While local union members and local leaders have to scramble to discourage their national leaderships from an early endorsement of Hillary Clinton without adequate consultation of their memberships, the Communication Workers of America {CWA) is trying a different method – MEMBER DEMOCRACY.

Could this become a model for the NEA, SEIU, AFSCME and other unions whose national leaderships would prefer to endorse Hillary now before the primaries even begin?

Four leaders of CWA locals have issued the following letter encouraging CWA members to vote for Bernie Sanders in an online presidential preference poll initiated by CWA national leadership.

]]> oldmole cwa votes https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/mass-teachers-say-noearlyendorsement-for-hillary/ Originally posted on <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://preaprez.wordpress.com/2015/09/29/mass-teachers-say-noearlyendorsement-for-hillary">Fred Klonsky</a>:<br />Massachusetts Teachers Association President Barbara Madeloni sent the following message to MTA members on Monday, Sept. 28, 2015: As some of you know, NEA President Lily Eskelsen García is pushing for the NEA to recommend Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primary. A motion to support this proposal will be made&#8230;<img alt="" border="0" src="https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?host=talkingunion.wordpress.com&#038;blog=2430503&#038;post=25539&#038;subd=talkingunion&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1"/> http://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/mass-teachers-say-noearlyendorsement-for-hillary/ Wed, 30 Sep 2015 15:35:13 +0000

Deirdre Fulton
September 23, 2015    Common Dreams

Last week the Los Angeles Times obtained a secret 44-page proposal drafted by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and other charter advocates, that according to one critic would “do away with democratically controlled, publicly accountable education in LA.” With the aid of a billionaires’ club of supporters, the plan is designed to charterize 50% of LA public schools.

More than 1,000 teachers, students, parents, and community members protested at the opening of the Broad museum in downtown Los Angeles Sunday. , Mayra Gomez/UTLA Facebook photo,

A California billionaire is enlisting other wealthy backers in a $490 million scheme to place half of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District into charter schools over the next eight years—a plan at least one critic says would “do away with democratically controlled, publicly accountable education in LA.”
The Los Angeles Times obtained a confidential 44-page proposal, “The Great Public Schools Now Initiative,” drafted by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and other charter advocates.
“Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to create the largest, highest-performing charter sector in the nation,” the executive summary reads. “Such an exemplar would serve as a model for all large cities to follow.”

The document outlines the following three objectives that would serve to overthrow the current public system:
to create 260 new high-quality charter schools;
to generate 130,000 high-quality charter seats;
to reach 50 percent charter market share.
The initiative seeks to accomplish these ambitious goals between by 2023. As the LA Times reports:
Organizers of the effort have declined to publicly release details of the plan. But the memo lays out a strategy for moving forward, including how to raise money, recruit and train teachers, provide outreach to parents and navigate the political battle that will probably ensue.
The document cites numerous foundations and individuals who could be tapped for funding. In addition to the Broad Foundation, the list includes the Gates, Bloomberg, Annenberg and Hewlett foundations. Among the billionaires cited as potential donors are Stewart and Lynda Resnick, major producers of mandarin oranges, pistachios and pomegranates; Irvine Co. head Donald Bren; entertainment mogul David Geffen; and Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk.
According to teacher and education reform watchdog Peter Greene, writing at his Curmudgucation blog on Tuesday, the plan reads as “forty-four pages of How To Completely Circumvent the Public School System For Fun and Profit.”
“This is not just about educational quality (or lack thereof), or just about how to turn education into a cash cow for a few high rollers—this is about a ham-handed effort to circumvent democracy in a major American city,” Greene continued. “There’s nothing in this plan about listening to the parents or community—only about what is going to be done to them by men with power and money.”
Among the plan’s sharpest critics is LA Unified school board president Steve Zimmer, who characterized it to LA School Report as a destructive strategy that would ignore the needs of thousands of children “living in isolation, segregation and extreme poverty.”
“This is not an all-kids plan or an all-kids strategy,” he told the online news site. “It’s very explicitly a some-kids strategy, a strategy that some kids will have a better education at a publicly-funded school that assumes that other kids will be injured by that opportunity. It’s not appropriate in terms of what the conversation should be in Los Angeles. The conversation should be better public education options and quality public schools for all kids, not some kids.”
He added: “To submit a business plan that focuses on market share is tantamount to commodifying our children.”
And in an interview with the LA Times, Zimmer called Broad’s plan “an outline for a hostile takeover.”
The proposal has reportedly split the school board, with battle lines emerging at a meeting on Tuesday. “The concept amazes and angers me,” said board member Scott Schmerelson. “Far from being in the best interest of children, it is an insult to teaching and administrative professionals, an attack on democratic, transparent and inclusive public school governance and negates accountability to taxpayers.”
Meanwhile, an estimated 1,000 teachers, students, parents, and community members came out for the much-anticipated Broad museum opening in downtown Los Angeles Sunday, protesting what they see as Broad’s negative impact on education in the city.
NBC Los Angeles spoke with United Teachers Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl, who “noted Broad’s political contributions to help defeat Proposition 30, a proposal to raise taxes to fund public schools, including arts program funding.”
“We’re concerned about the hypocrisy of building this great new arts museum in downtown, but working against schools having good arts programs across Los Angeles,” Caputo-Pearl said.
Education expert Diane Ravitch, writing Tuesday at her blog, put it more bluntly, saying Broad’s plan “would, of course, decimate the remaining public schools by draining them of students and resources.”
She continued:
And the city would run a dual school-system, both supported by public funds. But only the charters would be free to reject students they don’t want, and they would have ample resources from their friends in philanthropy and hedge funds.
Who elected Eli Broad, a man who has said publicly that he knows nothing about education, to redesign the public schools that belong to the people, not to him?
UTLA’s Caputo-Pearl has challenged Broad to a public debate over the future of public education in Los Angeles; Broad has yet to respond.
[Deirdre Fulton is a Common Dreams staff writer.]

Building more cars in Mexico.

It’s a flash point for about 40,000 UAW workers preparing to vote on a tentative agreement with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, knowing the new four-year pact includes pay increases, profit sharing and bonuses but also shifts car production to plants south of the border.

It raises the question: Is Mexico to be feared as a low-cost producer that steals jobs? Or is it the low-cost producer best-suited to assemble lower-profit vehicles, freeing up money to pay U.S. workers higher wages to build trucks and utility vehicles in the U.S.?

It’s an odd quirk of labor relations that unionized workers at Fiat Chrysler in the U.S. have a say in this aspect of the company’s global corporate strategy.

The UAW and Fiat Chrysler reached a  tentative agreement Tuesday night that puts more money in workers’ pockets and invests $5.3 billion to update plants. The investment is part of the automaker’s five-year product plan and involves shifting the geography of where many Chrysler, Dodge, Ram and Fiat vehicles are made.

In broad strokes, pickups and SUVs will be made in retooled plants in the U.S. Cars, including the compact Dodge Dart, the midsize Chrysler 200  and a small Jeep to replace the Compass and Patriot will move to a plant in Mexico.

Fiat Chrysler is not alone. Ford is shifting small-car production out of a Michigan plant, potentially to Mexico, making it a contract issue in talks with the Dearborn-based automaker as well. And the UAW wants to ensure it does not lose any GM jobs to Mexico over the length of its new contract.

The Detroit automakers are not unique. All automakers build vehicles in lower-wage countries; it serves as a counterbalance for a better U.S. wage while remaining globally competitive. It’s a way to have your cake and eat it too with the added benefit of building some cars closer to where they will actually be sold in foreign markets. The difference is companies without unions can make the decision to build in Mexico unilaterally.

Everyone is investing in Mexico

In 2014, automakers announced $18.25 billion in additional investments in North America. The breakdown: almost $10.5 billion for the U.S., $7 billion in new projects for Mexico, and a single $750-million project for Canada, according to the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor.

That’s on top of the 18 plants already in Mexico, and at least five more planned or under construction. Mexico has seen a 40% increase in auto jobs since 2008 to 675,000 last year while the U.S. saw only a 15% increase in the same period to more than 900,000.

Within North America, labor costs in northern U.S. states are close to $60 an hour; the South is closer to $40 an hour, and Mexico is less than $10. Canada is even higher, said Peter Hall, chief economist with Export Development Canada.

The average Mexican will work up to 450 hours more than an American every year, earning less than a fifth of the pay, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development.

Of the vehicles built in North America last year, Mexico produced about one in five, or double the rate from 2004. WardsAuto, which tracks production data, expects the rate to increase to one in four by 2020.

“Moving cars to Mexico makes sense,” said Haig Stoddard, industry analyst for WardsAuto. “It makes sense to build less-profitable vehicles in Mexico and more-profitable ones in the U.S.”

