Yesterday on KPFA/Pacifica's "Living Room," I heard someone (I think it was David Madland of the American Worker Project - I can't check because the link on the website is broken) talking about the assault on public sector unions, which I wrote about a little while ago. He said that private sector workers need to defend the unions, even if they are not in one, because the unions are what prevent our wages and benefits from plummeting.

He is right, but he is wrong. He is right that without the unions, private sector workers would be screwed, and therefore, we should defend them. But he’s wrong to put it on private sector workers who have never in their lives seen a union organizer to step up and get out there and walk the line for the unions. As I wrote back in October, it’s the unions that need to realize that they need us, the unorganized private sector, because without us, they are very vulnerable to these attacks. The interviewee also said that polls show that 53% of U.S. nonunion workers would join a union if they had the opportunity to do so and thought they wouldn’t be fired for doing it. And that’s without the unions doing ANYTHING to reach out or counter the anti-union propaganda that we’ve all been hearing for decades. If they made even a token effort to organize any of the private sector work force, they could probably get that number up to like 80%. And if any of those organizing drives were successful, then the public worker-private worker class war would be out the window, the U.S. labor movement would be back in gear, and initiatives like cutting or privatizing Social Security and Medicare would suddenly get a lot harder.

So why do I say it’s the unions’ responsibility? Because one, they are the ones who have the resources to actually go to where those private sector workers are and talk to some; two, they are the ones who know – or should know – that we have need to get it together; and three, that would mean they were actually doing something that private sector workers could support, as opposed to now, when if one is (like me) a private sector worker who wants to defend the principal of collective bargaining, one has to look high and low for a picket line to join.

So come on, brethren. You’ve figured out that you need the support of the corporate sellout private sector workers you've shunned all these years. So now figure out that you need to do more than whine about us not supporting you, especially since the vast majority of working class people are not listening to Pacifica.

Twice Censored: Underreported Women's and Gender Issues of 2010

I was trying to think of what to do for last Monday's Women's Magazine, the first show of the New Year, when I ran across the Project Censored List of Top 25 Censored Stories of 2009-2010. Guess how many of those 25 stories related to a women's or gender issue?

You guessed it: NOT ONE.

Does that mean women's issues get lots of attention? I don't think so. But it does point to the masculinist bias of even the progressive media and media watchdogs.

So I built the show around a dozen or so women's or gender issues that I feel were short-shrifted last year.

Check out my list, and let me know what you would have put on yours.

The Bad Sexual Politics of Julian Assange

When I heard that Julian Assange, founder/principal publisher of Wikileaks, was wanted for sexual assault, it was a “where is the nearest hole for me to crawl into” moment. It didn’t get better.

The debate between feminists Jaclyn Friedman and Naomi Wolf on Democracy Now! did not make me feel better; it made me feel worse. For those who missed it, Friedman, the author of Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, argued that the case would “raise the bar for the women of Sweden and the women internationally for what we can expect from our justice systems.” I can’t see this case raising any bar except the ones in whatever prison they decide to send Julian Assange to.

Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth and the lesser known but more relevant Fire With Fire, countered that when Assange started having sex with someone while she was asleep after repeatedly refusing to use a condom, “it seems to me that when you say, ‘OK, you better not have HIV,’ he said, ‘Of course not.’ Quote, ‘She couldn’t be bothered to tell him one more time because she had been going on about the condom all night.’ To me, that—I mean, if I was making love with a woman, if I was—you know, if I was a lesbian making love with a woman and we had that conversation, I would keep making love with her, because we had had a discussion about it and reached a conclusion.”

If that is Naomi Wolf’s idea of a positive sexual encounter, I’m just glad she’s not a lesbian.

