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June
17, 2003
Peter
Phillips and Jason Spencer
Entertainment Media 2003
Wayne Madsen
Outting Ashcroft's Latest Hypocrisy
June
16, 2003
Frida
Berrigan
Death in Aceh: US Weapon Aid the
Repression
Publius
Candidate Dem and Citizen Green
Tarif
Abboushi
Roadmap or Roadkill?
Rep. John
Conyers
Bush's Deceptions about Iraq Threaten Democracy at Home
Julian
Samuel
A Review of Pilger's The New Rulers of the World
Uri
Avnery
The Children of Death
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies,
Part 2
June
14 / 15, 2003
Edward
Said
A Roadmap to What and Where?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pryor Unrestraint: Killer Bill Pryor's
Mad Quest for the Federal Bench
David Lindorff
Rumsfeld v. Belgium
Jennifer
Loewenstein
Suicide's Most Willing Accomplice
Lee Sustar
US Tax System: Rigged for the Rich
Ben
Tripp
Of Dissidents and Dissonance
William
S. Lind
Lies, Damned Lies and Military Intelligence
Joanne
Mariner
Rebellious Judges
Gila Svirsky
A Macabre Alliance
Mickey
Z.
Where We Are
Chris Floyd
Metaphysics as a Guide to Murder
Noah
Leavitt
Peru as Our Crystal Ball?
Yves Engler
and Bianca Mugyenyi
The G8 and Africa
Dr.
Gerry Lower
Dear Rudy, Let's Get Those Damned Liberals
Ted Dace
A Review of Kovel's The Enemy of Nature
Adam
Engel
Midnight at the Apocalyptic Pancake
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Greeder, Albert, and O'Hayer
Website
of the Weekend
AEI: Starts Wars; Creates
Poverty
June
13, 2003
David
Vest
Bush
Roadmap to What?
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Reloaded?
John
Chuckman
The Man Who Wasn't There
Jason Leopold
Six Months Before War White House Silenced Critics of WMD Intelligence
Michael
Leon
Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media
Negar Azimi
Ashcroft's Cruel Version of America
Saul
Landau
Shiite Happens
Hammond
Guthrie
Then and Now
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/13
June
12, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Intel-gate Row in Britain: a Chronology
Ahmad Faruqui
The Tragic Legacy of the Six Day
War
Wayne
Madsen
Unfit for Office: Time for Rumsfeld to Resign
Laura Carlsen
Hunger and Security
Tarif
Abboushi
Warm and Fuzzy in Aqaba
Ray
McGovern
Deceived into War: Reflections of
a Former CIA Analyst
Steve
Perry
Counting Bush's
Lies, part 2
June
11, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Attack of the Hog Killers: Why the
Generals Hate the A-10
Elaine
Cassel
Meet Michael Chertoff: Ashcroft's
Top Gremlin
David Lindorff
The Republican Drive to Eliminate Overtime Pay
Tom
Gorman
Greens, the Antiwar Movement and 2004
Alfredo
Castro
Colombia: The Most Dangerous Place
on Earth for Trade Unionists
Nnimo
Bassey and Lawrence Bohlen
Bush Must Stop Telling Us What to
Eat!
Julie Hilden
Spike Lee v. Spike TV
CounterPunch
Wire
Blair Bros. Change Jobs!
Eric
Hobsbawm
The Empire Expands, Wider and Still
Wider
Steve
Perry
DHS: As Big
a Planning Snafu as Iraq?
June
10, 2003
Benjamin
Shepard
A Season in the Anti-War Movement
Chris
Floyd
Bush Family Lies About Iraq and Nazi
Germany
Wayne
Madsen
Weaponsgate
Jason Leopold
Powell's Denials Ring Hollow
Richard
Lichtman
Whining, Whimpering Leftists Confront the Logic of American World
Domination
Ray
Close
A CIA Analyst on Why the Lies About
WMD Matter
Hammond
Guthrie
Banking on Saddam?
