Tuesday must be our day

By Jeff WIGGINS
Area Council President

No group has more at stake Tuesday than organized labor.

The choice could hardly be clearer for union members. Sen. Barack Obama, the labor-endorsed Democrat, has voted the union position on legislation 98 percent of the time, according to the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education. Sen. John McCain, the Republican, has sided with unions on bills 14 percent of the time, COPE says.

 In other words, Obama is 84 percent better for us than McCain.

The national polls show Obama is leading. But surveys show him trailing in Kentucky .

At the same time, labor-endorsed Democrat Bruce Lunsford is about even with Mitch McConnell in the senate race. Sen. McConnell is even more anti-labor than McCain. His COPE rating is only 11 percent.

Kentucky polls that show McCain ahead and Lunsford and McConnell tied suggest that many people plan to split their vote on Tuesday. That would be a big mistake for union members especially.

The first casualty of a McCain presidency would be the Employee Free Choice Act. A President Obama would sign the bill. A President McCain would veto it.

 A veto override would be next to impossible. It takes a two-thirds vote of the House and the Senate to beat a presidential veto. The Democrats should make gains in the House and Senate Tuesday, but nobody expects them to win a two-thirds majority in either chamber.

 The Employee Free Choice Act the most important labor legislation proposed since the Wagner Act of 1935.

It would stop employees from stalling union elections for months, even years.

It would also prevent employers from threatening to fire – or firing – workers the bosses think would join a union.

 If it were to be passed and signed into law, the Employee Free Choice Act would give organized labor – all of us – its biggest boost since the Wagner Act, which gave workers the basic right to organize and bargain collectively.

 The Wagner Act also created the National Labor Relations Board and gave it the power to oversee relations between employers and employees. The NLRB was supposed to be impartial.

But we all know that Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes appointed fiercely anti-labor people to the NLRB, steeply tilting the panel toward management. Some union people have said the NLRB is so biased against organized labor we would be better off without it.

No doubt, a President McCain would continue to stack the NLRB with union-haters. A President Obama would not. He would restore fairness and balance to the NLRB, which is what Congress meant it to be when it passed the Wagner Act and President Franklin Roosevelt's signed it.

Likewise, we could expect a fair shake from the U.S. Department of Labor if Obama were elected. The current secretary, Elaine Chao, Sen. McConnell's wife, is perhaps the most bitterly anti-union labor secretaries in history. “Anti-labor secretary of labor” is a better title for her.

A President McCain would follow the lead of Reagan and the Bushes and appoint another Chao – or maybe even keep her on the job. You can bet Obama wouldn't nominate a union-hater as his secretary.

 Nor would he appoint ultra-conservatives to the Supreme Court and to the federal courts. One of the worst legacies of the Reagan and Bush I and Bush II administrations was the packing of the federal judiciary with far-right-wing judges who despise unions.

It is likely that vacancies will occur on the Supreme Court during the first term of the new president. There will also be openings in the lower federal courts. Do you want McCain filling them?

Here's the bottom line. Union endorsements aren't made lightly. They come from a thorough examination of a candidate's position on issues vital to us and from input from the rank-and-file. Some endorsements are easier than others.

But Obama over McCain and Lunsford over McConnell were easy choices. Obama and Lunsford are for us. McCain and McConnell are not.

Somebody nicknamed McCain “John McSame” as in four more year of the same anti-union policies of George W. Bush. “McSame” would also fit McConnell, whose labor voting record is even worse than McCain's.

Meanwhile, I'd like to add a special thanks to Bonnie Edwards of Possum Trot. Many of you know that Bonnie's husband, Aaron, recently passed away. Bonnie spent many hours taking care of him.

With union members, family comes first. She has had to miss meetings of the Western Kentucky Area Council, where she is a delegate. She also has had to miss meetings of the Jackson House-Sanders House Board of Directors.

Bonnie has not been able to help us with our labor-to-labor walks. She couldn't make it to the council hall to do phone banking. But she asked me to bring her a list of names in her area to call and she has been calling them faithfully.

Bonnie understands the meaning of family – her personal family and her union family. Our thoughts and prayers go out to her in these difficult days. Our thanks go out to her, too, for doing her part for Labor 2008.  

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Senator Obama, you're no socialist

By BERRY CRAIG

Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin haven't flat-out called Sen. Barack Obama a socialist. They just claim he supports socialist policies.

But a lot of McCainites are dropping the “s-bomb” on the Democratic presidential hopeful. They shout “socialist!” or wave signs saying Obama is a socialist at rallies when the Republican ticket toppers trash him. McCain and Palin love it, you betcha.

Anyway, not many reporters have bothered to ask genuine socialists – there are a few even in this most conservative and capitalist of Western industrial democracies – if they think Obama is one of them.

Rex W. Huppke of the Chicago Tribune did. The verdict: Senator Obama, you're no socialist.

“He's not really talking about transforming society beyond capitalism,” Huppke quoted Robert Roman of the Democratic Socialists of America. (A pair of communists Huppke interviewed didn't claim Obama for their side either.)

Of course, McCain and Palin hope by pinning the “socialistic” label on Obama, many Americans will equate the Democrat with cold war communist enemies like Gulag Joe Stalin, Uncle Ho and Chairman Mao.

About all that's left of the Red Menace are Fidel Castro, who evidently has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, and Kim Jong-il, who, as we say in Kentucky , is nutty as a fruitcake. 

In the first place, communists and socialists aren't the same thing.  Obama is neither, not by a long shot.

“Obama is about as far from being a socialist as Joe The Plumber is from being a rocket scientist," Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, told Huppke. “I think it's hard for McCain to call Obama a socialist when George Bush is nationalizing banks.”