Workers at FCA will have to decide whether shifting work to Mexico is a threat or whether the new products to be built in American plants offer greater job security.

“With the trend to consumers buying crossovers, demand for the 200 and the Dart will be flat at best going forward,” Stoddard said of the cars moving to Mexican plants. U.S. workers will continue to make popular Ram pickups and the most popular Jeeps.

And production shift concerns may be overshadowed in workers’ minds by the monetary gains in the tentative agreement.

Details of UAW agreement with Fiat Chrysler

Upon ratification, every UAW worker receives a $3,000 signing bonus.

And there are wage increases for all. Those hired before 2007 will get 3% raises and lump sums equal to 4% of their annual pay. That will take the base wage of an assembler from $28.05 an hour to $29.76 by the third year.

Second-tier workers with six or more years of service will receive incremental raises that take them to a maximum of $25.35 an hour. The starting wage for new hires and entry-level employees with less than one year of service goes from $15.78 to $17 an hour with annual raises until they reach $22 an hour. They also receive a 6.4% contribution to their 401(k) account.

There is a new profit-sharing formula with extra payments of up to $4,000 for second-tier workers if the company achieves higher profit margins. And there are additional lump sum payments ranging from $4,000 to $13,000 based on the company achieving other performance targets.

A new health care co-op for active workers is designed to stem rising health care costs, allowing benefits to remain largely unchanged, UAW President Dennis Williams said during a news conference on Friday.

As ratification votes are planned for Fiat Chrysler workers this week, Williams will soon choose the next company with which to finalize a formal agreement.

Williams has said he expects more goodies from Ford and General Motors because they have healthier spreadsheets. And he will be looking for plant investments, job guarantees and commitments to keep production in the U.S.

Ford must defend Mexico decisions

At Ford, that means securing something new to build at the Michigan Assembly Plant. The automaker plans to stop making the Ford Focus compact car and the C-Max hybrid and C-Max Energi plug-in hybrid there in 2018.

One idea on the bargaining table is bringing the Ranger back to the U.S. market and producing the compact pickup, as well as the Everest SUV, which could be sold as a reincarnated Bronco, at the Michigan plant.

Ford has also announced plans to spend $2.5 billion on new engine and transmission plants in Chihuahua and Guanajuato, in central Mexico, creating 3,800 jobs.

General Motors resisting trend

So far, General Motors has been the most reluctant of the Detroit Three to move small-car production from the U.S. to Mexico.

Some assembly of the 2016 Chevrolet Cruze will be done at the GM plant in Coahuila, but most Cruzes sold in the U.S. will continue to be built at the Lordstown, Ohio, plant.

GM makes its smallest cars, the Chevrolet Sonic and Buick Verano subcompact sedans, in Lake Orion, largely because the UAW agreed in 2010 that up to 40% of Lake Orion assembly’s workforce can be second-tier workers who are paid less.

But GM is following the trend of building utility vehicles in the U.S., announcing plans last year to bring assembly of the next-generation Cadillac SRX (to be renamed the XT5) north to Spring Hill, Tenn., from Ramos Arizpe, Mexico.

If new vehicle sales in the U.S. continue to skew even more toward pickups, SUVs and larger crossover vehicles, GM could make more changes. The automaker has committed to $5.4 billion in investments across 40 U.S. manufacturing sites of which $3.5 billion, or 65%, is targeted for pickup and  large SUV plants in Flint, Ft. Wayne, Ind., and Arlington, Texas.

One of the questions negotiators at GM will have to answer is this: Will the wage increases hammered out by the UAW and Fiat Chrysler change GM’s cost structure so much that producing passenger cars in the U.S. becomes less feasible, especially as GM’s brands sell more sedans and coupes?

GM is investing $5 billion and adding 5,600 jobs from 2013-18 with manufacturing hubs in Toluca, Ramos Arizpe, Silao and San Luis Potosi in Mexico.

Contact Alisa Priddle: 313-222-5394 or apriddle@freepress.com [1]. Follow her on Twitter @AlisaPriddle. Brent Snavely contributed to this report.

Reposted from Portside

– See more at: http://portside.org/print/2015-09-22/shifting-work-mexico-now-uaw-vote#sthash.6pI5pL3V.dpuf

The Boston Teachers Union — which represents 10,000 current and retired teachers and other school professionals — voted this month to endorse divestment of the state pension fund from fossil fuels. Report in The Boston Globe at http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/09/18/teachers-union-calls-for-pension-fund-dump-fossilfuels/4pLiKuoo0oMWKTCHrIXJWN/story.html.

Boston Teachers Union president Richard Stutman explains his union’s endorsement: “If you don’t do something about global warming, our pensions won’t matter.”

The Massachusetts public employee pension fund, PRIM, holds about $62 billion. Legislation is currently pending in the Massachusetts legislature that would require PRIM to identify and divest its fossil fuel holdings completely within five years.

In addition to the Boston Teachers Union [an affiliate of the Massachusetts Teachers Association/AFT] the fossil fuels divestment bill has been endorsed by public employee unions SEIU 888, SEIU 509 and and the Massachusetts Nurses Association [National Nurses United].

There is a strong movement on Boston area campuses, including Harvard, Tufts and MIT, demanding that their universities divest their portfolios from fossil fuels.

MIT could be on the brink of a historic win for divestment. The school’s own advisory committee has backed divestment from carbon-intensive fossil fuels and from climate denying corporations as part of a multi-faceted climate action plan.

MIT Fossil Free is planning a week of climate events leading up to the next MIT board meeting on October 2. The week will culminate in a massive rally from 12-2 pm on October 2 at Kresge Oval.

Massachusetts unions and student groups are engaged in the fight for climate justice state that they are in the fight against the fossil fuel industry for the long haul.

Noting his issues “align with nurses from top to bottom,” National Nurses United, the nation’s largest organization of nurses, endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for President in August, 2015. (Photo: NNU/flickr/cc)

 
Let’s make history. The 2016 election offers a rare moment to crack a barrier that can truly transform our nation – the opportunity to shatter the Class Ceiling.

As an organization of nurses, 90 percent of them women, we’d love to break the glass ceiling as well. But with declining social mobility, our children for the first time in history facing less opportunity and a lower standard of living than their parents, and a rapidly shrinking promise of the American dream, smashing the Class Ceiling is our most pressing priority.

Sen. Bernie Sanders presents our best opportunity to bust through that bar. He offers the most comprehensive solutions – and understands it will take all of us, a “political revolution,” to stand up to the power of Wall Street, big corporations and the billionaires who have corrupted our political and economic system.

Here’s a few reasons why lifting the Class Ceiling must be our first target.

The wealth and income gap. As Sen. Sanders notes, since 1985, the share of wealth owned by the bottom 90 percent in the U.S. has plummeted from 36 percent to 23 percent, a loss that equates to over $10 trillion, nearly all of it going to a tiny sliver of the wealthiest. Over the last 30 years, the top one-tenth of one percent have seen its share of our nation’s wealth more than double from 10 percent to 22 percent. Meanwhile real median family income is almost $5,000 less than in 1999. Wages have flat lined for many workers; since 1973, worker productivity has climbed 72 percent but hourly compensation increased just 9 percent.

Poverty. Today, 46.7 million Americans live in poverty, according to the Census Bureau. The U.S. has far greater childhood poverty than any major industrialized country. Nearly 50 million Americans live in food insecurity households. Some 11 million tenants spend half their income on rent and as many as 39 percent of households have housing insecurity.

Health care. Even with gains made under the Affordable Care Act, 33 million Americans remain without health coverage. Last year, 35 million Americans could not get their prescriptions filled because they could not afford it. A Commonwealth Fund study documented that the U.S. ranks last among 11 developed countries on the quality of our health system, including shorter life spans than comparable countries.

Education. Students who live in wealthier communities had lower-student teacher ratios, more up to date computer and science equipment, better libraries, more current textbooks, and more guidance counselors. A result, affluent students have higher high school graduation rates, higher test scores, and more job opportunities when out of school. College student debt totals more than $1.2 trillion leaving many in debt for much of their life.

Racial disparities. African-Americans and Latinos have higher rates of unemployment, infant mortality, chronic illnesses, shorter lifespans, and are far more likely to be turned down for home loans than whites. African-Americans and Latinos, one-fourth of the population, comprise 58 percent of those incarcerated, and the loss of life of unarmed African-Americans in police shootings and while in custody has become a national scandal.

