Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Prisoner of the State, and Why It’s Relevant Today

I hate to follow up my last article about the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre with yet another Tiananmen Square-related article. I realize that there is more to China than Tiananmen Square (and human rights atrocities against religious and ethnic minorities–no upcoming articles on Tibet or the Uighurs, I promise). I am also wary of writing from dissidents within Communist countries. Not that their stories aren’t compelling, but because I always suspect that these stories are being crassly exploited by good, commie-hating, free-market-loving American publishers with an ideological axe to grind. But the newly published secret diary of former Communist Party General Secretary and moderate reformer Zhao Ziyang was described to me as a rare and fascinating look into the secretive world of Chinese politics, and so I thought it would be worth my time.

As it turns out, the partially read copy I checked out from the library is now long overdue and since I can’t renew it, my intended “book review” must be much more limited than I hoped. More complete reviews and information about the book can be found here, here, and here. I will provide a limited review, but what is even more interesting to me is that much of what played out in China in 1989 looks in certain ways similar to what has been happening in Iran since last month’s disputed presidential elections. Consequently, Zhao words take on a gravity and relevance beyond the events he discusses in his book.

Prisoner of the State is the journal of former Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. Zhao was General Secretary at the time of the crackdown at Tiananmen Square and was placed under house arrest for his determined opposition to the violent, repressive action ordered by the Party’s hardliners. While in seclusion, Zhao secretly recorded his journal onto tapes smuggled out of the country after his death in 2005. These tapes were then complied and published as Prisoner of the State.

Zhao’s journal begins with a vivid description of the weeks leading up to the June 4 massacre in Tiananmen Square. He details the political back and forth between himself and other Communist Party leaders as they struggled over how to deal with the unprecedented protests which gained strength daily. The demonstrations began as a chance to mourn the death of a popular reformer within the Communist Party. They quickly became a chance for students, and later all segments of urban Chinese society, to vent their frustration with political corruption and to demand democratizing reforms. Zhao’s position was that by empathizing with the students’ demands, making limited reforms, and treating protesters with a soft touch, the protests were sure to die down and that they did not pose a serious threat to the Chinese state or the Communist Party. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping was swayed by the party hawks, who saw a show of force as the best way to end the protests, reassert the Party’s power, and strengthen Deng’s standing.

The tragic events of June 4, 1989 resulted in the deaths of hundreds of protesters and the end of Zhao Ziyang’s life as a respected politician. While Zhao endured nearly two decades of confinement, China advanced along the liberalized economic path he had championed. Unfortunately, Zhao’s silencing after Tiananmen Square also meant the silencing of those politicians who had advocated political reforms and the continuing rule of a small political elite within the Communist Party who resolved to remain in power no matter how ruthless the means. By the end of his life, after years under house arrest, Zhao had come to support political ideas far more radical than those he held in 1989. In Prisoner of the State, Zhao argues that China must have a free press, an independent judiciary, additional political parties, and ultimately parliamentary democracy.

Reading Zhao’s words against the backdrop of the popular political unrest roiling Iran made them even more relevant, shedding light on what might currently be going on in Iran. The two situations are similar and quite revealing, though probably not in the ways most Americans think. Most Western media accounts of the recent Iranian protests have interpreted events extremely sympathetically, and as a grassroots uprising against reviled President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the religious conservatism of Iran’s Shiite clergy, and the repressive security forces of the Iranian state. The truth is quite a bit more complicated however. Serious political analysis of the crisis has been eschewed for glowing personal narratives and the drama of violent clashes between students and government militias. I would even go so far as to say that the picture painted by the Western media is one that it desperately wants to believe – that wants its own fantasies of a secular, non-threatening, US-friendly Iran sans loud-mouth anti-American leader to be validated by the opinions of the Iranian people.

