Throng protests “right to shirk” in Indianapolis

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

National Right to Shirk Act?

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) urges a federal “right to shirk” law to limit free bargaining, and asks you to be a “sledgehammer” against “forced unionism” — something that doesn’t exist.⁶

Sources

1. ‘Indiana state House approves right-to-work bill’ by James B. Kelleher, Reuters, 2012-01-25

The House approved the law by a 54-to-44 margin, even though five Republicans joined Democratic lawmakers to oppose it.

The state Senate voted 28 to 22 in favor of the measure, with nine Republicans joining all 13 Democrats in voting against it.

3. Universal Declaration of Human Rights

4. ‘“Right to Work” Laws: Get the Facts’ – Minnesota AFL-CIO

A “right to work” law is a state law that stops employers and employees from negotiating an agreement – also known as a union security clause – that requires all workers who receive the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement to pay their share of the costs of representing them. Right to Work laws say that unions must represent every eligible employee, whether he or she pays dues or not. In other words, “Right to Work” laws allow workers to pay nothing and still get all the benefits of union membership.

“Right to Work” laws aren’t fair to dues-paying members. If a worker who is represented by a union and doesn’t pay dues is fired illegally, the union must use its time and money to defend him or her, even if that requires going through a costly, time-consuming legal process. Since the union represents everyone, everyone benefits, so everyone should share in the costs of providing these services. Amazingly, nonmembers who are represented by a union can even sue the union is they think it has not represented them well enough!

5. ‘The Duty of Fair Representation’ – UE (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America)

Throughout the years a legal principle has been developed by the National Labor Relations Board called “the duty of fair representation” (DFR). This legal principle quite simply states that a union must represent all workers equally and without prejudice. A union cannot refuse to represent or improperly represent a worker due to the worker’s age, race, creed, nationality, sex, religion, political beliefs, union status or personality. If a union fails to represent a worker due to prejudice, or hostility, the union can be charged.

The idea of failure to represent includes failing to properly investigate a grievance, process a grievance, or in some cases, even to arbitrate a grievance.

The duty to represent all workers is especially true in the case where a non-member or anti-union worker files a grievance. Personal feelings or the feelings of the membership cannot be allowed to interfere with the processing of that person’s grievance.

6. ‘“Right to Work” Laws: Get the Facts’ – Minnesota AFL-CIO

Q: Without a “right to work” law, can a worker be forced to join a union?
A: No. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that no collective bargaining agreement can require anyone to join a union. Unions and employers may only negotiate contract provisions requiring nonmembers to pay their fair share of the union’s costs in representing them.

…

Q: Does a union security clause require nonmembers to pay full union dues?
A: No. Nonmembers are required to pay only the proportion of union dues related to collective bargaining expenses, so these costs are fairly shared by all represented employees.

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright (CC BY-ND) 2012

Occupy Chicago guards first aid tent.

[A]t 11 o’clock white shirt Chicago police officers came up and told us that there’s an ordinance that says you have to leave the park at 11 p.m., and if you do not leave or move your tent, you will be arrested. And then they were like “Are you sure you don’t want to move your tent, or do you want us to move your tent?” And we told the officers we believe that Chicago occupiers have a right to protest, a right to assemble and freedom of speech, and we believe that this ordinance is violating that right. And as long as the protesters are here, we will be here. … [F]inally at 1 o’clock they put this big light, like a ball park light, and put it on the tent. And then they moved in on us. And so all the protesters surrounded the tent to prevent them from taking the tent down, and to prevent them from arresting us. So they surrounded the protesters and us, and then maybe like an hour later they moved in. They arrested the back people first and then they went to the right side, the front. And then once they arrested everybody, … they took the tent down and we were just standing there, and there was people watching us get arrested. We were the last two to get arrested.

Martese Chism (AP/M. Spencer Green)

Birdia Keglar

My grandmother, her name was Birdia Keglar. And in the 1960’s … she marched with Dr. King, and made the effort trying to get the black people in Mississippi to register to vote. So in January 1966, when I was five years old, she went to Jackson, Mississippi, to give testimony there – with a group, this was like three cars. She went to Jackson, Mississippi, to Senator Robert Kennedy’s hearing to give a testimony on them being denied their right to vote. And on her way back, she was pulled over and it was maybe six people, but her and another woman, they were murdered … And at the time — I mean cause they let us know that you could die, but to keep the dream alive and keep moving forward. And so at six years old, that’s when I made up my mind that when everybody else was crying at the funeral, as a child I didn’t cry. I said, “I will continue your dream, continue your fight.” And so I went on to college, and did everything. And until now, it looks like the things that the civil rights people fought for, that the American dream is in trouble. And I feel that it’s my time, the nurses’ time to fight to save this dream … And on her way back in that car, you know when they tell the story … My grandmother dealt with a lot of college kids, white college kids, coming down there to help them. She would hide them in her home, and I was too young to remember. So when I see these kids, it brings back memory … when she did it. And that’s why I’m like, they’re standing up for their rights, this is not the first time young kids have stood up for other people’s rights. … [A]nd our nurses union, we believe that’s the right thing to do so we’re standing with them.

Chism said she would go back to Grant Park:

… As long as they’re out there, we’re going to be out there with them.

Malloy asked, “Is there anything you need listeners of this program to do — just support the movement I guess.”

… They need to call their legislature. Because, what our union is trying to do, is to get Congress to tax Wall Street. Because we believe that this economic crisis, it was caused by Wall Street. And so we’re trying to get Congress to pass a financial transaction tax. … [T]he only way we can heal Main Street, we have to deal with Wall Street. And I know it’s not going to be an easy fight, because I can see what the president is going through now. But if people put the pressure, like they did with the civil rights movement. And even with freeing the slaves, it’s the people. So the people need to start moving. Join the nurses, doing the Occupy Wall Street. And we have a movement to move Washington into the people’s direction.

Sources

(1) ‘Interview of Martese Chism by Mike Malloy 2011-10-24’ From The Mike Malloy Show, Monday, October 24th, 2011 – audio and transcript

(2) ‘Police again arrest Occupy Chicago protesters in Grant Park’ By Peter Nickeas and Jim Jaworski, Chicago Tribune, October 23, 2011

(3) ‘Jailed Occupy Chicago Protesters Describe Harsh Treatment By Police, Plan To Picket Rahm Emanuel’s Office’ The Huffington Post/AP

The nursing group said two volunteer nurses were arrested along with the protestors. The women were finally released at about 1:30 a.m. Monday after spending about 23 hours in police custody.

“It was a terrible experience,” said longtime Stroger Hospital nurse Martese Chism, who said she didn’t expect to spend an entire day in jail. Despite spending a night in a cold cell and having her mattress taken from her, Chism said she’d return for protests next weekend, if asked.

Other Occupiers took to Facebook and Twitter to complain about conditions in the jail. Occupiers accused 1st District officers of hanging up on callers checking to see if their friends or family members were still in custody, and claimed that 30 men were held in one room with no toilet paper for 30 hours.

The arrestees also claimed they were unable to make their one phone call for more than 16 hours.

(4) ‘Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy’ by Bruce Watson – CSPAN Book/TV – CLICK HERE to buy the book at Powell’s.

