The tax payer bill of rights (TABOR) initiatives on the ballot in Maine and Washington State were both voted down yesterday. The measure, which is a pet project of many on the anti-tax right, would have capped state, county, and city funding at current revenue levels. Recession-era spending would be locked in place, decimating essential services.  But it didn't happen.

In WA I-1033 lost by 55 percentage points, while Maine's Question 4 lost by 60 percentage points. In the beginning of the race, both were up by similar numbers. In between early polls and election night, spirited opposition campaigns arose in both states. TABOR opponents highlighted the potential damage to public services and voters took heed.  

I wrote an article for the Prospect on why a TABOR victory would have been disastrous for either state.Check it out.

The Economist’s Democracy in America blog has a post up today recommending the abolishment of the Senate. (Our own Dylan Matthews has the specifics.) As the DA notes, it would be functionally impossible to get rid of the Senate, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea. Preach it, anonymous blogger!

“The Senate embodies no rational philosophy of governance, and has a completely irrational electoral system. There is no representational philosophy that would legitimate apportioning the most powerful legislators in the country according to arbitrary and widely disparate numbers of voters, representing arbitrary tracts of land that owe their boundaries to the whims of land granters centuries ago. The fact that there are two senators each from North Dakota, Delaware, Texas and California is flat-out insane.”

I have a new article on the American Prospect today about Taxpayer Bill of Rights initiatives (TABOR). If tax reform doesn’t sound particularly interesting, think of it as libertarian plot to eviscerate funding for social spending. There are TABOR initiatives on the ballot in Washington State and Maine this year, threatening funding for education, roads, Medicaid, and other aspects of the social safety net.  

Check it out! 

Last week I interviewed John Dodds, director of the Philadelphia Unemployment Project (PUP), for a little story I’m working on for YES! magazine. (Actually, it will be an update of this piece I did for the American Prospect on organizing the unemployed.)  

PUP is a scrappy non-profit that has fought for Philly’s impoverished and unemployed since the OPEC recession. Dodds’ work with them dates back to its founding in 1975, meaning he’s been with them through more recessions than you can count on one hand. I asked Dodds if he thought this one was considerably worse, from his organization’s viewpoint, than the others they’ve been through. His answer surprised me (although in retrospect, I should have thought of it).

Good New York Times piece on liberal frustrations “despite being in what, on the surface, is a commanding political position.” 

“On the surface” are the key words there. There is a well-documented tendency in the lefty blog-o-sphere, among political radicals, true blue progressives etc. to blame the Democrats, and specifically Obama, for squandering their “commanding political position” on moderate and incremental reforms. There certainly are some Democrats who hinder the process, Blue Dogs and Senate moderates mostly. They aren’t left-wing, and most have never claimed to be. But without them there would be no commanding majority. Without them we wouldn’t even be able to make incremental reforms.

And that is the chief reason our political system is so broken.

From TNR.

Arch-conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) proposes, in the pages of the Advocate no less, that GLBTQ communities come out in favor of market solutions to health care reform, particularly for the the HIV/AIDS epidemic. 

It will be interesting to see how Coburn, who has railed against GLBTQ people for years, would explain this attempt at outreach to his more reactionary constituents. It'd be even more interesting to see him explain his 2004 quote to the Advocate:

The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power ... That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That's a gay agenda.

Oops.

I was unable to come up with any insider contacts for a full fledged story on yesterday’s general strike in Puerto Rico.

The New York Times has a short article on the unrest here and as Gabo commented on my previous post, you can find up to date reports on the troubles here, but only if you speak Spanish.

The NYT article contains an interesting factoid I hadn’t heard before; “On an island with little industry, the public sector plays an especially large role, employing about 25 percent of all workers.”

To make matters worse, conservative Governor Luis Fortuño’s plan to layoff 17,000 employees seems specifically targeted towards lower class Puerto Ricans, leaving the higher echelons of public service relatively untouched.

Fortuño’s plan seems recklessly shortsighted, cutting off many of the island’s poorer families from their only source of income in a bid to remain fiscally solvent. Other options could include laying off higher paid officials (who most likely have diverse sources of income or savings), while cutting hours or pay for the majority of government employees. Some money is better than nothing.

Unemployment already stands at 15 percent. The planned cutbacks will push jobless levels past 17 percent.