I have little doubt that whatever else did or did not happen, these women did not get the idea to make criminal complaints against Assange by themselves. But the problem I have is that the women in this situation are props. Depending on your world view, either Assange is a persecuted hero or he is a sexual predator. The likelihood that he is both a persecuted hero and a sexual abuser doesn’t seem to come up. Both of these young women were supporters of Wikileaks and probably had a liberal amount of hero worship for Assange. If he took advantage of that admiration to coerce them to do what he wanted in bed, that doesn’t make him much different from Mike Tyson or Ben Roethlisberger.

When do we get to talk about the tendency of men in progressive movements (just like those in every other kind of movement) to treat the women they work with as lesser beings and sex objects?

In the few weeks before the Assange arrest thrust this issue into our national conversations, I happened to read about two incidents that occurred some years earlier.

The first concerned an allegation of domestic violence against the best known member of the revolutionary “youth” group STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement), which was active in the Bay Area in the mid 1990s. This was an incident I knew about at the time, because a couple women I knew from Women Against Rape were asked by STORM to help investigate it. My recollection is that they left the group in the aftermath, feeling that they were being used as window-dressing to give legitimacy to the group and its process. Last month, I happened to run across something that STORM had written about this incident, which I had never read before. The conclusion of their investigation was that the incident had not happened, that the woman involved had made up the accusation as part of some kind of COINTELPRO – CounterIntelligence Program to discredit a revolutionary man of color. Again, I don’t know what happened. What struck me about the reflection, written some years after the incident was resolved (in STORM’s mind), was that they never considered the possibility of multiple truths, that the woman involved actually experienced violence at the same time that the man had no awareness of having committed it. I personally witnessed that man being physically aggressive and threatening toward women I knew, when they disagreed with him during an action, and he refused to be held accountable after that incident, so I am predisposed to believe that he was capable of similar aggression toward a woman he was involved with and would be unlikely to cop to it.

The other piece I was reading had to do with our local Pacifica radio station, KPFA in Berkeley. KPFA, the oldest listener-sponsored radio station in the country, has a long history of bad gender dynamics and accusations of violence against men who are revered by portions of the left. We are currently mired in a terrible political crisis brought on by a huge financial deficit, and in that context a lot of old muck is getting raked up, including some related to two men accused of sexual harassment. One is an on-air personality with whom I personally am usually on the same side politically. This man, who is white, has been accused of harassment by a string of women. Most recently, a friend of mine won an enormous settlement of her claim against him and the station, which is one of the many reasons KPFA and Pacifica are in such financial trouble. The other was a former station manager who was accused of sexually harassing a stream of women. Other men jumped to his defense, saying that he was being targeted because of racism (he was African American), notwithstanding that nearly all of the women who accused him were women of color. The word “COINTELPRO” was again invoked.

A close friend of mine is an incredible organizer and has been instrumental in forming or sustaining a number of progressive organizations over the years. Like most of us whose lives center around movement work, he usually gets involved with women he meets doing political work. And for some reason (guess), when he stops being involved with them, they always end up feeling like they have to leave the organization. At one point, an ex-girlfriend accused him of sexual harassment. The organization was bitterly divided over the question of whether he was guilty or the woman was just an embittered reject. I don’t remember how that situation was resolved, but I do remember what a mutual friend said about it: “It probably wasn’t legally harassment, but he definitely has bad sexual politics.”

I suspect that every movement woman who ever dated men has had an experience like the ones described in the Assange police reports. When I was younger I had two encounters with male friends in the movement who wanted to have sex with me. I wanted to be close and cuddle with them, but not to have sex. They knew I was a lesbian. I kept saying I didn’t want to have sex and they kept insisting, and eventually I gave in. I would not say that I was raped. I didn’t feel afraid of them. If they still lived in this area, I would probably still be friendly with them. Even if I were the kind of person who thought of calling the police as an option, I would not have considered calling the police on them. Nevertheless, I know that what they did was coercive sex and was not okay.

