This morning I turned to the sports section to catch up on the latest football scores and also to sort out what has become one of the more exciting pennant races in history. In the midst of the stories about whether the Mets would manage to pull it out on the last day, whether the Yankees had a chance against Cleveland, and the complex mathematics of a potential National League playoff, I found a column by the the New York Times Selena Roberts, who seems to always have something interesting to say.Today the story she had to tell involves Heisman trophy winners, Swift Boats, ivory towers, Rutgers University’s football team and a storm gathering over America.Roberts’ column detailed how T. Boone Pickens–he of Swift Boat fame–has basically bought the Oklahoma State University athletic department. According to Roberts:

About 90 percent of the nearly $300 million Pickens has given to O.S.U. has been earmarked for sports. About 100 percent of the Cowboys’ coaching decisions are all but approved by Pickens.

Buit as always, Roberts has a larger point to make. She reports:

The Chronicle of Higher Education released a report last week that detailed how gifts to 119 of the largest athletic departments in the country have, in some cases, tripled in recent years, but donations to academics have remained flat.

The Chronicle Report makes for sobering reading, yet another example of the misplaced spending priorities of the richest Americans. “Let the rich decide what to do with their own money,” has been GOP gospel since Andrew Carnegie brought it back from Homestead carved into a steel ingot lathered with the oil of John D. Rockefeller.

America’s colleges and universities have always served as a gauge of these priorities since their rich alums decide for themselves how to earmark their gifts for the alma mater that sometimes first admitted and then passed them through with their gentleman’s “C” in the hopes of someday reaping the reward of that largesse. My own alma mater, which shall go nameless because it is far from shameless in this game, even openly debated whether to recruit more rich students. The word from campus is that these well-heeled undergrads are referred to as “trustee scholars” after the ones who advocated this policy.

Obviously, since the first tower later to be covered with ivy was erected, colleges have sought money from their richest graduates to help defray the cost of a new library or science building. In return the alum who forked over the most cash often had his or her name placed on the front of the building. There isn’t a campus in the land that does not have some building whose name is lost to history because the rich donor is no longer remembered–which when you think about it is kind of a cruel joke.

According to the Chronicle’s report, however, rich alums have made a major change in their spending habits since George W. Bush handed them a wad of extra cash with his tax cuts. Instead of investing in science buildings, endowed professorships, or scholarships, the Bush beneficiaries have been following the lead of the president who once “owned” the Texas Rangers baseball team and putting their dough into athletics.

In 1998 athletics gifts accounted for 14.7 percent of all contributions. By 2003 sports donations had reached 26 percent.

What is truly staggering is the AMOUNT of dough involved. The Chronicle estimates:

Between 2002 and 2007, colleges in the nation’s six premier athletics conferences raised more than $3.9-billion for capital expenditures alone.

The country’s largest athletics departments and booster clubs raised more than $1.2-billion in 2006-7, a Chronicle survey has found, with some programs more than tripling their annual gifts in the past decade.

Over the next few years, big-time athletics programs hope to raise an additional $2.5-billion for new buildings, the survey found.

Given the recent debate over the Children’s Health Care Insurance Program, it would be a no-brainer to suggest where these dollars might have gone, but even if we restrict our analysis to higher education, the impact of putting jocks over scholars has already had serious consequences for higher education–and by implication–for the future of America.

Bruce Flessner, a fund-raising consultant quoted by the Chronicle, notes one consequence:

They were the guys doing the golf tournaments, and no one took them seriously. Now they’ve pushed themselves front and center, and they’re eating a big slice of the philanthropic pie.

Ruitgers University professor William C. Dowling has been a vocal critic of this new emphasis on big time athletics, a move that has had a large impact on his own campus which made a conscious decision to nurture highly-ranked football and women’s basketball programs. His new book Confessions of a Spoilsport details not only the impact on Rutgers, but other schools as well.

Dowling reserves special wrath for the boosters–the well-heeled donors like Pickens–who are the heart of big time college athletic programs. A couple of D-1 athletes I know tell me the locker-room nickname for these creatures is “jock sniffers.” Dowling isn’t quite so graphic, but he is equally damning. In an interview with the Chronicle, he mentioned his research into booster clubs:

What you hear is an anti-intellectual subculture incredibly sensitive to anything they perceive as a threat to their control over the university. They can’t spell. They punctuate badly. They’re obscene beyond belief. But they do know that they own the university, and they’re not about to give that up.

In the same interview, Dowling described the impact on the campus of Rutgers’ decision to go big time:

Top New Jersey students have begun to avoid Rutgers in droves. The brightest students on campus are transferring out at an increased rate. Admissions standards are dropping. The school is now drawing students whose idea of “college” is drinking beer and painting their faces before football and basketball games

This issue, as Dowling himself notes, is not about whether colleges should have athletic programs. Speaking as the father of a son who was a four-year letter winner playing college basketball, I can testify that the experience was invaluable for him. As he would probably say, the issue is how those rich people are choosing to spend their tax cuts.

Every dollar diverted from academics to build yet another stadium or buy new uniforms like the ones my local University of Minnesota team wears that makes them look like lemons–which symbolizes the program itself–is a dollar that might have gone to provide a deserving student with an academic scholarship, bring to campus a Nobel prize winner instead of a Heisman trophy winner, fund research that might find a cure for AIDS, unravel the complexities of the American economy, better understand why Woodrow Wilson decided to enter the First World War, invent the next YouTube or Google, or create a poem or piece of music that will reach areas of the mind where touchdown passes cannot penetrate.

