A Legislative Agenda
for the First 100 Days
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Preface/The Setting
Two days after the November 2008
elections, Democrats and their allies are still celebrating the decisive defeat
of Republican John McCain. With his
defeat comes the chance to render unto history the remnants of the Bush/Cheney
regime that so ruined the lives of the bottom 80 percent of the U.S. population, and turned most of the world
against the U.S. Eight years of Bush/Cheney have brought incompetence,
jingoism, and neoliberalism. The wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, and the deepening
economic crisis have served to discredit much of the conservative agenda, even
going so far as to generate despair among the right-wing evangelical base.
Let’s
imagine that, after several months of drafting, the final touches are being
placed on what has come to be known as The
First 100 Days: A Working People’s Agenda for the First 100 Days of the Incoming
Democratic Administration. This
project, initiated by members of the AFL-CIO, Change To Win, as well as several
independent unions and other progressive working-class organizations, has
identified several key areas where the new Democratic administration must take
bold steps within its first 100 days.
Let’s also imagine that the drafting committee collected hundreds of
ideas and developed an extensive list of recommendations for an even more
comprehensive agenda; but the committee’s delicate task was to focus first and
foremost on the emergency steps required to rescue the country from the
potentially deep, and already devastating recession, and two disastrous wars.
Within a week, the
document will be presented to the President-elect and his transition team. The atmosphere in this final meeting is one
of both excitement and anxiety as everyone realizes that just as this document
is being drafted, several other documents are being drafted by various forces
representing constituencies whose interests are antithetical to those of
working people. The responsiveness of
the President-elect to The First 100 Days
will depend not only on the logic and persuasiveness of the document itself,
but also on the capacity of the constituencies uniting behind this document to
back up each word with people power.
Foreclosing on the
Free Market: How to Remedy the Subprime Catastrophe
By John Atlas, Peter
Dreier, and Gregory D. Squires
It’s now official. In January 2008,
the American Dialect Society selected “subprime” as 2007's
Word of the Year. “Everyone is talking
about subprime,” said Wayne Glowka, a society spokesman. “It's
affecting all kinds of people in all kinds of places.”
The
word is likely to gain even more currency in the next few years with the
accelerating number of foreclosures creating chaos in the housing and stock
markets, the banking industry, and the global money markets, triggering skyrocketing consumer debt, tight
credit, massive lay-offs, neighborhoods in decline, serious fiscal woes for
states and cities, and families and neighborhoods upended by the
turmoil.
Business
leaders, activist groups, and politicians are calling for our government to do
something before the situation worsens. The Bush administration proposed a bail-out for big Wall Street firms, but as
of this writing (May 2008) has done little for homeowners except asking banks
to voluntarily restructure troubled loans. The subprime crisis has been a hot-button
issue during the 2008 presidential campaign. The Republican candidates
were conspicuously silent, while the Democrats offered reasonable ideas for
coping with the symptoms (especially regarding homeowners facing foreclosure),
but no major candidate proposed the sweeping reforms needed to address the root
causes—four pillars of which are outlined below.
Make no mistake—it
is a crisis. More than seven million borrowers now hold subprime loans,
according to the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL). Most of them involved
adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) that include an initial low interest rate that
quickly “balloons” to a higher rate. The Federal Reserve reported that 2.1
percent of residential mortgage loans held by banks were delinquent at the end
of 2006.
In
2007, 405,000 households lost their homes, an increase of 51 percent in
2006. CRL projects that two million
families are likely to lose their homes in the next few years. More than 80 mostly subprime mortgage lenders
went bankrupt by the end of 2007. Regulators anticipate that between 100 and
200 banks will fail over the next two years.
But
it isn’t just borrowers and lenders who are losing. Home prices dropped by over 12 percent during
a 12 month period beginning in February 2007. A Congressional committee
projected a loss of $71 billion in housing wealth as a result of the mortgage meltdown.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors projected that ten states alone would lose $6.6
billion in local tax revenue.
This mortgage crisis
was preventable. Like most economic problems, it was due to corporate
greed. Top executives at major banks,
mortgage companies, and rating agencies saw an opportunity to increase
corporate income and their own compensation by engaging in risky
practices. In the short term, their
personal compensation was not connected to corporate performance, so they could
get away with irresponsible behavior. Eventually, however, these perverse
incentives caught up with them. Several
CEOs—Countrywide’s Angelo Mazilo, Citicorp’s Charles Prince, and Merrill
Lynch’s Stanley O’Neill—were forced out or faced criminal investigations, but not
before their firms suffered huge losses. Indeed, they put the entire financial
system in jeopardy.
Green-Collar Jobs, Industrial Policy, and a
Society with a Future
By Bernard Marszalek
Green-collar jobs have gone
mainstream. The popular reception of this program is a remarkable achievement
for what began only a few years ago as an underreported campaign uniting a few
progressive labor leaders and some politically astute environmentalists.
Despite its popular appeal, or maybe due to it, green-collar jobs
lack clear definition. The term arose from a groundbreaking alliance between
labor and environmentalists to create a massive national effort to jumpstart an
alternative energy program. They modeled it after John Kennedy’s well-funded
Apollo Project to get an American on the moon, fast.
The
Apollo Alliance, as the labor/environmentalist collaboration came to be called,
works “to catalyze a clean energy revolution” in order “to reduce our nation’s
dependence on foreign oil, cut the carbon emissions that are destabilizing our
climate, and expand opportunities for American businesses and workers.”
The
labor unions affiliated with the Alliance
support it to rally political backing for a program that would replace lost
manufacturing jobs with new, good-paying jobs in clean technologies. These new,
skilled jobs include erecting wind turbines, installing solar panels,
retrofitting old buildings with new “green” technology, and similar
pro-environment tasks. Social justice advocates recognized, with the call to
create new jobs, an opportunity to establish a national program to train those
who have been excluded from economic opportunities, particularly disadvantaged
youth. Good-paying jobs in these new green sectors, like the old blue-collar
industrial ones that led to a middle-class lifestyle, got branded as
“green-collar jobs.”
With
all three movements—labor, environment, and social justice—united behind the
“green-collar jobs for all” program, and with Democrats in an election year
eager to adopt innovative policies, a political synergy developed. The call for
green-collar jobs gained legitimacy and media currency.
The
push to promote this program without generating factionalism amongst the ranks
meant that no precision was sought in defining which jobs fit the green-collar
designation. The purpose of this program was to win popular acceptance, not to
create divisive tensions. But without a clear definition, opportunistic
corporations will undoubtedly promote their version of “green jobs” in “clean”
coal, nuclear energy, and other dubious areas.
