The
Official
Newsletter of the
Prepared by
Volume
11, Number 6, June, 2010
Rand Paul supports
right-to-work, opposes the EFTA
Bill Londrigan, president of the Kentucky State
AFL-CIO, says he can count 2,500 reasons why he’ll vote for Democrat Jack
Conway for the U.S. Senate:
“The
National Right to Work Committee gave Republican Rand Paul $2,500.”
Though he
had never run for office, Paul handily defeated Secretary of State Trey Grayson
of Richwood in the May 18 primary. Grayson’s supporters included Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and former Vice President Dick Cheney.
The Tea
Party movement got behind Paul. He was endorsed by Sarah Palin, the 2008
Republican vice presidential candidate who has become a Tea Party favorite.
“I have a
message, a message from the tea party,” Paul said in his victory speech, “a
message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We’ve come to take our
government back.”
Londrigan
says it is significant where Paul made his speech and threw his
victory party—at the Bowling Green Country Club.
“He says he
is for ordinary working people who are hurting. But it just goes to show
you who his constituents really are—wealthy country club-goers and not common
folks. It just shows you the hypocrisy of Rand Paul.”
Londrigan
says Paul’s big check from the National Right to Work Committee is
more proof Paul’s friends include “those who oppose organized labor
and the interests of working men and women of this commonwealth and this
country. The Right to Work Committee is backed by large corporations that are
hell-bent on destroying organized labor.”
Both Conway
and Mongiardo, a former state senator, oppose “right to work for less” laws and
support the Employee Free Choice Act, which would level the playing field for
workers seeking to form unions.
The state
AFL-CIO voted to endorse neither Conway nor Mongiardo in the primary.
We really
took a hard look at them and decided the best course was to remain neutral.
Individual unions and union members were free to support who they wanted. Both
Conway and Mongiardo had union support.
“But now the
work begins. Now we have to come together and make sure we get Jack
Londrigan
says Paul is too extreme for the
Londrigan
says Paul is wrong on more than “right to work” and the Employee Free Choice
Act. “He is wrong on health care and on banking reform. He is an
anti-government fanatic. We certainly will be informing our members that his
positions are counter to theirs on every issue that affects their
livelihoods.”
State
AFL-CIO expected to back
Council
President Jeff Wiggins expects the Kentucky State AFL-CIO to quickly endorse
Jack Conway for the U.S. Senate.
“We had two
good friends running in the Democratic Primary – Jack Conway and Dan
Mongiardo,” said Wiggins, who also serves on the state AFL-CIO executive board.
“
Conway, the
state attorney general, will face
“Neither
Paul nor Grayson are our friends,” Wiggins added. “Both of them support right
to work laws. Paul got $2,500 from the National Right to Work Committee. Both
Paul and Grayson oppose the Employee Free Choice.
“Since his
win, Paul has proved again what an extremist he is with his comments about the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans for Disabilities Act. He said he has
problems with both of these important acts.
“Paul also
said that President Obama’s criticism of BP’s oil spill is’un-American.’ Rand
Paul is too nutty for
Seventy-seven
percent of council delegates present at the November, 2009 meeting voted to
recommend
Wiggins also
invited
Wiggins: Chambers and Adair
‘ran good campaigns’
Two members
of the council family lost races in the May 18 Democratic primary. “Wayne
Chambers and Glenda Adair are still winners to us,” said Jeff Wiggins, council
president. “Both ran good campaigns and we hope to see them running again.”
Chambers, a
council trustee and retired Steelworker, came up short in his bid to unseat
Romey Holmes as the
Adair, wife of council Vice President Benny Adair, lost her
race for
By SAM STEIN
The Huffington Post
Seizing
on a series of politically eccentric statements from his opponent Rand Paul,
Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Jack Conway charged the Tea Party darling
with having an "empathy gap" and promoting a world view that is
"cold and callous."
"I
think Rand Paul would be bad for the country," the Kentucky Attorney
General said in an interview with the Huffington Post. "Rand Paul would be
bad for
The
dual comments have had the effect of placing Paul under a glaring and
uncomfortable political spotlight as even national Republicans acknowledge that
he needs more grooming. And
"He's trying
to say that the media is out to get him or the liberals are out to get
him," Conway said. "The problem is, several weeks ago he gave that
interview to the Louisville
Courier-Journal, the editorial interview. He knew what he said, but
then right after the election, he said it again on NPR, and then on MSNBC he
had those 20 very painful minutes with Rachel Maddow. And it just kind of took
on a life of its own."