A long time ago, a friend of mine was date raped by someone she had been going out with, who was in the same political group she was in. Some of the women in the group were dismissive of her accusation, saying, "If she was raped, I've been raped 100 times." One of the woman's male friends said that he felt uncomfortable judging this man because he had committed rapes when he was in a fraternity in college. It was very hard for this woman to remain in that organization, which was pretty much the only radical direct action group in town at that time. Fortunately, the group as a whole came together and forced the man to take responsibility for his action. They kicked him out of their full meetings, but the men's group continued to work with him and discuss what had happened. I don't know if he ever got it, and the group didn't last that much longer after that, but that was an example of a system for community justice that other progressive groups could emulate.

The women involved in the Assange case should not be letting themselves be used by the forces that want to put him away for creating a place for people to leak information. They should not be looking to the criminal “justice” system to remedy bad treatment by a man they believed in and trusted. But progressive people, especially people who call themselves feminists, should not be defending his behavior. We need to defend the rights of whistleblowers, the rights of journalists and the public’s right to know. We also need to defend the right of women to say no to sex, even with people they have had sex with before and plan to have it with again. Refusing to use a condom is a serious violation of a person’s right to safety, and if a man doesn’t want to have sex with a condom and a woman wants him to wear one, then he has no right to nag at her or coerce her to change her mind. He certainly has no right to initiate unprotected sex with her while she is sleeping, in the hope, presumably, that she’ll be too out of it to protest.

We must figure out how to hold all our political heroes, male and female, accountable for their bad sexual politics. When do we get started on that?

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party Comes to KPFA

I hate to say it, but what is going on at KPFA is a lefty version of the Tea Party. People are using the rhetoric of freedom, fairness, workers’ rights and diversity to subvert democracy, diversity and a lot of community programming. And they are determined to destroy probably the most valuable resource the left in this country has. (They're also, in general, good progressive people. I want to say that out front. I am friendly with some of them. But I believe they are good progressive people with a very bad vision for community radio.)

They’re extremely well organized, they are extremely unified, and they have been able to get their talking points broadcasting non-stop on the airwaves. And the people who know the truth and oppose what they are trying to do are either being timid or complacent, keeping their heads down, not organizing, talking in platitudes, wanting to compromise.

And when it is done we are likely to have lost both Pacifica and KPFA.

It’s about workers’ rights.

It is about workers’ rights, but not the right to organize or have a fair contract. It’s about the right of certain workers, who run the union, some of whom are or were managers, to decide who and what goes on the air, without meddling by ignorant community members.

The “union busting” offense that Pacifica committed was laying off people at the bottom of the seniority ladder, rather than people who raise less money in on-air fund drives. This offense is specifically required by the contract and rearticulated by the union negotiators when the contract was renewed last spring. (Tracy Rosenberg, who participated in the meeting where the two possible sets of layoffs were discussed, outlines the choice in an open letter. [I have some issues with Tracy, who has used her positions as both a KPFA rep to the Pacifica Finance Committee and Executive Director of Media Alliance, to wage political struggles against KPFA board members she has conflicts with. Even so, I found the evidence she presents pretty convincing.])

(Note: Pacifica's ED showed terrible lack of strategic sense in the way that the layoffs were done. I disagree with taking the Morning Show off the air before replacement hosts were lined up. If it's true that she has refused to talk with the union leadership, I condemn that, and I strongly disapprove of hiring Folger & Levin, a union-busting law firm, to defend against a lawsuit rather than trying to work with the union. But that doesn't change what I know to be true.)

It’s about democracy.

It is about democracy. The people who are vocally demanding their jobs back and their allies on the local station board don’t believe in it, at least not for KPFA. They insist that board elections are a waste of money. They have openly said that the only role for the elected community leadership is to raise money so that paid staff can make all the decisions about programming. They disparage unpaid staff – many of whom have been at the station much longer than most of them – and paid programmers they feel are not up to their lofty (white) standards of professionalism. (Larry Bensky famously referred to all of us as “clowns” on Michael Krasny’s Forum two weeks ago.) They disbanded the Program Council, the mechanism for community input into the programming grid, and de-recognized the Unpaid Staff Organization, which was established when unpaid staff were kicked out of the union.

