Turning Michigan into Colombia: The Global Assault on Workers and the Prospects for Solidarity
This article by Kevin Young is re-posted from ZNet.
December 11 marked a major defeat for working people in the United States, as a lame-duck legislature made Michigan the twenty-fourth state to pass so-called “right-to-work” legislation. The Orwellian term “right to work” was popularized by employers starting in the 1940s as they sought to roll back the historic gains of labor during the prior decade. Right-to-work (RTW) laws prohibit contracts that require all workers to contribute to the costs of union representation, encouraging “free-riding” and making it much more difficult for unions to survive (unions remain legally bound to represent all workers within a bargaining unit, whether or not they pay their fair share of dues). Michigan’s RTW legislation sends an ominous signal for workers everywhere given the state’s historic reputation as a union stronghold and the fact that a mass protest of at least 10,000 workers at the state capitol in Lansing on December 11 did not succeed in preventing passage.
One of those 10,000 workers was visiting from Colombia, which has long been a poster child for the sort of neoliberal sweatshop economy desired by corporations and international financial institutions. Jorge Parra came to Detroit in September to confront his former employer, General Motors, for firing him and over 200 other autoworkers from its plant in Bogotá after they suffered workplace injuries and illnesses. Parra had sewn his mouth shut and begun a hunger strike on November 20 to publicize the workers’ demand for direct negotiations with GM. Reacting to the news about Michigan’s RTW legislation, Parra says that “I see a clear connection between what’s happening here and what has happened in Colombia.” He notes that the RTW laws in this country “are the same ones that have weakened union activity” in Colombia.
Parra’s comment highlights the transnational nature of the attack on working people and points to the imperative of cross-border solidarity. Parra understands on a profound level what most unions in this country have only started to learn: that “it’s all one fight.” In an era of declining labor rights, precarious employment, and inequality—and soaring corporate profits—international solidarity is more crucial than ever.
Starving for Justice: The Colombian GM Workers
Jorge Parra’s hunger strike hits the five-week mark on Christmas Day, December 25. After five weeks of not eating, the human body begins to risk permanent tissue and brain damage; a week or two after that, organ failure, blindness, and death become more likely with each passing day. 
Parra was driven to this desperate measure by General Motors’ refusal to negotiate with the workers unjustly fired from its Colmotores factory in Bogotá. After Colombia’s institutional mechanisms for redress failed—no surprise given the Colombian government’s corruption and subordination to corporate interest—Parra and his fellow workers formed the Association of Injured and Ex-Workers of General Motors Colombia (ASOTRECOL) and in August 2011 began a tent occupation outside the U.S. embassy in Bogotá, choosing that site because of the U.S. government’s part ownership in GM following the U.S. auto bailout of 2008-09 and the close ties between Colombia and the United States. On December 25 the tent occupation enters its 512th day, with many of the workers there also engaging in hunger strikes in recent months. They are demanding that GM provide compensation for the wrongful firings, comprehensive medical care, and new job placements for those who are still able to work.
The workers’ families have suffered even more than the workers themselves. Some have already been evicted from their homes, by some of the same banks and mortgage companies throwing U.S. families out on the street. Many of the workers have small children. Earlier this month five of the workers’ wives wrote personal letters to GM Vice President of Labor Relations Catherine Clegg, which supporters hand-delivered to Clegg’s mansion in the Detroit suburbs on December 6. The wife of one injured worker told of how her 8-year-old daughter constantly asks why her father “is not happy like he was before, why he has his mouth sewn shut, why she has seen him so sick, and other questions that I do not know how to respond to.” The couple’s other child is a 12-year-old boy named Angel, who has cerebral palsy and is about 98-percent incapacitated. Since his father’s firing Angel no longer receives the medicine and therapy he needs. Such scenes are repeated for many of the workers’ families, who live in a world that GM executives will never see or experience. In 2011 GM recorded a record profit of $7.6 billion, thanks in part to its subsidy from taxpayers.
The struggle of ASOTRECOL is just one piece of a larger and ongoing tragedy in Colombia. The country has long been the most dangerous place in the world for trade unionists, with 29 killed and hundreds receiving death threats in 2011. Peasants, Afro-Colombians, and indigenous people are routinely murdered and displaced by business elites who covet their land and resources. Sexual violence is frequently used as part of this effort. Dozens of priests and human rights defenders are killed each year. And underlying these acts of overt criminality is the structural violence of daily life for the country’s majority: 1.15 percent of landowners control 52 percent of the land, three-quarters of rural residents live in poverty, and about 121,000 Colombians die each year from undernourishment.
But the Colombian government does very well in one respect. In 2010 the World Bank and International Finance Corporation applauded Colombia’s strides toward maintaining a “business friendly environment.” The report ranked Colombia third in Latin America with regard to the “ease of doing business.” Not coincidentally, Colombia has been the United States’ most reliable ally in South America over the past two decades, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in annual military aid that is used in large part to kill and control Colombia’s hungry majority.
During these same two decades the Colombian government has adhered to the familiar recipe of neoliberal economic policies: reducing spending on social programs, privatizing public resources, lowering corporate tax rates, and deregulating business activity and financial transfers. Colombia’s recent “free-trade” agreements with the United States and the European Union are additional steps in this direction, designed to further liberate big business at the expense of ordinary people in all countries involved. Despite promises to respect workers’ rights—embodied in the “Labor Action Plan” that accompanied the 2011 U.S.-Colombia agreement—the idea of protecting working people runs directly counter to the logic of such trade deals.
Anti-union legislation has played an important role in this neoliberal agenda. The American Center for International Labor Solidarity notes that prior to 1990, “Colombian workers were among the most organized in Latin America.” But since the government passed anti-union legislation similar to RTW in 1990, “Anti-union discrimination by employers” has increased and “employer practices such as the dismissal and blacklisting of union leaders are widespread.” In 2005 the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions gave an overview of labor conditions in Colombia:
The state ministries and bodies responsible for social policy have been weakened, reformed or dismantled…Workers have been sacked or given less secure terms of employment in both the private and public sectors. Both sectors are being restructured using laws that promote labour flexibility and enable employers to evade clear obligations…It is a complex and sometimes impossible task to form trade unions, sign collective agreements or organise strikes…People wanting to set up a union are dismissed, harassed or even threatened with death…Impunity is the norm for those who violate labour rights (including murdering of unions leaders and members), whilst the full force of the law is brought to bear on workers, even where they are acting in full compliance with it.
The report noted that as a result, just five percent of the economically active population belonged to trade unions, and only one percent of Colombian workers were covered by a collective bargaining agreement—even worse than in the United States. But not much worse.
Moving Michigan Closer to Colombia
Twenty-three other U.S. states preceded Michigan in passing right-to-work laws, but most were in the low-wage economies of the South where unions were traditionally rare. Michigan, on the other hand, has the fifth-highest union density in the country. For this reason it was a particular target of right-wing billionaire donors like the Koch brothers, who poured millions of dollars into the state to promote RTW. These forces viewed Michigan as a litmus test for their effort to smash unions, wages, and corporate taxes in other northern states. Their dream is quite clear: an economy and society resembling Colombia’s, where atomized workers are paid starvation wages and work in dangerous conditions while the chosen few gorge themselves on the profits.
The rich have good reason to look favorably on RTW. According to a comprehensive 2011 study by the Economic Policy Institute, annual wages in RTW states are around $1,500 less than in non-RTW states, and the portion of employers who sponsor employee pension programs is 4.8 percent lower. Right-wing demagogues claim that RTW laws “create jobs,” but in fact they are just as likely to do the opposite, by lowering wages and thereby reducing consumer demand. Many workers simply enter the ranks of the permanently-unemployed and expendable population, while whatever jobs are created are typically of the low-wage, highly-precarious sort.
