The "Summit Hill" Crowd

I will be focusing on this issue on my blog over the next several months.

I think the time is now for hearings to determine if there isn’t some conflict of interest in what is going on with the Ford Plant and the Ford Site Planning Committee. Maybe some newspaper will have the courage to assign a few reporters to investigate what the Ford Motor Company is exchanging two thousand or more good paying jobs with excellent benefits for.

I think we need to know if the Ford Motor Company hasn’t made the decision to demolish this Plant because they have a more profitable scenario in mind. Keep in mind, Ford seems very unusually interested in the future of this property for a company that wants to abandon the property. Isn’t it kind of strange that no one has asked Ford if they intend to maintain a future financial interest as this property is "developed?"

I found many people in St. Paul struggling to keep their heads above water in paying mortgages ranging from $1,300.00 to over $4,000.00 dollars a month… and the Ford Site Planning Committee is planning for upscale housing for the well-heeled. Please see the last article from “The Nation”… in the same way, many homeowners in St. Paul are being foreclosed on right now because there is no way for them to meet their mortgage obligations; and neither the Mayor nor any city council members have stepped forward to assist these people. The DFL legislators have done absolutely nothing to halt predatory, parasitic lending, either.

I think we are getting a very good idea of the type of “planning” the Ford Site Planning Committee has in mind for this site…

Here is what I think “The Summit Hill Crowd” is looking at:

I think we will see a marina and high priced condos and town houses along the river and a new huge casino… luxury hotels and high-priced shops with artists and artisans.

I think we will see Ford remain as a partner in all of this much like what we see that Whirlpool Corporation has done in Benton Harbor, Michigan; as it shut down production in this community and moved production south and overseas. The properties and the economic scenarios are very similar.

We will see several thousand “service jobs” created that pay between $7.00 and $8.50 an hour with virtually no benefits; with tax-payers subsidizing these poverty wages with food stamps and welfare payments; and other workers throughout the area will suffer with this massive downward pressure on wages… we will see poverty in the Twin Cities soar out of sight and homelessness climb as soup kitchens scramble to keep up with their “new business.”

We will see the Minnesota Environmental Advocacy Council, a front for every polluting corporation in Minnesota, support all of this in the name of “open green spaces;” in the form of a few ballparks and a few small parks with some swings along with walking and biking trails.

I think we will see the City of St. Paul turn over its River Front property to these vultures known as venture capitalists and real estate speculators.

We will see the St. Paul Police Department crack down on child panhandlers; and, around election time crack down on prostitution.

Has anyone thought to ask if there might be some kind of conflict of interest among the public officials involved in all of this? Perhaps someone involved from the Mayor’s office or on the Ford Site Planning Committee has connections to gaming and real estate interests who will profit from all of this?

The “Summit Hill” crowd has big, big, plans for the Ford Property.

I can’t help but wonder how many members of the DFL state legislative caucus know what is going down here but won’t say. This may turn out to be one of the worst perversions of the democratic process in Minnesota history… not to mention the state's biggest boon-doggle.

I think we need to know why the UAW’s Gettelfinger has not dared to show his face in the Twin Cities to address this mess.

We may have to consider some kind of independent political action to address all of this. I think the time has come for the mass distribution of a special edition of a newspaper specifically focused on the future of the Ford Plant. Maybe even some kind of ballot initiative on public ownership of this plant.

Again, like the peat mining in the Big Bog, Minntac’s intent to contaminate the streams, rivers, and lakes of northern Minnesota and Lake Superior, and on the issues of single-payer, universal health care and the war in Iraq, the DFL State Central Committee and even the DFL Progressive Caucus refuses to address the issues involved in the Ford Plant closing and demolition. The continued silence is getting old. The Green Party has done no better. This is not being discussed on any of these list serves--- Shove’s Progressive Calendar has had little mention, while Charles Underwood’s “Peace Calendar” has not published anything in spite of a large sign promoting the war in Iraq at the Ford plant gate on Ford Parkway. I think we have a right to ask the question: What gives here?

I think we have to consider the influence that grants from “philanthropic foundations” in Minnesota have had in influencing the organizations that we have come to expect that would stand up and fight for what is right; my opinion is, that silence has been purchased.

Here are some web sites you might want to check out if you think the scenario I am putting forward is far-fetched:

http://www.epa.gov/swerosps/bf/06arc/harborshores.htm

http://www.chicagofed.org/publications/msa/msa12_01.pdf

http://www.abonmarche.com/devcomplete.html

http://www.michigan.gov/deq/0,1607,7-135-3308_3323-163914--,00.html

http://www.cornerstonechamber.com/about/pressroom.taf?do=read&newsid=12 (note the very last item in this press release by the Chamber of Commerce)

Check out how opponents to this kind of development are being treated in Benton Harbor, Michigan:

Published Apr 12, 2007 10:05 PM

The Rev. Edward Pinkney won’t be alone in Benton Harbor, Mich., when he faces the racist power structure that is trying to silence him and his organization, BANCO (Black Autonomy Network of Community Organizations). On March 21, the Rev. Edward Pinkney was convicted by an all-white jury on charges that supporters explain were highly motivated by political struggles taking place in Berrien County, Mich.
Detroit supporters are already organizing bus transportation to fill the courtroom when he is sentenced on May 14.

