People Before Profit blog

Wealth concentration report blasts hole in right-wing policies

Fri, 30 Jan 2015 16:45:00 +0000

Here is a story from The New York Times that will absolutely blow your mind. The global anti-hunger organization Oxfam says that the richest one percent in the world will probably control more than half of the world's wealth within the next year.

We are headed to a world where just one percent of the population own and control more than all the rest of us combined.

So much for free trade lifting the lives of the world's poor.

So much for job creators and investment that benefits everyone.

So much for the universal value of tax breaks for the rich.

So much for stopping government spending to balance the budget and give more and more to the rich.

Oxfam has just blown a hole in all the arguments of the Wall Street crowd, the financial elite, and the radical rightwing.

This massive inequality and the resulting poverty and massive misery have got to be the most important issues in America and in the world.

Here's a factoid from the New York Times story: "The 80 wealthiest people in the world altogether own $1.9 trillion, the report found, nearly the same amount shared by the 3.5 billion people who occupy the bottom half of the bottom half of the world's income scale."

And the inequality has been increasing since 2010.

There is no moral, economic, nor political justification for this appalling economic state of affairs!

From Stewart Acuff's blog.

Photo: AP

Couch-surfing: a revolutionary movement

Fri, 30 Jan 2015 11:52:00 +0000

My generation tends to be criticized by older generations because of our lack of creativity, responsibility, and our tendency to always look to take the easy road. We depend on our gadgets and social media - iPhones, laptops, Pinterest, and Instagram. Little did we know, somewhere in this world of gadgets and social media, a movement would be born.

The summer of 2014, I backpacked all over Europe on a budget. My budget included food, shelter, transportation, and attractions. I was able to make this adventure and cultural growth experience by working an incredible amount of hours (diminishing my family and social time, and staying home the few hours I was off). This was a sacrifice I made happily, because in our society we are taught that through sacrifice and hard work, we will achieve great things. I traveled with a group of friends and we strategized how to better stretch our money, by traveling overnight from city to city, so we would eliminate a night of paying for a bed. This was also a sacrifice. The American mentality pushed us forward on those hard nights.

Now I am living in the Twin Cities in Minnesota and recently discovered a movement that could have made an incredible difference in my backpacking trip to Europe and my constant hunger for travel.

I wanted to visit Duluth, Minn., and met someone who also wanted to travel there. I met Matias Levin at a Black Lives Matter demonstration during the first few weeks of my move to Minneapolis. We quickly clicked on many levels, including our Chilean American background and the passion for traveling. Matias introduced me to a website called Couchsurfing.com on this trip to Duluth. I knew a little about this social media site and the concept, but experiencing it is a completely different story.

I learned that couch-surfing is basically a community of people who are open to hosting or being hosted in private homes all over the world, all at one affordable price: free.

The term is kind of self-explanatory; in the sense that you "surf" the world (travel) and stay on people's couches. In the 1970s when community living and grassroots organizing experienced a boom through antiwar and "hippie" movements, people were already practicing a kind of couch-surfing, without the easiness of our social media world. Thus, this website now facilitates these originally grassroots community building movements on the Couchsurfing.com website, making it easy and safe.

At first you automatically think, "Staying at a strangers house? That's crazy!" I thought that when I heard another friend was consistently traveling through the same website. Danna Guerra, a friend from Florida, traveled to multiple cities in United States and Canada using the site, and she said she was able to save over $2,000 in hotel rooms, or hostels in a year of traveling. I was curious about the big question of safety. I asked Danna, who said, "Well, the good thing is that you get testimonials of people who know those people, they need to verify their identity and it gives you the option to meet up with locals even if you don't end up staying with them."

I did my own research on the site, and found a "Safety" tab that listed all of the ways to be safe while couch-surfing. With that in mind, I asked Matias what he initially thought about couch surfing and he responded, "At first I thought it was some weird hippie thing, but the idea of meeting random people and having less travel expenses sounded more and more inviting."

So, with this site you create a profile, are able to read and write reviews about your host or the people you hosted, "verify" that you are who you say you are, add pictures of yourself and your place, and meet up with people around you, without having to stay in their homes.

When looking at it through a wide-angled lens, we've been staying at people's houses for hundreds of years; saving money, meeting new people and really immersing ourselves in the culture.

In just a few days after that we searched through the website and found someone to host us in Duluth. It was my first time going to Lake Superior and I was incredibly excited. There was this sense of adventure in my gut again, and not having to budget for a place to stay gave room for more adventure. Our host was great; he was kind and warm. He made sure we had everything we could need, from towels to directions to the best local sights. To say the least I had quite the ground shaking experience. I visited Lake Superior, Enger Tower, Split Rock Lighthouse State Park, tried local brews and local smoked fish dishes. All this without a dent in my savings. I asked Matias how he felt about not paying for a place to sleep and he answered; "I feel that is true traveling. Backpacking, staying at friends and friends-of-friends houses. Not staying at an all inclusive resort all day, but immersing and sharing the culture, even if the culture is some random person's little world."

I thought about all the money (close to $2,000) I gave to million-dollar companies that didn't care to tell me what locals were doing and were not interested in who I was and why I was there. I know that the purpose of these big hoteliers is not to get to know me, but if there is this other option - an option where communities join in camaraderie thousands of miles away and make life happier, help educate and create awareness of what living is about - well if that's not revolutionary, than what is? I think that the Internet has made all this (and much more) possible, and creating relationships, learning from each other, becoming more self-sufficient people will be a step closer to changing this money-hungry, selfish, and ruthless world.

Photo: Camila Valenzuela/PW

Taking on inequality

Wed, 28 Jan 2015 13:45:00 +0000

Finally, most people outside the one percent at the top are realizing that the vast gulf of inequality is very dangerous for our country and the world. It is destroying lives and families and the economies of the United States and the rest of the world.

The dangers of inequality have been discussed at the meeting of the one percent in Davos at the World Economic Forum. Even Ted Cruz spoke out against inequality albeit with a typical idiotic antidote--more tax cuts for the rich.

As more and more realize how horrible the gulf of inequality is, it is essential that we act very strongly for those things that don't tinker with inequality but have the capacity to create good high wage and livable wage jobs, that we demand a much stronger middle class and access to the middle class for low-wage workers.

The Greek people just changed their government in a very fundamental way rejecting austerity and economic measures that focused on deficits and tax cuts and electing a new government that will focus on good job creation and government spending for good job creation. In Europe, the global recession that followed the 2007 Wall Street crash has been met with disastrous policies of belt tightening instead of job creation. The Greek people got sick of their 25-30 percent unemployment rate and completely changed their government.

Here in America it is critical that we demand real change that can fundamentally how the economy works and who the economy works for. We must work to build a broad, strong, sustainable movement that comes from our values that will last longer than one election or any four years and that produce change such as:

* The absolute freedom of all workers to form unions and bargain collectively. This costs the government nothing, builds worker power, and is the most natural and organic way to reduce inequality;

* Infrastructure investment to produce good jobs, fix our rail system, airports, water and sewer systems, roads and bridges. Infrastructure will increase productivity, wages, and efficiency;

* Minimum wage of at least $15 per hour tied to inflation so that it goes us as the cost of living goes up;

* Real, comprehensive manufacturing policy that allows us once again to create things that produce wealth;

* Enact President Obama's for free community college and make four-year public universities affordable once again. It is time to stop just talking about the value of higher education and make it possible for all;

* Invest in the best quality public education--Head Start through high school. Stop blaming teachers and invest in them.

Smart responsible tax reform on the obscenely wealthy and their corporations can fund these ideas and these ideas can actually produce more wealth for all of us by fueling consumer-buying power.

