Bowers Rants on Anti-Labor Liberals

Chris Bowers over at MyDD.com goes on a rant against liberals, who think it's okay to support a pro-choice politician who is anti-labor, but would never support a pro-labor politician who was weak on abortion rights (as may be the case in the Pennsylvania Senate race in 2006). As Bowers writes:

Here is an ugly truth about the netroots: we are the not so rich version of the DLC that we claim to hate. Our lack of interest and knowledge about labor is stunning. The importance of these issues among the netroots is revealing. Pop quiz--can anyone even tell me what private sector card check means, much less what it would mean to this country? The last time I used that term in a blog article, it elicited only questions, no affirmations.

Hopefully, most folks who read this blog know what "card check" means in the context of union rights, but the point Bowers makes is accurate across the blogosphere and most liberals.

However, I actually think he's wrong about the Democratic Party overall, that it's "sold unions down the river for middle-class liberalism." There are actually fewer anti-labor politicians in the party than there were a few decades ago. Democrats voted overwhelmingly in recent trade votes against "fast track" authority for both Clinton and Bush and have lined up strongly behind labor rights bills. They resisted union-busting in the 2002 Homeland Security bills to the point that Senators like Max Cleland were attacked as Osama-loving traitors for refusing to screw labor in those voters. Sure, Democratic leaders could push labor issues harder but they face unyielding filibusters by the GOP. No issue is more partisan these days than a vote on core labor issues.

No, in this case, Bowers first impulse is right. The problem here is not with the Democratic leadership but with its non-labor base of voters, who don't understand the issues and thus don't campaign hard to educate their fellow voters. The ongoing union-busting in the airline industry has gone barely unmentioned by most liberal blogs and one outrage after another comes down from the National Labor Relations Board without comment. If similar decisions were happening on abortion or race, it wouldn't be blogged from the far ends of liberal opinion outlets, but most liberals just don't give a damn.

No, the political leaders (who need labor help at elections) are actually ahead of much of the base on core labor issues. It's the liberal opinion leaders, not the elected ones, who need to clean up their act and take labor issues more seriously on a day-to-day basis.

Labor Blog: By Nathan at 08:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

On Why Roe was Bad for Progressives

In the discussion of evolution and judicial activism, the discussion jumped (inevitably) to Roe v. Wade. The fact is that no less a feminist than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg believes that Roe was bad for abortion rights because of its extreme judicial activism and the countermobilization it created on the Right.

Scott Lemieux -- whose Ph.D. on the subject I've been reading for this reply -- responded in a series of posts - here, here, and here. While he makes some good points, I think he is ultimately wrong.

Before I get to Scott's subtler points, let me lay out the basic points of the progressive case against Roe. I went into more detail in this post back in 2003, but here are the basic points:

Legislative reform was effective: Most of the increase in legal abortions in the US happened before Roe was decided. Between 1966 and 1972, legal abortions increased from 8000 to 586,000 per year. After Roe, the annual increases in legal abortion would be rather minor (21% in 1974, 15% in 1975, 14% in 1976, and so on).

Roe fed the rise of the New Right: Of course, as Scott argues, that mobilization was already happening in response to legislative changes, but Roe helped feed a particular form of populist anti-elistist rhetoric that helped merge abortion activists with other conservative groups created a unified rhetoric against "liberal elitism."

Roe's narrow rhetoric of privacy cut abortion rights off from broader Feminist mobilization: The rhetoric of the decision emphasized government withdrawing from decision-making over abortion, instead of emphasizing women's equality, so government withdrawing from funding it -- the Hyde Amendment -- was a natural part of the post-Roe rhetoric.

Roe broke feminist coalitions between rich and poor women: Economically conservative women no longer had to choose between their right to abortion and GOP economics; they had their social liberalism through the courts, so they were free to support the new Republican coalition (who were free then to cut off Medicaid funding for the abortions of poor women).