Brian Edwards-Tiekert, the principal spokesperson of this “Save KPFA” movement and one of the laid off hosts, was quoted in a recent article as saying, “Fifteen hours of airtime were dedicated to candidate forums for the local board. We spent more time covering KPFA’s election than Afghanistan’s and Iraq's elections combined.” Fifteen hours a year doesn’t sound like too much democracy to me. If that’s more time than we spent on the Iraq and Afghan elections, that might say something about our coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan, but it doesn’t say anything about the value or lack thereof of KPFA elections.

It’s about diversity.

The union is on the warpath because the hosts of the Morning Show were laid off. The person who has been most vocal, and whose job is the reason that there can be no peace (Brian Edwards-Tiekert again), is a white man. He and the people who support him have used the fact that a number of people of color chose to accept severance packages to make it seem that they are standing up for diversity at the station. In fact, at least some of those people of color left because those same people made them feel unwelcome. That’s not conjecture – one of them told me that personally. He said the show he helped to start, Hard Knock Radio, probably the single most unique show on KPFA, is devalued because they can’t raise much money through on-air promotions. They could raise a lot of money through concerts, but KPFA management (not Pacifica) would never agree to front money for security, venues and fliers for concerts, though they frequently put on speaking events, often taking a loss in order to get a recording they can use for premiums during fund drives. When the “Save KPFA” team goes on and on about how the Morning Show raises more money than anyone else, that’s in part a dig at Hard Knock.

A year and a half ago, the clique that runs the union and the station proposed eliminating Women’s Magazine to make room for a weekly “greatest hits” version of Letters to Washington. They did eliminate an hour of Music of the World for the daily version of Letters. In September, the station managers, who were part of that clique, proposed eliminating Hard Knock Radio and Flashpoints. If that had happened, they would not be picketing or screaming about injustice, despite the fact that the programmers on those shows have much more seniority than the Morning Show staff who were laid off.

The producers of Poor News Network, which airs on the Morning Show once a month, recently wrote in an open letter, “Throughout our tenure on KPFA we have consistently faced internal harassment and a varying amount of disrespect from paid staff on the show, saying we were airing ‘too much Spanish’ and/or our people didn’t speak correctly, even to the point that when we were supposed to produce a second show per month, which Andrea Lewis fought with for, it was vetoed in the end for not being ‘professional enough’.”

It’s about local control.

It is. The people who are protesting and picketing at KPFA feel they would be better off independent of Pacifica and the other four stations. They don’t care if people in Houston and DC lose their Pacifica stations, they don’t care if Free Speech Radio News or even Democracy Now can continue broadcasting, as long as they get to keep the money they raise locally. (FSRN and Democracy Now are funded by Pacifica, out of the money they get from the five member stations and the affiliates. People in the know have said that Democracy Now might be able to survive on syndication fees alone, but FSRN never could. It is a source of news that is not heard anywhere else, and a source of income and training for local journalists all over the Global South.)

If KPFA cannot pay its bills and Pacifica cannot raise the money to bail it out, the entire network goes into bankruptcy. This part is rumor, but I am pretty confident of it: that is what the ruling clique hopes will happen. They are amassing a war chest to buy the station by encouraging people to withhold money from Pacifica and put it in a separate fund instead, as was done in 1999. This idea did not spring up only after the layoffs – many people believe the $375,000 check that was supposedly misplaced by the previous General Manager was intended for this purpose.

But there is no guarantee, and in fact it is unlikely, that that is the way a Pacifica bankruptcy would end up. It would be up to a bankruptcy judge who would not be bound by Pacifica’s mission statement or any other concerns. The chair of Pacifica’s board recently wrote, “The outcome of bankruptcy hearings will not be five progressive stations running their own affairs, but more likely two commercial stations and three new Christian radio channels.”