Women’s equality. The gender gap bridges the economic and social landscape. Women earn less than men, and female-headed households experience a poverty rate 6.9 percentage points higher than men. The U.S. is among the very few industrialized countries that fails to offer paid maternity leave, spends far less on child care, and provides less sick time or flexible work schedules which affect women in greater numbers.

Pollution and climate change. Due in part to where power plants and refineries are placed, environmental pollution has more exposure in low-income communities and among people of color. One study found people of color breathe air with 38 percent more nitrogen dioxide, one reason for a growing asthma epidemic. The climate crisis in the form of droughts, which cut crop yields and add to hunger, and extreme weather events also have a more deadly impact on low income communities in the U.S. and globally.

Reversing these disastrous trends is a tall order, but Sen. Sanders’ program is a good place to start.

His agenda includes boosting the minimum wage to $15 an hour, pay equity for women, a $1 trillion jobs program to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure that would create millions of jobs, sweeping criminal justice reform, expanding Medicare to cover everyone, free tuition at public colleges and universities, and robust action on climate change. Needed revenue would come by putting people to work, improving health outcomes, making the wealthy pay their fair share, and taxing Wall Street speculation.

For our children and our future, there’s no time to waste.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

RoseAnn DeMoro is executive director of the 185,000-member National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union and professional association of nurses, and a national vice president of the AFL-CIO. Follow Rose Ann DeMoro on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/NationalNurses

This is an expanded version of an article in the Insight section of the San Francisco Chronicle:  http://sfchron.cl/1QHt9Jt

Larry Itliong.  Photo:  Bob Fitch Photo Archive © Stanford University Libraries

Fifty years ago the great grape strike started in Delano, when Filipino pickers walked out of the fields on September 8, 1965.  Mexican workers joined them two weeks later.  The strike went on for five years, until all California table grape growers were forced to sign contracts in 1970.

The strike was a watershed struggle for civil and labor rights, supported by millions of people across the country.  It helped breathe new life into the labor movement, opening doors for immigrants and people of color.  Beyond the fields, Chicano and Asian American communities were inspired to demand rights, and many activists in those communities became organizers and leaders themselves.

California’s politics have changed profoundly in 50 years.  Delano’s mayor today is a Filipino.  That would have been unthinkable in 1965, when growers treated the town as a plantation.

But a mythology has hidden the true history of how and why the strike started, especially its connection to some of the most radical movements in the country’s labor history.  Writer Peter Matthiessen, for instance, claimed in his famous two-part 1969 profile of Cesar Chavez in The New Yorker: “Until Chavez appeared, union leaders had considered it impossible to organize seasonal farm labor, which is in large part illiterate and indigent…”

After 50 years that curtain of silence is lifting. Dawn Mabalon, a history professor at San Francisco State University, has documented the radical career of Larry Itliong, who headed the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), one of the two organizations that carried out the 1965 strike.  Itliong not only shared leadership with Cesar Chavez, but actually started the strike.  In tens of thousands of words Matthiessen only mentions Itliong twice, in passing.

The Delano strike was not spontaneous or unexpected.  It was a product of decades of worker organizing and earlier farm worker strikes.  Leaders of the grape strike, like Itliong, had helped organize previous unions, including ones expelled from the CIO in the anti-communist purge of 1949.

The timing of the 1965 strike was not accidental.  It took place the year after civil rights and labor activists forced Congress to repeal Public Law 78 and end the bracero contract labor program.  Farm worker leaders then acted because growers could no longer bring braceros into the U.S. to break strikes.

The 1965 strike did not, in fact, start in Delano.  In Coachella, where California’s grape harvest begins, Filipino workers went on strike that summer.  They won a 40¢/hour wage increase from grape growers, and forced authorities to drop charges against arrested strikers.

Larry Itliong organized the Coachella strike.  He and the Filipino workers of AWOC then started the walkout in Delano.  Itliong had a long history as an organizer, going back to the 1930s.  He was a protégé of Ernesto Mangaoang, a revered leader of the CIO union for Alaska fish cannery workers, Local 7 of the United Cannery, Agricultural and Packinghouse Workers of America.  Itliong himself ran for office in that union.

The Federal government accused Mangaoang of being a Communist during the McCarthyite hysteria, and tried to deport him to the Philippines.  After UCAPAWA (renamed the Food, Tobacco and Agricultural Workers) was destroyed in the 1949 purge of the CIO, Local 7 was taken in by Harry Bridges’ union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.  It became ILWU Local 37, and today is part of the ILWU’s Inland Boatman’s Union.

In leftwing unions Filipinos and other farm workers mounted huge agricultural strikes in the 1930s.  After World War Two, Local 7 struck Stockton’s asparagus fields in 1949.  Itliong was active in that strike, as was Chris Mensalvas, who later became Local 37 president.  The Federal government also tried to deport Mensalvas as a Communist.

In the early 1950s Filipino farm workers continued to organize with the National Farm Labor Union, headed by Ernesto Galarza (author of Factories in the Fields).  They struck the giant DiGiorgio Corporation, then California’s largest grower.  In 1959 the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) was set up by the American Federation of Labor, which had merged with the CIO to form the AFL-CIO in 1953.  Despite the federation’s conservative politics, AWOC hired Itliong as an organizer because of his long history among Filipino workers.  AWOC used “flying squads” of pickets to mount quick strikes, and struck the Imperial Valley lettuce harvest in 1961-2, demanding $1.25 per hour.

Many Filipino workers in Coachella and Delano were members of ILWU Local 37 in 1965, when the grape strike began.  Every year they would travel from the San Joaquin Valley (where Delano is located) to the Alaska fish canneries.  Through the end of their lives, they were often active members of both Local 37 and the United Farm Workers.

Cold war fears of communism were strong in the 1960s – one reason why the contributions of Itliong and the Filipinos were obscured.  The strike in Delano owes much to Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla and other Chicano and Mexican leaders who came out of the CSO.  But the left wing leadership of Itliong, Philip Veracruz and other rank-and-file Filipino workers was equally important.

The alliance between Itliong’s AWOC and the Cesar Chavez-led National Farm Workers Association was a popular front alliance of workers who had, in many cases, different politics.  AWOC’s members had their roots in the red UCAPAWA.  NFWA’s roots were in the Community Service Organization (CSO), which was sometimes hostile to Communists.  Yet both organizations were able to find common ground and support each other during the strike.  They eventually merged to form the UFW.

Both the Filipinos and Chavez, in the CSO, opposed the bracero program.  To organize farm labor they sought immigration policies favoring workers, which would keep growers from using braceros to break strikes.  The Delano strike was a movement made up of immigrant workers, who wanted to keep growers and the government from using immigration policy against them.  Their opposition to contract labor programs is as important for immigration reform today as it was in 1965.

Chavez willingly acknowledged that the NFWA hadn’t intended to strike for another two or three years.  The decision to act was made by Filipinos – left wing workers.  It was a product of their history of militant fights against growers.

The political philosophy of the Filipinos saw the strike as their fundamental weapon to win better conditions.  The 1965 grape strike was started by workers on the ground, not by leaders or strategists far away.  Although some couldn’t read or write, as Matthiessen charged, they were politically sophisticated.  They had a good analysis and understanding of their situation as workers, and chose their action carefully.

In Delano Filipinos used popular front ideas they’d used before – that workers and organizations with different politics, or of different nationalities, could work together to win fundamental social change.  Growers had pitted Mexicans and Filipinos against each other for decades.  When Filipino workers acted first by going on strike, and then asked the Mexican workers, a much larger part of the workforce, to join them, they believed that workers’ common interest could overcome those divisions.

Strikers in Delano developed close friendships and personal connections with each other.  Many of the Filipinos died as single men, because anti-miscegenation laws prohibited them from marrying non-Filipinas, and the immigration of women from the Philippines was limited until the late 1960s.  Cesar Chavez’ son Paul recalls the way the older Filipino men looked at him and other children of Mexican strikers as their own family.  In the wake of the grape strike, the UFW and scores of young activists from California cities built a retirement home for them in Delano, Paolo Agbayani Retirement Village, to honor their contribution.

Philip Veracruz, a Filipino grape picker who became a vice-president of the UFW and later left over disagreements with Chavez, wrote during the strike’s fourth year:  “The Filipino decision of the great Delano Grape Strike delivered the initial spark to explode the most brilliant incendiary bomb for social and political changes in U.S. rural life.”  The contribution of these Filipino workers should be honored – not just because they helped make history, but because their political and trade union ideas are as relevant to workers today as they were in 1965.

RECENT CONTRIBUTIONS REMEMBERED:

The first school in the nation named after Filipino American labor leaders is in Union City, the Itliong/Vera Cruz Middle School. The New Haven Unified School District Board approved the renaming of Alvarado Middle School, effective January 2016.