Rev. Pinkney was accused of five counts of election improprieties during the successful 2005 recall election of Glen Yarbrough, Benton Harbor city commissioner and supporter of the Harbor Shores Development.

In the first trial, a jury with two African-American participants could not reach agreement. Charges included merely having another person’s absentee ballot in his possession. Pinkney admitted giving stamps and labels to people who could not afford to buy stamps to send in their absentee ballots.

A well-known community leader, Rev. Pinkney relentlessly exposes the racist court and economic system oppressing the mostly African-American people of Benton Harbor. The details of his trial and the jury selection prove once again what he has said all along about the unjust and racist treatment of the Benton Harbor people, especially the exclusion of Black jurors.

Wayne Bentley, a Kent County jury commissioner from Grand Rapids, reviewed three years of jury questionnaires from Berrien County where Rev. Pinkney’s trial took place. He found five ways that poor people—who in this racist society are disproportionately people of color—are currently being systematically under-represented on juries in that county.

But what about that Harbor Shores Development?

Harbor Shores is planned to be an upscale housing, retail development, a Jack Nicklaus golf course and more, on land currently owned by the initiator of the $500 million project—the transnational Whirlpool Corporation—and public land on the Lake Michigan shoreline owned by the city of Benton Harbor.

While the project, undoubtedly a big tax write off for Whirlpool, is portrayed as an “anti-poverty program” for the people of Benton Harbor, the city would only receive $1 million for the land and the people of Benton Harbor would receive “training” while being used as the excuse to get tax moneys from the state of Michigan to clean up former industrial sites for the developers.

In much the same way that U.S. “foreign aid” never really helps people in oppressed countries, capitalist “developments” don’t do much for poor communities here, especially Black and Latino communities.

Rev. Pinkney told the truth and tried to stop the capitalist bonanza called Harbor Shores. Could his truth about this racist enterprise have been his “crime”?
******

Could such treatment be in the future of those opposing the plans of the Ford Site Planning Committee… on Election Day the St. Paul Police Department blocked off a section of Ford Parkway up the hill from the Ford Plant with hundreds of people looking on as a dangerous “terrorist suspect” was detained for the “crime” of taking photos without consulting the proper authorities or obtaining permission. The dangerous “terrorist suspect” that the St. Paul Police Department detained for over an hour while blocking the street was me.

Watch my blog for photos:
http://thepodunkblog.blogspot.com/

Any concerned person has to ask: What the hell is going on in this country?

Really, do two thousand working people have to give up their jobs so Ford can stuff its corporate coffers even more?

Minnesota legislators were very eager to offer the Ford Motor Company all kinds of handouts in order to keep the production in the Twin Cities, however, have politicians and Ford Motor Company reached an even more lucrative deal for Ford that we haven’t been told about? I think this question needs to be asked.

*****

The New Suburban Poverty
By Eyal Press
The Nation
23 April 2007 Issue

Rockingham County, North Carolina, has never been known for its opulence, but until recently most residents would not have hesitated to describe it as comfortably middle class. For several decades the county, a rectangular block of land in the north central part of the state, owed its prosperity to textile mills and tobacco plants, industries that weren't always friendly to unions but that nevertheless furnished the local workforce with jobs that paid enough to raise a family and buy a nice house somewhere.

Among those to do so was Johnny Price, a 44-year-old African-American who lives in a ranch house with green shutters on a street called Sparrow in a leafy residential subdivision on the outskirts of the town of Eden. Two towering oak trees dominate Price's front lawn. In his driveway sits a navy blue station wagon. By the standards of some newly built suburbs, the setup is modest, but for Price, the youngest of ten children whose father died when he was 6 and whose mother worked as a domestic servant, it's a testament to the rewards of hard work and perseverance, values he's tried to instill in his teenage son and daughter, who have lived with him since he and his wife divorced. Lately this has gotten more challenging. A year ago Price lost the job he'd held for nineteen years in company-wide layoffs at Unified, a textile manufacturer. He's now struggling to make do on $1,168 in monthly unemployment benefits and, like many people in Rockingham County, which has been ravaged by plant closings in recent years, wondering how long he'll be able to continue paying his mortgage.

