about relaying the solidarity and notably high spirits that I felt among the demonstrators — at least a thousand of them, by my estimate, maybe more — and in myself for that matter.  At a time when it’s tempting for even some working class people say “I’m hurting, so they should hurt too” — and of course all but irresistible for mainstream media to give them a megaphone for that — it was great and important to feel like we were answering a call on Saturday, and to be with others who felt the same way.

Will that have an impact?  I don’t know — but not doing anything certainly would have had the wrong one.

As to the issue: clearly I agree with the labor movement for circling the wagons against Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s assault on collective bargaining, or I wouldn’t have gone to the rally.   The problem is well known; the labor movement as a whole is in undeserved disrepute, and the public sector unions are both a last bastion of that movement and — as has been repeated ad nauseam — ones indirectly employed by taxpayers rather than corporations.

For those who decry high public sector pension plans, I say first of all: why exactly? What is it about paying people well, as agreed on in a contract, for the jobs they have done?  Was a gun held to anyone’s head when the agreement was signed?  What is it about contractual obligations you don’t understand? I thought that was an underpinning of capitalism; does it suddenly not count when it’s a mere employee’s union?  Ezra Klein has relayed a study pointing out that “Wisconsin public-sector workers face an annual compensation penalty of 11%. Adjusting for the slightly fewer hours worked per week on average, these public workers still face a compensation penalty of 5% for choosing to work in the public sector. [...]  The residents of the various states, when all is said and done, will probably have gotten the work at a steep discount. They’ll force a renegotiation of the contracts and blame overprivileged public employees for resisting shared sacrifice. Which gets to the heart of what this is: A form of default.”

Rick Ungar at Forbes Magazine makes the point similarly: “If the Wisconsin governor and state legislature were to be honest, they would correctly frame this issue. They are not, in fact, asking state employees to make a larger contribution to their pension and benefits programs as that would not be possible- the employees are already paying 100% of the contributions. What they are actually asking is that the employees take a pay cut.”

But we lose sight of the forest for the trees and even the weeds by focusing on Wisconsin pension plans.  It’s not about that.  It’s about unionbusting pure and simple.  Walker confirmed that in the hilarious, notorious sting pulled off by the Buffalo Beast’s Ian Murphy (calling in pretending to be billionaire rightwinger David Koch), in emotionally recalling a final planning meeting where he compared himself to Ronald Reagan breaking the air traffic controllers union in 1981.  As Chris Hayes and Naomi Klein pointed out in a memorable MSNBC segment, we’re essentially facing a “Shock Doctrine USA”: a manufactured crisis leading to the looting and crippling of the public sector — as well as the crippling of solidarity with each other, and of a common purpose beyond looking out for number one.

Van Jones speaking to union supporters, Dupont Circle

From Wisconsin Solidarity Rally, Feb 26, 2011

I return to the rally, where former Obama White House official Van Jones made some interesting remarks — about the “Tea Party.”  Responding to widespread boos when he named the group, he held up his hand and said “no, no — they are our brothers and sisters too.  They just don’t know it yet.” And then he went on to say that he respected the Tea Party for one thing: that on the heels of defeat in 2008, they didn’t decide to “come crawling to the center” but instead redoubled their efforts for the principles they believed in.  And just as the crowd saw where he was going with that, he said it: now it’s our turn to do the same thing.  No crawling to the center — stand on principle.

Bucky Badger sez: On Wisconsin unions!

And no throwing fellow progressives under the bus.  A final great thing about the DC rally was that the site and time had actually been registered by a different coalition — one resisting cuts to women’s health and reproductive health funding –  and was generously shared by them.  Likewise, there were environmentalists with Sierra Club posters, and civil liberties advocates like Mary Beth Tinker and Johnny Barnes (ACLU-NCA) on the scene.  People from all facets of the American left are banding together to fight back.   It makes me hopeful that we can win this one, and start winning more.

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EDITS, 2/28: Chris Hayes, not Hedges, David Koch, not Richard.

A closer look at Rand Paul’s campaign contributors

In The Fall and Rise of Rand Paul (Jonathan Miller, Details Magazine), Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul reveals appalling ignorance about the environmental calamity of mountaintop removal mining (MTR):

“I think they should name it something better,” he says. “The top ends up flatter, but we’re not talking about Mount Everest. We’re talking about these little knobby hills that are everywhere out here. And I’ve seen the reclaimed lands. One of them is 800 acres, with a sports complex on it, elk roaming, covered in grass.” Most people, he continues, “would say the land is of enhanced value, because now you can build on it.”