(5) ‘FREEDOM SUMMER AND THE FREEDOM SCHOOLS’ By Kathy Emery, Sylvia Braselmann and Linda Reid Gold, EducationAndDemocracy.org

In the summer of l964, forty-one Freedom Schools opened in the churches, on the back porches, and under the trees of Mississippi. The students were native Mississippians, averaging fifteen years of age, but often including small children who had not yet begun school to the elderly who had spent their lives laboring in the fields. Their teachers were volunteers, for the most part still students themselves. The task of this small group of students and teachers was daunting. They set out to replace the fear of nearly two hundred years of violent control with hope and organized action. Both students and teachers faced the possibility, and in some cases, the reality, of brutal retaliation from local whites. They had little money and few supplies. Yet the Freedom Schools set out to alter forever the state of Mississippi, the stronghold of the Southern way of life.

(6) ‘Creating Jim Crow: In-Depth Essay’ By Ronald L. F. Davis, Ph. D.

In Mississippi, the method of controlling black votes and regulating their economic and public lives by full-scale and openly brutal violence was known as the First Mississippi Plan of 1875. Whites openly resorted to violence and fraud to control the black vote, shooting down black voters “just like birds.” …

When Mississippi began formally and legally to segregate and disfranchise blacks by changing its state constitution and passing supportive legislation in the 1890s, knowing observers referred to these legal moves as the Second Mississippi Plan. …

(7) ‘Dying To Vote In Mississippi, Part II’ By Susan Klopfer

In the early evening hours of January 12, 1966, as they returned home from a special meeting with Senator Robert F. Kennedy in Jackson, the two civil rights activists from Tallahatchie County were killed and four other passengers injured, two seriously, after their car left the road near the small town of Sidon, south of Greenwood in Leflore County.

Birdia Keglar, 56, was found decapitated and both of Adeline Hamlet’s arms had been “cleanly” severed from her body, confirm two Keglar family members, a close friend, and a Tallahatchie County minister. …

Months earlier, both women were hanged in effigy by local Klansmen and warned not to participate in further voting rights activities. Each had testified before a congressional hearing in support of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Keglar and the others were coming back home this time from a subcommittee meeting on discrimination and poverty in the Delta headed by Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

Several times before, Klansmen had tried to force [the driver] Grafton Gray off the road; Klansmen running blacks off the road was not an unusual event to take place in the Delta. Stories abound of such incidents, Chism and others confirmed.

Gray’s surviving second wife said that she was married after the accident “… and he would not tell me anything about it, nothing at all. I could tell that he was still afraid to talk. He had told me about other times Klansmen tried to run him off the road, but he would say nothing about this accident. It affected him greatly.”

…

(8) ‘FBI says end near in civil rights-era prosecutions’ by Allen G. Breed, Associated Press, Nov 05, 2011

Hamlett, 78, was a retired schoolteacher and one of the first blacks to register to vote in Tallahatchie County, Miss. Keglar, 57, was an organizer for the NAACP who had sued the local sheriff after she was prevented from paying her poll tax. Each had testified before a congressional commission in support of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The women died on Jan. 11, 1966, as they were returning home from a secret meeting in Jackson with then-U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. For years, relatives and certain researchers have insisted that the car was run off the road by the Klan.

…

Zachery was told that the driver of the car, Grafton Gray, supposedly played dead and could hear the women being tortured. “When my family members would try to talk to him, he would not,” she recently told the AP.

The FBI tracked down the wreck’s lone survivor, backseat passenger Richard Simpson, a white activist from Massachusetts, who confirmed the basic details contained in a Mississippi Highway Patrol report, the bureau’s letter said. The accident report said a car on the wrong side of the road struck the activists’ car head-on.

“The impact caused the hood of (the) car to break loose and move through the windshield, fatally injuring” Hamlett and Keglar, the FBI determined.

On a gloriously sunny spring day this year, two FBI agents appeared at 79-year-old Lila Hamlett’s door in Kansas City, Mo., to deliver their letter.

Dated May 27, it said there was “insufficient evidence to indicate that a racially motivated homicide occurred.”

(9) ‘After Over Four Decades, Justice Still Eludes Family of 3 Civil Rights Workers Slain in Mississippi Burning Killings’ – Democracy Now!, 2010-08-13

As the Justice Department announces it has closed nearly half of its investigations into unresolved killings from the civil rights era, we look back at the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the subject of the new documentary Neshoba: The Price of Freedom. Although dozens of white men are believed to have been involved in the murders and cover-up, only one man, a Baptist preacher named Edgar Ray Killen, is behind bars today. Four suspects are still alive in the case. We play excerpts of Neshoba and speak with its co-director, Micki Dickoff. We’re also joined by the brothers of two of the victims, Ben Chaney and David Goodman. And we speak with award-winning Mississippi-based journalist Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger, who’s spent the past twenty years investigating unresolved civil rights murder cases, as well as Bruce Watson, author of the new book Freedom Summer: The Savage Season that Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy.

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright 2011

Tahrir Square, Cairo, 2011-02-08 (monasosh)

As the situation continues to unfold, our first concern is preventing injury or loss of life. So I want to be very clear in calling upon the Egyptian authorities to refrain from any violence against peaceful protesters.

The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.

…

But we’ve always been clear that there must be reform: political, social, and economic reforms that meet the aspirations of the Egyptian people. In the absence of these reforms, grievances have built up over time. …

Violence will not address the grievances of the Egyptian people. And suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. What’s needed right now are concrete steps that advance the rights of the Egyptian people: a meaningful dialogue between the government and its citizens, and a path of political change that leads to a future of greater freedom and greater opportunity and justice for the Egyptian people.

Occupy Wall Street, 2011-11-15 (Henny Ray Abrams)

[T]he President’s position is that obviously every municipality has to make its own decisions about how to handle these issues, and we would hope and want, as these decisions are made, that it balances between a long tradition of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech in this country and obviously of demonstrating and protesting, and also the very important need to maintain law and order and health and safety standards, which was obviously a concern in this case.

So for Egypt, a call for the government to address the people’s grievances; for America, no such call. For Egypt, a clear statement for the human rights of assembly and free speech; for America, a hope to “balance” those rights. For Egypt, a call for police to keep from violence; for America, as the log of police violence lengthens, silence.^{6 7}

Sources

1) Occupy Wall Street – About

Occupy Wall Street is a people-powered movement that began on September 17, 2011 in Liberty Square in Manhattan’s Financial District, and has spread to over 100 cities in the United States and actions in over 1,500 cities globally. #ows is fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations. The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to expose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future.

2) ‘Bloody and bruised: the journalist caught in Egypt unrest’ by Jack Shenker, The Guardian, Wednesday 26 January 2011

“The police attacked us to get us out of the square; they didn’t care who you were, they just attacked everybody,” a lawyer standing next to me, Ahmed Mamdouh, said breathlessly. “They … hit our heads and hurt some people. There are some people bleeding, we don’t know where they’re taking us. I want to send a message to my wife; I’m not afraid but she will be so scared, this is my first protest and she told me not to come here today.”

3) Remarks by the President on the Situation in Egypt 2011-01-28

4) ‘Watch: Police make violent arrests during ‘Occupy Wall St.’ eviction’ By Andrew Jones, The Raw Story, Tuesday, November 15, 2011

New York City police once again acted aggressively towards Occupy Wall Street protesters, using pepper spray and tear gas as they made rough arrests early Tuesday morning at Zuccotti Park.