"What
did he say this morning?"
Story continues below
"We
are going to say: 'Look, Rand Paul seems to want to be the prince of some
national ideology. I want to be a senator for
As it stands now,
"I
will gladly take the underdog label if you want to give me the underdog
label," he said. "I'm going to go fight for
Howard Walker
honored with W.C. Young Award
About
50 people turned out to help honor Howard Walker as the 2010 W.C. Young Award
recipient.
“W.C.
would be proud that Howard is our winner this year,” said Jeff Wiggins, council
president. “Howard served his union and his community.”
The Young Award, named for the late W.C.
Young, a national labor and civil rights leader from Paducah, is the highest
honor the council bestows. Young earned the first award in 1994.
Walker, who still carries a Local 184 card,
was also McCracken County sheriff for a dozen years. Even then, he was union.
He tried to organize his deputies as a Laborers’ local.
Walker was honored at the annual
W.C. Young Award dinner in Paducah. Larry Robinson, a retired Local 184 business
manager, gave the keynote speech. Benny Adair, council vice president, again
served as emcee. Guests included Labor Secretary J.R. Gray of Benton, Kentucky
AFL-CIO President Bill Londrigan, state AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Larry
Jaggers, Carol Young, W.C. Young’s widow; State Reps. Mike Cherry and Steven
Rudy, McCracken County Sheriff Jon Hayden, County Jailer Bill Adams and Paducah
City Commissioner Gerald Watkins.
State Reps. Fred Nesler and Will
Coursey were in
Meanwhile, Wiggins said input from
delegates about future Young Awards is welcome.
“I have formed a committee to come
up with some guidelines that might be helpful to follow,” he said. The
committee consists of
Wiggins said delegates can contact
the committee members or him with suggestions. “We will also welcome
suggestions at council meetings,” he said. “Hopefully, we can come up with a
set of guidelines before next year.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Our friend Phinis
V. Hundley, president of UAW Local 2012 and a member of the Kentucky Democratic
Party’s State Central Executive Committee, sent us this excellent article about
Rand Paul from Salon.com:
By JOE CONASON
Salon.com
To understand
Rand Paul's agonized contortions over
Specifically, both the
Kentucky Republican Senate nominee and his father, Ron Paul, have been closely
associated over the past two decades with a faction that described itself as
"paleolibertarian," led by former Ron Paul aide Lew Rockwell and the
late writer Murray Rothbard. They eagerly forged an alliance with the "paleoconservatives"
behind Patrick Buchanan, the columnist and former presidential candidate whose
trademarks are nativism, racism and anti-Semitism.
Repeatedly during Ron Paul's
political career, his associates used the same kinds of inflammatory rhetoric used
by Buchanan in order to attract support and raise money, all while Paul himself
pretended not to know what they were doing and saying in his name. Paul could
always cover himself by saying, just as Rand Paul says now, that his opposition
to civil rights statutes is purely constitutional and has nothing to do with bigotry.
The last time that anyone
examined the details of the Paul family's gamy history was back in 2008, when
the
were replete with ugly references to blacks, Martin Luther King, homosexuals
and other targets of the racist far right. At the time, Reason magazine, a
libertarian magazine that opposed the "paleo" deviation, gave the
most revealing account of its movement's degenerate element in a long article
by Julian Sanchez and David Weigel.
Following Ron Paul's dismal
performance in the 1988 presidential campaign as the Libertarian Party
candidate, Rockwell and Rothbard "championed an open strategy of
exploiting racial and class resentment to
build a coalition with populist 'paleoconservatives,' producing a flurry of
articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary
mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters" uncovered by the
New Republic. Rothbard died in 1995, but in 2008 Rockwell was still at Paul's
side as a top advisor, "accompanying him to major media appearances;
promoting his candidacy on the LewRockwell.com blog; publishing his books; and
peddling an array of the avuncular
According to Sanchez and
Weigel, the tone of Paul's newsletters shifted to reflect his political
circumstances. Between his first presidential campaign and his return to
Congress in 1996 as a Republican, they were filled with slurs against blacks
generally and Martin Luther King Jr. in particular, including the accusation
that the civil rights leader "seduced
underage girls and boys." Rothbard hated King deeply, describing him in
November 1994 as "a socialist, egalitarian, coercive integrationist, and
vicious opponent of private-property rights ... who was long under close
Communist Party control," and concluding that "there is one excellent
litmus test which can set up a clear dividing line between genuine
conservatives and neoconservatives, and between paleolibertarians and
what we can now call 'left-libertarians.' And that test is where one stands on
'Doctor' King." (Then again, he hated
This offensive drivel was
calculated to wring contributions from a narrowly targeted segment of the
population. The Reason story quotes Ed Crane, longtime president of the Cato
Institute, recalling a discussion
with Ron Paul about the most fertile source of direct-mail contributions to his
campaign: the mailing list of the Spotlight, the anti-Semitic national tabloid
published by the "populist" Nazi sympathizer Willis Carto.