Of course, they may hope to force Pacifica to sell KPFA to them under threat that otherwise, they will take the whole network down. If they succeed, they will not only be free of the “albatross” of Pacifica’s expense (though they will have to assume a lot of expenses that are now paid by Pacifica including insurance, licensing fees and auditors). They will also be free of those pesky bylaws and the democracy they foist on us. They will be able to do away with the local station board and the Program Council and get all us scruffy unprofessional “clowns” off their airwaves.

In the recent board election, the top vote-getter was Mal Bernstein, of the “Save KPFA” slate. In an on air candidate forum, he stated that the “core shows” on KPFA are the Morning Show, Against the Grain, Letters to Washington, Sunday and the evening News. Notice anything about those shows? Notice what that “core” does not include? If he and his allies win this fight, we can assume that what we will hear is more time devoted to shows like those, and less time to shows like Hard Knock, Voices of the Middle East, La Raza Chronicles, APEX and Full Circle.

A friend recently asked me, “Who is organizing for the real left/people of color at KPFA?” The sad answer is, I fear, no one.

No doubt, the KPFA Tea Party (or should I call them the Tiekert Party?) will dismiss me as exactly the type of conspiracy theorist/snake oil huckster they are trying to banish from our airwaves. You may choose to believe them, but keep this in mind: the other Tea Party also denies that its rise has anything to do with racism.

Become an Iron-Jawed Angel, Don't Vote for One

There’s a letter that made the rounds on email and feminist blogs a few weeks ago. It read in part:

“Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie ‘Iron Jawed Angels.’ It is a graphic depiction of the battle [the woman suffragists] waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder. … So, refresh my memory. Some women won’t vote this year because why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn’t matter? It’s raining?”

On election day, I read something very similar on Daily Kos (I can’t find it now) invoking the spirit of the African American civil rights movement to exhort people to go out and vote.

It’s true, many people fought and died at many different times for the rights of disenfranchised groups to vote. But they didn’t fight for the vote as a symbol of equality. Voting was supposed to bring actual equality. Which is a greater betrayal of the suffragists and the martyrs of Freedom Summer? Not voting, or voting for someone who will use my vote to give more money to billionaires? Not voting, or voting for a progressive woman Speaker of the House who was willing to trade away our reproductive rights for a health care plan that delivered millions of our hard-earned dollars to the insurance industry? Not voting, or voting for the man who imprisoned eight sixty- and seventy-year-old former Black Panthers for a 36-year-old murder they didn’t commit?

Sure, I went to the polls. I mostly voted for people that had no chance to win. Sadder than that, I probably wouldn’t even have liked their policies if they did win. I did cast my second-choice vote for Oakland mayor for Jean Quan, and it looks like all those second-place votes may actually propel her over Don Perata, which would be a victory for actual democracy. Maybe it will convince other progressive cities to try ranked-choice voting which, despite dire predictions, has yet to bring down the power grid or cause a volcano to erupt in Oakland (which has no volcanoes, in case you were wondering). I voted for legalized marijuana, which we didn’t get, and for implementing California’s Clean Air Act, which we did. We voted to drop the two-thirds majority requirement for passing a state budget, but two-thirds is still needed to raise any taxes so it’s not worth much.

In the end, voting will not turn around the despair that I feel around and within me. It won’t put money back into our bankrupt community college and university system, or find jobs for the millions who have been out of work so long they’ve stopped looking. It won’t provide childcare or job training for single mothers trying to squirm their way out of poverty; it won’t provide restorative justice for survivors of sexual assault.