Stories of downward mobility in America's suburbs have not exactly cluttered the headlines over the past decade. Gated communities of dream homes, mansions ringed by man-made lakes and glass-cube office parks: These are the images typically evoked by the posh, supersized subdivisions built during the 1990s technology boom. Low-wage jobs, houses under foreclosure, families unable to afford food and medical care are not. But venture beyond the city limits of any major metropolitan area today, and you will encounter these things, in forms less concentrated - and therefore less visible - than in the more blighted pockets of our cities perhaps, but with growing frequency all the same. In the three counties surrounding Greensboro, North Carolina, the city half an hour south of where Johnny Price lives, the poverty rate has surged in recent years. It now stands at 14.4 percent, only slightly below the level in New Orleans.

Greensboro, it turns out, is not alone. Last December the Brookings Institution published a report showing that from Las Vegas to Boise to Houston, suburban poverty has been growing over the past seven years, in some places slowly, in others by as much as 33 percent. "The enduring social and fiscal challenges for cities that stem from high poverty are increasingly shared by their suburbs," the report concludes. It's a problem some may assume is confined to the ragged fringes of so-called "inner ring" suburbs that directly border cities, places where the housing stock is older and from which many wealthier residents long ago departed. But this isn't the case. "Overall ... first suburbs did not bear the brunt of increasing suburban poverty in the early 2000s," notes the Brookings report, which found that economic distress has spread to "second-tier suburbs and 'exurbs'" as well.

The result is a historic milestone that has gone strangely ignored: For the first time ever, more poor Americans live in the suburbs than in all our cities combined.

One reason this shift may not have sunk into public consciousness is that for as long as suburbs have existed, Americans have tended to envision them as pristine sanctuaries where people go to escape brushing shoulders with the poor. The most familiar historical example - much lamented by a generation of progressives who came to associate the migration to suburbs with racial backlash and urban decline - is the mass exodus of middle-class white ethnics from the nation's central cities, which accelerated in the wake of the riots and social unrest of the 1960s. In more recent years, it's often assumed, the forces fueling the growth of suburbs have only made things worse - the social landscape more segregated, the sprawl more extreme, the gap increasingly vast between people who rarely set foot in cities and those who rarely leave them.

In fact, however, the gentrification of many urban neighborhoods, from Brooklyn to San Francisco to Washington, has forced many working-class residents out. In a reversal of the classic migration story, many of these displaced residents have fled to the suburbs, lured in part by the growing pool of mostly low-wage jobs there - cleaning homes, mowing lawns, staffing restaurants, strip malls and office plazas. Alan Berube, co-author of the Brookings Institution study, says the "decentralization of low-wage employment" is one of the main factors driving suburban poverty rates up.

In some counties, a lot of those jobs are falling to immigrants, who are increasingly heading straight to the suburbs rather than to cities in search of employment. In his 2004 book On Paradise Drive, David Brooks presents a sunny portrait of the gorgeous mosaic that the influx of foreigners into formerly lily-white subdivisions has wrought. "Now you'll see little Taiwanese girls in the figure-skating clinics, Ukrainian boys learning to pitch," he writes.

What you'll also see are people like the day laborers who gather every morning in the parking lots of the Home Depots in Nassau County, Long Island, where the median family income is $87,558 and the overall poverty rate is fairly low, but where the demand for food stamps has increased by 40 percent since 2003. Although the median hourly wage for the roofing and construction jobs that day laborers land is $10 an hour, many don't see a penny of this: A study last year by researchers at UCLA found that nearly half experience wage theft. A worker from Mexico I spoke with on a frigid day in February said he was owed $400 for some plumbing he'd done recently. Like most of the other men around him, he wore a hooded sweatshirt rather than a coat and cupped his fingers around his mouth to warm his bare hands, proper winter apparel evidently being an unaffordable luxury. Because the work is seasonal and sporadic, few day laborers earn more than $15,000 a year. More than half of those injured on the job don't receive the medical care they need.

Other immigrants on Long Island ply trades whose wages and hours call to mind certain features of urban sweatshops, save that the exploitation, like so much else in suburbia, is more hidden and dispersed. "We did a survey of domestic workers here and found that people were working seventy-hour weeks and getting, on average, $4.03 an hour," said Nadia Marin-Molina, director of an immigrants' rights organization called the Workplace Project, in Nassau County. Not long ago, three workers dropped by her office from a nearby restaurant to report they'd been getting $20 for twelve-hour shifts, well below the minimum wage even after factoring in tips. At a deli in the town center of Garden City, an affluent enclave of sprawling homes and fancy shops just down the road from the Workplace Project's modest headquarters, several others were fired simply for demanding to be paid on the books. Last year, the Workplace Project helped immigrants in Nassau County recuperate $143,849 in back wages, some from contractors who paid them with checks that bounced, others from companies like Popeyes and D'Angelo Pizzeria that didn't compensate them for overtime.

