unusualmusic_lj_archive

Crisis in the auto industry is hardly limited to Detroit. Japan’s Toyota is hurting big time--a two-year old truck plant in San Antonio was shut down for a few months this year. And the opening of a new Prius plant in Mississippi was put on hold. Toyota’s U.S. production overall was cut 20 percent and China just loaned its Chery Automobile Company $1.45 billion after losses there.

Why aren't people buying cars? You can't blame the price of gas -- not this week. The problem is the lack of credit -- and that's masking what's really at fault. Falling wages. Check out your paycheck, if you still have one: since 2004, real wages in the U.S. are down despite huge profits for a few under George W. Bush.

People simply don’t make enough money to buy cars: hence the need for credit. The auto bailout is the first that might actually put some money in workers' pockets. And not just auto-workers' pockets. Today, one in ten Americans receive foodstamps and most of those recipients go to work everyday. Tax dollars pay for those stamps—so have we the taxpayers been subsidizing corporate profits? You bet. To allow corporate wages? You bet.

But money for profit is never as controversial as money for people. In today's crisis we have a chance to change that. MORE

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has ordered all state agencies to stop doing business with Bank of America until they resolve a standoff with employees of Republic Windows and Doors. According to Mark Meinster, an organizer for the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) on GRITtv, the employees are asking for wages owed them under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) as well as pay for vacation accrued and benefits. Meinster also noted that it is still unclear why the factory was closed. Whether Bank of America cut off the company’s line of credit or if the company is seeking to simply downsize and relocate. “We know we’re being lied to by one or both parties,” Meinster said.MORe

There are various threads to this story: A company that violates federal law by refusing laid-off workers 60 days severance plus owed vacation and sick time and the plant's connection to the federal Wall Street bailout bill (the company blames Bank of America, which got $25 billion from the feds supposedly so it could loan money, for imposing the condition that it not pay the workers; a claim the bank now denies).

Another is real estate: The factory sits on Goose Island, traditionally home to manufacturing but in recent years a target for gentrification and upper-income homes. The value of the property upon which Republic Windows and Doors sits has likely risen dramatically and the company probably wants to sell it at a healthy profit. This is one of the consequences of capitalism: factors that have little to do with supply and demand impinge upon the lives of everyday people, dislocate them and lead to hardship after tragedy, one family at a time. The way that real estate speculation imposes upon other industries is one of the grand failures of an unregulated "free market."

So far, the stated goal of the union is to assure that its workers get the severance pay owed them, with some vague rhetoric toward saving the factory and its jobs. What we haven't heard (yet) is a serious proposal that, since the company has shirked its responsibilities, the workers themselves take over ownership of the factory and share the profits it generates instead of continuing to see them surrendered to the middlemen in suits that push papers, count beans and sit on boards of directors.

As the US economy worsens (and this is absolutely related to international trade agreements like NAFTA that send US jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, where owners can violently repress unions and organizers and aren't subject to serious environmental or safety regulations) the union can choose to nibble at the margins - say, get 60 days pay and then it's goodbye - or push for the viable long-term solution: to own their own jobs.MORe

Will community organizers have a voice in Washington? In December 2007, at the Heartland Forum in Iowa five presidential candidates including Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich and Barack Obama spoke to a crowd of thousands of community leaders and activists and voiced their support for community change. Obama was particularly outspoken and said he’d meet with community organizers not only during the first 100 days of his administration but also during the transition.
Whether he keeps his promise or not, on December 4, more than 2,000 community organizers are gathering in Washington, D.C. to talk directly with elected officials--demanding a place at the table and a voice in shaping public policy. The event, Realizing the Promise, will be broadcast from 3-6 pm EST on December 4. You can watch it live here.
On GRITtv we'll find out how community activists plan turn their vision into real policy changes with Sally Kohn, Director of the Movement Vision Project of the Center for Community Change, Desiree Pilgrim-Hunter, Co-Chair of the Board of the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, and Christopher Hayes, Washington D.C. Editor of The Nation Magazine and a fellow at the New America Foundation.
Followed by a word from Jay Smooth of The Ill Doctrine. (He says it's time to Get Back To Work.)

Jimmy Carter asked, "Why not the best?" Why can't Obama--and all of us--ask, "Why not the truth?" He wants bipartisanship? Fine. But why must bipartisanship require lies? And not just individual ones, but the whole Orwellian package that makes truth-telling virtually impossible? Why can't Obama simply and straightforwardly link the two together? Like this:

"We need to begin a new era of bipartisanship and truth."

