People Before Profit blog

EDITORIAL: A mean and vicious veto

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 05:24:00 +0000

Mean. Vicious. Those words describe the 154 Republicans and two Democrats in the House who voted Oct. 18 to sustain George W. Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

The vote was 273-156, just 13 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to override. Forty-four House Republicans broke with Bush to override. The Senate had approved, by a veto-proof margin, a $35 billion expansion of the program renewing coverage for 6.6 million children and extending coverage to an additional 4 million youngsters.

Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, put the issue squarely: “Ten million American children will not get the care they need because of a small group of callous Republicans led by President Bush. They can find billions of dollars to spend on a never-ending war in Iraq, but won’t fund doctor’s visits for children. This vote is morally outrageous.”

The Republican right spread crude lies about SCHIP. It was “socialized medicine” or a covert scheme to open the door for national health care. Bush said the bill would encourage middle-income families not to buy private insurance.

True, the SCHIP extension bill would have covered uninsured children in families with annual incomes three times the poverty rate, $61,950 for a family of four. Sen. John Kerry pointed out that buying private health care for that family would cost about $15,000 a year. Providing SCHIP coverage for these millions of youngsters is wholly justified.

Assuring good health care for children whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to buy private insurance is not only the right thing to do, but an urgently needed investment in our country’s future.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) vows to reintroduce SCHIP. She says her bottom line is that any SCHIP bill must extend protection to a total of 10 million children. We say keep this fight going! No retreat!

And let’s prepare a list of every lawmaker who voted to sustain Bush’s shameful veto. Voters should oust them on Election Day, Nov. 4, 2008.

EDITORIAL: Californias wildfires

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 05:22:00 +0000

As we went to press, devastating wildfires sweeping southern California had forced at least half a million people to flee their homes, with close to 2,000 houses destroyed. Twenty-one firefighters and at least 24 others had been injured. Several deaths were reported.

The fires, spread by winds up to 100 miles per hour, burned about 670 square miles from the Los Angeles area to the Mexican border, with San Diego County the hardest hit.

Thomas Swetnam, a forestry expert at the University of Arizona, says the increasing numbers of large forest fires and area burned in the western U.S. are “significantly correlated” with larger warming and drying trends.

Interviewed on “60 Minutes” last week, Swetnam described how it plays out: Spring is arriving earlier because of warming conditions, and mountain snow melts and runs off earlier. Logs, branches and tree needles all dry out sooner, leaving dry tinder on the ground for longer periods — thus more opportunity and fuel for fires to start.

Said Swetnam, “We’re dealing with a period of climate, in terms of temperature and humidity and drought, that’s different than anything people have seen in our lifetimes.”

Amy Luers, California climate manager for the Union of Concerned Scientists, warned that the scientific evidence “suggests that if we do not make dramatic cuts in our emissions of global warming pollution, the wildfires throughout the West could lead to dramatic changes in the western landscapes.”

President Bush rushed to look like a take-charge leader in this disaster — a former adviser called it an “anti-Katrina” response.

But the same newspapers that carried front-page photos of the flames also carried a news report that the White House had forced the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to slash scientific references to the health risks of climate change from testimony she gave to Congress this week.

Serious leadership on global warming is required, not phony photo-ops.

Republican wins in Louisiana, exploits Jena 6

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 04:38:00 +0000

Republican Bobby Jindal won election as governor of Louisiana, Oct. 20, with a campaign that evaded the issues while offering barely coded appeals to racism in the case of the Jena Six.

Jindal won 53 percent of the vote in a primary election marked by low turnout. Under Louisiana law, all candidates run in an open multiparty primary in which voters can cross party lines. If a candidate receives a simple majority in the primary, he or she is automatically declared winner of the general election. Jindal’s opposition was split 11 ways.

According to The Times-Picayune newspaper, voter turnout statewide was 45 percent, meaning Jindal takes office with about 23 percent of the eligible vote. In New Orleans, the turnout was 27 percent, or 75,880 votes, compared with 122,000 who voted in New Orleans in the 2003 pre-Katrina gubernatorial election. Statewide, 51 percent of whites voted, but only 35 percent of eligible African Americans. Jindal received only 10 percent of the Black vote.

Jindal was also helped by the purging of the voter rolls in Louisiana of tens of thousands of Katrina evacuees, a majority African American voters from heavily Democratic Orleans Parish. State Rep. Juan LaFonta (D-New Orleans) pointed out that thousands of African American voters were not allowed to vote in their accustomed places in New Orleans. “I’m very disappointed. I feel like I’m in Florida, not Louisiana,” he said, referring to the stolen 2000 election.

While campaigning in Shreveport, Sept. 20, Jindal was asked about the 50,000 people who demonstrated peacefully in support of the six Black teenagers in nearby Jena that same day. “We certainly don’t need any outside agitators coming in here,” Jindal said, echoing a line used against the civil rights movement by a string of segregationist governors throughout the South in the 1960s.

Jindal voiced full support for the LaSalle Parish court’s handling of the Jena Six case, even though outrage has spread across the nation that District Attorney Reed Walters and LaSalle Parish Judge J.P. Mauffray have enforced one code of justice for the Black youth and another for the white youth.

Mauffray threw 17-year-old Mychal Bell back in prison for 18 months, saying Bell violated his probation for a previous conviction. The judge took this action even though an appeals court threw out Bell’s conviction on aggravated battery charges.

Alan Bean, director of Dallas-based Friends of Justice who has traveled to Jena 17 times working for justice for Jena Six, told the World, “There are plenty of white voters who think the Jena Six are getting what they deserve, and guys like Jindal know that is what they think.”

Tannie Lewis Bradley, an African American community activist writing in a Shreveport Times op-ed, said, “I would like to ask Mr. Jindal if he honestly believes that the legal system would have acted with deliberate speed when Black churches were being burned and bombed, angry white mobs were attacking school children, terrorists (Klansmen) were riding … and politicians were shouting ‘segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.’”

She continued, “I hope Mr. Jindal’s reference to ‘outside agitators’ is not a veiled shout of ‘injustice today, injustice tomorrow, injustice forever’” for the Jena Six and other African Americans in Louisiana.

Jindal is the first Indian American ever elected to govern a state in the United States. His election was greeted widely with jubilation in the Indian American community. But many in the South Asian community note that his record in the U.S. Congress has been unwavering support of George W. Bush’s Iraq war and the rest of the administration’s right-wing agenda.

Jindal advocates the teaching of “intelligent design” in the public schools. He has been remarkably quiet in the face of nationwide outrage at the Bush administration’s betrayal of victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana.