Roe demobilized pro-choice forces: In many ways, this was the key result. With abortion protected by the courts, abortion became a less salient issue for potentially pro-choice voters, so they stopped extensively campaigning and educating the public on the issue. Not only was the Right counter-mobilizing against Roe, they were facing a largely demobilized opposition.

So what is the response in defense of Roe?

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NathanNewman.org: By Nathan at 07:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Do Privatizers Believe in the Stock Market?

By which I mean, do those pushing social security privatization believe the stock market exists as anything but an abstract investment device? Does it do anything useful, such as allocating capital in an intelligent manner between better and worse uses in our economy?

Apparently not, since according to most reports, any investments in private accounts will be restricted to a handful of potential investment funds to reduce administrative costs and prevent individuals from being too risky. And most expect those choices to be index funds-- broad-based investments in large numbers of stocks across the economy. So instead of choosing better and worse investments, the government through these individual accounts will just be handing out potentially trillions of social security dollars on autopilot.

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NathanNewman.org: By Nathan at 11:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Dictatorships for Liberty

A few commentators, including Matt Yglesias, highlighted that for all Bush's paean to "liberty," our actual allies in the war for that "liberty" include dictatorships like Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, along with looking the other way as Russia consolidates new tyranny and China continues its oppression.

The easiest answer by the neocons is that change only comes step by step. Each country won to democracy strengthens the global commitment to that value, weakening the position of the remaining dictatorships. So a few tactical alliances now are excuseable.

The problem is that the "war on terror" is in tension with the "war for liberty," since Bush's own assaults on civil liberties and human rights here and abroad just opened the door for Russia, China and Pakistan to actually tighten their dictatorships.

No major Western country has condemned General Massarraf for breakng his promise to step down from his military position, since his value to the war on terror means that blocking his consolidation of dictatorship is not a priority.

China has used the rhetoric of the war on terror to crack down on ethnic Uighurs in the northwestern Xinjiang province, including in the words of Human Rights Watch, "arbitrary arrests, closed trials, extensive use of the death penalty, [and] religious discrimination."

And Vladimir Putin has largely eliminated the vestiges of emerging democracy in that country, while the "war on terror" has allowed it to justify continued "enforced 'disappearances,' rape, torture and extrajudicial executions by [Russian] federal troops" in Chechnya and surrounging areas.

Since these three countries contain almost a third of the world's population, it is pretty poor tactical logic of exchanging the increased sanction of tyranny in those countries for what are ambiguous gains in Afghanistan and what may turn out to be no gains in Iraq if civil war cannot be contained.

There was at least a realpolitick logic to the "war on terror" alliances -- enemy of my enemy alliances are hardly new -- but glossing the Bush strategy with the rhetoric of a global fight for liberty is a cynical exercise.

NathanNewman.org: By Nathan at 09:14 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Bush Attacks States Rights/Promotes Corruption

Following up on this previous post, the federal government is still fighting to yank $250 million in federal transportion funds because New Jersey wants to ban political contributors from receiving state-controlld highway contracts. In court filings, the Bush administration argues there is no possible connection between political contributions and political corruption in public contracts:

"Nothing about a bidder's history in contributing, or not contributing, to political causes or elective contests impacts in any way the ability of that contractor to provide quality work at an efficient price."

It's hardly surprising that the Bush administration can't imagine that taking large corporate bucks might corrupt the bidding process -- this is the administration of Halliburton -- but topping that position off with an assault on states rights to control how they spend public money just keeps the administration in the hypocrites winner circle.

Not that federal rules on how states spend public funds -- some of which come from the feds -- are all illegitimate. But going after this rule is such pure scut work by the Bush administration on behalf of its corporate paymasters that it ought to be embarassed.

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NathanNewman.org: By Nathan at 07:35 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (1)

Street Heat in the Restaurant Industry

A nice profile in the NY Times of the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), which I mentioned a couple of days ago, and its executive director, Saru Jayaraman. As the article says:

The center is on a roll. This fall, it plans to open a restaurant, Colors, on Lafayette Street near Astor Place, to be owned and governed by workers. On Tuesday, the center is set to release what it describes as a groundbreaking report on the state of the restaurant industry.

