Today's Teamster News 10.27.13

Teamsters score big organizing gains, go “kosher” too!  People's World   ... while the biggest win was in Santa Monica, Calif., the most unusual saw the union "go kosher" - winning an election and a first contract for 15 kosher dining hall workers at the University of Pennsylvania...
Sell-Out Alert: 9 Democrats Already Caving to GOP On Social Security Cuts  Alternet   ...There are at least nine in the Senate. California’s Dianne Feinstein, Montana’s Max Baucus, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Delaware’s Chris Coons and Tom Carper, and Colorado’s Michael Bennett have all said they support cuts to entitlements in letters to constituents, proposed bills or statements...
Putting Profits First? No Way – Health Groups  Medical Observer   ...militant health groups belonging to Health Alliance for Democracy and the People’s Health Movement-Philippines picketed the office of the World Health Organization to express their strong opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement...
Jiangxi businessman pays model Mo Lulu 100,000 yuan to breastfeed him  South China Morning Post   ... at a private dinner after the automobile show, Mo breastfed a man who paid her 100,000 yuan. According to the report, the businessman called Mo “mom” every time he took a sip. Other people at the dinner took photos and uploaded them online...
Middle Classes Are Stronger in States with Greater Union Membership  Center for American Progress Action Fund   ... four of the top five union states—Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, and Rhode Island—had middle classes of above-average strength...
Marty Sullivan figured out how the world’s biggest companies avoided billions in taxes. Here’s how he wants to stop them.  Washington Post   ...it was Sullivan who in 2010 pieced together from public filings that Apple had understated its reported profits to hide the fact that it was paying a tax rate of less than 2 percent on its overseas profits, shining the spotlight on Apple’s tax avoidance schemes...
Means-Tested recovery: Over 108,000,000 Americans received means-tested benefits in latest report from Census Bureau, more than are currently employed full-time.  My Budget 360   ...the stock market is rallying higher and higher thanks to financial maneuvering but the actual American worker is taking it on the chin.  This is obviously unsustainable...
Libertarians And Progressives Team Up Against NSA Surveillance  Buzzfeed Politics   ...Organized by the coalition Stop Watching Us, which includes dozens of groups ranging from Internet freedom advocates to Tea Party organizations, the rally attracted hundreds of people to the Capitol Reflecting Pool to protest the electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency revealed by Edward Snowden this year...
Police, fire pension fund still falls short, report says  Columbus Dispatch   ...Rep. Lynn Wachtmann, the Napoleon Republican who leads the Ohio Retirement Study Council…threatened to dismantle the Police & Fire Fund as a separate board because of what he perceives as members’ continued intransigence. “Some of these members are union thugs who know about power and aren’t afraid to use power or abuse power if they need that to win...”
Tea Party activists gather signatures for so-called right to work amendment  Plunderbund   ...At this rate, Ohioans could vote to make Hillary Clinton the next president of the United States before we ever get a chance to vote on another anti-union measure in Ohio.  Unless, of course, they pick up a lot of funding and start collecting signatures at a faster pace...
LETTER: Asbestos Bill Will Complicate Veterans' Claims  Wisconsin State Journal   ...veterans make up only 8 percent of the population, but 30 percent of all mesothelioma-related deaths. Senate Bill 13 would add additional hurdles for victims seeking claims against asbestos companies and would delay or deny justice for asbestos victims...
Georgia man runs into burning home to save beer  KTRK   ..."I went back into the house like a dummy." That's what one man in Georgia said after he risked his life to save beer from his fridge while his house was on fire...

Straight from the elephant’s mouth

Longtime congressional staffer Mike Lofgren says the main function of today’s Republic Party is to make the party’s super-rich supporters even richer. All that other culture war saber-rattling is just the bait for working Americans to vote against their own economic interests.

That’s not exactly news to most of us who follow politics and economic issues in this country, but it is remarkable coming from Lofgren. He's a former GOP operative who puts all the cards on the table in a recent interview with Truthout.

Lofgren’s new book, “The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted,” takes both parties to task for the decline of the middle class. But he saves much of his criticism for the GOP.

He told Truthout:

The primary purpose of the GOP these days is to provide tax breaks and other financial advantages (such as not regulating pollution and other socially costly externalities) to their wealthy donor base. All the rest of their platform, all the culture wars stuff, is simply rube bait.

These people know what they’re doing. They use a superficial populism tinged with craziness to further a rational, plutocratic agenda.

Lofgren blames much of the Republicans’ success on a complicit media and commercialized society:

Since the GOP is loath to tell the public in straightforward terms what their economic agenda is, and the media are not exactly forcing the GOP's hand, and, finally, the people are operating in a knowledge deficit, Republicans respond by sleight of hand: "We're more American than that Kenyan socialist in the White House!" Or "The Obama administration is riddled with Muslim extremists." Or "Planned Parenthood is taxpayer-subsidized murder." Or "Obama wants to take away your guns." Even "Obama raised your taxes," when in fact he lowered them.

While he credits the labor movement for the “upward arc” that led to a middle class in America, Lofgren says the movement has lost momentum in part because of a stultifying consumer culture:

[In the 1880s and 1930s] going on strike was a serious business that could get you killed. Governors routinely called out the national guard with orders to shoot to kill, and companies hired Pinkerton thugs to murder strike leaders. Yet, somehow, they got wage and hour laws, abolition of child labor, the recognition of unions, and other improvements… This movement ran out of steam. It may partly have been due to the very consumer society it created, because its fruits - particularly the electronic media - encouraged an atomization of society and a personalization of our problems and failures. Solidarity at the union hall doesn't cut it when American Idol is on.

Lofgren also points out how globalization has ended any sense of nationalism among the 1 percent:

So-called globalization resulted in our economic elites having a ready relief valve anytime workers become restive. And it effected a psychological change. Where our elites were once national, now they identify more with their elite counterparts in London, Tokyo, and Beijing than with their own countrymen of lesser means.

So what’s the solution? We need to get money out of politics:

There is so much money washing through the political system that political action through the traditional party system has been neutralized… Nothing will be solved in Congress until we get the money out of politics… But of course, doing that is a chicken-and-egg problem insofar as the current money-dominated system is designed precisely to prevent that from happening.

[But] these problems are not existential "givens." They arose because of stupidity and lack of attention, and they are amenable to solutions we can devise.

We only hope that Lofgren is right and that this party for the 1 percent will soon be over.

-- Union Thug