Mahony writes: "Renewed negotiations could bring to a close the largest US strike in five years, which has seen nearly forty thousand workers - mostly landline technicians but also some call-center and retail employees - walk out for more than a month."
A Verizon picket line in Washington, D.C., May 19, 2016. (photo: Stand Up to Verizon/Flickr)
Long Live the Picket Line
By Elizabeth Mahony, Jacobin
24 May 16
Improving workers’ lives will always require workplace action.
n Tuesday, news broke that Verizon would return to the bargaining table with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). The renewed negotiations could bring to a close the largest US strike in five years, which has seen nearly forty thousand workers — mostly landline technicians but also some call-center and retail employees — walk out for more than a month.
At stake are the potential outsourcing of call-center jobs to the Philippines and Mexico, the implementation of forced overtime, the assignment of employees to other cities for months at a time, and the increased use of non-union contractors.
But beyond specific contract issues, the strike is drawing out the distinct paths forward for a labor movement that faces a strategic fork in the road.
The CWA, through the strike and its decision to endorse Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary, exemplifies one approach: high-risk, high-payoff, militant labor action paired with a break from the blank-check relationship with establishment Democrats. (Many IBEW locals have also voted to endorse Bernie Sanders, while the international has held off.)
That approach has not sat well with much of the commentariat. They have embraced Verizon’s description of the landline business — and of the workers who make it possible — as “legacy,” frequently quoting Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam’s assertion that the strike is about “nostalgia for the rotary-phone era.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board applauded McAdam’s denunciation of Sanders’s anti-Verizon rhetoric, writing that “credit is due to the rare executive willing to defend economic reality and stand up to political intimidation.”
But most contemptible was Mark Gimein’s New Yorker essay about “the Verizon workers’ shrinking world.” Gimein, who is under the impression that “a picket line is to a Democrat what a revival meeting is to an evangelical,” argues that labor’s future lies in a tamer, more policy-oriented road, without loud strikes and rudely still-existing workers.
As negotiations resume, it’s worth setting the record straight about what’s really at issue — and why a labor strategy of workplace action and bold political vision is more necessary than ever.
1. We’re not in the robot future yet — we still need skilled workers.
The landline workers who are striking are not part of a “shrinking world.” Though it might appear that everything operates on the Cloud nowadays, telecommunications companies still need physical infrastructure to support their wireless and web services. Verizon just doesn’t want to pay for the infrastructure, or the skilled work it takes to build and maintain it.
The Wall Street Journal admits this outright, writing: “Verizon isn’t even looking to shed jobs. It is merely seeking more flexibility to manage its workforce, such as consolidating under-used call centers and the ability to hire more outside contractors.”
Verizon wants to either do this as cheaply as possible (which is dangerous, and probably harmful to the customer) or eventually get other, non-union contractors to do it and just sell the product.
The union is the chief obstacle standing in the way. Just as manufacturing was never a “dying industry” — just one that capitalists found more useful when performed elsewhere by lower-paid workers — Verizon’s line technicians will have some work to do for the foreseeable future.
2. We still need strikes, and unions.
Gimein writes that the “greater hope in the labor movement these days comes not from the picket line but from legislative efforts such as the union-backed minimum wage initiative Fight for 15.”
This is a bizarre leap of logic. Fight for 15’s goals might be legislative, but its primary tactic has been — wait for it — strikes. To be sure, many on the Left have criticized Fight for 15 for prioritizing media optics over worker organization. But Gimein’s argument is almost precisely the opposite.
As he writes: “The way forward now is less in getting people to join unions and more in taking seriously the question that Sanders raised: what can be done for the millions of workers who don’t have a union and never will?” Yet even when it comes to carrying out the kind of legislative action Gimein prescribes, it’s very hard to advocate for workers, union or non-union, if you don’t have some unions around.
The union backing Fight for 15, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), has been able to throw around its legislative weight only when it’s applied direct pressure to employers. No city that’s passed a minimum-wage ordinance has lacked a picket line.
3. The legislative route is a dead end.
Part of Gimein’s argument seems to be that because CWA members comprise a small slice of the Verizon workforce, this makes them irrelevant and their decent pay and work conditions, perhaps, unfair.
But what the striking workers lack in numbers they make up for with their strategic position. As Verizon’s sole unionized beachhead, CWA members will play a pivotal role in spreading unionization to the rest of the company’s ranks — the wireless and retail side in particular.