He raised at least $11 million in campaign contributions, much of from Texas-based oil and gas corporations. Richard Kinder, a G.W. Bush “Pioneer,” former CEO of Enron and the current founder of Kinder-Morgan Energy Partners, one of the nation’s largest oil and gas pipeline companies, gave Jindal $5,000. Kinder is worth an estimated $10 billion. In one year, Kinder gave $470,000 to the Republican National State Elections Committee. Another Jindal donor who also gave $5,000 is Ray Hunt of Dallas, a scion of the oil and silver magnate H.L. Hunt, notorious for his fascist-like sympathies. Pfizer, the pharmaceutical

giant, also gave the maximum to Jindal.

A New Orleans blogger, Kingfish, charged that Jindal’s opponents, Democrats and independents, “were too scared to attend the Jena Six marches (except John Georges) … too scared to call out Jindal for echoing the awful, loaded phrases of past segregationists.”

Throwing young Bell back in jail “shows malice on the judge’s part,” Bean said. “The demand has to be a change of venue. If this case went to trial outside LaSalle Parish, Bell would go free because there just isn’t the evidence to convict him.”

The evidence against the other five defendants is even more flimsy, he said. Now, he said, is the time to join the half million or more who have signed petitions demanding “Free the Jena Six.”

Jindal’s election won’t make that demand go away.

greenerpastures21212 @yahoo.com

EDITORIAL: Take the long view

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 08:18:00 +0000

It’s been said that Communists make the best fighters for social progress because they have the big picture of the struggle, the long view of the road towards a better society, and feel strongly about justice.

Probably the most unjustly vilified political movement of the 20th — and 21st — centuries, U.S. Communists are still fighting the good fight. Evidence comes from little-publicized events in the last two weeks: the Communist Party held three regional conferences — in Oakland, Calif., Chicago and New York — focused on building at the grass roots.

Where is anti-communism today? What holds people back from joining the Communist Party or Young Communist League? Why does a bigger CPUSA matter? The conferences took up these and many other questions.

Some of the biggest gains for workers of all races and unions, for African Americans and other people of color, for immigrants, for women and young people, were made when there was a sizeable and influential Communist Party. During its height in the 1930s and ’40s, Communists helped win far-reaching advances, like unions and Social Security, that — although under attack now — are still seen as centerpieces of our nation’s social safety net.

During the 1960s and ’70s, the party was infused with a new generation of anti-Vietnam-War and civil rights activists. As with the New Deal, there’s a correlation between landmark measures like the Great Society’s Medicare and the Civil Rights Act, the mass upsurge that won those advances, and the growth of the Communist Party.

When anti-communism rages, setbacks to democracy are sure to come. The prime example is the McCarthy/Cold War period. But recall that Ronald Reagan promoted aggressive anti-communism — calling the Soviet Union the “evil empire” and illegally funding anti-communist Contras to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government — and at the same time launched 27 years of ultra-right attacks on unions, civil rights, public services and democracy.

The Communist Party conferences showed that a big-picture people’s movement in our country is alive, relevant and necessary. That’s good news for the struggles of today and tomorrow.

You can learn more about (and join) the Communist Party at and the Young Communist League at .

EDITORIAL: Lying about spying

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 08:15:00 +0000

The Bush administration was pressing phone-spying on Americans long before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a former phone company CEO has revealed.

According to a stunning Oct. 11 report in The Rocky Mountain News, former Qwest Communications head Joseph Nacchio says in newly unsealed court papers that his company refused a National Security Agency proposal that company lawyers considered illegal back in February 2001, nearly seven months before 9/11.

He says the NSA retaliated by depriving Qwest of lucrative contracts.

Nacchio is currently appealing a conviction for insider trading, and the new revelations were contained in documents related to his appeal.

Administration officials have claimed their domestic spying program started in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. But the court documents say the Bush administration was pressing Qwest to participate in illegal spying on Americans only weeks after taking over the White House, and long before 9/11 and its proclaimed “war on terrorism.”

Nacchio says the NSA proposal came at a meeting at NSA headquarters on Feb. 27, 2001. At the time, he was chairman of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, “whose members included top executives of most of the major communications companies,” according to an Oct. 14 New York Times report.

A lawsuit filed against several telecommunications companies last year charges that around the time of Nacchio’s NSA meeting, seven months before Sept. 11, AT&T “began development of a center for monitoring long distance calls and Internet transmissions and other digital information for the exclusive use of the NSA.”

A PBS “Frontline” documentary, “Cheney’s Law,” aired last week, showed how Vice President Dick Cheney has for decades pushed for unchecked presidential authority — an imperial “national security” state.

The latest revelation offers evidence that the Bush administration took advantage of the Sept. 11 tragedy to advance a pre-existing program of shredding the Constitution. Bush, Cheney and their would-be “law and order” successors like Rudy Giuliani continue to hypocritically exploit the blood and tears of 9/11 to press their right-wing agenda.

We need a Congress and president that will say “Enough!” and undo the damage.

Sparks fly at Capitol Hill hearing on Jena 6

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:57:00 +0000

WASHINGTON — Witnesses in a Capitol Hill hearing Oct. 16 blasted the U.S. Justice Department for doing nothing as Jena, La., officials inflicted blatantly discriminatory punishment on six Black high school students while white students who committed violent racist acts were let off with a slap on the wrist.

LaSalle Parish Judge J.P. Mauffray last week sent 17-year-old Mychal Bell back to jail for 18 months, saying Bell violated his probation for a previous conviction. The judge took this action even though an appeals court overturned Bell’s conviction as an adult by an all-white jury on aggravated battery charges and the district attorney declined to retry Bell as a juvenile. Bell had already spent 10 months in jail.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), one of several Congressional Black Caucus members to visit Jena, told the hearing, “As a parent, I am almost in tears. Mychal Bell is back in jail” and “nooses have now proliferated around the country.”

Glaring at two Justice Department attorneys sitting at the witness table, she thundered, “I want you to tell me why you didn’t engage. Why didn’t you intervene?” Many in the crowded hearing room stood and applauded.

The witnesses and several Democratic lawmakers on the committee charged that the Jena Six had the book thrown at them for allegedly attacking a white classmate, Justin Barker, a year ago, yet white students who earlier attacked Robert Bailey, an African American student, with fists and beer bottles, screaming racist epithets, received a brief suspension. Bailey is now one of the Jena Six defendants.

Also treated with velvet gloves were three white students who hung Ku Klux Klan-type nooses from a tree on the school lawn after Black students dared to sit under the so-called “white tree.”

House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers (D-Mich.) convened the hearing with U.S. Attorney for Western Louisiana Donald Washington and Civil Rights Division attorney Lisa Krigsten among the witnesses.

Washington, the first African American U.S. attorney in that region, reversed his earlier position and told the hearing that hanging nooses is indeed a hate crime under U.S. law. He claimed he met with LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters, who has ramrodded the case against the six Black youths.

Krigsten claimed the Justice Department has launched an investigation of the LaSalle Parish judiciary to determine if they engaged in discriminatory law enforcement. She added, “We were concerned only that federal laws are applied uniformly, not Louisiana state law.”

Washington claimed his hands were tied and the Bush administration is powerless to act on prosecutorial misconduct in the re-imprisonment of Bell.

