Hugs, Not Thugs

To give you an idea of how mushy the movement in Labor Movement has become in the past several decades, take a gander at how the unions are behaving in anti-union North Carolina this week. Instead of aggressively demanding stuff like collective bargaining, a living wage bill and job protection, they're eager to demonstrate their "soft side" to the voting public. (Translation: Wall Street, corporations, and slanderous Republicans.) The once-great AFL-CIO has actually set up a "Hug a Union Thug" booth to demonstrate how quietly they plan to go into that good night. And there's a website that couldn't be more conciliatory if it tried:

While several unions are boycotting the convention because the Democrats chose a right-to-work state (with the lowest union density in the entire country) for their quadrennial confab, the heavy hitters  are there with their whiffle balls and bats. People like AFL-CIO Chief Richard Trumka, who often whines that the Democratic Party has betrayed the unions, writes vociferous letters blasting job-killing free trade deals, and vows to withhold contributions -- and then eagerly endorses their candidacies all the same. Where else can they go? Wa-a-a-a-a-h.

The union people on display in Charlotte have sadly devolved into performance artists for the purpose of President Obama's re-election. According to The Hill's Kevin Bogardus, the labor groups are "trying a mix of celebrity, social media and humor to polish up the labor movement’s image in the eyes of everyday people".

MaryBe McMillan, secretary-treasurer for the North Carolina State AFL-CIO, said the state labor federation wanted to break down stereotypes regarding union members by dishing out the hugs.

“We see this as an opportunity to dispel that stereotype that union members are mean, scary and violet. (sic) What better way to disarm folks than to hug them?” McMillan said. “Union members take care of you in the hospital, deliver your packages and sit next you in church. We are just average folks.”

Oh, no. That dreaded phony populist "folks" word has insidiously crept even into the parlance of workers' rights. Give me the Purple Meanies any day.  From Jimmy Hoffa tough to McDonaldland's plummy Grimace character tender, is just about correct. The shrinking violet-not-violent unions are now just fine with people working at temporary minimum wage jobs rather than having no jobs at all. Just think of all the poor unemployed people in Charlotte getting pocketfuls of change from the Hollywood celebrities and professional athletes and A-listers of all stripes converging in town this week, to see and be seen.


North Carolina is so anti-labor that the United Nations International Human Rights Committee has condemned a Jim Crow-era law on its books forbidding public employees to  collectively bargain. And here you were wondering why President Obama did not join the protests against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker trying to do the exact same thing.

Labor journalist Mike Elk, writing for Working in These Times, has an excellent piece about the Democratic Party's sellout of the labor movement. While some workers in Charlotte were putting in dangerous amounts of overtime at low pay to prepare for the convention, he says, the irony is that unions were treated well in Tampa for the GOP orgy of the oligarchs. It seems that Florida still does have collective bargaining rights.

Read the whole article. His description of DNC Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Shultz's canned endorsement of labor and her subsequent running away from his pointed questions would be hysterically funny if it weren't so depressing. The conventional wisdom among the unionists, Elk says, is that they're going for Obama for the simple reason that he is a slower bleed compared to Mitt Romney's "bullet to the head."

Even the unions not attending the convention are careful not to use the word "boycott" for fear of hurting Obama's re-election chances. They're just passive-aggressively not showing up. Among them is the International Association of Machinists, which came up with the idea of Labor Day in the first place.

So, Happy Labor Day, everybody. But when it comes to hugs not thugs, all I can do is shrug.


Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your McJobs



Ozymandias Obama

A gigantic sand sculpture of President Obama has arisen from the vast wasteland of corruption known as Wall Street South. It was supposed to be a Mount Rushmore-type homage to the 2008 grand prize winner of Ad Age's Marketer of the Year contest. Sadly, it's turning into a reprise of a certain sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Oh, how the mighty are crumbling.

Just when you'd gotten resigned to the sight of the erstwhile liberal class marching in ovine personality cult lockstep with the Big Sellout, Barack Obama's right-wing side has at last been dented. Literally. 

Because, wedge-issue feminist pandering from Democrats notwithstanding, Mother Nature herself is singularly unimpressed and definitely not fooled. Maybe you were smugly assuming that she favors the Blue Team just because she so obligingly pre-empted the first day of the GOP's orgy. But she is plenty pissed that the president, too, has turned out to be such a bellicose arch-conservative. And she is absolutely livid that while she's suffering through the climate change, he seems to have lost interest. So it was no surprise that the massive sand sculpture of Himself being constructed in Charlotte, NC suffered some damage yesterday when a sudden rainstorm hit the Democratic convention city.

 The vaunted center of the malleable edifice is carefully protected from above, but the right side was left vulnerable to attack by an angry squall arriving from the left. The wind-driven downpour obliterated the sharp right elbow he'd previously used to jab those marginalized purist ideologues. And although most of the right-sided aspect survived largely intact, the face was dimpled with unsightly pockmarks. And the poetical sneer of cold command remains. As He Himself is so wont to intone, "there's still a lot of work to be done." The sand statue, like the presidency, is being defended as a work in progress. Lots of smoothing over, lots of soothing platitudes, lots of folksy schmoozing with the masses.

Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair!

Could the storm damage spell payback for the choice of anti-labor North Carolina as the site of the convention? Could it be discontent with the fact that the government is taking extraordinary rendition to a whole new level by proclaiming the convention an "extraordinary event" and squelching protest? Could it be outrage that while a mere statue of Mr. Sandman-Send-Me-a-Dream Obama has a protective roof over its head, millions of ordinary people have lost their homes to foreclosures and mortgage fraud by banks? Could it be disgust that the president will be giving his acceptance speech in Bank of America stadium? (yet another edifice constructed with the ill-gotten gains of the unpunished lords of finance.)

That the Democrats' unscripted Clint Eastwood moment has arrived even before the official start of their propaganda party may well be a harbinger of better things to come. We can only hope. And protest, and resist, and march. It's only natural.

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.