Michigan’s RTW laws are the culmination of a host of anti-union measures imposed in the state in the past two years. The most notorious is the “emergency manager” law that allows the governor to hand over cities and school districts to unelected dictators, who are empowered to dissolve union contracts, lay off workers en masse, and privatize public land and services. After Michigan voters rejected the law in a November referendum, the lame-duck legislature passed a slightly-modified version of the law around the same time it was pushing through RTW. In recent months Michigan’s politicians have also prohibited dues check-off for teachers, eliminated benefits for the domestic partners of state employees, and decreed that research assistants at universities are not workers and therefore cannot unionize. Governor Rick Snyder and his fellowRepublicans have led the onslaught, though sometimes with the cooperation or only tepid opposition of state Democrats.
In Detroit Jorge Parra views these developments with a sad but knowing expression on his face. “The same story is being repeated here,” he says with regard to RTW. “They put this same law into effect in the early 1990s in Colombia, and now it’s practically a death sentence to be a unionist.” Michigan workers do not face the same level of violence and hardship that Colombian workers face, but RTW and other attacks have inched Michigan ever closer to that reality.
Cross-Border Solidarity: Prospects and Obstacles
In this context, cross-border solidarity has become more urgent than ever. Solidarity has a pragmatic as well as moral logic, according to Ron Lare, a retired Detroit autoworker. Lare has been active in both the GM-Colombia solidarity campaign and the fight against RTW in Michigan. He comments that “if conditions in Colombia and other nations do not rise toward the best of U.S. union conditions via international solidarity, U.S. pay and conditions will continue to sink toward those in Colombia and other oppressed nations.” Lare notes that while GM fires injured workers in Colombia, “something approaching this situation is already the case” in many U.S. workplaces that employ temporary and non-union workers. In Michigan auto plants, for instance, “GM-Colombia conditions are already foreshadowed” in the use of temporary workers and the two-tier wage system, sending an ominous signal for the future. For Lare, “the new ‘right to work’ (for less) laws in Michigan show why workers here should care about what is happening to General Motors-Colombia workers.”
Other Michigan autoworkers echo these sentiments. Melvin Thompson was so moved upon meeting Jorge Parra that he staged a 23-day hunger strike of his own to help call attention to General Motors’ crimes. Thompson has witnessed the impact of wage cuts, speed-ups, and dangerous factories on his fellow workers, and says that in GM’s Colombia operation “you can see the parallels to how we do business here. Everything that they endure, we endure to a much lesser extent.” He felt compelled to take such dramatic action “because our struggles are tied together.” Chrysler worker Martha Grevatt says that the “unsafe practices” at her own plant and her experience dealing with company abuses for the past 25 years “tells me that the companies don’t care about workers.” That experience makes it “impossible” for her “not to be interested in and sympathetic with the workers in Colombia.” Given the global nature of the capitalist assault on workers, “the only way we can win is by uniting in common cause and refusing to be divided by borders or language.”
The solidarity campaign waged by these workers and others around the United States is an encouraging sign. Thompson’s hunger strike and the other components of that campaign represent U.S. labor at its best: self-sacrificing, compassionate, angry, and conscious of how global capitalism functions. But any effort to recruit large numbers of U.S. workers into this sort of campaign will have to confront a host of obstacles. Many of these obstacles are reflections of U.S. corporate capitalism and the racism and nationalism within U.S. society, and thus beyond the direct control of labor, while some derive from the structure and ideology of U.S. unions themselves.
Perhaps the greatest barriers to cross-border solidarity are ideological. In this country we are taught from a young age that the lives of U.S. citizens (especially the white middle-class ones) are inherently more valuable than the lives of foreigners. This implicit assumption pervades our school textbooks, newspapers, and television shows, and has a profound impact on us all. And the borders are not just national: the U.S. workforce itself has always been divided along lines of race, gender, sexuality, age, skill, wage levels, immigration and unionization status, and other categories. In this context the old IWW slogan that “an injury to one is an injury to all” is a truly revolutionary statement. “The biggest barrier to solidarity is the ability of the bosses to pit workers here against workers in other countries in competition for fewer and fewer jobs,” says Martha Grevatt. “We have to see that we have more in common with workers in other countries than with the capitalists of our own countries.”
The structural position of U.S. workers also presents certain obstacles to solidarity. As consumers, workers in the United States derive some material benefit from the exploitation of labor and resources in underdeveloped countries (though far less than capitalists do). In the case of the U.S. auto industry, employee stock ownership and profit-sharing arrangements give workers a concrete stake in the prosperity of the companies and, at least potentially, a disincentive to support the demands of other workers like ASOTRECOL in Colombia. The UAW leadership has certainly bought into this idea of shared interest between executives and workers. “Management’s not the enemy,” says one union official in Ohio. “The enemy is the competition.”
As such comments suggest, unions themselves often present institutional obstacles to solidarity. Most U.S. union leaders have done little to foster cross-border ties among workers. Even when denouncing neoliberalism, their posters and campaign literature tend to be filled with nationalistic assertions about “American” jobs. They speak not of the working class but of the “middle class,” a term that reinforces the sense that there is some other class of lazy, undeserving, often-dark-skinned parasites hovering below. This perception leads most union leaders to dismiss foreign workers as well as U.S. service workers, immigrants, domestic laborers, and the unemployed (and also provides much of the basis for right-wing populism in this country). Union leaders even sell out their own constituents by agreeing to “two-tier” wage schemes and other concessions. Their approach tends to rely much more on backroom discussions with bosses and on the concept of “partnership” with employers than on the mobilization of rank-and-file workers to confront the employers. Their political strategy consists of playing lapdogs to the Democrats.
Most Michigan unions exemplify these problems. When several solidarity activists visited a recent meeting of union executives in one Michigan town to request a donation for the families of the Colombian GM workers, most of the union leaders on the council questioned the very idea of aiding anyone but “our workers.” In thinly-veiled racist language, the council’s president worried that if they donated anything they would be “inundated” with hordes of outsiders soliciting assistance in the future. The phrase “working class” was never uttered.
Other examples abound. Many progressive critics point out that union leaders’ constant concessions and failed political strategy helped pave the way for the recent passage of RTW. Ron Lare notes that when they first heard rumors about RTW in late November, those leaders’ first instinct was to “talk to the boss” rather than mobilizing their bases for strikes and civil disobedience; even after RTW’s passage in Michigan, many national labor leaders remain committed to the same failed strategy. The injured GM workers in Colombia have yet to receive any public support from the leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW) despite countless appeals by Jorge Parra and his fellow workers. Michigan unions’ disinterest in the recent campaign to repeal the “emergency manager” law—which would primarily affect black population centers like Detroit—is yet another telling indication of these same sorts of prejudices. Most labor leaders remain wedded to the traditional model: trying to elect Democrats, “talking to the boss” rather than engaging the rank-and-file, and remaining narrowly focused on the concerns of one’s “own” workers.
Yet if the year 2012 offers one definitive lesson for U.S. labor, it is that a militant, aggressive unionism that emphasizes rank-and-file mobilization and community alliances is the most promising strategy for defending working people. The most compelling evidence comes from the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike in September, which confronted a Democratic mayor and successfully prevented his plans to cut wages and destroy job security and the union. Though public school teachers are commonly vilified by politicians of both parties, the CTU had the strong support of Chicagoans—thanks in part to union outreach to city residents and a “social unionist” perspective emphasizing the need to fight not just for dues-paying members but also for students and the community at large (for instance, by opposing school closures and demanding smaller classes). Soon after, non-unionized manual laborers in Wal-Mart’s supply chain went on strike in Illinois and California and successfully won back pay and improvements in working conditions.
