Labor Leaders Disappointed by Lack of Working People's Voices at Vermont Healthcare Reform Discussion

by the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare, posted on CommonDreams.org on March 18

Working people's voices were not heard at the Obama Administration's second regional Health Care Summit in Burlington, VT on March 17.

"Despite the fact that several union spokespersons attended the meeting, we were not called upon and unfortunately the voice of workers was shut out of the discussion," said Peter Knowlton, president of the Northeast Region of the United Electrical Workers Union (UE). "When it came to the financial discussion, Gov. Douglas and Gov. Patrick [the two governors moderating the session] only called on wealthy special-interests from the worlds of business and professional circles."

Sandy Eaton, a nurse who attended the forum stated that nurses' voices went unheard as well. "Nurses were well represented, but our voices were not heard -- and the term "nurse" or "hospital worker" was never mentioned in the two hour forum," said Eaton who is a member of the executive board of the Massachusetts Nurses Association.

Outside the auditorium where the summit was held, over 250 labor and community members rallied in support of HR 676 and single payer healthcare. "Our system needs fundamental reform," said Dawn Stanger, President of the Vermont Workers Center-Jobs with Justice. Stanger, a UPS employee and member of Teamsters Local 597, was joined by dozens of unionized nurses who worked next door at Fletcher Allen Health Care, the largest hospital in Vermont.

"We need to build a movement to demand change," Stanger told the crowd. The Vermont Workers Center is coordinating a major statewide "Healthcare Is a Human Right" rally on May 1 at the Vermont Statehouse, which will include U. S. Senator Bernie Sanders. The rally will oppose Vermont Governor Douglas' proposed budget cuts to healthcare programs and support state and national single-payer legislation.

"I was really hopeful that these forums would finally give voice to workers concerns," added UE leader Peter Knowlton. "There were many people there who could have reminded them about the serious problems hourly workers face with skyrocketing premiums and dealing with the horrors of co-pays, deductibles, out-of-pocket expenses and the run around all workers face with managed care. If this forum is any indication of future ones, we will need to be much more aggressive to get our voices heard."

Knowlton, Eaton and Stanger were among the several labor leaders at the forum who support HR 676, the "Expanded and Improved Medicare for All" Act. HR 676 was re-introduced this year by Congressman John Conyers. It currently has 66 congressional co-sponsors. Because it eliminates the private insurance industry from profiting from people's misfortunes and, like Medicare, establishes the federal government as the "single payer" of everyone's medical bills, HR 676 can provide healthcare for all with no co-pays or deductibles in a fiscally prudent manner. HR 676 has the endorsement of hundreds of state and local labor federations and local unions as well as many other civic and religious organizations.

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Michael Parenti: Capitalism's Self-inflicted Apocalypse

Posted January 2009 at michaelparenti.org

After the overthrow of communist governments in Eastern Europe, capitalism was paraded as the indomitable system that brings prosperity and democracy, the system that would prevail unto the end of history.

The present economic crisis, however, has convinced even some prominent free-marketeers that something is gravely amiss. Truth be told, capitalism has yet to come to terms with several historical forces that cause it endless trouble: democracy, prosperity, and capitalism itself, the very entities that capitalist rulers claim to be fostering.

Plutocracy vs. Democracy
Let us consider democracy first. In the United States we hear that capitalism is wedded to democracy, hence the phrase, "capitalist democracies." In fact, throughout our history there has been a largely antagonistic relationship between democracy and capital concentration. Some eighty years ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis commented, "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both." Moneyed interests have been opponents not proponents of democracy.

The Constitution itself was fashioned by affluent gentlemen who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to repeatedly warn of the baneful and dangerous leveling effects of democracy. The document they cobbled together was far from democratic, being shackled with checks, vetoes, and requirements for artificial super majorities, a system designed to blunt the impact of popular demands.

In the early days of the Republic the rich and well-born imposed property qualifications for voting and officeholding. They opposed the direct election of candidates (note, their Electoral College is still with us). And for decades they resisted extending the franchise to less favored groups such as propertyless working men, immigrants, racial minorities, and women.

Today conservative forces continue to reject more equitable electoral features such as proportional representation, instant runoff, and publicly funded campaigns. They continue to create barriers to voting, be it through overly severe registration requirements, voter roll purges, inadequate polling accommodations, and electronic voting machines that consistently "malfunction" to the benefit of the more conservative candidates.

At times ruling interests have suppressed radical publications and public protests, resorting to police raids, arrests, and jailings—applied most recently with full force against demonstrators in St. Paul, Minnesota, during the 2008 Republican National Convention.