However, what has been happening in Iran, and what happened in China in 1989, is not a full-scale popular revolt aiming to overthrow an existing government. In Iran and China, domestic protesters have had different goals and motivations for opposing their political leadership than outsiders have. Both sets of protests were possible only because there was an existing political split within the ruling powers over how to govern their respective countries. In both cases, the protests began as a show of support for political factions that showed more tolerance for dissent and change within the existing political framework. In China, Zhao represented a moderate, reformist political group of the ruling Communist Party. In Iran, presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi claims to represent a similar reformist, moderate wing of the political elite. However, what is happening in Iran may just be factional fighting with little real ideological change at stake. Mousavi – who appears more interested in fighting for his own political advancement – doesn’t appear to be the reformer Zhao was, and Western hopes that Mousavi would magically give up Iranian nuclear ambitions and live in peace with Israel and the US appear completely misplaced. Mousavi has been strongly supported by certain members of Iran’s ruling Shia clergy (particularly Ayatollah Rafsanjani) who detest Ahmadinejad for his attacks on their corruption and privilege. And though foreign media sources depicted Iran’s protests as massive public outpourings of discontent, it is fairly obvious that the protests were limited to educated upper-class students in Tehran and a handful of larger cities. Their demands are certainly not insignificant, but their point of view doesn’t seem to represent a majority of Iranians. The rural poor seem to have again backed Ahmadinejad at the polls. And, despite Western desires, demonstrators are hardly calling for a toppling of Iran’s religious leadership or an overthrow if the ideals of the 1979 Islamic revolution. Indeed, Mousavi’s strongest backers are certain members of the clergy themselves.

In any case, Prisoner of the State illuminates the hidden political complexities that can exist in any country at any time – be it China, Iran, or the US. It also provides a powerful lesson for those who wish to create simple, moralizing narratives out of events that are vastly more complex than most people know at the time they are occurring. We live in a mediated world, but the story the media tells us is rarely the whole story. Zhao has done us all a great service by smuggling his words out of China. They remain relevant as a challenge to repressive regimes that deny their citizens basic human rights, and as a reminder to each of us to think more critically about the world around us.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Expected to Fail: Making the Familiar Strange

The achievement gap between White and Minority students – as demonstrated through achievement tests, years of schooling, high school graduation and, more generally, outcomes – is formidable and shocking.The NAEP (National Assessment of Education Programs) compiles an annual report card on the achievement gap including trends and graphs in an overall assessment of progress. The unequal results of schooling are endemic and seem to be built into some part of the system as they continually recur, impervious to minor tweaks on schooling.

Inequity in schools and school achievement limit the opportunities students have to achieve equality in the economy at large as unequal preparation and access determines future positions in the work force. Real differences in resources (i.e., good teachers, computer access, private tutoring, material parts of schools) impact and skew the education system in an obvious and measurable way but are not completely at fault for unequal outcomes.  I often wonder and am even more frequently asked what other factors help explain low achievement, school misconduct, and other social problems in urban schools.

As a society and as learning communities, we’ve grown from the days where we quoted bogus studies about brain-size and differently structured DNA to explain differences in school achievement levels. Work in the sociology of education field rationalizes the achievement gap and school failure by mostly Black and Latino students by pointing to culture, politics, economics, and other social circumstances to explain real differences in educational outcomes. The schools we build and run are not necessarily neutral settings where information and rewards are equally accessible to all students. Social interaction between groups and individuals defines many of the outcomes available to students and the processes that lead to those outcomes. Expectations that schools, teachers, and families place on students are heavily influenced by the achievement gap statistics and attitudes we have related to poverty.

Rationalizations for the achievement gap such as the increasingly popular culture-of-poverty explanations by sociologists affect our schools and teachers as they walk into classrooms every day. [For a discussion on the Culture of Poverty and education and an interview with William Julius Wilson, please see “Thoughts on Education Policy.”] These rationalizations for failure are interestingly challenged through Sociology of Education expert Pedro Noguera’s work at Berkeley High School. The Diversity Project he spearheaded worked to accomplish something we should replicate throughout our failing schools; they worked on “Making the Familiar Strange.” These effects were exceptionally clear to me as I walked into an all-too-familiar parent-teacher night at the school that I work at in New York City.

