Psyche, Science, and Society

Pasquale: Revolt of the Elites

In a must read article, Frank Pasquale at Balkinization provides a detailed and sobering account of the class war being waged by the ultra-wealthy against the majority. He concludes that they will induce greater stability in US society as the majority become increasingly terrified of protest in an induced state of learned helplessness. He points to the creation of a total surveillance state that will, he claims, be turned against domestic protests against the looting of the rich.

We can only hope that he is wrong and organize.

Revolt of the Elites

By Frank Pasquale

Bernard Harcourt has analyzed new forms of radicalism adopted by the most and least privileged. Umair Haque at the Harvard Business Review has also identified dispositions shared by street looters and certain elites. As the chief political commentator at London’s Daily Telegraph has observed, “The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom.” Yet there are very different consequences for each group’s transgressions.

The more disruptive the disenfranchised become, the more they provoke harsh responses from authorities, thus worsening their already marginal position. By contrast, finance and government elites have positioned themselves to gain from whatever risks they shift onto society at large, via bailouts, emergency powers, and the revolving door. As Ross Douthat observed, “The economic crisis is producing consolidation rather than revolution, the entrenchment of authority rather than its diffusion, and the concentration of power in the hands of the same elite that presided over the disasters in the first place.”

Rather than being grateful for public subvention, Wall Street demands even lower tax rates and less monitoring. At least in the US, this “revolt of the elites” is more of a menace to social order than the type of mass protests against inequality and corruption now sweeping India, Israel, Spain, Chile, and many other countries. Whereas the poor are swiftly punished for disruptions, the worried wealthy‘s initiatives for not-so-creative destruction are self-reinforcing.

1) From risk shift to capital strike: Jacob Hacker’s book The Great Risk Shift described forty years of policies designed to shift risk away from corporations and government and onto individuals. For millions of workers, 401(k) plans replaced defined benefit pensions. In 1979, 82% of impoverished families got TANF benefits; thirty years later, only 27% do. During the Bush Administration, there was even a vogue for “health savings accounts” to replace defined health benefits. Current GOP presidential contenders are upping the ante, attacking Medicare and Social Security, and proposing the replacement of traditional unemployment insurance with “personal accounts.” These policies and proposals all shift the risk of sudden accidents, a frail old age, child poverty, and economic slumps onto the vulnerable themselves, rather than their employers, or the larger polity.

Austerity for the poor and middle classes is only one half of the risk shift. It helps pay for lavish backing of connected companies. The same groups that benefit most from tax cuts financed by a gutting of the safety net are also pushing for “certainty” in their business ventures. Just as capital is taxed preferentially, so too must its owners’ ventures receive subsidies. Lionized on the pages of Forbes or Fast Company for “taking risks,” Wall Street’s favorite executives often avoid them at all costs. Derivatives are a favorite way of engineering away uncertainty. They do business with “too big to fail” banks, secure in the knowledge that taxpayers are on the hook if anything goes awry. Big investors, too, are keen on loan guarantees and other state “givings.” And that is just the beginning of the “certainty” they’ve been demanding, and getting, as Yves Smith argues:

Businesses have had at least 25 to 30 years near complete certainty — certainty that they will pay lower and lower taxes, that they will face less and less regulation, that they can outsource to their hearts’ content (which when it does produce savings, comes at a loss of control, increased business system rigidity, and loss of critical know how). They have also been certain that unions will be weak to powerless, that states and municipalities will give them huge subsidies to relocate, that boards of directors will put top executives on the up escalator for more and more compensation because director pay benefits from this cozy collusion, that the financial markets will always look to short term earnings no matter how dodgy the accounting, that the accounting firms will provide plenty of cover, that the SEC will never investigate anything more serious than insider trading (Enron being the exception that proved the rule).

As Smith notes, now many of the same corporations “have played their cost-focused business paradigm out.” It turns out that the same workers pressed to the wall for concessions happen to be customers, too, and they can’t pay for goods and services like they used to. (As the Wall Street Journal puts it: the same “lucky duckies” who are too poor to pay taxes can’t even go on their “dollar store splurges” any more.) The obvious macroeconomic prescription is for the state to tax those who are doing well, in order to pay for relief, recovery, and reform. But that isn’t happening, either.

Rather, the power groups that dominate the US Congress, Presidency, and courts believe that only private investment can lead to more growth. The problem is that most of those capable of investing now have so much money that they don’t need to earn anything from it. It’s a capital strike against anything but a “sure thing.” Many corporations are also cutting and hoarding. That’s a brilliant strategy for CEO’s, who may need just a few years at the top to accumulate a massive fortune.

The role of money in an economy is like that of blood in a body—it has to circulate to keep the entity that contains it alive. When a tremendous amount pools in one place, other parts suffer. Redistribution of income is vital to the health of American capitalism. Its decline presages a different type of economy on the horizon.

2) Doom Loops: So why isn’t anyone doing anything about this? Some brave protesters in India and Israel provide a model response to their own countries’ inequalities. As Rana Dasgupta notes, “taxpaying professionals working 70-hour weeks now compete unhappily for urban space with massively wealthier and more powerful businessmen and bureaucrats whose sources of wealth are opaque and, on the face of it at least, too effortlessly acquired.” “Opaque” turns out to be a bit of a euphemism:

After independence in 1947 . . . [f]ortunes were accumulated to be spent on property – in India and elsewhere – or stored abroad. The globalisation of the Indian economy in the 1990s only expanded the opportunities for this corrupt . . . entrepreneurial class. “Big-ticket” deals multiplied, much as they did in Russia during the same period: businesses became involved in a scramble for the ownership of basic resources previously controlled by the state – land, mines, oil, mobile telephony spectrums etc – and this only the political class could endow.

The seamless integration of political elites with executives in finance, real estate, extractive industries, and communications is a feature of many so-called “free market” economies. But, as Harcourt notes, social disturbances in the US, Spain, and Britain have too often been unmoored from any positive political vision for change. And the most aggressive protests have themselves become the target of popular ire, rather than the conditions that sparked them.