But like any good organizer, Saru wants the attention on the worker members, not herself, and criticized the reporter for doing this kind of personality profile:

"As an organizer, I don't think that this is appropriate," she says somewhat sternly. "The point is that restaurant workers lead their own struggles for justice. I'm just a spark in the fire."

Always the dilemma for organizers dealing with the press. They want personality more than substance, and Saru has a good story (read it), so that's the hook to get more publicity on the bad employer actions in the restaurant industry.

As long as they spell the organization's name right :)

Labor Blog: By Nathan at 07:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Economics Catches Up With Common Sense

I am all for the new investigations of "behavioral economics" or "neuroeconomics" as the hip new economic studies, detailed in this past week's Economist, are called, as they investigate economic actions in relations to the operations of the mind.

But sometimes their conclusions make you say, well, Duh. After a lot of hand waving, they come to conclusions that everyone else already knew.

Part of the problem is that economists spend much of their time trying to explain why people don't act perfectly rational, discounting future risk and reward with precision. For everyone else, who have noticed that people aren't always rational and reasonable, the answer is kind of obvious. But economists need a lot of research to even consider that pure free market doctrine isn't the guide to reality and all public policy. To take one experiment detailed in the Economist:

In one recent experiment, noted in our science section on October 30th, Mr Laibson and others found that the brain's response to short-term riches (in this case, gift certificates of $15 or $20) occurs largely in the limbic system, a region that governs emotion. By contrast, the prospect of rewards farther into the future triggers the prefrontal cortex, which is often associated with reason and calculation. Thus, choosing immediate economic gratification, by spending excessively on credit cards or not saving enough even though you “know better”, could be a sign that the limbic system is in charge.

A lot of fancy words to notice that people do impulse buying that they often regret later when they have time to think about it. And the solution:

Government policies, such as forced savings or “cooling off” periods for buying property or cars, may be one remedy.

So a free market "buyer beware" policy isn't the ideal consumer policy. Glad to see modern economic research has been able to explain the New Deal and the consumer protection movement.

The neurological research may be fascinating in its own right, but you just have to laugh watching economists using it to shadowbox with their own ridiculous theoretical starting points.

NathanNewman.org: By Nathan at 06:41 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

At Least Some Workers Benefit from Inaugural

Even if a second Bush inauguration promises gloom for most American workers, the DC festivities gave hotel workers in that city the leverage to win a good new contract. As a head of the local union explained, "I think having the inaugural as a leverage point and having our membership willing to sacrifice money that they would have made was a key" to getting an agreement. And all the hotel workers get double pay for working on Inauguration Day, so at least a bit of that GOP money flowing in the city will be going to the workers checking their bags and setting up the convention halls.

Labor Blog: By Nathan at 07:49 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Obit for Murdered Iraqi Labor Leader Hadi Saleh

The Guardian has this wonderful obituary for Hadi Saleh, a man sentenced to death and hunted by Saddam Hussein, even as he would oppose the invasion of Iraq by the United States. Having covertly been a leader on behalf of labor rights in Iraq since 1980, he helped found the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU)-- which the Bush administration would militarily attack and politically undermine by retaining Saddam's anti-union laws.

It is sad that for all many pundits wistfully discuss an Iraq not divided by ethnic and religious ideology, they largely ignore the Iraqi labor movement and men and women like Hadi Saleh, who seek exactly that vision:

Hadi Saleh's commitment to trade unionism was a vital feature of his vision for a democratic, peaceful and federal Iraq, which would unite all Iraqis, regardless of their background, ethnicity or religion. For him, trade unions would be the key to achieving such unity. Thus he championed workers' rights to organise and to strike to achieve decent jobs, pay and working conditions: the basic building blocks of strong, non-sectarian trade unionism. Such a strategy remains the only way to defeat the IMF shock therapy and trans-national economic occupation, which has been imposed undemocratically on Iraqis by the occupying powers.