A strike defeat would forestall, if not foreclose, the possibility of organizing these workers — giving Verizon free rein to cut wages and attack working conditions. It would also make organizing harder in the retail industry more broadly, relegating millions of people — disproportionately women and people of color — to desperate poverty.
A successful strike, on the other hand, could shore up union strength, steadying the foundation for a drive into the ranks of the non-unionized.
It would also vindicate the strategy of organizing skilled technical and logistics workers in order to establish a foothold in companies that employ massive, difficult-to-organize workforces. While this “militant minority” strategy has had mixed results in the past, a victory at Verizon could give it new life.
If this seems like shaky ground to rebuild the labor movement, the legislative route Gimein advocates has proven, after decades of loyal use by some of the United States’s most powerful unions, disastrous. As inspiring as Sanders’s showing in the primaries has been, he is a lonely figure in a legislative arena largely hostile or indifferent to unions. The only way to fundamentally reshape that structural antipathy is to build power in the workplace.
For Gimein, the problem seems to be that strikes are difficult and workers are outmatched. But that’s always been the road that labor has had to travel, through narrow passes and in enemy territory. When it wins, however, it greatly expands what’s considered politically possible for working people.
A Party Founded by Nazis Just Lost the Austrian Election - Barely
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=32251"><span class="small">Zack Beauchamp, Vox</span></a>
Tuesday, 24 May 2016 08:10
Beauchamp writes: "In runoff results announced on Monday morning, the Freedom Party candidate, Norbert Hofer, lost to the Green Party's Alexander Van der Bellen - by a 0.6 percentage point margin."
A rally for the Austrian Freedom Party. (photo: Getty Images)
A Party Founded by Nazis Just Lost the Austrian Election - Barely
By Zack Beauchamp, Vox
24 May 16
ustria's far-right Freedom Party was founded in 1956, its leadership full of former Nazis. Though it has twice been part of coalition governments, the party has been relatively marginal in Austrian politics.
But it just came within a hair's breadth of winning control of Austria's presidency. In runoff results announced on Monday morning, the Freedom Party candidate, Norbert Hofer, lost to the Green Party's Alexander Van der Bellen — by a 0.6 percentage point margin:
To be clear, Austria's president is a historically ceremonial position — the leader of the parliamentary majority, called the federal chancellor, generally wields power. That person is Christian Kern of the center-left Social Democratic Party.
And the Freedom Party isn't openly fascist, nor are its leaders Nazis. But it's still a very hard-right, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim organization — to the point of being outright racist. And the fact that it came this close to victory in a national election illustrates just how powerful the far right is becoming across Europe.
The Austrian Freedom Party is riding an anti-immigrant wave
The Freedom Party's power has ebbed and flowed over the course of modern Austrian history. In 1999, it won 26.9 percent of the national parliamentary vote under the leadership of Jörg Haider, a firebrand who once celebrated the Nazis for their "decent job creation policies." This led to it joining a coalition led by the center-right People's Party in 2000.
Haider won by railing against Austria's two dominant political parties, the People's Party and the Social Democratic Party. A major part of his complaint was Austria's relatively open immigration policy: In 2003, 12.5 percent of Austrian residents were foreign-born. Haider accused the mainstream parties of permitting "foreign infiltration."
Haider died in 2008, shortly after his party collapsed to just 11 percent in the 2006 elections. But the Freedom Party has made a comeback in recent years.
"The [Freedom Party's] support is steadily growing: for more than a year it has topped every representative poll, being consistently backed by around 30 per cent of the respondents," political scientists Philip Rathgeb and Fabio Wolkenstein write at the London School of Economics' Europe blog.
According to Rathgeb and Wolkenstein, there are a number of reasons for this, including a slow economy and a political stalemate between the two dominant parties that has stymied policymaking. But immigration is a major part of the story.
Austria's longstanding nativist streak came to the fore in the summer of 2015, when the European refugee crisis became the continent's dominant political issue. The Freedom Party has cast Syrian and other Muslim refugees as a threat to Christian-European civilization. This message has clearly resonated with Austrian voters, a majority of whom think their country is on the wrong track.
"We don’t want an Islamization of Europe," Heinz-Christian Strache, the Freedom Party's leader, told Austria’s public broadcaster in an interview (per the New York Times). "We don’t want our Christian-Western culture to perish."
Freedom Party pressure was so severe that the previous Social Democratic chancellor, Werner Faymann, reversed his pro-refugee policy, closing Austria's borders to refugees and asylum seekers. Initially, that wasn't enough to stop the Freedom Party: It won a plurality in the first round of Austria's presidential election in April, forcing a runoff between Hofer and Van der Bellen.