Meanwhile, at the top of society, reckless behavior is rewarded time and again. Looting is an established business strategy, unpunished by authorities who appear far more interested in getting their own opportunity to loot rather than exposing malfeasance. Peter Boone and Simon Johnson describe how a “doomsday cycle” of privatized gains and socialized losses continues to this day:

[M]ajor private sector firms (banks and nonbank financial institutions) have a distorted incentive structure that encourages eventually costly risk-taking. Unfortunately, the measures taken in various US and European bailout rounds during 2008-2009 (and again in 2010 for the eurozone) have only worsened, and extended to far more entities, these underlying moral hazard incentive problems. . . .

This cycle of boom followed by bailouts and bust amounts to a form of implicit taxpayer subsidy that encourages individual institutions to become larger – and the system as a whole to swell. Our preparation to bail out their creditors means systemic institutions are able to raise finance cheaply in global markets. The implicit subsidy to creditors encourages greater debt, which makes the system ever more precarious.

Years after the financial crash, the chief perpetrators—be they foolish, negligent, or purposefully fraudulent—are wealthier than ever. And they continue to push for liquidationist measures that force lower living standards onto workers and citizens, rather than investment in a positive-sum future for all. In case of peak oil, today’s smart investment is to buy oil futures, rather than invest in a green energy startup. If effortless grabbing of a larger share of a shrinking pie is a bit more profitable than long-term investment to shift out the production possibilities frontier, Mr. Market endorses it. Each year, our brightest business school graduates vote with their feet: thousands opt for the financial alchemy behind a quick buck, while far fewer take part in the hard work of creating a sustainable future.

3) Expect More Stability: Several analysts have argued that the resulting flow of incomes away from the bottom 90% (whose income has gone up 1% in real terms since 1980) and toward the top 1% (which has enjoyed a nearly fourfold increase in income, with much higher gains for those in the top 0.1 and 0.01%) will generate social unrest in the US. I doubt this. First, as Dan Ariely has shown, not many people actually understand how unequal our society is. Second, our media is profoundly uninterested in discussing issues of equity or opportunity. Rather, it has bought, hook, line, and sinker, the Pete Peterson-sponsored message of endless austerity for the middle and lower classes. Third, US authorities are getting more creative in defusing protests, in actions that even a leading libertarian advocate of the First Amendment applauds for targeting “the bad people.”

Finally, and most importantly, technologies of surveillance have made dissent more costly. Sarah Jaffe has explained the consequences of the application of military-grade technology on the homefront:

As a burgeoning international protest movement takes shape, opposing austerity measures, decrying the wealth gap and rising inequality, and in some cases directly attacking the interests of oligarchs, we’re likely to see the surveillance state developed for tracking “terrorists” turned on citizen activists peacefully protesting the actions of their government. And as U.S. elections post-Citizens United will be more and more expensive, look for politicians of both parties to enforce these crackdowns. Despite growing anger at austerity in other countries, those policies have been embraced by both parties here in the States.

Citron & I have discussed several aspects of this phenomenon, including domestic intelligence collection about political action, and problematic collaborations between state and corporate “law enforcers.” Add into the mix the growing power of entities that secretly generate reputational data about individuals, and you have a variety of “chilling effects” on political activism that challenges inequality in the US. Meanwhile, the Bush-Obama war on whistleblowers has demonstrated the dangerous consequences of trying to publicize misuses of that technology. The end result is a mass “learned helplessness,” as the very idea of collective action becomes a bitter joke to a critical mass of the populace.

I only mean to predict increased stability within the US. Elsewhere, food scarcity (including that induced by our own wasteful energy use) is likely to wreak havoc. Complexity theorists in MIT’s Technology Review predict that, “If we don’t reverse the current trend in food prices, we’ve got until August 2013 before social unrest sweeps the planet.” Fortunately, the food stamps program in the US appears to have enough support from large agricultural interests to preserve it here.

History teaches that the great change agents in our society lost dozens of times before finally making a positive and lasting mark in law. As Harcourt notes, we could stay in the eye of this storm for a long time. Electoral politics, our traditional venue for gradual and constructive public investment, has been deeply corrupted by mass distraction and targeted influence. It will take years, and perhaps decades, of work to restore a party system that rewards politicians for addressing the real economic and environmental needs of their constituents. The best public intellectuals can do is follow the example of the minds who brought us to the present impasse: namely, to develop a “Mt. Pelerin Society” for those who actually believe there is such a thing as society.

Note: Given my title, I should acknowledge that Christopher Lasch identified a “Revolt of the Elites” 15 years ago.

 

September 5th, 2011

Change To Win: The End of the American Dream?

While I don’t agree with everything here, it’s good to see segments of the union movement directly taking on inequality and the class war:

September 4th, 2011

Joe Hill framed, new book reveals

The New York Times reports on a new book offers evidence that Joe Hill was innocent of the murder for which he was executed.

On November 19, 1915, the famed radical labor songwriter Joe Hill was executed by firing squad in the state of Utah for a murder for which there was absolutely no evidence he had committed. Every year since then, members of Hill’s union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies, write the governor of Utah on November 19 saying “We never forget!” In addition to be a lover of Hill’s songs, I have always felt connected with him as November 19 is my birthday. For decades I played Hill’s songs on my birthday.

Just before his execution, Hill penned his will:

My will is easy to decide
For there is nothing to divide
My kin don’t need to fuss and moan
“Moss does not cling to a rolling stone”
My body? Ah, If I could choose
I would to ashes it reduce
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow
Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again
This is my last and final will
Good luck to all of you, Joe Hill

Here are two songs about Joe Hill, working class martyr:

Luke Kelly

Phil Ochs (sorry for poor quality, but its a classic):

And Wobbly songwriter  Bruce “Utah” Phillips and Ani DiFrancosing Joe Hill’s most famous song, The Preacher and the Slave:

The Times article:

Examining a Labor Hero’s Death

Steven Greenhouse

At Woodstock, Joan Baez sang a famous folk ballad celebrating Joe Hill, the itinerant miner, songwriter and union activist who was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1915. “I never died, said he” is the song’s refrain.

Hill’s status as a labor icon and the debate about his conviction certainly never died. And now a new biography makes the strongest case yet that Hill was wrongfully convicted of murdering a local grocer, the charge that led to his execution at age 36.

The book’s author, William M. Adler, argues that Hill was a victim of authorities and a jury eager to deal a blow to his radical labor union, as well as his own desire to protect the identity of his sweetheart.