Labor unrest has been simmering for weeks in Puerto Rico, where the conservative governor Luis Fortuño recently announced the termination of 17,000 public sector jobs, beginning in November. He enacted this drastic cut in response to the island’s $3.2 billion deficit, the result of a three year recession.

The cuts are expected to propel the 15 percent unemployment rate well past the 17 percent mark, worse than any U.S. state. In reaction to these devastating numbers, Puerto Rico’s unions have announced an island-wide general strike today, culminating with a march on the capital. At least twelve of the island’s unions are expected to participate, and non-union workers are being actively encouraged to join as well. Organizers are anticipating at least 100,000 people for the march alone.

The government has not been standing idly by. In a move decried by the ACLU, Fortuño has threatened to charge protesters with terrorism if they block the function of the air and sea ports. This seems likely, given that a general strike is, well, general. (The right to strike is protected under the Constitution.)

I have put out feelers to some of my labor sources and I will be attempting to contact participants and experts Thursday night. In any case, I will try to post something at day’s end and with any luck I will be able to get a feature length article up by Friday, unless my attempts to harvest on the ground sources prove fruitless.

In any case, stay tuned.

On and by the way: there hasn’t been a general strike in the United States since the mid-1930s. Frankly, it’s a little hard to imagine a circumstance that would cause the mainland U.S. labor movement to use such militant tactics.

I just posted a wonky piece on the other website I write for, the Seattle-based Publicola, exposing a potentially problematic side of the public option, at least for hospitals in states like Washington (or Minnesota and Wisconsin) that have efficient healthcare delivery systems.  

I encourage you to read it, but the basic premise is that the fee-for-service style of Medicare reimbursement benefits those hospitals that provide quantity of service over quality. Thus, states with less efficient care, like New York and Florida get two times the reimbursement rates of states like Washington that get good outcomes for their patients, quickly. And those efficient providers fear that if the public option is based upon Medicare reimbursement rates they’re losses will be compounded and they may eventually go broke.

Harold Pollack over at The New Republic has a great post, complete with a neat map, on House Dems' attempts to lift the 1988 federal ban on funding for needle exchange programs—one of the single most effective weapons in the fight against HIV/AIDS. But the bills in question have been weighted down with two riders that ban federally-financed programs from an area within 1,000 feet of “colleges, universities, parks, video arcades, day-care centers, high schools, public swimming pools and other institutions” (according the NYT ed board). This means that the ban would effectively remain in urban areas, where most intravenous drug users live.

It's almost as though Congressional representatives aren't so concerned with people who, generally speaking, don't vote. What, after all, is the point of doing good if it doesn't guarantee you a job in every two years?

In These Times has launched a new worker's rights blog, "Working In These Times". I highly recommend it. There aren't nearly enough media outlets that cover these issues. 

MoveOn's new celebrity-studded video snarkily argues for the public option by highlighting the plight of those poor health care executives with their millions of dollars in walking around money. (Isn’t it time they had a chance?) Check it out.

My favorite line goes to Will Ferrell:

“Insurance companies are detail oriented enough to deny claims for things like typos. If you spell something wrong, do you really deserve surgery?  I don’t think so.”

Farrell’s line is funny, but it’d be a lot funnier if it wasn’t true. I just reported a story for the Seattle-based political blog Publicola on health insurance company abuses that included this horror story.  

Wolfe sez:  

“One reason to lament the passing of Irving Kristol is that we will never know what this acerbic and witty critic of the New Left’s most romantic and hare-brained ideas really thought of the even more preposterously absurd thoughts of the contemporary conservatism that Kristol himself did so much to launch.” 

I tend to think he would have embraced them.  Perhaps not in a bold lettered editorial, but discreetly. Kristol was a big believer in lying to the dumb, brutish masses for political ends and to keep the buggers stupefied. His fear of and contempt for those not of the ruling class can be seen quite clearly in this excerpt from Hillel Italie’s obituary.

“By his mid-20s, Kristol had already backed off his most radical beliefs. A member of the armed infantry in Europe during World War II, he was surprised by his sympathy for the military establishment and by his distance from his fellow soldiers, whom he regarded as ‘thugs or near-thugs.’