The Rev. Al Sharpton shook his head in disbelief at this cop-out. “They are telling us that Louisiana state law supersedes federal law. You have to ask: who won the Civil War?” He pointed out that federal law is the highest law in the land and that Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson sent Justice Department officials and federalized the National Guard to enforce that law in the face of segregationist “states’ rights” claims.

Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) read off a list of federal statutes, including the hate crimes law and civil rights laws. “If charging decisions were made in a racially discriminatory way, what actions can be taken against the prosecutor?” Scott demanded.

Washington conceded that, if it is proven that the Black and white youth were subject to two different standards, “Yes, that would be a violation of law.”

Dr. Charles Ogletree, director of the Harvard Law School Institute for Race and Justice, said the record in the Jena Six case “is replete with disparities” that open the door for prosecution of District Attorney Walters.

Calling hanging nooses a “powerful symbol of white supremacy,” Ogletree warned, “What happened in Jena is not an isolated incident. Lynching may seem historic but we can’t forget what happened to James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, or Emmett Till. There is a cancer in Jena and we try to treat it with aspirin and good wishes. When an adult tells Black youth that hanging a noose is a ‘prank,’ they are not addressing the underlying tensions in our communities.”

The Rev. Brian Moran, pastor of the Antioch Baptist Church in Jena and president of the newly-founded Jena branch of the NAACP, told the hearing that prosecutor Walters caused deep fear when he told Black students at a Jena High School assembly that he could “take away their lives ‘with a stroke of my pen.’” Moran said, “We know that justice can be done. The question is: why hasn’t justice been done? Right now, Jena is a town with two systems of justice. That is simply un-American.”

The two Justice Department attorneys had laid it on thick that the Bush administration is working for “reconciliation and healing” in Jena. Moran retorted that the “healing will not begin until there is justice” for the Jena Six.

greenerpastures21212 @yahoo.com

Click on link to see Tim Wheeler’s Online eXtra story Are the Jena 6 victims of GOP ‘dirty tricks’?

At 300 vigils, the cry is, Dont let Bush take away kids health care!

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 07:30:00 +0000

WASHINGTON — Two-year old Bethany Wilkerson was making such a healthy, happy ruckus during a Capitol Hill rally, Oct. 16, that her mother, Dara, had to hand her over to the child’s father so she could appeal to Congress to override President Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

“Children are hanging by a thread until Congress overrides this veto,” she told the crowd at the candlelight vigil in Upper Senate Park sponsored by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). It was one of 300 vigils across the nation urging Republican lawmakers to break with Bush and vote to override his veto of the bill.

The bill would increase funding for the SCHIP program by $35 billion, covering all 6.6 million youngsters now served and extending coverage to 4 million more uninsured children.

“We did not know how vital SCHIP and Medicaid are until Bethany was born with several holes in her heart,” Wilkerson of St. Petersburg, Fla., continued. “Without surgery covered by SCHIP, she might not have been here with us tonight.”

Wilkerson’s husband, Bo, told the World he and his wife are both employed at a restaurant in the Tampa Bay area earning a modest income. They would have been ruined financially if they had to pay for their child’s surgery out-of-pocket. “Everything is going great,” he said. “Bethany has a slight heart murmur but she is fine. We are going tomorrow to the offices of Florida members of Congress to ask them to vote to override.”

Florida Rep. Tom Feeney is the target of television ads in central Florida by the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, blasting him for standing with Bush rather than the 190,000 children served by SCHIP in his state.

Lisa Alston, a health care worker from Baltimore, wearing her purple Local 1199 T-shirt, was there with her four children. “My 12-year-old son has asthma and my two-and-a-half-year-old uses a nebulizer,” Alston told the World. “My eldest daughter has allergies and my youngest has an astigmatism. SCHIP is very vital. I just visited the offices of Maryland congressmembers two weeks ago to ask them to override this veto. All of my children have been protected by the Maryland SCHIP since they were born.”

Dennis Rivera, president of the 1.1-million-member Local 1199, the health care division of SEIU, told the crowd that uninsured parents across the U.S. bring their children to emergency rooms with conditions that could have been prevented by SCHIP preventive care.

“This veto is simply cruel and inhumane,” Rivera said. “We believe tonight we are about 15 votes short of the majority needed. This is a mass movement. If we fall short, we are not going to stop. We are going to make sure children get health care and those who vote against it don’t come back to Congress after the next election.”

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney told the crowd that health care is a basic human right “and yet in the richest country in the world nearly 10 million children cannot see a doctor. … Now is the time for the rest of Congress to do the right thing and override this disgraceful veto.”

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) was one of a roster of lawmakers who left the House and Senate floor to address the crowd. “When President Bush vetoed SCHIP, he said it was ‘excessive.’ The next day he sent a request for $190 billion for the war in Iraq. Clearly it’s a matter of priorities. The people want an end to this senseless war and they want health insurance for their children,” she said as the crowd cheered.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) scorned Bush’s claim that if SCHIP protection is extended to families with annual incomes at 250 percent of the poverty line, about $50,000 for a family of four, they will not buy private insurance. “Private health insurance would cost that family at least $12,000 a year,” he said. “The president brags that half the children in Iraq have immunizations. I want a president who provides 100 percent immunization of American children.”

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), her arm wrapped around children standing beside her on the platform, declared, “This is a defining moment. … Are we going to allow this president who by the end of the year will have proposed three-fourths of a trillion for the war in Iraq to deny health care for our children? We aren’t going to let him get away with it.”

greenerpastures21212 @yahoo.com

Are the Jena 6 victims of GOP dirty tricks?

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 05:43:00 +0000

Louisiana’s LaSalle Parish Judge J.P. Mauffray ordered 17-year-old Mychal Bell back to jail for another 18 months Oct. 12, stirring outrage across the nation since an appeals court threw out Bell’s conviction as an adult on battery charges and the district attorney declined to retry Bell as a juvenile.

The judge’s action triggered new calls for solidarity with Bell and his five co-defendants, known as the Jena Six. So far over 350,000 have signed an online petition for their freedom, at the colorofchange.org web site.

Supporters charge that Mauffray’s ruling is revenge for the outpouring for the six Black youths who took a stand against a racist hate crime, the hanging of three nooses from a so-called “white tree” on their high school lawn.

But others are asking if more is at work. This is an important election year in the Bayou State and the Republican right, reeling from the Bush administration’s abandonment of Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans, is stealthily exploiting the Jena Six case to divide and confuse voters.

U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal, the Republican candidate for governor, has hailed the criminal justice system’s handling of the Jena Six case. “We certainly don’t need any outside agitators coming in here,” Jindal said when asked about the huge, peaceful demonstration in Jena Sept. 20.

Keeping the pot boiling by sending Bell back to jail could be a ploy straight out of Karl Rove’s playbook.