A Salt Lake City jury convicted Hill largely because of one piece of circumstantial evidence: he had suffered a gunshot wound to the chest on the same night — Jan. 10, 1914 — that the grocer and his son were killed. At the trial, prosecutors argued that he had been shot by the grocer’s son, and Hill refused to offer any alternative explanation.

Mr. Adler uncovered a long-forgotten letter from Hill’s sweetheart that said that he had been shot by a rival for her affections, undermining the prosecution’s key assertion. The book, “The Man Who Never Died,” also offers extensive evidence suggesting that an early suspect in the case, a violent career criminal, was the murderer.

Hill, who bounced around the West as a miner, longshoreman and union organizer, was the leading songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, a prominent union that was widely feared and deplored for its militant tactics. He penned dozens of songs that excoriated bosses and capitalism and wrote the well-known lyric “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”

His conviction was so controversial that President Woodrow Wilson twice wrote to Utah’s governor to urge him to spare Hill’s life, and unions as far away as Australia protested on his behalf.

After his death, Hill was immortalized in poetry and song, including the 1936 ballad embraced by Ms. Baez, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson and others: “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.”

In the letter found by Mr. Adler, Hill’s sweetheart, Hilda Erickson, wrote that Hill had told her he had been shot by her former fiancé, Otto Appelquist — someone she had broken off with a week earlier and who had asked her “if I liked Joe better than him.” In her letter, she added, “I heard Joe tease Otto once that he was going to take me away from him.”

Historians say the letter is groundbreaking because it is apparently the first time anyone has stepped forward to explain exactly how and why Hill was shot. Neither Hill nor Ms. Erickson testified at his trial, although Hill did tell the doctor who treated his wound that a rival suitor had shot him.

The prosecution maintained that Hill had been shot by the grocer’s son, even though the police never found any bullet cartridges or traces of blood, other than the victims’, at the murder scene. Prosecutors used Hill’s silence to persuade jurors that he must have murdered the grocer.

Ms. Erickson wrote the letter in 1949 to Aubrey Haan, a professor who was researching a book on Hill. The book was never published, and Mr. Adler found the letter in papers stored in the professor’s daughter’s attic.

“When I first read the letter, it was a ‘holy cow’ moment because all these years people wondered about what happened that night,” Mr. Adler said in an interview.

In his book, which Bloomsbury will publish on Tuesday, Mr. Adler also lays out what historians say is highly incriminating new information about the person police originally suspected of the two murders, Frank Z. Wilson.

The police arrested Mr. Wilson the night of the murders after they found him walking without an overcoat near the grocery. They also found a bloody handkerchief on him.

Mr. Adler said Mr. Wilson had lied repeatedly to the authorities after they arrested him, but they soon released him for reasons that remain unclear. Mr. Adler also discovered that Mr. Wilson had used at least 16 aliases during his many arrests and convictions, several for robbing trains. He was later involved in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929, with a getaway car registered under an alias he often used.

“His research is just incredible — it expands what we know in really dramatic ways,” said John R. Sillito, co-author of a new book on radicalism in Utah and a retired archivist at Weber State University in Ogden. “It builds a strong case that Wilson should have been the prime suspect.”

Hill declined to testify at his trial, standing on the principle that he should not have to prove his innocence, especially when he believed that the prosecution could not possibly prove he was guilty with the limited evidence it had.

Mr. Adler’s book suggests that Hill also did not testify partly because he wanted to safeguard Ms. Erickson’s privacy. She was in her early 20s at the time, the niece of the two Swedish brothers he was boarding with.

Rolf Hagglund, a grandnephew of Hill’s who lives in Stockholm, has read galleys of the new book and welcomed its findings.

“From the start, people knew he was set up,” Mr. Hagglund said in a telephone interview. “This book presents the strongest case so far that there was an alternative shooter and how Joe was shot and why he was shot.” (Hill immigrated to the United States from Sweden in 1902, changing his name from the original, Joel Hagglund.)

But John Arling Morrison, a grandson of the murdered grocer, put little stock in Mr. Adler’s findings. “Joe Hill was the one who murdered our grandfather and destroyed the economy of our family,” said Mr. Morrison.

Mr. Adler, a Denver resident, decided to write about Hill after reading Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles,” which argued that the Hill case was a miscarriage of justice.

“Initially I saw the book as a murder mystery, and I saw myself in the role of gumshoe,” Mr. Adler said. “I also wanted to explore how Hill went from being an anonymous worker to finding his voice as a songwriter to becoming a working-class hero to becoming, ultimately, a martyr.”

Like many historians, Gibbs M. Smith, author of a Hill biography, said the trial was unfair. “Under today’s laws of evidence, he never would have been convicted and executed,” Mr. Smith said. Historians have observed that the judge unjustifiably ruled against Hill on evidentiary questions and that the prosecution coached witnesses to say they saw Hill near the grocery that night.

Some students of the case say one reason for Hill’s silence may have been a belief that he could do more for labor’s cause as a martyr than alive. At the time, the I.W.W. had fewer than 20,000 members, but it was detested by business leaders because it pushed miners, lumberjacks and railway workers to use strikes, slowdowns and sabotage to pressure employers to improve pay and conditions.

Shortly before his execution, Hill wrote supporters an emotional note, saying, “Don’t waste time mourning, organize,” which later became the union catchphrase, “Don’t Mourn, Organize.”

August 28th, 2011

Verizon workers on their strike

1981 had PATCO. 2011 has Verizon. This strike may decide the fate of workers for years. It is vital that the workers win.

August 17th, 2011

Laws require job creation

Marjorie Cohn and Jeanne Mirer make the case that US law requires the government to create jobs to combat unemployment. But since when have laws constrained the powerful?

Lost in the Debt Ceiling Debate: The Legal Duty to Create Jobs

By Marjorie Cohn and Jeanne Mirer

The debate about the debt ceiling should have been a conversation about how to create jobs. It is time for progressives to remind the government that it has a legal duty to create jobs, and must act immediately – if not through Congress, then through the Federal Reserve.

With official unemployment reaching over 9%, the unofficial rate in double digits, and the unemployment rate for people of color more than double that of whites, it is nerve wracking to hear right wing political pundits say the government cannot create jobs. Do people really believe this canard? On “Real Time with Bill Maher” a few weeks ago, Chris Hayes of The Nation stated that the government should create and has in the past created jobs, but he was put down  by that  intellectual giant Ann Coulter who said, ”but they (WPA jobs) were only temporary jobs.” No one challenged her.

