Labor Campaign for Obama Was Smart

Labor Unions Claim Credit for Obama’s Victory

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/labor-unions-claim-credit-for-obamas-victory/

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

The nation’s labor unions have not been shy about claiming substantial credit for President Obama’s re-election.

In a news conference Wednesday, Richard Trumka, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s president, said that without the huge push by the nation’s labor unions, Mr. Obama never would have won Ohio, Wisconsin and Nevada — and their combined 34 electoral votes.

“We did deliver those states,” Mr. Trumka said. “Without organized labor, none of those states would have been in the president’s column.”

A.F.L.-C.I.O. officials said that during the last four days of the campaign, union members and their community partners contacted 800,000 voters in Ohio alone, as part of what they said were 10.7 million door knocks and phone calls made nationwide by the federation’s 56 unions. Moreover, the Service Employees International Union said that its members alone knocked on 5 million doors, including 3.7 million in battleground states.

“We had 100,000 volunteers across the country in the final days,” said Mary Kay Henry, the S.E.I.U. president.

Sixty percent of voters from union households in Ohio voted for Mr. Obama, higher than the 50 percent that Mr. Obama received over all from Ohio voters, according to exit polls that had not been completed. Union households accounted for 22 percent of Ohio’s voters. In Wisconsin, voters from union households made up 21 percent of the electorate, and they voted for Mr. Obama over Mr. Romney, 66 percent to 33 percent.

Fifty-eight percent of voters from union households nationwide backed Mr. Obama and 40 percent supported Mr. Romney, according to the exit polls.

Michael Podhorzer, the labor federation’s political director, said organized labor’s newfound ability – made possible by the Citizens United decision — to knock on the doors of not just union members, but also those of nonunion workers, went far to explain why a significantly higher percentage of white working-class voters in the battleground states where labor was most active voted for Mr. Obama than white working-class voters in non-battleground states.

Some political experts say, however, that white working-class voters in the battleground states leaned toward Mr. Obama out of gratitude for the auto industry bailout and because of the many Obama campaign advertisements attacking Mitt Romney for Bain Capital’s closing plants and outsourcing jobs.

Lee Saunders, chairman of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s political committee and president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said, this was the “the smartest, biggest and broadest effort we’ve ever run” in a political campaign.

Union leaders also hailed the victories of some of labor’s best friends on Capitol Hill, including Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio.

In his news conference, Mr. Trumka stopped short of saying he expected any quid pro quo from Mr. Obama. But he made clear what organized labor hoped for, especially as the White House prepares to negotiate with Republicans on Capitol Hill on how to reduce the budget deficit.

“People don’t want cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security,” Mr. Trumka said. “Even people who voted for Mitt Romney don’t want that.”

He made clear that to help cut the deficit, Mr. Obama should push forward with his plan to raise taxes on the highest-earning 2 percent of Americans.

The nation’s labor unions are planning rallies in roughly 100 cities on Thursday to protest against cuts in Medicare, Social Security or other social insurance programs.

Mr. Trumka said he also wanted Mr. Obama to push more aggressively to create jobs – for instance, to invest more in rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure and to push Congress to pass the stalled American Jobs Act.

Ms. Henry of the service employees union and Mr. Trumka also made clear that they were eager for the president to push forward on immigration reform, saying that their organizations would strongly back him in such an effort. They join with many Hispanic groups in calling for a path to legalization for millions of unauthorized immigrants.

On Wednesday, labor leaders were celebrating a major victory in California: the defeat of Proposition 32, a ballot initiative backed by several wealthy conservatives, that would have gone far to cripple labor’s political efforts by largely banning unions from using their dues money for politics. That initiative was voted down by 56 percent to 44 percent.

Several conservatives had said that if they won that battle in California, they would push for similar ballot initiatives in other states.

But organized labor suffered a major loss in Michigan on Tuesday. There theUnited Auto Workers and several public employees unions had vigorously backed a ballot initiative that would have enshrined collective bargaining in the state constitution. Such a move would have prohibited the state’s Republican-dominated legislature from enacting a “right to work” law or passing legislation that, like the law in Wisconsin, curbed the ability of government workers to bargain collectively. Business leaders warned that this pro-labor measure would injure the state’s business climate and push up costs for cities and school districts.