His murder by what appears to be the ex-security forces of the old regime doesn't fit simple versions of either the pro- or anti-war story line, so his story is largely being ignored in the mainstream news. But his death should be on the front page representing the attacks on the best hope for a non-sectarian future for Iraq.

Labor Blog: By Nathan at 07:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

Workers Win Union at Second Quebec Wal-Mart

Want to see why the Bush NLRB is trying to crush even voluntary card check recognition of unions in the United States? Look North where Quebec requires companies to recognize a union whenever a majority of workers sign cards requesting one:

Paul-Andre Lapointe of Laval University said Quebec's labour laws and courts are much more pro-union than those in the United States, where he said employers can use threats of closures or promises of wage hikes to thwart a union drive.

In Quebec, "the state and the courts have a favourable bias for unionism; the right of workers to participate in their working conditions is seen as a dimension of industrial democracy," Lapointe said.

"That's the goal of the labour code; it doesn't mean it campaigns for unions, but it gives equal rights to employees during a union drive, to balance things out."

That was the the labor law in the United States, as well, in the 1930s and 1940s until the 1947 Taft-Hartley Law ended the practice of the NLRB recognizing unions based on card checks. Instead, the best unions can do in the United States is negotiate voluntary recognition by an employer -- usually after applying other kinds of political or economic pressure on the employer just to end the usual threats and intimidation of workers under the NLRB process.

And the Bush NLRB is even trying to undermine or even outlaw that voluntary recognition process.

Over half of US workers say they would join a union if they had a real chance to do so, but current labor law makes it so dangerous that less than 10% of workers in the private sector have done so. The fact that another 40% are so terrorized that they can't act on that desire to be in a union is one of the shames of US democracy.

Labor Blog: By Nathan at 07:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)

Bush's Plan B

So if the backup plan is to leverage the social security debate to argue for private savings accounts, what's the payoff to Bush's wealthy supporters? Here are some details:

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NathanNewman.org: By Nathan at 12:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Do We Have to Be Quiet about Genesis
to Fight Creation-Science

Most reaction to my posts on evolution and the courts have focused on my condemning using the courts to fight creationism. But PZ Myers paid a bit more attention to the fact that I'm also urging belivers in evolution to argue more aggressively for the incompatibility of fundamentalist readings of genesis with the facts of evolution.

In fact, since secularists in court always have to emphasize that evolution has nothing to do with religion, they've had to soft pedal that point since they want to pretend for legal purposes that evolution is completely compatible with everyone's religious beliefs. No siree, judge, no problem at all.

But as PZ agrees:

They aren’t, they really aren’t [compatible]. Religion can make itself compatible by adopting a very abstract position, the idea of a largely non-interventionist, watchmaker god, but that isn’t the kind of religion that is causing us trouble, and it’s not the kind of religion our leaders and the public are imagining.

But PZ hits me with a tough question. How can I argue for more militant challenges to religious fundamentalism in public debate as a solution?

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NathanNewman.org: By Nathan at 06:57 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)

The Bush Social Security Feint?

With social security privatization looking like such a political loser, Kevin Drum wonders what the Bush administration was thinking. Kevin himself points to Ed Kilgore with the answer:

You have to wonder if the purpose, if only the fallback purpose, of the Bush SocSec campaign is to suddenly shift the debate from personal retirement savings accounts financed by payroll taxes to personal general savings accounts stuffed with sheltered upper-crust investment income. If there's any chance of that, Democrats needs to start preparing for it.

The details of the Bush proposal always looked suspiciously modest-- no more than $1000 per worker per year going into the accounts. Where was the boost to the wealthy in that?

But as part of Bush's "ownership society", Bush wants to make taxing work the focus of the IRS, while leaving capital gains and interest income in special savings accounts not only untaxed today, but untaxed in perpetuity. This article describes the goals in depth, but the key part of the Bush 2001 tax cut to go into effect in 2006, is to expand the idea of Roth IRAs to become Roth 401(k)s:

Another provision that can help the next generation will be Roth 401(k) plans, which employers will be able to offer beginning next year. Like Roth IRAs, they will be funded with a worker's after-tax dollars; similarly, withdrawals will be tax-free. But Roth 401(k)s will also allow much higher contributions than regular IRAs — the same as those for other 401(k) plans — thus allowing an end run around the income limits that make many well-to-do people ineligible for a Roth IRA.