Filmmaker Marissa Aroy has released a video on Filipino farmworkers, “The Delano Manongs.”

English: at a Hillary for Obama rally in 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With: Randi Weingarten (AFT) and Larry Cohen (Labor for Bernie)
with Juan Gonzalez, Basil Smikle and Ed Ott
The livestream starts tomorrow at 8.30 am (Eastern Time), you can watch the roundtable here:
http://murphyinstituteblog.org/2015/09/11/livestream-unions-workers-and-the-democratic-party-918

American Labor is facing the most exciting political contest since 2008’s rivalry between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Both candidates have a long record support from unions.

Partisans for each candidate and observers interested in the process are eager to see the first debate of the season – even if the candidates aren’t present, and the debate format is a friendly roundtable.

Please tune in on Friday, 9/18, at 8.30 am (Eastern) for the livestream of Unions, Workers, and the Democratic Party.

Join the debate on Twitter and Facebook. Please consider using hashtag #MurphyTalks and handle (@murphyinstitute) if appropriate. If you support Bernie Sanders, be sure to also use hashtag #laborforbernie and #feelthebern.  Thank you!

U.S. Supreme Court building. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Lessons from Wisconsin

by Donald Cohen

Next spring, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide a case that could threaten the economy and American democracy. Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association asks the justices to consider overturning a 1977 Supreme Court unanimous ruling (Abood v. Detroit Board of Education) that protected the right of teachers, nurses, librarians, firefighters and other public workers to form unions. The Abood case emphasized that these workers act as the middle class’ backbone by providing quality public services and ensuring healthy communities.
In Abood, the Court ruled that every public worker who benefits from collective bargaining could be required to pay their fair share for those efforts. It’s a basic democratic principle.
For a preview of what will happen if the Court sides with the plaintiffs in Friedrichs, we should look at Wisconsin. In 2011, Governor Scott Walker stripped collective bargaining rights for most public workers. The result? Vital public functions and assets were privatized, public services were undermined and the state economy suffered:
While an estimated $1.1 billion will be spent by 2017 on the state’s private school voucher program since Walker first expanded it in 2011, Wisconsin classrooms have fewer and less-experienced teachers than before the program, resulting in crowded classrooms and less individualized attention for students.
The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC), a public-private agency charged with creating jobs, has repeatedly broken the law by spending federal funds without authorization and losing track of millions of taxpayer dollars.
Wisconsin job growth has ranked at or near the bottom of the Midwest, and personal income growth has been last in the Midwest and 44th nationally. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, American Community Survey, real median household income nationally shrank by 0.09 percent between 2011 and 2013. In Wisconsin, during that same period, it fell by 1.39 percent, a much steeper rate of decline.
Despite these glaring concerns, more privatization may be on the horizon. In 2010, Wisconsin had 88 job openings for correctional officers. After Walker stripped collective bargaining from officers at state prisons in 2011, the number of job openings for that position has ballooned from 88 to more than 400. Given Walker’s history of advocating for private prisons, there is serious cause for concern.
What happened in Wisconsin paints a bleak picture of what happens when the people that serve our communities every day lose their voice. Let’s hope the Supreme Court paints a different picture—one with a strong middle class, a vibrant democracy and government that serves the common good.

Tags: FRIEDRICHS V. CTA U.S. SUPREME COURT

Donald Cohen
Donald Cohen is the founder and executive director of In the Public Interest, a national resource and policy center focusing on privatization and responsible contracting.

Shared from Capital and Main.

A common theme at Friday’s DNC meeting was the clear intention by the Democratic Party elite–principally, the chair of the party, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, to prevent much debate during the primaries. This is a pretty obvious tactic to prevent the “presumed front-runner” from having to answer many questions along the way and prevent the voters from having maximum ability to decide between the candidates.

Martin O’Malley made that point very well. So, did Bernie. Now, a small idea: they should stand together (include Lincoln Chafee, why not?) in front of the Democratic National Committee HQ, with throngs of their supporters, and demand that the party elite stop shutting down the process of discussion.

O’Malley:

In the fiercest speech of his candidacy so far, Mr. O’Malley condemned his party’s leadership for curtailing the number of primary debates to six and scheduling them at times when few people would see them. (He went even further in a news conference afterward when asked if the party had “rigged” the debate calendar to benefit Mrs. Clinton and lower the visibility of her rivals. “Yes, I think so,” he replied. “Don’t you?”)Mr. O’Malley’s repeated demand for more debates drew standing ovations from the audience and scowls from the party chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, seated a few feet away.

And Bernie:

“In my view, Democrats will not retain the White House, will not regain the Senate or the U.S. House, will not be successful in dozens of governor races across the country, unless we generate excitement and momentum and produce a huge voter turnout,” he said. “With all due respect — and I do not mean to insult anyone here — that turnout, that enthusiasm, will not happen with politics as usual.”[emphasis added]

“Politics as usual” is refusing to have an open, broad process. No one doubts that the sole reason more debates are not scheduled is because the chair of the party is doing the bidding of the “presumed front-runner”. Everyone knows it–the elites know it, the voters know it.

This has been a pretty typical standard operating procedure of the presumed front-runner…and I understand the problem, as I said to a reporter at the Netroots Nation party in 2014 (though I thought we were just having a beer not thinking Dave Wiegel would actually quote me): ““Whenever [Hillary] opens her mouth, there’s enough people who say: ‘I just don’t believe her.’ ”

That’s the presumed “front-runner’s” problem.

Bernie has no fear of debates–and I suspect he would be perfectly fine with many more debates if he was the “presumed front-runner”. He is not in the position of having to be careful about what he says, trying to remember what his new positions are and what the best poll-tested lines are. His views are etched deep in his soul because he’s held them for decades.

He’s not worried about gaffes or being exposed to voters.

The presumed front-runner is hiding. Every moment is a moment where the campaign risks a “I’m dead broke” statement. It is a sign of weakness, not strength, to run from debates.

And it doesn’t do much to energize voters, as Bernie pointed out.

Bernie and O’Malley should join forces on this issue.

Stand together at the DNC and say: what is the  party afraid of?

I’d go to a rally like this.

Would you?

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One of the great tactics used by companies to rip off workers–and there are many–is to pretend like the Big Dog at the top (say, McDonald’s) doesn’t actually directly employ workers who labor down in the distributed workplaces that clearly have a relationship–through franchises, in particular, in the fast food industry–with the Big Dog.

It’s one of those scams. And the National Labor Relations Board is using logic to correct this scam.

Today:

The National Labor Relations Board on Thursday handed down one of the biggest decisions of the Obama presidency, ruling that companies can be held equally responsible for labor violations committed by their contractors.
At issue is whether waste management firm Browning-Ferris is responsible for the treatment of its contractor’s employees. The Houston-based company hired Leadpoint Business Services to staff a recycling facility in California.The labor board determined Browning-Ferris should be considered a joint employer with the Phoenix-based staffing agency. As a result, the company could be pulled into collective bargaining negotiations with those employees and held liable for any labor violations committed against them.

This is a sharp departure from previous labor laws that hold companies responsible only for employees who are under their direct control by setting their hours, wages, or job responsibilities. Companies could avoid those requirements by hiring staffing agencies and subcontractors that deal more closely with the workers.

But the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) charted a new course Thursday. A regional director initially ruled in favor of Browning-Ferris, but the Teamsters union, which represents the workers, appealed the case to the national board.

It’s the latest in a string of major victories for labor groups under President Obama’s administration, which has already issued several sweeping executive actions on worker protections and wages.

The Democratic-controlled NLRB — which has a recent history of ruling against businesses — has also taken steps to make it easier for employees to unionize.

The NYT:

“The decision today could be one of the more significant by the N.L.R.B. in the last 35 years,” said Marshall Babson, a lawyer who helped write the brief for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the case and who was a Democratic appointee to the labor board in Ronald Reagan’s presidency. “ Depending on how the board applies its new ‘indirect test,’ it will likely ensnare an ever-widening circle of employers and bargaining relationships.”Beyond Browning-Ferris, the ruling may have a significant immediate effect on a case the labor board is litigating against McDonald’s and several of its franchisees. In that case, the N.L.R.B.’s general counsel, who essentially acts as a prosecutor, asserts that the company is a joint employer along with a number of franchisees, making it potentially liable for numerous reported violations of workers’ rights, like retaliating against those who have tried to organize unions.

Thursday’s N.L.R.B. ruling, by enshrining a broader joint-employer definition into doctrine, makes it more likely to apply in the McDonald’s case as well, though experts point out that joint employer designations are typically very dependent on the circumstances of each case.