We must not let this moment that is opening slide by without making the change we all know that we all need.

This article originally appeared in Stewart Acuff's blog.

Photo: mSeattle/Flickr

Fact-checking my inbox

Wed, 28 Jan 2015 13:06:00 +0000

Over the holidays, my cousin sent me a chain email that has been floating around the web for a while. Called "Spiral America," it purports to show that our country has more people on the dole than those who work, that our private enterprise health system provides better care than countries where they have a national program, and that it is all the fault of the Obama administration because hardly anyone running things has any business experience.

Why my cousin sends me these things I really do not understand. He knows I think differently from him, and I don't disturb him by sending him my perspectives. This time I couldn't stop myself. I had to do some fact checking, which is fairly easy these days using the Internet. So in case you have relatives or friends with nothing better to do than send you these types of chain letters, here is what I found out.

Let's begin with welfare. The unsigned attack piece claims that in a dozen states, including California, there are more people living off government programs than people who work for a living. This seems impossible on the face of it - and it is. There are about 14 million employees in both the private and public sectors in California. On the other hand, 1.4 million people receive cash grants (Temporary Aid to Needy Families or TANF), and about 4.1 million get food support (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP) and another 7.4 million have state-supported health care (MediCal). The distortion occurs by adding up these numbers and comparing the total with the number of working employees. They aren't comparable figures.

The welfare attack also claims that people living on the dole make more per hour than the average working person. It claims that welfare pays people about $30 an hour while the average job pays just $20! Somehow, if a person lives on some combination of government programs, they make $168/day versus working people earning $137/day. Fact checking says no way. In 2012, the average TANF benefit was $375 per month for a family of three. The average SNAP benefit in 2013 was about $125 a month per person, and the program has since suffered budget cuts.

The anti-welfare argument also claims that all the states where this is true are run by Democrats - which, of course, is patently untrue since the list includes places like Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Kentucky, all dominated by Republicans.

This piece then takes up health care by comparing the American system - pre-Obama - with the national medical systems of England and Canada. It says that cancer survival rate five years after diagnosis is 65 percent in the U.S., 46 percent in the U.K. and 42 percent in our northern neighbor. It shows similar disparities in diabetes treatment, as well as access to senior hip replacement, medical specialists and MRI scanners. Well, the U.S. does have a lot of MRI scanners - a situation some see as further inflating the high cost of care in the American system.

As for the survival rates, the critics of these numbers argue that such rates vary by type of cancer, so comparisons are difficult to make. Instead, people who study health care systems use various categories to compare overall effectiveness. These include: quality, access, efficiency, equity, overall health and cost. In these types of comparisons, the U.S. does better in some categories and worse in others. Overall our ranking is poor. A study by the Commonwealth Fund of the healthcare systems of 11 developed nations ranked us dead last. Ditto for a comparison of 17 developed nations by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine. Notably, all of the countries above us possess a national health care system.

Finally, the hit piece blames all this on President Obama for not appointing enough business-types to his cabinet. The attack says only eight percent of the president's cabinet have had business experience in the private-sector - the lowest since John F. Kennedy's cabinet, at 30 percent. But the person who compiled this list missed or minimized a number of cabinet members with business experience and excluded everyone who had been a lawyer. If we include the people the analysis missed and the attorneys, Obama's cabinet appointees with private sector experience runs to 78 percent. If that's a key value, he certainly has not ignored it.

In a time as polarized as ours and with the web offering easy dissemination, we can expect such distortions as commonplace. So when I read these slanted screeds, I remember the words attributed to my favorite American humorist, Mark Twain. For most of a century he has been credited with saying, "Figures don't lie, but liars can sure figure." I try to always apply that bit of wisdom, and when I do it pays off every time.

Rev. Jim Conn is the founding minister of the Church in Ocean Park and served on the Santa Monica City Council and as that city's mayor. He helped found Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, Los Angeles, and was its second chair, and was a founder of Santa Monica's renter's rights campaign.

Reprinted with permission from the author and Capital and Main. The original is here.

Reformers, radicals, and challenging Wall Street

Mon, 26 Jan 2015 16:18:00 +0000

Gretchen Morgenson isn't a household name, and probably never will be. But on Wall Street, everybody knows her. And most, I suspect, don't like her in this male-dominated, testosterone-driven industry.

Morgenson, you see, is a journalist and in that capacity an astute and unrelenting critic of the "Street's" practices. Nearly every week in her column in the business section of the Sunday New York Times, she uncovers the seamy side of Wall Street. Indeed, she spotlights the less than transparent practices and culture that put money, and lots of it, in the pockets of financial insiders and institutions, while recklessly rolling the dice with the financial system, and, as we learned all too painfully a few years ago, the larger economy.

In a recent column, for example, she turned her attention to the efforts of the new Congress to further roll back "regulations put in place to keep markets and Main Street safe from reckless Wall Street practices."

In its sights, Morgenson tell us, is the Dodd-Frank law - a law passed by a narrow margin in 2010 that is designed to rein in some of the speculative trading and destabilizing practices of Wall Street and its "too big to fail" financial institutions.

While Dodd-Frank isn't, Morgenson notes, a "comprehensive fix" for a risky banking system and leaves many rules governing financial trading still to be written by congressional committees and regulators friendly to the financial industry, it is still too much regulation for the titans of finance. If they had their way, "self-policing" would be quite enough.

Which explains their unending effort to eviscerate Dodd-Frank. And to their good fortune, they can count on the congressional Republicans, now in the majority, standing ready to do their dirty work. In fact, a few days after Morgenson's column appeared in the Times, House Republicans (joined by a few Democrats) passed a bill that further weakened Dodd-Frank. One casualty was a robust interpretation of the Volcker Rule, named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. In its robust form, the Volker Rule was supposed to prevent speculative trading by federally insured banks, much like the Glass-Steagall Act did until it was repealed in the late 1990s at the insistence of another friend of Wall Street at the time - the Clinton administration.

The attempt at further weakening Dodd-Frank continues a strategy - or should I say tactic - of this motley coalition comprised of Wall Street financial institutions, their lobbyists on K Street in D.C, and a right-wing-dominated Republican Party to dethrone it not in one fell swoop, but with "death by a thousand cuts," executed in small committees beyond public view, over "business" lunches, and on the House and Senate floors.

Unless these efforts are blocked by congressional Democrats and/or presidential vetoes, the regulatory environment will soon look much like it did before the the 2008 financial meltdown, that is, barely a wisp of regulation on financial transactions. And everyone remembers what that eventuated in - the freezing up of the financial system and the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

But that awful possibility doesn't enter at all the calculus of the GOP as they run roughshod over Dodd-Frank or anything else that might regulate financial and speculative trading. How could it be otherwise for a party that is captive of the top tier of the 1 percent and a "free market" ideology that is resistant, even hostile, to reality and facts.

It is a keen awareness of all this that makes Morgenson very unpopular among the predators and parasites (I'm choosing my words judiciously) that inhabit the chic and well secured towers of lower Manhattan.

Don't get me wrong. Morgenson isn't a radical; she is a reformer, albeit a tougher one than many sitting in Congress and the White House, which is another problem to air out in a later article.

She's doesn't advocate turning the financial industry into a public utility, transparently and democratically governed by a public commission.

Nor, to my knowledge, does she make a case for heavily taxing speculative transactions in their many forms.

Nor does she suggest a concrete solution to the problem of "regulatory capture" - the all-too-frequent situation where regulatory agencies are taken over in one way or another by the very corporate institutions that they are charged with regulating.