Rekindling this spirit of militant unionism is crucial if U.S. workers are to achieve a decent future for themselves and their posterity. Labor must not only become more aggressive and more member-driven, but, as Martha Grevatt says, must also “build solidarity with the global community of workers who are under attack.” Time is short for a person on hunger strike, necessitating immediate action in solidarity with the GM-Colombia workers. But in this great global race-to-the-bottom, “our time is short as well,” says Ron Lare. “Time is short for us all.”
WAYS TO SUPPORT THE GM WORKERS IN COLOMBIA:
DONATE to the workers’ families by writing a check to Wellspring UCC with “Colombia relief” on memo line, and send to Wellspring UCC, Box 508, Centreville, VA 20122. Or donate at www.wellspringucc.org and write “Colombia relief” on the message subject line.
CALL/EMAIL and TELL THESE PEOPLE TO PUSH GM TO NEGOTIATE (Dial 888-720-3180 to be directed to any of them):US Embassy in Colombia: aquillaal@state.gov (Andrea Aquilla, Labor Officer), Colombian Embassy in DC: vturk@colombiaemb.org (Veronica Turk, assistant to the Ambassador), US Bureau of Int’l Labor Affairs (Jason Kuruvilla): kuruvilla.jason@dol.gov
POST ON TWITTER: @GM @USEmbassyBogota; @BarackObama; @JuanManSantos
POST ON FACEBOOK: GM: www.facebook.com/generalmotors
US Embassy: www.facebook.com/usdos.colombia
For more info visit the workers’ website at www.ASOTRECOL.com and the solidarity campaign’s Facebook page: www.facebook.com/SolidarityWithGMHungerStrikers
U.S. Energy Independence is a Sham
This article by Joshua Frank is re-posted from Counter Punch.Whether it is the hucksters pushing for the Keystone XL pipeline to cut across the Heartland, or the coal barons who are ramping up their exploits in Powder River Basin, a familiar refrain can be heard echoing throughout their propaganda: America must produce its own energy and stop relying on “terrorist” countries to keep our homes heated, cars running and economy kicking.
“The United States consumes 15 million barrels of oil per day and imports 11 million,” Russell K. Girling of the TransCanada Corporation, which is to build the Keystone pipeline, wrote in The Hill. “Keystone XL offers Americans the choice of receiving their oil from a friendly, secure supplier in Canada, instead of importing crude from unstable, volatile foreign nations such as Venezuela, Libya and other areas of the Middle East.”
Despite popular belief, Keystone XL, which is to transport tar sands from Alberta, Canada to Port Arthur, Texas, will be used domestically. Refiners based in Port Arthur, where the oil will end up, are focused on exporting oil to Europe and Latin America. The majority of the heavy tar sands oil extracted in Alberta will never end up being burned in the United States.
“To issue a presidential permit for the Keystone XL, the administration must find that the pipeline serves the national interest,” says Stephen Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International. “An honest assessment shows that rather than serving U.S. interests, Keystone XL serves only the interests of tar sands producers and shippers, and a few Gulf Coast refiners aiming to export the oil.”
Additionally, Valero, which is to be one of Keystone XL’s main customers, purchasing 76 percent of initial production, has detailed to its investors that the crude it is to buy is mainly set for export. To top it off, Port Arthur, where the dirty oil is to be refined, is in a Foreign Trade Zone, where the company can operate without paying any U.S. taxes. Valero’s contract is to last until 2030 and the company is to take around 100,000 barrels of tars sands per day.
Despite an outpouring of opposition to the proposed pipeline, which culminated in over 1,200 arrests in late August and early September 2011 outside the White House and ongoing protests in Texas, the Obama administration is slowly moving forward with the deal. President Obama’s jobs advisers are lending support for the pipeline and he is also likely getting pressure from within his own party to give the project a green light.
In 2008 Paul Elliot, who now serves as TransCanada’s chief Washington lobbyist for Keystone XL, served as a national campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s presidential race. Additionally, as was discovered by anti-Tar Sands activists from Nebraska as they prepared for hearings on the matter at the State Department, the hearings were being held by a company called Cardno Entrix. It turns out that Cardno Entrix is contracted to run the environmental-review for the Keystone XL pipeline, but lists TransCanada as one of its major clients on its website.
“The pipeline company recommended the firm they wanted to review them, a firm that listed the pipeline company as one of their major clients,” writes Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein. “Perhaps–just perhaps–that explains why the review found that Keystone XL would have ‘limited adverse environmental impacts,’ a finding somewhat at odds with the conclusion of 20 of the nation’s top scientists who wrote the president this summer to say it would be an environmental disaster.”
It appears that TransCanada is doing all it can to impact the Obama administration’s decision on the matter by hiring a former Democratic campaign manager, and has certainly pushed Obama’s State Department to hire a company with close ties to the very company it is supposed to independently review. Additionally, some have criticized the job numbers for the project. In 2010, TransCanada said that, “During construction, Keystone XL would create 13,000 jobs and further produce 118,000 spin-off jobs.” But a report from Cornell University says these numbers are inflated, writing that the project will create no more than 2,500-4,650 temporary construction jobs for two years based on the data TransCanada has given the State Department.
Not only will hundreds of thousands of jobs not be created, and not only will tax revenue not help the country get back on track, the majority of the oil from the tar sands will end up not even being used in the United States. Debunking these myths are just one part of the fight for a clean energy future.
And it is not just the tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline facts that need to be straightened out; the coal industry is currently on a major PR push to pressure the public into believing that locally produced coal is a crucial part of the U.S.’s energy independence. The U.S. is the fourth largest coal exporter in the world and companies are working hard to increase production and shipments.
“America’s abundant coal reserves — and our continued use of coal to generate electricity — also promote greater U.S. energy security,” said American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a front group that is made up of over 40 coal industry companies. “The reason is simple: The coal we rely upon is found right here at home, and we have a more than 200-year supply based upon today’s rate of usage.”
While it may be true that the U.S. has some of the world’s largest reserves, along with Canada a total of 29 percent of the globe’s recoverable coal, major companies like Peabody and Arch Coal are looking more and more at oversees markets and mines to turn a profit. They know the jig is up here at home, where dozens of new coal plant proposals are being tossed in the trash. As such, Asian countries are increasingly coming into play, as China continues to build two mid-size power plants a week. In 2007 the Energy Watch Group reported that China could reach maximum production by 2015, which means they will have to get much of their coal from elsewhere.
This is why companies operating in the coal-rich Powder River Basin are increasingly eyeing potential coal export facilities up and down the West Coast. There are only two coal terminals that ship coal to Asia; one in Seward, Alaska and another major terminal in Vancouver, B.C. Coal exports from the U.S. to Asian markets during the first six months of 2010 increased almost 400 percent compared to the entire year of 2009. It’s one of the only shimmering lights on the horizon for the struggling coal industry, which is facing increased opposition in the U.S. as old power plants are shuttered and new proposals are being met with stiff resistance.
This hasn’t stopped the Obama administration from pumping hundreds of millions into “clean coal” projects or from allowing the Bureau of Land Management from opening up public lands in the Powder River Basin for coal mining. Nonetheless, as awareness of coal’s contribution to global warming and human health impacts grows, American coal companies are going to fight to keep the mines operating and the coal burning. Even it if means helping to fuel one of our country’s main economic rivals, China.