The dirty secret behind the shift in alumni contributions comes from a report from the Education Trust. It found:

Between 1995 and 2003..flagship and other research-extensive public universities decreased grant aid by 13 percent for students from families with an annual income of $20,000 or less, while they increased aid to students from families who make more than $100,000 by 406 percent.

Another equally ominous development was noted by the National Academies report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” which might be likened to higher education’s equivalent to the famous “Nation At Risk” study of K-12 education in the 1980s. The report’s executive summary states:

In a world where advanced knowledge is widespread and low-cost labor is readily available, U.S. advantages in the marketplace and in science and technology have begun to erode.

If you want to know the possible consequences of this take a walk through the academic buildings of a big time sports university on a football weekend. As the sounds of cheering and blaring bands drift though open windows, your footsteps echo in the deserted corridors as you walk past empty classrooms and deserted laboratories. Even the library is free of all but the most devoted of students, most of whom are probably graduate students. The other students are all at the game or partying. This may not be that unusual for a Saturday even at a D-3 top-ten academically-ranked college, but imagine if it occurred on a Wednesday–which is not out of the question given the demands of sports television programming?
And in one of the luxury boxes that now are a feature of even college stadiums a group of rich alums toast the success of their team with thousand dollar bottles of wine and catered gourmet food–all courtesy of one George W. Bush and his generosity–AND the Democrats and Republicans who helped to write the checks.

After the game, a black man will sweep up the remains of their party and try to recall the dream he once had of going to college.

Tagged with: Andrew_Carnegie • athletic_boosters • Bush_tax_cuts • college_athletic_departments • college_athletic_donations • college_football • confessions_of_a_spoilsport • education_trust • future_of_the_Democratic_Party • George_W_Bush • google • GOP • heisman_trophy • Hillary_Rodham_Clinton • Iowa_caucuses • John_D_Rockefeller • national_academies • new_york_mets • New_York_Times • No_Child_Left_Behind_Act • okalhoma_state_university • recruiting_rich_students • rising_above_the_gathering_storm • rutgers_university • Rutgers_womens_basketball_team • swift_boat • T_Boone_Pickens • william_c_dowling • Woodrow_Wilson • yankees • YouTube

The time has come to see Matewan in perspective, the way we do Lexington and Gettysburg—not just as an isolated incident of the tragic spilling of blood, but as a symbolic moment in a larger, broader and continuing historical struggle—in the words of Mingo county miner J.B. Wiggins, the “struggle for freedom and liberty.

–Historian David A. Corbin

The United Auto Workers has announced that it has reached a settlement with General Motors. A key feature of the agreement–and one that could become a template for future agreements is the creation of a voluntary employees’ beneficiary association (VEBA) that will be funded by GM, but managed by the union. GM will pay an estimated $35 billion into the trust which is designed to be self-sustaining. The UAW estimates it should pay health benefits for retired workers for the next 80 years.

The contract still must be ratified by union locals, but national officials, who voted unanimously for the contract, expect it to pass. In honor of the settlement, this site’s usual “Saturday Night at the Movies” post has chosen organizer Joe Kenehan’s speech to the miners from the movie Matewan.

Matewan (1987), perhaps one of the best labor films ever made, tells the story of the Matewan Massacre, an event that occurred in the West Virginia mining town in 1920. The Massacre involved a shootout between agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, which had been hired by the coal operators to strangle the union organizing that had caught fire in the region. Since most union members lived in so-called “company towns,” one of the operator’s main tactics was to evict any miner and his family they suspected of being involved in union activity. The detectives supplied the “muscle” to enforce the evictions.

Matewan was unique in that it had its own town government, presided over by Mayor C. Testerman and its own law enforcement in the person of police chief Sid Hatfield, both of whom openly sided with the miners. When Baldwin-Felts detectives evicted six families from company-owned housing near the town, Hatfield and Testerman confronted them. A gun battle broke out in which Baldwin-Felts president Thomas Felts, Mayor Testerman, two miners and most of the detectives were killed.

Hatfield was acquitted by a grand jury, but Baldwin-Felts had their revenge, brutally gunning him down while he sat in front of a hotel. This precipitated the largest armed insurrection in American history since the Civil War.

Sayles is probably one of America’s most under-rated film makers, mostly because he takes on controversial subjects. The film was shot by Haskell Wexler, one of Hollywood’s greatest cinematographers, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his efforts. Those who think of cinematographers as merely standing behind a camera and shooting would do well to rent the DVD of Matewan to see a master at work.

Sayle’s main protagonist is labor organizer Joe Kenehan, played by Chris Cooper. Other familiar names in the film are James Earl Jones who plays a black miner named “Few Clothes” Johnson, Mary McDonnell as boarding house keeper Elma Radnor and David Strathairn as Hatfield.

The speech that appears below occurs not long after Kenehan first meets with the miners. It is precipitated by a miner who argues that the black Johnson does not belong in the union. Kenehan’s answer is one of the great speeches in American film about solidarity.

You ain’t men to that coal company. You’re equipment… They use you til you wear out and then they get a new one……You think this man is your enemy? This is a worker! Any union that would keep this man out ain’t a union, it’s a club…They got you fighting white against colored, native against foreign, holler against holler. You all know there ain’t but two types of people, them that work and them that don’t. You work, they don’t. That’s all you got to know about the enemy. I know you all are brave men. I know that you could shoot it out with the company if you had to. The coal company don’t want this union, the state government don’t want it and the federal government don’t want it. All of them are just waiting for an excuse to come down here and crush us to nothing! Fellas, we’re in a hole full of coal gas here, the tiniest spark at the wrong time is gonna be the end of us…We got to work together, together til they can’t get the coal out of the ground without us cause we’re a union. We are the workers.

