Going For Woke

Via Vox.

I'm always pleased to see somebody I admire catching up with some ideas I've been cherishing for a while, even more so when they're using words I might well have used myself, as in this from Washington Post's Greg Sargent on dated concepts of the US working class:

In the emerging Democratic reading, the old vision of a White, male, breadwinning working class concentrated in burly jobs shapes much political analysis, but it’s a pundit fiction. With service, retail and health-care sectors growing as manufacturing and mining jobs dwindle, the new working class is far more ethnically and culturally diverse — and more socially liberal — than commonly supposed.

What he's commenting on is the remarkable string of progressive legislation that's been coming out of Michigan all year since Democrats captured the state legislature in spite of its gerrymandering, most recently when they repealed the state's "right-to-work" law, enacted in 2012 to combat unions by disallowing closed shops so that workers could benefit from union contracts without paying union dues. 

Look for the Union Libel, Continued

 

Via redditor Honest_Horky.

Little Marco takes a stand on the Amazon workers in Alabama, in USA Today:

Here’s my standard: When the conflict is between working Americans and a company whose leadership has decided to wage culture war against working-class values, the choice is easy — I support the workers. And that’s why I stand with those at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse today.

Right. He'll support unionization at a company he thinks is too liberal, because they deserve to be punished. If he likes a company's "culture", like the Little Sisters of the Poor and their unrelenting efforts to stop their employees from getting affordable birth control, he'll side with the company.

Because the Little Sisters are on the side of "working-class values" and the workers are against them. Sure thing.

How does Amazon fight against "working-class values"? It

Joe Did What? Labor Edition

In "Joe Did What?" news, President Biden posted a video reaction to the upcoming vote of the 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama as to whether they should become the first workers in Amazon history to be represented by a union (the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union):

“Workers in Alabama, and all across America, are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace,” Mr. Biden said in a direct-to-camera address posted on the White House Twitter page, after a recent pressure campaign by pro-union groups pushing him to weigh in on the drive.

“Let me be really clear: It’s not up to me to decide whether anyone should join a union,” he said. “But let me be even more clear: It’s not up to an employer to decide that either.”

Yes, sir, the second sentence was more clear than the first. Thank you.

Amazon's inveterate opposition to unions is well known (that's what torpedoed their plan for a Long Island City headquarters, more than anything else, making it impossible for Mayor de Blasio to keep supporting the deal), and the company has been willing to descend to a near–Roger Stone level of dirty trickery to stop them, as in this Alabama case, as Sarah Jones reports at New York:

Through Plague Eyes: David Brooks and Solidarity Forever

I was starting to worry about David Brooks, who's been filing his copy on time ever since he got married but didn't seem to have shown up last night the last time I looked, but my phone says his column went online by 8:00 PM, and he seems to have recovered from the sense of dread he was showing last week, of the world relapsing into Hobbesian savagery; now he's as jaunty as Mrs. Miniver getting the family ready for an air raid ("Screw This Virus!"):

While we’re at it, screw certainty. Over the past few weeks I’ve been bingeing on commentary from people predicting how long this is going to last and how bad it’s going to be. The authors seem really smart and their data sets seem really terrible.

I’m beginning to appreciate the wisdom that cancer patients share: We just can’t know. Don’t expect life to be predictable or fair. Don’t try to tame the situation with some feel-good lie or confident prediction. Embrace the uncertainty of this whole life-or-death deal.

Screw the grim data sets and the feel-good lies. Make it a threesome!

President on Strike

Thisbe, Wall, and Pyramus in the 2010-11 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the University of Delaware Resident Ensemble Players.

Well, that's a relief:

JERUSALEM – President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, said Sunday that the U.S. military withdrawal from northeastern Syria is conditioned on defeating the remnants of the Islamic State group, and on Turkey assuring the safety of Kurdish fighters allied with the United States.