Parent Teacher Night at Brandeis

I work as a tutor at Brandeis High School in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, serving a group of 42 students to succeed academically any way I can. On the surface, it simply involves preparing them for any test that will occur within the next five periods, but I actually spend most of my day being an advocate for them with their teachers.  When some of my students shared with me that they would have liked their parents to come to last week’s parent-teacher conference day – which they couldn’t attend due to work obligations – I stepped in and tried to see as many teachers as I could. No teacher I spoke with at Brandeis wants the students to fail at school or at life, and I’m certain they wish the kids nothing but the best.  However, the ways that a few teachers that I talked with explain failure is exemplary of how the culture of poverty discourse and the expectations that it reinforces are hurting the students it aims to help. The discussion I had with some teachers in some classrooms sometimes turned rapidly to socioeconomic or cultural issues that supposedly preconditioned the students for failure.  When I pressed a foreign-language teacher for examples of shortcomings or specific areas where the student could improve, the teacher insisted that the student had other siblings that had dropped out of Brandeis and that the student should probably be tested for something. Some teachers were sometimes incredibly aware of the existence of problems in the students’ home lives, but were often unsure what problems they were, using the information only as an explanation for their failure in class.

In support of my informal findings in a limited context at Brandeis, sociologist Martin Haberman’s writes in Pedagogy of Poverty: “[R]ecord-keeping is the systematic maintenance of a paper trail to protect the school against any future legal action by its clients. Special classes, referrals, test scores, disciplinary actions, and analysis by specialists must be carefully recorded.” The path of least resistance for the student in school is an unstructured and unchallenging classroom where teachers can create an impossibility for real failure since the expectation of success never exists. The teacher may be compliant because compliance means order and peace of mind within the classroom. And, I should add, because that expectation of success may never exist in the teacher. Haberman argues that unless the definition of good teaching (or even just teaching) is challenged and changed, nothing will improve for struggling urban students. “In the present system, teachers are accountable only for engaging in the limited set of behaviors commonly regarded as acts of teaching in urban schools – that is, the pedagogy of poverty.”

Expanding the argument of how the expectations on minority students ultimately affect their school outcomes, educator Joe Nocera talks about “White Flight” from urban schools. Over the past half century, middle-class parents all across the United States have abandoned the public school system in the big city because of diminished expectations of the schooling offered. Nocera details his own experience and outlines the fears that middle class parents have of the peer group their children will be involved with in high minority urban schools. The school-abandoning phenomenon – which is also practiced by Black middle-class parents – has drained voices and resources from the public school and reinforced the low expectations placed upon it. Prospective public-school middle-class families have bought into the idea of a culture of poverty and frightened of the consequences of negative outcomes for their children have taken them to private school or relocated the whole family to put them in public schools elsewhere.

Making the Familiar Strange – Pedro Noguera and BHS

As mentioned earlier, Pedro Noguera, cognizant of the implicit adherence to this culture of failure by the teachers and school itself at Berkeley High School,  sought out to “make the familiar seem strange and problematic” as part of the Diversity Project. The taskforce was charged with improving the school. In one of their initial meetings Noguera writes that they “understood that the biggest obstacle to be overcome involved the explanations and rationalizations of this phenomenon that already existed in the minds of most people. Data on the attrition of minority students and on their performance in academic classes had been publicized and made available to the entire school and community for many years.” In order to make the school realize what it was doing, Noguera and the Project challenged the teachers to question their assumptions on why the students were succeeding and why they were failing. One of the first activities of the Diversity Project took the teachers through the neighborhoods where most of their students lived. The cultural and community resources embedded in these neighborhoods had been previously ignored. Even teachers that grew up in those very neighborhoods now saw them as breeding grounds for academic failure! The Diversity Project asked the teachers to look at these neighborhoods and their denizens in a different way.