Most of the jobs created under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) – and there were millions of them – lasted for many years, or until those employed found other gainful employment. They provided a high enough income to allow the worker’s family to meet basic needs, and they created demand for goods in an economy that was suffering, like today’s economy, from lack of demand. The WPA program succeeded in sustaining and creating many more jobs in the private sector due to the demand for goods that more people with incomes generated.

The most galling thing about pundits stating with such certainty that the government cannot create jobs is the implication that the government has no business employing people. In actuality, however, the law requires the government, in particular the President and the Federal Reserve, to create jobs. This legal duty comes from three sources: (1) full employment legislation including the Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978, (2) the 1977 Federal Reserve Act, and (3) the global consensus based on customary international law that all people have a right to a job with favorable remuneration to provide an adequate standard of living.

1.         Full Employment Legislation

The first full employment law in the United States was passed in 1946. It required the country to make its goal one of full employment. It was motivated in part by the fear that after World War II, returning veterans would not find work, and this would provoke further economic dislocation. With the Keynesian consensus that government spending was necessary to stimulate the economy and the depression still fresh in the nation’s mind, this legislation contained a firm statement that full employment was the policy of the country. As originally written, the bill required the federal government do everything in its authority to achieve full employment, which was established as a right guaranteed to the American people. Pushback by conservative business interests, however, watered down the bill. While it created the Council of Economic Advisors to the President and the Joint Economic Committee as a Congressional standing committee to advise the government on economic policy, the guarantee of full employment was removed from the bill.

In the aftermath of the rise in unemployment which followed the “oil crisis” of 1975, Congress addressed the weaknesses of the 1946 act through the passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978. The purpose of this bill as described in its title is:

An Act to translate into practical reality the right of all Americans who are able, willing, and seeking to work to full opportunity for useful paid employment at fair rates of compensation; to assert the responsibility of the Federal Government to use all practicable programs and policies to promote full employment, production, and real income, balanced growth, adequate productivity growth, proper attention to national priorities.

The Act sets goals for the President. By 1983, unemployment rates should be not more than 3% for persons age 20 or over and not more than 4% for persons age 16 or over, and inflation rates should not be over 4%. By 1988, inflation rates should be 0%. The Act allows Congress to revise these goals over time.

If private enterprise appears not to be meeting these goals, the Act expressly calls for the government to create a “reservoir of public employment.” These jobs are required to be in the lower ranges of skill and pay to minimize competition with the private sector.

The Act directly prohibits discrimination on account of gender, religion, race, age or national origin in any program created under the Act.

Humphrey-Hawkins has not been repealed. Both the language and the spirit of this law require the government to bring unemployment down to 3% from over 9%. The time for action is now.

 

2.         Federal Reserve

 

The Federal Reserve has among its mandates to “promote maximum employment.” The origin of this mandate is the Full Employment Act of 1946, which committed the federal government to pursue the goals of “maximum employment, production and purchasing power.” This mandate was reinforced in the 1977 reforms which called on the Fed to conduct monetary policy so as to “promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices and moderate long term interest rates.” These goals are substantially equivalent to the long-standing goals contained in the 1946 Full Employment Act. The goals of the 1977 act were further affirmed in the Humphrey-Hawkins Act the following year.

3.         The global consensus based on customary international law that all people have a right to a job with favorable remuneration and an adequate standard of living

In the aftermath of World War II, and for the short time between the end of the war and the beginning of the Cold War, there was an international consensus that one of the causes of the Second World War was the failure of governments to address the major unemployment crisis in the late 20’s and early 30’s, and that massive worldwide unemployment led to the rise of Nazism/fascism. The United Nations Charter was created specifically to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” To do so the drafters stated that promoting social progress and better standards of life were the necessary conditions “under which justice and respect for obligations arising under treaties and respect for international law can be maintained.”

It is no accident that one of the first actions of the UN was to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (UDHR or the Declaration). The Declaration was ratified by all then members of the United Nations on December 10, 1948. It is an extremely important document because it recognized the connection between the respect for human dignity and rights, and conditions necessary to maintain peace and security. The Declaration is the first international document to recognize the indivisibility between civil and political rights (like those enshrined in the Bill of Rights) on the one hand, and economic, social and cultural rights on the other. The UDHR is the first document to acknowledge that both civil and political rights are necessary to create conditions under which human dignity is respected and through which a person’s full potential may be realized. Stated another way, without political and civil rights, there is no real ability for people to demand full realization of their economic rights. And without economic rights, peoples’ ability to exercise their civil rights and express their political will is replaced by the daily struggle for survival.

The Declaration, although not a treaty, first articulated the norms to which all countries should aspire. It stated that everyone has the right to an adequate standard of living. This includes the rights to: work for favorable remuneration, (including the right to form unions),  health, food, clothing, housing, medical care, necessary social services, and social insurances in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability or old age. There has been a conspiracy of silence surrounding these rights. In fact, most people have never heard of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Similarly, most Americans do not know that the UN drafted treaties which put flesh on the broad principles contained in the Declaration. One of the treaties enshrines Civil and Political Rights; the other guarantees Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. These treaties were released for ratification in 1966. The United States ratified the treaty on civil and political rights and has signed but not ratified the economic, social and cultural rights treaty.

The latter treaty requires the countries which have ratified it to take positive steps to “progressively realize” basic economic rights including the right to a job. Almost all countries of the world have either signed or ratified this treaty. When most countries become party to a treaty, they do so not because they think they are morally bound to follow it but because they know they are legally bound. Once an overwhelming number of countries agree to be legally bound, outliers cannot hide behind lack of ratification. The global consensus gives that particular norm the status of binding customary law, which requires even countries that have not ratified a treaty to comply with its mandate.

The conspiracy of silence

With the duty to create jobs required by U.S. legislation, monetary policy and customary law, why has the government allowed pundits to reframe the debate and state with certainty the government cannot do what it has a legal obligation to do?

We allow it because of the conspiracy of silence which has prevented most people from knowing that the full employment laws exist, that the Federal Reserve has a job-creating mandate, and that economic human rights law has become binding on the United States as customary international law.

Congressman John Conyers of Michigan knows about the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, and he has introduced legislation that would fund the job creation aspects of that Act in the “The Humphrey-Hawkins 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act,” HR 870. It would create specific funds for job training and creation paid for almost exclusively by taxes on financial transactions, with the more speculative transactions paying a higher tax.