Besides
the matter of definition, other concerns are holding green jobs back from
becoming a prime catalyst for employment stimulation.
Every
community seeks development, especially the clean, high tech sort. In the
1990s, for instance, cities and regions across the country sought to create
their local versions of Silicon Valley. More
recently, in farsighted communities, alternative energy production emerged in
anticipation of the demise of cheap oil, as the new economic development
panacea. A few localities have already secured contracts with European
manufacturers of turbines, electric cars, or solar collectors. As significant
as this is, it seems unreasonable to expect each city or region, not to mention
each state, to become a green technology center.
The Latino Vote in
2008
By Rodolpho O. de la
Garza
The
candidacies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, a black man and a white woman,
signal a profound change in American politics. Less significant but also
contributing to a new political terrain is that the 2008 election is the first
in which Latino voters may be in a position to influence who is elected
president. Will they? I am confident that they will mobilize, but not out of
ethnic solidarity. Instead, their motivations will be class-based, reflecting
their larger concerns for better jobs, health care, and quality education for
their children: the types of issues that the Democrats traditionally champion.
The
likelihood of Latinos finally playing a major role in a U.S. presidential election is
supported by national population figures, such as those citing the recent
increase in the Hispanic presence: in 1960, they numbered 14.6 million; today
they exceed 40 million. Distributed across
the country, they now constitute a national minority, that is, while (as
recently as the 1980s) they had been primarily concentrated in the Southwest, California, Miami, and New York, they now are visible in every U.S. state and
major city.
But the electoral
significance of these numbers is diminished by several factors: over a third of
these Latinos are non-citizens, thus ineligible to vote. Equally problematic is that the median age of
Latinos who are citizens is
approximately 14 years old compared to the median age of 36 years old for the
total U.S.
population. In sum, unlike most whites
and other groups, most Latino citizens are too young to vote.
The
probability of strong Latino voter turnout is further diminished by
socioeconomic factors. It is a truism of
American politics that the higher educated and more affluent citizens vote more
regularly than the poorer and less educated. Approximately 40 percent of
Latinos (compared to eight percent of non-Hispanics) do not have a high school
degree, and only 12 percent have a Bachelor’s degree (compared to 32 percent of
non-Hispanics). This might help to
explain why Latinos vote at significantly lower rates than non-Hispanic
whites. The effects of this gap are
exacerbated by similar patterns regarding income. In 2001, the average second or third
generation Latino family income was $32,300 and $34,100, respectively, compared
to $48,800 and $51,700 for second and third generation white American families. Similar gaps were evident at the individual
level: second generation Latinos earned $16,000, while their white counterparts
received $28,300; and third generation Latinos earned $10,100 less than third
generation whites.
These
characteristics help to explain why so few Latinos vote. In 2004, they were 9.3 percent of all
registered voters, a total that has increased to 10.6 percent in 2008. However, the number of Latinos expected to
vote in the 2008 U.S.
presidential election is 8.6 million, an increase from the 7.6 million who
voted in 2004. While the numbers of
active voters continue to increase, they are still underrepresented relative to
the total Latino population. In 2007, by
one credible estimate, Hispanics were 15.3 percent of the population but only
8.9 percent of the voters. In 1996,
Latinos constituted 6.2 percent of the voters and approximately 11 percent of
the population. This shows that the gap
between electoral participation and total population numbers persists, although
it continues to decrease. Because of
this persistent pattern and the demographics previously described, Latinos in
2004 accounted for only six percent of all voters even though they totaled
approximately 14 percent of the U.S.
population.
Beyond the Mutual
Backscratch: A New Model for Labor-Community Coalitions
By Amy Dean and Wade
Rathke
Labor historian David Montgomery once compared the George Meany era
of the AFL-CIO to a great snapping turtle, “hiding within its shell to shield
the working-class from contamination” and “snapping out” at those forces who
venture too close. But, when he became the AFL-CIO president in 1995, John
Sweeney announced that supporting “local coalition-building efforts with
community, religious, civil rights and other organizations” would become part
of labor’s organizing strategy. Today, collaboration with community groups is
the official policy of the AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and many individual unions.
Now,
however, some trade unionists are questioning this commitment, asking whether
the benefits are worth the costs. What
does labor get in return for the money and effort it puts into cultivating
community allies?
As labor activists
who have been involved in scores of community-labor coalitions, we think these
are legitimate questions. Many coalition
efforts may indeed be of questionable value, often vanishing with little or no
long-term effect. But we believe that
coalitions that are deliberately built to have a long-term impact on local and
regional communities are not only a vehicle for helping labor achieve its
objectives—they help to establish labor’s role as a community leader, serving
the interests of all working people.
The
benefits gained from forging coalitions cannot be measured merely on the basis
of new union members or rally turnout for collective bargaining campaigns. Rather, it requires a more expansive view of
labor’s responsibility (and opportunity) to champion working people’s interests
not just in the workplace realm, but across the whole range of arenas in which
their lives are implicated. In order to
do that we need to establish coalitions in which the partners coalesce around a
common long-term agenda, striving to meaningfully influence the local
political, economic, and social climate.
Conventional
coalitions-of-convenience may make only a limited contribution to short-term
labor interests. Solidifying long-term
power for working people requires the creation of much deeper, longer-lasting
coalitions that can vie for power. We
will discuss several aspects of this process based on our experiences in California and in the
South.
Labor’s
approach can’t just be transactional—“I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch
mine.” Individuals, constituencies, and
organizations are unlikely to make a permanent commitment to each other on the
basis of a temporary confluence of interests.
Of course, such short-term interests are important; but social alliances
are only likely to last if those immediate goals are seen as just one
expression of a broader set of shared values that reflect the long-term needs
of all. The emergence of the modern
labor movement in the 1930s illustrates why shared values matter.
The
building of a new labor movement in the 1930s has often been described in terms
of dramatic battles waged by industrial unions in the workplace. But these achievements rested on a greater
social vision, fueled by a broad alliance with progressive allies, and a
subterranean base of community organizing around common progressive values that
united their interests with those who were organizing in the workplace.
How Foreign-Owned
Auto Plants Remain Union-Free
By Laurie A. Graham
Only three of the 36 foreign-owned
auto plants in the United
States are unionized. This fact has contributed, perhaps more than
any single other factor, to the decline in wages, benefits and bargaining power
of workers at “the Big Three” (Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler)
represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW).