“Let’s let you decide what to do with your land,” he says. “Really, it’s a private-property issue.”

…something between indifference and diffidence about the role corporate wrongdoing played in the Big Branch mine disaster earlier this year:

“Is there a certain amount of accidents and unfortunate things that do happen, no matter what the regulations are?” Paul says at the Harlan Center, in response to a question about the Big Branch disaster. “The bottom line is I’m not an expert, so don’t give me the power in Washington to be making rules. You live here, and you have to work in the mines. You’d try to make good rules to protect your people here. If you don’t, I’m thinking that no one will apply for those jobs. I know that doesn’t sound…” Here he stumbles, trying to parse his words properly but only presaging his campaign misstep. “I want to be compassionate,” he concludes, “and I’m sorry for what happened, but I wonder: Was it just an accident?”

…and some astonishing ignorance about the state he hopes to represent as a Senator:

Rand Paul and I are trying to remember why Harlan, Kentucky might be famous. That’s where Paul is driving me, on a coiling back road through the low green mountains of the state’s southeastern corner, in his big black GMC Yukon festooned with RON PAUL 2008 and RAND PAUL 2010 stickers. Something about Harlan has lodged itself in my brain the way a shard of barbecue gets stuck in one’s teeth, and I’ve asked Paul for help. “I don’t know,” he says in an elusive accent that’s not quite southern and not quite not-southern. The town of Hazard is nearby, he notes: “It’s famous for, like, The Dukes of Hazzard.” (links added)

But it’s the way he summed up his libertarian purism for a meeting in Harlan, Kentucky that I’d like to focus on particularly.  Again, it was in reference to mountaintop removal; here’s how Nola Sizemore of the Harlan Daily Enterprise reported his remarks:

I think some of these people complaining about [mountaintop removal] need to come and take a look at it. I say, if you don’t live here, it’s none of your business. Ask the people who live here about it.

Paul said he can’t see why residents of Louisville and Lexington should have any say in what people do with their land in other areas. He said he hadn’t heard any complaints from people who live here. (emphasis added)

Maybe because the ones who are against MTR know it’s a waste of time showing up at your events, Mr. Paul.  At any rate, they’d be right to suspect he doesn’t think it’s any of their business either, once they got a look at where his campaign contributions are coming from.  As Greg Skilling of the Louisville Independent Examiner puts it,

“Rand Paul believes almost everything should be handled at the state and local level - everything except for campaign fundraising.  A quick look at Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports filed by Rand Paul’s campaign and it becomes immediately clear that Kentuckians are vastly outnumbered on the donor list by people who live outside the Bluegrass State. Like his father Ron, Rand Paul has used the Internet to successfully solicit out-of-state campaign contributions from individuals.“

Skilling identifies out-of-state PAC contributions from Sarah Palin’s PAC, Duke Energy, and the like, but left his analysis at “vastly outnumbered.”  So I had a closer look at those FEC reports, and specifically at the breakout of individual vs. committee and in-state versus out-of-state contributions.  The resulting summary sheet can be seen here.*

The upshot: over 76% of all contributions to Rand Paul’s Senate campaign — nearly 75% of individual contributions and nearly 92% of political action committee contributions –  are from out of state.  Those donors don’t live in Kentucky either, but I guess Rand Paul figures it’s their business anyway who should be its next senator.  Or maybe he doesn’t, but takes their silver anyway:

Unamuno’s “San Manuel Bueno, Mártir” is, he says, “a great short story. It’s about a priest who doesn’t really believe in God but feels he needs to protect his parishioners from this disbelief, that it’s too much for them.” This calls to mind another favorite story of Paul’s, Somerset Maugham’s “Rain.” “Once again about a conflicted priest,” he says. Priests in a crisis of faith, I point out, appears to be a theme with him. Lightly, he says, “I went to a Baptist college. I had to have an outlet.”

There’s something especially galling about so-called libertarian candidates who — whodathunkit? — wind up consistently protecting the interests of big business in the guise of protecting local control or individual rights.

