Blog

Leo Toribio
Pittsburgh, Pa.

As the 2012 election year gets underway, we will probably hear Republican candidates attacking unions (as they did in previous elections in Wisconsin and elsewhere).  What should we think of such attacks? 
 
I grew up in the forties and fifties in a household with several working women — and working mothers as well.  They all belonged to unions and one of them was even a union steward.  What I learned from that was that managers would
occasionally attempt to work one sort of injustice or another against workers, and God help the manager who did so against one of these women (He rarely did).  The unions helped them to assert their rights and obtain justice in the workplace. 
 
I never belonged to any union.  In one sense, I didn’t need to because I learned from my mother and the other women in my childhood home what my rights are and how to defend them.  On the other hand, most of the jobs I’ve held were deemed “professional,” on a par with management in many cases.  But I was acutely aware of the benefits that accrued to me in companies that had strong unions:  salary, health care, work rules and other benefits.
 
Unions are largely democratic, not socialist.  They provide their members with protection against abuse by poor managers and make working conditions better and more productive for both the employee and employer, and help to reveal actions by managers that may be counterproductive, among other things.

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A spring awash with Etch A Sketch conservatives, camera-wielding GOP con men and a bogus deficit reduction budget from House Republicans shows that for the right, wrong is justified when it achieves the desired results.

A perfect example of this political philosophy is the work of James E. O’Keefe III, a right wing, unsupervised, unaccountable, self-appointed and self-styled “investigative journalist” who has violated federal law, lied about his identity and deceitfully cut and pasted video to destroy what he perceives as liberal institutions.

Oddly for the party that claims conservative Christians as key constituents, O’Keefe’s misbehavior is celebrated by GOP talking heads — the likes of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. That encourages copycats. The New York Times last week told the tale of one.  John M. Howting, a bungling video scam man, sees himself as an O’Keefe apostle. 

Honorable journalists abide by an ethics code forbidding lying to secure a story. For them, the end does not justify the means. By contrast, for O’Keefe and today’s Etch A Sketch conservatives, the end they want vindicates any scheme to secure it. Deliberate lying, cynical deceit, cut-and-paste deception – all of that is rationalized by conservatives to get their way. It’s a lovely escape clause they’ve written for themselves from that annoying Judeo-Christian thou-shalt-not-lie commandment.

O’Keefe wanna-be John M. Howting tried clumsily to trod in his disgraced mentor’s footsteps, lying about his name, who he represented and his intentions in a failed effort to discredit a couple of what he perceived to be liberal New York community groups.

O’Keefe had better luck. This right wing rebel without a conscience lied about his name, who he represented and his intentions in successful efforts to manipulate some targets into saying stupid stuff, which he surreptitiously recorded. His deceptive and distorted films destroyed ACORN and damaged other groups he considered progressive.  Despite O’Keefe’s liberal use of the Commandment escape clause, he became conservatives’ golden boy.  

Among right-wing talk show hosts who urged their conservative Christian listeners to praise the con was Bill O’Reilly who said O’Keefe should be awarded a Congressional Medal.  Not so worshiping were federal prosecutors who charged O’Keefe with misrepresenting himself in an attempted phone hacking at the office of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. O’Keefe pleaded guilty. And not so revering was the California state attorney general who determined that O’Keefe’s sliced-and-diced video misrepresented the actions of ACORN workers. (more…)

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom couldn’t have said it better — or worse. When asked by CNN Wednesday morning whether Mitt was being pushed so far to the right by Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich that he’d be handicapped in the general election, Fehrnstrom said “you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

An Etch-A-Sketch, for those of you under twenty, is a thick flat gray screen that comes in a plastic frame with two knobs on the front in the lower corners — one left, one right. Twisting the knobs changes the aluminum powder on the back of the screen, creating completely new images. If you twist the left knob, you alter the powder horizontially; twist the right nob, and you alter it vertically.

Remind you of anyone?

When Mitt ran for governor of Massachusetts he twisted the left knob, moving horizontally to the left. (I know first hand because I ran in the Democratic primary that year.) He became a social liberal, tolerant of abortion and willing to entertain the idea that gays and lesbians should be able to form civil unions. He was also an economic moderate interested in seeking ways to expand health-care coverage.

But ever since Mitt left the governor’s office, he’s been twisting the right nob, moving downward into the muck of regressive Republicanism in pursuit of the Republican nomination.

Etch-A-Sketch was introduced in 1959 near the peak of the baby boom. (It was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1998, and in 2003 the Toy Industry Association named it one of the hundred most memorable toys of the twentieth century.)

But Etch-A-Sketch has been replaced by digital toys that have the capacity to play and replay videos. These new video toys aren’t just for kids. Almost every voting adult has one, or has easy access to one. (more…)

By Harold Meyerson
Editor-at-Large, The American Prospect

Republicans have reached their 1984. I don’t mean this in the Orwellian sense, though Republicans have more than their share of Orwellian impulses. Rather, I mean that the kind of divisions that have characterized Democratic presidential primaries since the 1984 contest between Walter Mondale and Gary Hart have now popped up in GOP primaries as well: This year, Republicans are dividing along lines of class.

According to data compiled by the Wall Street Journal, in all the states that have voted thus far, Mitt Romney has won 46 percent of the counties with incomes higher than the statewide median, and just 15 percent of those with incomes beneath the statewide median. Rick Santorum, by contrast, has won 39 percent of the counties with higher income, and 46 percent of those with lower income.

These numbers — a product of the kind of residential-sorting-by-class that Charles Murray documents in his new book, “Coming Apart” — reinforce exit polling that shows Romney’s strongest supporters come from households making more than $100,000 a year. Indeed, the higher up the income scale, the higher the level of Romney support.

These numbers look familiar to anyone who has tracked Democratic presidential primary voting for the past three decades. Beginning with the Hart-Mondale donnybrook, Democratic voters have often clustered by class. In that year, Mondale, the presumptive favorite, was given a tough race by Hart, whose supporters were disproportionately upscale, younger professionals more concerned with environmentalism and cultural issues than with the bread-and-butter staples of New Deal politics. Mondale’s key backers were more downscale voters, disproportionately union members and African Americans, and his platform emphasized more traditional liberal priorities. (more…)