Understanding why the foreign-owned plants remain impervious to organizing
will prove crucial to reversing this decline.
In 1989, I worked
as a covert participant observer at Subaru Isuzu (SIA), a Japanese auto
transplant in Indiana. A few years after leaving SIA, I was involved
with a well-executed UAW campaign to organize that facility. It was nicely organized, lively, and
thoroughly thought out. (I was not new to the problems involved with
organizing—ten years prior, I had worked as a union organizer). While participating in the campaign, I talked
to several workers that I had known back in '89. Many were strongly pro-union while others
were strongly anti-union. Their opinions
often had more to do with their individual backgrounds, such as being raised in
an anti-union family, than with their actual experiences with or knowledge of
unions. The campaign was ultimately
unsuccessful, but not due to any lack of commitment on the union’s part. Since then, I have come to believe that
unless transplant workers become so desperate that each employee has a real
fear of losing his or her job due to some common experience such as a failing
economy, most will continue to respond in the same manner—they will call upon
the union for help when unhappy, but will reject the union when the company
"promises" to meet their demands.
It is lucky for them that the union has established high wages in their
industry, however what they don't seem to realize is that without the support
of new workers, those high wages will eventually disappear.
Foreign-Owned Auto Companies
As
foreign-owned auto companies continue to expand in the U.S., the Big Three are
struggling. U.S. auto employment reached a peak
of 1,313,600 workers in 2000 and then dropped 16% by 2005, a loss of 215,500
jobs. An additional 28,000 jobs were lost in 2006. (According to the U.S. Department of
Commerce, the U.S.
automotive sector lost 243,000 jobs between 2000 and 2006). Japanese, German, and South Korean companies
employ well over 60,000 U.S.
workers.
The wage gap
between union and nonunion auto workers continues to decrease as foreign auto
companies try to keep wages competitive in order to keep the union out. As the Big Three continue to struggle
economically, the union has negotiated a two-tiered wage agreement which will
also lead to narrowing that gap. For
example, according to a Detroit Free
Press article, the hourly wage for General Motors (GM) workers in 2007 was
$27. Under the new contract, a portion
of the new hires will be reclassified as non-core workers and may be paid as
low as $14 an hour. Honda's workers now
earn $24.25 per hour, Nissan workers are paid $24 in Mississippi
and $26 in Tennessee,
and Hyundai pays $14 to start which grows to $21 after two years on the job.
The Big Three have traditionally had much stronger benefits than any of the
transplants, including: defined pensions (instead of 401ks); health care
coverage for both retirees and current workers; generous tuition benefits for
both workers and their families; and greater time away from work (in the form
of more paid holidays and vacation time).
Working Alone: The
Erosion of Solidarity in Today’s Workplace
By Charley Richardson
Introduction
Solidarity forms the bedrock of the
labor movement, but there is remarkably little discussion of it—what it really
is, where it comes from, and how to build it. A successful labor movement
depends on solidarity that is more than just an abstraction printed on plaques
and in mission statements and extolled in songs at the end of meetings.
Solidarity, in its practicality and concreteness, is at the core of unionism
and collective power, and it is critical to any successful struggle for the improvement
of working people’s lives.
Solidarity has
always faced significant challenges in the form of racism, sexism, and other
“isms” of division that penetrate into the workplace. Management initiatives
such as two-tier wage and benefit systems, and productivity/safety/merit
bonuses—particularly when combined with the ideologies of competition and
individualism—serve to further undermine solidarity.
Today, solidarity
faces new and largely unacknowledged challenges that are aimed at its very
seedbeds—the workplace and the work process. Management is engaged in a
concerted (and largely successful) effort to change work processes in ways that
undermine the creation of connections and networks in the workplace, rendering
those seedbeds incapable of nurturing the bumper crop of solidarity that is
necessary to build a thriving movement.
As a result of new
technologies and the reorganization of work (including speed-up, downsizing,
standardization, and job combination, as well as formal restructuring programs such
as lean, kaizen, Six Sigma, and the Toyota Production System) workers are
increasingly working alone, isolated from their co-workers. This isolation, in
turn, hinders the formation of “dense networks of interconnection” which are
critical to the transformation from individual to community that serves as the
basis for workplace-based collective action—what we would call organic
solidarity and what others may call social capital.
The
discussion in this article is based on three fundamental tenets:
●Solidarity is, at its core,
dependent on robust, personal, and deep networks of connections among workers;
●These connections are generally
created in the course of regular interaction at the workplace and within the
work process; and
●New technologies and innovations with
respect to the organization of work—fueled by management’s interest in changing
work processes to enhance their productivity, profitability, and control—are
creating a workplace experience that increasingly fails to provide opportunities
for social networking and the development of strong social connections among
workers.
Solidarity and Work
Workers who spend eight or more
hours together, five or more days a week under commonly imposed conditions will
generally find both the opportunity and the need for interaction. Their shared experiences
(of accomplishments and oppressions) create a sense of connection, mutual
support, and collectivity.
As a shipfitter in
the 1970s and 1980s, I bummed cigarettes, talked sports, complained (about the
cold, the welding smoke, and the bosses), and exchanged social support with
co-workers with whom I spent more waking time than with my family. I relied on
co-workers to help me out, give me advice, and cover for me. Together we
created, we suffered, we produced, we complained, and we accomplished. These
interactions tied us together as we faced common conditions, struggles, and
oppressions. The walkout described at the beginning of this article was a wildcat of workplace connections—we walked
out to support Dan, though we ultimately won improved health and safety conditions,
while increasing the respect for union power.
3 Responses to “The
Sound of One Hand Clapping: Labor’s Silence on Union Media Democracy”*
By Fred Glass, Peter
Hogness, and Esther Kaplan
*The original article by Martin Fishgold appeared in the
Summer 2008 issue of New Labor Forum.
Fred Glass:
It's difficult to disagree with Martin Fishgold's
premise that most labor media outlets do not measure up to the task of
rebuilding the American labor movement. His specific critique of the AFL-CIO
for failing to create "a national labor newspaper, radio program,
television program, or a national labor media electronic network to counteract
the right wing's media assault" could be extended to the international
unions, which have more resources. At
the grassroots level, greater support for democratically-produced labor media
can indeed contribute to union activism.
Such efforts should move higher up the union priority list.
Where I part paths with Fishgold's
analysis is his omission of context, both on the "labor" and the
"media" sides of "labor media," in explaining their
failures. Fishgold's tendency to
overgeneralize doesn't help us get at the complexity of the problems labor
communicators face in talking with union members and the public.