5) Press Gaggle by Press Secretary Jay Carney and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes, 2011-11-15

6) ‘In day of protests, “Occupy Wall Street” faces police violence’ By Alain Sherter, CBS News, 2011-11-17

Such unnecessary force has become a feature of law enforcement operations against the Occupy movement in recent weeks. Scott Olsen, a former U.S. Marine and Iraq war veteran, suffered a fractured skull and brain injuries in October after being hit by a tear gas canister or rubber bullet reportedly fired by Oakland police. At the University of California-Berkeley, campus police also are under investigation for allegedly roughing up students and faculty (as seen in this video) at an Occupy rally earlier this month. And in Seattle this week, an 84-year-old community activist, a priest and a pregnant teenager were pepper-sprayed.

Such tactics have drawn fire not only from Occupy Wall Street and civil libertarians, but also from law enforcement experts. Here is what Norm Stamper, who was the police chief in Seattle during the chaotic anti-World Trade Organization protests in 1999, recently had to say about police violence in the latest uprising:

More than a decade later, the police response to the Occupy movement, most disturbingly visible in Oakland — where scenes resembled a war zone and where a marine remains in serious condition from a police projectile — brings into sharp relief the acute and chronic problems of American law enforcement. Seattle might have served as a cautionary tale, but instead, U.S. police forces have become increasingly militarized, and it’s showing in cities everywhere: The NYPD “white shirt” coating innocent people with pepper spray, the arrests of two student journalists at Occupy Atlanta, the declaration of public property as off-limits and the arrests of protesters for “trespassing.”

One Occupy-affiliated protester in New York, who said he was a former NYPD officer, echoed this theme of an increasingly aggressive, militarized police prone to responding to mostly peaceful protests with inappropriate force. The police are “jacked up” to crack down, he told me.

7) ‘Caught on Camera: 10 Shockingly Violent Police Assaults on Occupy Protesters’ By Joshua Holland, Alternet, November 18, 2011

Occupations across the country have born the brunt of some violent police tactics, and in a world where everyone has a camera-phone, a lot of their brutish behavior has been caught in photographs and on video.

Police work is difficult and dangerous, and the majority of officers on the street behave like pros. When it comes to controlling crowds of angry protesters, they’re often put into tense situations and ordered to do things they may not want to do by commanders who are far removed from the scene. I’ve witnessed a lot of restraint from cops, which of course doesn’t make the news.

But being human, cops are also prone to fear and rage like everyone else. A minority of cops, like a minority of protesters, lose their cool in tense situations. The difference is that they aren’t amateurs – they’re well trained and have guidelines that they’re required to follow. When a cop loses his or her cool, it can be terrifying. And when a protester exercising his or her right to assemble and speak is a victim of excessive force, it also violates the United States Constitution.

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright 2011

Occupy Cleveland – circa 2011-10-21

There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the ‘non-rich’, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.

The Managerial Aristocracy, like in the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the thriving nineties, needs to commandeer a vast chunk of that rising profit share, either through capital income, or simply paying itself a lot.

Could the plutonomies die because the [American] dream is dead, because enough of society does not believe they can participate? The answer is of course yes. … There are signs around the world that society is unhappy with plutonomy … But as yet, there seems little political fight being born out on this battleground.

Now the political fight has been born, and the next Citigroup report to investors may begin with “Welcome to the Plutonomy Backlash.”

Sources

(1) Citigroup Plutonomy Report 1 2005-10 (pdf)

The 2007 Michael Moore movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” publicized the Citigroup plutonomy reports.

(2) Citigroup Plutonomy Report 2 2006-03 (pdf)— follow-up report upon the release of the 2004 Federal Reserve Consumer Finance Survey.

‘It’s the Inequality, Stupid’ By Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot, Mother Jones, 2011-03
The following charts show the top 1% in income stretching its shares between 2001 and 2007, and the top 1% in net worth having more than the bottom 90% in 2007.

(3) ‘An Inside Story of Wall Street Bank Crashes’ – The Paragraph, 2008-12-26

‘Banks’ Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis’ by Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica, Aug. 26, 2010

Over the last two years of the housing bubble, Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history.

Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses: They created fake demand.

A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks — primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others — bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged.

The products they were buying and selling were at the heart of the 2008 meltdown — collections of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.

(4) ‘Sanders on The Fed Audit: This is socialism for the rich’ – vtdigger.com, 2011-07-21

The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Wall Street reform law passed one year ago this week directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study.

“As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world,” said Sanders (I-Vt.). “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.”

(5) ‘Obama’s Risky Business’ by Jeff Madick, New York Review of Books, 2010-07-15

The financial reregulation package just passed by Congress is far from a comprehensive reform of American finance. Despite the enormous threat to the world’s financial markets created by the failure of Lehman Brothers and the stunning excesses of insurance giant AIG and banking conglomerate Citigroup, the reforms are in truth modest. Neither the Obama administration nor Congress opted to cut banks down to size, and the bill is only placing mild limits on risky banking activities. The giant financial institutions, meanwhile, are as big—even bigger—than ever and bankers’ compensation is once again at stunning levels.

But the problem with the legislation is not merely its small scale. It is the way it is supposed to be implemented: to avoid controversy and get the bill passed, congressional reformers foisted the responsibility for setting most of the specific, sticky rules on federal regulators at the Fed, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and elsewhere, who are to make them over the next year or two. These are, for the most part, the same regulators who failed to stop the speculative excesses and ensuing credit crisis of 2008. While they now have a few more tools at their disposal, their already substantial tool box was barely touched in the years leading up to the housing and credit crash and severe recession. Will it be different next time?

(6) ‘Can the Middle Class Be Saved?’ by Don Peck, The Atlantic, September 2011

Income inequality usually shrinks during a recession, but in the Great Recession, it didn’t. From 2007 to 2009, the most-recent years for which data are available, it widened a little. The top 1 percent of earners did see their incomes drop more than those of other Americans in 2008. But that fall was due almost entirely to the stock-market crash, and with it a 50 percent reduction in realized capital gains. Excluding capital gains, top earners saw their share of national income rise even in 2008. And in any case, the stock market has since rallied. Corporate profits have marched smartly upward, quarter after quarter, since the beginning of 2009.

Even in the financial sector, high earners have come back strong. In 2009, the country’s top 25 hedge-fund managers earned $25 billion among them—more than they had made in 2007, before the crash. And while the crisis may have begun with mass layoffs on Wall Street, the financial industry has remained well shielded compared with other sectors; from the first quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2010, finance shed 8 percent of its jobs, compared with 27 percent in construction and 17 percent in manufacturing. Throughout the recession, the unemployment rate in finance and insurance has been substantially below that of the nation overall.

(7) ‘Great recession is over, officially’ – The Virginian-Pilot, 2010-09-22

Americans have plenty of reasons not to trust the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, which said Monday that the Great Recession was over.

In August, 27 states reported higher unemployment rates than the previous month – 7 million jobs lost during the recession. The number of people living in poverty – including one in five children – was higher last year than in the previous 50 years. One in 10 households has missed at least one mortgage payment, and one in five home-owners owes more on their home than it’s worth.

…

The declaration that a recession has begun or ended is technical and based on when the economy began a steady decline and when it reached its lowest point.

Officially, the recession began in December 2007 and reached its nadir in June 2009, the committee said.

The factors determining the start and end are gross domestic product, which has been growing steadily for a year; income, which has been increasing since June 2009; industrial production, now 6.2 percent higher than a year earlier; retail sales, up nearly 5 percent over a year ago; and employment.