If Congress refuses to enact this legislation, the President must demand that the Federal Reserve use all the tools relating to controlling the money supply at its disposal to create the funds called for by HR 870, and to start putting people back to work through direct funding of a reservoir of public jobs as Humphrey-Hawkins mandates.

There is nothing that would prevent the Federal Reserve from creating a fund for job training and a federal jobs program as HR 870 would require, and selling billions of treasury bonds for infrastructure improvement and jobs associated with it. The growth in jobs would stimulate the economy to the point that the interest on these bonds would be raised through increased revenue. There is no reason the Fed on its own could not add a surcharge on inter-bank loans to fund these jobs. These actions could be done without Congressional approval and would represent a major boost to employment and grow the economy. If the Federal Reserve is going to abide by its mandate to promote maximum employment, and comply with the Humphrey Hawkins Act, and the global consensus it must take these steps.

Failure of the Fed and the President to take these affirmative steps is not only illegal, it is also economically unwise. The stock market losses after the debt ceiling deal is in part based on taking almost 2 million more jobs out of the economy and will only further depress demand creating further contraction in the economy. This is not an outcome any of us can afford.

************

Jeanne Mirer, who practices labor and employment law in New York, is president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild.

 

August 13th, 2011

Decline of unions major factor in increasing inequality, new study argues

Daily Kos reports on a new study supporting the notion that declining union membership is a major factor in increasing inequality.

They extract the following points from the study in the American Sociological Review 76(4):

• We argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity, reducing the dispersion of nonunion wages in highly unionized regions and industries. Accounting for unions’ effect on union and nonunion wages suggests that the decline of organized labor explains a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality—an effect comparable to the growing stratification of wages by education. (513)
• [D]eunionization’s effects on inequality are only half as large as education’s effects for women, but union and education effects are equally large for men. (528)
• [We argue] that unions not only equalize union members’ wages, they also equalize the nonunion wage distribution by threatening union organization and buttressing norms for fair pay. We found strong evidence that unionization rates in detailed industries for geographic regions are positively associated with wage equality among nonunion workers. (532)
• The decline of U.S. labor and the associated increase in wage inequality signaled the deterioration of the labor market as a political institution. Workers became less connected to each other in their organizational lives and less connected in their economic fortunes. (533)

DK concludes:

In other words, when Republicans and their corporate masters go after unions, they’re not just coming for non-union workers next, they’re already doing it. And when they tell you that unions are just looking out for their own members at your expense, they’re saying something that contradicts the facts.

August 5th, 2011

Daily Kos Labor launches

The liberal blog Daily Kos has announced a separate blog: Daily Kos Labor. They explain why here.

On the plus side, they clearly acknowledge that “labor” includes all working people, not just the minority in labor unions:

Labor doesn’t just mean unions. One question that came up several times when Markos announced the launch of DK Labor was, “Will you cover workers who aren’t in unions?” In the United States these days, yes, “labor” is frequently shorthand for “organized labor.” But Dictionary.com defines labor as:

–noun
1. productive activity, especially for the sake of economic gain.
2. the body of persons engaged in such activity, especially those working for wages.
3. this body of persons considered as a class (distinguished from management  and capital).

We could argue that defining non-union workers out of the term labor is part of a longer-term attempt to drive a wedge between union and non-union workers, to diminish class consciousness. But whatever the reason we’ve gotten away from identifying ourselves-as-workers with the term labor, the vast majority of us work for a living, “labor” is an appropriate term to describe what we do, and if you have to work for a living, your interests are more aligned with those of other people who have to work for a living than they are with the interests of the wealthiest 2 percent.

And they acknowledge the class war being waged by the wealthy against the mass of ordinary Americans:

But most of all, those waging class war from above know the rest of us are in it together, even when we don’t. Here’s just a sample of stuff we’ve covered in the past month: 88 percent of the growth in real national income between June 2009 and the end of 2010 went to corporate profits, while just 1 percent went to wages. No less a bastion of capitalism than JP Morgan said that wage reductions have driven increases in corporate profit margins. Two-parent families are earning a tiny bit more than in past generations, but only by working a whole lot more hours. Meanwhile Republicans in the House of Representatives are gearing up for an attack on minimum wage and overtime protections. Child poverty is nearly 25 percent, but hey, the Heritage Foundation says some of those poor kids have cable television, therefore they’re not really poor and we should cut the safety net. Meanwhile, over the past 12 years tax rates for the 400 richest Americans were cut nearly in half—but that didn’t prevent a mighty howl at the notion of eliminating a tax break for corporate jets. Corporations are helping to write legislationthat shows up in states across the country, while House Republicans shut down the FAAin a drive to strip workers of union rights and Senate Republicans promise to blockRichard Cordray, President Obama’s strong nominee to head the CFPB. Meanwhile,unemployment is at 9.2 percent, and we face the end of extended unemployment benefits.

On the negative side, their initial statement doesn’t comment on the central role of many Democratic politicians in weakening labor, facilitating the increasing corporate control of our society, and generally furthering the class war, albeit, with slightly less harsh rhetoric.

Nonetheless, I know that this blog will be added to those I examine daily.

July 25th, 2011

Interview with an Iranian labor leader

Josh Eidelson, in Dissent, has a very interesting interview with an underground Iranian labor leader:

What’s Next for Iran? An Interview with a Leader of Iran’s Labor Movement

By Josh Eidelson

JUNE 12 will mark the two-year anniversary of the Iranian election that set off a firestorm of protests and the birth of Iran’s Green Movement, demanding political reform. After a fierce crackdown, the movement mostly disappeared from Western view—until this year, when protesters hit the streets once again, inspired by and in solidarity with the wave of “Arab Spring” actions and demonstrations by labor and anti-regime activists across several countries in the Middle East.

Homayoun Pourzad is the pseudonym of a leader in the Iranian labor movement. Pourzad is part of the editorial collective of the Iran Labor Report (ILR) and a member of the Central Council of the Network of Iranian Labor Associations (NILA). He became active in the labor movement seven years ago, when he began trying to organize a union at the printing company where he works.

Pourzad is visiting the United States on behalf of the NILA, working to build solidarity between American and Iranian workers. Pourzad and I met in New York City on Tuesday, May 31 to discuss the relationship between the Green Movement and the labor movement in Iran and the challenges they face. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.

