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United Steelworkers (USW) local unions at Asarco in Tucson, Ariz., contributed to the Congressional campaign of attorney Wenona Baldenegro, a Democrat from Arizona.  Ms. Baldenegro, the first American Indian to graduate from Arizona State University’s prestigious Barrett Honor’s College, is attempting to become the first American Indian woman to serve in Congress.

Ms. Baldenegro’s platform focuses on promoting jobs, supporting local businesses and helping to save federal programs.  Ms. Baldenegro, a Harvard Law School graduate, works as an attorney in Flagstaff and volunteers for numerous causes.

USW Director Bob LaVenture said Ms. Baldenegro has served her community and her goals as a lawmaker reflect those of unions.

“Ms. Baldenegro brings values to the campaign that we have not seen in a long time,” LaVenture stated. “She reminds us so much of politicians from years gone by that will go to D.C. and actually stand up for workers, working families and retirees. We proudly and wholeheartedly endorse her campaign.”

 

Already, four of the GOP presidential contenders have had to drop out – Michele Bachmann because she was too wacky, Jon Huntsman because he was too sane, Herman Cain because he was too exposed, and Rick Perry because he was too dim-witted.

But the greatest surprise is the sudden surge of the Adelson campaign. Little-known until now, Adelson was the big winner in South Carolina, is way out front in Florida, and looks to have the political kick needed to go the distance.

Never heard of the Adelson campaign? It’s the married duo of Sheldon and Miriam, neither of whom are actually on the ballot. Rather, they are running on the cash-ticket.

Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas-based, global casino baron, has long been a major funder of far-right-wing causes – and, he’s Newt Gingrich’s very special political pal. When Newt’s presidential bid nearly flat-lined after his electoral collapses in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sheldon rushed in with emergency CPR – Cash-Powered Resuscitation. This one rich guy wrote a $5 million check to Gingrich’s SuperPAC, which is named “Winning Our Future.” The PAC injected Sheldon’s money directly into toxic attack ads against Mitt Romney in South Carolina’s primary, jolting Newt’s campaign back to life. (more…)

Man, it’s hard thinking and talking about social class in these United States.  Most of the time since President Obama was elected, there’s nobody out there but “the rich” and “the middle class,” as if both the working class and poverty have been eliminated.  Then along comes a political election, and all of a sudden the mainstream media starts talking about a “working class” that turns out to be all white, all male, and uniformly good at bowling!

A recent spurt of this usage is particularly confusing as it casts Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum as “a working-class hero.”  Santorum, a lawyer who now makes about a million dollars a year, grew up in a Pittsburgh suburb the son of a clinical psychologist and an administrative nurse.  His “working-class roots” derive from one of his grandfathers having been a miner and from Santorum’s having driven past steel mills as a teenager.  Santorum had a 15% AFL-CIO voting record when he was a Senator, and according to the Washington Post, he now earns his living “as a consultant for groups advocating and lobbying for industry interests . . . [including] $142,500 to help advise a Pennsylvania natural gas firm, Consol Energy.”  Nobody mentions his bowling average, but otherwise newspaper articles with titles like “Santorum fits working class bill” (David Brooks in the New York Times) and “Like Rocky Balboa, Rick Santorum is a working class hero” exhibit a broader pattern of class talk among the punditry.

As a Working-Class Studies studier, I am generally grateful for any reference to the existence of a working class in the U.S., and I am on record as arguing that Working-Class Studies does not need a single, univocal definition of the class in order to study it.  I have been sympathetic with the progressive Democratic focus on “white working class” voters since it was first articulated by Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers in their 2000 book America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters, and I have followed the definitional debate between identifying the working class by education (those without a bachelor’s degree) or by income (those in the bottom third of the income distribution) over the past decade.  The overall result of this debate has been positive, in my judgment, both in blowing up a conception of the electorate that mistakenly saw college-educated voters as a huge majority and in pushing Democrats in a substantially more progressive economic direction in their policies and political appeals.  I also think that Teixeira’s continued cold-eyed social-scientific probing of voter demographics along these lines continues to be both insightful and practically fruitful in informing Democratic Party operatives and politicians.