The advantage for the next generation is that those affluent enough to let the money accumulate until they die will be able to name a child or grandchild as the beneficiary of the account. The child will be required to withdraw the money over his or her expected lifetime, receiving what is essentially a lifetime stream of tax-free income.

Read that last phrase.

Read it again.

This is the politics of creating an aristocracy of multi-generational untaxed incomes, enriching the already wealthy while starving future governments of a source of revenue.

And due to compound interest, the numbers are remarkably scary. Back in 2002, I wrote this article, which looked at some of the numbers:

Imagine a Roth 401K owner in twenty years with $1 million in his account at death; he leaves $100,000 to each of ten grandchildren. Under the exponential math of compound interest, those grandchildren could each enjoy by some estimates as much as $50-100 million of tax-free income over their lives from these Roth 401K bequests.

That's bad enough, but Bush wants to keep expanding the realm of untaxed investment income until nothing is left to tax but the wages of the workers. The hope no doubt on the Right is that those workers will slash the remains of the welfare state to escape that tax burden, achieving a step-by-step starving of the New Deal into non-existence.

Social security privatization would be a home run for the rightwing if achieved, but if it allows them to advance a few bases through the creation of more untaxed savings boondoggles, they'll take that as a win.

NathanNewman.org: By Nathan at 01:23 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

From Ashes of 911
A New Worker-Owned Restaurant

When the north tower collapsed on 9-11, seventy-three workers at the famed Windows on the World Restaurant died. But the survivors, in collaboration with the local restaurant union and other allies, came together to form a new organization, the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), to advocate on behalf of the rights of restaurant workers in the city.

And one result of that effort is a new cooperatively-run restaurant owned by thirty-five of those largely immigrant Windows survivors and launched with the support of ROC.

The restaurant has raised a large part of its initial capital from the Italian cooperative movement, a nice sign of international worker solidarity.

I've done quite a bit of political work in support of ROC in the last two years, so I'm happy to see this new venture successfully moving forward.

Labor Blog: By Nathan at 08:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

There is No Crisis

I've added this link to a nice project pulling together resources debunking Bush's hyped social security "crisis." I actually think the blogs are making a real dent in how the press and other commentators are responding to Bush's propaganda assault, so any resources that pulls those resources together for quick fact-checking is to be applauded.

NathanNewman.org: By Nathan at 08:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Measuring Risk: Al Qaeda v. Disease and Global Warming

In the wake of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, I made the heretical statement that "there are many other threats -- yes MORE IMPORTANT than the threat from terrorism -- that we are neglecting in favor of the 'war on terror.'" The point is that disease and environmental catastrophes kill far more people than ever die from wars of any kind. As an example, I noted ten times more Americans died in the 1918 influenza epidemic than during WWI.

None of the warbloggers caught the post at the time, but American Future has now belatedly weighed in with these comments which I think are worth responding to

It's simply impossible to know whether the threats to health and the environment are more serious than the threat of additional terrorism.

While the past never determines the future, the fact that such health and environmental threats have always been more devastating than war in the past is a significant argument. Yet in the past, governments still loved hyping the threat of war to fund armies over dealing with health and environmental threats. Bush is following older patterns -- hyping war to strengthen the government's popularity through fear -- because dealing with long-term problems like the environment and disease inherently don't deliver the same partisan gains.

And of course my point is that if we take the possibility of terrorism seriously enough to spend hundreds of billions, our comparative lack of spending on other serious threats of more certain danger reflects the fact that it is not risk assessment but the ideological gains for the government from hyping the terrorist threat that leads to this disparity.

But terrorism is different, argues American Future:

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NathanNewman.org: By Nathan at 07:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)