Trump's not going to pull US troops out of Syria until all the reasons for not pulling troops out of Syria go away. He's totally going to do it, just not as long as it's a really bad idea. As soon as it's a good idea he'll be there.

Or, putting it another way, the Anonymous Resistance is still at work even though "Mad Dog" Mattis has bowed out. All we have to do is wait until Trump's obsessed with some other crazy project and you can correct the current mistake without him noticing, at least as long as the mistake is so terrible even Bolton and Pompeo and Netanyahu know it's a mistake and they all get on board.

The Lake of Labor

The Allen River enters Lake Chauekuktuli in Southwest Alaska. Photo by Robert Glenn Ketchum, via Bristol Bay Land Trust.

Verbatim David Brooks, "The National Death Wish", February 25 2017, offering a novel version of the "lump of labor" fallacy, to explain why immigration does not lower wages:

Cotton and Perdue’s position, which is now the mainstream Republican position, is based on the unconscious supposition that American society is like a lake, with a relatively fixed boundary. If you cut the supply of fish coming from outside, there will be more food for the ones born here.

The problem is that American society is actually more like a river. Sometimes the river is running high, with a lot of volume and flow, with lots of good stuff for everybody, and sometimes it’s running low.

This has to be one of the worst analogies in literary history, especially insofar as the point he'd like to be making, if only he knew how, is a valid one.

A healthy lake actually provides an analogy for how a society prospers with a steady flow of immigration; lakes are fed by rivers bringing them oxygen, nutrients, and, yes, more fish, some of which are food for fish that live there. Ecologically rivers and lakes form integrated systems; a lake that isn't getting fed is the aptly named Dead Sea.

Losing their grip

Photograph by The Nation, which also has some great coverage.

A labor story that doesn't seem to be getting a lot of play outside of New York City is the epic of the contract dispute at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus, whose 400 AFT faculty members have been ordered off campus, cut off from their classrooms and email accounts, and stripped of their salaries and health insurance, as the semester begins, and students find their classes being taught, or not, by "replacement workers". Rumor had it that ballet courses would be taught by Dean David Cohen, an elderly biology professor who specialized in plant morphogenesis.

The issues are gross inequities in salary between the faculty in Brooklyn and at the school's Post campus in Brookville, Nassau County, and the treatment of adjuncts, in the new cost-cutting contract the administration offered. Alana Semuels writes in a great piece in The Atlantic:

Arthur Kimmel has been an adjunct at LIU’s Brooklyn campus for more than 20 years. Under the terms of the proposed contract, he would have his income cut by 30 to 35 percent, he said. That’s because, in addition to the $1,800 or so per course he teaches, he has received pay for having office hours and money from an adjunct-benefits trust fund to help defray the cost of health insurance. Kimmel says the university’s proposal would eliminate the adjunct- benefits trust fund and payments for office hours, among other cuts. The new proposal would also decrease the number of credit hours he could teach, and establishes a two-tier system for adjuncts so that new employees would receive less than Kimmel does.

When the faculty overwhelmingly rejected the contract on Tuesday and the faculty senate overwhelmingly voted no confidence in the president, the administration made its move.

It's not completely surprising, in these times of increasing corporatization, when academic institutions come more and more to be run by business-administration types with little or no teaching experience of their own (LIU president Kimberly Cline has "experience as a president of a multicampus institution, as a CFO of a university system and as a university attorney, bringing a rare trifecta of managerial, financial and legal expertise to her new role" but clearly hasn't taught a class since she was a grad student, Doctor in Educational Administration, at Hofstra), to see teachers treated with such contempt, though it is distressing.

The contempt for the customers, fee-paying students, on the other hand, and their parents, as the academic year begins and the administration refuses them the education they've paid for (tuition is $34,000 a year), is just astonishing and anything but corporate. It's people who are supposed to be hard-headed and focused on the bottom line succumbing to emotionalism, dominated by rage and spite, against its own economic interests. It shows, I think, a CEO class that is losing its grip, in much the way the Donald Trump phenomenon does, doing terrible damage as it thrashes and fails.