If anything reminds us how little the Voting Rights Act has actually done to increase racial equality, it’s the sentencing of Johannes Mehserle in Los Angeles last Friday, before the final election results in our state were even known. Mehserle is the white transit cop who killed 20-year-old Oscar Grant last New Year’s morning with one shot to the back while Oscar was pinned on the ground. On Friday he was sentenced to two years (including four months already served) for involuntary manslaughter. On Friday night, Oakland police, led by African American police chief Anthony Batts, herded protesters into a trap where 152 were arrested, ostensibly because a very few people broke a few windows. I am not condoning breaking windows of small businesses or cars. But the chief made it clear that the plan to break up the march was crafted long before a single window was broken, and executed as soon as the marchers deviated from an agreed-upon route. They didn’t arrest the few vandals, they arrested everyone they considered part of an “illegal assembly.” The story I heard from people who were there was that when the vandalism started, the crowd chanted for it to stop and it did.

Yes, we should be inspired by the suffragists and the civil rights movement. But the lesson we need to take from them is not that we must vote even if there is nothing we want to vote for, but that we can and must organize for the change we truly need.

Whose Giants?

I have a confession to make.

I’m not a Giants fan.

I have nothing against them, mind you. I just don’t watch or follow them. So now that they’re World Series champions, I can’t suddenly claim a loyalty I never had just to share in the excitement of my town.


Sad, because I remember the first year I was here, when the Oakland Raiders won the Super Bowl. With my friends, I watched the game and then we all spilled out into the streets, joining our neighbors, and headed over to Jack London Square, where I’d never been despite living not far away in South Berkeley. It was a great party.

I see my coworkers in their orange and black, brandishing Giants banners and huge smiles. I see my neighbors standing on trucks and screaming in joy.

“We Won!” they say.

“Who is we?” I respond in my head. I had nothing to do with it. They would have won with or without me. The last time I bought a ticket was around eight years ago when my nephew came to visit. The only time I was at the ballpark this season was to protest the Arizona Diamondbacks over SB1070.

They won because a bunch of guys not from San Francisco, hired and coached by guys not from San Francisco (though to be fair, CEO Bill Newkom did grow up nearby) got paid a lot of money to throw and hit well and they did it.

So what does San Francisco get out of it? Does a kid from San Francisco have a better chance of becoming a Giant than a kid from Georgia or Colombia? Clearly not. Will being the home of the World Series Champions put a dent in San Francisco’s chronic homelessness epidemic? Obviously not. Will San Francisco voters carry their good mood into the voting booths and defeat the initiative to punish people for being homeless by making it a crime to sit or lie down on the sidewalk? I can cherish that faint hope, but I wouldn’t take it to the bank (or the polls).

Did they even build their own stadium? Of course not. They got San Francisco taxpayers to cough up for it by threatening to move out of town. Good role models for loyalty.

Yet none of this changes the fact that local sports teams fulfill people’s deep desire to belong, to have in Carson McCullers’ immortal words, “the we of me.” That desire to belong, to be one with the people around us, is something I share, and something to be cherished. It’s what at times makes people engage in those random acts of kindness and generosity that make me slightly believe in the goodness of human nature. I just wish we could find it in something more real and less fleeting than a sports championship we did nothing to earn.

Labor Movement: Save the Rest of Us to Save Yourselves

The latest attack ad from Meg Whitman, right-wing businesswoman running for governor of California, targets public sector unionization. “Who can retire at 55?” the narrator asks. "As governor, Jerry Brown allowed state workers to collectively bargain. That’s why now they can retire at 55 with nearly full pension.”

Of course it’s a lie – a friend who is a public school teacher said if she retired at 55, even with thirty years in the same job (a contingency Whitman’s ad doesn’t mention), she’d get about half of what she will get at 65. But it’s also shocking that Whitman thinks she can increase her voter share by attacking not a specific bargaining agreement but the whole idea of collective bargaining. I’m not shocked that SHE is anti-union to her core – most businesspeople are. (Even KPFA radio, the first noncommercial radio station in the country, where I volunteer, thinks that now that they have to cut jobs, they don’t need to do it according to seniority. And the union leadership is supporting them because they or their friends will get jumped over more senior people.) But I was shocked that her campaign managers are convinced that the public is so fiercely anti-union.