But you can't have everything, as they say. In fact, in any broad-based coalition assembled to rein in Wall Street, there will be reformers as well as radicals, in fact, the former will very likely outnumber the latter. Thus, competing views over exact demands, methods of struggle, and longer-term perspectives will inevitably be part of the conversation.

But there is no reason to think that such views can't be discussed, negotiated, and resolved in a constructive way. Is there any other option? After all, only a broadly based coalition can de-fang Wall Street. Radicals can't do it on their own. Nor can reformers, like Morgenson, get the job done by themselves either. One needs the other. And both, when push comes to shove, depend on the engagement of millions of aroused and engaged people to take down the "Street." So keep on writing, Gretchen!

Photo: Occupy Chicago rally, Nov. 17, 2011. John Bachtell/PW

The war on rest

Mon, 26 Jan 2015 16:14:00 +0000

Our friend showed up late in the evening from Northern California to spend a couple of days with us before pushing on in a long-planned vacation. But when I woke up the next morning, he had been up for hours. I found him surrounded by three screens and his cell phone - solving a tech problem for his company.

"Auspicious beginning of a vacation," I said. "I thought you were supposed to leave all that behind."

"Oh, no," he said, "not at my pay level."

And so it goes. "No rest for the weary and the wicked go free." That was an oft repeated phrase an early mentor in work mumbled as he sipped on yet another cup of coffee and ran to yet another customer. He may have been obsessive and wired, but he only worked a 40-hour week. None of us worked more, except the boss now and then. Not so now. We are in a take-no-prisoner war on rest - what Jews and Christians have always called Sabbath, a day or several days without responsibilities. Today, from management to the shop floor, everyone works more and harder than ever before.

While some people can't get enough hours to feed their families, half of all workers say they work up to 50 hours every week. Some work more. The 47-hour week just makes you average, apparently. Google, reportedly one of the best places to work in America, "doesn't stress out about work-life balance among its employees: work this meaningful and fulfilling isn't just 'work,'" according to a recent New Yorker piece. So people just love to work all the time.

Really? I can remember when San Diego State offered a degree in leisure time, when theologians were writing books about the theology of leisure. Now people wonder if they will get enough sleep. About 50 percent of people in households earning $30,000 a year or less - that's about a million working families in Los Angeles - sleep six or fewer hours a night. They work multiple jobs, hold late shifts, drive long commutes or suffer from poor health. Meanwhile only a third of those making $75,000 or more sleep for six or fewer hours.

Part of this push to work more can be attributed to the recession. Fifty-three percent of workers say they were handed extra responsibilities, and 93 percent of those workers got more duties without any additional pay. Speedups are common among nurses as well as assembly line workers who must do more, faster, at the peril of their own health. The work pileup has contributed to an increase in on-the-job injuries as well as higher stress levels. Corporate takeovers haven't helped either. When companies buy other companies they often fire workers, but expect the same output - so everyone left with a job works harder, and more frequently for less.

The list of occupations affected by these changes cuts across the spectrum. It's not just Google techs and nurses and assembly-line workers but warehousemen, delivery people, oil field roustabouts, meat cutters, truck drivers, teachers, fast food workers, and anyone who must pass through a security screen to work. In a closely watched case featuring Amazon.com, the Supreme Court just ruled that despite the company's screening requirement, it doesn't need to pay employees for their waiting time. That hour or more a day is off the clock.

Workers are being made to work harder, longer - and there is no respite, not even sick leave. Forty million workers - almost 40% of the private work force - do not get paid for taking a sick day. So they go to work sick, wheezing and coughing around their co-workers, into our food, on our children, and in our work-spaces. We cannot seem to give people a rest because it would "cost more."

The result: People go to work sick; they work more hours; they don't have time to sleep; they work when they are supposed to be on vacation. Life moves faster, and we have become addicted to the speed. We've become so accustomed, we don't even notice. But someone did: They invented the Cell Lock-Up, a miniature jail for that ubiquitous cell phone. Now you can actually lock it away where it can't be grabbed every time it pings. Maybe that's the only way a family can have some uninterrupted, quality time together. During these winter holidays, I hope you take some time for rest.

Photo: Man sleeping in a Baltimore fish market, 1938, by Sheldon Dick.

Reprinted with permission from the author and Capital and Main. The original is here.

What is "inclusive prosperity?"

Mon, 26 Jan 2015 13:41:00 +0000

President's Obama's State of the Union address included a welcome centerpiece proposal taxing finance capital and the rich, and giving it to the middle class and poor. Personally, I view it as the return of stolen wealth, not a gift. But as long as the check is good, I don't care what it's called.

The president is drawing on a revival of "inclusive capitalism" theory in economics. This is not exactly a new theory, but it is receiving a lot of attention now. A cluster of policy initiatives and inclusivity debates in mainstream economics has arisen in response to the impact of major inequality. Those debates are also not new. They include a lot of work by Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Daron Acemoglu, and others. But the debate has taken center stage since the publication of Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century." Indeed, Jason Furman, the current chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisors, was quite frank about this in a major speech on "Inclusive Growth" delivered last May at the Institute of International and European Affairs (IIEA) in Dublin:

"One of the useful contributions of the much-discussed new book by Thomas Piketty, 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century,' is to highlight that there are other important sources of inequality that derive from capital rather than labor."

Furman goes on to endorse one of Piketty's fundamental conclusions, namely, that aggravated inequality will adversely affect both growth and stability. Further, he supports tax and income remedies in line with Piketty's framework. Not only Furman, but also former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and Ed Balls, a British Labor Party politician, argue that inequality and a lack of financial resources among those in the bottom half of the income distribution will result in too little spending to keep gross domestic product at or near its capacity. "Developed nations," they write, "need new social and political institutions to make 21st-century capitalism work for the many and not the few."

"Inclusive capitalism," according to Summers and Ball, seeks "to make our economic system more equitable, more sustainable and more inclusive."

While some have said "inclusive capitalism" can be dismissed as "leftover new-Keynesianism" - as if one person in a hundred thousand would really know what that phrase meant - the core proposals are entirely consistent with what I will call "anti-monopoly" economics. And, as far as anyone can tell, anti-monopoly economics is at least half way to socialist economics - even if it is also true that it "saves" capitalism, and all of us too, from another collision and catastrophe like 1914-1945.

I will have more to say about the relationship of "anti-monopoly" economics to "socialist economics" in a later column.

"Inclusive capitalism" proposals would substantially alter the rules of the marketplace and the legal status and liability of "too big to fail" corporations. These include major revisions of the tax code to:

Tax both wealth and income.
Pass legislation to pressure corporations to increase pay to match productivity growth.
Expand refundable tax credits to include low-income workers as well as households making as much as $80,000 a year.
Expand retraining and transition subsidies, including free education, to raise human capital, and human consuming, capacity.
Greatly increase public infrastructure investments in both human and physical capital.
Undo corporate "personhood."
Expand labor rights.
Reform corporate law to include stakes of public, environmental and employee interests and composition in boards of directors, especially of "too big to fail" firms.

Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen has further developed specific tax ideas along these lines.

Mark Carney, the Canadian governor of the Bank of England, articulated a fundamental premise of inclusive capitalism: "Just as any revolution eats its children, unchecked market fundamentalism can devour the social capital essential for the long-term dynamism of capitalism itself." Among the attendees: Bill Clinton; Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google; and Summers.

Put in strictly "political economy" terms, "inclusive capitalism" is really less capitalism and more socialism, less market fundamentalism and more industrial policy, i.e., planning.

