Never Change Your Ideals, Just Your Expectations

There was a short-lived television show in the 1985-86 CBS season called "Foley Square", set in the New York City District Attorney's office.  A quote from one of its episodes has stuck in my head for all these years, and has helped me get through some tough social and political times.

Hector Elizondo, playing the DA, says to his Assistant DA, played by Margaret Colin:

"Never change your ideals, just your expectations."

Sandy Pope For Teamsters President

While the news media focuses on the daily ups and downs of the Republican candidates vying to run for President of the United States in 2012, a different type of Presidential election kicked off this week.

Ballots were mailed out yesterday (October 6) to the 1.4 million members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) labor union, and will be counted beginning on November 14. General President James Hoffa, in office for the last 12 years, is running for reelection, but is being challenged by reformer and democracy advocate Sandy Pope, currently serving as President of Local 805 in New York City. A Pope victory would be a victory for bottom-up democratic decision-making over the top-down autocratic rule exemplified by Hoffa, and would also put a woman in charge of the Teamsters for the first time in their history. Both of these symbols could help improve the image of the Teamsters, and of unions in general, in the eyes of the rest of the country.

For many of us, our image of the Teamsters union was formed by their controversial President in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jimmy Hoffa, father of the current President. The McClellan Committee of the U.S. Senate held public hearings on allegations of corruption and dealings with organized crime by Hoffa and his predecessor, Dave Beck. John F. Kennedy, then a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, was a member of the committee, and his brother Robert F. Kennedy was its chief counsel. After JFK was elected President in 1960, RFK continued investigating Hoffa and the Teamsters as Attorney General, eventually convicting Hoffa of jury tampering and fraud. Hoffa was released from federal prison in 1971 when Republican President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence; he disappeared in 1975 and is presumed to have been murdered, although his body has never been found.

Around that same time, groups of rank-and-file Teamsters who felt they had no voice in contracts being negotiated for them by top officials formed a reform group called Teamsters for a Democratic Union. TDU organized members across the country around a set of basic reforms aimed at making the officers more accountable to the membership and less prone to corruption. They also worked hard to rid the union of its connections to organized crime. One of TDU's major points was that the President should be directly elected by the members, rather than by delegates to a convention. The fact that Sandy Pope is today campaigning for the votes of those members is a direct result of TDU having won that democratic reform. TDU is an enthusiastic supporter of Pope's candidacy, and her view of unions being democratically run by its members is consistent with TDU's mission.

Sandy's belief in democratic unionism isn't limited to just the Teamsters. She has a long history of reaching out to members of other unions to share her vision and experience. In 2008 I attended a conference in Dearborn, Michigan sponsored by Labor Notes magazine. Sandy led a workshop I attended on contract negotiations, covering elements of the process from how the negotiating committee should act in front of management at formal sessions to how to rally the membership to support your negotiations. After the workshop was over, she took names and addresses of people who were interested in more resources, and then mailed each of us a package of articles and sample contract language. As a member of my engineering union's negotiating team, I had the opportunity to put some of Sandy's lessons into practice the following year as we successfully negotiated several significant improvements in one of our collective bargaining agreements. This willingness on her part to share what she's learned with members of other unions demonstrates her commitment to helping workers everywhere negotiate for better conditions, and having someone with that mindset leading the Teamsters would certainly have a positive impact on the state of organized labor in this country.

We'll have to wait until mid-November to see if Sandy succeeds in her election bid. In the meantime, you can help by sending her a donation. Current Teamster members can contribute to the campaign's General Fund, while nonmembers can contribute to the Legal and Accounting Fund, as I have done. In addition, if you know or come into contact with any Teamsters (e.g., your local UPS driver), encourage them to cast their vote for Sandy. Just as citizens around the country are demonstrating in favor of more participatory democracy - the right to participate in decisions that affect them - so should our brothers and sisters in the Teamsters demonstrate their support for greater internal democracy.

Republican Strategy Explained

Have you noticed that the only consistent theme in Republican position statements appears to be opposition to whatever it is that President Obama proposes? Time and time again, whether the topic is healthcare, foreign policy, budget deficits, or unemployment, we see Republicans in Congress make their proposals, after which President Obama endorses some elements of those proposals (to the chagrin of many Democrats), only to see the Republicans reverse their positions and back away from their own proposals, for no apparent reason other than to distance themselves from the President.

This scene from the 1932 Marx Brothers movie "Horsefeathers" pretty well sums up this sophisticated Republican strategy, and may well have been its original inspiration:

Troy Davis, Rest In Peace

Troy Davis (October 9, 1968 - September 21, 2011)

The state of Georgia proceeded with the execution of Troy Davis tonight; official time of death was declared to be 11:08 p.m. Eastern time. Death was by lethal injection.