Peter
Hogness:
Martin Fishgold’s description of
the state of U.S.
labor media is on target in many
ways, and he deserves some credit for raising these themes over the
years. But the picture he
paints is over-simplified, and the article
is little help in developing a strategy for change.
Fishgold wants labor media to be
different in many ways: more militant, more political, more creative. He wants
to see more analysis, more news coverage, more debate. And he wants to see it
expand—more publications, more pages, more use of radio, television, and new
media.
All these are needed, but they don’t add
up to a simple need for “more democracy.” The weaknesses in today’s labor media
reflect many different problems of the U.S. labor movement—political,
organizational, financial—and to lump them all together under this one label
won’t help us figure out how to solve them.
Esther
Kaplan:
I’ve had the lucky experience of
editing a paper for a local (Communications Workers Local 1180) whose
leadership allowed me, in my very first issue, to profile a failed unionization
drive and, later on, to write about the history of racism and sexism in the
international union and to devote significant real estate to topics that did
not narrowly affect our members, such as the role of Iraqi trade unionists in
resisting the U.S. occupation. So I know firsthand that such things are
possible in the labor press. On the other hand, I occasionally got pushback,
such as when my coverage of our members’ employer—the mayor of New York City—was deemed
too critical at a delicate point during contract negotiations. Or when a
Central Labor Council (CLC) official excoriated me for airing dirty laundry
when I wrote about the scandal surrounding Brian McLaughlin—the former head of
the New York City CLC who was indicted in 2006 on 43 counts of embezzlement,
fraud, and bribery. And I’ve heard countless stories, far worse, from my
colleagues in the labor media. So I have a sense of what most labor editors are
up against, forced, in Martin Fishgold’s words, “to march in lockstep with
union leadership;” to function not as journalists but as “their house public
relations staff.”
Martin
Fishgold replies:
Thanks to my three colleagues for
their thoughtful responses to my article.
Other than Peter’s final ministerial paragraph instructing me on
humility, and the fact that the responders mostly ignored statements by voices
other than my own, their points were well taken.
It was Ed Ott,
executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council, and not me, who
said of unions and union media, “It would help us with the general public if we
covered ourselves honestly, warts and all;” and it was Janine Jackson, research
director and radio program host of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR),
who stated that “the closed, insular nature of the labor press, their
insistence on serving as ‘house organs,’ represents a huge, missed
opportunity.”
As for the recent
record of the International Labor Communications Association: that organization
did a good job of bringing the story of New
Orleans to the labor media. But what else has it done recently to advance
media democracy? Its website contains nothing about media issues, or what it
means to be a journalist; it doesn’t reach out to progressive media here and
abroad; and it functions as an uncritical union press service, as does the Workers
Independent News. Both are beholden to unions for their operating money.
Working-Cass Solider
By Perry O’Brien
On
September 11th, 2001, I was on the Eagle
Tower obstacle course at Fort Benning, Georgia. It was my first week of
Basic Training. Like the other new Army recruits I was red-faced and sweaty, my
head recently shaven, awkward in a baggy uniform and new boots. We had spent
the day navigating the challenges of the five-story tower, climbing ropes and
cargo nets and learning to rappel down a sheer wall. These tasks were completed
to the already familiar soundtrack of screaming drill sergeants, who offered a
constant barrage of humiliating insults as we struggled up and down the tower.
Halfway through the morning, however, there was a palpable change in the
training atmosphere. The drill sergeants had seemed distracted, the yelling
rare and half-hearted. Several times I noticed impromptu gatherings of
whispering sergeants and officers, all of which contributed to an uncanny sense
that something huge was taking place, something beyond our understanding and
pay grade. Among the recruits, rumors began to spread. Someone had heard a
drill sergeant say "terrorists," someone else had heard something
about a disaster in New York.
No one had the courage to directly ask what was happening; at only a week into
our training, we were used to being kept in the dark.
Finally, we were loaded
up into a cattle car and brought back to base, then ordered to stand in
formation while our company commander addressed us. Visibly shaken, the captain
explained that the World
Trade Center
and the Pentagon had been the targets of two successful terrorist attacks.
There were few details, but our commander warned us to be ready for anything.
As of this morning, our country was at war.
That
night, I lay awake in my cot, terrified. I had joined the Army hoping to get
medical training and, at worst, a deployment to Eastern
Europe with a peacekeeping force. Real war had seemed
mythological. But now I was in training to invade a country I knew nothing
about, to fight a mysterious enemy. How had I gotten myself into this?
Only
a year earlier, I never could have imagined I'd be in the Army. I had grown up
on an island off the coast of Southern
Maine, a child of two liberal, artistic activists. My
mother was a children's book author and illustrator, active in diversity work
and conflict resolution. My father was a musician and organizer for the
Democratic Party, funding these passions by working as a boat builder, lead
detector, disaster damage inspector, and countless other jobs. I was a wild,
defiant kid, and my parents homeschooled me after it was clear I couldn't deal
with the structure of a traditional high school education. At age 18, I was a
blue-haired punk, hanging out in downtown Portland,
occupied primarily with drugs and petty crime when I wasn't studying philosophy
at the University of Southern Maine (USM). By the end of my second year at USM,
however, I felt a powerful need for change. Much of this stemmed from an
increasingly uncomfortable feeling of traction in my life. While most of my
friends were leaving town or getting jobs, I felt like an aimless
pseudo-intellectual without any real experience or job skills.
Economic Prospects:
Green Investments and the Path to Prosperity
By Robert Pollin
Can policies
designed to fight global warming also be an engine of economic growth and job
creation in the United
States?
Support for this idea has grown exponentially over the past year. For example, a March 26, 2008 New York Times feature article reported
that, “Presidential candidates talk about the promise of ‘green-collar’ jobs—an
economy with millions of workers installing solar panels, weatherizing homes,
brewing biofuels, building hybrid cars, and erecting giant wind turbines.”
Amid such
high-profile claims, it is easy to forget how completely this position departs
from what had been the received wisdom, in the New York Times itself and elsewhere, that implementing strong
environmental standards necessarily entails serious economic sacrifices. Is there a trade-off between fighting global
warming and promoting economic prosperity?
Unfortunately, the answer is an unresounding “it depends.”
The major cause of
global warming is the emission of carbon into the atmosphere that results from
energy produced through burning fossil fuels—oil, coal, and natural gas. It is clear that to fight global warming, we
have to dramatically reduce our reliance on these three fossil fuels, building
support for conservation and renewable energy.
