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In three weeks, the international trade union movement is sponsoring a world wide day of action in support of the workers of Iran -- and in particular jailed trade union activists such as Mansour Osanloo and Mahmoud Salehi (pictured).
Please take a moment and send off a message in support of the campaign. Thank you.
Please spread the word about this campaign to your friends, family and colleagues.
A spectre is haunting American politics -- the spectre of John Edwards. A week after "suspending" his campaign, the former North Carolina Senator received over 380,000 votes in super Tuesday primaries.
Many states still listed Edwards on the ballot -- as well as the names of other candidates who had withdrawn. In some states, absentee ballots were counted, including those were submitted before Edwards withdrew from the race.
In Oklahoma, Edwards came within a few thousand votes of crossing the 15% threshold, which would have earned him another half dozen delegates (in addition to the 26 he won in earlier primaries).
In California, he received a staggering 143,000 votes -- and that's with only half the precincts reporting in. There were counties were he received 18% of the vote.
In New Mexico, Edwards voters exceeded the margin of victory for the winning candidate.
To put those 380,000 votes in perspective, that's only a few thousand fewer than Ralph Nader received nationwide in 2004, running as an independent in the general election. And these are votes for a candidate who has withdrawn from the race.
If nothing else, the Edwards campaign -- even suspended -- shows the futility of third-party efforts and confirms the importance for progressives of campaigning within the Democratic Party.
Those Edwards voters have sent a message to the remaining Democratic candidates that the ideas put forward by their candidate -- most importantly, universal health care -- are still very much on the agenda. The candidate who wins the nomination will be the one who succeeds in winning over Edwards voters and should keep in mind that in the final polls before he withdrew, Edwards was commanding the support of one in six Democrats. That translates into at least ten million votes in a general election.
Edwards himself has refrained from endorsing a candidate and his supporters seem torn equally between switching over to Clinton or Obama. Those choosing Obama share his vision of change and to a certain degree a more critical view of the Clinton years in the White House (years which saw the passage of free trade legislation, the decline of unions, and a rise in inequality). Those who have endorsed Clinton point to her universal health care plan which is essentially a clone of the Edwards proposal.
The results of Super Tuesday for the Democrats provide no clearer sense of who is going to win the nomination -- but do raise the possibility once again of a deadlocked convention, or one that might be decided by a handful of votes.
"I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part." - Otter, "Animal House" (1978)
I am about to propose something which is certainly futile and maybe stupid too.
I've been talking in recent days to people who, like me, supported the candidacy of John Edwards.
I've found that most of us are in a bind: we don't really have a clear preference for one or the other Democratic candidate.
What we all do want is for the issues John Edwards placed on the table to remain on the table.
We want Clinton and Obama to live up to their promises to Edwards to put fighting poverty at the top of their agenda. We want Edwards' ground-breaking proposals on health care to become the Democratic platform.
We know that John Edwards moved the Democrats to the left. And we're concerned that with him out of the race, Clinton and Obama will move towards the center -- convinced that it's the only way to beat the Republicans in November. Edwards voters are in their pockets anyway -- we're not going to vote Republican, after all.
I've decided that tomorrow, Super Tuesday, I'm going cast my vote for ... John Edwards.
If Edwards appears on ballot papers which were printed before he withdrew, I'll simply vote for him. If his name isn't there, I'll write it in.
I realize that the vast majority of Edwards' supporters will either be voting for Clinton or Obama, or not voting at all. Voting for Edwards is of course a futile gesture; he is not going to be the Democratic nominee in 2008. But I'm going to do it because when all is said and done, I prefer Edwards to the alternative. And I don't mind saying so.
The withdrawal of John Edwards from the contest for the Democratic Presidential nomination on Wednesday has made the race suddenly less interesting. Like many other progressives, I was fascinated by the Edwards candidacy and by its promise to put radical ideas on the national agenda.
It was not that Edwards said all kinds of left-wing things. After all, so did Ralph Nader in 2000, running as the Green Party candidate. What made Edwards so appealing was that he did so from the mainstream. Polls consistently showed that were the Democrats to nominate him, his would be the strongest possible candidacy against McCain and the other Republicans.
In other words, he could have won.
