Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Minnesota Public Radio... all the democracy corporate money can buy...

I Am Attacked on Minnesota Public Radio by Kerri Miller and John McCarthy without the right of response

I called into a morning program on Minnesota Public Radio that featured as one of its guests John McCarthy, the rich white man who heads up the Minnesota Indian Gaming Association.

After making two points I was cut-off while making the third point at which time the host of the program opened the microphone up to John McCarthy to attack me until he was done with his lies.

If Minnesota Public Radio was the least bit interested in democracy and fairness I would have been provided the opportunity to respond to McCarthy and the viciously anti-labor and racist remark made by the program host that, "no one is forced to work in the casinos."

In fact, two circumstances by themselves and combined do force people to work in these loud, noisy, smoke-filled casinos at poverty wages and without a voice at work and without any rights under state or federal labor laws.

Circumstance #1:

The faltering economy. Tens of thousands of people are out of work. Economic necessity forces people to work in these casinos. Offer casino workers a job elsewhere at real living wages with good working conditions and their rights protected by state and federal labor laws and these casinos will be left without anyone to staff them. 

Circumstance #2:

Racism. Racist hiring practices make it practically impossible for most Native American Indians to get jobs outside of the casino industry. The statistics and facts bear this out. In all the counties and their townships and cities in, near and around where the Indian Reservations of White Earth, Red Lake and Leech Lake are located, there are fewer than 20 Native American Indians employed in these public sectors out of thousands of workers. Because Affirmative Action is not being enforced in accordance with state and federal law, and the townships, cities and counties aren't even required to have Affirmative Action policies and programs in place, these racists don't have any Affirmative Action programs in any of these townships, cities or counties. Racism forces Native Americans to seek employment in these unhealthy smoke-filled casinos where they have no rights, receive poverty wages with no or little benefits and no voice in the workplace.

In fact, when it comes to Native American Indians they are forced to work in these casinos because Circumstance #1--- unemployment and Circumstance #2--- racism are both dominant and determining factors since unemployment rates on these three Indian Reservations range from a low of 60% to a high of 85%.

How can anyone be so arrogant and callous to argue with complete disregard for economic and racist factors that "no one is forced to work in these casinos?"  Yet, this is just what Minnesota Public Radio's Mid-Morning host, Kerri Miller, argued. And then she proceeded to arrogantly and undemocratically not allow me to respond while turning the microphone over to John McCarthy to viciously attack me; again, without allowing me to respond.

Now, the facts are such that Minnesota Public Radio has intentionally ignored the plight of casino workers because the casino managements are now underwriting MPR programming to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

And, where do these underwriting funds originate from?  Indian Gaming revenues. Racist Indian Gaming which is controlled by a bunch of racist white mobsters who own the slot machines and table games and those like John McCarthy who dole out campaign contributions to the politicians who in return assure them of cheap labor.

John McCarthy and Kerri Miller refused to address the issues I raised:

1. Why don't these casino operations pay taxes as it just happens that if they were taxed like any other business Minnesota would not have any budget problems plus the Indian Nations would receive more than they are presently receiving from gaming revenues?

2. Why didn't John McCarthy or Kerri Miller respond to the fact that 41,000 casino workers are forced to work in loud, noisy, smoke-filled casinos at poverty wages without any rights under state or federal labor laws and without any voice at work. Why no explanation as to why this situation exists in the first place?

3. Why didn't John McCarthy or Kerri Miller address the fact that the Minnesota Indian Gaming Association spends tens of millions of dollars contributing to the campaigns of everyone except Native American Indians and there isn't one single Native American Indian sitting amongst Minnesota's more than two-hundred state legislators?

Of course, Kerri Miller, the host of Minnesota Public Radio's Mid-Morning Program did not ask John McCarthy about the ethics of him owning Tony Doom Enterprises, a big-business making millions in profits as a result of selling campaign advertising materials to the very politicians he funnels the campaign contributions to through the Minnesota Indian Gaming Association. If this isn't a racket I don't know what is.

I leave it to people to draw their own conclusion as to whether I should have been allowed to respond to the anti-labor and racist response of Kerri Miller and the following vicious attack on me personally by John McCarthy who is such a coward he doesn't dare debate me on these issues but then goes on to attack me for "posting malicious, vicious and nasty things on my blog here" without substantiating one single one of his accusations.

Furthermore, John McCarthy told Kerri Miller that he "knows" me; another outright lie.