Do I have a problem with out of state contributions to a Senate candidate?  Of course not — I do it myself all the time.  But I don’t go around saying “if you don’t live here, it’s none of your business” either.  I know people in other states who have to work in unsafe mines or live downstream from MTR runoff need help from individuals like me, and from the federal government, if they’re to have a chance against well-financed corporations — and their glib spokesmen like Rand Paul.

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* I can send the full workbook to readers on request. In a nutshell, the FEC data must be copied in pieces and pasted to an Excel workbook as HTML. Functions of the form “=IF(MID($B21,1,2)=”KY”,$D20,0)” then isolate the two-letter state designation for individual contributions, and tally the contributor or his/her dollar contribution to a new column — “KY” (Kentucky) or “elsewhere”. Addresses were not provided in the initial committee tallies, but there were few enough that I could find the home state of each committee “by hand.”

From the AFL-CIO:

This week, 223 representatives signed on as co-sponsors of the Employee Free Choice Act. They are leading the way in the fight to restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life. It is imperative that we thank these representatives for siding with working families instead of Big Business lobbyists.

Thank you, Representative Van Hollen. As one of the cosponsors listed in the preamble of the act itself, and as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, I hope he’ll continue to lead the charge for this important legislation in the days and weeks ahead.

As is well known, the bill seeks to “amend the National Labor Relations Act to establish an efficient system to enable employees to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to provide for mandatory injunctions for unfair labor practices during organizing efforts, and for other purposes.”

The means for that efficient system is the so-called “card check” method of organizing a union, in which the National Labor Relations Board is directed to immediately certify a union as the representative for workers when “a majority of the employees in a unit appropriate for bargaining has signed valid authorizations designating the individual or labor organization specified in the petition as their bargaining representative” when the workers are not already represented.

Read the rest of this entry »

Make no mistake — whatever the header to this e-mail may imply, I’m writing to *support* the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), better known as “Card Check” legislation. Please vote “YES” on this sensible, well designed legislation.

Workers deserve a fair workplace, which includes the right to vote “yes” or “no” on unionization by secret ballot — or the right to organize by other means when corporate anti-union policies make it necessary. Card Check legislation *enhances* worker’s rights by giving them another way to organize.  Opponents cite potential fears of workers under card check, but studies show workers actually feel less coerced by co-workers in “majority signup” situations than in secret ballot ones.

Americans cherish the secret ballot in *fair* elections. But as you know, all too often elections deciding unionization are anything but fair; companies can propagandize their employees at will, and often threaten them with workplace shutdowns or other punitive measures. Imagine if a mayor could really threaten moving the city if he lost the election!  Would that be a fair election?  Of course not!

As EFCA opponents like to say, the secret ballot is a cornerstone of our democracy. But what they *don’t* like to say is that card check does nothing to change that, since at any time, if 30 percent of the workers want an election, they can have one. (And once they have a union, workers also vote to elect their union representatives.)

I urge you to *support Card Check legislation*, which will even the playing field between unorganized workers and their company bosses.  And more unionized workers means a more prosperous America. I look forward to hearing where you stand on this important matter. Thank you!  God bless America!

Substitute this message to your Senators and Representative for the anti-EFCA boilerplate text here — pass it on!

For more information about EFCA, click here (my blog post), here (AFL-CIO) or here (Americans Rights at Work).

Blogging will be sparse at best. Meanwhile some items worth paying attention to:

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Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News (Glenn Greenwald) — Greenwald makes a pretty good case that the government’s case against Bruce Ivins (the Fort Detrick germ lab scientist who committed suicide), the m.o. of the anthrax terrorist, and ABC News’s false insistence at the time that lab results pointed to Iraq all add up to a case that urgently requires Congressional investigation. Whoever gave ABC the false “bentonite additive” story has a lot to answer for — very arguably the Iraq war.

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Wal-Mart mobilizing against EFCA, pressuring “associates” on how to vote — That’s illegal, and that’s arguably what they’re doing by raising Obama’s support for the Employee Free Choice Act in in-store meetings. The charge is based on a Wall Street Journal article “Wal-Mart Warns of Democratic Win“:

The Wal-Mart human-resources managers who run the meetings don’t specifically tell attendees how to vote in November’s election, but make it clear that voting for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama would be tantamount to inviting unions in, according to Wal-Mart employees who attended gatherings in Maryland, Missouri and other states.