Some, both on the right and left wings of the Democratic Party, and the socialist left as well, have objected that the tax proposals were just presidential hot air given Republican control over both houses. Of these, the ones who were counseling Obama to shut up and go away, to kowtow to "debt and austerity" economics, or boondoggles like Keystone XL, or a more militaristic foreign and military policy prior to the elections, mostly got their clocks cleaned in the midterms.

On the left, some forces feel comfortable damning the president with faint praise for his economics. But mass movements - women, labor, African American, Latino - responded overwhelmingly favorably. That's because, I believe, they know, as does Obama, that the stage on which working people must contend will be the next national election. This Congress will do nothing good. We will be lucky indeed to survive it intact. The president identified the key link that, if we grasp it, can pull the chain to the future. I believe he is correct.

There are splits remaining - important ones - on trade and foreign policy. However, I submit that from a working class point of view both of these areas are very divisive. If we strategically focus on them, we will be fighting our natural and necessary allies more than our real enemy. Why are they divisive? Because you cannot easily isolate the multinationals' and billionaires' wealth in the trade and foreign policy debates. That's where we have to focus. That's where the billionaires are vulnerable. That's where unity can be forged. The question of wealth and income is the key to both national and international democratic and working people's unity. It is the question everyone in every continent can understand. The 19th - and early 20th - century paradigm of imperialism and anti-imperialism is not a sufficient, is too simplistic a foundation for either understanding or constructing a new trade, or foreign, policy in a globalized world. I submit both trade and foreign policy will be an incomparably easier task to resolve differences if unity on inequality is achieved.

As I said at the opening, I don't care if the president or his advisors call it "inclusive capitalism." I am going to support the reforms as important components in "anti-monopoly democracy." To those who say it's pie in the sky: Well, it is true I do not believe Bill Gates can bring this into being. But we can! Sí se puede!

Photo: President Obama delivers his State of the Union address on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. | AP

A radical third party? I agree!

Thu, 22 Jan 2015 13:45:00 +0000

"We need a labor-led third party in this country" is a refrain I hear more and more. It's a sentiment I agree with wholeheartedly!

In fact, a labor-led third party and mass participation in the electoral arena are prerequisites for winning advanced economic and social democracy, and even winning a green, democratic, demilitarized socialism. The challenge is: How to move from present political realities to the actual establishment of a radical third party.

Certainly, there's widespread disillusionment with both the Democratic and Republican parties. That's reflected in the latest Pew Research poll: 38 percent of voters describe themselves as independent, 32 percent as Democrats, and 25 percent as Republicans. In 1991, the three were approximately equal.

A major reason for disillusionment with the Democratic Party is its leadership's deep connections to Wall Street. It is a party often dominated by corporate interests and especially those forces driving neo-liberal policies. After all, it was President Clinton who advanced NAFTA, welfare reform, and policies that facilitated mass incarceration.

Corporate forces pushing school privatization have a heavy influence at all levels.

Both parties are deeply intertwined with the Wall Street-dominated foreign policy and state security apparatuses, supporting imperialist aggression.

Domination by Wall Street interests constrained the Democratic Party's ability to deliver a clear alternative in the Nov. 4 elections. Millions voted their disillusionment by staying home, resulting in the lowest voter turnout in 72 years.

The class struggle within

However, it's not enough to make sweeping generalizations about the Democratic and Republican parties. It's true both parties are dominated by Wall Street interests, but it's also necessary to see how each party differs, particularly their social bases and how this affects their policies.

While the Republican Party is led by the most reactionary sections of Wall Street capital including the energy extractive sector and military industrial complex, it also consists of extreme right-wing elements including the Tea Party, white supremacists, social conservatives, right-wing evangelicals, climate deniers, anti-reproductive rights groups, etc.

Meanwhile the Democratic Party is also home to labor, African Americans, Latinos, other communities of color, women, most union members, young people, and a wide range of social and democratic movements. These constituencies exert influence on party leadership and hold positions at all levels.

Because Democrats embrace a multi-class constituency, the class struggle rages within, between what are loosely the Wall Street and the progressive or pro-labor wings. This includes a struggle against mayors like Rahm Emanuel (Chicago) and governors like Andrew Cuomo (New York) who champion the neo-liberal agenda and those considered part of the so-called "Blue Dogs."

Even while labor and its allies are in unity with sections of Wall Street capital in the fight against the ultra right, they are battling these same forces daily on the economic and political front.

However, despite growing dissatisfaction, labor and other key social forces are not about to leave the Democratic Party anytime soon. They still see Democrats as the most realistic electoral vehicle to advance their agenda, especially in the national battle against the extreme right. Their main goal at this time is changing DP policies and approaches away from influences of the Wall Street wing and the more conservative elements.

While many of these forces are deeply tied into Democratic Party structures at various levels, they are also developing their own independent political apparatuses and approaches.

The Communist Party's tactics for political independence rest on several interrelated elements. First, they occur within the constraints of the two-party system. We don't operate in a parliamentary system which allows proportional voting. Instead, winner takes all, and during the general election it usually comes down to voting for one of two candidates most likely to win.

That means candidates are backed by coalitions. Under these circumstances voting based on purity of positions is not a viable tactic. Coalition forces may disagree with a candidate on one or another issue, but find they must support candidates for strategic reasons - to advance issues and create a more favorable terrain of struggle.

Our tactics also occur within the framework of our strategic policy of building a broad coalition to defeat the extreme right, which we see as the main danger to democracy and social progress, embodied within today's Republican Party. There are voting constituencies that presently support the GOP that have to be won over. Such an approach sees the need to actively challenge right-wing and GOP ideas that influence sections of the people, especially working-class whites, for example, through hate talk radio. This includes racism and intolerance which are key issues dividing the working class.

We see this as one of the stages in the long struggle for advanced democracy and socialism. Without decisively defeating the most reactionary sections of monopoly capital, disintegrating Republican Party support at every level, it's hard to see winning more radical and advanced programs and policies and waging a fight against the monopoly class as a whole.

These are realities that can't be escaped.

Wide variety of forms

We envision a prolonged process toward political independence, with many turns, advances and defeats, utilizing many forms, resulting in a radical third party based in labor, working-class neighborhoods, communities of color, and democratic movements. Such a coalition third party must extend its reach beyond urban areas, to suburbs, exurbs, rural areas, and in "red" states and congressional districts.

First, we are part of building the broadest anti-ultra right alliance possible, uniting the widest array of class (including a section of monopoly), social and democratic forces. This necessarily means working with the Democratic Party. This differentiates us from those left groups who underestimate the right danger and overestimate the readiness of key class and social forces to bolt the Democratic Party.

Second, our objective is not to build the Democratic Party. At this stage we are about building the broad people's movement led by labor that utilizes the vehicle of the Democratic Party to advance its agenda. We are about building the movements around the issues roiling wide sections of people that can help shape election contours and debates.

In this sense we are for building movements in the electoral arena and see engagement in the electoral arena and democratic governance as a vital means to further build movements. But based on the experience in the Obama campaigns and local elections, it is difficult to sustain electoral activism. It remains a huge challenge to overcome widespread voter disengagement and cynicism: Many feel that their voice and vote have no impact.

Third, we are part of building labor's independent structures, including its electoral and political apparatus and its program to train union members to run for office. At last count, thousands of trade unionists have been elected.

Labor's independent structures include building labor-community, grassroots-based organizations or networks where activists can work together on candidates, campaigns, civil rights and environmental issues, legislative lobbying, labor organizing and strike solidarity.