People should take a drive by John McCarthy's home and ask why he is living high on the hog as a direct result of his racist role in the impoverishment and ill-health of the Indian people. John McCarthy lives just outside of Bemidji, Minnesota in a two-million dollar estate at 8925Cove Drive NE, Bemidji, Minnesota. Take a drive out to see John McCarthy's estate and then drive through the Leech Lake, Red Lake and White Earth Indian Reservations to see how casino workers getting paid poverty wages have to live or check out the dirty, filthy, rat infested apartment complex in Warroad, Minnesota that Floyd Jourdain and the Red Lake Tribal Council reserve for the members of the Red Lake Nation who work in the Seven Clans Casino Red Lake who have to pay over half of their poverty wages to live there.

Why doesn't Minnesota Public Radio report on any of this? The reason is obvious; John McCarthy and the casino managements and the Minnesota Indian Gaming Association are bribing MPR into silence just like the politicians have been bribed to enable this horrendous and most disgraceful situation to come into existence and continue where poverty is the only thing that flourishes so a few mobsters owning the slot machines and table games can profit.

For those who don't care about the plight of casino workers and enjoy gambling and the cheap meals served, keep this in mind:

* The Minnesota Department of Public Safety who is supposed to be monitoring slot machine compliance checks fewer than 150 slot machines a year in all of Minnesota.

* Food served in the casinos is not inspected by federal or state inspectors nor is the condition of the places where the food is prepared.

* And for those staying in the casino hotels/motels there has been no building inspections by local or state building inspectors.

As for John McCarthy's claim made on Mid-Morning that all the casinos have been built and constructed by union workers this is an outright big fat lie. I challenge John McCarthy to produce the union contracts. In fact, union business agents and stewards are not even allowed on these construction sites.

And casino workers, like the 5,000 employed by Stanley Crooks at his Mystic Lake Casino empire are forced to sign statements stating that they agree, as terms of their employment, that they will not engage in union organizing knowing they will be fired.

In fact, Stanley Crooks has fired over 200 casino workers from his Mystic Lake Casino empire in the last three years simply for "blogging about working conditions." And not a peep of any of this from Minnesota Public Radio. How come Kerri Miller is allowed to voice her anti-labor and racist views from a radio network funded by tax-payers in addition to casino managements without any restrictions or retribution?

One would think that an industry created by politicians at tax-payer expense while generating tens of billions of  dollars annually in profits would require a bit of scrutiny from Minnesota Public Radio but all this industry gets from MPR, its management, program hosts and reporters is unconditional praise.

Kerri Miller doesn't even ask one of Minnesota's leading politicians or John McCarthy who speaks for this dirty, corrupt and disgusting casino industry why it is that these casinos have been allowed to circumvent  the ban on smoking applicable to all other places of employment in Minnesota.

How much is it costing Minnesota tax-payers to have 41,000 Minnesotans working in loud, noisy, smoke-filled casinos where casino workers are fired without compensation of any kind if they develop coughs and begin to lose their hearing?

Perhaps Kerri Miller should invite someone from the Indian Health Service, the Minnesota Heart and Lung Foundation or the American Cancer Society to explain the impact of second-hand smoke on casino workers' health and lives and the impact to their families.

John McCarthy is concerned about all the "nasty things" I have to say about him, the casino managements and the Minnesota Indian Gaming Association along with the politicians he bribes and then profits from, again, here on my blog... well, let's talk about the real nasty things John McCarthy brings to Minnesota--- smoke-filled workplaces, poverty and racism.

And if these nasty things and the nasty people like John McCarthy don't get talked  talked about here on my popular blog, where do they get talked about? On Minnesota Public Radio? Ha!
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Monday, March 28, 2011

Losing Our Way

I would encourage everyone to photocopy this article and pass it it out at every demonstration across the country along with the unity program on the top of my blog. Post it on every union bulletin board and every break-room and lunch-room. Post it on every church bulletin board and in every school. This op-ed column should form the basis for discussion groups. It is unfortunate that this column is Bob Herbert's last column for the New York Times.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/opinion/26herbert.html?_r=1
Op-Ed Columnist New York Times

Losing Our Way


By BOB HERBERT

Published: March 25, 2011
So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Bob Herbert
Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.
Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.

There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.
This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”

G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.

Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.

New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.


