Public-sector unions are not the problem

http://eastwindsor.patch.com:/swf/external_video_player.swf

    New Jersey’s public employee unions are starting to fight back by doing what working people should have been doing in this country for years. They are taking it to the streets. The teachers were in Trenton last week; today, it was the police and fire unions. Who’s next? As glad as I am to see them take to the street, we have to face the fact that these rallies lack the unity and sense of larger purpose that the Wisconsin fight has had. Workers in the Badger state face the prospect of being stripped of bargaining rights, even after giving the governor every concession he has requested. The issue there is the basic right to organize and act collectively. Here the talk is about saving pensions and medical benefits and preventing layoffs — worthy goals — but not necessarily ones that will connect with the larger swath of put-upon workers in the state. And not necessarily ones that will shift public opinion. The teachers, firefighters, police and other public workers need to rally together over several days and they need to frame their demands as more than just protecting what the public has come to see as their cushy benefits. The issue is the final assault on the compact that has governed American working live for 60 or so years, but that has been eroding for the last three decades. The collapse of the private-sector union movement, the labor movements disconnection from the larger social movements of its day (think of the bulk of unionists on Vietnam, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, etc.) and the general assault with government help by corporate America and presidents and Congresses of both parties has left the public-sector unions as the only strong unions in the nation. The public-sector workers need to reconnect to workers at large, find a way to cut past the jealousy that has far too many New Jersey residents saying “take away their benefits.” That kind of demand is short-sighted and will only continue the race to the bottom on wages and benefits that has American workers earning, at best, what they were earning 10 years ago, while the top one-tenth of 1 percent of earners — about 300,000 Americans — saw their wages more than triple. Public-sector unions are not the problem. The problem is the lack of private-sector unionization and a legal structure that is decidedly hostile toward union building. This is the argument they should be leading with: Stand with us now and we will stand with you later as you fight to revive the working and middle classes.

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The right to be racist

The First Amendment’s free speech and assembly protections mean nothing unless we are willing to afford them to the most reprehensible and disturbing speech.

So, while I despise everything that the Westboro Baptist Church stands for and find their use of soldiers’ funerals deplorable, I have to applaud the Supreme Court’s ruling today:

In an 8-1 vote, Supreme Court Justices voted in favor of the Westboro Church, ruling that the protesters are protected by the First Amendment, no matter how offensive their anti-gay, anti-military message might be to some.

The church and Fred Phelps were being sued by Maryland resident Albert Snyder, the father of the late Matthew Snyder, a soldier who died in Iraq in 2006. Albert Snyder cited “emotional distress” as the reason for his lawsuit. Phelps and his family protested at Matthew Snyder’s funeral with signs that read “God Hates America” and “Semper Fi Fags”.

Nothing that the church has done or does can be defended or should be defended. Its members and views are offensive and hateful. But nothing the church does should be the subject of government interference.

Do we really want to follow the French example on this and prosecute the speaker of hateful speech? Does an anti-Semitic or racist rant warrant a jail sentence of as long “as six months in prison and up to €22,500, or $31,000, in fines”? Should Mel Gibson or Michael Richards have gone to jail, as they likely would have under French law, which “makes it a crime to incite racial hatred”? And who gets to decide what inciting hatred means?

American law, thankfully, protects our rights to be idiots. I prefer it that way.

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  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Rubber-necking a Hollywood wreck

We have a propensity to do this, to get caught up in the speedy downward spiral of some overly hyped, rich and pampered star, to revel in his or her disgusting behavior — as entertainment, as a way of proving we are better than these rich lowlifes, as a sop to our voyeuristic urges.

We slow down on the highway when we see a car wreck, not because we think we can help, but because we are curious, because we want to see. Police stories are the most popular on news web sites, often not because we are concerned that crime is encroaching but because we want to see, we want to oggle.

So, Charlie Sheen gets to ride the media merry-go-round and we all watch — and, yes, I did watch last night — and hope that his drug-addled mind will snap, that his mania will be on full display for our entertainment.