Whitman’s people didn’t come up with that idea by themselves. They took it from the Tea Party strategists, who have declared a class war on public workers. The corporate interests funding and fueling the new populism have decided that they can turn the supposed (but mostly unseen) anger at bailouts for banks, BP and businessmen by turning it against unionized public sector workers earning a living wage and a pension when they retire. I admit it’s true that when my friends who are unionized government workers complain that their pensions are shrinking, I sometimes think, “At least you have a pension.”

But what is unsaid in this, like all the rest of the Tea Party rhetoric, is what lies behind the somewhat bland expression “overpaid public workers.” Like every other plank of this new populist platform, it comes down to racism. “Pampered public workers” is code for “unqualified” Black and immigrant workers, because the civil service has been the one sector that has been forced, by the use of the test and affirmative action, to be relatively color-blind. People of color pass the test, thus proving they are qualified, so they have to be hired if they are next in line. It’s one more example of the “logic” by which “elite” has come to stand for the most oppressed people in our society.

It’s not new. Remember that oft-quoted Niemuller poem? “First they came for the unionists…” That’s right, the unions were the first target of Nazism, which was also a pseudo populism funded and used by corporations. So maybe this would be a good time for Jews to come back to our progressive labor heritage.

The unions also need to take some responsibility. The biggest mistake the labor movement ever made was to stop organizing and start protecting. My whole working life has been in the unorganized private clerical sector. It’s always been equally frustrating to me that my coworkers were mostly uninterested in organizing and the unions were uninterested in organizing us. Some parts of the labor movement have recently started important and innovative organizing campaigns, mostly among low-wage immigrant workers at hotels, restaurants and piecemeal sweatshops. That’s great, I’m all for it, I have gone to many of their picket lines. But I have a secret to tell them. Most immigrant workers can’t vote. Please don’t misunderstand me for a second - I’m not saying to stop those campaigns. But I am saying that by ignoring the mass of citizen voters who are in nonunion jobs, the union movement may have dug its own grave.

Or maybe it’s not too late. If the unions took all the money they pour into electing useless Democrats and threw it into organizing, they might be able to turn the tide around. If they could tell unemployed workers in places like Kentucky and Nevada, we’re going to set up a hiring hall and you’ll be able to get a few days’ work every week at a decent wage; if they could tell workers slaving away at Wal-Mart or Starbucks, “You’re going to be (theoretically) able to retire at 55 yourself,” people might stop being so enamored of the Tea Party.
Of course it is an uphill battle. Destruction of the unions is the number one agenda of neoliberalism. But look at France. Three million people in the streets, almost the entire economy shut down, over the threat of raising the retirement age to 62.

Yesterday I went to a rally in Oakland demanding justice for Oscar Grant, the young man who was shot in the back by a transit cop a year and a half ago. This rally marked an extraordinary event: the ILWU shut down all the ports in the Bay Area in solidarity with Oscar’s family, because his uncle is a longshore worker. It represents an amazing organizing effort. On the other hand, there were less than 1,000 at the rally, which means that the unions that put their names to the action didn’t call their people to come out. In fact, none of my friends who are in unions were there, and most of them didn’t even know about it. One of the speakers made a call for a general strike. A friend who is newer to activism came up to me enthusiastically.

“Did you hear them call for a general strike?”

“Yes,” I said, “but it won’t happen.”

She shook her head. “I’m excited,” she said.

To her, I’m just a professional naysayer, which is hardly a role I want to play. So I asked myself, “Am I wrong? Could we have a general strike, like France?”

Of course I hope I am wrong, but I’m pretty sure that unfortunately, I am not. The problem with that call-out, like so many things here, is that people don’t get the difference between calling for something and doing it. A general strike isn’t just something you call for. In order to have a general strike, you have to have an organized labor movement. And that’s the difference between us and France.