But the public media discussion of working-classness has so consistently stereotyped and psychologized a resentful, culturally confused, and politically volatile blue-collar white guy that at this point public discussion of white working-class voters not only does more harm than good.  It bewitches any chance we might have of understanding class dynamics in the arena of electoral politics. (more…)

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U.S. Senate Candidate and financial expert Elizabeth Warren explores the consequences of America’s changing investment priorities and where the money goes.

On Dec. 18, a dozen retirees, men and women in their 60s, 70s, even 80s, began occupying a median strip along Route 33 in front of the closed Century Aluminum smelter in Ravenswood, W.Va. In tents and under tarps, a small group stays overnight, despite hypertension, arthritis and other old age ailments. One has suffered a stroke.

These vulnerable people expose themselves to weather extremes although some have no health insurance at all. Century cancelled it. That’s why they’re occupying Century.

The retirees labored their entire lives for wages and pensions comparably lower than those of other aluminum workers. They did it believing they made those sacrifices in exchange for good, lifelong health coverage. Over the past two years, however, Century evicted them, about 540 retirees altogether, from the insurance plan.

The betrayal burns. Executives at Century, corporate 1 percenters, committed the same sort of treachery that is being condemned by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators representing the victimized 99 percent across the country. Thus the retirees adopted the grandchildren’s protest tactic of encampment.

Century shuttered the 50-year-old Ravenswood smelter in February of 2009, throwing 651 workers out of jobs. Century, headquartered in Monterey, Calif., didn’t go bankrupt though. It still operates aluminum plants in Kentucky, South Carolina and Iceland. And it didn’t immediately cancel promised insurance for retirees.

Nine months after the shutdown, it announced it would terminate as of June 1, 2010 health benefits for retirees eligible for Medicare.  Then on Nov. 1, 2010, Century told its retirees who weren’t yet eligible for Medicare that it would stop paying for their coverage as of Jan. 1, 2011.

This revoking of earned benefits isn’t an isolated incident or a fluke. It is part of a pattern documented by Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Ellen E. Schultz in her new book “Retirement Heist.”  The subtitle is, “How companies plunder and profit from the nest eggs of American workers. (more…)

More than most elections, the contest for President this fall is likely to be decided less on “wedge issues” — or even candidate positions that are symbolic of who is on whose side — and more on the character and core values of the candidates — and for that matter on the question of the core values of the society we hope to leave to our children.

Last Friday, speaking to the Democratic Caucus Policy Conference, Vice-President Joe Biden told a story that speaks volumes about the character of Barack Obama.

According to Biden, the day before he ordered the raid that finally stopped Osama Bin Laden, President Obama met with his top national security advisers in the Situation Room. At the close of the meeting, he went around the room asking each person for his or her recommendation on whether to launch the risky nighttime mission.

As it went around the table, Leon Panetta recommended that the President proceed. Most of the others expressed reservations and handicapped the odds of success as only fair. Finally, the President got to Biden who said he recommended not proceeding until two additional steps were taken to enhance the odds.

Then the President stood and told his advisers he would let them know of his decision in the morning.

The next day, as Obama stepped onto his helicopter to leave on a day trip, he turned to his National Security Adviser, Tom Donilan, and issued a simple order: “let’s go.”

Much more was at stake in the Bin Laden mission than success or failure killing or capturing the most wanted fugitive of modern times. In some respects Obama’s Presidency itself was at stake.

To quote Biden, “The President has a backbone like a ramrod.” (more…)

The massive flow of imports into America is destroying our domestic industries at a terrifying pace, and with it the jobs of millions of workers and our capabilities as a self-sufficient nation.