The main link leads to “Americans Rights At Work,” where you can add your name to a petition urging the FEC to investigate Wal-Mart for potential election law violations.

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Last and definitely not least, the ACLU is sounding the alarm about a jaw-dropping legislative initiative by Bush and Attorney General Mukasey:

After years of litigation, the Supreme Court recently ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that detainees held at Guantánamo have a right to challenge their detention through habeas corpus — the ancient freedom that protects people from being thrown in prison illegally, with no help, no end in sight and no due process. Habeas proceedings could allow detainees to bring up the fact that the evidence that the government has against them came from hearsay, or even torture and abuse. Courts could also release people who are detained indefinitely without charge. Attorney General Michael Mukasey wants to make sure neither of these things happen. That’s why he’s calling on Congress to authorize indefinite detention through a new declaration of armed conflict. He is also proposing that Congress subvert the right of habeas corpus with a new scheme to hide the Bush administration’s past wrongdoing — an action that would undermine the constitutional guarantee of due process and conceal systemic torture and abuse of detainees.

More here. Join the ACLU petition to your Representative and Senators here urging them to oppose this misbegotten idea. Thanks to Mick Arran and the Talking Dog for sounding the alarm as well. As Mick says: “Please let’s not give them this one.”

washingtonpostunfair.com. Click here
to see the other ads, and radio and TV spots.

Advertisements like the one to the right have sprouted in the Metro Center subway station in downtown Washington. At issue is that the Washington Post is practicing some of what its op-ed royalists preach, by executing a grab for a Communications Workers of America (CWA) local pension fund. CWA Local 14201 has set up a WashingtonPostUnfair.com web site where they explain what’s going on:

Right now, the production workers have a national pension plan administered jointly by a board of employer and union trustees. But the Post is now demanding the right to withdraw from that plan, as well as requesting the unilateral right to decide what to do with the money in the plan. That money has been diverted from the workers pay raises over the last 30 years. It belongs to the workers. That’s right - the Post is asking to take pension money that has been coming out of its workers’ paychecks.

The pension fund was almost entirely funded by withdrawals from workers paychecks over the years. Now I understand why the Washington Post likes to sound the alarm bell about Social Security — raiding it is no more than they’d been planning themselves.

Wise guys and recent graduates of Econ 101 will probably think deep thoughts about the declining newspaper business to themselves, but Washington Post made $325 million in profits last year, and the management got itself a nice little “Incentive Compensation Plan” that was amended in 2005 “to increase (i) the maximum amount that can be given as an annual incentive compensation award to a participant in a given year, and (ii) the maximum payout of Performance Units at the end of an Award Cycle to a participant, in each case to $5 million.”

Meanwhile, CWA workers haven’t had a raise in 5 years — and the Post hasn’t even been willing to negotiate with them for four years. What are they hoping for? Your help :

Let the Post know you want them to treat their workers with fairness and respect. If you have five minutes to spare, can call the Post at (202) 334-6000. Ask to speak to CEO Don Graham. If you have one minute to spare, use the form below to send an email directly to the Post’s Ombudsman. The Ombudsman serves as the readers’ advocate; and attends to questions, comments and complaints about the paper.

The CWA aren’t calling for a boycott of the Washington Post — yet. On the other hand, why pay 50 cents for the Post when you can get the Washington Times for a quarter? They’re virtually indistinguishable in every other way.

…an occasional review of further developments in issues, news, or other items I’ve written about before.

Re Jackson Diehl’s “The House’s Ottoman Agenda”, 03/05/07; 90 years ago: Armenian genocide begins, 04/25/05 — Back in March, the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl wrote an exceptionally snotty op-ed deriding the value and wisdom of H.Res. 106, the Armenian Genocide Resolution, saying it “pandered” to Armenian Americans and was “almost comically heavy handed.” Rubbish; see for yourself, and ask yourself what you would write if the murder of 1.5 million countrymen went unacknowledged for 90 years. Now the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) reports Majority of US House Members support Armenian Genocide Resolution (link added):

In gaining 218 cosponsors, we have demonstrated that a majority of the House strongly supports recognizing the facts of the Armenian Genocide,” said lead sponsor, Congressman Adam Schiff. “While there are still survivors left, we feel a great sense of urgency in calling attention to the attempted murder of an entire people. Our failure to acknowledge these dark chapters of history prevents us from taking more effective action against ongoing genocides, like Darfur.”