If managed
properly, ending dependence on fossil fuels and building a clean energy economy
could indeed generate millions of good jobs.
But a clean energy transformation will require high levels of public
investments in both energy conservation measures—including building
retrofitting and public transportation—as well as renewable energy sources,
such as wind, solar power, and biomass fuels.
The federal government will also have to impose some form of tax or
absolute limit on the burning of fossil fuels, to place the costs (of
constantly spewing carbon into our atmosphere) on everyone.
Lower Carbon Emissions and Higher Gas Prices
The
mechanisms for raising the costs of carbon emissions are straightforward and
are gaining support in mainstream political circles. One approach is to impose a “carbon tax” on
consumers of oil, natural gas, and coal.
A related idea is to establish legal limits for the amount of carbon
that can be released into the environment through burning oil, natural gas, and
coal.
The U.S. Congress
has been considering so-called “cap-and-trade” proposals for a few years now,
which would set increasing absolute limits on total carbon emissions. Energy companies would receive permits from
the government establishing how much fossil fuel energy they could
produce. Firms could exceed their quota
defined by their permits, but only by purchasing permits from companies which
don’t feel compelled to exceed their quota.
Businesses could therefore earn profits just by being greener than their
competitors.
The most recently
debated cap-and-trade proposal, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act,
would require a series of mandated reductions of carbon emissions so that by
2050, they would fall to 70 percent below the 2005 level. But thus far this measure, like its
predecessors, has not been able to muster a veto-proof level of support in the
Senate, despite the enthusiasm of many Republicans and Democrats.
Of course, the
multinational energy giants helped to block passage, as did the Bush
administration. Yet oil company greed
aside, we have to recognize that either the carbon tax or cap-and-trade system
will mean higher energy prices for consumers.
Such measures are designed to encourage conservation and clean energy
alternatives.
Caught in the Web
By Kim Phillips-Fein
Predatory Lenders
As the subprime mortgage crisis
unfolded, the defenders of the financial industry argued that no matter what
problems they might cause, subprime mortgages were actually a good thing
because they expanded the housing market by extending credit to people who
otherwise wouldn’t be able to buy homes.
But in fact, according to the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), a
North Carolina-based organization that has been at the forefront of advocacy
and research on the crisis, only nine percent of subprime loans made between
1998 and 2006 went to people who were first-time homebuyers. The rest must have been taken out by people
who wanted to buy a bigger house or to refinance their mortgage. Far from expanding home ownership, the ultimate
effect of the subprime mortgage crisis could be to reduce the number of
Americans who own their homes over the next two years thanks to the subprime
crisis, with an effect that will ripple throughout the entire economy. Check out http://www.responsiblelending.org/pdfs/Net-Drain-in-Home-Ownership.pdf
for the complete study.
The
organization’s website includes links to a wealth of reports (by the CRL and
other groups) and even video links on all aspects of the mortgage
meltdown—everything from its likely impact on early childhood education, as
children of families who have lost their homes due to foreclosure frequently
will need to move school districts, which is in turn associated with poor
academic and behavioral performance, to the average decline of $5,000 that the
owners of homes in neighborhoods experiencing foreclosures are likely to see—as
well as proposals for how to help bring relief to borrowers and critiques of
the policy suggestions coming out of Washington.
The
CRL also criticizes other kinds of predatory lending like payday, tax refund
anticipation, and car title loans, all of which are forms of debt that target
low-income people, snaring them in financial traps that can seem impossible to
escape. Take, for example, the case of
Lisa Engelkins, a 33-year old single mother who makes less than $8 an hour
working as a temp in Winston-Salem,
North Carolina. Eager to find a way to have a little extra
cash without borrowing it from her parents, she took out a payday loan for
$300. Because she didn’t understand how
the system worked, she came back two weeks later and took out another—while the
fees on the first one began to pile up.
Soon, she owed more than $1,200. Engelkins isn’t alone—payday loan
companies make $4.2 billion a year off of high fees. Even the Pentagon has criticized the payday
lenders that crop up near Army bases, preying on young soldiers who have little
experience with debt. For more, check out the site at http://www.responsiblelending.org/.
American Politics X:
Polarization and it Discontents
Reviewed by Robert
Andersen
The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America
By Ronald Brownstein
Penguin Press, 2007
Polarized America:
The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches
By Nolan McCarty,
Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal
MIT Press, 2006
Red and Blue Nation?
Volume 1: Characteristics and Causes of America’s Polarized Politics
Volume 2: Consequences and Correction of America’s Polarized Politics
Edited by Pietro S.
Nivola and David W. Brady
Brookings Institution
Press, 2006 (Vol. 1); 2008 (Vol. 2)
As of 1968, a sinister force has
seeped into American political life. Call it the X factor. For the past 40 years,
American politics has wandered in the desert, driven by a dark energy. First
made manifest with the collapse of the twin towers of the Reform Tradition—the
Great Society presidency of Lyndon Johnson and the Dominion of the Democratic
Party—and the emergence of a Right Turn Polity predicated upon “positive
polarization,” that energy has brought the Republic to the brink of the
unthinkable.
The
succession of failed presidencies, constitutional crises, rhetorical
revolutions, populist insurrections, and polarized power grabs is emblematic of
a politics reaping the whirlwind. Now the Right Turn Polity is itself rubble,
and the country is left holding the bag, endless war abroad and a gross society
at home. Four decades later, America
is back where it started with a crisis of 1968 proportions.
The
potential for a regime change makes this election year fraught with portent and
consequence. To paraphrase 2008 U.S.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, we now face a fierce urgency as
we confront a gaping political void. So much is at stake. The 1968 election turned
on anger points and wedge issues. The 2008 election will turn on the anger
wedged in the electorate as a result of the sinister forces governing the Bush
Presidency.
The eerie symmetry of 1968´s Democratic implosion and
2008´s Republican debacle suggests that America has arrived at its moment
of truth. America
is no longer secure in its national treasure, its political stability and
longevity. Certainly the Bush administration has given us a preview of what
happens when a despotism of singular blindness and provocation seizes power.
American Politics X is a subject approached with no little trepidation.
It comes almost as a relief, then, to consider these books
on polarization: a thick volume brilliantly written; a thin volume keenly
argued; and two volumes of essays and commentaries of the highest caliber.