•

This is my last column for The New York Times after an exhilarating, nearly 18-year run. I’m off to write a book and expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society. My thanks to all the readers who have been so kind to me over the years. I can be reached going forward atbobherbert88@gmail.com
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Thursday, February 24, 2011

Racism rears its ugly head at Bemidji State University

Published February 23, 2011, 12:00 AM

Speaker compares Holocaust to American Indian reservation system

Scholars, historians and people interested in the subject of American Indian tribal issues gathered together last night in Bemidji State University Thompson Recital Hall to hear Humanities scholar Clay S. Jenkinson.
By: Patt Rall, Bemidji Pioneer
Scholars, historians and people interested in the subject of American Indian tribal issues gathered together last night in Bemidji State University Thompson Recital Hall to hear Humanities scholar Clay S. Jenkinson.
Many of the same audience came to hear him because they remembered his appearance as Thomas Jefferson for the Bemidji Symphony Orchestra’s July 4 Concert.
“We saw him last summer and he just enchanted everybody and was so interested to hear what he had to say,” said attendees Bob and Sally Montibello.
Beverly Everett, music director of the Bemidji Symphony Orchestra, invited Jenkinson to speak as a prelude to the outreach program planned for May. “The Defiant Requiem,” written by Murry Sidlin, is the musical story of the performances of Verdi’s work in the Terezin Concentration Camp during World War II. The premise of Jenkinson’s talk was “Relating the Holocaust to Native American Issues.”
“In this part of the world we cannot talk about the Holocaust without bringing up the problem of our treatment of Native Americans,” said Jenkinson during an interview earlier in the day. “I don’t think that our treatment of Native Americans was ever identical with the purposes of the Holocaust. In other words, I don’t believe that it was the policy of the United States government to insist on a systematic extermination of the Native American population; in fact, it is just the opposite.”
Attendees Nadine Wade and her friend Linda Cabrales said, “This is the first time we heard the word because it’s usually genocide. There is a lot of history that has not been taught in the schools. It’s nice to have the real story told once in awhile.”
During his talk at the university, Jenkinson went on to explain what he has learned about the treatment of native populations. In the western territories, it was actually the people who were calling for the extermination of the native peoples, and the government held them back.
The general theme of Jenkinson’s talk was on the Europeanization of this land (America) which started with Christopher Columbus because it was clear that Europeans wanted to take over the continent as effortlessly as possible, but as bloodthirstily as necessary. That varied from place to place and culture to culture. There was no way that Europeans were going to let native populations stand in their way. In fact, there have been attempts throughout American history to create reservations of the kind that Oklahoma was meant to be. But the de facto policy of white Europeans was that Indians could not be allowed to get in the way of white people’s dreams. That theme played itself out, over and over again, with different variations, Jenkinson said.
Students Jen Froderman, a social work major, and her friend Christina Knutson came to the lecture for different reasons. Froderman because of her field of study and interest in Indian culture and Knutson because she is interested in history.
All this happened relatively late in the segment of time known as Imperialism. Printing presses and media would point out to the general public what was happening to the native population. The fact that this country was born of the Enlightenment meant that European settlers couldn’t just do this and hope that it would be forgotten. There was an attempt to do it as legally and with as little violence as possible. The net result was cultural genocide, but not a policy of physical genocide.
For example, Captain Richard H. Pratt, the founder of the Indian Boarding Schools in Carlisle, Pa., is quoted as saying, “Kill the Indian to save the man.” By 1900, thousands of Indians were housed in 150 boarding schools. That’s not quite Dachau, said Jenkinson, but it was not that far away either, for not all concentration camps were Auschwitz.
It is not fair to do a Holocaust program in faraway Minnesota without looking in the mirror and saying, “How really different have America’s policies been, a much more benign version of what the Nazis were up to.”
The word Holocaust has to be looked at carefully, and for Jenkinson, it means the systematic industrial extermination of a people, purposefully out of mere hate. He said he feels that was not true in America.
Jenkinson went on to explain that the U.S. government did not go that far. Reservations today are homelands for Indians. They like the culture, a refuge, a place where white culture has a small footprint. They are places where Indians can be together and gain solidarity and have a relationship with the earth that they can’t have in white populations. The reservations were really concentration camps that were created in the 1870s as a stop gap measure to keep Indians together in preparation to their assimilation into the white population.
The reservation system was a way to imprison Indians on lands that nobody else wanted and now in the 21st century it’s become something different. Jenkinson said if you asked Indians today if they want to terminate the reservation system, they would say absolutely not. That is a big reversal, but the point is that the white people of Minnesota took the lands from the native people here. White negotiators would come to Bemidji and say to the Ojibwe, we’d like to buy this territory and if the Ojibwe did not want to sell it, they would take it.
The government of the United States would respond to the demands of the white population and make promises they couldn’t keep when Minnesota was first being populated in the 1820s and ’30s in the St. Croix area. They were what are called “second hop” because they already had lives in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Ohio, for example, and then moved here. At first nobody wanted northern Minnesota, so it was just left to the Indians. Then immigration after the Homestead Act brought more people to this area. At first, the Indians cooperated out of innocence or not understanding the negotiations or were bullied or given alcohol. In some cases, the native population would simply refuse, and a border skirmish would happen where an Ojibwe would kill a white family that was squatting on their land. Then troops would come in. There would be a war and the government would simply take the land that they wanted.
There is so much spiritual and emotional support for Indians today that it would be impossible for this to happen now, Jenkinson said. If there was anything that he would have liked listeners to take back with them last night, it is a respect for the resilience of these peoples: the European Jews and other minority populations like the Gypsys and the Native Americans.
The event was well attended and free to the public. It was funded, in part, by a grant from the Minnesota State Legislature and the McKnight Foundation.


