Bush to America: Eat Shit And Die

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Friday December 10, 2004 · 4:49 AM PST

2004/12/10 · 04:49

While I was in Columbus working on the campaign, I took an evening off to visit my daughter at Kenyon College. After dinner, I went back to her room to check my e-mail. As I was about to leave, one of her friends revealed that she was probably going to vote for Bush.

Now, my first instinct when someone intelligent tells me they're going to vote for Bush is to tell them to "Eat Shit and Die, sucker."

But a patient man am I, down to my fingertips, the sort who never could, ever would, let an insulting remark escape his lips. Instead, I calmly asked her why she was voting for Bush. She explained, first, that she really liked Ronald Reagan (this from a woman who was born in 1986.) Second, she said that she believed in small government.
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Can a Crisis in Superfund Bring Hope To Democrats?

jbarab

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Tuesday November 30, 2004 · 4:03 PM PST

2004/11/30 · 16:03

Could a crisis in Superfund contain the seeds of the resurrection of progressive forces in this country? It's up to us.

I'm managing to find a bit of time to read again and right now I'm reading a fascinating and infuriating book, Deceit and Denial, by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner. The first half of the book covers the shameful behavior of the American lead industry and its efforts throughout most of the 20th century to cover up the havoc it was wreaking on American children and workers with promotion of lead paint and leaded gasoline as safe and essential for the survival of American economy and the American way of life.

Then, like a bad case of deja vu, I read this in last Thursday's Washington Post Read More

John Kerry: Can We Talk (Clearly!)

jbarab

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Monday October 11, 2004 · 6:18 AM PDT

2004/10/11 · 06:18

The more I hear John Kerry, the more I like him - and the madder I get because he is seemingly unable to speak so that people can understand him. People want facts, they want details, but most of all, they want simplicity, clarity and the ability to relate what you are saying to what they already know or experience. Make the connections for them.

For example, Kerry's latest attempt to handle the charge of flip-flopping over the $87 billion troop support bill was pathetic, and he could have hit it out of the park.

I mean, what the hell is this (from the last debate)?

I made a mistake in the way I talked about it. He made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is a worse decision? (How did you make a mistake in talking about it? What does that mean?) Now I voted the way I voted because I saw that he had the policy wrong. (How? Which policy? Supporting the troops? What are you talking about?)And I wanted accountability. I didn't want to give a slush fund to Halliburton. (What the hell does Halliburton have to do with the $87 billion?)I also thought the wealthiest people in America ought to pay for it, ladies and gentlemen. (So what does this have to do with supporting the troops? Are we back to taxes again? I'm so confused.)He wants your kids to pay for it. I wanted us to pay for it since we're at war. I don't think that's a bad decision.(How are my kids paying for this? Is he talking about the deficit now? I'm totally confused)

Makes me want to scream!

Here's a better way to address this issue: (See extended entry:)
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Don't Let the CIA Take the Fall for Missing WMD: Blame Bush

jbarab

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Thursday January 29, 2004 · 11:51 AM PST

2004/01/29 · 11:51

David Kay has blamed the missing WMD's on the failure of intellegence gathering, in other words, on the CIA. Like all the rest of us, our well-meaning President was duped.

Ain't so. There are two steps to the wise use of intellegence. First, it has to be gathered, second, it has to be properly analyzed and interpreted.

As Seymour Hersh revealed in his October 2003 New Yorker article, this Administration -- chiefly Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney -- "stovepiped" raw unanalyzed CIA intellegence right to their offices, used it to justify their pre-determined quest to invade Iraq, and then sent it to the White House where Condoleeza Rice dutifully provided it to the President.

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic--and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book "The Threatening Storm" generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was "dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.
"They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information," Pollack continued. "They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn't have the time or the energy to go after the bad information."
The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. "The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet"-- the C.I.A. director --"for not protecting them. I've never seen a government like this."

While David Kay attempts to shift the WMD "buck" from the White House to the CIA, Bush attempts to shift justification of the war from WMDs to "Saddam was a bad person." And as David Broder points out in today's Washington Post,

By shifting the argument, Bush fuzzes the basic issue in assessing his policy. Many shared his fear of the Iraqi dictator, and many others believed Hussein had these weapons. But Bush alone decided the threat was so grave that it justified a preventive war -- one that already has cost more than 500 American lives and billions of dollars, with more to come.
That he now evades the issue and gives scant evidence of a searching reappraisal of his administration's decision-making is profoundly disturbing. It is, and ought to be, an issue in this election.

Let's not allow him to get away with it.

Labor and the Iowa Caucusses

jbarab

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Tuesday January 20, 2004 · 2:18 PM PST

2004/01/20 · 14:18

Predictions of the demise of labor's electoral clout as a result of the Iowa caucusses are premature. Labor unions were successful in getting the vote out. 23% of Iowa caucus attendees were members of unions -- a disproportionately high figure compared with the 13.6% of Iowa workers who belong to unions.

Where the unions didn't succeed was in selling one (or two) specific labor candidates-- because there weren't one (Gephardt) or two (Dean) candidates who stood head & shoulders above the others on issues important to labor. In fact, allthe Democratic candidates had good labor positions.