Wrote this up partly because I didn't notice that Erik Loomis had done so, but he has. Loomis also notes how you can donate to the LIU Lockout Solidarity Fund.

It's the conservatism, stupid

#NotAllBlueWalls. Just saying. Photo by Bonnie Hull.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, writes:

Last December, my colleague David Brooks noted that police unions are resisting change on every issue where police reform might be contemplated, from body cameras for officers to reversing the militarization of local law enforcement.

Running the gamut from paragraph 7 to paragraph 8, as it were. Brooks wasn't "noting" anything. Everybody knows that Police Benevolent Associations and Fraternal Orders of Police are out-of-control, retrogressive monsters. What Brooks was actually doing in that column, of course, was taking advantage of our horror at the New York PBA treatment of Mayor De Blasio at the time of the Eric Garner and Akai Gurley killings to make the case that public sector unions such as the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees are out-of-control, retrogressive monsters—by asserting that the police associations were a typical case (which they aren't) of the public sector union in general:

New York note

Not your (Irish) grandfather's NYPD; this year's Police Academy recruits being welcomed on January 9 by Mayor Bill de Blasio (David Handschuh/New York Daily News).

Via Mahablog, very encouraging columns by Juan Gonzales at the Daily News suggest a lot of ferment going on in the NYPD over the police brutality controversy of Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, and Patrick Lynch's leadership of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, not to Lynch's advantage: for the first time since 2003 he seems likely to have an opponent in the PBA election, which is coming up in June, and it will be one who represents the patrolmen's embarrassment over his shameful treatment of Mayor de Blasio:

Benevolent Despots

Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray arriving for the service. How the rank and file really feel when the PBA bosses aren't choreographing them. Photo by Mike Segar/Reuters in the Daily News.

I didn't fully get the picture that the cops turning their backs on Mayor de Blasio as he gave a eulogy for murdered officer Rafael Ramos yesterday were outdoors performing for the cameras, out of the mayor's sight, while inside the church things were different, as they should be:

Truthiness from David Brooks

Montreal cops in 2008 or 2009 protesting against government messing with their pensions by dressing down. They are a real union. You never hear of Montreal cops killing unarmed black men. Coincidence? You decide. Via CyberSmokeBlog.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Union Future", December 19 2014:

I'm not going to lie, police departments are pretty abusive. Kind of like teachers, refusing to fire incompetent officers, refusing accountability in the form of body cams, refusing to apologize. Some socialists accuse them of racism, but even-the-liberal-Conor-Friedersdorf will tell you the real problem is they're unionized.

No law of capitalism?

Image via GulfCoastProgressive, 2006.

Sorry, But There’s No ‘Law Of Capitalism’ That You Have To Pay Employees As Little As Possible - Business Insider http://t.co/ThJukP5Zo3
— Pierre Omidyar (@pierre) March 29, 2014

Wanted to reply, but didn't,

Leftist is as leftist does

AFL-CIO Now did a very nice piece, I thought, on effective ways of "kicking ass for the middle class" as exemplified by a bunch of labor and state legislature actions taking place around the country, and I felt compelled to reply to an unnecessarily unappreciative comment from a FireDogLake contributor called Bill Perdue. His ripostes to that got stuck in moderation purgatory, probably with reason in the first case, because he told me I was lying, which is pretty bad manners; but his second version isn't so bad, and I thought I'd run it here, with a lengthier response of my own, and an invitation to him to carry on the discussion if he wants.

Via plattsburgh.edu.