Happily, Van der Bellen won. But the closeness of the race illustrates that the Freedom Party is still troublingly popular and influential.
"Austrian voters are likely rally around whomever [Hofer's] opponent is in an attempt to halt the party’s rise," the Financial Times's Ralph Atkins wrote in a prescient piece in April. "But Vienna’s policy reversal over immigration showed the party’s growing influence over Austria policies."
This reflects a troubling Europe-wide trend
The Freedom Party has for some time been Europe's most effective far-right party. But it's far from alone — and evidence suggests that support for far-right parties has grown in the past several years. That's almost certainly a result of the refugee crisis.
Der Spiegel has a nice map on this, showing the countries where far-right parties have a presence in parliament (yellow dots) or are actually part of the government (red dots). It turns out the xenophobic far right has surged in countries as diverse as Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands, and Hungary:
These parties have, in most cases, ridden the European refugee and migrant crisis to power. Austrians, like many Europeans, have been skeptical of immigration for some time. But the huge surge in migrants last year dramatically inflamed these sentiments — leading to a rise in the far right's poll numbers. Italy's Northern League, for example, is polling at four times what it was in 2013.
Political science research shows that the support for the European far right is driven principally by fear of immigration.
Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, a comparative politics professor at the University of Bergen in Norway, examined seven European countries with far-right parties in a 2008 paper. Specifically, she was looking to see what drove people to the populist right: dissatisfaction with the economy, distrust in political institutions, or anti-immigrant sentiment.
Her findings were unambiguous: "As immigration policy preferences become more restrictive, the probability of voting for the populist right increases dramatically," Ivarsflaten found. By contrast, voters with right-wing economic views were barely more likely to vote for the far right than other voters. Ditto those who didn't trust politicians very much, as the below charts make clear:
"This study therefore to a large extent settles the debate about which grievances unite all populist right parties," Ivarsflaten concluded. "The answer is the grievances arising from Europe’s ongoing immigration crisis."
The immigration crisis today is, of course, much worse than it was when Ivarsflaten's piece was published in 2008. Hence why the Freedom Party and its far-right brethren are on the march throughout Europe.
Watch John Oliver Explain Baffling Primary-Caucus System
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=32437"><span class="small">Ryan Reed, Rolling Stone</span></a>
Monday, 23 May 2016 13:13
Reed writes: "John Oliver has attempted to break down the insanely convoluted process of caucuses, primaries, delegates, state conventions and superdelegates that often results in frustrated, alienated voters."
John Oliver. (photo: HBO)
Watch John Oliver Explain Baffling Primary-Caucus System
By Ryan Reed, Rolling Stone
23 May 16
'Last Week Tonight' host breaks down how our presidential race has devolved into "an erratic clusterfuck every four years"
merican voters are rightfully pissed off by a perplexing electoral system – or as John Oliver calls it, "an erratic clusterfuck every four years" – where a presidential candidate can win a primary or caucus yet receive fewer delegates than their opponent. We've seen that happen in both parties this year: Bernie Sanders won the Wyoming Democratic caucus with 56 percent, but received only 7 delegates to Hillary Clinton's 11. Donald Trump beat out Republican opponent Ted Cruz by 3.6 percent in the Louisiana primary but took home fewer delegates. In his latest Last Week Tonight deep dive, Oliver sorted through the madness.
The voting system has become a nightmare, as caucuses can cause scheduling strains since they require a long meeting beforehand. In 2012, the Republican Party averaged 3 percent voter turnout at caucuses. "If you have three percent turnout at an orgy, it's basically just you masturbating next to a table full of uneaten snacks," Oliver cracked.
The host attempted to break down the insanely convoluted process of caucuses, primaries, delegates, state conventions and superdelegates that often results in frustrated, alienated voters. "Any competition should have clear rules," he said. "You don't get to the end of a football game and say, 'OK, who found the most eggs?'"
This time, we "got lucky," Oliver said, as both parties will likely nominate their most popular candidate. Trump leads his closest Republican rival, Ted Cruz, by nearly 4 million votes, while Clinton has over 3 million more than Sanders in the Democratic race.
"The problem is there's no guarantee that the candidate with the most votes will win next time," he said. "And if they don't, all the flaws we just documented will be exposed yet again. Unfortunately we only get angry about the primary process during the primary process when it's impacting the candidate we care about. But the middle of the game is the worst possible time to change the rules."