Unemployment, now at 9.6 percent, was at its highest rate during this downturn in October 2009, when it hit 10.1 percent.

(8) ‘Unemployment rate dips amid sluggish jobs growth’ by Dan Burrows, CBS News, 2011-11-04

The economy added 80,000 jobs in October, the slowest pace of hiring in four months, while the unemployment rate ticked down to 9 percent from 9.1 percent.

…

The broadest measure of unemployment, which includes the unemployed, part-time workers in search of full-time work and so-called discouraged workers who have given up actively looking for jobs, fell to 16.2 percent from 16.5 percent in September, the Labor Department said.

(9) ‘Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade’’ By SABRINA TAVERNISE, New York Times, September 13, 2011

Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.

…

The report said the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line last year, 15.1 percent, was the highest level since 1993. (The poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,314.)

(10) ‘Student Debt and the Class of 2010’ – Project on Student Debt, November 2011 (pdf)

We estimate that two-thirds of college seniors who graduated in 2010 had student loan debt, with an average of $25,250 for those with debt, up five percent from the previous year.

(11) ‘U.S. Credit Conditions – Mortgage Delinquency Rate 90+ Days’ – Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2010-Q3

The Federal Reserve considers the record rate of mortgage delinquencies, foreclosures and their impacts on communities an urgent problem. …

Foreclosure Activity on Slow Burn – RealtyTrac, October 11, 2011

“U.S. foreclosure activity has been mired down since October of last year, when the robo-signing controversy sparked a flurry of investigations into lender foreclosure procedures and paperwork,” said James Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac. “While foreclosure activity in September and the third quarter continued to register well below levels from a year ago, there is evidence that this temporary downward trend is about to change direction, with foreclosure activity slowly beginning to ramp back up.

“Third quarter foreclosure activity increased marginally from the previous quarter, breaking a trend of three consecutive quarterly decreases that started in the fourth quarter of 2010,” Saccacio continued. “This marginal increase in overall foreclosure activity was fueled by a 14 percent jump in new default notices, indicating that lenders are cautiously throwing more wood into the foreclosure fireplace after spending months trying to clear the chimney of sloppily filed foreclosures.”

(12) Occupy Together – Actions and Directory From Wall Street, the Occupy Movement has spread to hundreds of cities across the U.S., and more across the world.

(13) New York City General Assembly #occupywallstreet – FAQ

What is Occupy Wall Street?

Occupy Wall Street is an otherwise unaffiliated group of concerned citizens like you and me, come together
around one organizing principle: We will not remain passive as formerly democratic institutions become the
means of enforcing the will of only 1-2% of the population who control the magnitude of American wealth.

Occupy Wall Street is an exercise in “direct democracy”. We feel we can no longer make our voices heard
as we watch our votes for change usher in the same old power structure time and time again. Since we can
no longer trust our elected representatives to represent us rather than their large donors, we are creating a
microcosm of what democracy really looks like. We do this to inspire one another to speak up. It is a reminder
to our representatives and the moneyed interests that direct them: we the people still know our power.

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright 2011

‘Videos: The People’s Parade to Repeal SB5’ – ProgressOhio.org

Video: Unloading the petitions from the semi-truck.

Sources

(1) ‘Kasich signs controversial SB5’ by Marc Kovac, The Daily Jeffersonian, Cambridge, Ohio, 2011-04-01

(2) ‘Senate Bill 5 — Summary’ – Stewart Jaffy and Associates Co.

(3) ‘Ohio Referendum Information’ – Stewart Jaffy and Associates Co.

(4) ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’ for Wednesday, June 29, 2011 – transcript

MADDOW:  How will Democrats and the Democratic base get those many, many signatures you guys need in the next 90 days to get a ballot referendum?  I mean, 231,000 signatures is a very high bar.

STATE REP. ARMOND BUDISH (D), OHIO:  And that‘s 231,000 valid signatures.  We‘re going to have to collect 450,000 signatures or more to get the right number that are valid.  And what we‘re going to do, we‘re going to work like hell and fight like hell to do it.  That‘s all we can do.

…

MADDOW:  Members of the grassroots group We Are Ohio delivering 1.3 million signatures to the Kasich administration today—one day early and five times the required number.
They held a parade in Columbus before they delivered the signatures today.  Beforehand, they expected about 1,000 people to show up for the parade.  They got more than about 6,000, according to the local press.

The signatures delivered in 1,502 separate boxes.  They came in from all of Ohio‘s 88 counties.

If about, again, 230,000 of those 1.3 million signatures are validated, that means that the repeal of this union-stripping thing will be on the ballot in Ohio on November 8th.  So far, statewide polling suggests that a clear majority of Ohioans will vote to repeal the union-stripping law.

(5) ‘We Are Ohio Holds Million Signature March/People’s Parade and Celebrates Historic Achievement with Thousands of Volunteers’ – press release

(6) ‘SB5 – Bill Summary’ – Ohio Legislative Service Commission

(7) ‘Madison Protesters: Collective Bargaining About Workplace Democracy, Not Just Pay, Benefits’ By Micah Uetricht, In These Times, 2011-02-19

(8) STEVEN GREENHOUSE, _The New York Times, March 30, 2011

But James Brudney, a labor law professor at Ohio State University, said the bill effectively crippled collective bargaining. “There’s a kind of mask or illusion element in this,” he said. “The essence of collective bargaining is when you can’t agree on terms of a contract, you have a dispute resolution mechanism, by strikes or perhaps binding arbitration. Here, you have none of that. That’s not collective bargaining. I’d call it collective begging. It’s a conversation that ends whenever an employer decides that it ends.”

(9) We Are Ohio – citizens group for repealing SB5

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright 2011

Pacha Mama

Sources

(1) ‘Bolivia enshrines natural world’s rights with equal status for Mother Earth’ by John Vidal in La Paz, The Guardian, Sunday 10 April 2011

The law, which is part of a complete restructuring of the Bolivian legal system following a change of constitution in 2009, has been heavily influenced by a resurgent indigenous Andean spiritual world view which places the environment and the earth deity known as the Pachamama at the centre of all life. Humans are considered equal to all other entities.

…

Bolivia has long suffered from serious environmental problems from the mining of tin, silver, gold and other raw materials. “Existing laws are not strong enough,” said Undarico Pinto, leader of the 3.5m-strong Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, the biggest social movement, who helped draft the law. “It will make industry more transparent. It will allow people to regulate industry at national, regional and local levels.”

Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said Bolivia’s traditional indigenous respect for the Pachamama was vital to prevent climate change. “Our grandparents taught us that we belong to a big family of plants and animals. We believe that everything in the planet forms part of a big family. We indigenous people can contribute to solving the energy, climate, food and financial crises with our values,” he said.

…

In the indigenous philosophy, the Pachamama is a living being.

The draft of the new law states: “She is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and cares for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos. She is comprised of all ecosystems and living beings, and their self-organisation.”

(2) Constitution of Ecuador

Article 71. Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes. …

Article 72. Nature has the right to be restored. …

Article 73. The State shall apply preventive and restrictive measures on activities that might lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems and the permanent alteration of natural cycles.

The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that might definitively alter the nation’s genetic assets is forbidden.