Alan Bean, director of Dallas-based Friends of Justice, has traveled to Jena 17 times working for justice for the Jena Six. He told the World he saw the Jena situation as “smart politics in Louisiana” aimed at mobilizing Republicans’ racist voting base. “There are plenty of white voters in central Louisiana who think the Jena Six are getting what they deserve and guys like Jindal know that is what they think,” Bean said.

Former Klansman David Duke carried a majority of white votes in LaSalle Parish on a program of racist incitement when he ran for governor in 1991. George W. Bush carried the parish by a 4-to-1 margin in 2000 and 2004.

Individuals with ties to oil and gas corporations, mostly in Texas, have poured over $200,000 into Jindal’s campaign. Among the donors are Richard Kinder and his wife Nancy of Houston, who contributed the maximum $5,000. Kinder, a G.W. Bush “Pioneer,” is a former Enron CEO and the founder of Kinder-Morgan Energy Partners, one of the largest oil and gas pipeline companies in the U.S.. He is worth $10 billion. In one year, Kinder gave $470,000 to the Republican National State Elections Committee.

Another Jindal donor who also gave $5,000 is Ray Hunt of Dallas, a scion of the H.L. Hunt oil and silver fortune. H.L. Hunt was notorious for his fascist-like sympathies.

Jindal and the Republican right are also counting on a divided opposition to win in a state they should lose by a landslide.

The labor movement has endorsed Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, a Democrat, for governor. Asked at a candidate forum about the Jena Six case, Campbell endorsed as “the right decision” the appeals court ruling that threw out Bell’s conviction.

Also running is John Georges, a wealthy New Orleans businessman, running as an independent. Georges showed up at the Sept. 20 rally in Jena in a truck filled with bottled water labeled with his campaign logo, which he handed out to the thirsty marchers. Asked where Georges stands on the Jena Six case, an aide said, “I can’t speak for Mr. Georges. But he is here and that tells you something.”

Another candidate is Walter Boasso, a conservative Republican who switched to the Democratic Party to run for governor.

The Republican right is counting on another dirty trick: purging the state voter rolls in of tens of thousands of Katrina evacuees, a majority of them African American voters from heavily Democratic Orleans Parish.

State Rep. Juan LaFonta (D-New Orleans), chair of the Legislature’s Black Caucus, told the World the caucus and the NAACP have filed a lawsuit asking the Justice Department to halt the purge on grounds that it was not “pre-cleared” as required under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The multiparty primary election is Oct. 20 with a runoff Nov. 17 if no candidate wins a majority.

Kerry McLean, an executive board member of the National Lawyers Guild, blasted Judge Mauffray and District Attorney Reed Walters for “numerous brazen violations of the constitutional rights of the Jena Six.” He said, “Mauffray and Walters have breached the ethical requirements of their offices. They should be made to answer for all of this.” Both should be removed from the case and disbarred, he said.

Throwing young Bell back in jail “shows malice on the judge’s part,” said Bean, from Friends of Justice. “The demand has to be a change of venue. If this case went to trial outside LaSalle parish, Bell would go free because there just isn’t the evidence to convict him.” The evidence against the other five defendants is even more flimsy, he said.

greenerpastures21212 @yahoo.com

THIS WEEK IN LABOR: Oct. 13

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 06:04:00 +0000

A big fat rat

If you check in at an airport, don’t be surprised if you are greeted by a giant inflatable rat holding bags of money.

United Airlines’ unionized pilots are using the rodent to represent United’s CEO. He hiked his own salary from $800,000 a year to $39 million a year while he slashed the salaries of airline employees more than 30 percent.

Cheers for a living wage

As 100 labor and community activists applauded, Ohio’s Cuyahoga County commissioners pledged support for a $10 an hour living wage for all county employees and contractors. The wage would meet the federal poverty standard for a family of four.

Tim Hagan, chair of the three-member Board of Commissioners, said the plan could be enacted by late October provided county prosecutor Bill Mason certifies the absence of conflict with state law.

Teachers endorse Obama, Clinton

Barack Obama picked up a major labor endorsement Oct. 3 as members of the Chicago Teachers Union’s House of Delegates (AFT Local 1) voted to endorse his campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

On the same day Local 1’s parent union, the million-plus-member American Federation of Teachers, endorsed Hillary Clinton for that nomination.

Coalition of Labor Union Women convenes

The Coalition of Labor Union Women held its 14th biennial convention Oct. 10–13 in Las Vegas.

CLUW is the national women’s organization within the AFL-CIO and the labor movement as a whole.

At the convention, delegates took up a range of issues, including support for the Employee Free Choice Act, pay equity, the extension and expansion of the Family Leave Act, national health care, fair trade policies and an end to the war in Iraq.

Union members casting e-ballots

Starting Oct. 1 and up until Nov. 9, the 700,000 members of the Communication Workers of America can go online to indicate their choice for U.S. president in a first-ever Internet poll of union members. The site is www.cwavotes.org.

Home Depot targeted by Steelworkers

The United Steelworkers (USW) on Oct. 1 sponsored a “North American Day of Action” at Home Depot stores in 150 cities to support more than 7,000 British Columbia forestry workers on strike against 30 companies, including two that Home Depot buys from, Western Forest Products and Interfor. Workers are striking because 65 workers have died from hazardous conditions on the job since January 2005.

Thousands of USW members, leaders, community activists and their families distributed information about the labor dispute at Home Depot stores throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Another anti-labor move

Once again “Labor’s Watchdog” has shown itself in need of plenty of watching itself. The National Labor Relations Board has made it easier for anti-union workers to file decertification (union ouster) petitions in cases where firms recognized the unions by card check, i.e. where the majority of workers signed authorization forms for union representation.

In its ruling involving two firms the UAW organized by card check, the Bush majority on the NLRB said it was making decertification easier “in order to achieve a finer balance of interests that better protects employees’ free choice.”

The fightback at Wal-Mart

Researchers have uncovered 14.6 million violations of both Minnesota law and company policy at the state’s Wal-Mart stores, violations that have cost the workers $27 million in wages. Some 56,000 Wal-Mart workers have filed a class action suit against the company in the Dakota County, Minn., District Court.

According to the suit, Wal-Mart failed to pay workers when they missed their breaks and lunch periods, routinely required employees to work off the clock for no pay before and after shifts, falsified time sheets to show that breaks were taken when they were not and engaged in a “one-minute punch practice,” punching workers out right after they clocked in to deny them a day’s pay.

Union/nonunion contrast in the mines

The stark contrast between conditions in union and nonunion mines showed up on Capitol Hill in Oct. 3 testimony on the fatal Utah mine disasters in August.

The witnesses, led by relatives of the dead miners and United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts, painted a picture of “retreat mining” that the nonunion firm should never have submitted for approval and that the Mine Safety and Health Administration should never have approved — and of workers afraid to speak up for fear of losing their jobs.

Witnesses testified that union coal miners have avenues to raise safety questions before they go underground, and protection when they do.

