Party on, my union sisters and brothers. This is the awesome. One more reason to love Oakland cawacko. 
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN01447701[/quote]
In a sign of a reinvigorated American Left, longshore workers declined to come to work on Thursday, paralyzing ports along the West Coast from Los Angeles to Seattle, in protest against the Iraq War.
The union workers complained that "many of the big shipping companies are profiting from the war."
If the Democrats could get both the executive and both houses of Congress in the fall, one measure of whether they are just time-servers and lackeys or whether they are serious about reforming the country away from its current abuses will be whether they revise Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin, the 50s-era legislation that laid the legal groundwork for the successful union-busting by US corporations of the past three decades. Despite the myths, most unionized workers are substantially to the left of the white collar middle class on important social issues, and gutting the unions has ensured that their voices have been muted. On Thursday we got a glimpse of what they think and an inkling of what the US would be like if union membership hadn't plummeted to only about 12%.
Corporations are very wealthy and very organized. The rest of us are not wealthy and not organized at all in comparison. And in politics, that means we almost always lose. Unions are the main form of organization that could at least sometimes prevail over corporation policies that injure the rest of us, and if they are strong then we have lost our shield. For news of union-busting activities, Workinglife.org does a good job. Of course, not all corporations benefit from the Iraq War, and some actually are suffering from it in some ways, which is probably the main hope for ending it.
juan cole
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN01447701[/quote]
In a sign of a reinvigorated American Left, longshore workers declined to come to work on Thursday, paralyzing ports along the West Coast from Los Angeles to Seattle, in protest against the Iraq War.
The union workers complained that "many of the big shipping companies are profiting from the war."
If the Democrats could get both the executive and both houses of Congress in the fall, one measure of whether they are just time-servers and lackeys or whether they are serious about reforming the country away from its current abuses will be whether they revise Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin, the 50s-era legislation that laid the legal groundwork for the successful union-busting by US corporations of the past three decades. Despite the myths, most unionized workers are substantially to the left of the white collar middle class on important social issues, and gutting the unions has ensured that their voices have been muted. On Thursday we got a glimpse of what they think and an inkling of what the US would be like if union membership hadn't plummeted to only about 12%.
Corporations are very wealthy and very organized. The rest of us are not wealthy and not organized at all in comparison. And in politics, that means we almost always lose. Unions are the main form of organization that could at least sometimes prevail over corporation policies that injure the rest of us, and if they are strong then we have lost our shield. For news of union-busting activities, Workinglife.org does a good job. Of course, not all corporations benefit from the Iraq War, and some actually are suffering from it in some ways, which is probably the main hope for ending it.
juan cole
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<-----SARCASM indicator for those that need such notification
