The National Post: John Moore

There’s blood in the water for the labour movement, and the political sharks are circling.

In Wisconsin the Governor has stripped public workers of the right to collective bargaining. Tellingly, he exempted those unions that supported him during the election. The rhetoric south of the border has reached such a peak that one deputy attorney general floated the idea of using live ammunition on protesters. “You’re damn right I advocate deadly force,” he frothed.

In Canada the mood is less lethal but an anti-union wind is blowing. The city of Toronto has petitioned to remove the right to strike from transit workers. The measure ignores the fact that the union has walked out a grand total of 75 days since 1921, but newly elected Mayor Rob Ford says this is only the start when it comes to laying down the law to city employees.

Free market cultists rejoice in these developments. They’ve waited decades for the right circumstances to marshal their forces against organized labour. Now they make the case that our economic troubles stem not from bad fiscal policy or the chicanery of the financial sector, it’s the average working man who is to blame.

They complain that unionized workers make more than their non-unionized colleagues, which is a bit like being astonished that pasteurized milk has less bacteria than the raw stuff.

In a column entitled “Why the Public Sector is Hanging on For All It’s Worth” (March 6), Terence Corcoran crows that Canada’s private-sector workers don’t want unions, pointing out that organizing efforts at Walmart and Toyota have failed. He omits that Walmart shuttered a profitable Quebec outlet as a means of staving off a pro-union vote, while Toyota workers coast on the wages and benefits hard won by the CAW at the Big Three.

Corcoran and others may present more persuasive arguments when it comes to public sector workers except that as Kelly McParland has pointed out in “Unions and Government, a Happy Marriage that Benefits Both” (March 2), the packages politicians decry as overly generous were eagerly dispensed by their own vote-hungry hands.

Governments at all levels claim the larder is bare, forgetting always that they themselves emptied it with ill-considered tax cuts and wasteful spending. Wisconsin was actually in surplus when its union-bashing governor came to power in January 2011, but Scott Walker gave 117% of it away to business in the form of tax cuts. In other cases governments looted the very same pension plans they now say cannot be sustained.

There was a time where lifting up the collective standard of living was a shared and worthy endeavour. Men and women did a day’s labour in a safe working environment and enjoyed protection from the capriciousness of their supervisors. In return they earned enough to buy a home, a car, raise a family, take a vacation and enjoy a few years retirement before they died.

But as more and more people slip into economic hardship the new attitude is “if I’m going to barely scrape by why should anyone have it better?” This collective foul mood is manna to grandstanding politicians and indignant businesspeople who have always regarded unions as a type of shakedown operation. Never mind that according to CAW records 98% of collective agreements are concluded without a strike.

Critics claim that unions have outlived their mandate. Children no longer toil in factories and seamstresses aren’t burned alive in firetraps. But the union movement didn’t just seek to lift people above the status of interchangeable and disposable mules; the intention has always been to use collective power to obtain a portion of wealth that represents the genuine value of labour.

Unions and the working man didn’t create the financial meltdown. They didn’t invent and market worthless financial instruments. They didn’t swindle pension funds or blow up the housing market. They didn’t hack away at revenues to the point where government can no longer supply basic services. In short, unions didn’t create the dire economic circumstances now being used to justify a wholesale attack on their very existence.

Let elected officials surrender their pensions. Perhaps it’s the spoiled brats of Wall Street — whose six figure bonuses have been paid from government funds — who need to wake up to the new economic reality.

The upside to the anti-union endgame is that it may lead to a resurgence of labour solidarity. The sharks may be circling, but they will always be outnumbered by the fish.

John Moore is host of Moore in the Morning on Newstalk 1010 AM Toronto. Outside of southern Ontario he can be heard at Newstalk1010.com.

By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet
Posted on March 1, 2011

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THE CURRENT ECONOMY is routinely and universally referred to as the worst recession since the Great Depression.

It makes sense, therefore, to look back at government tax and spending policies during the Depression and what the results were.

The GNP grows another 8.1 percent, and unemployment continues to fall.

The Great Depression is finally over.

When taxes were raised the economy improved. Every time. Deficits had no negative effect on the economy. Indeed, when deficits were at their highest, the economy boomed.

When taxes were raised again, and government spending went sky high, the Great Depression finally ended.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
Crossposted with: http://www.alternet.org/story/150099/

Barbara Ehrenreich: The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

By Emily Wilson, AlterNet

Posted on October 10, 2009, Printed on March 7, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/143187/
© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

Ehrenreich: Give me reality any day.

Ehrenreich, the author of 16 books, including Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, which examine the blue- and white-collar job markets, took on what she sees as an epidemic of positive thinking in her new book: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

Ehrenreich believes this has permeated our culture and that the refusal to acknowledge that bad things could happen is in some way responsible for the current financial crisis.

Emily Wilson: At the beginning of the book, you talk about going to be treated for breast cancer and being told to think positively. Was that what started you thinking about this?

Barbara Ehrenreich: That was my first exposure to positive thinking as an ideology. I was just astounded and dismayed by it. Here I was in a real crisis in my life, and people were trying to market pink ribbon teddy bears to me, and where I thought I would find sort of sisterly support on the Internet, I found instead the constant exhortations to be cheerful and to embrace my disease [she laughs].

EW: What is the difference between being told to try and stay upbeat and to have a good attitude and positive thinking?

EW: Were the doctors telling you that?

EW: You write about how positive thinking started with Mary Baker Eddy and Phineas Quimby and how it was a response to Calvinism.

BE: It had ceased to be seen as a healing method, although that comes back. By the time I encounter it, breast cancer has come back into the health area. But in the early 20th century there was, for the first time, scientific medicine and the beginnings of some sorts of effective treatments. That kind of closed a door for the positive-thinking movement, which then increasingly in the 20th century addressed itself to prosperity and wealth and success.

BE: How about a little realism? How about not seeing the world so totally colored by our own wishes and emotions? For the positive thinker, that means everything looks rosy and everything is going to be all right no matter what, so you have to block out the little warning signs.