Another interesting activity accomplished by the Diversity Project was to divide the teachers into four rooms that challenged “familiar” concepts within their schools and forced them to understand them as “strange” outcomes. One such strange concept was published in national newspapers because of both how familiar and strange it was.

The analysis of 9th grader GPA by zip code and median household income (shown below) shows the shockingly straightforward relationship between household income and mean GPA. The more the 9th graders family earned at home, the better the grades he or she received at school. Other room presentations showed teachers the frequency of minority students in remedial classes, the racial differences in choosing extracurricular and after-school activities. (White students were disproportionately represented in activities that could enhance one’s academic performance, i.e., debating team or academic clubs.)

While the research conducted in the definition of the culture of poverty highlights some important issues needed to reconstruct confidence and reinform minority students, the realities of expectations that teachers and school systems have on the students shaped by belief in this culture of poverty or belief in insurmountable obstacles is also often at play in the classroom. Noguera’s work shows the value in working with the schools to transform their expectations and make them appreciate their current role in the reproduction of inequality and the opportunities accessible through change.

From my own experience, I have learned that when the hopes of teachers are encouraged and transformed into real actions for improving the quality of teaching, the possibility of bringing about substantial change in schools can be realized.

Conclusions

The “Culture of Poverty” and lower expectations may have affected some City teachers for decades. For some teachers, their understanding of achievement gap research informs their idea of where “urban students” come from and leads to generalizations that end up damaging student opportunities and academic outcomes.

One of the important lessons here is that systemic reaction to research is an important consideration in publishing. Education policy needs to be informed by great research in education, and the achievement gap is certainly an issue that needs that kind of focus and exploration. However, realizing the crucial role that expectations play in the classroom education policy should also work to condition teachers to use this research as a rallying call against racial injustice and not as an excuse for continuing failure. Pedro Noguera’s goal of “making the familiar strange” should serve as a fine example for all teachers and administrators on how to properly react to familiar, pervasive failure.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? President Obama Stumps in New Jersey for Governor Corzine

Thursday, July 18, 2009

PNC Arts Center

3:15 pm– Members of the press passing out in a massive, seemingly endless line into the center, and its not on the account of President Obama but the scorching heat. Audacity of Hope? More like the Audacity of Heat Stroke

3:20 pm– I just made it through the security check and I didn’t even have to take off my shoes…Yes we can!

3:24 pm– Finally made my way down to the press pool seating area. In retrospect, I probably would’ve have sat in the blogger section, but then I’d be on the side of the Garden State Parkway.

3:30 pm– Some state senator approaches the podium and addresses the throngs of exuberant Obamaniacs and their one Corzine fan. She touts and panegyrizes the achievements and accomplishments of Governor Corzine. Yeah, how’s about addressing the fact that New Jersey received more than 17 billion dollars in Federal Stimulus money and yet no free bottled water in sub-Saharan heat.

3:32 pm– Much to the pleasure of the ultra-partisan crowd, State Senator begins to equate Chris Christie, the Republican candidate for governor, to president Bush. Not surprisingly, the crowd erupted in a raucous of boos. I think Bush is about as popular with the general electorate as flesh eating bacteria.

3:36 pm– Oh my, there appears to be a full-scale chorus singing. The chorus sang mellifluously and were very impassioned, but I fear I was much too much to distracted by the plethora of awkward white guy dancing. Clearly the black part of Obama would be put to shame.

3:45 pm– Whose Congressman’s leg do you have to hump to get a martini around here!

3:46 pm– Still no Obama or that other guy whom one person came to see.

4:00 pm– NJ Governor Corzine just made his way up the stage and to the podium and announces that he’s a Gay American. But seriously, Governor Corzine begins to address the enthusiastic crowd. What, too hot for sweater vests?

4:02 pm– Oh my, this man really needs to touch Obama because he has the charisma of a week’s old meatloaf. If he isn’t the Art Garfunkel to Obama’s Paul Simon…

4:05 pm– The topic of health care–the wheezing 800 pound gorilla in the emergency room–was broached.