Some might say that it doesn't really matter -- that whoever the Democrats nominate will be just fine and will easily beat the thoroughly-bankrupt Republicans. But that's not necessarily true. Both Clinton and Obama have some serious vulnerabilities which have become clear even now, very early into the race. And the Republicans look increasingly likely to select a man who looks to be their most appealing candidate, John McCain.
McCain seems honest and supports a number of liberal causes, such as campaign finance reform. He is one of the strongest opponents of the use of torture, having been tortured himself while held in a North Vietnamese prison. But make no mistake about it: McCain will continue Bush's policies, particularly in Iraq. Alone among the Presidential contenders, he believes the Iraq war was and is a good idea, and should continue.
Democrats are going to have a very hard time of it beating McCain and winning back the White House in November. Their most appealing candidate, the one that Republicans, independents and white male voters in general said they liked the most, was Edwards.
With him out of the race, the pressure on Clinton and Obama to move leftwards is now gone. To the contrary, facing the real possiblity of a Republican victory in November, it's more likely that we'll see both of them turn sharply towards the center. Their commitment to ending poverty, made to Edwards in phone conversations earlier this week, isn't worth the paper it's not written on.
Edwards probably had his own good reasons for giving up the fight now, and we need to respect that. After all, the man has been working flat out for more than a year. And his wife, Elizabeth, has terminal cancer. In defeat, Edwards remains a noble figure, deserving of our admiration and respect.
But American politics has suddenly become far less interesting, at least for me. For that reason, this will be my last column on the subject for the Morning Star.
Back in 1974, I was a student in Cornell University's labor relations program working during the summer for a union in New York City. The union's education director (today its president) suggested to me that I quit university and go to work in a factory where I could organize workers. That was the way to get involved in the trade union movement, he told me. I pondered the offer -- it would have involved moving to Indiana -- and eventually decided not to do it.
Thanks to the Internet, that scenario is no longer possible.
I had been a political activist for a few years by then (I started quite young) but there was really no way for a factory owner in Indiana to know who I was. I probably could have covertly entered the factory and helped unionize it.
Today, factory owners are a mouse-click from knowing everything about each of us. The old strategy of blacklisting -- employed so successfully against unions like the IWW for so many years -- has now become infinitely more effective thanks to the net.
According to a recent report, "Starbucks managers discovered that two pro-union employees in New York were graduates of a Cornell University labor program ... Managers took the names of graduates from an online Cornell discussion group and the school's Web site and cross-checked them with employee lists nationwide. They found that three employees in California, Michigan and Illinois were graduates of the program and recommended that local managers be informed."
That's pretty clever -- Starbucks was not only looking for troublemakers, but for potential troublemakers, or people who might have sat in class next to troublemakers. It was chilling to me to read that they were specifically targetting Cornell labor program graduates. That brought home to me the point that if this technology had existed in 1974, it would not have been possible to covertly insert someone like myself into a non-union factory.
Using the techniques of data-mining, human resources staff are going to be able to block the employment not only of trade union organizers, but of people who might be friends with union organizers. If I were a union-buster, the first thing I'd do is signup to Facebook (where one is actually face-less and anonymous) and "befriend" all the union activists I could. In the real world, this would be tricky, expensive and time-consuming. But not online.
Many of us, myself included, have long argued that unions should make the best use possible of the net, and that the net offers us new possibilities to organize, to campaign, to strengthen our unions. The low cost and global reach of the net, we believed, we empower unions and level the playing field in the struggle with employers.
But the net also offers new possibilities for union-busters and there is some evidence that corporations are using the net more effectively than we do.
How do we cope with the dangers of data-mining and net-based blacklisting? We need our members and especially our organizers to learn some of the basic skills of protecting their privacy online. We're hearing all the time now about how teenagers are being warned that what they're writing today on MySpace and Facebook may come up to haunt them when they apply for their first jobs. But where are the unions warning members how to behave online, how to protect their identities, encrypt their correspondence, visit websites anonymously? Which unions are creating for themselves secure areas for online discussion that are not easily data-mined by the opposition?
As the Starbucks example shows, some employers have thought this through and are way ahead of us in the game. We in the trade union movement need to begin training our officers, staff, members and potential members in the art of survival in an age when privacy is increasingly becoming a thing of the past.
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