This Week in Labor is compiled by John Wojcik (jwojcik @pww.org). Press Associates Inc. and Rick Nagin contributed.

Making dry bones come alive in New Orleans

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 05:12:00 +0000

NEW ORLEANS — It takes a leap of faith to believe that this lovely city can be rebuilt from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, given the cruelty of President Bush who concealed his administration’s abandonment of the working people of New Orleans with honey-sweet promises, all of them broken.

Yet on the marquee outside the gutted Mt. Carmel Missionary Ministries church in the Lower 9th Ward is posted this message from the Holy Scriptures: “Can these bones live? O, ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. ... These bones shall live!”

The church is the only building still standing for blocks in any direction after the levee broke Aug. 29, 2005, unleashing a 25-foot wall of water that smashed everything in its path.

What the water didn’t destroy, bulldozers have leveled in the two years since, leaving acre after acre of empty, weed-infested lots where houses once stood. Further away from the levees, thousands more houses that could be repaired stand vacant while the owners struggle against stalling tactics on the delivery of “Road Home” grants to rebuild.

‘I grew up here’

As I was pondering that passage from the Prophet Ezekiel, Randy Gibson drove up and got out of his car. He is one of many thousands forced to flee Katrina who has now returned, helping push the city’s population back up to 60 percent of its pre-Katrina population.

“I grew up here. My whole life was here,” Gibson told the World. “I moved away the day before the hurricane hit. My wife and I ended up in Lakeworth, Fla. I worked as a mailman. Now I’m back working as a letter carrier here in New Orleans. We’re so shorthanded, I work until 9 or 10 o’clock every night, so I don’t get back down here as often as I’d like.”

He pointed toward the levees along the Industrial Canal to the west. “My house was right over there on Tennessee Street,” he said. “It’s gone. The barge that broke through the levee that night was sitting right there. It was bigger than this church.”

Then he spoke wistfully of the past. New Orleans is a party town, and nowhere more so than in the Lower 9th Ward, he said. Right around the corner from the church was a nightclub.

“We’d spend Saturday nights there listening to jazz,” he said. “When we came out at dawn, the congregation of this church was already arriving for Sunday morning services.” Underlining the vibrancy off that culture is the nearby home of Fats Domino, still standing defiantly in the Lower 9th Ward with the initial’s “FD” on its bright yellow facade.

Gibson added, “To come here now and see all this devastation, it’s unreal. It’s unbelievable. This was a disaster in America. What is the problem with coming in here and rebuilding this whole community?

“You talk about billions,” he continued. “Congress just approved another $50 billion for Iraq. Why can’t the federal government just print up that money and use it to rebuild here? If this neighborhood was up and running, there would be parties on every block for every Saints game.”

Fighting greedy developers

A few blocks nearer the levee is the “Blue House,” headquarters of the Common Ground Relief Center that played a heroic role in the days immediately after Katrina. Common Ground, with the help of Veterans for Peace, opened the first emergency medical center after the flood. It was staffed by doctors, nurses and other health care professionals at a time when the city’s hospitals were flooded and abandoned.

Common Ground and its tireless leader, Malik Rahim, orchestrated much of the volunteer efforts in the two years since to “muck” people’s houses and help them begin to rebuild. An estimated 1.1 million people have worked as volunteers in New Orleans since Katrina. It might be the greatest, most sustained volunteer effort ever.

Yet the crisis in the Lower 9th is unabated, fueled by the greed of developers who see Katrina as a golden opportunity for wholesale “urban removal” of 127,000 people — mostly poor African Americans.

Volunteer Calvin Bernard was on duty at Blue House. Common Ground, together with ACORN, now has shifted its focus to stopping the developers from wholesale theft of property of families displaced from the Lower 9th Ward. Bernard, a construction worker, was working on a job site in Baton Rouge when the levees broke. His home, with his wife trapped inside, was swept away. Her body was found eight months later.

Now Bernard works every day helping Katrina survivors, or planting lawn signs with the words, “Stop Land Grab” and “Stop the Bulldozers.”

Common Ground initiated a project of placing house numbers on the lots where houses once stood to protect the property rights of homeowners forced to flee and now lacking the resources to return and rebuild.

“Three families have come here today planning to begin remodeling their homes,” Bernard continued. “They found out the city had bulldozed their houses without informing them in advance. The big land developers want all this land. But they aren’t going to get it as long as I’m living.”

The New Orleans diaspora

Of the estimated 200,000 who evacuated New Orleans before and after Katrina, only an estimated 31,000 have returned. The other 170,000 are scattered in every state of the union, with heavy concentrations in Baton Rouge, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Atlanta, Memphis, and southeast Mississippi.

The Times-Picayune newspaper featured a front-page report on this “diaspora” Sept. 2. While some of the evacuees are building new lives, many more are homesick and drive back long distances to visit the sites of their damaged or destroyed homes, the Times reported. Others are returning because FEMA has terminated hurricane relief benefits and they cannot find jobs, affordable housing or health care in the cities where they took refuge. Many also face the pressure of rising discrimination and racist hostility.

A tale of two cities

My son, Morgan, a union electrician, is working as a volunteer after his regular job. He drove me around the Lower 9th Ward, introducing me to some of the volunteers and residents he has assisted.

Then we headed across town to the Garden District. “This is still a tale of two cities,” he said, echoing Charles Dickens, as we cruised beside Audubon Park, an immaculate green oasis with magnificent 200-year-old oaks and a manicured golf course. Wealthy residents were strolling on the grass or jogging beneath the spreading boughs.

On St. Charles Avenue stood the entrance to Audubon Place, a community protected by tall wrought iron fences and a gatehouse. A sign posted outside, warns, “Illegal to enter.” Beyond the bars stand the dazzling white mansions of the rich with their fluted columns and sweeping verandas.

The floodwaters never reached this fabulously wealthy enclave, Morgan said. “They may have evacuated, but the houses they returned to were as gleaming as when they left.”

Morgan then drove me back to Treme Vieux Carre, the neighborhood where he lives with a crew of electricians from Guatemala working in the rebuilding effort.

Nearby is a big public housing complex, handsome brick buildings surrounded by neatly trimmed lawns. They are now boarded up and posted with menacing signs warning trespassers not to enter. While I was there, former residents, members of the Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund, staged a sit-in at the New Orleans Housing Authority demanding that these apartments be repaired and reopened to help ease the acute shortage of affordable rental housing.

Soon after the floodwaters began to subside in New Orleans, professor Scott Myers-Lipton of San Jose State University in California launched a campaign to push through Congress what he calls the “Gulf Coast Civic Works Project” (GCCWP), a program to employ 100,000 Gulf Coast residents in federally funded jobs rebuilding schools, hospitals, libraries, streets, sidewalks and other infrastructure in cities and towns on the Gulf Coast. The campaign has caught fire, especially on campuses. Now students enlisted in the campaign are attending the debates of the Democratic and Republican presidential contenders to ask them questions like: “If elected president of the U.S., would you introduce legislation based on the Gulf Coast Civic Works Project? Do you support the idea of a WPA-like project to rebuild the Gulf Coast?”