Labor and business interests each spent more than $20 million in the fight, and the proposal was defeated 58 percent to 42 percent.

Several union leaders said that if they had won that battle in Michigan, they would have pushed for similar labor-friendly initiatives in other states.

Ed.  Let's offer one in Calfornia

Monopolies Destroy Our Economy

Monopoly Endgame for the Global Economy

Thursday, 08 November 2012 14:29By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks, The Daily Take | Op-Ed

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Let’s face it, if your opponent in Monopoly scoops up Boardwalk, Park Place, North Carolina Avenue, Pacific Avenue, both utilities, and the four railroads – that’s game over.

The other players, all of whom have been relegated to mere consumers instead of property owners, will slowly go bankrupt having to pay higher and higher costs for rent and services, utilities, and transportation. Eventually, one player has all the money and the losers have to clean up the board game and put it away.

But let’s assume the Monopoly game doesn’t end there. Let’s assume the broke players keep rolling the dice and keep going around the board. They essentially keep living their lives desperate and broke, using their credit cards and home lines of credit to stay in the game. Maybe they end up in jail. If they’re lucky, they land on Baltic Avenue and can afford to stay a night in the slums.

Meanwhile, the oligarch who owns everything can no longer collect any income. The other players can’t afford to pay rent, they can’t pay utilities, and they can’t ride on the railroads. Eventually, without consumers spending money, the Monopoly oligarch goes broke, too. His properties and businesses disappear and suddenly everyone is broke!

That’s what Monopoly’s version of economic collapse looks like. And it’s very similar to what global economic collapse in the real world looks like, too.

Now put the Monopoly game board away and consider this: Researchers in Zurich, Switzerland have found that there are roughly 43,000 transnational corporations that dominate the global economy. Of those, there are about 1,300 companies that control 80% of all the global revenues for all the transnational corporations on the planet. Now let’s take it a step further. Of those 1,300 core companies, only 147 companies, which all happen to own each other in some way, control 40% - or nearly half – of all the wealth in the entire transnational corporate network. That means 1% of transnationals own 40% of all the world’s business wealth.

In other words, the global 1% has its own 1%.   

This is similar to a Monopoly situation in which just one player owns 40% of the board. And just like it’s game over for Monopoly, it’s game over for the global economy, too.  

Right now, you can count the number of banks that own half of all the wealth in the U.S. economy on just one hand. There are just five of them and they are the usual suspects: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup. Their total assets equal 8.5 trillion, which is 56% of our entire economy.

In 2007 we all learned the consequences of disproportionate wealth and power concentrated in the hands of just a few companies. When one company begins to fail, they all begin to fail. And when they all fail, well, that’s what collapse looks like.

That why policymakers labeled the banks “Too Big to Fail” and bailed them out to prevent total collapse. Today, these banks are even bigger. And thanks to globalization, their tentacles are wrapped around the entire world’s economy. It won’t just be the United States imploding the next time these giants fall: it will be much of planet Earth itself.  

This is the danger of raw, unfettered capitalism. This is where the demands of higher and higher quarterly profits take down the economy. Companies begin devouring each other, sucking whatever wealth they can from each other. This was made easier by deregulation policies in the 1980’s and 1990’s that trigged a mergers and acquisitions mania under Reagan, and free trade policies under Clinton that opened up the game board for these transnational corporation to feast on even more industries abroad.  

Out of this, the few strong survive and have enormous power to fix prices for consumers. The inventors of Monopoly were right about what happens when one person owns all the railroads or all the utilities or all the apartment buildings: prices go up.

And to secure even more profits, these companies begin extracting wealth from their own workers, cutting their salaries and benefits. And like broke Monopoly players, real world consumers can’t afford to pay their mortgages, put gas in their car, or buy groceries. In the game-world, the corporate masters win. But in the real world, they eventually lose like the rest of us.

The corporate masters seem to have forgotten they depend on working people for their own survival. And today things have gotten really bad.