At some point it’s worth discussing whether, and how, unions can take advantage of this ruling.

But, for today: I have a lot of sympathy for the emotional view that there is no difference between the two main political parties. And, in many respects, that is true.

However, in day-to-day things like this, it does matter–because this ruling could mean a lot more people get the protection of a union at work, which means they get probably a slightly better standard of living and a little less stress in life.

That matters.

And that doesn’t happen without someone in the White House who will appoint a chairperson of the National Labor Relations Board who believes unions are good things and workers deserve a fair shake.

That won’t happen under a Republican.

Yes, it’s complicated. I think, though, that it’s possible to walk in a world with two ideas that might seem contradictory–we want to upend the political system AND we want to make sure that, in the short term, until the political system is changed, people have a better life.

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A true testament of whether a person running for office is really about what he or she says or is just blowing smoke to get elected comes when dollar bills get waved underneath their noses. At that moment, most candidates crumble–and I don’t mean they do something against the law.

It is that they twist themselves into the most amazing rhetorical binds, making the most laughable justifications for taking money from questionable sources–“questionable” meaning do they not think that those people donating want something in return? Whether that’s people on Wall Street, corporate raiders/bankers/oligarchs donating to private foundations or similar sludge?

Not Bernie. Bernie is campaigning resolutely against the billionaires and the corruption of money in politics. He could have said, “you know what, I’ll set up a SuperPAC because I’m a good guy, I’m ethical and when I get into office I’ll change the system”–and everyone in the political system would have given him a pass, and said, “right, you can’t unilaterally disarm”.

Not Bernie:

Donna Mae Litowitz, a Miami Beach retiree, likes Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont so much that three months ago she sent his presidential campaign $10,000. His campaign sent back all but $2,700 because it was more than he was allowed to take under federal election law, but she wishes he had kept it all.“I like what Sanders stands for, and he says what needs to be said,” said Ms. Litowitz, who gave money in 2008 to Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. “And I don’t like Hillary Clinton.”

In an election dominated by million-dollar donations to “super PACs,” Ms. Litowitz qualifies in Mr. Sanders’s insurgent campaign as a big donor. Unlike almost all of the other major Democratic and Republican candidates this year, Mr. Sanders has refused to accept support from super PACs, relying instead on supporters like Ms. Litowitz as well as tens of thousands of small donors giving as little as $5 or $10.

The average donation, according to campaign officials, is $31.30.[emphasis added]

And:

While direct comparisons are difficult at this early stage in the 2016 race, Mr. Sanders’s small-dollar support appears significantly higher than Mr. Obama’s in 2008, and more than any other candidate this cycle.

Mr. Sanders has raised more money in gifts of $200 or less than any candidate, Democrat or Republican, an analysis of campaign finance reports shows. A huge chunk of his money — $11.4 million, or about 75 percent of all his contributions — has come from small donations routed through ActBlue, an online site that facilitates contributions to Democrats, records show.The influx of support has helped Mr. Sanders build a formidable war chest, with his campaign raising $15.2 million as of the most recent filings with the Federal Election Commission in July. Campaign officials say he has raised millions more since then and will far surpass that total this quarter. That still puts him far behind Mrs. Clinton’s fund-raising juggernaut, but Mr. Sanders said in an interview that he was unbowed.

“We will be greatly outspent, yes, but we will raise enough money to wage a winning campaign,” he said.

Democratic strategists are beginning to take notice.

“His money is very impressive,” said Bill Burton, a former aide to Mr. Obama who helped found Priorities USA, a super PAC that is now supporting Mrs. Clinton’s bid for the Democratic nomination and has received donations of at least $1 million each from a number of big Democratic donors like Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, George Soros and Haim Saban.[emphasis added]

The point is: the people believe the system is entirely corrupt and that only people with money matter and, as important, no matter what a politician says in a campaign, once she or he is elected, it doesn’t matter–the big donors are all that matter.

Bernie is basically saying no, that isn’t me.

And, then, there’s Larry Lessig.

I’ve known Larry for about 15 years. I knew him much better and was in regular conversation when we had two different cases on copyright issues headed for the Supreme Court. His case, Eldred v Ashcroft, challenged the constitutionality of the copyright extension act. As a person who believes in authors’ rights, I supported Lessig’s view for many reasons (I don’t want to digress on this topic too much–but briefly, I think (a) the public’s right to information and knowledge deserves equal weight over copyright protections and (b) most copyright laws benefit big corporations, not individual authors, and this is an issue where authors have to organize unions and exercise collective bargaining power). People criticized Larry for taking this particular case on. But, I respected his moxie and passion.

Then, Larry, who could have rode his prominence in the copyright world for the rest of his career and sat safely in academia and be paid quite well, gave it all up to dive into the question of the corruption of politics by big money; he did that partly because of how he saw all copyright legislation being warped by big money. Again, I respected that decision as well.

He, then, raised $10 million in the 2014 cycle for his so-called MayDay PAC, with an aim to use big money to elect people who would end the system. It failed, some argued, if one looks at the results. Again, I don’t want to spend too much time on this effort–personally, I shrugged and wondered, at the time, whether it would be effective but I don’t begrudge people who want to take chances and try to be against-the-grain innovative.

But, Larry has now gone too far, in my opinion. When I learned recently that he was considering running for president because he wasn’t pleased enough by Bernie Sanders’ view on ending the corruption of money in politics–as if making the repeal of Citizens United and forgoing any use of SuperPACs wasn’t enough, among other things Bernie advocates–I wrote to him privately and on his website.

Basically, I said, no, Larry, this is absurd. Every dollar you raise and every minute you occupy attention is a dollar and moment you take away from Bernie’s efforts–and if you can’t see that this is likely the one option in the near future to clean up the corrupt system (and, as I’ve said in every instance, Bernie faces a steep hill even without such distractions), then, no, you’ve gone too far.

I said this mostly privately and in a low key way. But, enough is enough:

“Donald Trump is the biggest gift to the movement for reform since the Supreme Court gave us Citizens United,” said Lessig in a recent interview, referring to the court decision that riled up liberals by granting essentially unlimited campaign contributions from corporate entities. “What he’s saying is absolutely correct, the absolute truth. He has pulled back the curtain.”

And:

So enamored are some reformers with Trump’s truth-telling invective that Lessig, who announced this month that he is considering a run for president to highlight the issue, told POLITICO Magazine he would not rule out a third party run with Trump should the opportunity arise. (A spokesperson for Trump could not be reached for comment.)“I’ll make a promise,” Lessig later added. “If Trump said he was going to do one thing and fix this corrupted system, then go back to his life as an entertainment figure, I absolutely would link up with Donald Trump.”[emphasis added]

This is blindness of the worst kind (and, knowing Larry, he’ll think, “no, you don’t see the truth”). Donald Trump is a liar, a psychopathic, abusive, dangerous man. He is stirring up the most hateful elements in our society, targeting millions of people, he has an entirely hateful view of women and their roles. Essentially, Trump is only respectful of one kind of person: the kind that bows down to Trump and accepts his rule.

To be sure, money in politics is corruption.

But, corrupting the soul, corrupting and poisoning the entire social fabric is the end result of Trump’s “message”. What kind of country will be left, purified of billionaire money and influence-peddling (if, you, Larry, get your dream candidate elected and he, in fact, banishes money from Washington…good luck with seeing that promise through) if millions of people are under attack and, as an aside, in the world, we are treated as a laughingstock (as if that isn’t already the case) when we elect a guy who will treat the Lincoln Bedroom like the Playboy mansion–not to mention someone who would on any given Monday be insulted by some world leader and, for the heck of it, on Tuesday send in the Marines to teach a lesson?

Larry, you’ve gone over the deep end. Pull yourself back before it’s too late.

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There’s been a lot of Joe Biden news–will he run?–and one of the things that has been clear to me is that a significant part of the conversation is being driven by elite, traditional media and the insiders of the Democratic Party who (a) are petrified–in the latter’s case–that the “presumed front-runner”, if she is the nominee, will lose the White House (and potentially open the door to 1-3 more right-wing Supreme Court nominees and (b) are petrified–in both cases–that Bernie’s movement is going to leave them outside the money trough they all suck off.

A question: would Biden drain Bernie’s support? Nah.

Here’s a decent take on that:

Unlike Warren or Bernie Sanders, the Vermont progressive who’s assumed the support of many Warren backers, Biden is a pillar of the Democratic establishment, vice president in an administration that many progressives consider too centrist.That puts him in roughly the same position as Hillary Clinton: liberal on many issues, but a traditional party loyalist at the end of the day.