Bravo to Congressman Schiff and his 217 cosponsors, including Chris Van Hollen (D-MD-8) who, in an e-mailed response to my support of H.Res. 106, noted that he sponsored a similar measure in the Maryland legislature before coming to Congress. Meanwhile: House 218, Diehl 0.

Support the Employee Free Choice Act, 06/20/07 — As is well known, the Employee Free Choice Act was defeated when Senate failed by 9 votes (51-48) to reach the 60 needed to end debate on the measure. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t thank the representatives and senators who supported it. Locally, it was a clean sweep: Representative Chris Van Hollen and Senators Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin all voted for the bill. At “Free State Politics,” Isaac Smith provides a video clip of Senator Cardin’s floor speech, in which Cardin rebutted the canard that the Act prohibited secret ballot elections. From the official transcript of Cardin’s remarks:

“I listened again to what the Republican leader said about secret ballots, and I know there is a disconnect here, because, again, this legislation doesn’t get rid of that. What this legislation tries to say is we want workers rights to be adhered to. If the majority wants to have a union, they should be able to have a union without intimidation from the employer. And if the majority does not want to have a union, they should be able to do that without intimidation from the union.”

Earlier in his remarks, Cardin was also very good at spelling out what the stakes were for the country as a whole — union and non-union:

Real wages for U.S. workers are lower today than they were in 1973, even though productivity has increased by 80 percent. We do pride ourselves that each generation of Americans will live a more prosperous life than in previous generations. That will not be true for a large number of Americans. Today, wages are not keeping up with productivity. There is a problem in the workforce, and it affects all of us in this country. We need to do something about it.

Real median household income in my own State of Maryland has declined by 2.1 percent from 2000 to 2005. We find a widening of the income gap in America, a widening of the wealth gap in America. We should be moving to narrow that gap, not to see it continue to increase. We have a problem we need to deal with, and this legislation, H.R. 800, gives us an opportunity to debate these issues and determine whether the decline of unionization is one of the factors in contributing to these difficult economic trends.

CEOs are now paid 411 times what workers are paid in America–411 times. In 1990, it was bad enough at 107 times–once again, a widening of the gap. I remember when I was in college talking about the strength of America. The strength of America was that in all the western economic powers we had the narrowest gap between wealth and income. Now we have the widest. We need to do something about it. Unionization helps bridge that gap.

What has happened to unionization? In 1973, 24 percent of Maryland workers worked in a company that offered union representation. In 2006, that number dropped to 13 percent.

Pay attention to the Smithfield Tar Heel walk-out, 11/17/2006; New ICE age for labor?, 02/02/2007 — The Smithfield Tar Heel meat packing plant in North Carolina has been the scene of repeated walkouts and labor strife; the conflict has turned even uglier with Smithfield’s apparent reliance on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to pressure immigrant workers in the midst of a labor dispute.* But what Smithfield, other employers, and their misguided Republican allies in Congress and the White House are likely to find out is that if you stonewall, punish, and harass your workers for trying to improve their appalling working conditions (according to a Human Rights Watch report), those workers just going to have to up the ante.

To wit, Justice at Smithfield and the Union of Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) are now calling for a kind of surgical boycott of Smithfield Tar Heel products. Consumers are urged to take a close look at Smithfield products, and if they’re from the Tar Heel plant, contact the store manager and urge those products to be withdrawn. How can you tell it’s a Smithfield Tar Heel product? Except for a “Queenella” brand, all carry the Smithfield label — and all have a particular identification code. Justice at Smithfield:

You can identify the Tar Heel plant products with these codes:
EST 79C on bacon and EST 18079 on all other pork products.

(Red added to make you look.) The codes are part of the “use by” information and/or USDA inspection information on the meat packaging; see J-at-S’s “Find the Meat” document for examples.

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* ICE guidelines supposedly preclude raids on workplaces in the midst of a labor dispute. That’s sensible, since otherwise they’d be essentially encouraging employers to hire illegal workers, only to have ICE be their company cops once a strike is looming. But a recent study shows ICE’s real attitude is “guidelines, shmidelines”: fully 54% of ICE workplace raids take place at workplaces with active labor disputes.

EDIT, UPDATE, 3/10/08: 51-48 vote link added. Worth noting — Obama and Clinton both voted to end debate on the bill, McCain did not.