The conservative plutocracy also seeks to rollback democracy’s social gains, such as public education, affordable housing, health care, collective bargaining, a living wage, safe work conditions, a non-toxic sustainable environment; the right to privacy, the separation of church and state, freedom from compulsory pregnancy, and the right to marry any consenting adult of one’s own choosing.

About a century ago, US labor leader Eugene Victor Debs was thrown into jail during a strike. Sitting in his cell he could not escape the conclusion that in disputes between two private interests, capital and labor, the state was not a neutral arbiter. The force of the state--with its police, militia, courts, and laws—was unequivocally on the side of the company bosses. From this, Debs concluded that capitalism was not just an economic system but an entire social order, one that rigged the rules of democracy to favor the moneybags.

Capitalist rulers continue to pose as the progenitors of democracy even as they subvert it, not only at home but throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Any nation that is not "investor friendly," that attempts to use its land, labor, capital, natural resources, and markets in a self-developing manner, outside the dominion of transnational corporate hegemony, runs the risk of being demonized and targeted as "a threat to U.S. national security."

Democracy becomes a problem for corporate America not when it fails to work but when it works too well, helping the populace move toward a more equitable and livable social order, narrowing the gap, however modestly, between the superrich and the rest of us. So democracy must be diluted and subverted, smothered with disinformation, media puffery, and mountains of campaign costs; with rigged electoral contests and partially disfranchised publics, bringing faux victories to more or less politically safe major-party candidates.

Capitalism vs. Prosperity
The corporate capitalists no more encourage prosperity than do they propagate democracy. Most of the world is capitalist, and most of the world is neither prosperous nor particularly democratic. One need only think of capitalist Nigeria, capitalist Indonesia, capitalist Thailand, capitalist Haiti, capitalist Colombia, capitalist Pakistan, capitalist South Africa, capitalist Latvia, and various other members of the Free World--more accurately, the Free Market World.

A prosperous, politically literate populace with high expectations about its standard of living and a keen sense of entitlement, pushing for continually better social conditions, is not the plutocracy’s notion of an ideal workforce and a properly pliant polity. Corporate investors prefer poor populations. The poorer you are, the harder you will work—for less. The poorer you are, the less equipped you are to defend yourself against the abuses of wealth.

In the corporate world of "free-trade," the number of billionaires is increasing faster than ever while the number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. Poverty spreads as wealth accumulates.

Consider the United States. In the last eight years alone, while vast fortunes accrued at record rates, an additional six million Americans sank below the poverty level; median family income declined by over $2,000; consumer debt more than doubled; over seven million Americans lost their health insurance, and more than four million lost their pensions; meanwhile homelessness increased and housing foreclosures reached pandemic levels.

It is only in countries where capitalism has been reined in to some degree by social democracy that the populace has been able to secure a measure of prosperity; northern European nations such as Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark come to mind. But even in these social democracies popular gains are always at risk of being rolled back.

It is ironic to credit capitalism with the genius of economic prosperity when most attempts at material betterment have been vehemently and sometimes violently resisted by the capitalist class. The history of labor struggle provides endless illustration of this.

To the extent that life is bearable under the present U.S. economic order, it is because millions of people have waged bitter class struggles to advance their living standards and their rights as citizens, bringing some measure of humanity to an otherwise heartless politico-economic order.

A Self-devouring Beast
The capitalist state has two roles long recognized by political thinkers. First, like any state it must provide services that cannot be reliably developed through private means, such as public safety and orderly traffic. Second, the capitalist state protects the haves from the have-nots, securing the process of capital accumulation to benefit the moneyed interests, while heavily circumscribing the demands of the working populace, as Debs observed from his jail cell.

There is a third function of the capitalist state seldom mentioned. It consists of preventing the capitalist system from devouring itself. Consider the core contradiction Karl Marx pointed to: the tendency toward overproduction and market crisis. An economy dedicated to speedups and wage cuts, to making workers produce more and more for less and less, is always in danger of a crash. To maximize profits, wages must be kept down. But someone has to buy the goods and services being produced. For that, wages must be kept up. There is a chronic tendency—as we are seeing today—toward overproduction of private sector goods and services and underconsumption of necessities by the working populace.

In addition, there is the frequently overlooked self-destruction created by the moneyed players themselves. If left completely unsupervised, the more active command component of the financial system begins to devour less organized sources of wealth.

Instead of trying to make money by the arduous task of producing and marketing goods and services, the marauders tap directly into the money streams of the economy itself. During the 1990s we witnessed the collapse of an entire economy in Argentina when unchecked free marketeers stripped enterprises, pocketed vast sums, and left the country’s productive capacity in shambles. The Argentine state, gorged on a heavy diet of free-market ideology, faltered in its function of saving capitalism from the capitalists.

