DEAD PARROT
Number 28 -- Saturday, June 7, 2003
BUSTING LABOR'S CHOPS
For someone who, by his own account, is such a bull on job creation, Bush has a rather negative attitude toward the people who actually do the work. He showed his inclinations (if there had been any doubt about them) early on by nominating Linda Chavez as Secretary of Labor. Chavez, whose commitment to racial justice was such that she attempted to dissolve the Civil Rights Commission when Reagan appointed her to direct it, had an even better qualification for her new job: she opposed any increase in the minimum wage. No doubt her druthers would have been to chuck out the whole 20th century and make all those grape pickers, burger flippers, janitors, and Walmart clerks, who are living in the lap of luxury at $5.15 an hour, face up to the noble rigors of a free market economy. (Once that was done, the administration could see about reintroducing children into the coal mines--they fit the narrow places so much better.)
Chavez's nomination foundered on the not-too-surprising discovery that she had had an illegal alien doing the gritty jobs around the house, but Bush's campaign against labor went on and on. The AFL-CIO web site (
http://www.aflcio.org/issuespolitics/bushwatch) keeps a running record of actions that the administration has taken or tried to take against the interests of working Americans. These include a systematic effort to revoke worker-safety regulations that industry finds expensive or inconvenient and to make remaining rules unenforceable by cutting staff at OSHA and the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Another major assault, on collective-bargaining rights, is spearheaded by plans to privatize the federal workforce. This project turned especially ugly during the midterm elections last fall, when Max Cleland of Georgia, who had already lost three limbs in Vietnam, lost his senate seat as well. Cleland cast doubt on his own patriotism by insisting that workers in the Homeland Security Department should have union protection. TV spots showing him side by side with bin Laden finished him off.The administration's preferred strategy for neutralizing unions is to encourage the stereotype that they are sinkholes of corruption in which leaders profit at the expense of the rank and file. (This approach has the additional advantage of distracting attention from corporate scams that are several orders of magnitude larger than anything a union boss could dream of and that come embarrassingly close to Bush and Cheney themselves.) When Labor Secretary Elaine Chao addressed the AFL-CIO winter meeting in February, she played the corruption card by reading aloud for several minutes from a dossier about criminal cases against officials in the machinists' union (NY Times, 2/27), neglecting to add that, as its president later pointed out, the crooks had been collared by the union's own investigation. Chao's remarks were part of a push to hit unions with new financial disclosure regulations that will suck up a lot of their money and energy and reduce their clout during the 2004 election season.
If corruption can't be proved, the right wing has another sensational accusation to bring against unions: that they are motivated by self-interest! The Boston Globe's inimitable Jeff Jacoby broke this shocker in a column (5/22) on the National Education Association. All labor unions, he revealed, exist to seek "higher pay, better benefits, easier work conditions, and less discipline" for their members and have little or no interest in "tightening professional standards or advancing the public good." It certainly is a sad commentary on our times--all those Enron execs busting their bottoms to advance the public good by creating artificial power shortages, while union members can't think of anyone but themselves. Jacoby complains that teachers in Massachusetts have secured a substantial reduction in class sizes since 1991--purely as a form of featherbedding, of course, because "they're not in business 'for the children.'" Quoting an "engrossing new book" by one Sol Stern, he warns that teachers' unions "cast a giant shadow over American politics." And to think that we had mistaken their silhouette for that of the oil industry.
By way of full disclosure I must mention that I am a teacher--although, because I work in a private school, I do not belong to a union. I do know that you can accomplish a lot more "for the children" when there are 18 of them in a class than when there are 35. I also know that the union movement is one of the proudest chapters in American history--a courageous campaign to develop institutions that would counter the power of money with the power of the people. Right now the power of money seems to be doing pretty well for itself. Another link on the AFL-CIO web site lists the pay of CEO's at 1500 major corporations. You can plug in your own pay and perks and find out how many years you'd have to work to amass one year's compensation for a given CEO. To match Patrick Stokes of Anheuser-Busch, for example, I'd have to stay in the traces for another 452 years.
As for the power of the people, barely over one in eight workers belongs to a union this year, down from a high of one in three in the 1950's (Times, 3/9). And those layabouts that Jacoby denounces are scarce. As Kevin Phillips reports in Wealth and Democracy (see DP #14), Americans have now overtaken the Japanese and work "the longest hours in the industrialized world." One more little push and wage slavery will be back for everyone.