One of the links provided on the GCCWP web site features more than 100 photographs of the magnificent reconstruction of public buildings in New Orleans during the Great Depression by unemployed workers hired through the Works Progress Administration. It includes restoration of some of New Orleans’ architectural treasures in the French Quarter, the house where Gen. Andrew Jackson lived during the 1812 Battle of New Orleans, and the St. Roch Public Market, already 100 years old in 1937. Now that market is closed and falling into ruins. All this begs the question: Why not a new WPA program to rebuild New Orleans?

A weeklong visit to the Crescent City brought home an inescapable reality: The devastation here is too immense ever to be rebuilt by volunteers or profit-driven developers. Only the federal government has the resources to rebuild this city. Use the tax dollars we have already turned over to them time and time again, the lion’s share now gobbled up in the endless war in Iraq. The program must guarantee a controlling voice for the people of New Orleans, including those displaced across the nation and still hoping to take that “road home.” The federally funded jobs must include strong affirmative action guarantees and protection of union rights.

If we can make this an overriding issue in the 2008 elections and bring it to reality after the elections, then the “dry bones” of New Orleans will indeed live again.

Tim Wheeler (greenerpastures21212 @yahoo.com) is national political correspondent for the People’s Weekly World.

Somethings rotten in Shangri-la

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 05:06:00 +0000

Economy puts GOP on defensive in stronghold

WEST MILFORD, N.J. — Drive 60 miles northwest of Manhattan and you’re on a New Jersey road winding beneath mountain ridges exploding with fall colors reflected in a string of lakes. As you think you might be in Shangri-la, you pass a billboard proclaiming, “Welcome to West Milford — a Clean Community,” signed by the Republican mayor. An American flag flutters atop a pole next to it.

In five minutes, you pull into the Shop-Rite mini-mall parking lot. As you walk from the car to a shop, you pass young people in their late teens and early 20s standing around chatting, riding bikes or balancing skateboards. You may witness a drug deal or two.

Blake Depp, 18, spends a few hours a day in the parking lot. He and his mom live in a Victorian mansion on Marshall Hill Road, a quarter of a mile away. The mansion is a homeless shelter run by Save Our Sisters. The two had been living on the streets of nearby Paterson after the bank foreclosed on their mortgage. Mom had a breakdown. Blake was supposed to leave the shelter in August when he turned 18, but has a little extra time granted to first-time job seekers.

“The day laborer thing is not just for immigrants,” Blake, who is white, told the World. “I wait around and get picked up by someone who needs yard work or painting. I also haul out garbage.”

“It’s rough,” Blake said. “I’ve got to help my mom because she can’t make it right now and there’s no time or money for college. Half the kids who graduated from West Milford High in June don’t have jobs yet. If there’s an opening at Dunkin’ Donuts I can do that but they’re full right now and Shop-Rite isn’t hiring.”

Jason Mann, 25, is an African American who lives in Ringwood, the neighboring town. Jason was hired in September as a bus driver for New Jersey Transit. He started in the parking lot six years ago, earning tips to carry supermarket bags and getting money under the table from the store manager to round up scattered shopping carts. His transit job pays only $10 an hour “because that’s all new drivers get,” Jason said. “It will take two years to get bumped up to full time and get a raise.” Jason’s wife, Evelyn, is pregnant and works in Shop-Rite as an $8-an-hour cashier.

“We’re never going to do as well as pop and grandpa did,” said Jason. His father is a full-time bus driver making a union wage and his grandfather was an autoworker at the Ford Mahwah plant, which shut down in 1986.

The situation here shows reality behind Bush administration attempts to put a positive slant on the latest job figures. The Labor Department reported 110,000 jobs were created in September, and revised the 4,000 loss reported for August to a gain of 89,000 jobs. This is supposed to be great news.

So why all the unemployed youth in the Shop-Rite parking lot?

Economists estimate it takes 150,000 new jobs per month to absorb a growing workforce. Only a few in that parking lot are “making it” into Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, Shop-Rite or, in Jason’s case, a low-tier transit job. This is because the 110,000 “new jobs” reported in September were really a net job deficit, less than what is needed monthly to absorb all the “kids” in America’s parking lots.

Another factor, of course, is the kinds of jobs available. The 2001 recession led to an unprecedented loss of 3 million manufacturing jobs. The number has continued to drop. In September it was less than 14 million, the lowest since 1951.

Layoffs, foreclosures and no jobs for first-time job seekers are rapidly becoming the new reality in idyllic West Milford. “We used to think that was what happened in Paterson,” said Bob Berson, a mail carrier at the West Milford Post Office. In Paterson, with its abandoned textile mills, half the predominantly African American population is unemployed. “People didn’t want to see that if it could happen in Paterson, it can and will happen here,” Berson said.

Berson is a member of the local Democratic Party club. Last November his club successfully ran two people against incumbent Republican councilmembers. They’re now backing the woman who runs the town’s volunteer animal shelter in her bid to unseat the Republican mayor. “People are starting to wake up,” Berson said. “The kids in this town are suffering and the local Republicans are afraid because they can’t defend a president who tells children they don’t need health insurance, a president who says ‘Let them go to an emergency room.’”

jwojcik @pww.org

Year of the Woman? Not in election coverage!

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 09:15:00 +0000

How many elections can be hailed as “The Year of the Woman” before anything actually changes? Hint: no answer to this question exists yet.

This year, it would seem that things should be different. A woman is speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and there is a viable female candidate for president. But peek below the surface at some of the press coverage, and it is clear that women still find themselves caught up in a double standard of press scrutiny that eludes their male opponents.

Consider recent coverage of the hotly contested Massachusetts 5th Congressional District race, where both the Democratic and Republican front-runners derive substantial name recognition from famous, deceased family members. Niki Tsongas is the wife of the late senator and presidential candidate, Paul Tsongas. Jim Ogonowski is the brother of John Ogonowski, the American Airlines pilot killed on September 11. Two candidates with close relationships to men of courage, but the description of their own qualifications for office could not have been more different.

The headlines on the Republican front-runner declared that the “GOP Sees Cause for Hope in the 5th District,” and described Mr. Ogonowski as “a candidate with a compelling life story.” A search for the details on this compelling story revealed Mr. Ogonowski’s background as a farmer and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel with a national profile arising out of the tragic death of his brother. The rest of the article focused on the excitement of the Republican Party over their chances for this open seat, with no description of his specific qualifications to serve in Congress.

The article on Niki Tsongas’ front-runner status carried the derisive headline, “Tsongas Campaign Focuses on Name,” followed by the subheading, “Critics question her experience.” The article dismissed Tsongas’ statements about what she learned from her years in Washington as the wife of a congressman and senator by noting she ran a home dessert-catering business while collecting “whimsical” antiques. The article also reported her campaign’s efforts to “bolster” her qualifications by highlighting her board work and role as a community college dean.