Article 74. Persons, communities, peoples, and nations shall have the right to benefit from the environment and the natural wealth enabling them to enjoy the good way of living. …

(3) ‘A new law of nature’ by Clare Kendall, The Guardian, Wednesday 24 September 2008

The origins of this apparent legal tidal shift lie in Ecuador’s growing disillusionment with foreign multinationals. The country, which contains every South American ecosystem within its borders, which include the Galapagos Islands, has had disastrous collisions with multi-national companies. Many, from banana companies to natural gas extractors, have exploited its natural resources and left little but pollution and poverty in their wake.

Now it is in the grip of a bitter lawsuit against US oil giant Chevron, formerly Texaco, over its alleged dumping of billions of gallons of crude oil and toxic waste waters into the Amazonian jungle over two decades.

It is described as the Amazonian Chernobyl, and 30,000 local people claim that up to 18m tonnes of oil was dumped into unlined pits over two decades, in defiance of international guidelines, and contaminating groundwater over an area of some 1,700 hectares (4,200 acres) and leading to a plethora of serious health problems for anyone living in the area. Chevron has denied the allegations. In April, a court-appointed expert announced in a report that, should Chevron lose, it would have to pay up to $16bn (£8.9bn) in damages.

…

The laws would have particular relevance in the Yasuni national park, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas and home to at least two “uncontacted” Amazonian tribes. It is also “home” to a possible 1.2bn barrels of untapped crude oil, which companies want to extract.
bq.. “The hope is that the new laws will give us unprecedented legal muscle to protect areas like this where there are competing interests,” says Linda Siegele, a lawyer for the UK-based Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development.

(4) U.S. Declaration of Independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

(5) U.S. Constitution

(6) ‘‘Unequal Protection’: The Deciding Moment’ by: Thom Hartmann

The very first sentence of Davis’s note reads, “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

That sentence was followed by three paragraphs of small print that summarized the California tax issues of the case. In fact, the notes by Davis, farther down, say,
“The main—and almost only—questions discussed by counsel in the elaborate arguments related to the constitutionality of the taxes. This court, in its opinion passed by these questions, and decided the cases on the questions whether under the constitution and laws of California, the fences on the line of the railroads should have been valued and assessed, if at all, by the local officers, or by the State Board of Equalization…”

In other words, the first sentence of  “The defendant Corporations are persons…” has nothing to do with the case and wasn’t the issue on which the Supreme Court decided. Two paragraphs later, perhaps in an attempt to explain why he had started his notes with that emphatic statement, Davis remarks:
“One of the points made and discussed at length in the brief of counsel for defendants in error was that “Corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.” Before argument Mr. Chief Justice Waite said: “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”“

A half-page later, the notes ended and the actual decision, delivered by Justice Harlan, begins—which, as noted earlier, explicitly says that the Supreme Court is not, in this case, ruling on the constitutional question of corporate personhood under the Fourteenth Amendment or any other amendment.

(7) ‘SANTA CLARA COUNTY v. SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD COMPANY’ – 1886-05-10

There has been much misunderstanding about this Court decision. Despite the issue being raised in arguments, the Justices offered no written opinion on the question of whether corporations should be considered “persons” and enjoy the protections of the 14th Amendment. The Court reporter’s notes, however, quoted Chief Justice Waite declaring that, “We all are of the opinion” that the 14th Amendement applies to corporations.

Many people (rightfully) are outraged that a Court reporter could turn the Bill of Rights and 14th Amendment on their heads, which effectively is what occured once Santa Clara was cited as precedent in subsequent cases. However, the fact that the Justices never issued an opinion on “corporate personhood” lost its legal significance once they cited the case

(8) ‘Abolish Corporate Personhood’ by Jan Edwards and Molly Morgan, May 20, 2004

Once corporations had jumped the constitutional line from the government side to the people side, their lawyers proceeded to pursue the Bill of Rights through more Supreme Court cases. As mentioned above, in 1893 they were assured 5th Amendment protection of due process. In 1906 they got 4th Amendment search and seizure protection (Hale v. Henkel). In 1922 they got the “takings” clause of the 5th Amendment (Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon), and a regulatory law was deemed to be a “takings.” In 1936 (Grosjean v. American Press Co.) and 1947 (Taft-Hartley Act) they started getting First Amendment protections.

In 1976 the Supreme Court determined in Buckley v. Valeo that money spent for political purposes is equal to exercising free speech, and since “corporate persons” have First Amendment rights, they can contribute as much money as they want to overturn ballot initiatives or referenda (First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti). Every time “corporate persons” acquire one of these protections under the Bill of Rights, it gives them a whole new way of exploiting the legal system in order to maintain minority rule through corporate power. And since 1886, every time people have won new rights – like the Civil Rights Act – corporations are eligible for it, too.

(9) ‘Sins of the Fathers: How Corporations Use the Constitution and Environmental Law to Plunder Communities and Nature’ by Thomas Alan Linzey, Esq. – Executive Director – The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Inc., Thursday, March 4th, 2004, University of Pittsburgh School of Law”

Several years ago, cell phone corporations sued a Pennsylvania municipal government for denying them authority to build a cell phone tower. Not content with asserting their rights as persons under the Constitution to strike down the law, the telecommunications corporation demanded attorneys fees and damages from the municipal government under the authority of Reconstruction-Era Civil Rights Statutes originally adopted to protect African-Americans from government sponsored discrimination.

…

As persons, corporations have pioneered the concept of “regulatory takings” in which local and state governments can be sued for the value of property “taken” by the enforcement of an environmental regulation.

…

As persons, corporations cannot be subjected to unannounced searches by OSHA and other regulatory agencies under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Corporations are now guaranteed by law participation in our elections and issue discussions under the authority of the First Amendment.

(10) ‘Justices, 5-4, Reject Corporate Spending Limit’ By ADAM LIPTAK, The New York Times, January 21, 2010

Joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing, Justice Stevens said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings.

(11) PDA’s Amend to Suspend Corporate Personhood (A2S) Action Group

(12) Move to Amend Petition

(13) Complete Text of Justice Stevens’ Dissent on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

The basic premise underlying the Court’s ruling is its iteration, and constant reiteration, of the proposition that the First Amendment bars regulatory distinctions based on a speaker’s identity, including its “identity” as a corporation. While that glittering generality has rhetorical appeal, it is not a correct statement of the law. … The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court’s disposition of this case.

In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright 2011

Rally in Madison, Feb. 26th (Andy Manis / AP)

Sources

1. ‘Quick facts about Wisconsin’s Budget Repair Legislation’ – Amercians for Prosperity

2. ‘Gov. Walker Misleadingly Claims His Union-Busting Bill Doesn’t End Collective Bargaining’ By Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, Feb 28th, 2011

WALKER: “… in this case we said we could narrow it down, still have a role for collective bargaining, still have a role for public employee unions …”

Walker is making this claim because his budget repair bill would still allow workers to “negotiate” for their wages: under a cap that Walker and the Republican legislature want to set in stone. This is clearly not “collective bargaining” in any real sense of the word, since public employees would already have strict limits imposed upon them before they even get to the bargaining table. Plus, restricting collective bargaining to only wages means that the employer can simply change other elements of worker compensation (like slashing benefits) to make up for any wage increases, without workers having any say about it.
Walker’s goal is simply to bust public employee unions, which is exactly what happened in Indiana after Gov. Mitch Daniels (R ) ended collective bargaining for public employees …

…

This is not the first time that Walker has tried to mislead the public about the practical implications of his union-busting effort. In fact, earlier this month, he ludicrously claimed that under his proposal “collective bargaining is fully intact.”