Labor's allies are also building independent formations inside and outside the Democratic Party. These include independent grassroots political organizations like the 22^nd Ward Independent Political Organization (IPO) in Chicago. In addition, a coalition of labor and community groups called United Working Families was established and is playing a role in the 2015 municipal elections. Its aim is to build independent political organizations in as many wards as possible.

In many cities reform Democratic clubs express political independence.

Fourth, we participate in third-party formations like Working Families Party in New York, which won 120,000 votes Nov. 4, and five other states and Washington, D.C. Rules in these states permit candidates to run on more than one line, allowing for independence but not splitting the anti-ultra right coalition.

In Lorain, Ohio, the Central Labor Council organized a sweep of City Council with a slate of union members who ran on an Independent Labor Party line after Democratic officials engaged in union busting efforts.

Richmond, Calif., residents voted in pro-labor candidates, including the mayor and majority of the City Council, this past November. Voters elected three retired trade unionists who were part of the Richmond Progressive Alliance. They defeated a well financed campaign by Chevron Oil.

Fifth, we participate in coalition campaigns that challenge the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party and galvanize forces around a progressive agenda, mainly in Democratic primary elections. These include labor activists, progressives, socialists and communists who emerge from movements and run as candidates, backed by broad coalitions. A campaign by socialist Bernie Sanders within the Democratic Party presidential primaries would help do just this.

Many of the recent victories of pro-labor, progressive, reform candidates took place within the Democratic Party primaries. These include elections in New York, Newark, New Haven, Boston, and Richmond, California.

In New Haven, Conn., a broad labor-community coalition which emerged out of a long history of shared struggle challenged corporate Democrats and elected a progressive pro-labor mayor, and City Council majority, including many trade unionists.

In places like Chicago, municipal elections are nonpartisan, and it's possible to utilize the runoff system to defeat Wall Street-oriented Democratic candidates.

California law allows for open elections where more than one candidate from the same party can appear on the ballot. So increasingly, pro-labor and pro-corporate Democrats are going head to head.

Independent campaigns are positive where they don't split the anti-ultra right vote. More progressives, communists and socialists should run for public office and more are. But these campaigns should grow out of movements. Communist Party candidates need to be coalition candidates and, like everyone else, must earn their leadership. Running Communist Party candidates for its own sake is not a strategy for building a movement.

If the CPUSA is to be a mass political party it must be a mass electoral party, immersed in every aspect of electoral politics and the process toward political independence.

Sixth, we are part of movements to broaden democracy, including Move to Amend that would remove corporate cash from elections, repealing voter suppression legislation and expanding the right to vote, opening space for third parties, and promoting proportional representation.

Finally, another necessary part of the process toward political independence is growing the left current within a very broad coalition that unites left and center forces. This means growing the left, including the Communist Party, especially at the grassroots.

2015 municipal elections

We are immersed in the political and legislative battles on a national level. But with political gridlock in Washington, what happens on the state and local government grows in importance. Municipal elections are a key arena of battle in 2015.

A major battle is unfolding in Chicago, where several candidates, including progressive Cook County Commissioner Jesus Garcia, are challenging Mayor One Percent - Rahm Emanuel. A wave of grassroots activists, including public school teachers and trade unionists, are running for City Council seats against Democratic machine hacks. This has the potential to be a history-making campaign in one of America's largest cities.

The experiences in New York City, Newark, New Haven, Lorain, Seattle, Richmond and other cities where progressive reform alliances were elected to power is worth studying. In many places progress is being made raising the minimum wage, building affordable housing, advancing climate action plans, ending stop and frisk, expanding public transit, protecting immigrants rights, public education and public workers, fighting corruption, etc.

Fresh from their success in state legislative takeovers, the far-right group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has begun targeting county, city and village governments. They have set up a new entity called the American City County Exchange. The Guardian reports, "There are almost 500,000 local elected officials, many with considerable powers over schools and local services that could be attractive to big business."

The right wing has for many years targeted local school boards and planning bodies. In many places progressives are part of the efforts to block their schemes.

Municipal government is not only an important arena of struggle against the extreme-right policies, but also against corporate Democrat policies of privatization, pension cuts and giveaways to the rich and corporations, and for building grassroots political independence.

Clearly, there is an immense amount of electoral activism and movement building that is laying the foundation for the eventual emergence of a mass radical third party.

Photo: Underscoring the extent to which the ultra-right has a hold over the Republican Party is the fact that four of the major candidares for that party's last presidential nomination vied for official support from the tea party. (From left to right, those who sought tea party support were Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachmann, and Rick Santorum.) | AP

On Day One, GOP Congress takes the axe to Social Security

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 11:15:00 +0000

The Republicans have a plan: pit older workers who receive Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) against so-called "freeloading" beneficiaries of disability insurance. The plan is being sprung just in time for the 2016 election.

No sooner than the first week of the 114th Congress, GOP legislators in the House of Representatives passed rule changes that would allow "any member to raise a 'point of order' if the House considers a 'clean' bill to fix a predicted shortfall by authorizing an internal re-allocation of Social Security funds."

The "point of order" would prevent a transfer of funds - done 11 times by Congress spanning Democratic and Republican administrations alike - from the Social Security trust fund to the disability program.

The problem: payroll tax deductions only account for 80 percent of the disability fund. "If Congress does nothing, the program's 10 million enrollees could face a 19 percent benefit cut, about $200 per month for the typical beneficiary."

The GOP intention is clear: "force us to look for a long-term solution for SSDI rather than raiding Social Security to bail out a failing federal program," explains rule co-sponsor Rep. Tom Reed , R-N.Y. "Retired taxpayers who have paid into the system for years deserve no less."

It's patently obvious they're trying to convince retired workers that in order to preserve the system, the disabled should be sacrificed.

Presidential aspirant Rand Paul took the ploy on the road in a recent swing through New Hampshire claiming "Over half of the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts."

But Paul knows full well typical beneficiaries aren't gaming the system - most are either physically disabled or injured workers no longer able to hold down a job. Only about 25 percent of the disabled who apply for the benefits are even approved. Over 30 percent are between 60 and 65! Many have been forced to seek disability benefits because of legislation that has raised the age that people are eligible for the regular old-age benefits. Will the scheme hatched by Paul and his cohorts work? Last November's election suggests such appeals to older beneficiaries should not be discounted.

Those who think that it is the intention of Republicans to cut disability benefits so they can save Social Security overall should remember that the GOP has shown by its past deeds that it has no intention of saving Social Security but rather seeks to privatize it.

Senate Democrats have voiced opposition to the plan. But what could happen in future budget negotiations? One thing is clear: Only unity between older and younger, able-bodied and disabled, will prevent significant cuts to the program. Call your Congressperson and let them know you will not tolerate cuts in the disability program.

Photo: The latest parliamentary maneuver by the GOP-controlled House is just one more salvo in an 80-year attack by that party on Social Security ever since it was signed into law by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933.

So long Donahoe: Are lifetime careers a thing of the past?

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 15:11:00 +0000

Yesterday was a milestone for me. Not a day of sadness as much as a day of reflection. January 12, 2015, was the fifth anniversary of my father's death. His demise came suddenly. A massive heart attack, then - poof! - he disappeared from our lives.

I remember vividly getting the phone call from Big John. I was setting up my route and my phone kept ringing over and over. I was too busy to answer the damn thing but something didn't feel right. I answered the fourth time John called. "You have to get to the hospital right away. Something's wrong with Bob." I dropped my mail and rushed to the emergency room. My heart sank and then shattered into a million shards when the doctor told me, "There was nothing we could do." I felt like an orphan.