It was sordid, painful and completely unnecessary, as Dan Watson on Neon Tommy points out:

Charlie Sheen, the star of “Two and a Half Men” — who thinks he can live the same fantasy as his character — is sick. And I don’t mean in some “funny uncle” way.
Sick, as in less than a month ago he began in-home rehab. Sick, as in he admitted to doing enough cocaine — “7-gram rocks” — to send him into mania at that time. And sick, as in a score of doctors are saying he is bi-polar.

He is not a “winner.” He is not a hero raging against the corporate machine. He is not playing a joke on us. He is not a serious interview subject.

He is sick.

Tonight was an abomination.

The executives at ABC should be tried in court for enabling a drug user.

They are preying on a sick man. And all the while, laughing at rival CBS — host of Sheen’s wildly successful show.

Sheen, of course, is responsible for his plot in life. He diagnosed himself perfectly in one interview:

“I’m on a drug: It’s called Charliesheen.”

“Tiger blood,” runs through his veins, he said.

Today, he loves himself. Tomorrow, he will hate himself.

Tonight, was, to put it lightly, the most devastating interview I have ever seen. It was also one of the more disgusting things I have ever seen.

And it is not likely to be the last time we see it, and I’m not talking about Sheen and his sordid, tawdry life. Yes, Sheen is engaged in a high-profile battle with his network and a very public battle with his ex-wife,  so the Sheen narrative is likely to be a part of our lives for as long as we wish it to be.

Sheen’s story is his own, but it also is part of a larger narrative of American obsession with famous meltdowns. Last night, it was Sheen blathering on, while in the recent past it has been Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, Mel Gibson, Anna Nicole Smith and far too many other unstable, out-of-control celebs. When Sheen’s public meltdown ceases to be interesting, we will move on to someone else.

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  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Libya on the brink and the French respond

The French are stepping in to aid the rebels in Libya, as the Qaddafi regime steps up its repression.

The civil war already has created a humanitarian crisis in the African nation, one the west needs to address. So we should follow the French lead, aid the rebels — in Libya and across the region — to show that we believe our own rhetoric about democracy and that we are not the monsters al Qaeda paints the West to be.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

For democracy to flower, the grassroots need constant attention

Democratic self government needs some help in the United States. We have grown soft in our assumption that change comes from the orderly, yearly visit to the ballot box. Nothing more is needed from us.

Is that true? Not when you consider the evidence. Our willingness to cede our own authority to our elected officials, to vote them into office and then ignore what they do, has left us with a fragile connection to power. Money governs the electoral process — picks the candidates and runs the campaigns — and the winners at the ballot box know exactly to whom they owe their jobs.

A huge majority of Americans tell pollsters they want politicians to leave Social Security alone, for instance, but because the financial services sector wants a piece of the federal retirement pie it keeps ending up on the table.

We got financial reform, but only in name, health-care reform that leaves corporate health-care companies in charge, a recommitment to state secrecy, and we’re still waging two disastrous — and unpopular — wars, despite two elections in which voters emphatically said we should leave.

It’s not Barack Obama’s fault, however. Anyone who thought Obama, whose ascendancy in the Democratic Party was anything but a challenge to the party hierarchy, would challenge the corporate state just hasn’t paid attention to his history as a politician or the history of the republic.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m angry with Obama and the Democrats. They talked a decent game, but had no intention of playing.

But we cannot blame them for betraying progressive principles if we have not applied the necessary pressure.

Consider the wars — as Chris Hedges does in this rabble-rousing column. The wars go on because we have not demanded that they end, have not forced the issue.

We will not stop the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we will not end this slaughter of innocents, unless we are willing to rise up as have state workers in Wisconsin and citizens on the streets of Arab capitals. Repeated and sustained acts of civil disobedience are the only weapons that remain to us.

We have to march and write and speak out. That’s what history tells us, as Howard Zinn made clear during the early part of the 2008 election season, as the press got caught up in the blathering nonsense of candidates and the minutiae of horse-race politics:

The unprecedented policies of the New Deal—Social Security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing—were not simply the result of FDR’s progressivism. The Roosevelt Administration, coming into office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover Administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army—thousands of veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle.

In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis, a general strike in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.

Without a national crisis—economic destitution and rebellion—it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.

Rahm Emanuel said before the inauguration that Obama would not let a crisis go to waste. The president did, as did a neutered American left. It is up to us on the left to change the dynamic, to make them do the right thing.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.