This brings us to the curious case of natural gas, the one fossil fuel that continues to be deemed a clean energy source by many despite the fact that its extraction through fracking could have catastrophic impacts, not to mention global warming causing emissions from leaks and carbon from its burning. There is no doubt there is a natural gas boom taking place across the country, with proposals for new fracking operations spreading from California to New York. But how much of this proposed natural gas will actually be used in the United States in the future is a question that has yet to be answered.
The first natural gas export from the United States was approved for Cheniere Energy in March 2011 by the Department of Energy. It will be the first large natural gas export out of the Gulf of Mexico, with other proposals in the pipeline by companies wanting to sell American natural gas to the global market. Their loyalty isn’t to America, but to their bottom line.
The Keystone XL pipeline saga and the recent misinformation about coal development illuminate how these resource profiteers market their destructive endeavors to normal Americans — as a means of energy independence and national security. Nonetheless, as the U.S. public looks to wean the country off of dirty fossil fuels, it’s a safe bet that the extraction industry will have little problem selling their dirty products to anyone who’s ready to buy.
People Watching is not the same as being a Watchdog: MLive’s 13 Michiganders for 2013
Beginning on Sunday, MLive let its readers know which “Michiganders” we should be watching in 2013.
The MLive posting provides a list of 13 people who are most likely to “make headlines.” The posting does acknowledge that the method they used to pick the 13 was not scientific, but MLive feels their “list covers a pretty wide range of movers and shakers.”
Nowhere in the article does the MLive reporter define what a mover and a shaker is, but it is safe to say that what MLive defines as a mover and a shaker is someone primarily from the business community and is a proponent of “development.”
Indeed, looking at the list of 13, it is disproportionately made up of business people, with a couple of politicians.
Watching or Watchdog?
The idea that news agencies should be watching people is certainly an old notion, but there is a major difference between watching, in a shallow celebrity sense, and being a watchdog, where people with power are monitored and scrutinized.
MLive, and its print sister The Grand Rapids Press, have never really been a watchdog of power, as we have noted in our news analysis section and in the many news reports over the years.
What MLive has demonstrated is a commitment to celebrity news and acting as an apologist for those in power, whether that has been the local 1% or development projects that continue to primarily benefit those who are already obscenely well off.
As an indication, look at the first two profiles already posted in the series of thirteen. On Sunday, MLive posted a profile of Grand Rapids bar owner Mark Sellers and today it posted a profile for billionaire Dan Gilbert.
In both profile, the MLive reporter presents nothing but gushingly positive information about both Sellers and Gilbert, with five fun facts about each of these two businessmen. Again, no information that would question the wealth both of these men have amassed or investigation into their financial practices. MLive readers are instead presented with a perspective, which says that both of these men are making the downtown of Grand Rapids and Detroit exciting places.
When MLive gets to Wednesday and posts a profile of Donald Weatherspoon, emergency manager for Muskegon Heights and Highland Park public schools don’t expect an investigation into Weatherspoon’s background or the very nature of the emergency manager policy that was voted down by the public in November, only to have the State Legislature overturn the public will and pass a new state law that can not be overturned by any ballot initiative.
Such a series focusing on those with power only reinforces and normalizes that these are the only people who really matter and can accomplish anything worth acknowledging. Such a series conversely says working class people and grassroots organizers and organizations don’t count and are not really relevant when it comes to making a difference in the world.
Just one more reason why we need as much independent and grassroots media as possible to counteract the celebrity and power-drunk commercial media in this community.
The 12 Days of a Capitalist Christmas
This article by Paul Buchheit is re-posted from Common Dreams.
On the first day of Christmas my employer gave to me ONE penny for every $3 the richest 130,000 Americans make. It’s been a national tradition since 1980.
On the second day my doctor showed me TWO Americans needing mental health care, but only one of the two could afford treatment. The doctor informed me that the fifty states have cut $1.8 billion from their mental health budgets during the recession, and that the 2013 Republican budget proposes further cuts. “It’s crazy,” I protested. “Some states are allowing guns in schools and daycare centers and churches and bars and hospitals, but they’re cutting mental health care?” The doctor just nodded in frustration.
On the third day The Economist told me that it costs just THREE cents in administrative expenses for every $100 raised through a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) in the United Kingdom, versus $1.42 for the personal income tax and $1.25 for the corporate income tax. With up to THREE quadrillion dollars in total U.S. financial transactions, we could replace federal income taxes with a tiny FTT.
On the fourth day a food pantry gave me FOUR dollars worth of food. That’s about what food stamp recipients get each day through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). To pay for rent and utilities, a family of three gets $400 per month from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which comes to about FOUR dollars a day per person.
On the fifth day a financial advisor introduced me to his FIVE richest investors, who were the only ones out of 100 Americans to increase their wealth over the past 25 years, by the impressive rate of almost 20%. It’s like that throughout the entire country, the advisor said: only 5% took almost all the gains. Five golden rings, indeed.
On the sixth day, as the traditional 12-day song started to get annoying, Santa appeared to take me by the hand to the U.S. corporate offices, where the tax lawyers gave to me SIX cents for the national treasury. “Hey,” I said, “this used to be twenty-five cents. You’ve doubled your profits in the last ten years, but individual and payroll taxes have to pay 94 cents out of every dollar!” The lawyers just smiled. Santa shook his head in frustration.
On the seventh day a guidance counselor informed me that one out of SEVEN Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 is neither working nor in school.
On the eighth day an IRS agent gave me these matching facts: Over EIGHT percent of the GDP (8.4%) goes for tax expenditures (subsidies provided through the tax code, mostly to the very rich). That’s almost exactly the same amount (8.4% of the GDP) that goes to Social Security and Medicare.
On the ninth day an unemployed dietitian told me that the average male has increased his weight by NINE percent over the past 20 years (180 to 196), and the average female by TWELVE percent (142 to 160). As a NINE dollar per hour food-service worker gave me and Santa our burgers and fries and shakes, my jolly old partner chortled, “Ho Ho Ho, soon you’ll all look like me!”
On the 10th day a Forbes article confirmed that the TEN richest Americans made more than our entire national housing budget in just one year. That’s over $50 billion. The twenty richest Americans made more than our entire education budget. Santa assured me that the transfer of wealth from society’s needs to a few individuals was not the norm around the world.
On the eleventh day a creditor gave me a bill for ELEVEN trillion dollars of debt incurred by the American consumer, including mortgages, student loans, and credit card liabilities.
And on the twelfth day Santa gave me an IOU for TWELVE trillion dollars, the U.S. share of up to $32 trillion held overseas, untaxed. “One problem,” cautioned Santa, “my reindeer haven’t been able to find any of it yet.”
After all this I stood perplexed. “What does it all mean?” I asked Santa.
“Well, that’s capitalism,” I heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight. “It’s all about the individual getting all he can, because that will benefit everyone. And let me tell you,” he added with a twinkle, “those benefits are just as real as I am!”
And with that he was gone.
We Can’t Fix Our Economy Without Confronting White Supremacy
This article by Imara Jones is re-posted from Colorlines.
Regardless of when the president and Congress decide to end their current budget standoff, it is increasingly clear that the emerging deal will do very little to reverse the fiscal wrongs at the heart of the tax code. These wrongs have transformed America’s economy into the least equitable and most racially unfair it’s been in almost a half century.
Our collective denial over the fundamental injustice at the heart of our economic system is a result of white supremacy. The words “white supremacy” are radioactive to be sure. It pains me to write them. However, as a trained economist I go where the facts lead me. Since I have written potentially inflammatory words, let me be clear about what I mean.
White supremacy is a low-level assumption about characteristics that white people allegedly have which transforms inequality between them and everyone else into something natural. It often masks itself as fairness and goes unquestioned as a result. Using this definition, our current tax code is a work of white supremacy.