Bob "Moses" Dick was a proud union man. He had worked at the Ford Utica Trim Shop for thirty years. From 1963 to 1993 he sewed seats for the automobile giant. He was not a fan or a great example of what you might call the "work ethic." He told me many times as I was growing up that his bosses and even the Ford family only cared about what he could do for them, and he was sure enough gonna return the favor. He said "I got a contract with those folks. I do my thirty years sewin' those goddam car seats, and in return I have a decent paying job and a secure retirement. I don't have to like them, and they don't have to like me. Don't ever fool yourself, son. You're just a number to them. A cog in the wheel. I don't give them any more than I have to."

He would regale me and my brother with stories about working at the plant. He was outrageously honest, and claimed to have the worst discipline record at the Trim Shop. His temper was legendary, and if he thought a supervisor was acting prickly it was not unusual for him to threaten the health of his bosses. According to Pops, at one discipline meeting his exasperated steward exclaimed, "We have no defense for his actions. We plead insanity!" He loved the UAW, but I am not sure the feeling was completely mutual.

He was proud when I became a letter carrier on October 7, 2000. The first question he asked me was if I had joined the union. He loved reading my "Dicktations," and we had him added to our mailing list so that he would receive his own personal copy. He said something to me about my writing that I will never forget. He said I was profound. It was not his style to talk in that way, and all I could say was "Thanks." His death was premature at the age of 70, but at least he was able to retire at the age of 54 and enjoy 16 years of a Ford pension.

Much has changed in the five short years since my father died. Michigan is now a right-to-work (for less) state, and America is sliding backwards from the promises it had made to previous generations. The middle class is stagnating economically and the wealth gap between the richest and the poorest is dramatic. Many companies no longer make promises to their workers. My employer, the United States Postal Service, still does. But I have to wonder, "For how much longer?"

Our Postmaster General, Patrick R. Donahoe, is retiring in February after a nearly 40-year postal career. He started as a mail clerk and worked his way up to the head honcho position of the Service. At a recent speech at the National Press Club honoring his retirement, I was shocked to hear these comments from him: "Most young people aren't looking for a single employer over the course of their careers. In today's world, does it really make sense to offer the promise of a government pension to a 22-year-old who is just entering the workforce? And how reliable is that promise?"

Postmaster Donahoe went on to say what the future of the mail would look like. He said, "It will not be a person putting a piece of mail in a blue mailbox, but rather a far leaner organization, with a smaller workforce and less generous health care and pension benefits, that competes for e-commerce business, online advertising and other Internet based services." It is hard to imagine these comments from a man who spent his entire career at one organization. Guess he wasn't wearing his party hat at this retirement dinner!

Postmaster Buzz Kill made some other parting shots at the postal unions for single-mindedly fighting to preserve jobs and benefits, and the myopic shortsightedness of the mailers for trying to keep postal rates affordable. Rumor has it he kicked a dog and pushed an old lady before the speech was over. For those of us who have been trying to understand the decisions and direction this man has taken the Postal Service over the last several years, this one speech wrapped it all up in a tidy package and put a bow on it. He is a true believer in the "New America," where workers have no guarantees or contracts and bounce from job to job every few years. This is the philosophy of our very own Postmaster General.

In February, Megan Brennan will become the new Postmaster General. She has shattered the glass ceiling at L'Enfant Plaza and will become the first female to assume that position. I hope she has differing aspirations for what is possible for the United States Postal Service and its workers. We are the nation's second largest employer, and we are vital to this nation's economy. The "twenty somethings" I work with deserve a promise from our employer for the hard work they do every do. This is not a job; this is a profession and a career.

A photo of my old man sits on the shot glass shelf of the bar I have in my basement. I will do tonight as I have done many nights in the past; I will raise a glass of strong libation and toast to his memory and honor. The toast will be one of his favorites, and I will look at him with a salty tear in my eye: "God bless the union!" And for good favor: "Work Sucks!"

Photo: John Dick (courtesy of Jacqueline Dick)

The cost of war for families

Tue, 13 Jan 2015 15:53:00 +0000

Mainstream media have given little coverage to the official end of combat in Afghanistan, which means even fewer American people took notice. To the families of service men and women, especially mothers, it is bitter sweet. Yes, we are happy that there is less possibility for our children to be deployed and killed, but we are concerned about their welfare. There is little to no discussion on what our children need to end the combat that is going on in their heads.

What happened to all those people who put yellow ribbons on their tress and stuck "Support Our Troops" stickers on their cars? How about all those good folks who verbally and physically assaulted anti-war protestors, calling them unpatriotic? I ask myself, Where is their cry now, to support and take care of these hundreds of thousands of our troops and their families? Where is their demand to allocate adequate funds needed to help these service members regain their lives, to help restore their families to a state of normalcy?

In February of 2014, Senate Republicans blocked a $21 billion plan to build new VA clinics because they said it was too expensive. In May of the same year, the House Ways and Means Committee advanced a bill that would give businesses a 10-year $600 billion tax cut. So $2.1 billion a year over 10 years to provide better care for our veterans is too expensive, but $60 billion a year over the same time period is affordable as long as the money is going to the business sector. Where are those yellow ribbon-waving "Support the Troops" people now?

As a citizen of this nation - especially if you supported the war - you have the responsibility to make sure that the war truly ends for the troops sent out to fight. That the combat in their heads also ends. "Thank you for your service" comments are mere lip service if they are not followed by action that ensures ongoing care. The kind of care our returning troops need cannot be some standard one-size-fits-all practice, but specialized attention that addresses the varied and repeated traumas they have experienced.

There seems to be more concern about the Afghan people: Will they survive? Will there be setbacks? Will democracy hold? What about our sons and daughters, who have endured multiple deployments, heinous injuries, and the lingering after-effects of post-traumatic stress disorder? Is this the America that proclaims herself to be so humanitarian, that leaves her sons and daughters to suffer daily with the war that does not end for them?

Few Americans realize the continuing burden of these wars, the lingering effects they have on veterans and their families. These include high rates of suicide and mental illness, increased drug and alcohol dependence, high incidence of violence, including homicide, child abuse and neglect, appalling rates of homelessness and divorce, and clinical levels of stress among the children.

I call out to each and every citizen - and to all those people with the yellow ribbons on their trees and the stickers on their cars - I say to them, Now is the time for you to be out in the streets. Call your members of congress and demand that our homebound warriors get the necessary funds to provide the loving care which will end the combat that goes on day after day in their heads. That's the way to "Support Our Troops."

Photo: The weekend of October 8 & 9, 2011 during Fleet Week along The Embarcadero, at Pier 41, in San Francisco at the IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War), VFP (Veterans For Peace) & Civilian Soldier Alliance table. Judith Sandoval, Associate Member, Veterans For Peace, San Francisco Chapter 69.

Only tackling the root causes can end the cycle of violence

Thu, 08 Jan 2015 15:30:00 +0000

It was reported today that one of the young men who was part of the horrific and ghastly attack that killed 12 people in Paris yesterday was radicalized by the torture and brutality that occurred at Abu Ghraib. That tells me that these unforgivable atrocities (and there are many more in the Muslim world against Muslim people, including young children, that either go un- or barely reported) emanate, in the first place, from the real conditions of everyday life.

Thus any solution, if it hopes to end the cycle of violence and counter violence that grips and scars the modern world has to uproot these real conditions, that is, exploitation, oppression, poverty, racism, discrimination, torture, war, alienation, etc. and the structures, policies, and people that create and sustain them.

What won't help - in fact, they're a fool's errand and a demagogue's soundbite - are sweeping (and groundless) condemnations of Islam, or any other religion or people. Nor is the further militarization of already heavily armed police and security forces and more invasive spying an answer. Done that and it hasn't worked either.