‘My army experience permitted me to make an important political discovery,’ he wrote. ‘The idea of building socialism with the common man who actually existed - as distinct from his idealized version - was sheer fantasy, and therefore the prospects for `democratic socialism' were nil."

To control these dangerous elements (meaning, the majority of the American public) he advocated systemic manipulation. As I described it in my bio of Kristol back in February, he very much embraced the concept of the “noble lie—the idea of a fallacy propagated by the enlightened elite who must guide the benighted masses towards lofty goals they may not be ready to understand.”

Indeed, despite Kristol’s strident intellectualism and professed agnosticism he embraced such neo-populist causes as anti-Darwinism because he believed that there were certain truths the mass of humanity should not be privy to, truths that might erode traditional moral order and the very structure of society. So Kristol probably would have thought that Palin, Beck, and company are idiots—but useful idiots.  I very much doubt that he would have tried to discredit them, as Wolfe seems to suggest. At least not publicly.

Why are you here? 

This afternoon, New Republic senior editor Jonathan Chait dissected yet another dishonest column by the habitually dishonest Charles Krauthammer. Chait scores some good points, etc, but his post also raises an oft-repeated question. What the hell is Krauthammer’s name still doing on TNR’s masthead?

This point has been made before by more proficient bloggers than I, but it bears repeating. Krauthammer is only listed as a contributing editor, a purely honorary title. In fact, I can’t even remember when he last wrote for TNR. Presumably it was during the Micheal Kinsley/Hendrik Hertzberg reign, a time when praise was heaped upon the magazine by such lefty stalwarts as George Will, Norman Podhoretz and the National Review.

But today, TNR is a different, and much more consistently liberal, magazine—so they should take Krauthammer’s name off the masthead already.

The AFL-CIO convention just keeps getting better and better. This morning the 250,000 strong UNITE HERE announced their reaffiliation with the AFL-CIO. For those just tuning in UNITE HERE was one of six unions that left the labor federation in 2005. They formed their own coalition, Change to Win (CtW) because they felt the AFL spent too much time on the Democrats and not enough on organizing new workers.

The other CtW unions are Teamsters, the Carpenters, national powerhouse SEIU, the farmworkers (UFW), and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW). These six unions were some of the largest in the movement claiming a third of the union members in the country. They were also some of the most innovative and activist unions in the business. While many of the old school, business-oriented unions had abandoned the social justice elements of the movement, SEIU and UNITE HERE in particular had reemphasized their progressive roots. They allied with other left-wing movements and championed issues like immigration reform that the larger movement had long ignored. SEIU and UNITE HERE were also responsible for two of the most successful organizing drives of the past forty years, turning LA and Las Vegas respectively into union towns.

Thus, there was a fair amount of excitement when they left the AFL-CIO. There was talk in some circles of a revitalizing split, akin to the CIO’s emergence in the thirties. But it quickly became evident that no rebirth would be forthcoming. CtW ran up against the same impassable barrier as their AFL counterparts: our nation’s medieval labor laws. The only way to really move forward is to support progressive politicians who back your interests (like organizing the public sector, where unions have been growing). In short, CtW can’t organize any better than the AFL, so there isn't really a reason for CtW to exist. Then in the last year or so, UNITE HERE and SEIU started feuding for reasons too internecine to get into.  Really, it was only a matter of time until the UNITE HERE side came back to the AFL’s fold.

“We felt that Change To Win was too dominated by SEIU, and after last year’s election, where AFL and CtW worked together for President Obama, it was time to heal the split,” Pilaf Weiss, a UNITE HERE spokeswoman told me. “With the exception of SEIU we still work with all the other unions in Change to Win. They are all strong allies of ours.”

New AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka has stated that reuniting the labor movement will be one of his primary goals. This will rightly be seen as a feather in his cap. But the rest of the CtW unions, who don’t necessarily have UNITE HERE's extraordinary wariness of SEIU, will probably be a tougher sell.

For anyone curious about President Obama's address to the AFL-CIO yesterday in Pittsburg, here it is in full from 2 Political Junkies. I’m not going to directly link to it, as there are four segments and our video posting abilities are…imperfect. Link to text is here.