For those interested in the history of Matewan what follows is an oral history interview with Hawthorne Burgraff, the son of one of the participants in the Massacre. It is not intended to be the last word on what happened, but only to give the perspective of the miners.

What I’m gonna’ tell you is exactly what my father told me. When they arrived in Matewan and got off the train, they had their satchels with ‘em. We called ‘em grips back then, they call ‘em satchels, suitcases or whatever. But, they had in those suitcases submachine guns. They called ‘em Thompson submachine gun. Of course they wore their pistols on their side, because they were officers of the law. But, when they got off of the train in Matewan, Sid and my father walked over to Albert Felts, he was the leader of the Baldwin-Felts detective, and introduced themselves and asked him what he was doing down there. And, Albert said “we’ve come down here on a job. The coal company has asked us to put those people out of the houses and that is what our intentions are. We’re strictly goin’ to do that”. It was Sid who said, “well, you know that’s goin’ to lead to trouble.” And, Albert felts said, “well, we’re prepared to take care of any trouble that might come our way, we’re trained men. And, my advice to you is not to interfere with the Baldwin-Felts detectives.” Well, my father and Sid left and went back over the tracks into Matewan and the detective force went over to the camps and started their job of putting people out of the house. My daddy’s brother Albert lived in one of the houses. So, they moved out one family after another, maybe one or two, to set an example of what was going to happen.

Tagged with: auto_workers • baldwin_felts_detectives • biggest_insurrection_since_the_civil_war • cinematographer • detective_agency • felts • General-Motors • GM • haskell_wexler • hatfield • james_earl_jones • John_Sayles • matewan • matewan_massacre • mine_operators • mining_town • national_officials • president_thomas • retired_workers • sid_hatfield • solidarity • town_government • union_activity • union_locals • union_membership • union_organizing • United_Auto_Workers • United_Mine_Workers • veba • west_virginia

By now most of you reading this page have probably read a great deal about the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) The only comment I will make is that the vote on this bill shows how far the Bush Administration has fallen and how out of touch it is with reality. The ideological rhetoric raised by the administration in defense of its opposition to the BIPARTISAN bill is as reprehensible as it is irresponsible, for it holds the lives of American children hostage to an ideology.

My book The Strange Death of Liberal America has as its epigraph the following quote from the late Paul Wellstone:

I believe that every infant, every child we hold in our hands, no matter what color of skin, no matter boy or girl, no matter rich or poor, no matter rural or urban, and no matter what religion, that every child that we hold in our hands, is one of God’s children. I believe that every child, every infant should have the same chance to reach his or her potential. I tell you, that is the goodness of this country, that is the American dream, that is what makes us a great Nation, and that is the most important goal for our Nation. And whatever makes that possible, I’m for it. And whatever stands in the way of that, I’m against it.

Rather than add yet another opinion piece to the already large number of posts on the subject, in the tradition of this blog I thought I would do something different. In researching CHIP, I found myself engrossed by the Senate debate that took place on September 26.

The United States Senate has always nurtured eloquence and the best of that tradition was on display as senators from both parties rose in defense of America’s children. The bill they were debating was a bipartisan effort, much of it due to two Republican senators, Charles Grassley of Iowa and Orrin Hatch of Utah. In the interest of not only highlighting CHIP but also the memorable rhetoric of several senators, I offer below what I consider the best of the debate and one of the shining moments of the United States Senate. The occasion demanded eloquence for the very reasons Paul Wellstone spoke of and these senators did not disappoint. It is hard to be cynical about politics or politicians, or to not harbor hope for the future of this nation after reading their words.

I have to say, in listening to my colleagues talk about covering 200 percent of poverty, I hope the American people understand that when we talk about 200 percent of poverty—my colleague from New Hampshire talked about it as if it was a lot of money. When you talk about 200 percent of poverty, you are talking about a family of four trying to live on $41,300. Eighty percent of the people in the State of Arkansas whom I represent have an adjusted gross income of less than $50,000. As a parent myself, being blessed with two incomes coming into our household, a family raising and caring for a family of four on $41,300 a year—talking about what you are paying for rent, for food, for utilities, and then to say that we as a Nation don’t want to support you in caring for your children and seeing that they get good health care, that their health care needs are met; no, go into the private marketplace where the most expensive piece of health insurance you can purchase is in the private single-payer marketplace of health insurance——

Senator Blanche Lincoln, Arkansas

But it is interesting to me that the loudest moans in the Chamber of the Senate come when we take the floor of the Senate to talk about taking care of things here at home, taking care of basic things in this country. What is more basic than taking care of children and the health care of children? If it is not in first place, tell me what is in first place among your concerns about life. I am talking about the health of our children. If that doesn’t rank No. 1, tell me what does. It ought to rank No. 1, front and center.

Senator Byron Dorgan, North Dakota

It is interesting to me, we voted a while back about making English the national language. It is a reasonable request. If you want to become an American citizen, you ought to aspire to learn the language, English. Yet I come to the floor and I hear a foreign language. I don’t understand what they are talking about: ‘‘socialized medicine,’’ ‘‘Cubanstyle, government-run health care.’’ It seems to me they ought to speak English. I get so tired of people using these terms, such as ‘‘socialized medicine.’’