Both Rothbard and Rockwell
wrote of their strategy for a "right-wing
populism" that would bring "the rednecks" into the
libertarian movement. In an essay that appeared in their own joint newsletter
in January 1992,
Rothbard cited Joe McCarthy and David Duke, the openly racist former Klan
leader, as "models" for this approach. (According to Sanchez and
Weigel, a 1990 issue of the Ron Paul Political Report discussed Duke and his
movement "in strikingly similar terms.") This new movement would seek
to mobilize an alienated white middle class against wealthy East Coast elitists
and the "parasitic Underclass" spawned by liberal policy --
identified clearly enough in a regular newsletter feature called "PC
Watch," which featured news items about "interracial sex" and
"thuggish black men terrifying petite white and Asian women."
As for policy, the
paleolibertarians advocated lower taxes, abolishing welfare, and
"elimination of the entire 'civil rights' structure, which tramples on the
property rights of every American" -- a sentiment that Rand Paul echoes in
alluding to the right of private businesses to practice racial discrimination.
In 1992, Ron Paul joined with
Rothbard and Rockwell to support Pat Buchanan's insurgent primary candidacy
against the incumbent Republican President George Bush. (Buchanan returned the
favor in 2008.) "We have a dream," wrote Rockwell, "and perhaps
someday it will come to pass. (Hell, if 'Dr.' King can have a dream, why can't
we?) Our dream is that, one day, we Buchananites can present Mr. and Mrs.
America , and all the liberal and conservative and centrist elites, with a
dramatic choice ... We can say: 'Look, gang: you have a choice, it's either Pat
Buchanan or David Duke.'"
No wonder Sanchez and Weigel
concluded with a forthright condemnation of Ron Paul's dishonesty on race.
"Ron Paul may not be a racist," they wrote, "but he became
complicit in a strategy of pandering to
racists." The same polite formulation could be applied to the hard-line
activists behind the Goldwater campaign in 1964, or the "Southern
strategists" of the Nixon White House, or the "populist
conservatives" of
the George Wallace campaign, many of whom still remain active on the right
today. Despite the persistent efforts of Buchanan, Rockwell and many others on
the far right, their deranged "dream" of political advancement
through racial conflict never developed into a full-scale national nightmare.
Instead, King's dream has since drawn closer to fulfillment with the election
of Barack Obama. But the profound resentment of the first black president
symbolized by Rand Paul and his Tea Party supporters arose from an old
political fever swamp that has never been drained.
From The
Huffington Post
Change to Believe
in or Focus on Hate Mongering?
By LEO W.
GERARD
President United Steelworkers
When
President Barack Obama signed the historic health insurance reform bill, he
said it was, "Change we can believe in." He noted that his party has
sought reform for more than half a century. The effort began long before
President Harry Truman recommended to Congress on Nov. 19, 1945 a comprehensive
health program, noting: "People with low or moderate incomes do not get
the same medical attention as those with high incomes. The poor have more
sickness, but they get less medical care."
The
legislation Obama signed will tax the wealthy -- those earning more than a
quarter million dollars a year -- to help pay for extending insurance to
millions of poor and working people and for guaranteeing insurance companies
can't deny access to those with pre-existing conditions or withdraw coverage
from those who get sick.
Republicans
have vowed to overturn or repeal this law that would aid tens of millions of
Americans. House Republican leader John Boehner yelled, "hell no"
repeatedly to the reform proposals and described them as
"Armageddon."
Every historic moment in this country
-- from the Revolution and the Civil War tto the enactment of Social Security
and Civil Rights legislation -- compelled Americans to assess their values and
choose sides. In the case of Civil Rights legislation, for example, some,
including the late Republican senator from
This
is such a moment. Americans must decide what is just and decent in the richest
Democracy in the world. They must choose whether to side with the rich and the
hate mongers or to align themselves with working people and hope.