The fact that we’ve arrived at this point on the watch of the country’s first black president is an irony too large to ignore. Mostly victim, partly complicit, Obama is not fully to blame. Yet, economically speaking, the stubborn fact remains that the country is at a moment of racial injustice not seen in more than a generation. In the last four years, that injustice has only expanded and calcified.
White wealth is double what it was 30 years ago. Black and Latino wealth is at its lowest point ever recorded. These inequitable consequences flow directly from political choices embedded in our tax code. But since 1980 when these choices began to be implemented, we’ve talked ourselves out of race and into a mess when it comes to taxes. In fact the frame for our current fiscal debate has clear white supremacist roots.
Recent Origins
As I’ve written previously, it began in 1980 when Ronald Reagan announced that he wanted to reduce taxes and return money to the states. This was long a demand of southern White Citizens Councils. He did so in a Mississippi county were one of the most brutal murders of the civil rights era took place.
White Citizens Councils, the political wing of the Klu Klux Klan, detested federal taxes because they were used to promote economic fairness for blacks in the South. Government spending on economic opportunity had upset the pre-existing racialized economic order. So in speech after speech, Reagan promised to “turn back the clock” and won in a landslide.
Once in office, Reagan did as promised. He re-constructed a system which took money from the employed poor and working class—who are disproportionately black and brown—and gave it to a mostly white minority who were already wealthy.
The result of Reagan’s policies—which were turbocharged under George W. Bush—is that the top 1 percent have a greater share of national income than at any point in American history. And 97 percent of the top 1 percent are white. Yet poverty is stuck at decades-high levels. One out of three blacks and one out of four Latinos is poor.
Reagan’s policies, largely followed by his predecessors in both parties, have left us a country where a child born in poverty in any other advanced economy on the planet has a better chance of becoming rich than one born in the United States.
This is blatantly wrong to the vast majority of Americans, regardless of race. They would not allow this injustice to stand, if spoken to plainly about it.
But since Reagan’s success in winning office off of white supremacist notions, the U.S. has struggled to be honest with itself about the racial impact of its economic choices. The trouble is that you can’t solve a problem that you don’t admit exists.
A Longterm Legacy
The stubborn truth is that economic white supremacy hangs like poison in the national air. It’s been the default position of the United States since the country came into existence as a slave republic. The only way to neutralize white supremacy is to admit that it still animates many of our basic economic assumptions.
The fact that Oprah and Jay-Z are points of interests because they are people of color with vast wealth makes the point. We’re conditioned to be astounded by the economic success of blacks and more unassuming about the wealth of whites. Our stereotypes about who’s deserving and who’s not are grounded in an ongoing white supremacist paradigm.
You would think that having a black president would help us work through some of this. But President Obama has yet to give one speech dedicated exclusively to the Depression-like economic distress in communities of color nor the three-decades-long government policies which caused it. In his silence Obama extends his party’s complicity in our economic system’s destructive racial aspects.
Democrats argue that they fight for race-blind, middle-class economic policies.
The only problem is that Americans aren’t attune to issues of economic injustice. In our national subconscious, economic inequality is just assumed as a natural result of capitalism. It is not. However, through hundreds of years of struggle, Americans, are actually sensitive to racial injustice.
By not confronting the racial aspects of economic inequality, we’ve actually hardened our former racial caste system, which had economic implications, into an economic caste system that has racial implications. From the perspective of economic rights and wrongs, both approaches appear eerily similar.
Instead of a debate over tax increases or spending cuts, what we need to have is an argument about what kind of country we want to have. We need to ask ourselves whether the past was both right and good enough, and how we can build a better, stronger, and fairer future.
Until we have a real stand-off over our fundamental values, we’ll continue to be stuck in a national economic cul-de-sac shaped by white supremacy. Without real change, we’ll circle there in a fruitless, schizophrenic argument with ourselves.
Democrats, Social Security and the Fiscal Cliff
This article by Rob Urie is re-posted from Counter Punch.
With democrats ecstatic that political dysfunction has postponed their cutting the social insurance programs that Americans have paid for and count on for a few weeks, discussion of the intricacies of ‘chained CPI’ (Consumer Price Index) versus other measures of inflation used to adjust Social Security can now apparently wait for the New Year. Still, this probably isn’t a bad time to ask: why? Why cut Social Security? The program is currently solvent, is expected to remain solvent for decades to come, and projected shortfalls in the future could be better addressed by raising the incomes of the people who pay into the program, not by cutting payments to those who depend on them. What is to be gained by ‘solving’ a problem that isn’t?
If cutting Social Security isn’t necessary, why then is it being proposed? Barack Obama provided copious evidence in prior proposals, television interviews and speeches that doing so is his intent. Congressional democrats and labor leaders quickly acceded to his proposal to do so, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi going so far as to actively lie that proposed cuts will ‘strengthen’ the program. And given the cuts will eventually put tens of millions of Americans into dire poverty from a program they paid into for all of their working lives, what rationale could possibly justify doing so?
The reason I ask is a coalition of democrats, labor, liberals and progressives just re-elected Mr. Obama and democrats in Congress to what—cut Social Security? Mr. Obama created the ‘fiscal cliff’ to first push his stacked (in favor of cutting social insurance programs) ‘deficit commission’ to develop a plan to cut government spending and second, to force the issue to be revisited immediately after the election if no plan was agreed to. And Republican threats to refuse to raise the debt ceiling for leverage to ‘force’ spending cuts are idiotic—George W. Bush and congressional Republicans just led the largest increase in government spending in modern history. And that is not a difficult point to make. (And had it been on beneficial programs, it would have been laudable).
Ultimately the entire ‘debate’ is nonsense—the U.S. doesn’t fund spending directly from taxes. As the Federal Reserve is in the process of demonstrating with its QE (Quantitative Easing) programs, it can buy an unlimited quantity of government debt with money it ‘creates’ –the ‘debt limit’ is an arbitrary misdirection. This isn’t to argue that there is no relationship between economic production and money creation, but it is to point out that the ‘Federal budget’ is a convenient fiction. So, given his repeated analogy of the Federal budget to a family budget, is Mr. Obama ignorant of government finances or does he understand them and is purposely using the misleading analogy to further unstated goals?
The ‘Fix the Debt’ committee of politicians, corporate executives and connected financiers claiming to be concerned about the Federal deficit isn’t discussing eliminating the ‘carried interest’ deduction that benefits billionaire hedge fund managers, raising effective corporate tax rates that are currently the lowest in modern history, materially cutting end-of-empire levels of military spending and raising personal income tax rates on the titans of finance who would be begging for change in the street were it not for Federal government largesse in the (ongoing) bank bailouts. But they are deeply concerned about the Federal deficit, as are Mr. Obama and congressional democrats.
But again, why? The web of convenient fictions currently in play amongst both democrats and republicans in Washington—corporate tax cuts promote economic growth and job creation, government spending ‘crowds out’ more productive private sector spending, ‘excessive’ government debt will cause a financial market rebellion (bond vigilantes) and handing social insurance programs to private market profiteers is beneficial to the insured, are all demonstrably nonsense with only a cursory look at ‘the evidence.’
Effective corporate tax rates are the lowest in modern history and job creation, even before the economic calamity began in 2008, is the weakest since the 1930s. As global warming caused by largely private production and the predatory, dysfunctional private sector demonstrate on a daily basis, the ‘efficiencies’ of private production come from cost shifting, not by levels of human motivation intrinsic to capitalism. As QE is demonstrating, the Federal Reserve can control both short and long term interests rates—the ‘bond vigilantes’ are only in control when they provide cover for private interests. And Barack Obama didn’t choose the ‘least bad’ option with his healthcare ‘reform,’ he chose the private option to which he is ideologically committed.