4:08 pm– Governor Corzine panders to his most ardent supporters by playing up his support for unions and working class New Jerseyians.

4:12 pm– Governor Corzine announces the arrival of his good friend, Hillary Clinton. But seriously, President Obama has arrived!

4:13 pm– I think I just lost 80 percent of my hearing.

4:14 pm– President Obama begins to address the sweltering but ebullient crowd of thousands.

4:15 pm– I don’t care one iota if President Obama has back peddled on some of his campaign promises, belied some of his most vehement campaign rhetoric, and sheepishly kowtowed to the banks because he is adorable! He’s like puppy’s breath and new car scent all put in one! But seriously, President Obama exudes confidence and is highly commanding.

4:16 pm– Oh no he didn’t! I believe President Obama just handed Corzine his coat jacket. I guess Corzine is doing his laundry now.

4:18 pm– President Obama wastes no time in emphatically declaring Governor Corzine a crucial ally who had helped develop the national economic recovery plan, saving countless jobs, while working wonders on education and health insurance and still cutting the size of state government.

4:20 pm– President Obama seems very ensnared in his presidential campaign rhetoric and almost forgets that he got the job back in November. His tone is just as fiery and forceful as it was on the stump. Clearly Obama feels more comfortable in this arena than he does in the oval office.

4:25 pm– Health Care reform is explained not just in terms of the nation as a whole but to the great many small business owners suffering from soaring costs here in New Jersey.

4:30pm– Enough with all of this trivial health care reform! I want to know why the president hates flies and yellow mustard!

4:36– After lauding Governor Corzine for his own efforts in fixing health care, President Obama took this golden opportunity to highlight his own prescription for a workable and affordable health plan. In fact, President Obama took off the gloves and confronted the most vociferous republican and conservative Democrat opponents of his health plan by loudly declaring “What’s your Plan?!” Kudos!

“What’s your Plan?!” ~ President Obama

4:40 PM– President Obama concludes his 25 minute speech by reaffirming his support for Governor Corzine and thanks the crowd.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? On Electricity, Or, Can A Public Option Work?

Over the next few weeks there will continue to be great hub and bub about the “public option.” If there is a public option in the health care reforms that are being considered, it will be the end of all medicine in America, we are told. Some are positing that nobody will be able to get care because doctors will not accept the payment levels of the public option, and some believe that it will no longer be possible for private insurers to stay in business because they will be unable to compete with an enterprise operated by the government.

In today’s story that theory is tested—and it’s done by looking back in history, to a time when another government-owned business paradigm was introduced to the market. And if you guessed that comparing the health care market to the market for electricity in the Pacific Northwest would be the test…well, slap yourself on the back, ‘cause you’re the winner.

To make the story work, let’s pretend that you are a consumer of electricity living in Seattle. So you purchase electricity from Seattle City Light, which is owned by the citizens of Seattle, and they purchase their power from both publicly-owned and private sources. Other consumers in the State, including yours truly, purchase power from private sources. (I’m a customer of Puget Sound Energy, which is a stockholder-owned operation.) Still others purchase from a variety of Public Utility Districts (PUDs).

(Fun Fact: Snohomish County PUD is famous for discovering those astonishing “Grandma Millie” phone calls while reviewing the Enron Tapes; in which it was proven that Enron’s energy traders habitually manipulated markets for their own gain.)

The generation side of the equation is also based on a mix of private and public sources. Seattle City Light owns two hydroelectric projects which provide roughly half of the City’s power. They also purchase from the spot market on occasion, and on occasion they sell surplus power to the market.

Puget Sound Energy also owns generation resources, and sells surplus power of its own into the market. Virtually everyone who sells power to retail customers in this region also purchases power from the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA). The US Army Corps of Engineers own and operate a series of 31 dams in the Columbia River basin; the BPA sells the hydroelectric power generated at those dams to both public and private utilities. (They also operate most of the region’s transmission and distribution resources.)