Comment---

This will come as news to the tens of thousands of Native American Indians living in Minnesota:

"There is so much spiritual and emotional support for Indians today that it would be impossible for this to happen now, Jenkinson said. If there was anything that he would have liked listeners to take back with them last night, it is a respect for the resilience of these peoples: the European Jews and other minority populations like the Gypsys and the Native Americans."
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Friday, February 18, 2011

Workers' Rights Here and Abroad

This article, Workers' Rights Here and Abroad--- being published all over the place to confuse and intimidate and manipulate and control workers--- clearly articulates the official ideology of the U.S. labor movement throughout its long history except for a period from around 1930 to 1947 when the CIO was a powerful influence led by the "left," most notably the Communist Party USA which weilded substantial influence among working people with rank-and-file activists rising to become important leaders in leading union positions, including, Harry Bridges, Wyndham Mortimer, Phil Raymond and leaders of the CPUSA like William Z. Foster, James W. Ford, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Earl Browder and writers like Frank Marshall Davis... to name just a few. 

Note: This article appeared in newspapers all over the United States; it was published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Feb. 17, 2011. http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/116361909.html

Also, note: Spending on the wars is never mentioned as a major contributing factor to the budget crisis every state faces or is already experiencing. No mention of money for people; not for war.

Another note: check out the good dose of "red baiting" for extra measure--- "It's a throwback to 19th-century America, when strikes were suppressed by force of arms. Or, come to think of it, to Mubarak's Egypt or communist Poland and East Germany."

A most important note, the real issue to Harold Meyerson:
"Newly elected Republican governors, however, may reach the same conclusion Walker did and use the recession-induced fiscal crisis to achieve a partisan political objective: removing unions, the most potent force in the Democrats' electoral operation, from the landscape. "If we just stop and cure the pension problem, we have not gone far enough," Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend."

The Democratic Party gets its money from Wall Street and its "foot soldiers" and votes from organized labor along with very substantial funding which drains union coffers to assure labor doesn't use its formidable financial resources and organizational strength to start its own political party like organized labor has in Canada with the socialist New Democratic Party.


My comment:

This dangerous ideology of "pragmatism" posing as liberalism inthis artiicle enables Wall Street through the Democratic Party to manipulate and control labor---

What kind of crap is this? The Democrats can cut wages and benefits better than Republicans?

"Democratic governors such as California's Jerry Brown and New York's Andrew Cuomo have proposed scaling back public services, pay, and benefits without going after workers' fundamental rights to bargain. The right to bargain is clearly a separate question."

"Liberalism" and "pragmatism" are not one and the same thing; though they can be, and often are.

It must be noted that Obama and the Democrats have prepared the soil for this attack--- by both Republicans and Democrats--- on the working class, not only in Wisconsin but all across the United States by:

1. Spending on wars instead of human needs and universal social programs.

2. Pushing through the "Health Insurance and Pharmaceutical Industry Bailout and Profit Maximization Act of 2010" instead of single-payer universal health care or the more comprehensive and better alternative a National Public Health Care System leaving health care to remain a "bone of contention" in labor management disputes.