Yes, there is a government aspect to this issue. But as my colleague said, much of this is the private sector as well implementing it. I am so tired of people saying the Government can’t do a thing. How about those firefighters climbing the World Trade Center and giving their lives as those buildings came down? You know what, they were on the public payroll, were they not? Public service, that is what they were doing. Government workers. How about the teachers taking care of our kids today in the classroom? Government workers; yes, they are. How about Dr. Francis Collins working at NIH, who gave us the owners manual for the human body with the mapping of the genome code? Are we proud of him? Government worker.

I am a little tired of this language— ‘‘socialized medicine,’’ ‘‘Cuban-style system.’’ What a load. That is thoughtless rather than thoughtful debate.

The President says it is unfair to private health insurance companies for us to expand this program. I could not disagree more. Private health insurance companies are doing quite well. They do not need any more help from us. The fact that these kids do not have health insurance suggests these private health insurance companies either cannot or will not provide them the coverage they need.

Senator Richard Durbin, Illinois

I want to remind the President this issue is not about scoring political points or pushing an ideology. It is about bettering the lives of America’s future generation. Today we are making a choice, either to support a proven, effective program that has helped children in all States or supporting the status quo which could lead to more kids losing health care coverage as States struggle to make ends meet.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota

The compromise bill discourages States from covering higher income kids by reducing the Federal matching rate for States that wish to expand eligibility over 300 percent of Federal poverty limits. It rewards States that cover more low-income kids by providing targeted incentives to States that increase enrollment for coverage of low-income kids. So there is a very clear message to the States, all 50 States: Cover your poorest kids, meaning your kids from low-income families, first. Don’t spend money on childless adults, as we heard so often during the debate. The word CHIP has no A in it. It is for children, not adults. Don’t spend money on parents unless you can prove you are covering low-income kids. Don’t spend money on higher income kids unless you can prove that your State is covering your lower income kids first. It is all there in black and white. Everybody can read it.

I get a sense, talking to some of my colleagues, that they haven’t read what we are going to be voting on. Anyone who suggests this bill is an expansion to higher income kids or other populations, as has been done under some waivers given by the Bush administration, is simply not reading the bill.

This bill is not a Government takeover of health care, either. And you heard that. This bill is not socialized medicine. Screaming ‘‘socialized medicine’’ during a health care debate is like shouting ‘‘fire’’ in a crowded theater. It is intended to cause hysteria that diverts people from reading the bill, looking at the facts. To those of you, my colleagues, who make such outlandish accusations, I say: Go shout ‘‘fire’’ somewhere else. Serious people are trying to get real work done. Now is the time to get this work done.

Senator Charles Grassley, Iowa

I always find it ironic that the American people seem to get from the White House what they don’t want, and they don’t get what they do want. The American people want to end the war in Iraq as soon as possible, a war which will soon be costing us, if you can believe it, $750 billion—three-quarters of $1 trillion—which even in Washington is a lot of money. For the war in Iraq, for Halliburton contracts, we seem to have an endless supply of money. The American people don’t want it, but that is what they are getting. On the other hand, the American people do want health insurance for their children.

Senator Bernie Sanders, Vermont

Tagged with: Amy_Klobuchar • bernie_sanders • blanch_lincoln • blogs • Bush_administration • byron_dorgan • Charles_Grassley • Childrens_health_insurance • childrens_health_insurance_program • CHIP • cuban_medicine • eloquence • government • government_worker • Halliburton • health_care • health_care_system • health_insurance • health_insurance_companies • Iraq_War • low_income_families • orrin_hatch • Paul_Wellstone • richard_durbin • single_payer_health_insurance • socialized_medicine • the_strange_death_of_liberal_america • United_States_Senate

United Autoworkers Pickets in Flint, Michigan

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,
Nothing don’t mean nothing honey if it ain’t free, now now.
And feeling good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues,
You know feeling good was good enough for me,
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.

Strike. It is a word that has almost become extinct in the American vocabulary. During the years of the Republican Counterrevolution, strikes have become only the last desperate actions of those who feel they have nothing else to lose. On Monday, September 24 the United Auto Workers sent the following message:

Unless UAW members hear otherwise between now and the deadline, we will be on a national strike against GM at 11 a.m. EDT on Monday, Sept. 24th.

Commenting on the walkout, UAW Vice President Cal Rapson, director of the union’s GM Department said:

This is our reward: a complete failure by GM to address the reasonable needs and concerns of our members. Instead, in 2007 company executives continued to award themselves bonuses while demanding that our members accept a reduced standard of living.

The last time the UAW walked was in 1998 in Flint, Michigan, the hometown of Michael Moore, who first entered the national consciousness with his mocumentary Roger and Me, a 1989 indictment of GM.

Almost two decades later, union workers carrying picket signs are marching in thirty states. At stake is nothing less than the future of organized labor and with it the shape of American democracy, for make no mistake about it, the UAW strike represents one of those critical historical turning points, the outcome of which will reverberate for years to come.

It has not been that long since employers relied on hired guns to break up strikes, hired guns that were not bashful about pulling the trigger whenever they felt like it. The names of the most notorious of these struggles resound through American history like a roll call of great battles, the Iwos and Guadalcanals of organized labor: Homestead, Latimer, Ludlow and Matewan.

A stark chart kept by the Bureau of Labor Statistics records the number of “work stoppages” involving a thousand workers or more between 1947 and the present. Since George W. Bush became president the number has declined from 39 in the year 2000 to 20 in 2006.

But what really broke the back of using strikes as a tactic was Ronald Reagan’s handling of the air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981. In the process of breaking the Professional Air traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) Reagan fired over 11,000 workers, many of whom were never rehired after Reagan also moved to decertify the union. Where once corporate bosses enforced their will at the point of a gun with hired thugs posing as “detectives” and “security guards,” the current method is to enforce their will with the point of a pen, using hired men in Italian suits carrying briefcases.