3. ‘Throngs Rally to Keep Collective Bargaining Right’ — The Paragraph, 2001-02-27.

4. ‘The Wage Penalty for State and Local Government Employees’, by John Schmitt, May 2010, Center for Economic and Policy Research

On average, state and local government employees earn more than private-sector workers. But, state and local workers are also, on average, older and substantially better educated than private-sector workers. When state and local government employees are compared to private-sector workers with similar characteristics – particularly when workers are matched by age and education – state and local workers actually earn less, on average, than their private-sector counterparts. The wage penalty for working in the state-and-local sector is particularly large for higher-wage workers.

5. ‘Covert Operations — The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama’ by Jane Mayer August 30, 2010, The New Yorker

[Peggy] Venable—a longtime political operative who draws a salary from Americans for Prosperity, and who has worked for Koch-funded political groups since 1994— … explained that the role of Americans for Prosperity was to help “educate” Tea Party activists on policy details, and to give them “next-step training” after their rallies, so that their political energy could be channelled “more effectively.” And she noted that Americans for Prosperity had provided Tea Party activists with lists of elected officials to target. She said of the Kochs, “They’re certainly our people. David’s the chairman of our board. I’ve certainly met with them, and I’m very appreciative of what they do.”

…

A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party, “The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates!”

6. ‘Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker: Funded by the Koch Bros.’ By Andy Kroll, Mother Jones, Feb. 18, 2011

According to Wisconsin campaign finance filings, Walker’s gubernatorial campaign received $43,000 from the Koch Industries PAC during the 2010 election. That donation was his campaign’s second-highest, behind $43,125 in contributions from housing and realtor groups in Wisconsin. The Koch’s PAC also helped Walker via a familiar and much-used politicial maneuver designed to allow donors to skirt campaign finance limits. The PAC gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which in turn spent $65,000 on independent expenditures to support Walker. The RGA also spent a whopping $3.4 million on TV ads and mailers attacking Walker’s opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Walker ended up beating Barrett by 5 points. The Koch money, no doubt, helped greatly.

7. ‘Covert Operations — The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama’ by Jane Mayer August 30, 2010, The New Yorker

[Charles and David Koch] poured more than a hundred million dollars into dozens of seemingly independent organizations. Tax records indicate that in 2008 the three main Koch family foundations gave money to thirty-four political and policy organizations, three of which they founded, and several of which they direct. The Kochs and their company have given additional millions to political campaigns, advocacy groups, and lobbyists. …
Only the Kochs know precisely how much they have spent on politics. Public tax records show that between 1998 and 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than forty-eight million dollars. The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch and his wife, along with two company employees and an accountant, spent more than twenty-eight million. The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than a hundred and twenty million. Meanwhile, since 1998 Koch Industries has spent more than fifty million dollars on lobbying. Separately, the company’s political-action committee, KochPAC, has donated some eight million dollars to political campaigns, more than eighty per cent of it to Republicans. So far in 2010, Koch Industries leads all other energy companies in political contributions, as it has since 2006. In addition, during the past dozen years the Kochs and other family members have personally spent more than two million dollars on political contributions. In the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation. Other gifts by the Kochs may be untraceable; federal tax law permits anonymous personal donations to politically active nonprofit groups.

…

Charles Koch seems to have approached both business and politics with the deliberation of an engineer. “To bring about social change,” he told Doherty, requires “a strategy” that is “vertically and horizontally integrated,” spanning “from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.” The project, he admitted, was extremely ambitious. “We have a radical philosophy,” he said.

In 1977, the Kochs provided the funds to launch the nation’s first libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute. According to the Center for Public Integrity, between 1986 and 1993 the Koch family gave eleven million dollars to the institute. Today, Cato has more than a hundred full-time employees, and its experts and policy papers are widely quoted and respected by the mainstream media. It describes itself as nonpartisan, and its scholars have at times been critical of both parties. But it has consistently pushed for corporate tax cuts, reductions in social services, and laissez-faire environmental policies.

When President Obama, in a 2008 speech, described the science on global warming as “beyond dispute,” the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the Times to contradict him. Cato’s resident scholars have relentlessly criticized political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary. Ed Crane, the Cato Institute’s founder and president, told me that “global-warming theories give the government more control of the economy.”

8. ‘Koch Industries Slashed WI Jobs, Helped Elect Scott Walker, Now Orchestrating Pro-Walker Protest’ By Lee Fang, Think Progress, Feb 18th, 2011

According to the EPA, Koch businesses are huge polluters, emitting thousands of pounds of toxic pollutants. As soon as he got into office Walker started cutting environmental regulations and appointed a Republican known for her disregard for environmental regulations to lead the Department of Natural Resources. In addition, Walker has stated his opposition to clean energy jobs policies that might draw workers away from Koch-owned interests.

9. ‘Top US Marginal Income Tax Rates, 1913—2003’, TruthAndPolitics.org

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at TheParagraph.com

Photos

Photos from some of the rallies in support of Wisconsin public servants and collective bargaining rights across the nation on Saturday, February 26, 2011:

Madison, Wisconsin (Andy Manis / AP)

Columbus, Ohio (Jay LaPrete / AP)

Albany, NY (Twitter user @_1134)

Augusta, Maine

Austin, Texas (Stephen C. Webster)

Boise, Idaho

Boston, Massachusetts (Rick Tudor)

Washington, D.C. (Jeff Bloom and Josh William)

Denver, Colorado (Twitter user @RadicalRonRand)

Green Bay, Wisconsin

Asheville, North Carolina (Douglas Ross) / Jackson, Mississippi (Landon Wilson)

Juneau, Alaska (Dan Kantak)

Montpelier, Vermont (Lance Mills)

New York, New York (William Brown)

Phoenix, Arizona (Pat Kofahl)

Sacramento, California (Robin Kozloff)

Salem, Oregon (‘Derrick’)

Salt Lake City, Utah (Ryan Kowalchik)

San Francisco, California (Stephen Pawley)

Santa Fe, New Mexico (Alf Abeyta)

Seattle, Washington (Howie in Seattle)

Springfield, Illinois (Wayne Sedgwick)

St. Paul, Minnesota

Tallahassee, Florida (Jeanette Castillo – more here)

Sources

1. ‘12 Things You Need to Know About the Uprising in Wisconsin’ by Joshua Holland, AlterNet, 2011-02-18

Walker’s bill would strip public employees of the right to bargain collectively for anything but higher pay (and would cap the amount of wage hikes they might end up gaining in negotiations). His intentions are clear — before assuming office, Walker threatened to decertify the state’s employees’ unions (until he discovered that the governor doesn’t have that power).

2. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23, Item 4: Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

3. ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work – Freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining

The freedoms to associate and to bargain collectively are fundamental rights. … These enabling rights make it possible to promote and realize decent conditions at work. …

The recognition of the right to collective bargaining is the key to the representation of collective interests. It builds on freedom of association and renders collective representation meaningful. Collective bargaining can play an important role in enhancing enterprise performance, managing change and building harmonious industrial relations.