One of the stated goals of the organization is to provide power at cost, and consumers in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana are today paying about 1/3 less than the national average and roughly 1/2 the cost of electricity in New England.

So how is all this conversation about electricity relevant to health care? Some, like Georgia’s Congressman Phil Gingrey, believe that a public health insurance option means “turning the whole system over to the government to run like they do the DMV.”

But in this corner of the country, there are public options available for electricity consumers with private industry successfully operating alongside the public option. Further, the biggest recent shock to the system came from a private company that was caught manipulating the market for its own gain.

The presence of the public option has led to lower consumer costs compared to other regions of the country, suggesting that removing the profit motive from the business is indeed bringing benefit to consumers. And if you add customer satisfaction surveys to the overall picture, the “public option,” at least in the Pacific Northwest electricity market, equals happy customers who are saving significant amounts of money.

So the next time someone tells you a public option automatically equals The End Of The World…tell ‘em they should have a look at my power bill some time.

Michael Moore’s Romance with Capitalism

Michael Moore is coming out with another film to let us know more about evil corporations (as if we didn’t already know), Capitalism: A Love Story.

This new movie is the subject of this week’s cartoon.

Moore has been know to use questionable,  deceptive, and misleading tactics starting all the way back with “Roger & Me.” Now that GM and the major investment banks, the target of much of Moore’s criticism, have been forced to reinvent themselves, a new release gives the filmmaker a chance to bask in his pyrrhic victory.

The screening of the film begins with an  “alms collection” for the “host of needy banks.” While greed did serve as a major driver of the financial downturn, it’s too simplistic to blame capitalism per se – instead, there’s a lesson to be learned about human nature here, independent of the regulatory system.

Further, it’s interesting that a film criticizing capitalism is released to earn profits from sensationalism.  I don’t plan to buy a ticket– there are plenty of other worthwhile things to spend my money on during this financial downturn.

Review of Embedded With Organized Labor

Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home, by Steve Early
Monthly Review Press, 288 pages, $16.95

Ed Sadlowski; Jay, Maine; Pittstown Coal, Tony Mazzochi, the Charlestown Five; Ron Carey – as the names float by on the pages of “Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home,” it sometimes seems that Steve Early’s new collection of articles must encompass every person, place, or corporation of significance to the labor movement over the past four decades.  Not quite, but actually the volume’s thirty nine essays – most of them book reviews – cover even more ground than that.  For instance, there’s stories of labor journalists from the deep past of whom you’ve likely never heard.  But the topic most of interest to Early, recently retired from the Communications Workers of America but preferring to think of himself as “redeployed,” is the future of the American labor movement.

There was a time when leftists of a certain age asked themselves how they could love a labor movement that didn’t seem to want to love them back. Certainly the welcome mat wasn’t out on that day Early recalls “In May of 1970, [when] hundreds of flag-waving New York City construction workers … attacked a crowd of antiwar demonstrators on Wall Street.”  The breach between labor and the left would actually broaden two years later when the AFL-CIO refused to back George McGovern against Richard Nixon.  The South Dakota Senator would come closer to espousing the politics of the leftists of the day than any other Democratic nominee in their life time, but for AFL-CIO President George Meany he was too antiwar, too radical. Some see payback in McGovern’s current opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act.  But ironically, the individual he cites for past opposition to the concept of binding arbitration that constitutes one of the bill’s components is none other than Meany.

Still some, like Early, persisted.  A few unions like the United Electrical Workers (UE), which to this day maintains the egalitarian tradition of paying no official a salary higher than the highest you can earn under a UE union contract, actually worked with and encouraged student radicals – such as this writer.  (Early drops the sobering fact that this honorable organization – which had half a million members before leaving the CIO in 1949 rather than submit to the government-driven purge of Communist Party members going on in other unions – has now shrunken to 17,000 members.)