Maybe Niki Tsongas’ law degree and legal practice was not a sufficient qualification to warrant inclusion in the article. Or maybe it was an example of implicit gender bias — the unexamined stereotyping that emerges when people step outside their societal roles. The only thing missing was a critique of Tsongas’ wardrobe. But for that we only have to look to coverage of Hillary Clinton.

As first lady, Hillary Clinton endured endless press scrutiny of her changing hairstyles. As a Senate candidate, it was the critique of her pantsuits. As a senator, it was a cleavage sighting while addressing higher education issues from the Senate floor. And through her many years of public life, there have been the recurring references to her weight and her legs, as though her body shape was a credential equal to her Wellesley College and Yale Law School degrees, her service as an attorney at the Children’s Defense Fund and the judiciary committee of the House of Representatives, and her years spent in private practice.

But even these credentials, along with Sen. Clinton’s eight years in the White House, apparently lack sufficient gravitas. The same article which questioned Tsongas’ credentials compared her to Hillary Clinton by stating that both dismissed questions about their inexperience by “touting” their husband’s last names. And it seems like only yesterday when Hillary Rodham Clinton was vilified for retaining use of her birth name.

As long as these implicit biases continue in the press coverage of female candidates, “The Year of the Woman” will remain as illusory as it has been for the past several decades. In 1992, a record 60 million women voted, and in doing so helped secure the largest percentage increase of women in the House and Senate in history. But the record turnout of women voters was not repeated in the next election, and the statistics have moved far too slowly ever since.

Yet there is a link between the presence of viable women candidates and the involvement of women in the political process. A study detailed in the Journal of Politics demonstrated that more women vote when there are competitive races involving women candidates.

Women candidates, however, deserve the same opportunity as their male competitors to run on the issues and to have their backgrounds vetted without the emergence of biased press coverage that diminishes their legitimate accomplishments. If we are going to describe the antique collection of the women running for office, then include a description of the male candidate’s home décor. If Nancy Pelosi must continually be described as Armani-clad and wearing Tahitian pearls, then the press might as well tell us who dresses all the other members of Congress and whether they wear Rolex watches.

Or, better yet, forget the clothing, the jewelry, and the weight. Instead, focus on what the candidates offer the voters, how they approach issues, how they would react in a crisis, and what they hope to achieve when in office.

Let’s take the measure of the men — and the women — in the ways that truly matter. Now that would be press coverage worth reading.

Lauren Stiller Rikleen is a lawyer and the executive director of the Bowditch Institute for Women’s Success and the author of “Ending the Gauntlet: Removing Barriers to Women’s Success in the Law.”

Worry and anger as autoworkers study pact

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 07:45:00 +0000

Many autoworkers, back after their strike against GM, are worried or angry about concessions the company insisted on in the new contract.

United Auto Workers leaders, representing plants across the country, approved the tentative contract on Sept. 28 and union President Ron Gettelfinger said he expects membership ratification by Oct. 10.

The union began bargaining with Ford Oct. 2 and, at press time, had yet to begin talks with Chrysler. Those workers are in a fight whose outcome is far from certain.

Major concessions

The agreement with GM includes major concessions: a new two-tier wage system and a shift of $50 billion in health care obligations to the union. The UAW gave up cost-of-living raises in exchange for a freeze on health care premium payments.

GM made open-ended promises to invest in U.S. plants and products.

Mixed reactions

While union leaders and significant numbers of workers feel the agreement was the best they could get, many at GM, Chrysler and Ford plants across the country believe the agreement is a setback.

“It’s not perfect, but it’s as close as we are going to get,” said Danny Wood, a UAW local official at the Flint, Mich., plant.

Stan Washington, a Grand Blanc, Mich., retiree who worked for GM for 35 years, said, “It’s much more concrete in the promises than I thought.”

Other workers interviewed, however, expressed worry and anger. Most, whether they supported or opposed the agreement, directed their anger at GM, not the union, which they felt was between a rock and a hard place.

Patricia O’Reilly, a 10-year employee at GM’s Hamtramck plant in Detroit, said, “This is terrible for young workers. Second-tier workers are really going to feel the pain making $14 [an hour] instead of $28 and getting lousy benefits. Their only alternative will be Wal-Mart, which will pay even less.”

She continued: “I blame the government, which encourages big business to go overseas for cheap labor and to escape regulation. Then back here we buy what they made while they throw us out on the street.”

O’Reilly said that media pundits who call workers “greedy” and “selfish” should “give it a break. It’s not the unions destroying this country, it’s GM and the government.”

Will vote ‘no’

Jim McPherson, a worker at the Flint, Mich., plant, said he will vote against the contract but doesn’t blame those who vote for it. “They work their butts off every day, skipping lunches and breaks, risking their health and safety. Managers should only be half as good as these workers. They are afraid of losing everything, and I can’t blame them.”

Yet McPherson can’t bring himself to go along with the concessions. “I am voting no,” he said, because the two-tier system and the health care scam by GM will “destroy whatever future there is in this industry. If this goes through at all three companies, the day that you want to be an autoworker is gone.”

Forces at work

These remarks reflect the context in which the autoworkers’ struggle is taking place. It’s been a 30-year fight against the political ultra-right working with transnational companies to deny workers the right to organize, to ship manufacturing jobs overseas for greater profit margins and to keep an inadequate health care system under private corporate control, again for greater profits.

Two-tier wages mean greater profits

Under the agreement, GM will be able to buy out 25,000 workers, more than a third of its work force, and replace them with “second-tier” employees earning half as much. GM’s “wage savings” will translate into greater profits for the fat cats on Wall Street.

All “non-core” work categories will be part of the second tier and the agreement adds to the “non-core” list many categories currently classified as “core” manufacturing jobs.

Jobs that will become “non-core,” according to a UAW local president interviewed by the World, are truck drivers, material and parts handlers, warehousing jobs, re-packing jobs, subassembly positions, inspectors, machine maintenance jobs and others.

A full-time “first-tier” woman worker at Chrysler’s Belvidere, Ill., plant, said, “All the good jobs people waited for most of their working lives to get — the jobs with the most overtime — go to new hires at half the pay. The ball-busting, gut-splitting jobs stay with the older workers, so they are pushed out faster. Tell me about it, I know all about it.”

Seniority lost

A plant-wide two-tier system has been in place for over a year now at Belvidere, the only auto assembly plant in the country where this has happened so far. The second-tier workers there are called “enhanced temporary employees.”

“I can understand how a full-time worker would be worried now,” said Forrest Ammons, a Belvidere line worker who, himself, is an “enhanced temporary.”

“Full-time workers might be afraid, now, that the new two-tier system can be used to destroy seniority,” he said. “Why would the company let a full-time worker with a lot of seniority bid on a less physically demanding job unless he is willing to work for less?”