Collective bargaining, as a way for workers and employers to reach agreement on issues affecting the world of work, is inextricably linked to freedom of association. The right of workers and employers to establish their independent organizations is the basic prerequisite for collective bargaining and social dialogue. …

4. Supreme Court of Canada – Health Services and Support – Facilities Subsector Bargaining Assn. v. British Columbia, 2007-06-08

Item 82: The right to bargain collectively with an employer enhances the human dignity, liberty and autonomy of workers by giving them the opportunity to influence the establishment of workplace rules and thereby gain some control over a major aspect of their lives, namely their work (see Alberta Reference, at p. 368, and Wallace v. United Grain Growers Ltd., [1997] 3 S.C.R. 701, at para. 93).  As explained by P. C. Weiler in Reconcilable Differences (1980):

Collective bargaining is not simply an instrument for pursuing external ends, whether these be mundane monetary gains or the erection of a private rule of law to protect dignity of the worker in the face of managerial authority.  Rather, collective bargaining is intrinsically valuable as an experience in self-government.  It is the mode in which employees participate in setting the terms and conditions of employment, rather than simply accepting what their employer chooses to give them …. [p. 33]

6. National Laabor Relations Act — Wikipedia

The National Labor Relations Act or Wagner Act (after its sponsor, Senator Robert F. Wagner) (Pub.L. 74-198, 49 Stat. 449, codified as amended at 29 U.S.C. § 151–169), is a 1935 United States federal law that limits the means with which employers may react to workers in the private sector who create labor unions, engage in collective bargaining, and take part in strikes and other forms of concerted activity in support of their demands.

7. National Labor Relations Act — U.S. Code TITLE 29 > CHAPTER 7 > SUBCHAPTER II > § 151

It is hereby declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.

8. Labor-Management Relations, Collective Bargaining, and the Public Sector: Collaborative Solutions in Alameda, California, Edward J. Martin, Ph.D., The Graduate Center for Public Policy and Administration, California State University, Long Beach

In 1962 John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10988 made collective bargaining a lawful practice in public sector negotiations. For the first time, it allowed federal employees to engage in union organizing and collective bargaining. Later, this order was expanded upon by Richard Nixon’s Executive Orders 11491 (1969) and 11616 (1971), and Gerald Ford’s Executive Order 11838 (1975), which formalized the bargaining process for federal employees. Finally, in 1978 under Jimmy Carter, the Civil Service Reform Act stipulated that the president no longer had the authority to regulate the collective bargaining process on his own behalf (Kearney, 1998; Martin, 1979; Brooks, 1971; Chamberlain, 1965). As a result, clearly established procedures had been established for regulating public sector collective bargaining (Robertson and Seneviratne, 1995).

9. ‘Thousands rally at Wisconsin Capitol to protest anti-union bill’ – Associated Press, February 16, 2011

Wisconsin … passed a comprehensive collective bargaining law in 1959 and was the birthplace of the national union representing non-federal public employees.

10. ‘Factbox: Several U.S. states consider union limits’ – Reuters, 2011-02-25

Public unions have the right to collectively bargain in about 30 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

In some states in the south and west, public employees do not have the right to collectively bargain, and in Virginia and Texas, it is illegal to enter into a formal bargaining relationship with the public sector, according to Paul Secunda, Marquette University law professor.

11. ‘Volunteers help Wis. protesters keep up the fight’ By JASON SMATHERS – Associated Press, 2011-02-26

12. ‘Live blog: Americans answer call to protest for workers’ rights’ by By Stephen C. Webster, The Raw Story, Saturday, February 26th, 2011

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at TheParagraph.com

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones fought to bring a decent life to American workers’ families. In this pursuit she traveled the country, North and South, East and West. In 1903, the United Mine Workers’ (UMW) executive board asked her to check on the conditions of coal miners in Colorado. In her autobiography, Mother Jones told how she went undercover:¹

I … got myself an old calico dress, a sunbonnet, some pins and needles, elastic and tape and such sundries, and went down to the southern coal fields of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.

As a peddler, I went through the various coal camps, eating in the homes of the miners, staying all night with their families. I found the conditions under which they lived deplorable. They were in practical slavery to the company, who owned their houses, owned all the land, so that if a miner did own a house he must vacate whenever it pleased the land owners. They were paid in scrip instead of money so that they could not go away if dissatisfied. They must buy at company stores and at company prices. The coal they mined was weighed by an agent of the company and the miners could not have a check weighman to see that full credit was given them. The schools, the churches, the roads belonged to the Company. I felt, after listening to their stories, after witnessing their long patience that the time was ripe for revolt against such brutal conditions.

In November 1903, many hard metal miners in Colorado were already on strike.² And the mining companies’ man, the Republican James Peabody, had won the governorship in the last election, when the Democratic and Populist candidates split the progressive vote. Gov. Peabody promised to make Colorado “safe for investments”, and backed a corporate vigilante campaign to wipe out the hard metal miners’ union, the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). That campaign marked what came to be known as the “Colorado Labor Wars.” In this atmosphere, on November 9th, the Colorado coal miners struck. But a few weeks later the mine operators of the northern coal fields yielded, and UMW headquarters called a convention in Louisville to end the strike in those northern fields. Mother Jones went to Louisville to stop that action, and the miners called on her to speak:

“Brothers,” I said, “You English speaking miners of the northern fields promised your southern brothers, seventy per cent of whom do not speak English, that you would support them to the end. Now you are asked to betray them, to make a separate settlement. You have a common enemy and it is your duty to fight to a finish. The enemy seeks to conquer by dividing your ranks, by making distinctions between North and South, between American and foreign. You are all miners, fighting a common cause, a common master. The iron heel feels the same to all flesh. Hunger and suffering and the cause of your children bind more closely than a common tongue. I am accused of helping the Western Federation of Miners, as if that were a crime, by one of the National board members. I plead guilty. I know no East or West, North nor South when it comes to my class fighting the battle for justice. If it is my fortune to live to see the industrial chain broken from every workingman’s child in America, and if then there is one black child in Africa in bondage, there shall I go.”

The delegates rose en masse to cheer. The vote was taken. The majority decided to stand by the southern miners, refusing to obey the national President.

UMW president John Mitchell kept trying to get the miners of the northern fields to go back to work, and succeeded at last, when he threatened to cut off their support. Though she felt that the strike in the southern fields would now be lost, Mother Jones stayed there to fight for it. But Gov. Peabody wrote an order banishing her from the state, and sent members of the militia to take her to La Junta to take the next train out of Colorado. But Mother Jones, with thanks to a sympathetic railroad engineer, instead took the next train in to Denver:

In Denver I got a room and rested a while. I sat down and wrote a letter to the governor, the obedient little boy of the coal companies.

“Mr. Governor, you notified your dogs of war to put me out of the state. They complied with your instructions. I hold in my hand a letter that was handed to me by one of them, which says ‘under no circumstances return to this state.’ I wish to notify you, governor, that you don’t own the state. When it was admitted to the sisterhood of states, my fathers gave me a share of stock in it; and that is all they gave to you. The civil courts are open. If I break a law of state or nation it is the duty of the civil courts to deal with me. That is why my forefathers established those courts to keep dictators and tyrants such as you from interfering with civilians. I am right here in the capital, after being out nine or ten hours, four or five blocks from your office. I want to ask you, governor, what in Hell are you going to do about it?”

I called a messenger and sent it up to the governor’s office. He read it and a reporter. who was present in the office at the time told me his face grew red.

“What shall I do?” he said to the reporter. He was used to acting under orders. “Leave her alone,” counseled the reporter. “There is no more patriotic citizen in America.”