Without apparent irony, these convenient fictions are straight from the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World Bank playbooks circa 1980. While couched in the language of ‘economic development,’ IMF policies were / are extractive, designed to exert control over political economies and were / are tools of economic imperialism. The ‘austerity’ of IMF policies, cutting social spending to divert funds to service external debt, was rarely accompanied by even the pretense it benefited those whose social insurance programs were being looted. Cut to Mr. Obama and Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi mirroring the Vietnam Warism that to strengthen Social Security we must weaken it. Welcome to neo-Colonial America.
Also without apparent irony, the neo-Keynesian wing of the Democratic Party claims to have correctly analyzed current economic travails and prescribed the necessary and sufficient solutions if only Mr. Obama and the DC democrats would listen. In the first, this leaves the great mystery of why they haven’t listened and have actively articulated the policies of the radical right instead? In the second, Keynesian solutions imply that ‘we are all in this together,’ economically speaking, decades after official Washington and America’s plutocracy made it abundantly clear they believe they are responsible for their lot and we for ours, except when they need a few trillion dollars for a bailout. Finally, the ‘we’re all in this together’ monetary policies of the neo-Keynesians have benefited America’s richest 10% who own financial assets alone. (For explanations see Minsky’s essays on inflation and Marx’s Capital, Volume II).
With no respect whatsoever, this leads to the observation that Mr. Obama and his co-conspirators in the Democratic Party haven’t ‘caved,’ ‘capitulated,’ ‘relented,’ ‘given in,’ ‘submitted’ or ‘yielded’ by agreeing to cut social insurance programs. Mr. Obama’s far-right-of-center policies of his first term were just affirmed by the coalition that re-elected him. He will propose cutting Social Security again in just a few weeks. And democrats, labor, liberals and progressives will again be sincerely debating the merits of chained CPI versus other measures of inflation by which to cut Social Security. But while the effects of cuts will be real, the ‘debate’ won’t be. Put another way, the goal is to cut Social Security, not to ‘strengthen’ it.
In his speech at the Hamilton Project launch (link above) in 2006 Mr. Obama articulated the ‘slippery slope’ argument he believed was the ‘left’ position against ‘modernizing’ America’s social insurance programs. He argued supporters of these programs feared minor ‘adjustments’ were a pretext for the wholesale cuts desired by the radical right. But what this explanation leaves out is context. Were the ‘discussion’ taking place as the economic prospects of the poor and working classes were dramatically rising– rapid income gains, increasing income security, rising food security and income and wealth distribution resembling economic democracy, interpreted intent might be benign. But with Mr. Obama and congressional democrats several decades into giving voice to the desires and policies of the radical right, it would require a fool to believe benign intent today.
Hopefully I am underestimating the political pushback proposed cuts will engender. But given the propensity of democrats, labor, liberals and progressives to sincerely debate irrelevancies while giving unwavering support to the increasingly debased policies of their leaders, I doubt it. The bourgeois of these constituencies will likely break with the poor and working class and accede to the bogus rationale that the programs must be weakened so they may be strengthened, calculating that they’ll be all right in any case. And the pundit class will do the narrow calculus of cutting this program to save that without noticing the unwavering trajectory toward neo-liberal hell of the last forty years. To the folks who support the Democratic Party without apparently knowing what their policies are, good luck with that Social Security thing and all. To everyone else, we didn’t ask for this, but it’s coming our way anyhow.
Leonard Peltier Speaks Out from Prison on Denial of Medical Care, Bid for Clemency
This video is re-posted from ZNet.
Leonard Peltier, one of the nation’s most well-known and longest-incarcerated prisoners, speaks out from the U.S. Penitentiary at Coleman, Florida, where he is currently held. Peltier is the Native American activist and former member of the American Indian Movement who was convicted of aiding in the killing of two FBI agents during a shootout on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. Sentenced to prison in 1977, Peltier is now 68 years old. Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman spoke with Peltier on Saturday when he called into a press conference organized by his supporters.
So Now What?
The following video from subMedia is re-posted from Dissident Voice.
This week:
1. Daniel McGowan is out of jail!
3. Early start for the end of their world
4. #IdleNoMore
6. Michu MC
The Border Security and Criminal Alien Consensus
This article by Tom Barry is re-posted from CounterPunch.
Democracy in America works. One has only to observe the surge of bipartisan support for immigration policy reform following the November elections.
Election results revealed the new demographics of a multiracial, multiethnic America that is pushing aside the anti-immigrant backlash that dominated the immigration policy debate over the past two decades. Being anti-immigrant, anti-immigration no longer makes good politics in much of America.
The new bipartisanship for immigration reform may signal the advent of less divisive, more constructive politics in America. But underlying the apparent bipartisan support for some type of pro-immigrant, pro-immigration reform is another less welcome bipartisanship based around the traditional conservative politics around security, drug policy, and criminal justice issues.
The emerging post-election bipartisanship exists in the shadows of an almost enthusiastic bipartisanship in favor of increased “border security” and of ridding the nation of “criminal aliens.”
These two terms – border security and criminal aliens – have become central to the immigration policy debate over the past two decades. Both terms are also closely related to deeply bipartisan yet deeply dysfunctional convictions about drug wars and drug prohibition.
Border Security Consensus
Within Congress, there is no – absolutely none, — opposition to border security policy and operations. This bipartisan consensus in support of the border security buildup is largely uncritical and unconditional, and also counts on support of nongovernmental immigration reformers who have come to accept the conventional wisdom increasing border security increases the political base for reform.
The enthusiastic support for almost any spending program described as a border security initiative persists year after year— despite persistent widespread waste, recurring corruption, immigrant abuse, and the Border Patrol’s inability to set forth a coherent border security strategy with associated performance measures.
In Congress, there are differences about border security but these are largely limited to questions about just how many more agents, drones, walls, and surveillance systems are needed.
Unfortunately, President Obama already set the bottom line of the debate, when speaking about the need for immigration reform. In late November, he told the media: ”I think it [immigration reform] should include a continuation of the strong border security measures that we’ve taken because we have to secure our borders.”
Even as the immigration policy debate has dramatically opened following the election with substantially changed views about legalization, the “secure our borders” imperative remains unquestioned. Indeed, there will be many in Congress who will use the new immigration debate as an opportunity to lobby for even more border security spending than the Obama administration has authorized – in part because border security has proved popular politically and in part because of the infusion of pork-barrel spending in border areas.
The broadening political consensus for immigration reform is hopeful. Bipartisan border security, however, is a sure sign that the traditional bipartisanship over all types of security spending issues – defense, intelligence, homeland, and border policy — continues to taint politics and fiscal responsibility.
Bipartisanship is the rule not the exception when security issues are involved. That’s a sorry tradition in U.S. politics – a tradition that since 9/11 has expanded beyond national security to include homeland security and border security.
Uncritical Acceptance of Border Security
At first, the post-9/11 fear of foreign terrorists drove the multi-billion dollar campaign to “secure our borders.” The buildup continued, however, even as that fear diminished, counterterrorism experts (and common sense) concluded that it was unlikely that foreign terrorists or weapons of mass destruction would enter the country across the southwestern border – the focus of the new border security operations.
Congress and the White House have kept increasing the border security budgets – not so much to obstruct terrorists but to “secure our borders” against immigrants, driven by the mounting anti-immigrant backlash during the second Bush administration. More recently, border hawks – and the Obama administration – explain border security operations mainly in terms of the drug war or what’s now called the “combat against transnational crime.”