3. By Obama's freezing of federal government employees' wages.

4. By refusing to enact the Employee Free Choice Act which would have given labor the opportunity to push its agenda more agressively from a position of strength. In fact, it was the refusal of Obama and the Democrats to implement--- with acquiescence and passivity and approval in the form of making up excuses for Obama from the AFL-CIO leadership that the defeat of EFCA has led now to labor being vulnerable to these attacks across the country, and let us make no mistake in understanding that if these attacks on teachers and other public sector employees and their unions are a success, all working people will suffer and the attacks on private sector unions will increase to untold proportions--- and the pressure is at a high level as it is right now.

5. Through attacks on Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Not to mention attacks on the anti-poverty programs like the Community Action Programs which are an integral part of what little remains of the "war on poverty."

It is unfortunate the left and progressive movement lacks a real independent publication like the Daily Worker or the National Guardian as we face these difficult dangers and problems ahead; but, since we don't have these kinds of publications it means that each of us has to take the responsibility of thinking these these kinds of things through and sharing our ideas to stimulate the broadest discussions possible in order to counter these most reactionary ideas like in this aricle being pushed in the name of liberalism, progressivism and even leftism.

What is most urgently required is a good strong dose of anti-imperialist education in the working class movement explaining the relationship between wars and the capitalist economic crisis, the crisis of every-day-living working people are now forced to endure in order to try to survive and the austerity measures being forced on us by Wall Street and it various political surrogates from Obama and the Democrats to the Republicans, the Tea Party crowd and the Birchites and their racist, fascist ilk like Ron and Rand Paul who hide behind "libertarianism."

Here is the article meant to poison the minds of working people which requires a swift response from the left (the Communist Party USA is not up to the task, unfortunately; a problem we are trying to correct)---


Workers' Rights Here and Abroad



Workers toppled a dictator in Egypt, but might be silenced in Wisconsin.


Harold Meyerson | February 17, 2011 | web only


Wisconsin teachers protest budget cuts at the state capitol. (Flickr/markonf1re)


In Egypt, workers are having a revolutionary February. In the United States, by contrast, February is shaping up as the cruelest month workers have known in decades.

The coup de grace that toppled Hosni Mubarak came after tens of thousands of Egyptian workers went on strike beginning last Tuesday. By Friday, when Egypt's military leaders apparently decided that unrest had reached the point where Mubarak had to go, the Egyptians who operate the Suez Canal and their fellow workers in steel, textile, and bottling factories; in hospitals, museums and schools; and those who drive buses and trains had left their jobs to protest their conditions of employment and governance. As Jim Hoagland noted in The Washington Post, Egypt was barreling down the path that Poland, East Germany, and the Philippines had taken, the path where workers join student protesters in the streets and jointly sweep away an authoritarian regime.

But even as workers were helping topple the regime in Cairo, one state government in particular was moving to topple workers' organizations here in the United States. Last Friday, Scott Walker, Wisconsin's new Republican governor, proposed taking away most collective bargaining rights of public employees. Under his legislation, which has moved so swiftly through the newly Republican state legislature that it might come to a vote Thursday, the unions representing teachers, sanitation workers, doctors and nurses at public hospitals, and a host of other public employees, would lose the right to bargain over health coverage, pensions, and other benefits. (To make his proposal more politically palatable, the governor exempted from his hit list the unions representing firefighters and police.) The only thing all other public-sector workers could bargain over would be their base wages, and given the fiscal restraints plaguing the states, that's hardly anything to bargain over at all.

You might think that Walker came to this extreme measure after negotiations with public-sector unions had reached an impasse. In fact, he hasn't held such discussions. "I don't have anything to negotiate," Walker told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week. To underscore just how accompli he considered his fait, he vowed to call in the National Guard if protesting workers walked off the job or disrupted state services.

It's a throwback to 19th-century America, when strikes were suppressed by force of arms. Or, come to think of it, to Mubarak's Egypt or communist Poland and East Germany.

Now, it's not as if our states don't have fiscal crises to address, and Walker insists that it's Wisconsin's empty till that has driven him to curtail workers' rights. But there are other options.

Democratic governors such as California's Jerry Brown and New York's Andrew Cuomo have proposed scaling back public services, pay, and benefits without going after workers' fundamental rights to bargain. The right to bargain is clearly a separate question.

Newly elected Republican governors, however, may reach the same conclusion Walker did and use the recession-induced fiscal crisis to achieve a partisan political objective: removing unions, the most potent force in the Democrats' electoral operation, from the landscape. "If we just stop and cure the pension problem, we have not gone far enough," Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend.