Josh Eidelson: Last year the NILA presented a paper saying that we could be entering a fourth major phase of trade unionism in Iran. Have you seen that happening since then?

Homayoun Pourzad: No. Over the past year there has been a weakening of our movement. More people have been thrown in jail, jail terms have been extended for those who were already there, and the government’s really going out of its way to stamp out anything having to do with labor organizing. But the potential for a big flowering of the labor movement is right there. It could happen in a very short period of time.

JE: What would need to change for that to happen?

HP: The government should be forced either to leave or to change. That’s the only way out. With the present status [balance] of forces it’s out of the question. They want a monopoly of power over all political, economic, social, and religious forces.

JE: Have people you know experienced anti-union repression?

HP: Oh yeah, many people. Many, many activists are in jail, and some union leaders have been in jail for five years now in awfully abysmal situations. In fact, one of them is on a hunger strike in jail as we speak. If one guy tries to organize, they may let you get away with it once. If you do it twice, then you open yourself up to serious problems. If you do it a third time, you will be interrogated for months and they will throw you into solitary confinement. You won’t know when it’s daytime or when it’s nighttime. This is more or less routine in Iran at the moment.

JE: Have you experienced that kind of treatment yourself?

HP: No, I have not, because they don’t know me.

JE: How do you see the relationship between what’s gone on in Iran over the past year and what some are calling the “Arab Spring”?

HP: Before the Arab Spring, there was the spring in Iran, after the rigging of the elections.

I don’t know how much of an inspiration that was for the Arab Spring, in terms of the social networking or the slogans or the civil disobedience tactics, but the similarities are remarkable. But because the repression was so severe, the Iranian movement kind of went underground, and it wasn’t able to have any major victory. Then after the Arab Spring, on February 14 of this year, there was a day called for by the Green Movement leaders for people to come out in solidarity with the Arab Spring, and on that day there were between 200,000 and 400,000 people actually out in the streets in Iran. Every Tuesday since that time this has repeated, and then there was a Persian New Year [on March 20], and now we’re waiting to see what may or may not happen on the anniversary of the election, June 12.

JE: So what would constitute a major victory in Iran?

HP: To do away with the foundations of this really awful dictatorship in our country would be a victory. And the establishment of a regime that’s based on democratic principles, freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom of faith, whatever religious denomination you are. These are in our constitution, but they’ve never been practiced. For the labor movement, obviously, this is a matter of life and death. Without the legal safeguards for freedom of association, any government in power could disband labor unions and repress labor activists.

More specifically for the labor movement, we need to be able to establish organized unions in various sectors, because we have a huge industrial base and the workers are really ripe for this. Everybody wants it, and also there’s a huge economic crisis, so I think this could just mushroom in a very short period of time.

It’s unlikely that this regime is going to just hand over power to the people. And since we are all into peaceful means, for the democratic movement to succeed—which is a prerequisite for the labor movement to succeed—it will take support from not just the organized labor movement, but the working class. Organized strikes are what could make the difference. The last regime fell not because there were millions of fundamentalists in the streets but mainly because the oil workers went on strike. The regime was brought to its knees, and the major industrial powers forced the Shah to give up the country because it was becoming dangerous with the oil workers on strike. This is what we may see again. I think the Green Movement leaders have come to see that without working-class support they cannot fight this government.

JE: What level of skepticism do you think exists now in the Green Movement about Iran’s labor movement, or in the labor movement about the Green Movement?

HP: I would say there was a lot of initial skepticism by many in the labor movement about the Green Movement, a year and a half, two years ago, though not among our group. From the beginning, we were quite gung-ho. Some of our friends in the labor movement were skeptical because they felt that the Green Movement’s leadership comes from former regime elements, [Mir Hossein] Mousavi and [Mehdi] Karroubi. And anything that smacked of some form of fundamentalist influence was a no-no. But they’ve come to appreciate the necessity of this movement. One reason for that is that these two men and the cadre organizing on their behalf are really paying a heavy price for it. So nobody is saying anymore that this is just theatrical or it’s just an intra-regime struggle, because these guys are literally putting their lives on the line. That’s one factor. Another is the fact that our friends have realized that without political change there can’t be any change for us organizing in the labor movement. Things have really gotten out of hand with the repression in the last year.

Then on the side of the Green Movement, the democratic movement, both the followers and the leadership have realized that victory is not going to come that easily.  Everybody had overly optimistic views—they thought it would be a couple months, the whole thing was going to tumble and fall into their laps, and it didn’t happen. This is a very powerful, well-entrenched regime with a small but very highly motivated minority of the population that supports it. So the Green Movement is reaching out to the workers and the labor movement. Now on both sides there’s a realization that we need to come together. And that’s a very promising development in the past year. You can see a major shift on both sides.

JE: What kind of shift?

HP: For example the middle class, the young people, and the Green Movement supporters just talk much more about labor solidarity than before. For May Day they asked for joint action, even though before, most of these guys didn’t even realize there was a labor movement in this country. Some of this came from class bias, but some was just sheer ignorance. And as far as the labor movement activists who were skeptical at the beginning, just read what’s published on their websites. The shift is quite visible.

JE: What does the Green Movement have to learn from the labor movement in terms of tactics?

HP: We actually wrote articles telling the Green Movement, you have to come learn tactics from us. I’m sure labor has had some kind of an effect, because at the very beginning nearly two years ago, all the Green Movement knew was to come out to the streets and just chant slogans. And at nighttime they would go to the rooftops and chant, “God is great,” and that was it. But now we see more flexible attitudes. For example, people writing slogans on money, or sometimes people will just walk on the pavement together without saying anything. These tactics have been used in workplaces in years past.

JE: You mentioned people chanting “God is great.” How do you see the role of religion in terms of mobilizing people in the movement or suppressing the movement?

HP: For millions of people, including some workers, religion is the only language that they know in terms of culture and politics. Religious language and symbolism were used masterfully to mobilize people against the Shah. And the regime has been able to keep the mobilization going, even deepening it, with Ahmadinejad, with the same language and the same worldview. There is no reason why the democratic movement and even the labor movement shouldn’t use the same language. After all, many workers are devout religious people and most Iranians are believers, maybe over 80 percent. So this is not an opportunistic deployment of the other side’s tactics or language. It belongs as much to us as it belongs to them. So when in defiance of the regime people go on the rooftops and say, “God is great,” it really shakes the regime. Because that is exactly the language that they have used, and they have been able to dupe people with. And now it’s being hijacked. The same thing is going on in other Middle Eastern countries. And so I think religion could play a huge role in that sense.