In yet another graph that shows the impact of Ronald Reagan and the Counterrevolution, we see how with the ascendancy of Reagan the use of the strike as a tactic essentially disappeared. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from 1947-1980, the number of labor stoppages was always over 200 per year. Since the early 1980s it has been below 50.

The precipitous decline in the use of strikes as a labor tactic has also been aided by the Supreme Court. In a fascinating paper, “How American Workers Lost the Right to Strike, and Other Tales,” Rutgers University professor James Gray Pope details how through a series of decisions, the Court essentially curtailed American workers’ right to strike. Pope points out that one impact of these rulings is:

Employers fire or otherwise retaliate against 1 out of every 18 private-sector workers who support a union organizing campaign.

Pope argues that five critical Supreme Court cases:

Taken together… may account for a substantial proportion of the decline in the American labor movement. As in the pre-New Deal period…judges have deprived workers of the rights to organize and strike based on constitutional concerns.

Pope concludes:

Through misdirection, the Court has pulled off the perfect crime.

Essentially what Pope argues is that the UAW enters into this strike with its hands tied behind its back. Among the most important changes that Pope documents is the ability of employers to hire replacement workers. Pope notes:

The permanent replacement rule of Mackay, ignored at the time and rarely utilized until the 1980s [note date], now operates to prevent workers from exercising their right to strike for better conditions.

Ronald Reagan made this tactic the centerpiece of the PATCO strike, marking the first time in American history that a sitting president had hired scabs. Ever since, the threat of not merely facing the economic hardships that a strike entails, but the very real possibility of losing their jobs has served as a major deterrent to workers using strikes as a bargaining tactic. Northwest Airlines, for example, used replacement workers in a 2005 mechanics’ strike. A CNN story noted:

The nation’s No. 4 airline has used a combination of about 1,200 replacement workers, as well as 300 members of management and a number of outside contractors, to keep flying close to its normal schedule.

In the end the mechanics not only ended the strike, but faced the prospect of trying to get their old jobs back. The Northwest strike dealt another major blow to the American labor movement. University of Minnesota professor John Budd tallied up the results:

Northwest was able to fly through the strike with very little disruption and was able to achieve everything it was looking for. Probably more easily than it thought it would be able to. It’s pretty clear the airline won and the union lost.

For those keeping score about the execrable presidency of George W. Bush, add to his already miserable list of actions the fact that he banned Northwest’s mechanics from walking off the job. His precedent was not only Ronald Reagan’s action against PATCO but one William Jefferson Clinton’s action in the 1997 American Airlines pilots’ strike where he issued an executive order demanding they return to work.

Since 1980 four American presidents have directly intervened in a labor dispute, essentially putting their thumbs on the scale of justice so that it tilted toward management and away from labor. All four have denied workers the one tool they have to compel employers to negotiate–the right to walk off the job. So not only has the judicial branch of government curtailed the right to strike, but so has the executive branch.

Even as the number of strikes has declined, the number of unfair labor practice charges has grown alarmingly. In his 2005 book If the Workers Took a Notion: The Right to Strike and American Political Development Josiah Lambert includes a chart documenting this growth:

The parallel between this chart and the one above it is too striking to ignore: as the right to strike has been emasculated and as the Counterrevolution gathered steam, employers have unleashed a flurry of attacks on organized labor.

In a speech last year at Harvard University AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff outlined the consequences of this assault on organized labor:

• There is a direct correlation between 25 years of stagnant, flat-lined wages and the assault on unions.
• 46 million of us are without health care and 40 million with inadequate health care, [and] 20 percent more of us (live) in poverty now than when this decade started.

The impact of Acuff’s statistics is that the ability of workers to hold out in a protracted strike coupled with the prospect of replacement workers places a heavy strain on even the most committed union member. A University of Minnesota strike that ended last week with workers settling for the very contract they rejected illustrates this new reality. As many as two-thirds of union workers crossed the picket lines out of necessity, a necessity driven by the need to pay mortgages, loans and bills.

An AFSCME press release announcing the end of the strike stated:

We are forced back to work because we can no longer sustain the loss of salary and a looming end to our health care coverage. A typical striker earns $34,000 a year and qualifies for food stamps if supporting a family of four.

Barb Bezat, President of the Technical Local 3937 said:

The University should be ashamed that its workers can’t afford to attend or send their kids to the University.

The UAW workers will face the same obstacles as their strike begins with questions whose answers will determine what kind of country America will be in this next millennium. The first question is how long can the workers hold out? According to the New York Times:

The union, which pays workers $200 a week in strike pay if they take shifts on the picket line, has nearly $900 million in its strike fund, enough to cover a two-month walkout.

Morgan Stanley analyst Jonathan Steinmetz told the Times he believed General Motors could endure a strike lasting several weeks, but not more.

The other question the media has shied away from is whether GM will hire scabs to replace the striking workers. Many GM workers are highly-skilled and specialized, but then so were Northwest Airline’s mechanics. In this economy, it would not be hard to find people willing to cross the picket line.

The willingness to cross a picket line is aided by the fact that a generation of Americans has now come of age without really understanding the right to strike or the sacredness of a picket line. Given the BLS statistics, few Americans have seen a picket line, fewer have faced the decision of whether to cross one and fewer still have actually walked one.