Some years later, in the United States, came the multi-billion-dollar plunder perpetrated by corporate conspirators at Enron, WorldCom, Harkin, Adelphia, and a dozen other major companies. Inside players like Ken Lay turned successful corporate enterprises into sheer wreckage, wiping out the jobs and life savings of thousands of employees in order to pocket billions.

These thieves were caught and convicted. Does that not show capitalism’s self-correcting capacity? Not really. The prosecution of such malfeasance— in any case coming too late—was a product of democracy’s accountability and transparency, not capitalism's. Of itself the free market is an amoral system, with no strictures save caveat emptor.

In the meltdown of 2008-09 the mounting financial surplus created a problem for the moneyed class: there were not enough opportunities to invest. With more money than they knew what to do with, big investors poured immense sums into nonexistent housing markets and other dodgy ventures, a legerdemain of hedge funds, derivatives, high leveraging, credit default swaps, predatory lending, and whatever else.

Among the victims were other capitalists, small investors, and the many workers who lost billions of dollars in savings and pensions. Perhaps the premiere brigand was Bernard Madoff. Described as "a longstanding leader in the financial services industry," Madoff ran a fraudulent fund that raked in $50 billion from wealthy investors, paying them back "with money that wasn’t there," as he himself put it. The plutocracy devours its own children.

In the midst of the meltdown, at an October 2008 congressional hearing, former chair of the Federal Reserve and orthodox free-market devotee Alan Greenspan confessed that he had been mistaken to expect moneyed interests--groaning under an immense accumulation of capital that needs to be invested somewhere--to suddenly exercise self-restraint.

The classic laissez-faire theory is even more preposterous than Greenspan made it. In fact, the theory claims that everyone should pursue their own selfish interests without restraint. This unbridled competition supposedly will produce maximum benefits for all because the free market is governed by a miraculously benign “invisible hand” that optimizes collective outputs. (“Greed is good.”)

Is the crisis of 2008-09 caused by a chronic tendency toward overproduction and hyper-financial accumulation, as Marx would have it? Or is it the outcome of the personal avarice of people like Bernard Madoff? In other words, is the problem systemic or individual? In fact, the two are not mutually exclusive. Capitalism breeds the venal perpetrators, and rewards the most unscrupulous among them. The crimes and crises are not irrational departures from a rational system, but the converse: they are the rational outcomes of a basically irrational and amoral system.

Worse still, the ensuing multi-billion dollar government bailouts are themselves being turned into an opportunity for pillage. Not only does the state fail to regulate, it becomes itself a source of plunder, pulling vast sums from the federal money machine, leaving the taxpayers to bleed.

Those who scold us for "running to the government for a handout" are themselves running to the government for a handout. Corporate America has always enjoyed grants-in-aid, loan guarantees, and other state and federal subventions. But the 2008-09 "rescue operation" offered a record feed at the public trough. More than $350 billion was dished out by a right-wing lame-duck Secretary of the Treasury to the biggest banks and financial houses without oversight--not to mention the more than $4 trillion that has come from the Federal Reserve. Most of the banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of New York Mellon, stated that they had no intention of letting anyone know where the money was going.

The big bankers used some of the bailout, we do know, to buy up smaller banks and prop up banks overseas. CEOs and other top banking executives are spending bailout funds on fabulous bonuses and lavish corporate spa retreats. Meanwhile, big bailout beneficiaries like Citigroup and Bank of America laid off tens of thousands of employees, inviting the question: why were they given all that money in the first place?

While hundreds of billions were being doled out to the very people who had caused the catastrophe, the housing market continued to wilt, credit remained paralyzed, unemployment worsened, and consumer spending sank to record lows.

In sum, free-market corporate capitalism is by its nature a disaster waiting to happen. Its essence is the transformation of living nature into mountains of commodities and commodities into heaps of dead capital. When left entirely to its own devices, capitalism foists its diseconomies and toxicity upon the general public and upon the natural environment--and eventually begins to devour itself.

The immense inequality in economic power that exists in our capitalist society translates into a formidable inequality of political power, which makes it all the more difficult to impose democratic regulations.

If the paladins of Corporate America want to know what really threatens "our way of life," it is their way of life, their boundless way of pilfering their own system, destroying the very foundation on which they stand, the very community on which they so lavishly feed.