And:

Still, it’s not like the Warren acolytes have been sitting around waiting for a new leader. The vast majority have already signed up with Sanders, from the more casual to the top professional political leaders: Kurt Ehrenberg, the Run Warren Run point person in New Hampshire, and Blair Lawton, the point person in Iowa, are both now working for Sanders.

And I think Charles Chamberlain, president of Democracy for America, is right:

At the end of the day, Chamberlain added, “I think it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll see a lot of switching from people who support Bernie Sanders to support Joe Biden.”

And:

John Colombo, the Franklin County Iowa Democratic Party Chair who signed a letter in May urging Warren to run, and who remains without a candidate in the primary, said he’d like to see Biden enter the fray. That doesn’t mean, though, that he or any of the other pro-Warren people will get behind him — even if she endorsed him.“A lot of the infrastructure that was in the Run Warren Run campaign is going to the Sanders campaign, I don’t think they’d abandon that. But I could see Hillary supporters switching over,” Colombo said. “I don’t think endorsements do the trick here in Iowa. People just don’t care.”

There’s also the chance that a Warren endorsement could backfire — for Biden, and for herself.

“Frankly I think you’d have a ton of very angry Bernie Sanders supporters in the state, and you’d have a lot of rather confused and upset Clinton supporters, too,” said David Watters, a New Hampshire state senator from Dover who signed a letter in March urging Warren to run, but who is now with Clinton. “If Warren wanted to have her hand in the presidential race she should have run herself.”

This is one of those clear examples where personality blinds some to the reality of policy and values.

I don’t doubt Joe Biden is a nice guy, the “Everyman” who was just “Joe” on his daily rides home on Amtrak to be with his family every night when he served in the Senate. By the way, I don’t doubt that Hillary Clinton is nice to her family and a great grandmother.

That’s not the point.

Biden is the establishment. He has been a long-time defender of the credit card industry–and he led the campaign to pass a bankruptcy bill that protected credit card companies and hurt millions of regular working Americans. And, respectfully, Clarence Thomas sits on the Supreme Court thanks to Biden (for those who have forgotten Biden ceding the gavel essentially and telling Thomas, “You have the benefit of the doubt, Judge” when Republicans were smearing Anita Hill, see here)–and that has hurt millions of people and set back the nation on civil rights, workers rights and just plain sanity.

Bernie represents a movement. A revolution.

So, Joe, by all means, enter the race. But, we’re very happy with our candidate.

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Trillions of dollars lost, pensions ravaged, retired people who can’t pay to stay in retirement homes, peoples’ futures wrecked…that was so financial crisis days, huh?

But, if there is ever a moment to remember what a very stupid idea privatizing Social Security is, and why Bernie Sanders’ plan to expand and strengthen Social Security is so important, this is it. A teachable moment.

Bet most people are checking this out:

Stocks in the United States tumbled on Monday morning as another sell-off that started in China roiled markets around the world.Immediately after the opening bell in New York, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped more than 1,000 points, or more than 5 percent — one of the most precipitous such plunges in recent years. Within an hour, though, American stocks had made up much of their earlier losses and the Dow was down about 2 percent.

So, as if we should have learned this before, one reason people are worried about the stock market crash is because REAL PENSIONS barely exist anymore. Retirement “security”–and I use “security” quite loosely–is too often dependent on the money sitting in a phony “pension”…which is what I believe an IRA is.

REAL PENSIONS are those that actually guarantee a retired person a modicum of dignity and respect because they provide a reliable, steady income–not income based on whether some fuck on Wall Street wants to gamble with an old person’s money, and whether some mutual fund wants to drain an account with outrageous fees.

In the old days, when unions were strong, people got a real pension–meaning, a defined BENEFIT which was negotiated through collective bargaining. This wasn’t a gift. It was deferred earnings. Workers, and their unions, were smart enough, and willing enough, to put off pocketing some money today with the promise that decades later the money could be used for retirement (a topic for another day: how companies raided and/or mishandled those defined benefit funds).

So, that’s one reason why we need mass unionization–to get back to the days when people could depend on a real pension, not pray and hope that, in the years they happen to retire and need the money, the market is on some wild ride.

And, that’s why Social Security privatization is such a horrendous deal–putting retirement savings in the hands of people that just don’t give a fuck about anyone else.

And why, given the decline of defined benefit pensions, we should be talking about expanding Social Security and strengthening it. As Bernie Sanders has:

As boxes of petitions signed by 2 million Americans were hauled into the Capitol today, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced legislation to expand benefits and strengthen the retirement program for generations to come.The Social Security Expansion Act was filed on the same day Sanders and other senators received the petitions gathered by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

“Social Security is the most successful government program in our nation’s history. Through good times and bad, Social Security has paid out every benefit owed to every eligible American,” Sanders said. “The most effective way to strengthen Social Security for the future is to eliminate the cap on the payroll tax on all income above $250,000 so millionaires and billionaires pay the same share as everyone else.”

Sanders’ measure would make the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share.  Under current law, the amount of income subject to the payroll tax is capped at $118,500. That means someone making millions of dollars a year pays the same amount in payroll taxes as some making $118,500 a year. The legislation would subject all income over $250,000 to the payroll tax.  Doing so would impact only the top 1.5 percent of wage earners, the Center for Economic Policy Research has estimated.

The bill also would subject unearned household income above $250,000 to the same 6.2 percent tax as applies to most earned income. The top 0.1 percent of Americans  gets about half of all capital gains income.

Asking the wealthiest Americans to contribute more into Social Security, would not only extend the solvency of Social Security through 2060, it also would allow Social Security benefits to be expanded for millions of Americans.

“At a time when over half of the American people have less than $10,000 in savings and senior poverty is increasing, we should not be talking about cutting Social Security benefits.  We should be talking about expanding benefits to make sure that every American can retire with dignity,” the senator said.

The bill would:

Increase Social Security benefits by about $65 a month for most recipients.
Increase cost-of-living Adjustments for Social Security recipients.
Provide a minimum Social Security benefit to significantly reduce the senior poverty rate.

Social Security today has a $2.8 trillion surplus and will be able to pay all promised benefits until 2033, after which it will be able to pay around 75 percent of all promised benefits.  The Social Security Expansion Act would increase revenue and extend the solvency of Social Security for the next 45 years.

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The sauce is not top secret:

“They’ve reversed the normal political formula” in which professional staffers take the lead and pound the phone to drum up crowds, said Chip Evans, a liberal radio host and former chairman of the Washoe County Democratic Party, who watched the event take shape and said he was struck by the extent to which it had been organized by local amateurs.Now, the campaign is working to whip all those energized supporters into a political machine that can deliver votes and send Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire a message that, in the words of senior adviser Tad Devine, “there’s something big happening across the country and they can be a part of it.”

To that end, the campaign is adding data specialists to its staff and more racially diverse faces to its speaking rosters. And it is refining methods of gathering data on attendees and converting them into volunteers.

But in an age of advanced analytics and micro-targeting, the campaign’s process of throwing rallies remains a relatively simple one (the event staff has even settled on pen, paper and clipboard for gathering information from supporters, having found them easier for many attendees to use, and cheaper, than tablets or laptops).

It begins with selecting rally locations, often based simply on the number of supporters the campaign has on its email list in a given city.

“There’s actually no secret sauce” to the turnout, said digital director Kenneth Pennington.

And:

When a location is determined, staffers often simply turn to Google to find an appropriate venue by searching for coverage of large political rallies held in that area in recent years.The campaign takes the basic steps of sending an email to local supporters, issuing a press release, creating a Facebook event, and posting a notification on Sanders’ Facebook page, which has more than one million followers.

According to field director Phil Fiermonte, it does little else to promote turnout. “We have not spent any advertising dollars on these events,” he said. “It’s not like we have lots of staff on the ground making phone calls.”

Instead, it’s left to Sanders’ largely self-organized grassroots support to deliver the crowds.

One unexpected source of bodies has been the Bernie Sanders for President page on Reddit — the message-board-style online social network that is not often associated with political organizing. The page is administered by Vermont-based Sanders admirer and winery employee Aidan King, 23, along with a fellow supporter he met online.

As the rallies became a focal point of the campaign, King added a sidebar to the Reddit page with an event schedule. “At first it didn’t even dawn on us how important it would be to get the word out,” he said.

King first glimpsed the power of the Sanders Reddit page — which has 90,000 subscribers — to drive turnout ahead of an early July rally in Madison, Wisconsin, that drew 10,000 people.

And lastly:

About one in five Sanders event attendees checks the box to become a volunteer when they RSVP, according to Pennington.“As the campaign moves on, we hope to increasingly convert those event attendees into real actors who can secure votes for the campaign,” he said.