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/10
June
9, 2003
Alex
Coolman
Male Rape in US Prisons
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft is Coming!
Lee
Sustar
Is Iran Next?
Agustin
Velloso
Equatorial Guinea: Few Rich, Many
Poor
Gila
Svirsky
Some Lives Are Worth Less Than Others
Dr. Gerry
Lower
Human Worth in Bush's America
Michael
S. Ladah
A True Liberation
Ishmael Reed
Iraqi Slaughter, Mayhem and Plunder
Steve
Perry
How to Beat Bush, part 1
June
7 / 8, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Terrible Truth
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Going Critical: Bush's War on Endangered Species
Joanne
Mariner
Ashcrofts Sides with Torturers
Steven
Sherman
A Different Theory of Everything
Ron Jacobs
Sports, Politics and the 60s
M.
Shahid Alam
Pauperizing the Periphery
Amelia
Peltz
If This is the Road, I'd Rather be Lost
Shelton
Hull
Another Powell, Another Capitulation
Binoy Kampmark
Nuclear Deterrence and North Korea
Ben
Tripp
A Fish Story
Sen. Robert
Byrd
Where is the Outrage?
Robin
Philpot
Congo Distortions
Julie Hilden
Murder and the Matrix
Laura
Flanders
An Interview with Isabel Allende
David Lindorff
The Last Byline
Adam
Engel
Talk Dirty Scary Monsters
Poets'
Basement
Kearney, Reiss, Guthrie, Albert and Hamod
June
6, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft the Insatiable
David
Krieger
The Big Lie
Ramzy
Baroud
Sharon and the Myth of the Peacemakers
Anthony
Gancarski
Sharansky: "Crucifixion is a Privilege"
Sam
Hamod
His Own Little Country
Sean Carter
Why Indict Martha Stewart and Not Ken Lay?
David
Lindorff
Cracks in the Consensus
Stew Albert
Ari's Great Set
Steve
Perry
Greens and
Moore in 04? No
June
5, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pools of Fire: The Looming Nuclear
Nightmare in the Woods of North Carolina
Imraan
Siddiqi
Ann Coulter's Foul Mouth
Michael
Leon
Clinton, Reno & Waco: Remember What They've Done
Robert
Jensen
Texas Pledge Law Undermines Democracy
Ann Harrison
Rosenthal is Free, But the Fight isn't Over
Paul
Dean
How You Can Be Deliriously Happy in the Age of Bush
Gary Leupp
When Spooks Speak Out
Website
of the Day
Evidence in Black and White?
Hot Stories
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WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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June
18, 2003
Bush's Low-Intensity
War on Labor
Investigate,
Audit, and Intimidate
By RICK FANTASIA and
KIM VOSS
A quiet lull briefly settled over the United States
in the weeks immediately following 11 September 2001. The silence
was a respite from the usual din of commercial and cultural transactions
and allowed for a space of remembrance for the many firefighters,
police officers and emergency medical technicians who had risked
their lives in the collapse of the World Trade Centre, and died
there. This was more than a memorial; it was a heartfelt salute
to the courage of men and women who routinely risk death in their
everyday work.
In ordinary times it takes great power
or wealth to become a hero, but these workers were hailed for
being workers. And to be honoured for doing humble work is a
big thing in a society where decades of neoliberal dogma have
erased workers from the social imagination. The gratitude expressed
to and for workers after 9/11 was an uncommon gesture of recognition
for the usually invisible.
But this quiet reverence was quickly
overwhelmed by the noise of vengeance and war. The Bush administration,
which had previously shown indifference to workers and contempt
for their unions, discovered that it could use its war against
terrorism to front another kind of low- intensity warfare against
workers and trades unions. New laws were quickly passed to create
a new Department of Homeland Security. This meant an enormous
reorganisation of federal agencies, stripping 170,000 workers
transferred into the new super- agency of all rights to collective
bargaining and civil service protections. As the nation was still
honouring the (unionised) firefighters and policemen who had
died on 11 September, President Bush was claiming that unionisation
posed a national security threat.