Although
Brownstein, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, is alarmed at the current state of
politics, enough to pen a book entitled The Second Civil War, he draws
back from the X factor. Something “unprecedented” is going on—“deeply and
closely divided is an unprecedented and explosive combination”(p. 19)—but he is
loath to follow his argument to its minatory conclusion.
Brownstein has delivered a masterful narrative, not merely
a pleasure to read but a stellar analysis of how we got to where we are today.
“The central obstacle to more effective action against our most pressing
problems,” he writes, “is an unrelenting polarization of American politics that
has divided Washington
and the country into hostile, even irreconcilable camps” (p. 11). Wishing to
restore the Reform Tradition to “pragmatic” authority, Brownstein makes a
powerful argument for a postpartisan America.
Reforming Global
Sweatshop Reform
Reviewed by Jane
Collins
Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational America
By Gay W. Seidman
Russell Sage
Foundation, 2007
Unraveling the Garment Industry: Transnational Activism and Women’s
Work
By Ethel Brooks
University of Minnesota Press, 2007
Textures of Struggle: The Emergence of Resistance among Garment Workers
in Thailand
By Piya Pangsapa
ILR Press, 2007
Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone: Gender and Politics in Sri Lanka
By Sandya Hewamanne
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008
In a time when the
escalating horrors of the Iraq war, the quagmire in Afghanistan, and fears of
global recession haunt us, issues of global sweatshops may have moved far down
everyone’s “top ten list” of political concerns—perhaps a cause for relief
among the big labels and branded retailers of clothing and consumer goods who
continue to beat “last year’s price” even in the face of oil-price-driven
inflation. Fortunately, academics and
activists who have spent time in research and action on these issues are less
fickle than the popular media. As a
result, 2007-08 has seen the publication of a spate of intriguing new books on
shop floor politics and transnational organizing. These books might be considered the forward
edge of a “third wave” of writing on global sweatshops. The first wave accompanied the dramatic
movements of U.S.
capital abroad in the 1970s as global institutions forged new rules and firms
adopted new strategies in the wake of oil shocks. These early works traced the emergence of a
“new international division of labor” and documented the making of new
proletarians (most often women) in electronics and garment manufacture in the
global South. The rise of the global
justice movement and anti-sweatshop activism in the mid-1990s prompted a second
wave of scholarship, focused on the way in which two decades of neoliberal
policy at the national and international level had eviscerated opportunities
for worker organizing and propelled a race to the bottom in working conditions.
These works also documented significant new forms of transnational
activism. The latest round of books
seeks to improve upon earlier work.
These accounts are explicitly critical of the frameworks used to portray
developing world workers, particularly the tendency to deny them agency and
complexity; they also critique transnational organizing strategies that vest
too much control in northern actors and that are too focused on consumption
practices at the expense of conditions on the shop floor and in workers’
communities.
Sociologist Gay W.
Seidman, in Beyond the Boycott,
tackles the activism question. She poses
the following dilemma: “in a competitive global environment, when corporations
can move or outsource production and states cannot be counted on, what
regulatory mechanisms can be put in place to enforce labor protections?” (p. 23).
To answer this question, she analyzes three purportedly successful
instances in which consumer pressure has sought to implement some version of
independent monitoring in order to improve conditions for workers. The first case is that of the Sullivan
principles, a voluntary code of conduct adopted by many corporations doing
business in South Africa
in the 1970s and 1980s and one that has served as a model for subsequent codes
of conduct and monitoring schemes throughout the world. The second case is Rugmark, a labeling
program designed in the 1990s to certify that Indian carpets were not made with
child labor. The third is the experience
of COVERCO—a Guatemalan NGO that engaged in human rights monitoring in that
country in the 1980s, during the period of repression and civil war, and that
turned to labor monitoring in Guatemala’s
free trade zones with the transition to democracy in the mid-1990s. Seidman conducted field research in each of
these sites, interviewing key protagonists in order to document the history and
impacts of campaigns.
Nursing the Wounds of
Corporatization
Reviewed by Eileen
Boris
Daring to Care: American Nursing and Second-Wave Feminism
By Susan Gelfand
Malka
University of Illinois Press, 2007
Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines
By Suzanne Gordon
Cornell University Press, 2007
Safety in Numbers: Nurse-to-Patient Ratios and the Future of Health
Care
By Suzanne Gordon,
John Buchanan, and Tanya Bretherton
Cornell University Press, 2008
The public holds
them in the highest esteem. But America’s
registered nurses (RNs) remain caught between professional aspirations,
gendered expectations, and a health care system that places hospital profits
over patient needs. Neoliberal restructuring of the medical sector has
intensified their workload and eroded their authority, threatening the
occupational position that nurses struggled so hard to achieve during the twentieth
century. During the last two decades, however, thousands have signed union
cards. Nurses have demanded the working conditions necessary to fulfill the
public trust, despite Supreme Court and National Labor Relations Board
decisions that have allowed employers to reclassify many frontline nurses as
supervisors and so deny their right to fair labor standards and collective
bargaining. The national RN movement has shown that competency and skills
gained through individual education and experience are compatible with, and
indeed may flourish better through, collective action.
Campaigns for safe
nurse-to-patient staffing ratios have publicized the well-documented finding
that better working conditions lead to better care. Nurses have confronted
management strategies that seek to wrestle ward control away from them by
substituting standardized “patient acuity” programs for bedside judgment. They
have resisted speed-up and stretch-out much like the textile workers of old.
They have rejected demands to work off the clock. As craft workers, they also
have objected to replacing their skilled labor with workers with less training
and experience.
Behind corporate
assaults on nurses’ control have lurked old stereotypes that women will
sacrifice their own health to care for others, whether or not paid for their
efforts. As Suzanne Gordon explains in Life Support, a powerful portrait of
three nurses at Boston’s Beth Israel (BI) hospital during the early 1990s, “We
are returning here to the kind of pernicious stereotypes of a woman is a woman
is a woman, a nurse is a nurse is a nurse” (p. 305). In such a world, it is
easy to overlook the self-determination of nurses, who, next to flight
attendants, most benefited from the feminist revaluation of their labor. In defending
nurses against their foes, it also is hard to remember that the prestige of
nurses too often has come from distinctions of race, class, and education that
elite nurses have emphasized to separate RNs from Licensed Practical Nurses
(LPNs), orderlies, and home aides.
With nurses among
the most militant unionists today, it’s time to place RNs squarely within the
purview of labor studies. These books analyze their work, well-being,
education, and perspectives. Susan Gelfand Malka traces the impact of “second-wave”
feminism on RN education and work culture. Praising the nurse as “the last
professional in the new corporate world of health care” (p. 168), this nurse
turned historian offers an optimistic story, a tale of post-WWII modernization.