Nor should we hang our hopes on the projection of even greater military power in distant lands to make us safe. Look where that has got us since we launched our "War on Terror" in the wake of 9/11! And finally, let's not turn our country into a fortress that turns immigrants into enemies and democracy and civil liberties into something that we can no longer afford.

Again and as counter intuitive as it may seem to many people at this moment when feelings are running high, only a sharp turn to peace and non-violence, to substantive equality for all, to full human solidarity and universal love, and to dissolving the real conditions that generate and reproduce violence daily and hourly, both here and around the world, stands a ghost's chance of extricating humankind from this awful and seemingly intractable situation.

If this feels like too big challenge, too steep a hill to climb, we might want to reflect a bit on the life of Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate next week and whose commitment to overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges never faltered and ultimately proved victorious.

Photo: French police officers patrol in Longpont, north of Paris, France, on Jan. 8, 2015. | Thibault Camus/AP

Police unions and the challenge of solidarity

Wed, 07 Jan 2015 12:27:00 +0000

That could have been any of us!

As someone who lived in New York for 35 years and as the former president of one of its larger unions, the Transport Workers Union, Local 100 (2001-2009), and thus quite familiar with the fabric and terrain, I write to address the challenges facing the protest movement in the aftermath of the tragic murder of the two NYPD officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

This is clearly not what either the family of Eric Garner or the tens of thousands involved in recent protests wished or wanted. Indeed, the vast majority of voices raised and feet marching in protest called for change and not for violence. Nor was this criminally demented young man, who shot his girlfriend just before getting on a bus and traveling to New York where he launched his deadly attack on these unsuspecting officers, part of any protest movement.

We all extend deepest condolences to the families and colleagues of these fallen officers.

There is neither justification, good sense nor purpose to attacks and violence against individual police officers who have little or nothing to do with the policies and leadership that have created, promoted and defended the dehumanizing of the lives of black people and other people of color. The target of the protests has been and is indeed institutional racism, not the police in and of themselves.

The acquittals in Florida (Trayvon Martin), Missouri and New York are the doing of the guardians of the system of institutional racism. In each case, the governors, mayors and district attorneys hid their own refusal and failure to take action to defend the victims behind grand juries, whom they spoon-fed and steered to deliver the message that Black Lives Still Do Not Matter!-today, and certainly tomorrow!

While this experience, in terms of heinous acts and attitudes, is part of an unbroken American legacy, the recent spate of unpunished, sanctioned attacks are also intended to deliver the message: Even with Obama in the White House, don't think things have changed or forget who's in charge!

It is the city and state fathers and district attorneys and other top policy-makers who have for decades sustained the dehumanizing of communities of color in New York and around the country. Across-the-board inferior and unequal housing, education, employment, medical care, protection and other services, access to culture and to opportunities in general, translate directly and precisely into disrespected and devalued lives. The only preference allowed is for punishment and prisons.

But, in this way, people focus on each other, either as competing victims or to protect their own measly privilege, while the fat cats make out like bandits and control everything. Institutional racism serves systems of inequality and each will be defended with might and fright, as with words and prose.

The recent protest movement is the first breath of fresh air in a long while and represents the only hope that this generation and the next might move America closer to a more-just society where our teenagers, our sons, uncles and grandparents can leave their homes and walk the streets of America without fear from those sworn to protect and serve.

Today's movement might just accomplish what my own generation has obviously failed so miserably to do.

Changes are indeed needed. Police cannot be allowed to act without accountability or to operate as an occupying army. Governors, mayors, district attorneys and top policy-makers must be held chiefly accountable for the realization of actual equal treatment under the law and not just at election time when promises abound.

It would be pure folly to rely upon promises or on goodwill to move America closer to this elusive reality, just as it would be a profound loss and mistake to abandon the best mechanisms of pressure to bring these about-the protest movement. There is not even a whimper of hope for change without such a movement. For power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

In one sense, George Zimmerman in Florida and the police officers involved in the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner are mere tools and pawns in an American story that is much bigger than them. Tomorrow they too and their families can be discarded, if it suits that machine. The same forces that today sing praises to the cops underpay them and are working desperately and openly to strip them and their families of their pensions; that is more easily done if the public and communities view the work they do in an unsympathetic light. All communities should matter, not just some. This calls into question the very public actions of the leadership of so many of these police unions, which deserves to be addressed.

As a former union president, I must say that the leadership of New York's PBA and other police unions across the country has been utterly insensitive and worse with regards to the passionate feelings and concerns recently being expressed by the very communities which the police are sworn to protect, especially when those communities happen to be communities of color.

I know the leadership of New York's PBA fairly well and have personally valued the solidarity they showed for transit workers in past struggles. I was hopeful that they would demonstrate the ability to navigate the changes needed in policing and in their relationship with the communities.

Sadly, the leadership of these unions seems to ignore or forget that so many of their members/officers themselves today have sons and nephews who look exactly like Michael Brown and brothers and uncles who look like Eric Garner and moreover, could just as easily have been them!

Notwithstanding the positions being taken by the leadership of these unions, I am certain that this fact is not lost on many NYPD officers who go home to these very communities. Moreover, many if not most of the other members/officers do truly see their work as protecting the communities and as jobs-to feed, house and raise their families-NOT as a means to act out some "chip on their shoulders" or to feed their personal sick insecurities and need to "put people in their place," or as a badge to bully and kill for no good reason. So who speaks for that majority?

The challenge facing the PBA is to represent the interests of the majority of its members who are decent, and not the sickos and bullies, any more than I would glorify a station agent or bus driver who is truly abusive to the passengers they are supposed to serve and who pay their wages-even without the power to use deadly force, such as NYPD officers do.

When unions serve the interests of the few, they lose their way and their ability to be forward-looking. But one of the better-kept secrets is that invariably, they also quietly become alienated from their own members. Inevitably, if the leadership of the PBA continues to ignore and fail on this challenge, new leadership will be destined to take it up.

Meanwhile, the reality is that unless and until the doors of justice are equally open and guaranteed to all, we will be visited with unspeakable tragedies on all sides.

This article is reposted from The Chief's letter to the editor column.

Photo: American Federation of Teachers Union President Randi Weingarten gets arrested during peaceful civil disobedience protests in the aftermath of the announcement that the grand jury cleared police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the killing of Eric Garner. (via Twitter)

"The Country of the (Growing) Blind"

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 15:57:00 +0000

I live in a working-class neighborhood of houses that reflect their owner/renter's lives - struggling, getting by, doing very well. The folks going in and out reflect the diverse profile of this Central Texas town.

Where I work, in a public library, it's all out there to see on a daily basis, whether the patrons are toddlers or elders, homeless or well-landed. They're wearing a wild array of sarongs, Confederate gofer caps, power suits, Dallas Cowboy tees, grease-spattered overalls, and confident heels. Scarcely more than rags sometimes. Wheelchairs, powerful strides, canes, and shuffles.

I'm lucky that way. I see my fellow citizens in the real range and numbers they inhabit here.

Driving through other neighborhoods in my area, I can find the gated places, upper-class homes, and have even been inside by invitation a home that qualifies as a mansion except that there weren't a high fence and security guard to protect it.

The trend, however, is for those of means to become more remote, more out of view. Their gates, luxury boxes, first-class sections and elegant resort properties have become impossible to enter, except by invitation.

As the wealth gap in the U.S. widens, the rich exist for us as phantoms. A few of them enter politics or allow themselves to be seen as power brokers. Some become media whores, Trumpian in their inescapability.