He amplified the anti-worker tone of
his presidency more after the Republican gains in the mid-term
congressional elections of November 2001. When he could not eliminate
public employee unions by fiat, he intended to speed up the privatisation
of the federal workforce, permitting non-union and low-wage subcontractors
to bid for the jobs of some 850,000 federal workers, many of
whom are union members.
This assault on public sector unions
came in the context of a ferocious 25-year campaign of anti-unionism
by employers and their trade associations in the private sector,
where the rate of union membership has fallen to 9% (the overall
rate of 14% is propped up by higher rates of unionisation in
the much smaller public sector). In many European societies social
benefits are mandated by the state. But in the US union membership
matters very much and is hard to secure.
There are few statutory regulations upon
employers, so union membership is one of the few ways for a worker
to get reasonable social benefits and protection (paid health
insurance, a pension plan, paid holidays, a legally enforceable
grievance resolution system). Gaining union status is not easy
in the US; it must be won through a process of social combat
governed by judicial rules that overwhelmingly favour the employer.
The Bush administration has used the
congressional powers conferred because of the war on terrorism
against workers in the private sector. When Bush moved to save
the airline industry with a $15bn bailout against losses suffered
because of a slowdown in air travel after 9/11, he offered almost
nothing to 100,000 airline workers who had been laid off, and
used the power of injunction under the anti- Labor 1947 Taft-Hartley
Act to end strikes at two major airlines. He made a rhetorical
link between the interruption of economic activity and national
security.
This was reinforced in the US national
consciousness in autumn 2002, when Bush actively intervened on
the side of shipping companies after they locked out some 10,000
longshoremen from their jobs at 29 West Coast ports. Before the
lockout, the shippers had formed a coalition with some of their
biggest customers, mostly large retail chains like WalMart and
Gap, and had met a task force from the Bush administration to
prepare strategy. The administration's actions against the longshoremen's
union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU),
were a warning to the rest of the Labor movement. In the middle
of negotiations between the union and the shipping companies,
Tom Ridge, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, and
representatives of the federal Department of Labor telephoned
the head of the ILWU to dissuade the union from shutting the
ports. They warned that any strike or interruption of work on
the docks would be treated as a threat to national security and
that the government was prepared to deploy the military to replace
striking workers (echoing Ronald Reagan's actions in 1981). According
to a principle elaborated by the US de fence secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld, in the war against terrorism all commercial cargo,
not only goods directly intended for military use, would be considered
to have a military importance.
The Bush administration has adroitly
used regulatory mechanisms as a powerful weapon against the unions.
In contrast to the administration policies on the environment
and corporate governance, where the White House has fiercely
opposed any regulation of air and water quality, food safety,
and business practices, the Labor Department issued new regulations
in December 2001 that will require unions to itemise every expense
over $2,000 on organising workers, striking, and legislative
or political activities. This means an administrative nightmare
that will cost millions of dollars and weigh down their already
overburdened staff in bureaucratic practices that have limited
US unions for decades.
In Bush's current budget, funds have
been dramatically increased for auditing and investigating unions
while funds for enforcing health and safety laws, child-Labor
regulations, and violations of the minimum wage have been cut.
The unions have responded to this. At the end of February, the
leadership of the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress
of Industrial Organisations) registered its opposition to the
war on Iraq.
This was unprecedented, because the Labor
movement has for 50 years been a strong voice for military intervention,
a dependable ideological combatant throughout the cold war. Anti-communism
was obligatory for entry into the top leadership of almost all
US trade unions (and most US institutions), and there was a recognition
that millions of the jobs that sustained industrial unionism
depended on the policies of postwar "military Keynesianism".
The attack on anti- war demonstrators by hundreds of construction
workers in New York City in 1970 gave the working class a militantly
pro-war image.