And that’s not the only angle here, because the clergy in Iran are very, very active in whatever’s going on—they have been for 150 years. We need a split within the conservative clergy, and for a portion of these guys to come over to the democratic movement. Some already have. We need to isolate the hard-rightist, proto-fascist clerics, and we can’t do that ourselves—only other clerics can isolate them. These guys are extremely dangerous, because they use populist language, and they have a lot of supporters, and people are willing to give their lives for them. And so religion could be very important in the context of combating this mass mobilization and mass deception by the extreme-rightist clerics.

In fact, one reason that the Green Movement was not just bathed in blood two years ago was because it was consciously using religious language. It’s very hard for ordinary supporters of the regime, and many in the security forces, to kill fellow Muslims. When somebody says, “Allah is great,” and you kill him, it’s not that easy. You wonder if you’re going to be punished by God.

JE: What has the relationship historically been between the labor movement and the clerics in Iran?

HP: Not too cordial. The labor movement is a modern phenomenon. It comes with industrialization and the factories. The clerical establishment comes from medieval times. It hasn’t changed a lot in the past 1,000 years. So the two look at each other with an innate suspicion, especially because the secular-left Marxist groups always based themselves on the labor movement, and many clerics consider them anti-religious. But one great thing about this Green Movement is that it’s breaking down the old barriers and boundaries. So between the labor movement and the democratic movement, everybody’s now open to new avenues and new ideas. So I imagine many clerics on the Green Movement side are now very keenly interested in the labor movement, and vice versa.

JE: NILA has suggested that a strong labor movement could “lead and unify the country.” How so?

HP: Iran is only half Persian. The rest are ethnic and religious minorities. Everything’s just going down the drain for them, just like everywhere else in the country, but they also suffer doubly because they’re of a different ethnicity, and many of them are Sunnis and not Shias. So there’s a lot of religious repression against them. And especially in Kurdistan and Balochistan and perhaps even Khuzestan near Iraq, where Arab Iranians live, the illegality of the government and its human rights record is even worse than in the rest of the country. So there is a serious possibility of total disintegration of Iran if the central government weakens. If we have a powerful labor movement, which would have a Kurdish component, a Baluch component, and so on, this would help to keep the country from falling into different autonomous or independent republics like what happened in Yugoslavia or many different countries in the former Soviet Union. Had there been powerful unified labor federations in these countries, I think it would have made it harder for these radical nationalists to go their own way. So that’s one important factor.

The other factor is that we do stand for a multi-ethnic form of democracy, because it’s to our advantage. This is our hunch, that the labor movement is an important factor reinforcing national unity rather than lots of tension among ethnic groups.

JE: Was that your experience in organizing your own workplace?

HP: Yes. Sure, ethnic divisions are there, but less so than on the street, because people working together, day in and day out, have to learn to live together, and not to have constant tension. So that by itself forces less ethnic animosity.

JE: When Ahmadinejad was elected the first time, he was described in a lot of the press as a populist candidate. Was he perceived that way in Iran, and should he have been?

HP: Well, he is a populist, but populism in my opinion is not necessarily a positive trait. Because you can have populism of the right and populism of the left. Ahmadinejad is really a genius in what he does, mobilizing from below with his popular rhetoric, which is just demagoguery, but he’s very good at it. And he’s been very successful, around the world he’s been very successful. Many people who feel disadvantaged in the global order for whatever reason have developed some sort of a sympathy for Ahmadinejad. So that’s one of the dangers when you get a lot of people who are suffering from injustice: they could just as well go behind demagogic platforms as behind democratic platforms, in the absence of genuinely democratic forces.

JE: What do you want to see the U.S. government do or not do?

HP: I know Obama’s policy with the labor movement has been pretty bad here [in the United States], and with health care, from what I’m reading, it’s disappointing. But I think his policy with regard to Iran hasn’t been too bad, because unlike George W. Bush, he hasn’t had a very provocative policy toward Iran, and in fact he has been really restrained. The Iranian government is acting far more aggressively toward the United States than vice versa.

Obama is staying away from giving too much support—even moral support—to our movement, because if he does that, that’s very scary, because that makes it easier for the government to clamp down very heavily. So I think that’s a good decision. We don’t think it would help us at all if Obama gave lots of even verbal support. So the best support the U.S. government can give publicly is no support. Go after this regime with sanctions—we are all for it. And no military intervention of any kind, because this regime craves it. It would be a real shot in the arm for this regime if there is any sort of military threat to it, let alone bloodshed.

JE: So what do you think will happen next in Iran?

HP: It’s impossible to predict. It’s really crazy because we’ve got dozens of power centers vying for influence. It could go quite well or it could go frighteningly awfully, depending on how we get our act together, and what the foreign influences do or don’t do. So it’s really impossible to judge at this moment. But knowing this regime, we can assume that it’s not going to sit on its hands while the entire edifice is falling apart, which is what’s happening now. Everybody in Iran expects things to get worse before they get better. As long as it gets better, people are willing to take the suffering that comes with it.

For example, just about everyone in the democratic movement and in the organized labor movement groups are quite happy with the sanctions, and they wish they would hit the regime harder, just like South Africa. So that shows the extent of the gulf between the people and this regime. People are so incensed and so offended by this regime and its whole being that they’re willing to suffer in the short term—as long as they think that at the end of the tunnel is a ray of hope.

**************

Josh Eidelson is a freelance writer and a union organizer based in Philadelphia. He received his MA in political science from Yale. He blogs at josheidelson.com.

 

June 10th, 2011

As physicians become workers they start thinking like workers

e The New York Times has an interesting article on how physicians’ attitudes, interests, and politics are changing as the profession moves towards becoming more female and more likely to be (high paid) workers rather than self-employed business people. As they report, doctors are now less concerned about tort reform and insurance reimbursement and more concerned about healthcare access and public health. This change could presage an important change in healthcare politics in the country, as physicians come to identify with other workers, not other business people.

