Don't leave the ACA out of Xmas

Sorry, it's been a while.  Work, work, work.  But I have been arguing with a friend of mine (both of us are members of Labor for Single-Payer, but he's more active in it), and here's my latest spew:

First let me say I do think the ACA is "woefully inadequate."  Single payer is what we need, or nationalized health care, but some business interests (and not others, interestingly enough) and their lapdog politicians have blocked anything close to that (along with much that is not even close).  And since we failed to get either of those things, it would have been nice for elected representatives (especially Democrats) to at least include what was called "the public option" at the time.  I don't think any of those things would have necessarily solved the problem this poor guy [see below] is bringing up, but I'll get back to that.  I still have to say the ACA helped millions of people get coverage, and that is nothing to sneeze at.

Demand demand

We demand more demand!

And an economic policy that goes with it.

P.S.  It's the opposite of 'supplyside' baloney, and it's based on the crazy idea that when workers make money, we spend it; when our wealthy overlords make money, they hoard it or play the stock market with it.  Duh!

SEIU stands up at UI

I may have mentioned before how proud I am to have worked for ACORN. I am also proud to work for SEIU once again, this time for ass-kicking Local 73 in Illinois and Indiana.

Recently I had the honor of working with approximately 750 building service and food service workers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who were fighting back against an Administration that has been crying broke and at the same time handing out fat, juicy raises to top administrators and coaches, raising tuition every year, raising student fees, and dropping millions on pet projects. (Did they think we wouldn't notice?)

But we did, we stuck together, we fought back, and we won!

Wisconsin, Indiana union-busting

Somebody said to me recently, "the Democrats are at their best when they are not there." Actually, I think that's a little harsh, but there is an important point there. Workers in this country have only rarely been able to count on politicians of any political stripe to back us up, much less pitch in with improvements.

Most often we have to fight like hell just to not get robbed, for example in the state sector when workers' contributions to their own pensions are used -- we should say "stolen" -- to pay the employer's other bills. (Somehow this little tidbit gets lost when the public debate begins over public employee pensions, along with the "pension holidays" we get in Illinois for example when the employer doesn't have to pay its obligations: maybe because so many in office are guilty of this legal racketeering?)

Democrats are often as guilty as Republicans on that score, sometimes moreso.

But these legislators who have fled their states to deny quorum to these reprehensible anti-worker bills are very close to heroes at the moment, , like a kind of more creative Mr.-Smith-goes-to-Washington-type-filibuster. See them as a suit-and-tie 300 in the pass at Thermopylae, if you like. (I actually think of the workers in Wisconsin more that way.) But these legislators are not avoiding their responsibilities, which are after all not to the governor and his nutcase agenda, or to some misbegotten sense of decorum, but to the people.

Don't let anyone tell you they are avoiding anything. They are doing the only responsible thing.

More Uses for Poverty

"The number of people in the US who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama's watch, with ranks of working poor approaching 1960's levels that led to the national war on poverty," says an AP story on recent census figures. And considering all the low-income paranoids I know (and maybe you know) who dodge the census while their coworkers land stopgap gigs walking for the Census Bureau, not to mention how hard it always is to count the very people who need counting the most, we can safely assume that like most dire government statistics, these are optimistic.

Break 'em up while we still can!

So I'm in Northeast Mississippi just for a day or two and I happen to check out the Daily Journal, and I see that unemployment in the land of my birth has dropped (the same song we're hearing all around the country) - probably because more people have just given up. Even the official rate (we know how accurate that is) in Alcorn County is now 11.3 percent, and it's worse in nearby Tippah and Benton Counties. This is recovery?

Win for workers!

AP is reporting: UE workers occupying the Republic Windows plant in Chicago have won a major victory! Bailout recipient Bank of America has finally agreed - under intense pressure - to lend the company the money to pay the workers.

About time!

As always there is more they might have won: the right to run the plant themselves, as a co-op or something, for example. But this win is significant, and it might be just the beginning.

Certainly the Illinois Governor and US President-elect seem to see it that way. (Could it be that the economic crunch looks just bad enuf, like it might be ushering in a trend of plant closings, that the spirit of M. Keynes advises settling with workers fast, when their demands are confined to "the money we're owed" - in other words, before workers start demanding to keep their plants? That could still be next.)

More good news from Immokalee!

Subway agrees to farmworkers demands! Subway-bashing canceled nationwide!

http://www.ciw-online.org/

Once again the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, those impoverished, mostly immigrant and largely non-English-speaking farmworkers from the Southeastern US, are showing us all the way.

Their patient, direct grassroots organizing, combined with smart, media-savvy coalition-building and corporate consumer campaigns have paid off again and again. The effect of meeting the workers themselves, in person - and the message that human slavery and other horrendous conditions exist right now in the US - is powerful. But so is the dedication of these workers, who come from Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti and from the Southern US. They've built their own organization, and nobody tells them how to run it.

Yet they are excellent listeners. They have worked closely with students, building on the anti-sweatshop and anti-corporate globalization movements, and the result has been a symbiosis that has developed power and energy and understanding on all sides.

First Taco Bell in 2005, then McDonald's in 2007, Burger King this year, and a few others along the way like Pizza Hut and KFC, then Whole Foods, and now the third largest fast food chain!

Go CIW!

Depression, by any other name ...

“Private employers cut 250,000 jobs in November, the most in seven years, a report by a private employment service said on Wednesday, (Reuters 12-3-08).”