This has now changed. Since 1995 a younger
and more militant leadership group, with roots in the more dynamic
service sector unions, and less burdened by the cold war imperative,
have taken over leadership of the Labor federation. The change
is reflected in the willingness to break with the Bush administration
on Iraq. The shift is not only evident at the top, but throughout
the movement, where a longstanding ideological curtain of self-censorship
has been lifted and the accusation of being "soft on communism"
has lost its bite (although forces on the right are trying to
provoke fears with the charge of being "soft on terrorism").
The result is a more critical voice from the Labor movement,
and opposition from new organisations that have emerged as vehicles
of Labor mobilisation.
Besides the executive council's resolution
against the war, the leaders of 400 Labor groups, representing
nearly 5 million union members, signed an even stronger resolution
calling the drive to war a "pretext for attacks on Labor,
civil, immigrant and human rights at home" and warning that
the main victims of war "will be the sons and daughters
of working class families serving in the military and innocent
Iraqi civilians".
Once the war began, the open opposition
muted, as a curtain came down over all debate, in deference to
an enforced tradition of national unity and support always invoked
when US troops go to war. When they entered Baghdad, a lunchtime
rally to "support our troops" was held on the site
of the World Trade Centre (organised by the conservative New
York building trades unions), drawing over 10,000 union workers.
If the positions of the unions have changed,
so has the US military since 1973. It is half the size it was
at the height of Vietnam, with 1.4 million active duty members,
and an almost equal number of reservists. The draft, discontinued
at the end of the Vietnam war, gave way to the current "volunteer"
force, a term that perhaps misdescribes the social compulsions
at the intersection of civilian and military Labor markets. This
is most evident with African- Americans, for whom the US army
has been a central institution of social maintenance and mobility
(1). In 1988 10.6% of the army officer corps were African-Americans
(including 7.4% of the generals, the highest officer rank), an
increase of nearly 300% since the war in Vietnam (2).
The US military is overwhelmingly working-class,
from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, 90% of whom enter the
forces with just a high school diploma, and come from families
with a median income of $33,000 a year--about one-third below
average national income (3).
It is ironic that working-class soldiers
will come home from Iraq to a socio-economic reality that has
been shaped by the costs of a huge military establishment. Americans
pay for an annual military budget of $400bn and rising--yet they
go without national health insurance or affordable childcare,
and have an educational system full of inequities.
The Bush administration mandates huge
tax cuts for the rich and encourages the governors of 50 states
to reduce spending by privatising their workforces. Even more
progressive governors are left with little choice but to privatise
because almost every state staggers under the the expense of
homeland security, which the administration has required states
to implement without providing federal funds to cover the costs.
As US troops entered Baghdad, the administration
was quietly proposing changes to the federal Fair Labor Standards
act to exclude millions of workers from overtime pay for work
over 40 hours a week (workers in the US are paid time and a half
for every hour over 40). By reclassifying previously protected
workers as managers and administrative employees, and removing
overtime protections from workers in aerospace, de fence, healthcare,
and hi-tech industries, the Bush administration is handing to
employers who are already laden with gifts an especially generous
handout. The workers, including those soon to be discharged from
military service, will pay for this gift.
Rick Fantasia
and Kim Voss are sociology professors at Smith College
in Massachusetts and the University of California, Berkeley,
respectively, and joint authors of the forthcoming Hard Work:
Remaking the US Labor Movement (from the University of California
Press, autumn 2003).
(1) African-Americans aged between 18-24
years old make up 14% of the population as a whole, but almost
22% of the military. For the past 25 years the army has offered
them a more reliable education system than almost any other US
institution.
(2) Charles C Moskos, Soldiers and Sociology,
US Army Research Institute for Behavioural and Social Sciences,
1988.
(3) Vicki Haddock, "Who will fight
the war?" San Francisco Chronicle, 2 March 2003.
This article originally appeared in Le
Monde Diplomatique.
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Outting Ashcroft's Latest Hypocrisy
Larry
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Starlight
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Edward
Said
A Roadmap to What and Where?
Jeffrey
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of the Weekend
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Poverty
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