Others are clients you see in the course of your service to them, whether as a guard, a waiter, a building contractor, a maid, a nurse or legal secretary. Maybe you witness their luxe life; maybe you don't.

Many of the wealth class directly benefited from the economic turmoil of recent years in that their investments were protected, their companies bailed out, their tax write-offs unexamined by the IRS, and their offshore palaces free of responsible oversight.

While some of my neighbors lost their homes or had to sell at a loss under severe financial duress, their hard landings contrasted with the soft, mediated workarounds of the opposite end of America's power switch. I could see the struggles of the former, not so well the triumphs of the latter.

We are rapidly becoming the country of the blind when it comes to actually witnessing the divide between the super-haves and the rest of us.

We can read the statistics and reel at the impact of hidden fortunes on today's politics, but one thing we can do, those of us who come into contact, is to witness it for the rest of us. Render Facebook images, testimony, and interviews, however cloaked, with those who serve the wealthy so that their living conditions can be documented. Share exposés of ruses used by the wealthy to escape laws and accountability.

In H. G. Wells' short story "The Country of the Blind," you read that in such a place the one-eyed man is king. Today, all of us can be ordinary citizens, using the singular eye of smartphones, blogs, and shares, to expand everyone's vision.

The class war so trumpeted in the media has thus far been largely one-sided. The sides are starkly unequal. Our struggle isn't only about marches and shouts vs. teargas grenades and police tanks.

It's also about bearing witness to the divide. If you want people to know what's going on, show them. There are individuals in this country who made their fortune by manipulating the system. They may well continue to escape justice, but let them not escape our damning eyes.

For those who try so terribly hard not to see the blight in front of them, present evidence inescapable and inexcusable. Kim Kardashian is the current poster child for wretched excess, yet when former presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke before a private audience saying that about 47 percent of Americans think of themselves as victims, no voter outside that room would have known of this incendiary remark if a worker on the scene hadn't kept his smartphone handy.

Which of the two, Kardashian and Romney, is more important in our understanding of how the world works? One strips bare in public, the other was revealed as a would-be emperor in the raw.

Our eyes are constantly being pulled to the fleeting, to the ephemeral. That being the unblinking case, let us add to the cavalcade with images, footage and tales reflecting the truth, so that those who cloak themselves in moneyed obscurity no longer escape our united vision.

We have the gift of sight and the will to use it for good. Let us all be witnesses and serve as nonviolent observers for the people's United Nations.

For more on American inequality, check this out. And how about these revelations about the infamous Koch Brothers?

Photo: Young activists at the People's Climate March September 21, 2014 New York City. Earchiel Johnson/PW

The wealth gap and its threat to democracy

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 12:59:00 +0000

Although New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is tired of hearing about increasing the minimum wage, it is worth noting that this Jan. 1, nine states, including New Jersey, will see their minimum wages rise because of indexed increases. Additionally, ten states plus the District of Columbia enacted minimum wage increases during the 2014 legislative sessions while four states approved minimum wage increases through ballot measures in the 2014 general election. Illinois voters approved an advisory measure to raise the minimum wage.

These increases are unquestionably good news for low-wage employees without whose work the wealth of this nation, so inequitably distributed, could not be created.

But, the infinitesimal redistribution of wealth these legislative wage increases entail only barely narrow the mammoth wealth chasm in this country and do not come close-and are not intended to come close-to achieving any condition remotely resembling income equality. Rather, these increases make an inhumane economy less inhumane by helping the majority of ordinary working Americans meet their basic needs. Our current economy has as its primary objective the production of profit; meeting need is subsidiary. Thus, such legislation works to countervail an economic system whose internal logic will never bend toward economic justice.

Lest, though, we think these increases are some kind of charity, let's also remember that by many accounts raising the minimum improves the economy overall-even for those resistant to such legislation-by creating a vibrant consumer in an economy driven overwhelmingly by consumer spending, increasing tax revenues which will allow federal, state, and local governments to undertake urgent infrastructure repairs vital to the economy, and decreasing people's needs for government assistance which allows governments to redirect revenues to more developmental areas such as education. Raising the minimum wage is, simply put, just sound economic policy.

As Nobel Prize-winning economist and former leader of the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz underscores in his book The Price of Inequality, staggering income inequality such as we see in the U.S. is not only economically inefficient but also severely undermines democracy.

How we organize our economy and distribute and allocate resources can either facilitate or undermine a democratic socio-political culture. This effort enjoins, in part, interrogating the language we use to talk about and understand equality. Indeed, part of the difficulty of achieving political and social equality in this country lies in not just our inability to understand what constitutes equality but also that we have turned the meaning of the word on its head.

Often we hear in political rhetoric the phrase "equality of opportunity." Christie, for example, in addressing the Economic Club of Chicago last February asserted that "the problem we have is an opportunity gap, not an income equality gap."

Christie, of course, on one level is simply foolish to deny the glaring obviousness of the wealth gap in this country and its deleterious impact on our economy, which even the ratings agency Standard and Poor's has recognized. On another level, Christie's rhetoric is representative of the standard narrative of upward mobility. The narrative of upward mobility or economic opportunity only masks and even legitimates gross economic inequality, offering people the hope of escaping "low-wage work" but not eliminating the social necessity of someone doing that work. We need to change the way we value the necessary work people do to make our lives possible rather than ask people to increase their value.

Equality of opportunity is actually antagonistic to democratic conceptions of social and political equality, enabling some to achieve economic and hence political dominance over others. Again, we need to focus on the relationship between political equality and economic equality, as in the age of Citizens United, all should be able to clearly discern how economic inequality entails political inequality.

To illustrate this point, consider the following two recent occurrences:

Last October 30 at a staged event in Belmar, New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie, in a now infamous rant, berated former New Jersey city councilman and political organizer James Keady, who was protesting the Governor's failure to disburse millions of dollars in Hurricane Sandy relief funds to homeowners and small businesses still suffering from the devastation even now over two years later. Christie all but ripped Keady a new one, excoriating him for seeking his fifteen minutes of fame before the cameras rather than being one of those, like supposedly Christie himself, who has been rolling up his sleeves and doing the actual work to address people's misery when the cameras aren't rolling. Not surprisingly, Christie had no idea that for the past two years Keady has been working on the ground helping as an organizer of an action group devoted to conveying unused relief funds to Sandy victims. Ironically, of course, Keady's point, had Christie chosen to listen, was that Christie has not, in fact, been doing the work. Christie's response? "Sit down, and shut up!"

Last Nov. 13, Walmart workers from throughout California did, in fact, "sit down, and shut up," lining the aisles of a Walmart in Crenshaw, Calif., donning across their mouths green tape over which was written "Strike" in black marker. Reminiscent of the first retail sit-down strike in Woolworth's in 1937, the action dramatized the workers' refusal to be silent despite Walmart's scare tactics as they organized to fight for a $15 per hour wage.

In the first instance, we see how Christie's political dominance gives him economic control over dispensing public resources and also how this dominance enables him to disregard the process of deliberative democracy imagined by our founding fathers. In the second, we see workers resisting-and dramatizing-not just their economic marginalization but the way that economic marginalization has limited, if not outright silenced, their political voice and power.

In this age of Citizens United when we see the Koch brothers buying politicians and political power with their seemingly unlimited economic resources, availing themselves of what Greg Palast has called "the best democracy money can buy," we need to recognize that when we are discussing income inequality we are not only talking about addressing the right of people who perform vital social labor to be able to meet their basic needs but also about preserving-or perhaps restoring-democracy itself.

Click here to read the full article. Excerpted from politicususa.org.

Photo: Twitter, OURWalmart Black Friday Protests