Hospital-run diploma schools, which socialized white, unmarried women into “selfless
untiring service to the ill” (p. 39), not only provided cheap labor but also
reinforced deference to authority through sequestered dorm life, hospital
rounds, and graduation rituals. The 1960s saw a decisive removal of nursing
education to community colleges and universities, opening the work to a more
diverse group of students, including men, and expanding specializations.
The new feminism
generated contradictory impacts. Women rejected women’s work, like nursing, for
men’s jobs, like doctoring. The nurse represented female subordination. But
actual nurses demanded equal treatment and claimed a practice beyond “the
physician’s hand.” Many found validation in difference feminism, which recognized
the worth of women’s labors. Inspired by theorist Carol Gilligan, nurses
replaced an allegiance to duty with an ethic of care that prized
interdependence over autonomy.
Democratizing Labor
from Within
Reviewed by Thomas
Greven
U.S. Labor
in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, the Promise of
Revival from Below
By Kim Moody
Verso, 2007
On May 1, 2008,
100 labor-friendly scholars wrote a public letter to SEIU President Andy Stern,
advising him against placing the union’s third largest local, United Healthcare
Workers (UHW), under trusteeship. They argued that UHW’s dissent with various
SEIU policies was in keeping with legitimate democratic form. This was the
second source of bad news in short order for the union that generally serves as
the present-day model for successful organizing and politicking. At the April
2008 Labor Notes conference,
disruptive protests by a coordinated group of SEIU members, who were incensed
about the actions of the California Nurses Association (“rent-a-mob,” quipped labor
activist Steve Early), resulted in one death. But in spite of the SEIU’s
growing internal dissent and public concern about some of its practices, it
remains the fastest-growing union in the U.S., one of only two unions of the
Change to Win Federation (CTW) to have grown after the split. It must be doing
something right, and one may ask whether unions that want to successfully cope
with all the economic, political, and demographic challenges facing labor today,
not to mention their own organizational inertia, still have time for democracy.
Kim Moody emphatically contends that unions have no choice but to embrace
internal democratic practices. Democracy, he argues, is central to meaningful
union renewal because power merely based on union density, as in the
market-focused SEIU approach, is too shallow.
A long-time
critic of business unionism, with his 1988 book An Injury to All blaming the unions themselves for their decline,
Kim Moody is predictably pleased that many unions have embraced the “strategic
choice” perspective and now focus on organizing and growth. While not
discounting structural factors, which Moody elaborates upon as well, the current
consensus is that organized labor has played a role in its own demise and that
the development of new strategies can improve its fate. But is there really
“movement back in the labor movement,” per the motto of the Detroit-based
monthly Labor Notes (Moody’s old
stomping grounds before he began focusing on teaching and writing)? No, says
Moody, “democratic social movement unionism” is almost nowhere to be seen.
Moody delivers an
indictment of the “bureaucratic corporate unionism” in both post-split federations,
but most starkly in the SEIU. While some elements of social movement culture have
been adopted, he argues that the SEIU is now run like a corporation:
centralization trumps the traditionally localized autonomy, thus staff-driven
organizing trumps local membership-based organizing. The market-share strategy,
focusing on organizing all employers in local labor markets, has reorganized
locals along jurisdictional lines. Mega locals such as UHW have been created,
at times through forced mergers, resulting in further centralization. A
top-down corporate culture with entrepreneurial leadership styles and an
emphasis on staff-driven organizing has emerged. The union’s more centralized vision,
Moody argues, may ultimately lead to a new form of sectoral and national
relationship-building beyond the workplace. Unions are forming partnerships
with employers, with the union providing added value to companies facing
today’s competitive environment. Moody argues that this system ultimately leads
to deal-making that produces weaker contracts. It is made possible by the distance
between union leaders and members, and by a lack of union democracy.
Out of the Mainstream: Books
and Films You May Have Missed
By Matt
Witt
BOOKS
Beyond the Green Zone
By Dahr Jamail
Haymarket, 2007
An independent journalist without
the constraints of “embedded” reporters has made repeated trips to Iraq since the U.S. invasion to give a voice to the
civilians who are there and to investigate official government claims.
Black Glasses Like Clark Kent
By Terese Svoboda
Graywolf, 2007
A man who served as a military prison
guard during the occupation of Japan
after World War II began suffering from suicidal depression when news of Abu
Ghraib hit the airwaves. Before he died, he asked his writer niece to tell his
story.
Break Through
By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
Houghton Mifflin, 2007
The authors of the provocative
essay, “The Death of Environmentalism,” argue that the environmental movement
can’t build a worldwide political majority for sustainable economic and
environmental policies if it is seen as trying to stop poor people from
improving their standard of living. Environmental groups should not focus on
campaigns to save the whales or the rainforest, and unions should not focus on
protecting old-economy jobs, they argue. Instead, they should join forces to
push all-out for massive public investment in new forms of green economic
development.
Class and the Color Line
By Joseph Gerteis
Duke University Press, 2007
In the late 19th century,
the Knights of Labor and the Populist movement sometimes built interracial
coalitions and sometimes didn’t, depending on local economic and political
conditions.
Daring to Care
By Susan Gelfand Malka
University of Illinois
Press, 2007
A professor and former nurse
examines how changes in feminist thought since the early 1960s have affected
nurses’ goals and expectations.
Driven Out
By Jean Pfaelzer
Random House, 2007
At a time when immigration is a hot
topic in America, this study details the systematic campaign of terror waged
against Chinese immigrants in the western U.S. in the last half of the 1800s,
often by white working men whose anger was fueled both by fear of being
undercut by cheap labor and resentment of the growing power of big
corporations.
For Jobs and Freedom
By Robert H. Zieger
University Press of Kentucky, 2007
This 233-page review of the history
of African-American workers and organized labor since the Civil War finds a
frequent pattern of exclusion, although more black workers became part of
integrated organizations with the rise of the industrial unions of the CIO.
Free Lunch
By David Cay Johnston
Portfolio, 2007
For decades, corporate-funded
politicians have railed against “entitlements” for the working poor, the middle-class,
and the elderly. A long-time New York
Times reporter provides chapter and verse about how the real welfare in the
U.S.
is being collected by big corporations and the rich at everyone else’s expense.