Yet without the right to strike ALL Americans would be leading different lives today. Shortly before the UAW walkout, the union issued a one page fact sheet that dramatized what unions mean to American workers. The wages and fringe benefits of union workers averaged $35.69 while nonunion workers made only $24.79. It also noted:

The differences in insurance and retirement are especially striking: union members in the private sector get 2.4 times as much in employer-provided health insurance, and 3.3 times as much in retirement and savings plans, as the average nonunion worker.

These differences can be directly linked to the right to strike. But the right to strike has brought not merely economic benefits but changes in workplace safety, greater worker input in management decisions, improvements in job training and education, and, yes, improvement in the products that contain the label Made in America.

In 1969 no less than the National Council of Churches wrote:

The right to strike is ethically defensible as long as it is essential to the achievement of justice and freedom for workers…The only ethical way to eliminate strikes is to develop alternative strategies for the protection of economic freedom and justice which render strikes unnecessary. [Lambert, p. 6]

With the future of American labor literally on the line with the UAW strike the big question is: will the American people–and particularly those in the Democratic Party and on the left–come to the aid of American workers as forcefully as they have opposed the Iraq War? Will MoveOn and similar groups donate dollars and media time to the cause? Will big time liberal contributors like Hollywood celebrities and George Soros contribute to this cause? Will the blogs give this issue as much coverage as they devote to Iraq or will they be embarrassed by a replay of the Jena 6 case? Is the American left now controlled by “limousine liberals” who have lost touch with the average American and people of color?

The election of 2008 hangs in the balance. If the various liberal organizations desert labor in what is shaping up as its penultimate battle, it is safe to assume labor will desert them. For the candidates this may well be THE litmus test that determines who should be president.

Why? Because for most of the last century organized labor supplied the brakes the kept corporate excess in check. If the UAW loses this strike America will no longer be America any more.

Tagged with: Abramoff • AFL-CIO • AFSCME • air_traffic_controllers_strike • American_Airlines_pilots_strike • Bill_Clinton • blogs • Bureau_of_Labor_Statistics • Dean • Democratic_Presidential_candidates • flint_michigan • flint_strike • gaudalcanal • General-Motors • George_Bush • GM • GOP_Counterrevolution • homestead • Iraq_War • iwo • Iwo_Jima • jena_6 • latimer • Latino_voters • limousine_liberals • Michael_Moore • moveon • northwest_airlines • northwest_airlines_mechanics_strike • patco • replacement_workers • Republican_Counterrevolution • right_to_strike • roger_and-me • Ronald_Reagan • Saddam_Hussein • scabs • Supreme_Court • unions • union_members • United_Auto_Workers • United_States_Supreme_Court • University_of_Minnesota • university_of_minnesota_strike

Every Democratic candidate now has a health care plan and every Democratic candidate’s health care plan is wrong. Why? Because the American health care system almost killed me and none of the plans does anything to insure it won’t happen again.

In the years since my experience I have asked was it merely an anomaly—an isolated example of bureaucratic and clinical bungling—or a signal that something was wrong with the system? Being a systemic thinker, my inclinations lay toward the latter. Besides I felt that most of the people who cared for me were genuinely interested in my well-being, but were constantly constrained by more systemic problems.

As Peter Senge has pointed out to me numerous times, problems usually lie not with people but with the system. The health care people who cared for me did not set out to kill me, nor did the HMO that oversaw the process. In fact the bungling ended up costing the HMO far more than was necessary.

As I have talked with people inside and outside the American health care system I have come to see my case as more symbolic than unique. Many others have had similar experiences and, tragically, some of them did not make it out alive. Moreover the unnecessary costs of my case and the rigid rules that caused them were hardly unique—as we all know cost is a big issue in American health care.

Tragic deaths and the costs of providing care have been part of health care ever since curing injuries and diseases became the province of people who make this calling their life’s work. We like to believe we have progressed beyond those shadowy, even occult beginnings, yet for most of us health care remains largely a mystery yielding an occasional miracle.

Ask anyone in the world if they had one country to pick in which to be seriously ill and the odds are that the answer would be the United States. And that answer would be wrong. While our medical technology, our complex transplant surgery, and our miracle drugs inspire something akin to awe from the rest of the world, what is generally less known—even by most Americans—is that in what health care experts regard as key measures of a system’s true effectiveness our performance is mediocre.

For example, a UNICEF report on child well-being in rich nations ranked us 24th out of 24. In Critical Condition, reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele provide some sobering statistics about our health care system, which some still think is number one. They report that in a World Health Organization ranking of national health care the United States ranks 37th, between Costa Rica and Slovenia! Our infant mortality rate of 6.9 deaths per 1,000 live births trails Japan’s 3.2, Sweden’s 3.4, and France’s 4.6 among other countries. Life expectancy is this country is less for both men and women than in many European and Asian countries. (pp. 13-14)

But the most chilling statistic of all is largely unknown to most of the American public and the major reason why all those health care plans are not worth the paper used to print them and the exorbitant fees paid to the consultants who wrote them. Do you know what the third leading cause of death is in America behind heart attacks and cancer?

Take a guess. You’ll probably rack your brain trying to think of which disease it might be–and you will have wasted your time. According to Barlett and Steele, depending on which statistics you use, the third or ninth leading cause of death in the United States is medical mistakes.

What I refer to as the paradox of American health care has become one of the most crucial questions of our times: how can we have such advanced technology, skilled professionals, and exemplary research and yet at the same time rank so poorly in so many key measures? That something is wrong with the system has been the staple of political and talk show rhetoric for several decades. Scarcely a campaign passes without candidates offering this or that fix.