The execution had been scheduled for 7:00, but was postponed while the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed a request for a stay of execution. At 10:43, according to Richard Kim's live blogging at The Nation, the Supreme Court issued a one-line statement denying the request to stop the execution. It was also reported that there were no dissents - not a single one of our nine Supreme Court justices chose to intervene in this case.

Joining the Supreme Court in its unwillingness to stop the execution of a potentially innocent person was President Barack Obama; his Press Secretary Jay Carney said "it is not appropriate" for the President to "weigh in on specific cases like this one", according to ABC.

I watched online as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! reported live from outside the prison in Jackson, Georgia, interviewing NAACP President Benjamin Jealous as they both received news of the execution and of Davis' death.

Many people, in this country and around the world, tried to stop this madness. There are many compelling reasons to believe that Troy Davis was innocent of the crime for which he was just executed, which would mean not only that we just killed an innocent person but also that the real killer of off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail is still at large. Beyond the question of guilt or innocence, though, is the barbarity of this state-sponsored killing. Killing a murderer does not bring the murder victim back, and certainly does not demonstrate to the rest of us that killing people is wrong; it only increases the number of people being killed.

Sadly, there appear to be many people in this country who are immune to these arguments against the death penalty. Last year, when Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison ran unsuccessfully against Texas Governor Rick Perry in the Republican primary, her campaign considered making Perry's zeal for executions an issue to use against him. However, as reported by Salon, when her campaign asked a focus group of likely Republican primary voters about the possibility that Perry had ordered the execution of innocent people who were wrongfully convicted, they found that it didn't bother them at all. "It takes balls to execute an innocent man", said one registered Republican.

If that's our new national slogan, forgive me if I don't join people like that in chants of "USA!" tonight.

Ten Years of Living in a "Homeland"

"Videogames of the tower's fall

Homeland Security could kill us all"

- Green Day, "21st Century Breakdown"

For the last ten years, we've been told by government officials and the media that we're living in a "homeland". We're constantly reminded that the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon buildings on September 11, 2001 were attacks on our "homeland", and that our Homeland Security officials are working vigilantly to protect us from further attacks.

Before 2001, however, "homeland" was a term that was rarely, if ever, used to describe the US. We spoke of living in a country, nation, or republic, not a homeland. The US Constitution states that our goals are to "form a more perfect Union", "insure domestic Tranquility", and "provide for the common defense"; there's nothing in there about "securing the homeland". In fact, for many of us, the term "homeland" sounds uncomfortably similar to "fatherland" ("Vaterland" in German), a term that stirs up images of violent militaristic nationalism and fascism from the first and second World Wars.

So how did the United States of America become a Homeland?

One of the first official uses of the term, which received little public notice at the time, appeared in a series of reports by a bipartisan governmental commission. The US Commission on National Security/21st Century was created in 1998 under Democratic President Bill Clinton to perform a review of national security policies and strategies as we entered the 21st century. The commission was co-chaired by former Democratic Senator Gary Hart and former Republican Senator Warren Rudman, and included former Republican House Speaker (and 2012 Presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich, former CEO of Lockheed Martin (and its predecessor Martin Marietta) Norm Augustine, and Leslie Gelb, head of the Defense Department study group on the history of US involvement in Vietnam whose report became known as the "Pentagon Papers" after being leaked to newspapers by Daniel Ellsberg. The Hart-Rudman Commission's final report, released in February 2001 (seven months before the 9/11 attacks) was full of references to our "homeland"; the first major section was titled "Securing the National Homeland", there were warnings that attacks upon our homeland were becoming increasingly likely, and its recommendations called for several changes in governmental organization, including creation of an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Security as well as a National Homeland Security Agency.

The report seemed to languish under the just-inaugurated Republican administration of President George W. Bush, until the 9/11 attacks seemed to make the report more relevant. Within days, President Bush announced the creation of a new Office of Homeland Security, and use of this new term spread rapidly in the media. A little over a year later, in November 2002, Congress created a new Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, transferring existing organizations such as the Coast Guard, INS, Secret Service, TSA, and FEMA from other Executive Branch departments.

All of this begs the question: if the creation of a new Department of Homeland Security was necessary for the defense of the United States against attacks, then what is the purpose of the Department of Defense? Shouldn't an organization called "Department of Defense" be responsible for the defense of the homeland?

Unfortunately, that department's activities are probably better described by its former name, the War Department, as it was known from 1789 through 1947. After the end of World War II in 1945, the US public was weary of being at war, and so eliminating our Department of War and replacing it with a benign-sounding Department of Defense probably seemed like a popular move. The new name was also in line with the developing Cold War mindset, in which the Soviet Union was cast in the role of a belligerent warmonger while the United States was portrayed as only using its military for defense. In reality, the history of US military actions since World War II seem to have more to do with a projection of power, and protection of US business interests, beyond our borders than with an actual defense of those borders. Our "Defense" department invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965, Cambodia in 1970, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003, in addition to sending ground troops, bombers, or both to Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Haiti, and Libya, among other places.