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Mark Weisbrot: Health Care Reform Is Needed Now More than Ever

Published on Monday, March 2, 2009 by McClatchy Newspapers

With the U.S. economy's downward spiral still accelerating and the federal government looking at its largest budget deficits since World War II, some are saying that this is not the time to expand health care coverage to all Americans.

But this is exactly the time for the Obama administration to move boldly on its campaign promise to implement a universal health care system.

Obama wants spending that stimulates the economy in the short term, but he also wants to reduce the long-term deficit problem after the economy recovers. This is exactly what health care reform will do.

In the short run, health care spending, like other government spending on goods and services, creates jobs and generates income. This will help arrest the economy's downward spiral.

With the collapse of private spending, the federal government must act as the consumer of last resort - hence the vital importance of the $787 billion stimulus package that Congress passed last week. Fortunately this package did contain at least some health care stimulus. In included $87 billion for Medicaid payments to the state governments, $25 billion towards helping unemployed workers extend their employment-based health insurance after being laid off, and $19 billion for health information technology.

But health care reform would do vastly more. President Obama has proposed a reform that would, while keeping the employer-based health insurance that covers most Americans, create a public health insurance system for the 46 million that do not have insurance. Large employers would be required to either pay into this system or provide their employees with insurance that is at least as good as the federal system. Individuals without insurance could buy into the public system, and the federal government would subsidize these payments so that they would be affordable for low-income households and those without ties to the labor force.

The White House estimates that their plan would cost $50-65 billion annually, but it would be better to spend much more than this, with more federal subsidies to employers to cover uninsured workers and improve existing coverage. As big as it may seem, the $787 billion stimulus bill passed by Congress amounts to less than 2.7 percent of GDP. This is not nearly enough to counteract our deep recession: the Congressional Budget Office estimates the output gap (i.e., how much output is below the economy's potential) at $2.9 trillion over the next three years.

Besides saving thousands of lives by providing health care to the uninsured, and supplementing the fiscal stimulus, health care reform has another huge advantage: it can drastically reduce future federal budget deficits. The vast majority of our government's long-term shortfall is due to exploding health care costs in the private sector. These spill over to the public sector, which currently finances about half the nation's health care costs. The United States spends about twice as much per person on health care as other high-income countries, and yet has worse health outcomes, including life expectancy and infant mortality.

The main economic reason for this colossal failure is that our system of private insurance and powerful monopolies is vastly more wasteful and inefficient than the health care systems of other developed countries. Insurance companies spend tens of billions trying to insure the healthy, avoid the sick, and deny payment for claims. Pharmaceutical companies take $350 billion of our health care dollars for drugs that cost a small fraction of that sum to produce.

The Obama health care plan won't eliminate most of these perverse incentives and waste - eventually we will need a truly national, single-payer system like Medicare to accomplish that. But it would be a big step in that direction, creating a nearly universal insurance system and laying the foundation for a sustainable system that can contain costs.

Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), in Washington, DC. His column is distributed to newspapers by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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Deseret News: Activists Calling for Uprisings for Causes

Published on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 by Deseret News (Utah)
by Elaine Jarvik
Marches, rallies and honks for peace are all good strategies — but they're not enough, say local activists who gathered Saturday to discuss tactics for social change. It's time now for something more, a kind of "peaceful uprising," they say.

The all-day conference at the University of Utah drew about 150 activists representing groups ranging from the Healthy Planet Mobilization Committee to a new group called Provo for Palestine. There were environmentalists, peace activists and union organizers. Panelists included former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson and Tim DeChristopher, the eco-saboteur who last month disrupted the Bureau of Land Management auction of oil drilling leases.

The "old model" of social activism hasn't proved effective, said DeChristopher, who appeared on two panels. "We have to convince leaders that there will be an uprising," he said. "Changing a light bulb is not an appropriate response" to the climate crisis.

After a day of panels and films, about 30 people attended the final, what-shall-we-do-now session, where they discussed their shared vision of a "just, sustainable and peaceful world" and the pros and cons of getting arrested for their causes. Sixteen of the 30 raised their hands "yes" when asked by attendee Caleb Proulx whether they would engage in that level of civil disobedience.

"Sometimes you're willing to do whatever it takes, and maybe that time is now," said longtime peace activist Diana Lee Hirschi, who was arrested in 1989 as part of a national campaign to stop production of the Trident missile system.

While marches and rallies are helpful, "we could do something that's creative and powerful," suggested Ashley Sanders, who helped organize the "alternative commencement" at BYU in 2007 to protest the traditional commencement address of Vice President Dick Cheney and was youth coordinator for Ralph Nader's 2008 presidential campaign.