The paradox asks all of us whether we are getting our money’s worth. Many of us do not need to consult health care statistics to give an answer. Virtually everyone I know can relate a horror story–some major, some minor–of an encounter with the system. Michael Moore’s latest cinematic broadside, Sicko, is packed full of them. Here the paradox becomes intensely personal for what statisticians term the Lake Wobegone effect seems to operate in many of our minds. Other people may have stories, but our doctors, our nurses, our clinics are all above average.

The main problem with the system concerns not cost, but performance. I truly believe that if all of us thought we were getting what we paid for the issue of cost would evaporate over night. Concerns about cost in fact mask our unspoken fears that those statistics and anecdotes are trying to tell us something we may know is true but do not want to hear. This may not be the best place in the world to get sick.

I do not say this lightly–both of my parents were doctors. My wife is a professor of Nursing and medical researcher. Many of our friends are in the health care field. They also can talk for hours about the mistakes they have witnessed, some legitimate accidents, some the result of incompetence and some the result of what can only be called deliberate neglect.

Most politicians and the media seem obsessed with variations on a call for universal coverage or like Michael Moore issue indictments of HMOs, drug companies, and a cast of villains that has become familiar to anyone who has followed the issue. Most of these people advocate changing the system, many of them proposing some variation of a single payer system that guarantees care for all.

Which brings us to all those Democratic candidates’ health care plans, most of which owe something to the idea of universal coverage, but dodge the single payer issue in part because they don’t want to anger the insurance companies and even more out of a fear the GOP will once again raise the old battle cry of “socialized medicine.” In the end none of this matters if the care we get is mediocre.

In fact none of the presidential candidates much-ballyhooed healthy care plans seems to recognize medical errors as a serious issue or propose how to deal with them. The AFL-CIO has identified health care as one of their major issues for the coming campaign, but their emphasis is on cost not errors. Both organized labor and the candidates like to toss around the phrase “quality” health care, but it is unclear what they mean by it.

Before we start running off half-cocked, we need to understand why the system produces so many errors, otherwise the errors will continue no matter what plan we put in place. Even more ominously, systems thinkers will tell you the worst thing you can do is to tinker with the system without understanding it–and if we don’t understand why the errors are occurring we don’t understand the system. This kind of tinkering can actually make things worse, like the do-it-yourselfer who tries to fix a plumbing leak or wiring problem and ends up flooding the house or causing a electrical fire.

There are a fair number of what systems people call mental models out there about why there are mistakes, but which are true? In a sense we have before us in American health care all the ingredients of a murder mystery a who-done-it that asks not so much who personally is most guilty of needlessly killing thousands of people every year, but what policies, procedures, and methods are responsible?

Are mistakes caused by HMO policies that leave doctors’ and nurses’ hands tied so that they cannot give patients the care they need? Are they caused by hospital staffing procedures and mismanagement? Are they caused by the failure of professional organizations to police their own malefactors? Are they caused by lack of health coverage so patients die because they cannot afford the care they need? Are they caused by lack of what health professionals call health promotion, the lack of needed information that might prevent mistakes? Finally, are mistakes caused by patients themselves who self-treat in ways that can be fatal or who wait too long to call the doctor?

At the moment I have no answers to these questions–nor, unfortunately does anyone else. Until we do, we will continue to tinker with a system no one really understands–and people will continue to die unnecessarily while the politicians spew forth more reams of worthless paper.

Afterword: Readers feel free to add your own experiences with health care mistakes to the comments section.

Tagged with: American_health_care • barlett_and_steele • critical_condition • Democratic_Presidential_candidates • health_care • health_care_plans • health_care_rankings • health_care_system • hmo • hmos • infant_mortality • insurance_companies • leading_cause_of_death • life_expectancy • medical_mistakes • Peter_Senge • single_payer_plan • systems_thinking • UNICEF • world_health_organization

All the King’s Men is one of the great American novels, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1947, but it has fallen from grace over the last few decades. In his novel Robert Penn Warren painted an indelible portrait of a populist politician based on Louisiana Governor and Senator Huey Long. Warren’s Southern roots (he was one of the signers of the Southern literary manifesto I’ll Take My Stand) and his skill as a poet/writer enabled him to capture a man, a place and a time in a way that still speaks to us today.

In an essay in the Yale Review, Warren later wrote of the impact of Long on the novel:

When I am asked how much All the King’s Men owes to the actual politics of Louisiana in the ’30’s, I can only be sure that if I had never gone to live in Louisiana and Huey had not existed, the novel would never have been written.

Known as “the Kingfish,” Huey Long was one of the most controversial figures of the Great Depression, part demagogue and part democrat, his slogan of “Share the Wealth” made him the scourge of big business. Long was instrumental in helping Franklin Roosevelt secure the 1932 Democratic Presidential nomination, but quickly broke with FDR after the election because he felt the President did not support his plans to redistribute wealth. Long was preparing to challenge FDR when he was assassinated in 1935, provoking one of history’s great “what ifs.”

Warren’s novel portrays Long as a tragic figure, a man fallen from grace with an almost Shakespearean eloquence. The 1949 movie that was based on the novel had sense enough to use Warren as a scriptwriter, although changed the plot to make it more melodramatic–a tone captured in one of the film’s posters:

He thought he had the world by the tail…till it exploded in his face…with a bullet attached…

Another version of the novel shot in 2006 has fallen into the obscurity it deserves. Its cast of young Hollywood heartthrobs including Sean Penn, Jude Law, and Kate Winslet seemed totally out of their element. One New York critic wrote:

I’m completely serious when I say that if it weren’t for Underworld: Evolution, All the King’s Men would easily qualify as the worst film I’ve seen this year.

It did not help that the insipid James Carville was one of the film’s executive producers.