In the past decade we lost 55,000 manufacturing facilities closed or sold to foreign owners. Six million more workers lost their jobs, and we had total trade deficits of $6.3 trillion covered by borrowing abroad at $2 billion per day!

Enacting and enforcing balanced trade legislation is the best solution. We’re urging the U.S. Senate to move ahead on strong action NOW.

This is not a new problem. Here’s what I.W. Abel, then president of the AFL-CIO,  wrote 41 years ago to the U.S. Commerce Department:

“There is a too easy assumption in many quarters that the imposition of some restraints on imports is a retreat to the world of the early 1900’s. This is a misreading of reality. The plain hard fact is that world trade has, since the revival of Western Europe and Japan, moved away from the concept of so-called “free trade” (whatever that term means).

“The current world of international trade includes country after country with every conceivable hedge set up to give preference to their own products and to prejudice foreign imports. It just doesn’t make common sense for us to countenance these arrangements while we do little or nothing to protect the viability of our own economy.” (more…)

The activation of the administration’s long dormant task force on criminal misconduct in the financial collapse, with New York’s progressive attorney general Eric Schneiderman as co-chair, could be the most fateful political and economic development of the election year. There are still immense pitfalls ahead, as Wall Street allies inside the administration and on Wall Street itself try to reduce Schneiderman’s role to that of symbolic fig leaf.

But President Obama has done something potentially momentous for which he deserves our praise, even if he himself does not fully grasp the implications. The significance of the shift is still in play, of course, and will be made clearer as events unfold over the next several weeks.

Some skeptics in the progressive community have raised questions both about the upside for Schneiderman and his motives. Given the administration’s feeble record on prosecutions to date, the critics are right to flag the likelihood that people like Attorney General Eric Holder and SEC enforcement chief Robert Khazumi will try to sandbag Schneiderman. But my reporting suggests that they underestimate both the man and the dynamics that have been set loose.

The surprising move raises several questions.

First Big Question: Why did Obama, after letting the Treasury, Justice Department, and SEC sit on potential criminal prosecutions for three years, do this now? There was, after all, an inter-agency Financial Fraud Enforcement Group appointed in November 2009, and it contented itself with going after small and medium-sized fraudsters and settling mostly for slap-on-the-wrist civil fines, rather than getting to the bottom of the systemic crimes and bringing major cases.

The answer is in a harmonic convergence of three forces.

First, as illustrated by the larger themes of his recent State of the Union Address, Obama belatedly recognized an urgent political need for a more populist posture. What better bogeyman than Wall Street? Polls show that the single most damning factor that leaves voters skeptical about Obama’s economic credibility is his coziness with the big banks. Pecking Paul Volcker on the cheek once a year just doesn’t do it. Obama needed Schneiderman — and not just as a symbol. (more…)

Last year, the Women of Steel (WOS) Committee at United Steelworkers (USW) Local 5 in Martinez, Calif., decided to make the holiday season more memorable for patients at the Veteran’s Hospital. 

The committee collected items such as gift bags filled with toiletries, books, movies and clothing. WOS members personally delivered the gifts in December, raising patients’ spirits.

“It was quite an uplifting day,” said WOS Coordinator Raylynn McIntire. “It was so touching to watch the faces of the people, some who had been there for up to three years and never had received a gift.”

In numerous posts, I’ve argued that the evidence doesn’t come close to supporting the conservative talking point that what’s holding back hiring is Obama-driven regulatory uncertainty.

Well, here’s another data nugget: the share of layoffs, job losses, and UI claims that employers report are due to government regulations or interventions. They are tiny–expect in one case in the table, never more than half of one percent. And in the most recent quarter, they were all about zero (technically, the number reported was too small to meet BLS sampling criteria).

Source: BLS, Table 2My point is not simply to dispense with an erroneous talking point, but to try to stop the key-dangling-look-over-here-not-over-there routine re the major economic problem we still face: inadequate demand. (more…)