Oliver's solution is simple. "Let's together pick a date early next year to actually write an email to the chair of each party and remind them – politely – to fix this," he said. "I propose February 2nd. Now, that will be easy to remember because it's Groundhog Day, which does seem appropriate because, unless this primary process is fixed, we are all destined to live through the same nightmare scenario over and over again until the end of fucking time."
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=39255"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Website</span></a>
Monday, 23 May 2016 10:22
Reich writes: "The old politics featured carefully crafted speeches and calculated policy proposals. In this sense, Mrs. Clinton's proposals and speeches are almost flawless. But in the new era of anti-politics Americans are skeptical of well-crafted speeches and detailed policy proposals. They prefer authenticity. They want their candidates unscripted and unfiltered."
Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
Why Trump Might Win
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Website
23 May 16
new Washington Post/ABC News poll released Sunday finds Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in a statistical tie, with Trump leading Clinton 46 percent to 44 percent among registered voters. That’s an 11 percent swing against Clinton since March.
A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, also released Sunday, shows Clinton at 46 percent to Trump’s 43 percent. Previously she led 50 percent to 39 percent.
Polls this far before an election don’t tell us much. But in this case they do raise a serious question.
Since he cinched the Republican nomination two weeks ago, Trump has been the object of even more unfavorable press than he was before – about his treatment of women, his propensity to lie, his bizarre policy proposals.
Before this came months of news coverage of his bigotry, megalomania, narcissism, xenophobia, refusals to condemn violence at his rallies, refusals to distance himself from white supremacists, and more lies.
So how can Trump be pulling even with Hillary Clinton?
Throughout the Republican primaries, pundits and pollsters repeatedly told us he’d peaked, that his most recent outrageous statement was his downfall, that he was viewed as so unlikeable he didn’t stand a chance of getting the nomination.
But in my travels around the country I’ve found many who support him precisely because of the qualities he’s being criticized for having.
A Latina-American from Laredo, Texas, tells me she and most of her friends are for Trump because he wants to keep Mexicans out. She thinks too many Mexicans have come here illegally, making it harder for those here legally.
A union member from Pittsburgh says he’s for Trump because he’ll be tough on American companies shipping jobs abroad, tough with the Chinese, tough with Muslims.
A small businessman in Cincinnati tells me he’s for Trump because “Trump’s not a politician. He’ll give them hell in Washington.”
Political analysts have underestimated Trump from the jump because they’ve been looking through the rear-view mirror of politics as it used to be.
Trump’s rise suggests a new kind of politics. You might call it anti-politics.
The old politics pitted right against left, with presidential aspirants moving toward the center once they cinched the nomination.
Anti-politics pits Washington insiders, corporate executives, bankers, and media moguls against a growing number of people who think the game is rigged against them. There’s no center, only hostility and suspicion.
Americans who feel like they’re being screwed are attracted to an authoritarian bully – a strongman who will kick ass. The former reality TV star who repeatedly told contestants they were “fired!” appears tough and confrontational enough to take on powerful vested interests.
That most Americans don’t particularly like Trump is irrelevant. As one Midwesterner told me a few weeks ago, “He may be a jerk, but he’s our jerk.”
By the same token, in this era of anti-politics, any candidate who appears to be the political establishment is at a strong disadvantage. This may be Hillary Clinton’s biggest handicap.
The old politics featured carefully crafted speeches and policy proposals calculated to appeal to particular constituencies. In this sense, Mrs. Clinton’s proposals and speeches are almost flawless.
But in the new era of anti-politics Americans are skeptical of well-crafted speeches and detailed policy proposals. They prefer authenticity. They want their candidates unscripted and unfiltered.
A mid-level executive in Salt Lake City told me he didn’t agree with Trump on everything but supported him because “the guy is the real thing. He says what he believes, and you know where he stands.”
In the old politics, political parties, labor unions and business groups, and the press mediated between individual candidates and the public –explaining a candidate’s positions, endorsing candidates, organizing and mobilizing voters.
In this era of anti-politics, it’s possible for anyone with enough ego, money, and audacity – in other words, Donald Trump – to do it all himself: declaring himself a candidate; communicating with and mobilizing voters directly through Twitter and other social media; and getting free advertising in mainstream media by being outrageous, politically incorrect, and snide. Official endorsements are irrelevant.
Donald Trump has perfected the art of anti-politics at a time when the public detests politics. Which is why so many experts in how politics used to be played have continuously underestimated his chances.