"The bill I'm signing will set
in motion reforms that generations of Americans have fought for and marched for
and hungered to see," Obama said during the ceremony in the East Room of
the White House. That makes it a landmark bill, but it's also historic because
this measure is the first government attempt in thirty years to halt rising
income inequality, the New York Times reported a day after the signing.
The
wealthy -- those earning more than $250,000 a year -- will pay for part of the
reforms with tax increases. For example, those in the $1 million salary, perks
and bonuses club will pay an additional $46,000 a year in 2013, according to
the
The
richest one percent in this club now take in 23.5 percent of all income in this
country -- the largest percent since 1928, the year before the Great Stock
Market Crash and the onset of the Great Depression. Then it was 23.9 percent.
Income inequality has risen since the 1970s, when the fortunes of the nation's
rich began skyrocketing while middle class wages stagnated. Simultaneously, the
rich got tax rate breaks much larger than those given the middle class and
poor.
Beyond taxing the rich, the bill
contributes to reducing income inequality in another way. New York Times
reporter David Leonhardt described it:
"In the broadest sense, insurance is meant to spread
the costs of an individual's misfortune -- illness, death, fire, flood --
across society. Since the late 1970s, though, the share of Americans with
health insurance has shrunk. As a result, the gap between the economic
well-being of the sick and the healthy has been growing, at virtually every
level of the income distribution."
During
his presidential campaign, Obama promised to reform health insurance, and
signing this bill fulfilled that pledge. Here's how: It ensures that children
with pre-existing conditions get insurance, that adults with pre-existing
conditions have access to insurance from a temporary high-risk pool, that senior
citizens get help paying for prescriptions during the "donut hole" in
their Medicare drug coverage, that every insured person gets free preventive
care, that children up to age 26 can stay on their parents' insurance plans,
that no lifetime limit on benefits may be imposed by insurance companies.
It
provides for approximately 24 million people who don't have access to
affordable coverage through their employers to get tax credits to buy insurance
from new state-based exchanges. It enables everyone who earns less that 133
percent of the poverty level -- approximately 16 million people - to get
Medicaid. It gives small businesses tax credits of up to 35 percent of premiums
to help make coverage affordable for their workers.
And, a benefit for everyone -- even
the rich -- is that the bill will lower the national deficit by $100 billion in
the next decade, a determination made by the non-partisan Congressional Budget
Office.
Republicans
are intent on preventing Americans from receiving these benefits. Republicans
in Congress contend they'll try to repeal the law. A dozen Republican state
attorneys general filed suit seeking to overturn it.
Those opposing health insurance
reform don't mention the benefits. Instead, they call names, engage in
vandalism and incite violence. Sarah Palin posted a map on her sarahpac website
marked with 20 gun sight crosshairs on the congressional districts of Democrats
who voted for health insurance reform. The Republican National Committee posted
on its website a photo of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi surrounded by flames and
urging her firing.
The
FBI is investigating death threats made since the vote against Democrats and
their families. A brick was thrown through the office window of a
Former
Republican presidential candidate John McCain said that because the measure
passed, "there will be no cooperation for the rest of the year" from
the GOP. Republicans made good on that threat, using an obscure Senate rule to
prevent hearings past 2 p.m., forcing cancellations.
Republicans in the Senate have
announced they will do everything in their power to prevent passage of a
package of amendments adopted by the House to improve the Health Insurance
Bill. These amendments include elimination of perks given several states, including
the so-called Cornhusker Kickback and the Gator-Aid, both of which Republicans
have attacked for weeks. Still, Republicans say they'll attempt to retain those
deals in the final bill by blocking the amendments. Similarly, the package of
amendments provides a method to close the donut hole in the Medicare
prescription program, providing financial relief to millions of senior
citizens. The Republican's plan to prevent passage of the amendments would
force senior citizens to pay nearly $4,000 extra each year for prescriptions.
With
their anger and vitriol, Republicans and Tea Partiers are banking on Americans
rejecting health insurance reform. But their plan is in peril. Americans appear
to be embracing hope and change in health care.
Before the vote, polls showed a
majority opposed the bill. Many argued that could be explained by the fact that
a significant number of those counted as opponents simply wanted stronger
reform, such as a public option. Poll results are different now. A Gallup Poll taken
after the House vote found 50 percent enthusiastic or pleased, while only 42
percent were angry or disappointed. Similarly, in that poll, 49% thought the
reform measure to be good for the country while 40% thought it was bad.
Hate
and obstructionism are ugly. Americans prefer to see themselves and their
country as hopeful, constructive and goodhearted.
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