As part of that effort, the campaign put a twist on its massive rally formula with a nationwide network of organizing parties on July 29, with remarks made by Sanders from a Washington, D.C., apartment simulcast to 3,500 events across the country. Over 100,000 people RSVP’d for the events and the campaign deployed a new tactic, asking attendees to text “work” to its organizing number. Texters received a link to a page where they could fill out a detailed form about their level of commitment to volunteering and the types of work they’d like to perform.

39,000 people texted the number and filled out the form, according to Pennington.

The campaign is also adjusting its rally messaging to reach a broader swathe of the Democratic electorate.

Sanders’ rhetoric has been remarkably consistent for decades, and on Tuesday night he hit on his standard themes of inequality, access to health care, and the power of “the billionaire class.”

But the messaging has evolved in recent weeks in the wake of disruptions at Sanders events by Black Lives Matter protestors and as observers point out that the senator’s support is concentrated among white primary voters.[emphasis added]

The point here is two-fold. First, there’s some real infrastructure building that is happening in many places, in particularly a huge base of small donors.

Second, though as I for one have said repeatedly Bernie has a steep hill to climb trying to match the network the Clintons have built over the years through buying favors, the energy seen in rallies isn’t just a cotton-candy sugar-high that dissipates quickly. It’s slow movement building, a lot of it not being picked up by the political elite class.

Will it be enough? Who knows? But, damn, I’d take that inspiration and authenticity any day over Chipotle-stop PR-driven campaigns.

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Politico:

After a poll this week showed the previously unthinkable — the 73-year-old Independent senator from Vermont surging past Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire — there’s a feeling that the Bernie Sanders operation is maturing from a quixotic pursuit for the White House into the real deal.Sanders’ campaign is calling the Franklin Pierce University and the Boston Herald poll, which found Sanders beating Clinton 44 percent to 37 percent in the Granite State, an “astonishing” feat. It gives even more fuel to a momentum that the Sanders team is riding to significantly expand its ground game, especially in New Hampshire.

The campaign has already outgrown its modest office on Manchester Road in Concord, and will be moving the state headquarters to Manchester in the coming days. Over the next three weeks, aides will be scouting out more real estate to open field offices across the state to add to the 10 currently set up. Another six or seven open on Monday.

As for manpower, a handful of staff are starting in New Hampshire on Monday, and a week after, another new crew is starting.

“And then in the next month, our staff size is going to really bloom,” said Julia Barnes, Sanders’ New Hampshire state director, in an interview with POLITICO on Friday at her desk in front of a stack of resumes.

To be clear, as I have said from the outset, Bernie has a huge big hill to climb–he has started late, in relative terms, for a presidential campaign and he does not have 30-years of a history of buying the loyalty of political operatives in every state with favors, political appointments and political spoils.

But, he’s changed big parts of the campaign conversation–let’s see, his weeks-ago free college- education for all to be paid for my a financial transaction tax on Wall Street forced the Clinton campaign to come up with its own–far weaker–proposal–is a feature of the “Bernie proposes and then we hear, “Me, too, me, too” campaign season.

But, this is true:

“What this says to me is there’s a lot of fluidity in the race. And it’s going to be a long haul,” Jay Surdukowski, who has served as legal counsel for New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan and is giving legal advice to former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley as he runs for president.

This is clearly part of the dynamic that is playing into Joe Biden’s mulling of a race, despite the fact that he’d be getting into the race pretty late.

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You could find many instances like these if you do a little comparison between rich donors: there is virtually no shame, nor any hesitancy, by wealthy donors who fund just about every presidential candidate–with the exception of Bernie Sanders (though, by all means, prove me wrong on Sanders)–to put their hands in the pockets of taxpayers for their own wealth and enrichment.

Follow the bouncing ball…

Today’s example comes on an issue that drives me crazy–the loss of billions of dollars in badly-needed money to build sports arenas for the owners of sports teams who are very rich people. And, for the record, I am a devoted sports fan. There is nothing wrong with good, competitive, relatively non-violent sports.

But, I hate that these rich fucks come with their hands out and demand subsidies to build ever more lavish stadiums and, then, raise prices for the average fan in these new homages to their egos.

Scott Walker–you know, the conservative–just threw away more millions on a sports arena:

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin approved $250 million in public financing for a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team on Wednesday, a deal exposing him to charges of corporate welfare as he seeks the Republican nomination as a fiscal conservative.Mr. Walker praised the deal, passed with bipartisan support in the Legislature, as a sound investment that will return $3 in state taxes for every $1 invested.

The owners of the National Basketball Association team, who include hedge fund managers in New York and a top fund-raiser for Mr. Walker’s presidential campaign, had threatened to leave the state without public funding for a new stadium.

So, just for the record, most of these bullshit numbers about return on investments are bullshit, and no less bullshit than all the other phony studies you read that claim “multiplier” effects on bad trade deals or tax giveaways. And, from my point of view, you want to leave–fine, go…someone else will buy franchises that are mostly escalating in value, regardless of whether there is a palace attached.

But, here’s the beauty of it all:

The Bucks owners said a new arena, needed to attract fans, would cost $500 million. Former Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, a Democrat who was the team’s previous owner, agreed to contribute $100 million. The new owners, led by Wesley Edens and Marc Lasry, who run hedge funds in New York, will pay $150 million. Taxpayers will kick in $250 million.

Some Republicans objected to Mr. Walker’s embrace of a deal that would benefit Mr. Lasry, who is a major fund-raiser for Hillary Rodham Clinton, and who once employed Chelsea Clinton at his firm, Avenue Capital.A minority owner of the team, Jon Hammes, is a longtime supporter of Mr. Walker’s and now serves as a finance chairman for his presidential bid. A company registered to one of his family members donated $150,000 in May to a “super PAC” supporting Mr. Walker.[emphasis added]

So, you see, when it comes to fleecing taxpayers, there is a bi-partisan love-fest. And if you think much will change for hedge fund managers when it comes down to it after the 2016 election–despite the fraudulent rhetoric from the Democratic “front-runner” (though not perhaps much of a “front-runner” in New Hampshire)–you just aren’t paying attention to the record.

Walker’s funder, Hammes, and Clinton’s funder Lasry do not hesitate for a moment to take our money to enrich themselves. And if anyone doubts that they–and the other underwriters of virtually every campaign but the Sanders campaign–are not going to continue to pervert a tax system that benefits the elites, by calling in chits post-election, you are living in a fantasy world. This is a very concrete example of how campaign contributions buy access and, thus, buy policy.

There are, by the way, options to this fleecing. My good friend David Morris, for many years, has pointed out that community-owned sports teams can do quite well:

The Green Bay Packers, one of the NFL’s best teams of the 1960s, and increasingly of the 1990s, are owned by their fans. Football champions in 1929, 1930, and 1931, Super Bowl I, II, and XXX champions, the Packers were incorporated in 1923 as a private, non-profit, tax-exempt organization. Article I of their bylaws states, “this association shall be a community project, intended to promote community welfare…its purposes shall be exclusively charitable.” The team can move only through dissolution, in which case the shareholders get only the $25 a share they put in. A board of directors, elected by the stockholders, manages the team.This non-profit status has been threatened only once, in 1949. The Packers needed to raise more than$100,000 to avoid insolvency. Co-founder Curly Lambeau, coach since 1919, member of the board of directors, and current stadium namesake, found four men willing to invest $50,000 each if the team would become a profit-making venture. The board refused, instead choosing to authorize 10,000 shares of common stock at $25 a piece, 4,628 of which were issued. To insure that not one individual or company had too much control, the maximum number of shares per shareholder was set at 200. Instead of four owners, the team now had over 4,000. Lambeau resigned.

Theloyalty of these fans and owners is legendary. Games at Lambeau Field have been sold out for over thirty consecutive seasons. Streets are literally deserted for three hours on autumn Sunday afternoons. The waiting list for season tickets is 36,000 names long, for seats in a stadium that holds 60,000. It is common for season tickets to be willed from one generation to the next and to be hotly contested in divorce proceedings.

The bond between team and city that has been fostered through nearly fifty years of community ownership is also unique in professional sports. During training camp tradition dictates that all players -including 300 pound lineman-ride local children’s bikes to practice. Through this process players often foster friendships with individual kids throughout the preseason.

GreenBay’s metropolitan area is home to fewer than 200,000 people, yet the Packers rank in the top 20% of all professional teams in terms of franchise value. As player salaries have continued to escalate, however, the shareholders in late 1997 decided that more revenue needed to be raised for the team to remain competitive into the future. The 10,000 shares issued in 1950 were split into 10 million shares, 400,000 of which were made available to the public at $200 a piece.