Sanders suggested an "action" near the end of this year's legislative session. "We'll descend on the Capitol and hold an Athenian people's legislature," she said. She envisioned thousands of Utahns, perhaps wearing togas, frustrated by the laws being passed by the lawmakers and calling instead for ethics reform and clean air. She also pushed for civil disobedience, with the protesters asking for their own bills to be passed "or we're not leaving."

"That's a recipe for martyrdom," countered peace activist Dayne Goodwin, who drew the line at actions leading to arrests.

Seattle union organizer Paul Bigman told attendees earlier in the day that activists of all stripes need to "build coalitions," especially with the country's working class. Bigman took part in the 1999 civil resistance at the WTO meetings in Seattle. A screening of a feature movie based on that event, "Battle in Seattle," was also part of the weekend conference. While the movie was an adrenaline rush, real-life activism is "hard, hard work, and it goes on for a long, long time," Hirschi told conferencegoers.

A morning session on Saturday, "Activism in the Mormon Community" drew BYU and U. students. "It's a headache to be a progressive at BYU," said Shannon Clawson, "but there is such a strong community of people who are really passionate" about social justice.

Although the conference attendees didn't reach a consensus on specific actions for the near future, they did call attention to upcoming events: a four-hour civil resistance training led by Hirschi on Saturday, Feb. 21, from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Quaker Meeting House, 171 E. 4800 South; a climate change discussion with DeChristopher, author Terry Tempest Williams and Salt Lake City Council member Soren Simonsen at 7 p.m. the same day at the Salt Lake City downtown library; an environmental mass action in Washington, D.C., on March 2; and a multi-issue national action on April 4.

Upcoming events will be listed on the Web site of Utah Jobs with Justice.

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'Globalization From Below' Tackles the 'Great Recession'

The economic crisis makes it possible to put proposals on the table that have long been ruled inadmissible.

Can globalization from below really provide an alternative solution to the great recession?

by Jeremy Brecher, Brendan Smith, and Tim Costello, posted on Commondreams.org on January 26, 2009

[As tens of thousands of activists from around the world gather in Belem, Brazil for the World Social Forum, social movements everywhere are debating how to respond to the ever-deepening economic crisis. This article is excerpted from the longer Discussion Paper "GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW" TACKLES THE "GREAT RECESSION" prepared by Global Labor Strategies.]

At the pit of the Great Depression in 1930, an American country music group named the Carter Family recorded a song called The Worried Man Blues. It began:

"I went down to the river and I lay down to sleep
When I woke up there were shackles on my feet."

Though many subsequent verses describe the horrific outcome, there is no explanation of what had happened or why – just an awakening to a seemingly endless catastrophe. The song immediately became an unprecedented national hit. It's hard to imagine that its success didn't have something to do with capturing the sense of being the helpless victim of incomprehensible disaster that so many felt in the face of the Great Depression.

The seemingly sudden collapse of the global economy in 2008 has similarly left millions, indeed billions of people all over the world a victims of a catastrophe that appears both inexplicable and unending.

But what's now being dubbed the "Great Recession" is neither incomprehensible nor irremediable. On the contrary, it can be understood as an expectable result of a capitalism that has been globalized and at the same time "freed" by neoliberalism of control in the public interest.

The economic globalization that transformed the world at the turn of the century promised, according to its advocates, a glorious vista of prosperity that would provide unprecedented economic growth and raise billions of people out of poverty. In practice it generated personal and national insecurity, growing inequality, and a race to the bottom in which every community, nation, and workgroup had to reduce its social, environmental, and labor conditions to that of its most impoverished competitor.

But economic globalization also gave birth to a new convergence of global social forces that opposed this kind of globalization. People all over the world fought back against this "globalization from above" with their own "globalization from below." They used asymmetrical strategies of linking across the borders of nations and constituencies to become a counter power to the advocates of globalization. They created a movement – variously known as the global justice movement, the anti-globalization movement, global civil society, or as we call it, "globalization from below" -- that some in the media even characterized as "the world's other superpower."

The anti-globalization/global justice/globalization-from-below movement developed in response to the expansive phase of globalization and neoliberalism. Now the global economy has entered the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. The financial crisis has turned out to be the start of a cascade of other economic crises that are reshaping the global economy as definitively as an earthquake reshapes a city. Current leaders of the world's nations have utterly failed to develop a solution. The likely impact of their failure on ordinary people around the world is incalculable.

The advocates of globalization from above propounded as an article of faith that markets are self-regulating and that all would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds if only governments, labor unions, citizens organizations, and the unruly mob let them alone to do their thing.