Given the Defense Department's preoccupation with military adventurism abroad, perhaps there was a need for a new department to focus on defending the United States, but please, let's use a different name. "Homeland" seems to have been deliberately picked to stoke the public's feelings of nationalism, hatred of foreigners, and willingness to do almost anything in order to defend our "home". Use of the term "Homeland" has probably made it easier for the government to chip away at our civil liberties, increasing the scope of activities such as wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping (signals intelligence, or SIGINT), intrusive body searches and other invasions of privacy, and indefinite detainment without being charged. In short, the more we talk about securing a homeland, the more we move towards living in a national security state rather than a free and open democracy. As Benjamin Franklin wrote, "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

After ten years of talking about securing a "homeland", let's drop the hyperbolic language and get back to just providing "for the common defense", as it says in the Constitution. While we're at it, why not set up a new Department of Domestic Tranquility?

Capital Goes On Strike

For the first time in history, the creditworthiness of the United States Treasury was downgraded yesterday. Standard & Poor's dropped its AAA rating of US debt down a notch, to AA+.

During the last few weeks' arguments over negotiating a deal to increase the debt limit, both the Obama administration and members of Congress warned that a bill needed to be passed before hitting the debt ceiling on August 2 in order to avoid a credit downgrade. Well, they got a deal, it was signed into law on August 2, but our credit has been downgraded anyway.

Far from being an unprecedented or unexplainable move by a jittery rating agency, this instead seems to be part of a pattern of actions by finance capital to sabotage the US economy.

Corporations have large amounts of cash reserves - nearly $2 trillion, according to some estimates - but rather than using that cash to hire more employees, they're either using it to buy back their own stock (to pump up the price) or just sitting on it. Similarly, banks have nearly $1 trillion in cash, but they're reluctant to actually lend it to potential home buyers or startup businesses.

Just as workers use the withholding of their labor (a labor strike) to change unfavorable conditions, the financial industry is withholding its capital to change what they perceive as unfavorable conditions. We appear to be in the grip of a capital strike.

U.S. corporations have engaged in this sort of behavior before, sometimes with the cooperation of the U.S. government, to undermine social democratic governments in other countries. During the 1970s, Chile under President Salvador Allende and Jamaica under Prime Minister Michael Manley were both victims of capital strikes by U.S. companies as well as local businesses. Allende was overthrown in 1973 by a U.S.-backed military coup, while Manley's party was merely voted out of office in 1980, but in both cases capital began to flow freely once again under new conservative governments.

Not that President Barack Obama should be mistaken for a social democrat; Obama's policies pale in comparison to the wide-ranging reforms of Allende and Manley. Moreover, Obama did nothing to stop the overthrow of elected President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, where business interests welcomed the coup. Nevertheless, it appears that even the possibility of an occasional finger-wagging or public shaming from a Democratic President is more than our financial industry is willing to tolerate.

President Obama needs to stop worrying about being accused of "fomenting class warfare" if he targets wealthy individuals or corporations. The class war is already underway, instigated by the wealthy against the rest of us; yesterday's credit downgrade should be seen as a declaration of war. It's time for President Obama to be clear about what's happening, and stop trying to appease the markets, because that's clearly not working.

The United States can either return to the democratic rule of one person, one vote, or we can continue on the current path towards an oligarchy of one dollar, one vote.

Which side are you on?

"Battle In Seattle" Governor Approved As Ambassador To China

The nightly news has given us the impression that Congress has been unable to accomplish anything for weeks as they argue over whether or not to raise the debt ceiling before August 2. But yesterday, July 27, the Senate confirmed Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to be the next U.S. Ambassador to China.

Gary Locke, a Democrat, was Governor of Washington when Seattle hosted the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) conference, which famously drew tens of thousands of protesters opposed to the WTO's corporate agenda. As dramatized in the 2007 film Battle In Seattle, Governor Locke called out the National Guard to help the Seattle police clear protesters off the streets of Seattle so as not to tarnish his pro-business image.

It's bad enough that President Obama picked Locke to be his Secretary of Commerce, but now he's being sent to represent U.S. interests in China. Presumably his responsibilities will include keeping the shelves of our Wal-Mart stores stocked with products made by Chinese sweatshop labor, as well as convincing the Chinese government to continue funding our federal debt - assuming, of course, that Congress agrees to authorize more of that debt.

In honor of Locke's promotion, here's the classic 10cc song "Rubber Bullets" from 1973, set to video of protests at a G20 meeting. Hey, maybe Ambassador Locke can advise the Chinese government on crowd control methods!