This corporatocracy made up of just over 100 transnational corporations are desperately trying to garner more wealth by toppling governments in Europe and demanding wealth-extracting austerity (or what has been referred to in the United States since the 1980’s as “Starve the Beast”).

This was predicted by Bill Clinton’s former Deputy Secretary of Treasury, Roger Altman, back in 2011. He explained that these corporate forces, “oust entrenched regimes where normal political processes could not do so. They force austerity, banking bail-out and other major policy changes. Their influence dwarfs multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Indeed, leaving aside unusable nuclear weapons, they have become the most powerful force on Earth.”

The violence on display in Greece is a consequence of the Monopoly endgame the world economy is in. No matter how much austerity that nations like Greece, Spain, and Europe endure, these corporate masters will be unsatisfied and they’ll demand even more. They’ll take their harvesting machines to Germany, the U.K., and eventually the United States. In fact, they’ve already begun. Until eventually they’ve destroyed the one thing that keeps their own hearts beating: working people.

That’s when collapse happens.

As the researchers in Zurich have discovered with actual data, we’re all living in a functional oligarchy today with just a handful of corporations – all of which are wealthier and more powerful than most sovereign governments – sucking whatever remaining wealth they can from the rest of us.

And just like how the oil industry is willing to suck the last trillion dollars of oil out of the ground  with no plans about what to do when it’s all gone, these corporate masters are willing to suck the last wealth out of the middle class without any plans of what to do when their consumers disappear.

Everyone needs to wake up to this economic reality before we’re all dragged toward collapse. If not, the mess will be a lot bigger to clean up than just a few scattered dice, thimbles, and a chance card.

 

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

Women Voted Strongly Against War on Women

Women Fought the GOP's 2012 'War on Women' and Won

By Nancy L. Cohen, Guardian UK

08 November 12

 Women not only voted disproportionately for Obama, in distaste for Republicans, but also worked to make it a victory for women

 clear victor has emerged in the Republican war on women. Women.

With women breaking strongly for President Barack Obama and a banner year for women candidates, one thing is clear: the 2012 election is a mandate for women's equality and reproductive rights.

Let's first take a look at the presidential vote. In a year when women's issues were hotly debated and Democrats touted their pro-women principles, women favored Obama by 11 points. The president also benefited from an 11-point gender gap and women's higher turnout. Making up 53% of the electorate, according to preliminary results, women accounted for the lion's share of Obama's current 2.5 million vote lead. Obama racked up astoundingly large margins among several subgroups: single women went for him by a 36-point margin, Latinas by a 51-point margin. Despite the Romney campaign's insistence that women would break for him on the economy, Obama's support among women overall was nearly identical with his showing in the historic 2008 election.

Women's rights likewise played a starring role in one of last night's unanticipated headlines. Twenty women, a record number, are likely headed to the US Senate. All but one are pro-choice Democrats who campaigned, as well, as feminists. The story in the US House of Representatives was similar, if not quite as spectacular. These female candidates were lifted to victory by women's disgust at Republican attacks on women, which was then channeled by women-focused political action committees, such as Emily's List, Women Vote, and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, into successful and well-funded campaigns.

Women's pro-Democratic leanings were particularly apparent in states with high-profile women candidates supported by these PACs. In Wisconsin, for example, Tammy Baldwin won women by a 17-point margin to became the first openly lesbian woman elected to the US Senate. Baldwin defeated former three-term governor and Bush cabinet secretary Tommy Thompson, who did nothing to endear himself with the ladies when he explained that he became a lobbyist because "my wife likes to shop, OK?"

Although exit polls show that the economy was the No 1 issue for voters, pre-election surveys provide strong evidence that women's issues were also on their minds. In the final NBC/ Wall Street Journal survey, likely voters rated Obama better than Romney at "dealing with issues of concern to women" by 24 points. Four out of ten swing-state women ranked abortion as their No 1 issue, according to an October Gallup poll, and among them, Obama held a three-to-one advantage.