The times they are a-changing. US government officials long known as market fundamentalists seize banks, buy mortgage and insurance companies, and commit $7.7 trillion – half of the US annual product -- to government intervention in financial markets.

The Clintonite "moderates" who once gutted the social safety net and sacrificed commitments to jobs programs in order to build up budget surpluses now propose vast public works programs financed by budget deficits. The IMF, scourge of "irresponsible" countries that didn't balance their budgets, advocates a trillion-plus dollars in global government deficits and claims to have replaced "structural adjustment conditionalities" with condition-free loans.

These programs may well fail in halting the downward spiral of the global economy. But they open the door to new forms of more social and public economy. That's one reason conservatives normally oppose them – and one indicator of how serious the present crisis really is. The economic crisis makes it possible to put proposals on the table that have long been ruled inadmissible.

While economists have asserted with great confidence that one after another trillion dollar "solution" would save the global economy, one after another has failed, raising the specter that it cannot be saved in its present form. Peter Boon and Simon Johnson of the website baselinescenario.com recently raised that possibility in the Wall Street Journal. They note that economists generally believe even the Great Depression of the 1930s could have been stopped by proper monetary policy. But, Boon and Johnson argue, governments may simply not be able to prevent such huge deflationary spirals. "Perhaps the events of 1929 produced an unstoppable whirlwind of deleveraging which no set of policy measures would truly be able to prevent." Their implication seems evident: The same could be true today.

The multi-trillion dollar rescues and bail-outs so far just attempt – possibly futilely -- to save the status quo. But what can we do if the status quo can't be saved? Can globalization from below really provide an alternative solution to the great recession?

It has already started to do so. A landmark was the meeting of a group of social movements and NGOs in October, 2008 on the occasion of the Asia-Europe People's Forum in Beijing that developed a sketch for a "transitional program for radical economic transformation." The "Beijing Declaration" laid out alternatives that are "practical and immediately feasible" that put the "well-being of people and the planet at their center." This requires "democratic control over financial and economic institutions." It includes proposals for finance, taxation, public spending and investment, international trade and finance, environment, and agriculture and industry. It provides a brilliant first expression of a globalization-from-below alternative to the failures of globalization from above.

The basic vision of the Declaration is summed up in its title: "The global economic crisis: An historic opportunity for transformation." Its goal, in other words, is not to shore up the status quo and return to the destructive form of globalization that preceded the crisis. Its objective is almost the opposite of the eight-trillion-dollars-and-counting of bail-outs, rescues, and subsidies provided to business in recent months by the world's governments. It aims instead to provide "a transitional program for radical economic transformation" to a "different kind of political and economic order."

"Transitional program" may sound like antiquated socialist rhetoric – a call to take state power and nationalize industry. But both the goals and the methods are very different. Indeed, the Declaration points a path between merely reestablishing the status quo and assuming that actions must be "revolutionary or nothing."

No "maximalism" here. "To capture people's attention and support" the Declaration argues, proposals must be "practical and immediately feasible." That is possible because, even under the domination of globalization from above, people have been developing alternatives within the world's nooks and crannies. The unfolding economic crisis provides the opportunity "to put into the public domain some of the inspiring and feasible alternatives many of us have been working on for decades."

The goal linking these alternatives is "the well-being of people and the planet." And that requires a focus not primarily on restoring the financial system, but first and foremost on the great human and environmental crisis the world is facing in relation to food, climate, and energy.

Such common human interests are not the principal concerns of the people and institutions that now call the shots in national governments or the global economy. The "well-being of people and the planet" will not be achieved by economic jiggering. Instead, "democratic control over financial and economic institutions are required."

The vision of such democratic control, however, is not of either a centralized national or a centralized global economy. It is closer to what Walden Bello elsewhere described as the "co-existence" of a variety of "international organizations, agreements and regional groupings" that would allow "a more fluid, less structured, more pluralistic world with multiple checks and balances" in which nations and communities can "carve out the space to develop based on their values, their rhythms, and the strategies of their choice."

The current economic crisis creates opportunity for transformation, the Declaration argues, because it severely weakens the power of the US, the EU, and the IMF, World Bank, and WTO. It undermines the legitimacy of the neo-liberal paradigm. And, where global pseudo-consensus once asserted that "there is no alternative" to liberal capitalism, the future of capitalism is now becoming an open question.

Of course, this moment can also be seized by "fascist, right wing populist, xenophobic groups" who will try to "take advantage of people's fear and anger for reactionary ends."

What is the agency for pursuing constructive alternatives and resisting destructive ones? It starts with the "powerful movements against neo-liberalism" that have been built over past decades. These will grow along with public anger at the abuse of public funds for private subsidy, the crises of food, energy, and the environment, and the deepening recession.