The real goal of the American right is to reduce public employee unions to the level of private-sector unions, which now represent fewer than 7 percent of American workers. Walker's proposal not only confines public-sector unions to annual bargaining over wage increases but restricts the increases for state employees to raises in the consumer price index and compels every such union to hold an annual membership vote to determine whether the union can continue to represent workers. It clearly intends to smash these unions altogether.

Which would yield what? Our unions have already been decimated in the private sector; the results are plain. Corporate profits are soaring, while domestic investment, wages, and benefits (particularly at nonunion companies) are flat-lining at best. With nobody to bargain for workers, America increasingly is an economically stagnant, plutocratic utopia. Is everybody happy?

American conservatives often profess admiration for foreign workers' bravery in protesting and undermining authoritarian regimes. Letting workers exercise their rights at home, however, threatens to undermine some of our own regimes (the Republican ones particularly) and shouldn't be permitted. Now that Wisconsin's governor has given the Guard its marching orders, we can discern a new pattern of global repressive solidarity emerging -- from the chastened pharaoh of the Middle East to the cheese-head pharaoh of the Middle West.

Harold Meyerson's Washington Post column runs on Wednesdays. This one originally ran here.

Harold Meyerson is the editor-at-large at The American Prospect and a columnist for The Washington Post. Click here to read more about him.


Comment by Alan Maki:

The labor movement has been "led" by those adhering to the imperialist ideology of "pragmatism" since 1947 making it very easy for employers and the government as well as the Democrats to manipulate and control labor. This particular article is a very dangerous article and needs to be refuted; especially this idea:

"Democratic governors such as California's Jerry Brown and New York's Andrew Cuomo have proposed scaling back public services, pay, and benefits without going after workers' fundamental rights to bargain. The right to bargain is clearly a separate question."

This comes from one of the AFL-CIO's "partners," American Prospect.

Look what they say about themselves in their "mission statement:"


"At the same time, we take seriously our role as a forum for constructive debate and civil argument about ideas across a wide range of the center-left political spectrum. We don't have a party line, because we believe that robust, challenging internal debate, as well as honest and respectful engagement with philosophical conservatism, will strengthen our ideas, resolve weaknesses, and find the basis for compromise that leads to change."

"...honest and respectful engagement with philosophical conservatism, will strengthen our ideas, resolve weaknesses, and find the basis for compromise that leads to change."


From Wikipedia:

The American Prospect is a monthly American political magazine dedicated to liberalism. It bills itself as a journal "of liberal ideas, committed to a just society, an enriched democracy, and effective liberal politics"[1] which focuses on U.S. politics and public policy. Politically, the magazine is in support of modern American liberalism, similar to The New Republic and The Nation, which likewise target an intellectual audience.

The magazine was founded in 1990 by Robert Kuttner, Robert Reich, and Paul Starr as a response to the perceived intellectual ascendancy of conservatism in the 1980s. Originally it published quarterly, then bimonthly. In 2000, thanks to a grant from the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, it became biweekly.[2] Financial and logistical difficulties ensued, and the magazine moved to its present monthly format in spring 2003. Kuttner and Starr share the title of Editor with Mark Schmitt, who is also the magazine's executive editor. The online version of the magazine includes an active blog, as well as blogs by Dean Baker and Adam Serwer.

In 2010, The American Prospect was the recipient of Utne Reader magazine's Utne Independent Press Award for Political Coverage.[3]
The magazine's alumni include Jonathan Chait, Jonathan Cohn, Joshua Green, Joshua Micah Marshall, Jedediah Purdy, Chris Mooney, Matthew Yglesias, Michael Massing, Joe Conason, Michael Tomasky, Ezra Klein, and Scott Stossel.
Recent executive editors have included (from oldest to latest) Michael Tomasky, Harold Meyerson, and Mark Schmitt.
In March 2010, "The American Prospect" entered into a publishing partnership with Demos, a public policy research and advocacy center.

Alan L. Maki

Director of Organizing,
Midwest Casino Workers Organizing Council

and

Co-Chair,
Lake-of-the-Woods Communist Club (Minnesota-Manitoba-Ontario)

58891 County Road 13
Warroad, Minnesota 56763

Phone: 218-386-2432
Cell Phone: 651-587-5541

E-mail: amaki000@centurytel.net

Check out my Blog:
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