Since 2005, when Congress began debating comprehensive immigration reform, a key factor in ensuring wide support for the border security buildup was, oddly, the assumption that the imperative to “secure our borders” was a necessary precondition for immigration reform.
The uncritical – and largely enthusiastic – backing for more border security has cost the nation more than $100 billion over the last ten years. It has left a legacy of national shame and monumental waste in the form of useless virtual fence projects, embarrassing walls between north and south, a mounting toll of dead and murdered immigrants, and an escalation drug war throughout the U.S. and Mexican borderlands even as political pressure is mounting throughout the hemisphere to end drug prohibition.
Aside from the near total absence of strategic focus, the border security buildup represents an insult to professions of good governance and accountability. Again, the uncritical acceptance of border security has resulted in systemic abuse of the standards of accountability, transparency, and performance evaluations.
Rather than once again giving a free rein to the border security hawks, the coming immigration debate represents an opportunity to assess the assumptions and achievements of the continuing border security buildup. Without such a critical examination of border security, the proponents of immigration reform / border security become accomplices of the waste, human rights abuses, and drug war escalation that have become emblematic of the Border Patrol.
As part of the new movement for immigration reform, advocates and activists need to stand up and reject the implicit political marriage of immigration reform and the border security buildup. That doesn’t mean open borders but rather a stance in favor of sensible border control and regulation, not virtual militarization.
It would be unfortunate if progress on immigration reform gives border security a free pass, leaving mounting questions about the waste, militarization, misdirection, and lack of accountability in U.S. border policy unaddressed and unresolved.
Protecting the Homeland Against Criminal Aliens
In addition to border security, another source of broad agreement in the immigration reform is the widely shared conviction that noncitizen immigrants (whether here legally or not) should be “removed” from this country if they have criminal records. Even nongovernmental advocates of immigration reform accept the criminal exclusion provisions, or at least haven’t opposed these restrictions.
At first glance, this determination to deny legal residency and to deport criminal immigrants makes good sense. Why, after all, should America open its borders to foreigners who not only threaten public safety but who also burden every level of government with law enforcement, prosecution, and incarceration costs?
One should expect that in the coming immigration debate all the main actors – whether they be progressives, liberals, centrists, conservatives, and hawks — will accept the notion that the so-called “criminal aliens” have no place in U.S. society.
Yet if immigration reform is largely about social justice, can this automatic exclusion be defended morally? There are also unaddressed questions about the impact of this exclusion and deportation of criminals on the stability of neighboring nations and the spread of international criminal networks.
For reform advocates, opposition (whether tacit or explicit) against including criminals from immigration-reform benefits may stem less from an ethical conviction than from a political calculation – much as support for border security operations is seen as a precondition for any reform.
Immigrants are America
That’s a phrase often used by proponents of liberal immigration reform.
As the prospects for reform increase, it will be tempting for advocates to maintain a sharp focus on the strategy and tactics of the reform campaign, yet give short shrift to their own rhetorical and social-justice arguments for legalization of those immigrants who are already part of our communities and economy.
If “Immigrants are America” and if immigrants are “America’s voice,” as the pro-reform slogans have it, then perhaps the immigration reform campaign shouldn’t be so narrowly fought – on strictly immigration issues.
In the past, immigration reform activists have been so focused on their own campaigns and strategies that they have not sought out allies in the prison-reform, criminal-justice reform, and drug-law reform movements.
There are strong and increasingly powerful movements and lobbies to reform drug laws, mass imprisonment practices, and the dysfunctional criminal justice system. Immigration reformers would do well ally themselves with such citizen movements.
For fear of reinforcing the anti-immigrant stereotypes of immigrants as criminals and drug addicts, the immigration reform campaign over the past two decades has largely distanced itself from the movements against mass incarceration, drug prohibition, and the expansion of the federal government’s domination of our criminal justice system.
There are few other sectors of U.S. society that have been so victimized by our nation’s drug laws, imprisonment habit, and harsh criminal justice system.
Since the early 1990s there has been a steadily increasing merger of the criminal justice, drug prohibition, and immigration enforcement systems. Scholars call this conflation of the immigration and criminal-justice system the crimmigration of America.
Once caught in the grips of crimmigration, immigrants are doubly punished – first by jail, fines, and prison sentences; and second by automatic removal from the country.
Many otherwise law-abiding immigrants, as do many U.S. citizens, have drug violations on their record. Many immigrants have spent some time in jail or been on probation, the same as millions of U.S. citizens. If we are to accept that America has been a nation of immigrants and that immigrants continue to be an integral part of this nation, then our lawmakers shouldn’t exclude immigrants from the benefits of any immigration reform.
Such a course of action would preempt hundreds of thousands of future deportations that separate families and weaken communities. Dealing directly with the criminal alien shibboleth in the reform debate, rather than assuming that all immigrants with records will be ineligible for reform benefits, would created a more expansive community of immigration reform proponents, including members of the growing anti-drug prohibition movement.
In a powerful way, such a willingness to link immigration reform to criminal justice issues would also demonstrate that immigrants are not a population apart – that immigrants are America, and like many Americans have criminal records, mainly for drug control violations but are not dangerous criminals who represent a threat to community public safety or to homeland security. In the process, the coming immigration reform debate could push aside the restrictive framework that has stifled criticism of the border security buildup and the process of crimmigration.
Time to Reassess Border Security and Criminal Alien Bipartisanship
Fortunately the November election has opened up political space for immigration reform. Few observers of the immigration debate expected this increased support for a less restrictive immigration policy.
In the early 1990s, political pressure generated by the leading immigration restrictionist organizations and by the immigration backlash movement led to an expanding array of measures to target and then deport legal and illegal immigrants with criminal records. This same lobby has also been largely responsible for the monstrous buildup in border security.
For the most part, immigration reformers have largely accepted increased border security operations and the crackdown on “criminal aliens” as necessary preconditions for liberal immigration reform. Yet in may now be possible, as part of this new democratic opening for immigration reform, that the critique of the nation’s flawed and counterproductive immigration policy may also now extend to federal government’s border security buildup and criminal alien crackdown.
If democracy is to really work in America, more than to simply pass new policies to better regulate immigration, our body politic will also need to confront the political culture of heedless popular assent to laws, policies, and spending initiatives promoted as anti-crime and pro-security.
What went wrong in Michigan?
This article by Lee Sustar is re-posted from the Socialist Worker.
IF LOSING Indiana to “right-to-work” forces was a disaster for organized labor, the defeat for unions in Michigan was a catastrophe. Yet labor leaders themselves must bear most of the blame for this terrible loss.
Certainly, lavishly funded union-busters and labor-hating Republican politicians were formidable foes in pushing “right-to-work” measures. That’s shorthand for legislation that makes it illegal for union membership to be mandatory, even though unions must continue to provide services for workers who “opt out” of paying their fair share of dues.
Nevertheless, the road to a “right-to-work” victory in Michigan was paved by decades of labor’s failed strategy of partnership with employers and uncritical political support for the Democrats.
For three-quarters of a century, unions have been promising to organize the South, where “right-to-work” laws are prevalent. Now, the opposite is happening–anti-union political forces are steamrollering into the North, bringing the Southern laws with them.
“RIGHT-TO-work” became the law in Indiana earlier this year–a state where, in the 1960s, some 40 percent of workers were union members. But in recent decades, Indiana has become a favored site of investment for nonunion employers like Subaru, Honda and Toyota. Earlier this year, the heavy equipment maker Caterpillar closed a unionized locomotive plant in Canada–and moved production to a new nonunion operation in Indiana.