DP DOES THE NUMBERS
Annual pay of a US Army private in Iraq: $20,000 (Globe, 4/30)
Average annual pay of CEO's at the 37 largest publicly traded "defense" contractors: $11.3 million
Number of Texas Supreme Court justices who were Republicans in 1988: 0/9 (New Yorker, 5/12)
Number of Texas Supreme Court justices who are Republicans today: 9/9
Number of these who were Karl Rove's clients: 7
Size of contribution to the Bush 2004 campaign that will buy the donor a lunch date with Karl Rove: $50,000 (Washington Post, 5/25)
Approximate number of hours William Bennett played slot machines in order to lose $8 million: 800-1600 (Times, 5/18)
Number of chapters currently sponsored by the College Republican National Committee: 1148 (NY Times Magazine, 5/25)
Cost, according to the World Health Organization, of restoring Iraq's medical services to their pre-war level: $180 million (Times, 5/21)
Number of instructional days canceled by Hillsboro, Oregon, school district because of budget shortfall: 15 (Times, 5/24)
Cost of a fingerprint-reading system that an Akron, Ohio, school district will install to monitor students in its lunch lines: $700,000 (Globe, 6/1)
Amount of proposed cut in the $31.5 million California library budget: $30.5 million (Globe, 5/25)
Number of airport screeners to be laid off by the Transportation Security Administration because of budget cut: 6000 (Globe, 5/28)
Actual size of the "$320 billion" tax cut if Congress, as expected, overrides the sunset provisions: $800 billion (Times, 5/23)
Cumulative federal budget deficits predicted by administration's own internal report: $44 trillion (MSNBC.com, 5/29)
SPECKS ON THE NEGATIVE
Karl Rove wants two pictures to be perfect. One is the picture that everyone sees of Bush, the other the picture that Bush himself sees. People seeking to express contrary opinions represent a serious flaw in either of these pictures, and the White House, in conjunction with the Secret Service, is working hard to see that dissenters are excluded from the frame. If constitutionally protected speech conflicts with the production of upbeat imagery or with Bush's sense of being universally idolized, the constitution gets the short end of the stick.
Brett Bursey, of Columbia, South Carolina, is what the right wing likes to call a "serial protester"--the phrase of choice for demeaning critics who won't go away. As reported in the Times (4/27), Bursey is a fulltime political organizer with an arrest record going back to the Vietnam War. Last October 24, 100 yards away from the spot where he had been pinched for protesting a visit by Nixon in 1969, Bursey stood amid a crowd of Bush supporters with a sign that said, "No war for oil." Police told him that he would have to move to a "free speech zone" half a mile away (in his words, "out there behind the coliseum by the dumpsters"), where he could neither see nor be seen by Bush.
Bursey asked whether the content of his sign was what necessitated the move. The police told him it was. When he refused to go, they arrested him again. A charge of trespassing had to be dropped on the sort of grounds that people like John Ashcroft regard as an annoying technicality: Bursey was on public property. However, the Justice Department is prosecuting him for violating a law that enables the Secret Service to block access to areas a president is visiting. Since police did not arrest any of the several thousand Republican loyalists who were in exactly the same area as Bursey, this charge also seems pretty flimsy; but the case is proceeding toward a non-jury trial at the request of the US Attorney (none other than J. Strom Thurmond, Jr), and Bursey can get up six months of jail time plus a $5000 fine. On 5/27, 11 Democratic congressmen sent a letter to Ashcroft asking that the charge be dropped. You can read it at Barney Frank's web site:
http://www.house.gov/frank/scprotester2003.htmlI am grateful to DP reader David Pilbrow for acquainting me with a similar incident that took place in Indianapolis. On 5/13, as the Bush tax-cut road show rolled into town, crowds gathered along the motorcade route. A 57-year-old house painter named Carl Rising-Moore, who chose to greet the visitor with a large United Nations flag instead of the stars and stripes, was tackled, handcuffed, and hauled away by police. They reported that he was waving the flag "violently" and that the Secret Service had ordered them to "take [him] down"; they also charged that he struck the arresting officer in the face. Rising-Moore's supporters, 30 of whom turned up at his bond hearing, assert that he did not resist in any way, that he is committed to non-violence, and that he has a history of defusing tense situations. He has refused to post bail or let it be posted for him and says that he will wait in jail for a trial that could result in a two-year sentence. The whole story can be traced in a series of articles in the Indianapolis Star. Go to
http://www.indystar.com and enter "Rising-Moore" in the search window.It comes down to this: you can wave whatever flag you want to so long as it is the red, white, and blue. If you are willing to be part of Karl Rove's picture, you can go where you like, but if you want to get smart you have to stay in the free speech zone. It's over by the dumpsters.