Acceptance came much harder in most other unions, though, but ultimately those who didn’t see the labor movement as a collection of “real-life Archie Bunkers who railed against a whole generation of spoiled ‘meathead’ college kids,” would even prevail, to a degree, and by “the fall of 1999,” Early notes, “steelworkers and radical students were seen marching side by side (or at least on the same side) in street protests against the World Trade Organization.”

The signal change of those intervening years was John Sweeney’s 1995 election as AFL-CIO president.  Although a book that Early reviews on that subject bears the tile, “Not Your Father’s Union Movement,” his election did represent a return to the past in the sense that afterward the labor movement would again more or less openly welcome the left as it generally had before the Cold War.  Of course, with Joseph Stalin now more than forty years dead and the Soviet Union itself gone for a decade, this thaw came none too quickly.

Sweeney comes in for his share of criticism in Early’s book, yet it seems fair to say that he did pretty much try to do what he said he would  –  reverse the long term decline of labor that Early notes in the book’s first paragraph: “When I first got involved the labor movement in the early 1970s, unions still represented almost a quarter of the country’s workforce.  Now, unionization is down to 12.4 percent overall and only 7.6 percent in private industry.”  Sweeney had assumed the Federation’s leadership largely on the strength of the fact that his own Service Employees International Union (SEIU) had been an exception to the general downward trend, largely due to the fact that much of its constituency was public employees, more than a third of whom are now unionized.

But Sweeney has not been particularly successful in reversing the overall trend, although SEIU has continued growing to the point where it is has become the nation’s largest union.  And in 2005, Andy Stern, Sweeney’s successor at SEIU, led unions comprising about a third of the AFL-CIO’s membership into a rival Change to Win federation dedicated to doing what Sweeney could not.  About the best thing that can be said about the split to this point is that it has not damaged the labor movement nearly as badly as some had feared.  The overall national percentage of union membership has even risen for the past two years, although it remains lower than before the split.

Not one to see easy fixes for labor’s decline, Early is skeptical that even the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) currently pending in Congress will represent the cure-all some hope for.  He cites a Canadian labor relations scholar’s findings that “union density and bargaining coverage are falling even in provinces such as Saskatchewan and Quebec that have card check and first-arbitration clauses” – precisely the EFCA items that its advocates hope will save union representation drives from the often debilitating process of National Labor Relations Board elections and management refusal to bargain.  The measures he thinks are really needed – repeal of “Taft-Hartley Act restrictions on real union solidarity and the Supreme Court’s seventy-year old sanctioning of the use of striker replacement” are not part of political discourse today – “except in the speeches of Ralph Nader.”

And as SEIU has dominated the labor movement of recent years, so it dominates Early’s book, with Stern coming in for fairly severe criticism.  “Since 1996,” he writes, “when Stern replaced Sweeney, 40 SEIU locals – or 14 percent of its 275 affiliates – have been put under trusteeship to implant new officers.”  While he grants that “[S]ome of those ousted ran old-guard fiefdoms,” others just didn’t want to go along with what he views as questionable programs coming from the top, and perhaps the “air of arrogance and exclusivity” emanating from some SEIU staffers or an “attitudinal style … closer … to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs than to veteran staffers of the trade union movement” that one reviewed author describes.

(The largest of these trusteeship battles is currently playing out with the leadership of the newly formed National Union of Healthcare Workers claiming to have filed decertification petitions aimed at taking back close to 2/3 of the 150,000 members it formerly led in SEIU’s now trusteed California-based United Healthcare Workers West.)

The fact that book reviews constitute the core of Early’s book naturally constrains him largely to topics that other writers have chosen and many of the more interesting matters are raised only peripherally.  There is the fairly central question of just what a labor radical is to do.  At the one end are the “colonizers” like Wellesley graduate Elly Leary, interviewed in Staughton and Alice Lynd’s “The New Rank and File,” who spent twelve years building cars at the Framingham, Massachusetts General Motors plant.  Jobs like this were hard enough, Early notes, “without the additional task of proselytizing.” The group of radicals that Leary eventually became part of was just about learning its ass from its elbow on how to proceed sensibly when the plant closed in 1989 and they were deindustrialized out of the working class.