Yet the “right-to-work” success in Michigan is even more shocking. At the beginning of 2012, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union was celebrating the 75th anniversary of the sit-down strike in Flint, Mich.–the key battle in the great labor upsurge of the 1930s. These days, however, the UAW, as a result of massive job losses, is a shadow of its former self, with 355,000 members, compared to 1.5 million in 1979.
Labor’s decline, along with the Michigan Republicans’ takeover of the governor’s office and the state legislature in the 2010 elections cleared the way for a “right-to-work” sneak attack–Gov. Rick Snyder pushed the measure through with no notice during a lame-duck session.
Union members in Michigan and surrounding states responded with spirited protests, culminating on December 11 with a turnout of more than 10,000 demonstrators. Rank-and-file union members were prepared to take direct action to block the legislation.
But they were held back by labor leaders, who instead pointed them toward the 2014 elections. According to the mainstream website Politico, unions “are eyeing a large-scale counteroffensive against the conservative state leaders who have slashed away at union power since the 2010 midterm elections,” aiming to replace them with Democrats.
The electoral focus was reinforced by President Barack Obama, who spoke to workers at a Michigan factory shortly before the legislature voted on “right-to-work”:
We should do everything we can to keep creating good middle-class jobs that help folks rebuild security for their families. And by the way, what we shouldn’t do–I’ve just got to say this–what we shouldn’t be doing is trying to take away your rights to bargain for better wages and working conditions…The so-called “right-to-work” laws–they don’t have to do with economics, they have everything to do with politics. What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money.
IN FACT, Obama knows a lot about giving Michigan workers the “right to work for less money.” Under terms of the federal government’s 2009 bailout of the auto industry, UAW members saw tens of thousands of jobs disappear–autoworkers still on the job took huge concessions.
At GM, the government bailout was contingent on the union agreeing to a wage freeze, an end to bonuses and the elimination of work rules that limited speedups and helped ensure job security. The givebacks were worth between $1.2 billion and $1.3 billion per year. The union even gave up the right to strike when its contract expired in 2011.
These concessions followed a 2007 contract that cut pay for most new hires to $14 an hour–about half that for high-seniority workers. The result of all this is a reduction of hourly labor costs to the level of nonunion Toyota workers in the U.S.
The UAW, once the pacesetter for U.S. unions as they improved pay and benefits in the three decades following the Second World War, has now given employers the green light to push down wages and benefits–and not only in manufacturing. Public-sector unions in Michigan were soon in the crosshairs, too, as state and local government budgets were hit by the recession.
In response, Snyder–along with his Republican counterparts Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio–used the economic crisis as the pretext to gut public-sector unions. Snyder’s legislative allies beefed up Michigan’s emergency financial manager law, which empowers the governor to impose an unelected boss to control local budgets. The early targets were the cash-strapped Detroit Public Schools and bankrupt cities like Pontiac.
Then came Detroit’s turn. Mayor Dave Bing–a Democrat, like virtually all the city’s politicians–used the threat of an emergency financial manager to extract deep concessions from municipal unions. In April, Bing negotiated a deal with Snyder to avoid the appointment of an emergency financial manager. Instead, they got the Detroit City Council to surrender much of its power to a Financial Advisory Board.
Now, fresh from his success with “right-to-work,” Snyder has ordered a review of Detroit’s finances that could result in the appointment of an emergency manager anyway.
Obama’s and Bing’s central role in driving anti-union policies in Michigan should underscore the fact that the attack on organized labor is thoroughly bipartisan.
The Democrats are unlikely to attempt frontal assaults on unions through “right-to-work” legislation or gutting public-sector bargaining rights, as Scott Walker did in Wisconsin. That’s because the Democrats need unions to relate to their voting base and to provide troops and money at election time.
Yet if the Democrats seem reasonable, it’s only because Republican scorched-earth policies have now become standard. Thus, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn is attempting to renege on paying state workers promised raises. Quinn is also out to cut state workers’ pension benefits, following the example of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In California, Gov. Jerry Brown is also out to extract concessions from unions.
NO WONDER Snyder and the employer-backed anti-union groups thought that Michigan labor would be easy pickings for “right-to-work” legislation. Having presided over concession after concession in order to preserve labor-management partnership, the unions had surrendered much of their potential economic and social power. Politically, the unions mostly tailed the Democrats, who also want to reverse labor’s historic gains.
Michigan unions did try to take independent political action by pushing for a ballot initiative that would have amended the state constitution to prohibit the passage of legislation restricting public-sector bargaining rights. Their model was labor’s victory in a 2011 ballot initiative in Ohio, when voters overturned a Wisconsin-style attack on public-sector bargaining rights.
But where the Ohio fight was a straightforward battle over union rights, the Michigan debate was easier for employers to distort. The unions, they claimed, were trying to install special protections into the state constitution. The p.r. campaign worked: Despite the fact that labor spent $25 million on the effort, the union-backed measure was handily defeated.
So how should labor combat “right-to-work”? Fortunately, we have the example of a successful effort in 1978 by Missouri unions to head off “right-to-work” being imposed by a ballot measure. Jerry Tucker, the dissident UAW leader who passed away earlier this year, helped lead the effort on behalf of his union. Years later, he described the effort in an article written for Labor Notes. Building a broad labor-community alliance was key, Tucker explained:
The National Farmers Organization and leaders of the American Agricultural Movement participated in rallies and motorcades against RTW throughout rural Missouri.
Civil rights organizations stepped up, and national leaders such as Coretta Scott King visited Missouri. They emphasized that RTW hurts the underprivileged and minorities first and worst. Dozens of ministers took the message into the Black wards of Kansas City and St. Louis.
Women’s groups such as NOW held rallies. Senior citizens were a bedrock, handling the brunt of canvassing on Election Day. Students, however, seemed to misunderstand the issue and were not successfully recruited.
A majority of the state’s major officeholders from both parties spoke out against RTW, and many appeared at campaign functions. Urban Republicans, in particular, felt the deepening social heat.
Religious opposition to RTW was vital. It gave weight to the moral case–“Democratic decision-making in the workplace is just, and collective bargaining is good for society.” It allowed labor to reach tens of thousands of Missourians through their churches.
Religious opposition drew much attention in the press, helping to create a “good guys” image for unions and the reverse for the right-to-workers. The RTW campaign, with business as its principal backer, began to look sinister.
But the most important factor in stopping the anti-union measure, Tucker wrote, was the activism of rank-and-file union members:
Rank-and-file unionists were the mainstay of the campaign. In fact, some couldn’t seem to do enough, and at the outset thought their leaders weren’t doing enough.
While the labor committee was still ramping up, members were acting on their own. They set up meetings, visited the merchants with whom they did business, painted signs on their cars, and worked the polls.
Many traveled from urban areas back to their childhood homes in rural Missouri to urge folks there to vote “no.” On weekends, caravans of urban and suburban workers traveled to meet farmers and small-town shopkeepers to make their case against RTW.
Motorcyclists cruised the highways in bunches, with banners opposing RTW. Truckers used CB radios to maintain a steady stream of anti-RTW conversations on the Interstates.
In November, the “no” vote took 60 percent. The 1.6 million ballots cast set an off-year election record, with 60 percent of registered voters going to the polls. Right-to-work galvanized the big vote; Missourians cast 100,000 more ballots on the amendment than they did in statewide candidates’ races.
New member organizing spiked upward for several years afterward.
Today’s labor officials lack the strategic vision and organizational skills of Jerry Tucker, one of the outstanding labor leaders of recent decades. Even so, union members and supporters who want to fight “right-to-work” and anti-union forces can learn from the experience.
It’s clear that the employers want to permanently cripple organized labor–and that politicians of both major parties are helping to advance that goal. Facing up to that fact is the first step in developing a new winning strategy for labor today.