The full-time woman worker further explained: “If you are now a first-tier worker in a job newly defined as ‘non-core,’ you will be grandfathered out. Up until that time you might as well walk around with a bull’s eye on your back because they now have a bigger than ever incentive to fire top-tier workers.”

Downward pressure on all wages

Ammons, who earns $18 an hour doing the same work as a worker next to him earning $29, said “all of us here at the plant have really been biting our fingernails over this.”

“Our union local has demanded elimination of our second-class status here,” he said. “We are hopeful that this will happen because the UAW was successful in getting some GM temps hired as full time, but we won’t feel better till we see it on paper.”

He said he hopes the $14 an hour wage GM will pay its second-tier workers “won’t make Chrysler think it can pay us $4 less than what we get now.”

“I have to admit,” Ammons said, “this two-tier thing has us at each other’s throats. Everyone looks out for himself rather than each other, and once you start with two tier you can expect that in five or 10 years they will bring everyone down to the second tier.”

Job security loophole

The agreement calls for a moratorium on plant closings but leaves the company a big loophole, allowing closings caused by “market-related volume decline.”

“What kind of deal is that?’’ asked Carol Garza, a worker at the GM Hamtramck plant. “If GM designs a clunker resulting in so-called market-related volume decline, they can go ahead, close a plant and lay more people off.”

Health care disaster

The plan to shift health care costs into the lap of the union through a so-called voluntary employees benefit association, or VEBA, is also drawing fire.

Paul Shrade, a former UAW regional director, said that by taking on retiree health care and managing $35 billion in cash and assets from GM, “the UAW becomes a corporation, not a union.”

“GM is let off the hook,” he said, and “the pressure is off GM to lobby for comprehensive changes to the health care system.”

Workers at Caterpillar had a VEBA similar to the one GM wants. It ran out of money in 2004. Workers there now pay $200 a month for coverage in addition to out-of-pocket costs that keep escalating.

Gettelfinger’s comment during the strike that “no matter how much workers give, it is not enough, and no matter how much executives get, it is not enough” seems prophetic after reactions to the tentative agreement this week by Wall Street fat cats as they tried to pressure Chrysler and Ford to squeeze workers even harder than GM did.

“GM may be ceding more value to the union than we previously thought — pension benefit hikes won by the union will cost over $6 billion, and their retiree health care liability appears to stay with GM until 2010, costing them another $5.4 billion,” said Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Barry in a note to investors.

A spokesman for Deutsche Bank told The Detroit News that although GM could save nearly $1 billion a year in wages as a result of the two-tier arrangement, this was not enough because the company will pay out more than that in retiree health care benefits.

The struggle continues.

jwojcik @pww.org

Children demand Health care, not warfare

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 07:39:00 +0000

Huge coalition urges Congress to override SCHIP veto

Children marched to the White House Oct. 2 pulling red wagons filled with petitions demanding that President Bush drop his plan to veto legislation passed by the Senate and House that would extend the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and expand it to cover an additional 4 million children.

“Health care, not warfare!” the children chanted as they marched to the executive mansion in a protest organized by the Service Employees International Union. But deaf to the children’s pleas, Bush vetoed the measure Oct. 3 behind closed doors.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called it a “heartless veto,” adding, “Never has it been clearer how detached President Bush is from the priorities of the American people.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said, “We remain committed to making SCHIP into law, with or without the support of the president.”

The Democratic leadership is reportedly postponing a vote to override the veto for as long as two weeks to allow grassroots movements time to exert maximum pressure on Republicans and some Democrats to vote to override.

A grassroots coalition convened a Capitol Hill news conference to denounce the veto. Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, told reporters the coalition is staging 200 rallies in cities and towns across the nation Oct. 4 to demand that Congress override.

“With America on our side,” McEntee said, “we’re battling Bush on the budget, a battle to preserve the role of public services that keep our families safe and our communities strong.” McEntee hammered Bush for his endless Iraq war. “If Bush really wants to support the troops he should bring them home and should not block our attempts to get funding for veterans,” he said. (See related story, page 8.)

AFSCME is helping fund media ads that target Republican representatives, warning them that angry voters will exact vengeance in the 2008 elections if they refuse to vote to override.

The House approved the SCHIP measure Sept. 26 by a vote of 265-159, only 25 votes shy of the 290 needed to override a veto.

Debbie Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, told the World, “Republicans who stand with the president on this issue are walking the plank. We have coalitions on many fronts engaged in this incredibly critical fight to override the veto. While we would have preferred that 290 House members vote for SCHIP, we did get 45 Republicans to vote for it. It proves this legislation enjoys strong bipartisan support.”

The Senate approved their version of the bill with a veto-proof margin, 67-29, last week. Majority Leader Reid commented that the $35 billion cost to cover 10 million children under SCHIP is equal to the cost of “about one month of the war in Iraq. So clearly it isn’t about not having the money.”

Reid said Bush “has crassly calculated that holding children hostage is the only way to raise from the dead his partisan, unpopular, ineffective health care agenda.”

Critics charge that Bush’s plan to spend only $5 billion more for SCHIP is so paltry it will eliminate 1 million children who are now protected by the program. SCHIP, which was scheduled to expire Sept. 30, now protects 6.6 million children. Another 9 million children are still without health care.

An ABC-Washington Post poll shows that 70 percent of the public favors the legislation, including 56 percent of those who identify themselves as Republicans.

Weinstein told the World the ABC-Washington Post poll is especially significant because respondents were asked specifically if they favored the $35 billion expansion of the SCHIP program and 7 in 10 answered “yes.”

In a sign that the public is fed up with Bush’s guns-not-butter budget priorities, 70 percent of the respondents said spending for the Iraq war should be reduced. Bush is asking for $190 billion more to pay for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The poll showed that 46 percent favor reducing funding for the Iraq war “sharply” or “entirely.”

Eight states filed a joint lawsuit against the Bush administration asking the courts to overturn Bush’s new rules that block their efforts to expand SCHIP coverage to millions more uninsured children. Joining in the suit were the governors of Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York and Washington state.

Speaking at a news conference to announce the lawsuit, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer said, “It sends a compelling message when the U.S. Congress, states across the nation, and the public are so clearly committed to ensuring that families have access to affordable health care for their children.”

greenerpastures21212 @yahoo.com

TAKE ACTION: Join the fight for kids’ health care

A massive campaign across the nation is demanding that the House of Representatives join the Senate in overriding President Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). SCHIP was approved in the Senate by a veto-proof margin. But we must convince 25 more Republicans to join 45 who have already broken with Bush and vote to override.

Do your part: Telephone your representative through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 225-3121. Ask him or her to vote to override. Ask him or her to speak out strongly on the issue. Attend one of 235 MoveOn.org rallies near you to demand a veto override. Visit the TrueMajority website and sign their online petition at: www.truemajority.org. This is the first shot in the struggle for universal health care.