Bill_Perdue 

• 2 hours ago

It's the working class and you won't be doing any good until you abandon the Democrats and Republicans and reorganize the Labor Party and unleash to run against Democrats and Republicans and use it to help organize unions and educate the working class. [jump]

Cookie and the Works

The smear of right-to-work to one side, actually Mr. President I do have the "right to work for less money." Why should I be denied that?
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 10, 2012

Sir Charles Constant Wimbley Cooke, Bart., M.A. Oxon., F.R.A.S. (Fellow, Royal Arsehole Society), etc., etc., and a contributing writer at the National Review Online, has always disliked the idea of wages, which make one's work seem somehow so vulgar, and self-interested. If one must take money for doing something one ought to be doing purely out of a sense of moral responsibility, must one also "negotiate" the amount? They don't call your superior at work "superior" for nothing, you know, surely he knows better than you how much your work is worth, and as Scripture tells us the laborer is worthy of his hire.

As to the concept of a trade union, an organization entirely devoted to haggling like fishwives with its superiors over the worth of work, and not the work of real people but of a sort of arbitrarily "typical" employee whose demands are supposed to set a kind of standard for everybody else, he regards it with horror. Why not simply engage a pimp, if that's the way you feel, for heaven's sake?

I like to think Sir Charles once had a sort of "job" at, let's say, an especially chic art gallery back in the dear "old country", along with an old school chum, Beefy Waxe-Weatherford, who happened to fall in love with an American girl, and longed to propose to her.

"You'll do no such thing," said his governor, "or I'll cut you off without a penny."

"Of course I wouldn't need a penny if we joined the Euro," remarked Beefy, "but as things are, I think I shall have to ask for a raise." For his Tiffany was rather a high-maintenance operation, excessively fond of winter sports and summer hill stations.

"Don't do that!" Cooke urged him. "In the first place, you don't in point of fact do any work."

"That's true," said Beefy. "But think of the tone I lend to the place!"

"But think of how slimy you'll feel afterwards!" insisted Cooke.

"I know," said Beefy, "I'll call in a trade union to ask for me. You don't suppose they're very dear, do you?"

From Ebid (UK).

To be continued...?

Is it a bird? A plane? A public option?

Self-parody from EconomicFreedom.org.

No,  not quite; it's a government-sponsored all-American health insurance program, or rather two of them, as mandated by the Affordable Care Act, including one likely to be offered by the independent nonprofit Government Employees Health Association, to be offered to individuals and small businesses through the exchanges of every state. I understood stuff like this was allowed for by the ACA, and I figured it would inevitably come into existence, startling our Emoprog friends to no end. I didn't realize it was already chartered and in the works.

In addition to pressuring the insurance companies not to skimp in coverage, it will also pressure them to hold down premiums, and who knows? Maybe they'll be able to offer special no-birth-control rates for those institutions with tender consciences, too, heh-heh.

Once again the onion of Obamacare peels to reveal a new and unexpected layer. I didn't notice it in the Times, and might never have heard if not for Dr. Turk (who is skeptical on the subject).

Meanwhile, the latest right-wing panic is a new book by Mallory Factor described by David Martosko in the Daily Caller:  ”Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind”. Yes, the author's name really seems to be "Mallory Factor". What effect that may have had on him in childhood and adolescence is hard to say, but I'm sure it wasn't pretty.

The book argues from a memo of December 2008 from Dennis Rivera to the Obama transition team that the ACA had a secret agenda:

Factor, who is also a Forbes columnist and senior editor of money and politics for The Street.com, recounts emails from former federal Office of Labor-Management Standards staffer Don Loos, now a senior adviser to the president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.

“It is clear that Big Labor is banking on the probability that all healthcare workers eventually become federal, state, and municipal healthcare employees,” Loos told Factor. That, he said, would make them eligible for involuntary unionization through public-sector unions like AFSCME and the SEIU. “Obamacare is an SEIU and AFSCME membership ‘net,’” Loos claimed, “designed to eventually capture 21 million forced-dues paying government workers.”

Yes, the true purpose of Obamacare—pay no attention to those 30 million previously uninsured people behind the screen—is to juice union membership! The fiends!