What's wrong with that?
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Now, the standard Versailles narrative says that anything like this is not just impossible, but unthinkable. Any form of legal accountability would be retribution. (Note: not "seen as retribution by critics". After all, "fair and balanced" only goes so far.) Obama must choose. It's the only pragmatic thing to do: jettison justice in order to find what Bush would call "a new way forward." Which is, of course, Newspeak for "the same old way backwards into the exact same moral muck as those who attacked us on 9/11."
But what if Obama said good-bye to all that? What if he insisted on holding himself to a higher standard, and insisted that the only meaningful way to do this also required upholding the law for past violations as well? What if he said something like this:

In order to move forward and make a fresh start, we need to have a renewed commitment to truth--and that requires truth-telling about the past as well. We must hold those accountable who broke the law, and who lead us astray into un-American practices that have disgraced America's good name around the world. They have done uncalculable harm to America, regardless of their intentions. And a large part of the reason for this is because they acted in secret, and covered their actions in lies. They must be held accountable for this--both to show that world that we are serious about our values, and to ensure that this does not happen again. There are those who will say, "This is unconscionable. This political revenge-seeking. We cannot move forward together, while the Democrats are launghing political attacks."
But this is exactly backwards. If we uphold these past violations, even tacitly by refusing to investigate thoroughly and prosecute where called for, then we will be laying the groundwork for perpetuating the same sorts of violations ourselves. We cannot abide that. We cannot allow anyone--within this Administration or without--to think that we hold ourselves above the law. We must hold those who came before us accountable, precisely because that creates the demand that we be held accountable as well. This is the only way to begin earning your trust from the very beginning.MORE

For some, whether liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, it does not matter or pinch their consciences what happens to subsistence level indigenous farmers in a small town in Mexico. (Nor do they want to look at the direct consequences to their own communities when millions of Mexicans over the past 14 years have streamed over the border to the United States to escape from the economic and political harms that have inflicted them since the enactment of NAFTA.) So let me please tell you another story that should hit anyone of the most minimal conscience a bit closer to home

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There are those who claim that Senator Clinton is a "champion" of human rights, based on a solitary speech she gave in September of 1995 to the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, China, because her most quoted soundbite from that speech was "women's rights are human rights."
Nobody - certainly not this correspondent - takes issue with that truth: Women's rights are human rights, as are men's rights, children's rights, minority rights, and everybody else's. But if a politician doesn't have a basic understanding of what human rights are to begin with, and has shrunk from the duty to defend them time and time again even when they have hit close to home, that politician is not going to be able and ready to extend them to any gender or demographic.
In Latin America, as everywhere, the doctrine of Human Rights, begun in the Carter administration but left to atrophy by all administrations since, walks hand in hand with any pro-democracy agenda. When human rights are deprived as part and parcel of state terror campaigns against peaceful dissidents, labor, environmental and other community organizers, the chilling effect on all free speech and freedom of association makes democracy impossible.MORE

How about a new comprehensive, humane plan for immigration? While president-elect Barack Obama acknowledges that the US economy depends on millions of undocumented workers living in the shadows, the issue of immigration reform has itself remained in the shadows. The question of how attitudes toward 11.9 million undocumented immigrant workers will or or won't change in a workplace of diminished opportunities for everyone needs to be called. Well, there are those with a progressive plan and a new method of presenting the issue to the public. The idea is to change the frame that the Right has constructed, where immigration = border security and immigrant = criminal. The approach is to get up close and personal - talking about the experience of migration with a view to encourage policy that is responsive to people’s needs, rather than political jockeying.
The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization looks at the big ideas embeded in our immigration policy, about who is and can be an American. We welcome co-author, Rinku Sen, executive director of ARC, the Applied Research Center and publisher of Colorlines magazine; her co-author and one of the heroes of the book, Fekkak Mamdouh, a restaurant worker and union activist at the Windows on the World restaurant at the World Trade Center who organized the workers after that crisis; and Mamdouh's partner, Saru Jayaraman, an attorney, activist and professor. They co-founded ROC: Restaurant Opportunities Centers United which has set out to represent what they say is the some 40% of NYC's restaurant workers who are undocumented.

Michael Lighty, Policy Director of the California Nurses Association and Olveen Carrasquillo, Vice President and Policy Director of Latinos for National Health Insurance discuss the possibilities for healthcare reform during an economic crisis. With an ailing economy it is likely that the number of Americans who are uninsured will rise. One third of Latinos already lack health insurance and that doesn't include undocumented workers. Under Obama's current healthcare plan there is no provision for the undocumented--some 14 million people. If premiums keep going up, Lighty says, healthcare reform won't be very meaningful and private insurance companies will continue to profit.
What about single payer healthcare? It could actually serve as an economic stimulus by improving retention, cutting costs for businesses, increasing efficiencies, and offering a costs saving to health consumers that could be spent on other economic activity.
But will Obama's healthcare plan do anything to mitigate the crisis? And will single payer healthcare get a hearing? To find out more you can visit guaranteedhealthcare.org.

# Expand Hate Crimes Statutes: Obama and Biden will strengthen federal hate crimes legislation, expand hate crimes protection by passing the Matthew Shepard Act, and reinvigorate enforcement at the Department of Justice's Criminal Section.
# End Deceptive Voting Practices: Obama will sign into law his legislation that establishes harsh penalties for those who have engaged in voter fraud and provides voters who have been misinformed with accurate and full information so they can vote.
# End Racial Profiling: Obama and Biden will ban racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies and provide federal incentives to state and local police departments to prohibit the practice.

In the first year of his presidency, Barack Obama will develop and begin to implement a comprehensive national HIV/AIDS strategy that includes all federal agencies. The strategy will be designed to reduce HIV infections, increase access to care and reduce HIV-related health disparities. Obama will support common sense approaches including age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception, combating infection within our prison population through education and contraception, and distributing contraceptives through our public health system. Obama also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. Obama has also been willing to confront the stigma -- too often tied to homophobia -- that continues to surround HIV/AIDS. He will continue to speak out on this issue as president.