As social movements from around the world converge in Belem, Brazil at the end of January for the World Social Forum, they will be in a position to take the next step toward realizing their potential as the world's "other superpower." Indeed, it is the convergence of the already existing networks and understandings of globalization from below with the new outrage at what neo-liberalism has done to the world that provides the opportunity to show that another world is indeed possible.

Tim Costello, Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith are the co-founders of Global Labor Strategies, a resource center providing research and analysis on globalization, trade and labor issues. GLS staff have published many previous reports on a variety of labor-related issues, including Outsource This! American Workers, the Jobs Deficit, and the Fair Globalization Solution, Contingent Workers Fight For Fairness, and Fight Where You Stand!: Why Globalization Matters in Your Community and Workplace. They have also written and produced the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary Global Village or Global Pillage? GLS has offices in New York, Boston, and Montevideo, Uruguay. For more on GLS visit: www.laborstrategies.blogs.com or email smithb28@gmail.com.

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Labor Notes: Labor's "Medicare for All" advocates test their strength

by Mischa Gaus, for Labor Notes

Labor activists from 31 states gathered in St. Louis last weekend, solidifying their strategies to push “Medicare for all”—and to oppose the half-hearted health care plans circulating in Washington.

The meeting launched Labor for Single-Payer Healthcare, a campaign whose reform would cut the insurance industry out of health care and expand an improved Medicare system to everyone.

The single-payer concept has been endorsed by 39 state AFL-CIO federations, 100 central labor councils, and more than 400 local unions.

Yet some major unions that have endorsed single payer, including AFSCME and the Service Employees, in practice are backing plans that would preserve private insurers. Both union federations, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win, already have lined up behind compromise plans.

"There's another agenda out there. It's not what's best or what's right, but what's opportune," said Sandy Eaton, a regional president of the Massachusetts Nurses Association.

Heavy hitters in D.C., including Senators Edward Kennedy and Max Baucus, are pushing mixed public-private reform ideas. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney praised the plan Baucus floated in November, calling it a "giant step."

But their approach is fatally flawed, said Martha Livingston of Physicians for a National Health Program. Because it leaves the profit-making insurance companies as major players, it can’t control spiraling costs and does nothing to prevent insurers from denying care.

The new campaign was launched to make clear to policy-makers that a substantial section of the labor movement sees through the flawed proposals and believes the moment is right to embrace truly universal health care.

In contrast, Democrats are likely to put forward a Massachusetts-style plan, adopting an approach the state initiated in 2006. It mandated that each resident purchase health insurance, yet Eaton said tens of thousands in his state are still uninsured because they can’t afford premiums but don’t qualify for subsidies.

Grassroots Pressure
Representatives from 13 central labor councils and four state federations attended the kick-off meeting.

"Single payer is the only reform in health care that has a constituency," said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association (CNA). "We have to light the fire that builds the movement to get single payer."

The 150 delegates discussed how to grow support for single payer in their unions and communities. They’ll be coordinating actions, from plant gate and parking lot rallies to lobby days to more dramatic confrontations at insurance companies.

They believe they will have some breathing room, as Obama will likely not attempt a full overhaul of the system in his first year. They anticipate instead that the administration will focus immediately on smaller changes, such as expanding medical insurance for poor children and reining in excessive costs from private insurers that lure healthy seniors out of Medicare.

Tackling union opposition

Conference-goers said one problem within labor is that unions that run their own welfare funds tend to oppose single payer. These funds, which typically administer health care plans directly to union members, are common in the building trades and Teamsters. Union officers there generally argue that their members are happy with the status quo.

But whether plans are union-run or not, others said, the price of private health care is climbing, eating into salary gains and eroding members' benefits.

Some attendees foresee even the strongest unions being dragged into health care concessions.

"We don’t want to be the ones going back to members, saying, 'it's going to be more expensive this year,'" said Mark Dudzic, the campaign's coordinator. "Suddenly we become the agent of retreat for our members."

Dudzic added that activists need to challenge union leaders to think about what unions could do with the savings that national health care could achieve.

"You could convert a $6 per hour cost into a $2 per hour cost," Dudzic said, "and do incredible things—subsidized childcare, educational benefits—with the surplus we create as workers."

Indeed, single payer could pull the U.S. economy out of its quagmire by injecting $317 billion in public and private funds into the economy and creating 2.6 million new jobs, according to the CNA’s research arm.

A study the union previewed at the St. Louis conference said the spending would pump $100 billion in wages into the economy and create almost as many jobs as the economy lost last year.