Cripple Creek circa 1900

Mother Jones described the scene around Cripple Creek, Colorado, the center of the hard metal strike:

All civil law had broken down in the Cripple Creek strike. The militia under Colonel Verdeckberg said, “We are under orders only from God and Governor Peabody.” Judge Advocate McClelland when accused of violating the constitution said, “To hell with the constitution!” There was a complete breakdown of all civil law. Habeas corpus proceedings were suspended. Free speech and assembly were forbidden. People spoke in whispers as in the days of the inquisition. Soldiers committed outrages. Strikers were arrested for vagrancy and worked in chain gangs on the street under brutal soldiers. Men, women and tiny children were packed in the Bullpen at Cripple Creek. Miners were shot dead as they slept. They were ridden from the country, their families knowing not where they had gone, or whether they lived.

When the strike started in Cripple Creek, the civil law was operating, but the governor, a banker, and in complete sympathy with the Rockefeller interests, sent the militia. They threw the officers out of office. Sheriff Robinison had a rope thrown at his feet and [was] told that if he did not resign, the rope would be about his neck.

Three men were brought into Judge Seeds’ court — miners. There was no charge lodged against them. He ordered them released but the soldiers who with drawn bayonets had attended the hearing, immediately rearrested them and took them back to jail.

Four hundred men were taken from their homes. Seventy-six of these were placed on a train, escorted to Kansas, dumped out on a prairie and told never to come back, except to meet death.

In the heat of June, in Victor, 1600 men were arrested and put in the Armory Hall. Bullpens were established and anyone be he miner, or a woman or a child that incurred the displeasure of the great coal interests, or the militia, were thrown into these horrible stockades.

Shop keepers were forbidden to sell to miners. Priests and ministers were intimidated, fearing to give them consolation. The miners opened their own stores to feed the women and children. The soldiers and hoodlums broke into the stores, looted them, broke open the safes, destroyed the scales, ripped open the sacks of flour and sugar, dumped them on the floor and poured kerosene oil over everything. The beef and meat was poisoned by the militia. Goods were stolen. The miners were without redress, for the militia was immune.

And why were these things done? Because a group of men had demanded an eight hour day, a check weighman and the abolition of the scrip system that kept them in serfdom to the mighty coal barons. That was all. Just that miners had refused to labor under these conditions. Just because miners wanted a better chance for their children, more of the sunlight, more freedom. And for this they suffered one whole year and for this they died.

Coal miners in Carbon County in Utah had also joined the strike, and Mother Jones went there to cheer them.³ There too the state militia came for Mother Jones, and quarantined her inside a tiny room on the pretense that she had been exposed to smallpox. But people would still come to talk with her:

One Saturday night I got tipped off by the postoffice master that the militia were going to raid the little tent colony in the early morning. I called the miners to me and asked them if they had guns. Sure, they had guns. They were western men, men of the mountains. I told them to go bury them between the boulders; deputies were coming to take them away from them. I did not tell them that there was to be a raid for I did not want any bloodshed. Better to submit to arrest.

Between 4:30 and 5 o’clock in the morning I heard the tramp of feet on the road. I looked out of my smallpox window and saw about forty-five deputies. They descended upon the sleeping tent colony, dragged the miners out of their beds. They did not allow them to put on their clothing. The miners begged to be allowed to put on their clothes, for at that early hour the mountain range is the coldest. Shaking with cold, followed by the shrieks and wails of their wives and children, beaten along the road by guns, they were driven like cattle to Helper. In the evening they were packed in a box car and run down to Price, the county seat and put in jail.

Not one law had these miners broken. The pitiful screams of the women and children would have penetrated Heaven. Their tears melted the heart of the Mother of Sorrows. Their crime was that they had struck against the power of gold.

Mother Jones in 1902, age 65, Library of Congress

Two days after the raid, a company-hired goon burst in on Mother Jones:

[T]he stone that held my door was suddenly pushed in. A fellow jumped into the room, stuck a gun under my jaw and told me to tell him where he could get $3,000 of the miners’ money or he would blow out my brains.

“Don’t waste your powder,” I said. “You write the miners up in Indianapolis. Write Mitchell. He’s got money now.”

“I don’t want any of your damn talk,” he replied, then asked: “Hasn’t the president got money?”

“You got him in jail.”

“Haven’t you got any money?”

“Sure “ I put my hand in my pocket, took out fifty cents and turned the pocket inside out.

“Is that all you got?”

“Sure, and I’m not going to give it to you, for I want it to get a jag on to boil the Helen Gould smallpox out of my system so I will not inoculate the whole nation when I get out of here.”

“How are you going to get out of here if you haven’t money when they turn you loose?”

“The railway men will take me anywhere.”

There were two other deputies outside. They kept hollering for him to come out. “She ain’t got any money,” they kept insisting. Finally he was convinced that I had nothing.

This man, I afterward found out, had been a bank robber, but had been sworn in as deputy to crush the miners’ union. He was later killed while robbing the post office in Price. Yet he was the sort of man who was hired by the moneyed interests to crush the hopes and aspirations of the fathers and mothers and even the children of the workers.

From these strikes, Mother Jones drew lessons about unity among workers, and lawlessness among corporate and government elders:

The strike in the southern fields dragged on and on. But from the moment the southern miners had been deserted by their northern brothers, I felt their strike was doomed. Bravely did those miners fight before giving in to the old peonage. The military had no regard for human life. They were sanctified cannibals. Is it any wonder that we have murders and holdups when the youth of the land is trained by the great industrialists to a belief in force; when they see that the possession of money puts one above law?

Sources

1. ‘The Autobiography of Mother Jones’ Chapter XIII

2. ‘Colorado Labor Wars’ — Wikipedia’

3. ‘The United Mine Wokers of America’ by Allan Kent Powell

A strike began in Colorado began in September 1903, and within a matter of days coal miners in Utah’s Carbon County joined the strike when they were recruited by UMWA organizers sent from Colorado.

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at TheParagraph.com

Sources

¹ ‘The Originalist’ – California Lawyer, January 2011

² ‘Constitution of the United States, Amendments 11-27’ – National Archives of the United States Full text of the 14th Amendment, Article I:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

³ ‘Reed v.Reed’ By Linda Napikoski, About.com

⁴ ‘Scalia: Women Don’t Have Constitutional Protection Against Discrimination’ by Amanda Terkel, Huffington Post, 01/ 3/11

Greenberger added that under Scalia’s doctrine, women could be legally barred from juries, paid less by the government, receive fewer benefits in the armed forces, and be excluded from state-run schools — all things that have happened in the past, before their rights to equal protection were enforced.

⁵ ‘Women Aren’t People Under Scalia’s Constitution’ by Ann Woolner, Business Week, January 06, 2011

That women should have rights equal to men was a radical idea in 1868 when the Reconstruction Amendments passed. (Women didn’t get the federal right to vote for another 52 years.)

At the time, state laws prevented women from owning property, signing contracts, serving on juries. Unmarried women were freer than their married sisters due to notions dating back to English common law.

The “very being and legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage,” explained William Blackstone, the definitive British legal commentator of the 18th century.

It is “consolidated into that of her husband under whose wing and protection she performs everything,” he wrote.

⁶ ‘Justice Scalia’s ‘Originalist’ Hypocrisy’ By Robert Parry, January 5, 2011

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at TheParagraph.com