Greening Your Office
By Jon Clift and Amanda Cuthbert
Chelsea Green, 2007
Practical tips on reducing contributions to global warming range from
converting to truly paperless operations to cutting down on highly polluting
air travel.
Keeping the Promise?: The
Debate Over Charter Schools
Rethinking Schools, 2008
Charter schools promised to jumpstart new models for education reform
at a time when many school systems have not been able to respond with
appropriate urgency to children’s needs. Most charter schools are smaller than
traditional public schools. Some are operated by profit-making chains. Nearly
all are nonunion. This collection of essays examines whether they are
fulfilling their promise, and what lessons they are teaching about education
policy.
Linked Labor Histories
By Aviva Chomsky
Duke University Press, 2008
New England and Colombia
are used as case studies to show that globalization is not new, that its long
existence is a major reason for the wealth gap around the world, and that U.S.
unions have historically sided with capital against workers in other countries.
On the Global Waterfront
By Suzan Erem and E. Paul
Durrenberger
Monthly Review Press, 2008
Black longshoremen in Charleston, South
Carolina, generated international support as they
fought to preserve their union despite vicious physical and legal attacks.
Stand Up Straight
By Robert Creamer
Seven Locks Press, 2007
A long-time political organizer provides nearly 600 pages of thoughtful
advice for campaigners of all kinds about how to communicate and organize
effectively for progressive issues and candidates.
Swim Against the Current
By Jim Hightower with Susan DeMarco
Wiley, 2008
The populist with a sense of humor chronicles grassroots activists
across the U.S.
who have made a difference in their communities.
The Age of Dreaming
By Nina Revoyr
Akashic, 2008
What was it like for an Asian-American
to work in Hollywood
when the film industry was being born? This novel is as dignified and gradually
revealing as its main character, a Japanese star in the days of silent film.
The Associates
By Richard Rayner
W.W. Norton, 2008
Domination of American economic and
political life by a corporate elite goes back a long way. This account profiles
the no-holds-barred greed of four men who dominated the development of California in the 1800s—Leland
Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins.
The Big Squeeze
By Steven Greenhouse
Knopf, 2008
One of the few labor reporters left
at an American newspaper, the New York
Times reporter draws on years of interviews to paint a human picture of
declining living standards and workers’ rights. He contrasts the Wal-Marting of
the economy with the high road he says employers such as Costco have followed.
He also proposes reforms for the country, corporations, and unions to ease the
squeeze that most workers are facing.
The Great Strikes of 1877
Edited by David O. Stowell
University of Illinois
Press, 2008
Essays by six academics look at
different aspects of historic uprisings that took place across the U.S.
in 1877 and often had serious racial overtones.
The No Asshole Rule
By Robert Sutton
Warner Business Books, 2007
Corporations, agencies, and other
organizations should establish and enforce explicit policies against abusive
behavior, especially by those who have power over others.
The Squandering of America
By Robert Kuttner
Knopf, 2007
One of the leading economics
writers explains how the policies of both Republicans and Democrats have hurt
working people, and proposes alternatives that new leaders could adopt.
The Surgeons
By Charles R. Morris
W.W. Norton, 2007
A journalist spent months inside
the heart center at one of the top hospitals in New York, observing the work of leading
surgeons and, in the process, learns firsthand about the flaws of the health
care system in which they operate.
The Worst Hard Time
By Timothy Egan
Houghton Mifflin, 2007
Few in America realize that the
destruction of Dust Bowl communities in the 1930s was a man-made disaster, not
primarily a natural one, as the land was torn up for new crops produced with
mechanization, leaving it vulnerable to wind storms. Roosevelt’s
New Deal brought farmers together to try to restore and protect the land. This
book tells the story of people who stayed and survived rather than making the
trek to California.
Tree Barking
By Nesta Rovina
Heyday, 2008
A home health therapist schooled in South
Africa and Israel
provides an unvarnished memoir of her work with desperately poor county clients
in northern California.
Unafraid
By Jeff Golden
www.Unafraidthebook.com,
2008
At a time when a new national figure came from nowhere to contend for
his party’s presidential nomination by tapping into many Americans’ yearning
for a break from conventional politics, this novel evokes the author’s vision
of what is possible. His starting point—what if the bullet fired at John F.
Kennedy in Dallas
in 1963 only wounded him, and in the process gave him a new willingness to take
risks to implement progressive policies and an intense sense of urgency? How
might the years since then have been different?
Women Behind Bars
By Silja J.A. Talvi
Seal Press, 2007
The number of women in prison has
tripled in the past 30 years. This thorough report by an investigative
journalist explores why, while telling the human stories of those affected.
Workplace Chemistry
By Meg A. Bond
University Press of New England, 2007
A professor spent years consulting
for a New England chemical manufacturer that
was grappling with organizational change to promote diversity and combat
discrimination in all its forms.
FILMS
Freeheld
www.freeheld.com, 2007
As a woman who has served for 25 years as a police officer in Ocean County, New
Jersey, is dying of cancer, county politicians refuse
to exercise their power to pass on her pension to her female partner, as it
would be to a male husband. The male officers she has worked with lead a
community movement that forces a policy change. This 38-minute Oscar winner for
short documentary is a powerful tool for provoking discussion about the rights
of same-sex domestic partners.
Outsourced
www.outsourcedthemovie.com,
2007
This romantic comedy follows a young “fulfillment executive” in Seattle who is sent to India to train workers who will be
taking over the work that the team he once supervised used to do. In the
process, he falls in love, learns something about Indian culture as well as his
own, and finds out that Indians too are subject to the whims of global capital.
Secrecy
www.secrecyfilm.com, 2007
A dispassionate, 87-minute documentary interviews intelligence and
military insiders as well as outside watchdogs on the question of how to
balance the public’s need for information to make democratic decisions and
agencies’ desire to maintain secrecy.
Superheroes
www.superheroesthemovie.com,
2007
This feature film takes the viewer inside the head of a returning Iraq
war veteran whose wounds—both physical and psychological—dominate his life even
as he tries to make a new friend back home.
War Made Easy
www.warmadeeasythemovie.org,
2007
A 73-minute documentary, this film collects in one place virtually all
of the key video clips from U.S. presidents from Lyndon Johnson through Bush
the Second that show Republicans and Democrats alike lying to the public to
justify the launching and prolonging of wars. By juxtaposing nearly identical
clips from media coverage of war after war, the film exposes the pattern of
government-media collaboration to mislead, cheerlead, attack or ignore critics,
and then insist that withdrawal would cause more damage than continuing the war
indefinitely.