And why Trump’s demagoguery – channeling the prejudices and fears of Americans who have been losing ground – makes him the most dangerous nominee of a major political party in American history.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Monday, 23 May 2016 08:27
Ash writes: "I'm looking forward to backing Sanders in Philadelphia and beyond. But I'll vote for the Democrat either way."
Peace Dove. (image: Ellen Miffitt)
I Will Vote for the Democratic Nominee
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
23 May 16
e have been clear from day one: We prefer, welcome, embrace Bernie Sanders and his game-changing campaign. We sincerely hope he can still win the Democratic presidential nomination in November. With Sanders we see the best chance for fundamental change.
Our concerns with Hillary Clinton remain unchanged. We have laid out the case ad infinitum. If you like life under a security blanket, she’s a solid choice. A Clinton presidency would maintain, perhaps strengthen, a very unjust and corrupt system.
But this leads us unavoidably to a different kind of revolution, one just as ambitious as Sanders’ political revolution: Donald Trump’s fascist revolution in the making. Make no mistake about it, Donald Trump would absolutely, by orders of magnitude, launch a far greater assault on democracy and international law than Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton.
Trump’s Nazi-inspired rallies are a warning. They are a warning that every American would be well advised to heed. What we learned from George W. Bush is that political suicide is possible and the consequences can be catastrophic.
The Bernie-or-Busters (More on political suicide)
The entire Bernie-or-Bust concept is fraudulent on its face. It’s an attempt by individuals – whoever they might be, and it’s not clear who they are – acting entirely on their own, to commandeer Sanders’ political revolution for their own political ends, whatever those might be. Bernie, the movement’s namesake, has exactly nothing to do with it. Far from it.
From day one, Bernie Sanders has made it absolutely clear that his decision to run as a Democrat was intended to strengthen and unify the Democratic Party, not divide it and destroy it. Sanders, Clinton, and O’Malley, while he was still in the race, explicitly pledged to unify against whoever the Republican candidate might be.
The Bernie-or-Busters should rename themselves the “My-Personal-Political-Fantasy-or-Bust,” because in reality that’s what it is, however poorly defined. It is certainly nothing that Bernie Sanders has promoted or participated in. Suggesting so is categorically disingenuous.
If Bernie says unify, I will unify.
Managing the Next President
At a point less than a year from now, we will awaken one morning with Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump as President of the United States. At that moment every American who cares about the future and direction of the country needs to be ready to go to work with or without the blessing of the political establishment.
Historically, democracy functions best when the people lead and the politicians follow. Yes, that does in fact work. Who would be easiest to manage efficiently?
If you are not a billionaire the answer is simple: Bernie Sanders. He will be the most responsive and cooperative with community based citizen groups. That leaves Clinton and Trump.
Trump has made his contempt for intrusive little people mettling in the affairs of the ruling class abundantly clear. With Trump you can expect a Bush style no-holds-barred assault on democracy and international law, in addition to abortion rights, civil rights, and individual rights in general.
That leaves Hillary Clinton. Can she be “managed?” Short answer: far better than Trump, not nearly as well as Sanders. The key to understanding Hillary Clinton the politician is her belief, despite all evidence to the contrary, that she is a progressive. Clearly it is a delusion. But perhaps a useful delusion.
What would Hillary Clinton do to prove herself a progressive? It’s a tantalizing question that may already have been answered by her husband during his presidency.
There were positive takeaways from President Bill Clinton’s tenure. One very interesting and often overlooked development was a tolerance of dissent, leftist dissent particularly. President Bill Clinton was not a progressive and did not act progressively. Nor, however, did he attempt to destroy progressives or progressive organizing.
The left was free to organize in the Clinton years. That fueled, among other things, the rise of the Green Party. By 2000 the Greens had a real chance to accomplish something. What they did with that chance is a different subject. But there was no question that the Clinton years were fertile ground for the growth of the American political left.
In truth, Obama has been significantly less tolerant of progressives than Bill Clinton. But that’s another piece altogether.
So while it would be unwise to hold your breath waiting for President Hillary Clinton to act progressively, you could probably feel a bit safer doing so yourself than you would be with a Generalissimo Trump at the helm.
I’m looking forward to backing Sanders in Philadelphia and beyond. But I’ll vote for the Democrat either way.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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n Tuesday, news broke that Verizon would 
ustria's far-right 
e have been clear from day one: We prefer, welcome, embrace Bernie Sanders and his game-changing campaign. We sincerely hope he can still win the Democratic presidential nomination in November. With Sanders we see the best chance for fundamental change.