“Obama is like a center-liberal Democrat, and he is certainly not looking to overthrow capitalism,” added Bruce Carruthers, a sociology professor at Northwestern University . “My goodness, he wouldn't have the support of someone like The Wizard of Omaha, Warren Buffet, if he truly was going to overthrow capitalism. "

Obama's other economic gurus include Paul Volcker and Robert Rubin. Volcker, an economist, was Federal Reserve chairman under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. A corporate executive, Rubin was President Bill Clinton's treasury secretary. Socialists Volcker and Rubin aren't.

But socialists there are in other democracies. The U.S. is the only democracy that doesn't have a significant socialist party.

Most socialists are in Europe where they regularly win parliamentary majorities. They compete with conservative and centrist parties.

Obama is to the left of center in America , which makes him a liberal, not a socialist. But

Obama and other liberals would be centrists in other democratic nations. Almost all Kentucky Democrats and every Southern “Blue Dog” Democrat would be in conservative parties.   

At least McCain hasn't said Obama is a “communist” or an advocate of “communistic policies.” But of late, some of the shouters and sign wavers at McCain and Palin rallies have escalated to “c-bombs.”

One sign said “Hussein Communist.” That one would have made Sen. Joe McCarthy especially proud. He kicked Republican Red-baiting into high gear in the 1950s.

McCain's hero, Sen. Barry Goldwater – an Arizonan like McCain – helped keep the smear job going. He claimed John F. Kennedy was running on a “socialist platform” in 1960, according to Newsweek . A real socialist said JFK was an “enlightened conservative.” That was Willy Brandt, Social Democratic chancellor of West Germany , one of our NATO allies. 

Throughout the cold war, many NATO member nations had social democratic, or democratic socialist, governments at one time or another. Soviet communists hated the West European social democratic parties as much as they hated America 's two big capitalist parties.

What is Democratic Socialism? a book printed in the USSR in 1978, says social democrats are willing dupes of the capitalist powers-that-be and “try to lead the working-class movement away from the true path,” meaning Soviet-style communism. Democratic socialism is nothing more than “petty reformism,” according to the book.

Some Americans – even Democrats -- get socialism and communism mixed up because communists claim they are the true socialists. Remember the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ?  

But claiming to be something doesn't necessarily make it so. The Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship, and not a republic.

“Republic” means representative democracy, like the United States . (Right-wing thugs also have operated under the “republic” guise. For example, the Republic of the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos and the Republic of Nicaragua under the Somozas were dictatorships.)

Anyway, in his story, Huppke gave a pretty good definition of socialism: “ Generally, it involves espousing government control over a country's basic industries, like transportation, communication and energy, while also allowing some government regulation of private industries.” (Private enterprise flourishes in even the most “socialistic” of European democracies such as Sweden and the Netherlands .)

But here's the fundamental difference between socialism and communism: Socialists believe political power must come only from ballots, not from bullets. History instructs that no group has been more committed to democracy at crunch time than socialists.

Before and during World War II, socialists opposed Mussolini in Italy , Hitler in Germany and Tojo and the other far-right-wing militarists in Japan .  (Most conservatives in Italy , Germany and Japan warmly supported their dictators, or passively accepted them.)

Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese militarists mercilessly persecuted socialists, many of whom belonged to labor unions. (Socialists strongly support the right of workers to join unions. Some socialist parties call themselves labor parties.) When the communists took over Eastern Europe after World War II, they brutally suppressed socialist parties and free trade unions.

McCain and Palin really got going on the socialist stuff when Obama suggested in his now-famous exchange with “Joe the Plumber” (who turned out to be a fraud and another far-right-wing nut job) that “…when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.”

I can see where millionaires McCain and Palin – her family's assets are at least a cool $1.2 mill, according to the Associated Press – aren't big on sharing the wealth. But Huppke concluded that “with the economy in the tank, the idea of a little wealth sharing doesn't sound so bad to people whose 401k plans are worth less than the contents of their coin jars.”

This just in: Fifty-one percent of Americans in a Gallup poll said they favor “heavy” taxes on rich people to redistribute wealth, the AP is reporting. “That is significantly higher than when the same question was asked in 1939, at the tail end of the Great Depression, when 35 percent agreed,” according to the wire service.

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Calvert City Rally on October 26

IAM International President Tom Buffenbarger was the featured speaker at a Calvert City rally on Oct. 26. Buffenbarger was in town to help educate union members about the Bush administration's $700 billion bailout plan for banks and investment companies. Buffenbarger and others spoke from a flatbed trailer with a 40-foot banner that declared, “Wall Street Got the Gold Mine – We Got the Shaft!” From Calvert City , the trailer was towed to rallies in Henderson and Louisville , then on to more rallies in cities in Ohio and Pennsylvania . Buffenbarger is shown in the above left and center right photos. A couple listens attentively in the top right photo while the center left photo shows Larry Johnson, a Machinist and Area Council delegate, and Jeff Wiggins, council president. The bottom photos, from left, are Carroll Hubbard, Democratic candidate for the state senate; and state Labor Secretary J.R. Gray.

OUR TICKET:

BARACK OBAMA FOR PRESIDENT

BRUCE LUNSFORD FOR U.S. SENATE

CARROLL HUBBARD FOR STATE SENATE

MIKE LAWRENCE AND ZANA RENFRO

FOR STATE REPRESENTATIVE

ROBERT COLEMAN FOR MAYOR OF PADUCAH

GERALD WATKINS AND RICHARD ABRAHAM FOR COMMISSIONER, CITY OF PADUCAH

            
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(Photos by BERRY CRAIG, copyright 2008)

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