The speech itself is pretty stirring stuff, as I tweeted yesterday: “This is the guy I voted for”. It is reminiscent of Obama’s finer moments on the campaign trail, and opening with a cute pick me up: “You know, the White House is pretty nice, but there's nothing like being back in the House of Labor.” (Although he kind of spoils the moment by following it up with a nod to Arlen Specter.)

Obama included a lot of health care talk, naturally, a reaffirmation of his support for the Employee Free Choice Act, and a necessarily brief list of his labor victories (Ledbetter Act, rescinding Bush’s anti-worker executive policies).  He tied the success of organized labor to the success of the middle class, and thus to the success of the U.S. as a whole and at the end he delves into the proud history of organized labor in Pennsylvania

There isn’t anything new or particularly revelatory here. But having spoken to a couple of my friends in organized labor, they seem pretty rejuvenated by the speech. These are people who have been flagging throughout the summer, getting more and more depressed by the imbecilic, yet effective, attacks on health care, the EFCA quagmire, and the general standoff that is the U.S. Senate. The fact that Obama was able to overcome their post-August cynicism shows that the president hasn’t completely alienated his left-wing supporters, contrary to recent sensational news coverage. Check out the labor blog Talking Union for more.

Tomorrow, John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO and its most progressive president, well, ever, will step down after 14 years of service. Taking his place will be his long-time second-in-command, Richard Trumka, formerly of the United Mine Workers, a rough-and-tumble labor leader who has promoted a more “aggressive” labor movement. 

Trumka gained a lot of attention last year with a fiery election-year speech denouncing racism among union members. Usually, the labor world is pretty airtight. Something HUGE can happen in there and people on the outside won’t hear a thing. This time, 550,000 people watched the speech on YouTube, and even Andrew Sullivan, who doesn’t seem to realize unions exist, gave it a link.

Trumka’s pre-Obama history is less well-known and just as interesting. Thomas Geoghegan, author of a brilliant labor memoir, knew Trumka as a player in a reform movement, Miners for Union Democracy, that swept out the United Mine Workers corrupt (and murderous) old guard.  He shared a secretary with the young Trumka, and Geoghegan envied his officemate’s easy manner with the rank and file members:

“He was no different than me, really, but he was the son of a miner and he had been in the mines. Rich Trumka was just as much a Washingtonian as I was, but he was a miner. The miners could pour out their hearts to him and call him ‘buddy,’ and he could call them ‘buddy’ back.

And I couldn’t, and that’s what annoyed the hell out of me. [O]ne night, Rich and another miner taught me how to chew tobacco. They leaned their chairs against the wall, and they chewed and spit in long arcing freethrows into [a wastebasket] across the room.

I had to get up, walk across, lean over the basket, and drool.”  

But Geoghegan’s blissful days of drooling tobacco juice were numbered. No one remembers this now, but as the rank-and-file miners got a taste of democracy in the mid-70s, they decided they weren’t going to take anymore crap—from anyone. They stood up to their old union bosses, then their employers, and then, when the courts got involved, they struck against them, too. “For two years in the middle of the 1970s almost all the coal miners in America were engaged in a strike against the U.S. government,” which resulted in an injunction a day and millions of dollars of fines. As Geoghgan remembers in his memoir, the young turks, including Trumka and himself, who’d taken over the D.C. HQ of the UMW, couldn’t control the rank-and-file and they were turned out in disgrace.

 “Rich Trumka told me he was going back into the mines. I didn’t know what to say to Rich. He was young enough to go into the mines, I suppose, but my God…I knew he had vague political ambitions, which seemed quite stranger and farfetched to me…”

Not too farfetched as it turned out. Five years later the young turks were back, with Trumka at their head.

“Trumka became president in 1981. And today the UMW is probably the stablest, most adult, most democratic union in all of labor,” Geoghegan reflected. 14 years later, Trumka was elected Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO on Sweeney’s reformist ticket that replaced the Cold War-era old guard with a new progressive leadership. Tomorrow, he’ll be president of the largest labor federation in the country. I can’t think of a better guy for it.

Now if you want to discuss how much he’ll actually be able to get done, that’s a different story. The institutional and historical restraints binding him are tough. The AFL-CIO doesn’t actually command much power over its members and organizing new members is excruciatingly difficult. Neither of these encumbrances can be blamed on Trumka (although their effects will be anyway), but as we saw under Sweeney they can hobble even the best of intentions.