He wrote that in 2009 but it is still true. The Give Fans A Chance Act, introduced by Rep. Earl Blumenauer would severely would, “forbid leagues from prohibiting community ownership. If a professional sports league ignores this provision, it will lose its sports broadcast antitrust exemption. This exemption allows teams to collaborate to sell their broadcast rights, thus increasing their value dramatically (to the tune of $17 billion over four years for the NFL).”

The problem is that community sports teams would not benefit the rich elites that fund people like Walker and Clinton. And, so, it’s going to be a long slog to stop this particular fleecing of taxpayers on behalf of the wealthy.

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BUY: The Essential Bernie Sanders and His Vision For America

Every day, a worker dies somewhere just doing his or her job. And that death rate hits hard particularly communities of color and immigrants because many work in industries and jobs with low pay and very sketchy safety practices.

This is murder at work, the human “cost of doing business” in the glorious “free market”–except there is very little cost to the company. And usually the managers and CEOs skate, getting a fine or some other slap-on-the-wrist.

Those who wear the burden are the family members of the murdered worker.

In this sea of injustice, a glimmer of justice beckons from New York.

Kudos to the Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance who is seeking justice for Carlos Moncayo:

With construction-related deaths and injuries on the rise, prosecutors announced on Wednesday that manslaughter and other charges were being brought against two construction managers and the companies they worked for in the April death of a worker at a Lower Manhattan building site.…The worker who died, Carlos Moncayo, 22, an Ecuadorean immigrant who lived in Queens, was crushed by thousands of pounds of dirt when the walls of a site in the meatpacking district, steps from the High Line, collapsed around him on April 6.

Prosecutors said on Wednesday that the two managers — Wilmer Cueva, of Sky Materials, and Alfonso Prestia, of Harco Construction — had ignored repeated warnings for months from private inspectors that treacherous conditions existed at the site on Ninth Avenue.

City and federal regulations require that any excavations deeper than five feet must be shored up to prevent the walls from caving in. But in this case, at a site where a Restoration Hardware store will occupy the former home of the restaurant Pastis, the trenches went as deep as 14 feet and lacked any fortification, according to prosecutors, citing emails and other evidence.

On the morning Mr. Moncayo died, prosecutors said, another private inspector noticed a seven-foot-deep trench, and alerted Mr. Prestia, who was inside a trailer at street level and unable to see inside the pit. The inspector also notified Mr. Cueva, who was at the site, supervising work. But Mr. Cueva did not do anything initially, prosecutors said. Nor did Mr. Prestia.

By the time the pit reached about 13 feet, two hours later, Mr. Prestia told the workers, in English, to get out. But the workers, who spoke mainly Spanish, did not. Not long afterward, the walls collapsed, crushing Mr. Moncayo.[emphasis added]

So, we understand that the deaths of workers all across the nation does not usually happen in huge numbers all at once (an exception would be the 28 coal miners killed in 2010 at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, for which Don Blankenship will go on trial this Fall). Mostly, workers die alone or in small numbers so the drip-drip-drip of murder is not seen.

It’s a product of two things. We have a shitty safety and health system. It’s partly because of the decline in unions because, truthfully, having a union at work is your only real protection against abuse and threats to your safety and health. And that’s largely because the safety and health regulatory system is piss poor.

Today, the OSHA budget is just $552 million–and federal enforcement is only $208 million–that’s under a DEMOCRATIC Administration. So, the AFL-CIO found in its annual report:

At its current staffing and inspection levels, it would take federal OSHA, on average, 140 years to inspect each workplace under its jurisdiction just once. In 10 states (Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Dakota, Texas and West Virginia), it would take 150 years or more for OSHA to pay a single visit to each workplace. In 28 states, it would take between 100 and 149 years to visit each workplace once. Inspection frequency generally is better in states with OSHA-approved plans, yet still is far from satisfactory. In these states, it now would take the state OSHA plans a combined 91years to inspect each worksite under state jurisdiction once.[emphasis added]

And, then, you add to that the legal regime that makes it virtually impossible to charge managers and CEOs with felonies and put them behind bars.

I’ve made this point about the Wall Street thieves but it’s basically true about all criminality at the CEO level: we need to jail these people, take away their freedoms, take away their limos, their fine wines, their jets and their huge pay and give them hard time. You do that just a little bit and you will get some behavior to change.

Cyrus Vance is going to have a hard road to get to a conviction with jail time. But, good on him for trying.

#WorkersLivesMatter

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BUY: The The Essential Bernie Sanders and His Vision for America

Republicans are embracing the full Dick Cheney doctrine. I don’t mean simply the “let’s break international law and bomb the fuck out of people in service to Halliburton.” I mean the doctrine that, for all the tough talk, when it came time to serve, the vast majority of these guys who are ready to go to war with Iran, decided, like Cheney, that when it came to serve in the military and put their lives on the line, they all had other priorities.

This is a group of “chicken hawks” who are ready to have more people die–Americans and others–but would never put their own lives on the line.

Bernie did show some some official support from a union endorsement poll:

At a meeting of the Utility Workers Union of America in Florida this week, Bernie Sanders won 65 percent of the vote in cell phone poll of the 400 elected delegates to the convention. Clinton won 23 percent, with Martin O’Malley taking 7 percent and the combined Republican field winning 5 percent.

The union is relatively small but still worth noting.

More important:

In a possible setback for Hillary Clinton, the AFL-CIO’s political committee has recommended the nation’s largest labor union federation delay endorsing a candidate for the 2016 presidential race as it seeks to push her to be more supportive of its policies on issues such as trade and wages.The committee on Monday voted unanimously to support the proposal, three union sources told Reuters. The recommendation will be presented at a July 29-30 meeting of the executive council of the federation, which will make the final decision. It could reject the recommendation and still go ahead with an endorsement, though one of the sources said that is unlikely.

The move highlights the pressures Clinton is facing to take a tough stand against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed free trade deal backed by President Barack Obama but vigorously opposed by unions who see it as detrimental to jobs and wages in the U.S. Unions also want her to back labor-friendly policies on other issues, such as the minimum wage and the Federal Reserve.

And:

The federation has been trying to quell a revolt in its ranks as some local unions have declared their support for Sanders, who is known for his progressive stance and who has spoken out strongly against the TPP.In contrast, Clinton has simply said that any final trade agreement needs to include strong worker protections and that she will reserve judgment until a completed deal is presented. Negotiators from the U.S, and 11 other nations from the Pacific Rim, including Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Australia, Mexico and Canada, are meeting in the next week in Hawaii in an attempt to reach a final agreement.

The trade deal will likely be the top issue at the two-day gathering of the AFL-CIO, which represents workers in a wide range of occupations, from brick layers to machinists to nurses.[emphasis added]

Like the rest of the challenges facing Bernie, it’s a steep hill to climb to nab the AFL-CIo’s endorsement, whatever the merits. But, time, in this case, is his friend.

It’s a book…about to see the light of day.

It’s an organizing tool.

It’s Bernie’s voice.

Word:

“Why would any sane human being, knowing his background and who pulls the strings, vote for Scott Walker?” he added. “If you cut the two strings behind him that go to the Koch brothers, he’s like putty. He falls down.”

So true. The country where politicians run around talking about “family values” and never miss a chance to be photographed with a child–while too many of them cut health care for kids and vote for illegal, immoral wars that bankrupt the country and send kids to war (though their own kids never serve–they just give speeches for five-figures in which they say nothing).

Bernie pegs it. And wants to at least create 1 million jobs for young people over the next two years.

WTF? Ok, I guess I should actually say: this is not shocking but because Chuck Schumer just made me yell “WTF?” and ruin my schedule for the rest of the day…

The loud yelling and clapping you just heard came cascading down from executive suites of all the tax-dodging big corporations who must be dancing in the halls. “Bi-partisanship” is about to fleece the American people–yet again. And it’s being led by the presumed Democratic majority leader come 2016, Chuck Schumer.

Banks on the brink. Financial system close to collapse–or so said the experts. To the rescue rode the Federal Reserve Board, which authorized trillions of dollars for all sorts of financial institutions, domestic and foreign…even if said institutions didn’t need the money but were happy to take essentially free money.

That was back during the financial crisis.

Now, it’s Greece and its banks running short on cash, squeezed by the money lenders and, in particular, the European Central Bank. So, why not: the Federal Reserve Board should be directed by Congress to commit to providing liquidity to Greek banks so the people in Greece–millions of human beings–can pay their bills, get their pension payments and continue to have money to buy food–or cut off the ECB from its Fed-backed line of credit.