Following the disastrous 1994 election, the labor movement finally realized that it was no longer adequate to just tell members who to vote for. The secret was to educate union members about the issues, tell them where each candidate stands on the issues, get them to the polls (by firing them up & addressing logistics), then hoping like hell they'll put it all together & vote correctly.

And this is how labor has been successful lately -- especially in 2000. It didn't work so well in2002, because members weren't fired up by the weak Democratic response to Bush & stayed home.

In Iowa yesterday, union members came out in large numbers, but made up their own minds, based on the information they had (much of it supplied by the unions), about who to vote for.

Contrary to the Iowa caucuses being a loss for labor, I think this bodes well for labor's influence in November as long as the education process goes well AND the Democratic candidate presents a real alternative. While the results of the Iowa caucuses were not necessarily bad for labor in general, they were bad for the individual unions that put a lot of resources into individual candidates.

In other words, the Iowa results raise serious questions about the advisability of committing significant resources to primary contests where there are a number of viable labor-friendly candidates. Maybe in this situation it would have been better for unions to keep their powder dry until the Democratic dust settles and the differences between the Democratic and Republican candidates are more real.

-- Jordan Barab, Confined Space: Commentary on Workplace Safety & Health and Labor Issues

Workers Die While OSHA Sleeps: Campaign Issue?

jbarab

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Monday December 22, 2003 · 12:44 PM PST

2003/12/22 · 12:44

Check out these two excellent articles in the NY Times (and one tomorrow)A Trench Caves In; a Young Worker Is Dead. Is It a Crime?, and U.S. Rarely Seeks Charges for Deaths in Workplace by David Barstow, author of last January's excellent series on the McWane corporation in the NY Times.

These are stories of workers being killed in workplaces where the employer had full knowledge of the unsafe conditions, yet OSHA was unwilling (or, in some cases, unable) to push the cases forward for criminal prosecution. It's a combination of weak political will and bad laws. But it's a story of tragedy for the families who are looking for some kind of closure to the completely preventable deaths of their loved ones.

If we're looking for election issues to fire up blue collar workers, friends and family in "conservative" parts of the country, this is it.

It doesn't have to be that way. Higher penalties and easier criminal prosecutions will help. There are bills in Congress calling for higher penalties. The Republicans, the Administration and the Chamber of Commerce all oppose them. Ultimately, making it easier for workers to organize unions and give workers more security to refuse dangerous work, whatever the law may say.

We have a great opportunity in the coming year to commit politicians of both parties to make some changes. Why not make ever local and national candidate respond to these questions: "Suppose OSHA can prove that an employer knew a workplace is unsafe, but sends a worker to work under those conditions anyway and the worker is killed. Should that employer go to jail?" Or "Do you think that $5,000 or $50,000 or $150,000 is enough for an employer to pay who knowingly sends a worker into an unsafe workplace and the worker is killed?"

Let's use the energy generated by these articles to strike while the proverbial iron is hot.

Labor Fight Gets Ugly in Missouri

jbarab

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Thursday December 04, 2003 · 6:35 PM PST

2003/12/04 · 18:35

AFSCME and SEIU are fit to be tied over a threat made by a Gephardt aid to repeal public employee collective bargaining in Missouri if the unions didn't stop organizing support for Dean in Missouri.

It's a little known fact that public employees in this country are second class citizens when it comes to labor rights. Public employees aren't covered by OSHA in most states and they can't bargain collectively or form unions unless it is formally permitted through legislation or an Executive Order. Collective bargaining rights are therefore the life-blood for unions like AFSCME, and, to a certain extent, SEIU. Threatening to rescind them is the height of union-busting.

Missouri state employees only recently gained that right through an executive order issued by Missouri Gov. Bob Holden (D) two years ago.

According to the Washington Post,

at a meeting Monday that included Missouri Gov. Bob Holden (D), Joyce Aboussie, the vice chair of Gephardt's presidential campaign, issued an "ultimatum" to representatives of the two unions.
The ultimatum, McEntee and Stern said, also included demands that AFSCME and the SEIU use none of their Missouri members to campaign for Dean in Iowa, that the unions make no independent expenditures in Missouri for Dean and that they not communicate with their Missouri members about Dean's candidacy.
If the unions did not abide by the demands, the two union presidents said, Aboussie said she would send a letter to the Republican leaders of the Missouri House and Senate, signed by some Democratic state representatives and senators, calling for the repeal of the governor's executive order providing state workers with collective-bargaining rights.

McEntee and Stern called the threat "an unconscionable and outrageous act" and called for Aboussie's removal.

A Gephardt spokesperson, while not denying that the event took place, reaffirmed his support for collective bargaining for public employees.

The Post article pointed out the significance of this affair

The exchanges underscored the anger generated by the AFSCME and SEIU decisions to endorse Dean, rather than Gephardt, a longtime labor champion during his quarter-century in the House, as well as the growing tension between the Gephardt and Dean campaigns.

Hopefully, the bad feelings will evaporate once a nominee is picked. It will be hard enough beat Bush next year, but impossible without a united and active labor movement.

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