As Physicians’ Jobs Change, So Do Their Politics

By Gardiner Harris

AUGUSTA, Me. — With Republicans in complete control of Maine’s state government for the first time since 1962, State Senator Lois A. Snowe-Mello offered a bill in February to limit doctors’ liability that she was sure the powerful doctors’ lobby would cheer. Instead, it asked her to shelve the measure.

“It was like a slap in the face,” said Ms. Snowe-Mello, who describes herself as a conservative Republican. “The doctors in this state are increasingly going left.”

Doctors were once overwhelmingly male and usually owned their own practices. They generally favored lower taxes and regularly fought lawyers to restrict patient lawsuits. Ronald Reagan came to national political prominence in part by railing against “socialized medicine” on doctors’ behalf.

But doctors are changing. They are abandoning their own practices and taking salaried jobs in hospitals, particularly in the North, but increasingly in the South as well. Half of all younger doctors are women, and that share is likely to grow.

There are no national surveys that track doctors’ political leanings, but as more doctors move from business owner to shift worker, their historic alliance with the Republican Party is weakening from Maine as well as South Dakota, Arizona and Oregon, according to doctors’ advocates in those and other states.

That change could have a profound effect on the nation’s health care debate. Indeed, after opposing almost every major health overhaul proposal for nearly a century, the American Medical Association supported President Obama’s legislation last year because the new law would provide health insurance to the vast majority of the nation’s uninsured, improve competition and choice in insurance, and promote prevention and wellness, the group said.

Because so many doctors are no longer in business for themselves, many of the issues that were once priorities for doctors’ groups, like insurance reimbursement, have been displaced by public health and safety concerns, including mandatory seat belt use and chemicals in baby products.

Even the issue of liability, while still important to the A.M.A. and many of its state affiliates, is losing some of its unifying power because malpractice insurance is generally provided when doctors join hospital staffs.

“It was a comfortable fit 30 years ago representing physicians and being an active Republican,” said Gordon H. Smith, executive vice president of the Maine Medical Association. “The fit is considerably less comfortable today.”

Mr. Smith, 59, should know. The child of a prominent Republican family, he canvassed for Barry Goldwater in 1964, led the state’s Youth for Nixon and College Republicans chapters, served on the Republican National Committee and proudly called himself a Reagan Republican — one reason he got the job in 1979 representing the state’s doctors’ group.

But doctors in Maine have abandoned the ownership of practices en masse, and their politics and points of view have shifted dramatically. The Maine doctors’ group once opposed health insurance mandates because they increase costs to employers, but it now supports them, despite Republican opposition, because they help patients.

Three years ago, Mr. Smith found himself leading an effort to preserve a beverage tax — a position anathema to his old allies at the Maine State Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Party but supported by doctors because it paid for a health program. The doctors lost by a wide margin, and the tax was overturned.

Mr. Smith still goes to the State Capitol wearing gray suits, black wingtips and a gold name badge, but he increasingly finds himself among allies far more casually dressed, including the liberal Maine People’s Alliance and labor groups. And while he still greets old Republican friends — he is a lobbyist, after all — he spends much of his time strategizing with Democrats.

Representative Sharon Anglin Treat, a powerful Democrat who was first elected in 1990, said that she and Mr. Smith were once bitter foes. “But Gordon’s become like a consumer activist,” she said with a big smile. “I’ve seen him more times in the last few years than I can count.”

Dr. Nancy Cummings, a 51-year-old orthopedic surgeon in Farmington, is the kind of doctor who has changed Mr. Smith’s life. She trained at Harvard, but after her first son was born she began rethinking 18-hour workdays. “My husband used to drive my son to the hospital so that I could nurse him,” she said. “I decided that I really wanted to be a good surgeon, but also wanted to raise healthy, well-adjusted kids I would actually see.”

So she went to work for a hospital, sees health care as a universal right and believes profit-making businesses should have no role in either insuring people or providing their care. She said she was involved with the Maine Medical Association, for the most part, to increase patients’ access to care.

Dr. Lee Thibodeau, 59, a neurosurgeon from Portland, still calls himself a conservative but says he has changed, too. He used to pay nearly $85,000 a year for malpractice insurance and was among the most politically active doctors in the state on the issue of liability. Then, in 2006, he sold his practice, took a job with a local health care system, stopped paying the insurance premiums and ended his advocacy on the issue.

“It’s not my priority anymore,” Dr. Thibodeau said. “I think Gordon and I are now fighting for all of the same things, and that’s to optimize the patient experience.”

Many of Mr. Smith’s counterparts in other states told similar stories of change.

“When I came here, it was an old boys’ club of conservative Republicans,” said Joanne K. Bryson, the executive director of the Oregon Medical Association since 2004.

Now her group now lobbies for public health issues that it long ignored, like insurance coverage for people with disabilities.

Even in Texas, where three-quarters of doctors said last year that they opposed the new health law, doctors who did not have their own practices were twice as likely as those who owned a practice to support the overhaul, as were female doctors.

Dr. Cecil B. Wilson, the president of the A.M.A., said that changes in doctors’ practice-ownership status do not necessarily lead to changes in their politics. And some leaders of state medical associations predicted that the changes would be fleeting.

Dr. Kevin S. Flanigan, a former president of the Maine Medical Association, described himself as “very conservative” and said he was fighting to bring the group “back to where I think it belongs.” Dr. Flanigan was recently forced to close his own practice, and he now works for a company with hundreds of urgent-care centers. He said that in his experience, conservatives prefer owning their own businesses.

“People who are conservative by nature are not going to go into the profession,” he said, “because medicine is not about running your own shop anymore.”

May 30th, 2011

Workers music for Labor Day

Music in remembrance of all those workers who struggled for a better world, one guided by human need and desire rather than human greed. In the United States, at least, these songs, and that struggle, are needed today more than they have been needed for decades as we confront yet again the disaster that befalls the vast majority when greed is allowed to set the rules.

Utah Phillips explains the One Big Union concept and sings Dump the Bosses Off Your Back

Hazel Dickens sings The Rebel Girl, written by Joe Hill about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn:

Utah Phillips and Ani DiFranco sing Joe Hill’s Pie In The Sky

Pete Seeger sings Solidarity Forever
“In our hands is placed a power greater than their horded gold.”

And, finally, Billy Bragg asks the question that faces each of us, Which Side are You On?

September 5th, 2010