Not only did women voters positively affirm their support for pro-women's rights candidates and policies, they also rebuked the GOP for its multi-pronged assault on women's rights. Down ballot and state contests offered more proof that the 2012 elections were a mandate for women's rights. New Hampshire's Tea Party standard-bearer, Ovide Lamontagne, a far-right Republican opponent of abortion and the state's gay marriage law, admitted just a few weeks ago that he opposed equal pay laws. Democrat Maggie Hassan won the governor's office with a 22-point margin among women.

Republicans can chalk up their failure to win control of the Senate to their abundance of clueless and loquacious gray-faced men: Todd "legitimate rape" Akin and Richard Mourdock, who seemed to think that God plays wingman for rapists, both lost races they would have won but for speaking out of church about their true beliefs on women and rape. The lesson here is that even in quite conservative states, voters reject anti-woman extremists.

The Republican party would do well to heed the message and take stock of its unpopular assault on women's rights. Consider what might have been had Romney "Etch-a-Sketched" sooner to close his gender gap - if he had said, "heck yes, I support equal pay for women," instead of rhapsodizing about "binders full of women"; if he had condemned Rush Limbaugh's attacks on Sandra Fluke; or if he'd stayed out of the GOP's birth control panic or not cut ads for Mourdock.

Instead, the morning-after mandate denialism has already begun. It was Sandy. It was Christie. It was robotic Mitt.

Don't fall for it. Women earned this victory. And we intend to claim it.

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Nancy L Cohen is a historian and author. Her books include The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914 (2002) and, her latest, Delirium: How the Sexual Counterrevolution is Polarizing America (2012). Her journalism has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Business History Review and Huffington Post. Nancy has held positions as a visiting scholar at UCLA's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and visiting professor of history at Binghamton University, SUNY, and Claremont McKenna College. She has also been a senior policy analyst at LAANE, an advocacy organization for economic empowerment and justice.

Defend Working Families

A New Mandate to Protect Working Families

By Bernie Sanders and Staff, Reader Supported News

08 November 12

 en. Bernie Sanders, re-elected with 71 percent of the vote, said right-wing extremism suffered a major defeat on Election Day.

Despite dozens of billionaires spending unprecedented sums of money trying to defeat President Barack Obama and progressive candidates around the country, Obama won a strong victory and Democrats, forced to defend 23 seats in the Senate, appear to have picked up two more seats, a result very few predicted.

Sanders urged the president to embark on a nationwide campaign to challenge right-wing Republicans in the home states of members of Congress who are out of sync with mainstream majorities on issues ranging from Social Security to tax breaks for millionaires to global warming.

"My sincere hope is that the Republican Party now understands that the American people do not want a government pushing right-wing extremist policies. They want a government that addresses the needs of working families, the elderly, the children and the sick, and not just the wealthiest people in this country," Sanders said.

"Poll after poll shows that the American people do not want to see cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. As part of deficit reduction, they want the wealthiest people and largest corporations in this country to start paying their fair share of taxes. They want to end an absurd tax policy that enables the wealthy and large corporations to stash trillions in tax havens in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere, costing the U.S. Treasury more than $100 billion a year.

"Poll after poll shows that the American people are increasingly concerned about the growing income and wealth inequality in America. At a time when the top 1 percent owns 42 percent of the wealth of the country, while the bottom sixty percent owns 2.3 percent, the American people want that enormously important issue addressed.

"Poll after poll shows that the American people do not believe, as Republican leaders do, that global warming is a 'hoax.' On the contrary, they want this country's energy system to move aggressively toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy.

"Poll after poll shows that the American people believe that we must invest in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and, by doing that, create millions of good paying jobs.

"Poll after poll shows that the American people strongly disagree with those Republicans who want to cut spending on education. Quite the contrary! The American people want to make college more affordable for struggling working families and their kids.

"My strong hope is that, on behalf of the American people, President Obama forcefully challenges the right-wing extremist agenda. My hope is that he visits states around the country where House and Senate members are defending the interests of billionaires at the expense of working families, and asks those Americans to demand that their members of Congress represent them - and not powerful special interests," Sanders concluded.

Listen to an interview With Ed Schultz Here