In contrast, for all its melodrama and differences with the original novel, the 1949 film still stands up pretty well. A major reason is the searing performance of Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark, a performance which won him an Oscar. The film also won an Oscar and Mercedes McCambridge picked up a third for Best Supporting Actress.

The speech which follows occurs after Stark first tastes victory. You might note its similarity with Orson Welles’ speech in Citizen Kane, which has previously appeared in Saturday Night at the Movies.

This is not a time for speechmaking. I should get on my knees and ask God to give me strength to carry out your will.

This much I swear to you — these things you shall have: I’m going to build a hospital, the biggest that money can buy, and it will belong to you. And any man, woman or child who is sick or in pain can go through those doors and know that everything will be done for them that man can do: to heal sickness, to ease pain. Free! Not as a charity, but as a right. And it is your right. Do you hear me? It is your right.

And it is your right that every child should have a complete education; that any man who produces anything can take it to market without paying toll. And no poor man’s land or farm can be taxed or taken away from him.

And it is the right of the people that they shall not be deprived of hope.

Just to give you the flavor of Warren’s novel here is Stark talking about the same hospital:

I’m going to build me the God-damnest, biggest, chromium-plated, formaldehyde-stinkingest free hospital and health center the All-Father ever let live. Boy, I tell you, I’m going to have a cage of canaries in every room that can sing Italian grand opera and there ain’t going to be a nurse who hasn’t won a beauty contest at Atlantic City and every bedpan will be eighteen-carat gold and by God, every bedpan will have a Swiss music box attachment to play “Turkey in the Straw” or “The Sextet from Lucia,” take your choice. (p. 139)

That is writing, not Hollywood. Note how Warren builds the hyperbole by mixing the high and the low until it culminates in the final improbable image of opera and bluegrass. There is not more telling portrait of a now-extinct American political rhetoric any better than this, a rhetoric that was part tall tale, part bombast and all heart, a rhetoric in which the audience was in on the joke enough to urge the speaker to stoke the fire ever higher.

Today with the likes of James Carville advising candidates, no one speaks like that and the wink between candidate and audience has been lost.

Tagged with: American_novels • broderick_crawford • controversial_figures • demagogue • Democratic_Presidential_nomination • fallen_from_grace • FDR • Franklin_Roosevelt • Great_Depression • huey_long • Ill_take_my_stand • james_carville • jude_law • kate_winslet • melodramatic • oscar_nominations • populist_politician • Robert_Penn_Warren • senator_huey • senator_huey_long • share_the_wealth • southern_roots • underworld_evolution • willie_stark

The “white tree” at Jena High School–note burned windows after arson

There were only a hundred of them, not enough to attract the cameras or national reporters even though they were marching less than ten blocks from the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. They were invisible even to a blogosphere that publishes daily rants on causes most of us did not even know existed and too many rants that run the same topic into the ground–just Google Petreaus and you will see what I mean. Technorati currently lists 58, 939 blog posts about the General–enough to populate a fair-sized town, a veritable Babel of egos with nothing better to do with their time, each striving to show that their high school English teachers were wrong, all hoping to capture perhaps the fifteen seconds of fame that has become the new standard of a YouTube world.

Those hundred could have used a few of them–or at least their keyboards–but I’ve said before the blogosphere resembles high school, so when everyone else decides General P is the big story, the way high school hallways buzz with the same gossip, they feel they need to throw in their penny thoughts. And so the hundred tried to make as much noise as they could to attract attention, but few listened even though the march marked a mourning for one of their own and the impending death of a generation.

Two days later there was another march, this one better attended and better covered, even though the cause that prompted it had been festering for over a year. It too was about death, an ugly and fetid smelling death involving nooses and black men. The small Louisiana town where it took place could have served as a backdrop for Atticus Finch and his plea to free Tom Robinson. In the near-ninety degree September heat one could feel the weight of the past as if it were something as organic as the “white trees” that populate it and nearby towns with names such as Possum Point, Goodpine and Trout.

Numbers were at the center of both marches–in one case a six and in the other 298. The six were known as the Jena 6–following that peculiar American tendency to refer to groups of defendants, especially people of color, by numbers or euphemisms (remember the Scottsboro “boys”). The names of the Jena 6 are Robert Bailey Jr., Bryant Purvis, Carwin Jones, Theodore Shaw, Mychal Bell and an unnamed sixth juvenile. The 298 is the number of murder victims in a city that has become known as “Murderdelphia.” The hundred who marched were also marching for a name, Esther Schultz, who worked as a therapist and counselor for a home health care agency.

Bailey, Purvis, Jones, Shaw, Bell and the unnamed juvenile were accused of attempted second degree murder and conspiracy in the lunchroom beating of a white student. The white district attorney justified the murder charge because Bailey used a lethal weapon–a tennis shoe–and because the attack was carried out by a group it became a conspiracy. Bell, the first to be tried, was convicted of conspiracy and second degree battery, after the charges were reduced at his trial this June. On September 4, an appeals judge threw out the conspiracy charge but let the battery conviction stand, with one important caveat–Bell should have been tried as a juvenile.

Today’s march and a national day of support that asked people to wear black in support of Bailey, Purvis, Jones, Shaw, Bell and the unnamed juvenile had been planned for the day Bell was supposed to have been sentenced, but the appeal ruling negated the sentencing. According to CBS:

Dennis Courtland Hayes, interim president and CEO of the NAACP, compared the outcry over the Jena arrests to the controversy that followed racial remarks by radio personality Don Imus.

“People are saying, ‘That’s enough, and we’