Many activists raised a big, unanswered question: How to approach union supporters of the mediocre health care reforms competing for attention in Washington?

Essentially, they won't—for now. Unions and coalitions that support combined private-public plans will go their own way, while activists raise the profile of single payer and pressure Congress members back in their home districts.

"If everybody puts this plan into play," said Al Cholger, a Steelworkers staffer in Detroit, "this train won’t leave the station without us."

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Critics see bailout as massive blank check

by Adrianne Appel
Published on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 by Inter Press Service

BOSTON - U.S. activist networks have shifted into high gear to protest the secretive 700-billion-dollar plan to bail out Wall Street, which they say is unfair to average citizens and a giveaway to banks.

"We're outraged," Gael Murphy, founder of Code Pink, told IPS. "We want to see the people who caused this problem and profited from it, pay for it," said Murphy, echoing the sentiment of many activists, and people in general, according to weekend polls.

The skeletal, three-page plan was fielded Friday by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Jr. and would grant him the authority to purchase billions in bad debts on behalf of the U.S. public, now held by U.S. and foreign banks.

Paulson and Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, say the U.S. must purchase the debts in order to keep the banking system from certain collapse.

The plan is now in Congress and may be approved as early as Friday, when lawmakers want to adjourn to go home and campaign for the November elections. Reports Monday indicated that lawmakers may alter the plan somewhat to include some oversight of the spending, and restrict bank CEO pay, which can stretch into the hundreds of millions.

Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs who owns $523.5 million in that company's stock, has said he is opposed to placing limits on bank CEO compensation.
While the lawmakers and finance officials met behind closed doors Monday, the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted 372 points, and the price of oil shot up to 120 dollars per barrel. The Group of Seven finance ministers announced that they would keep a close eye on international markets and intervene as necessary to protect the international banking system.

Paulson's proposal does not describe which companies would benefit from his plan and by how much, and calls for no oversight.

"The lobbyists for the banking community are really out in force trying to get as much as possible for themselves," Dorene Isenberg, an economist and chair of the Economics Department at University of Redlands, in California, told IPS.

Code Pink and other groups organised throughout the weekend via phone, internet and late-night meetings, then hit the ground Monday morning and headed straight for the U.S. Treasury building. They made it there by rush hour.

"Stop Paulson's Plunder," blared just one of the large banners they held in front of the building. "Protect Main Street, not Wall Street," said another.

Members of Code Pink then went up to Capitol Hill, to encourage lawmakers to help homeowners facing foreclosure, cut bank CEO pay and boost the economy for the long term. The activists visited the leading banking lawmakers, Democrats Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank.

Frank told the group of seven activists that he wants the plan to include protections for homeowners facing foreclosure, and to restrict bank CEO salaries, among other provisions, Murphy said.

Frank, known for his quick whit and sharp tongue, "became quite offended" when the activists explained they were visiting Frank out of concern that the Democrats not give in to pressure from lobbyists and the administration, as they have on other issues, Murphy said.

"He didn't like that," she said.

On Thursday, it's Wall Street's turn to hear directly from activists, when a large group from Move On, True Majority, Greenpeace, Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice and others will protest in New York City.

Other groups, like The Backbone Campaign, have already organised a petition drive on their website, calls to Congress and a conference call between activists and progressive economists to answer questions about the complex, near-meltdown of the U.S. economy.

"This is a 700-billion-dollar blank cheque for Henry Paulson to use any way he wants," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, during one such call.

Any bailout should be overseen by a board, not just Paulson, and help should be very targeted to those institutions that absolutely cannot help themselves, and that are necessary to keep the economy active, Baker said. The U.S. should insist that CEO pay be trimmed to 2 million dollars and that companies hand over part of any future profits as payback to taxpayers.

A payback is "a fine idea economically" but politically is very unlikely, Isenberg said.

Isenberg said it's possible that the added 700-billion-dollar debt will drag down the U.S. dollar, depending on how much confidence foreign investors maintain in the U.S. economy.

"It might lead to a further decline, that's truly possible," she said.

According to Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Observer, the bailout will not shore up the U.S. economy. The economy is fundamentally weak because the average U.S. worker's standard of living shriveled during the past decade, and at the same time the markets are not creating enough good jobs.

Meanwhile, CEO salaries grew to excess and their income taxes were reduced, especially by the George W. Bush administration.

"We can talk about derivatives but there is a fundamental polarisation of income and wealth that contributed to this meltdown," Henwood said. "We need to get the incomes of the middle class and bottom up, by taking from the incomes at the top."

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