At the other end there is “SEIU’s ‘best and brightest’” who come in for Early’s criticism because “most have never been a janitor, security guard, nursing home worker, home health care aide or public employee.”  Of course, Early himself came in for that very criticism back in the mid-1970s as he recounts in the book’s first piece: when he was interviewing coal miners for the United Mine Workers Journal, one obviously wary miner politely shook hands with him, then “looked me in the eye and said knowingly, ‘Ah, pencil hands.’”

And then there’s the question of why the labor radicals do what they do.  I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb in saying that most of the people we encounter in these pages saw themselves as socialists, if not by that name precisely then by some synonym they thought more appropriate to the time and place.  They weren’t motivated just by the hope of a better labor movement, but of a better country, a better world – and they saw the labor movement as the best means to that end.  For that sort of thing we will have to wait for Early’s next book, though – he is currently writing his history of the sixties radicals and the labor movement.  But the current book will give you plenty to chew on for the moment.  And, oh yes, it comes with an excellent index, unusual in an essay collection, but extremely useful because this book is dense – and I mean that as a complement.

Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? All Play and Carrie Bradshaw Makes Scott an Unholy Boy

One of Bill Maher’s funniest antireligious moments on TV was the time he put up a photo of three asinine-looking clerics at some interfaith dialogue. You had the Greek Orthodox guy in his stupid hat; next to him was a Muslim mullah with the big turban, and then there was this bishop with his big stupid hat. So here are these three old men in Halloween costumes talking about their gods and moralities and the only thing they could agree on was that sex is bad.

“Why is sex bad, anyway?” Sarah Jessica Parker said to me plaintively, in a dream I had from Sex and the City. Actually she didn’t say that; I just wrote it for effect. But I did dream about her. She’s not even my type, physically speaking (I like Asians), but I dreamed of her overnight hugs, kisses, and highly charged intimate passion because her personality in the TV show was so appealing. Well, OK—so was her body, not to mention the gorgeous hair. Obviously the Lord abandoned me that night to my evil thoughts. Within the space of three weeks I dreamed not only of Carrie Bradshaw but also my beautiful Vietnamese physician and my Chinese ex-wife’s sister. At least I got my Asians in there, but the consensus among the religious is that I will burn in hell for all eternity. Repent! I must repent my sinful subconscious!

One thing the religions all agree on is that they each have exclusive rights to the correct answers. Others may be partially correct, but only my religion has all the correct answers. You ask me if my religion offers the correct answers? What a dumb question. Of course it does, otherwise I wouldn’t belong to it, now, would I? I know it’s the correct one because my parents and my clerics and people like me have been telling me so all my life.

It’s so comfortable not to have to think, to have clerics and parents and the lowest common denominator of sheep do the thinking for me.

It is said by some that Mormons believe they will become gods in the afterlife and get their own planet if they’ve been good during their mortal lives. Others deny it, but frankly I am not interested in doing enough research to determine definitively whether Mormon families inherit their own planets. I give it as much credence as Catholics thinking, to paraphrase Bill Maher, they’re actually eating the flesh of a 2,000-year-old dead god when they suck on the wafer. It’s not even worth my time contemplating other than to make it grist for my anti-religion mill. Come on, life is short; use your brain cells for something reasonable. Joseph Smith believed in moon men, for Christ’s sake, who looked like us and lived for a thousand years.

Decades ago, when I was a child in the Netherlands, young Mormon missionaries on bicycles wearing short-sleeved white shirts and skinny ties visited us on a weekly basis to impart priceless truths. My parents were religious nuts too, so we had a weekly Battle of the Religions. I liked the final logic of the Mormons, though: “The thing is,” they said, “all the religions tell you they’re right. The difference is, we know we’re right.”

Right.

By the age of 16, I knew I was done with religion.

Theatre of the Absurd is a regular satirical column at Demockracy