That landing a service job hardly guarantees earning an adequate income would not come as news to former factory workers in North Carolina. Johnny Price is currently enrolled in courses at Rockingham Community College, funded under the Trade Adjustment Act, in the hope of becoming an accountant. He told me there's no way he could keep up with his $700 mortgage payments and support his kids working as a clerk in a place like Wal-Mart, a major employer with two new stores in the area.

Price used to make $15 an hour, with health benefits and vacation days. What he's hoping to avoid is the fate of people like Jodi Wilmouth, whom I met at the Rockingham County Red Cross, which opened a food pantry several years ago in a low-slung brick building in Eden. Wilmouth earns $6.25 an hour as a cashier at a local department store called Belk, which she said is not enough to cover her basic expenses. On the day she dropped by, President Bush was visiting a Caterpillar plant in Peoria, Illinois. He later said that in today's economy "workers are making more money."

Ada Wells, who works at the food pantry, offered a different view. "What we have are the working poor," said Wells, another former textile employee. "When I left my factory in 1999, the lowest-paid workers made $9 an hour, with insurance and vacation days. Now we have people who can't pay their electricity bills on the wages they earn."

There are certain comparative advantages to being poor in a place other than inner-city Cleveland or Detroit. Whatever else he may fear, Price doesn't have to worry about his children growing up on a street strewn with crack vials and gang graffiti - the one he lives on has manicured lawns and driveways with basketball hoops. The peculiar toxicity of urban poverty, many scholars believe, rests in its intense concentration, the welter of enmeshed problems that fuel crime, spiraling dropout rates and an air of hopelessness that leeches into every aspect of neighborhood life.

But the suburbs also have their disadvantages, among them the fact that getting anywhere generally requires a car. There's no public transportation system in most outlying suburban areas, which is why the people who show up at the food pantry at the Red Cross in Rockingham County often carpool to get there, cramming one person each from four or five families into a single vehicle to save gas. Then, too, the newness of suburban poverty means in many towns there's a dearth of social service agencies to offer help. Nearly 7,000 people showed up at the food pantry last year, a sevenfold increase from 2000. "It's overwhelming," said Janna Nowell, the facility's director. The day before I visited, the pantry ran out of food, a problem that's become familiar in many suburban locales. "There's a growing spatial gap between the providers and the people in need," says Alan Berube. "Public hospitals, nutrition assistance programs - most of these things are still overwhelmingly urban. You see small-scale operations in suburbs getting inundated. They just can't deal with the demand."

An even more vexing challenge is finding an affordable place to live, since most of the low-income, subsidized housing in America was built in cities. Where do indigent people in the suburbs go? In North Carolina, among the few options are places like the slate-gray trailer that 62-year-old Barbara Hall now calls home. She used to live in a four-bedroom ranch house with her husband and kids. That was before she got divorced and lost her job. "It's humiliating," says Hall, who has long silver hair, clear blue eyes and a chronic bad back that requires her to take medication she can't currently afford.

There are, of course, more fortunate people in the suburbs whose houses have doubled and tripled in size in recent years - tech workers in the booming area surrounding North Carolina's research triangle, for example. But since 1998, housing foreclosures in North Carolina have nearly tripled.

The trend extends beyond the South - there were 1.2 million foreclosures across the country in 2006, a 42 percent increase from the previous year - and is among the indications that the number of people under economic duress in many suburbs far exceeds the percentage that is officially poor.

Compared with Barbara Hall, who is unemployed and surviving on disability checks, Rosa Melara, who lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburban area adjacent to Washington, is doing well. Melara works in a nail salon and earned $28,000 last year. She also lives in a county with more low-income housing than most suburbs, thanks to inclusionary zoning policies that for decades have required affordable units to be built in large-scale developments. Yet Melara rents a converted garage without heating because most of the apartments and houses in Montgomery County are still well beyond her means. About half the parishioners in the church she attends in suburban Bethesda are facing similar problems, she told me.

I met Melara at another church in neighboring Howard County, also in the Washington-Baltimore corridor and for several years among the wealthiest counties in the United States. Last year a task force on affordable housing appointed by County Executive James Robey warned that "an undeniable gap" exists between the need for low-income housing and its availability in the area, and not only for the poor. Seventy percent of the jobs in the county, including those of entry-level teachers in its celebrated public school system, cops who patrol the streets and firemen who respond to emergencies, pay less than $50,000 a year. Meanwhile, the average single-family house sold for nearly ten times that amount, $485,500, and rents have crept ever higher. The result is that a growing share of the population - public servants, couples starting families, retirees, recent college graduates - can't find affordable places to live, according to the task force: "These are the children and parents of County residents," its report stated, "County teachers and police officers, the waiters and waitresses who serve meals, the Mall workers, the hospital workers, the people who contribute to the quality of life in Howard County in countless ways."

The dilemma is far worse, of course, for the truly indigent, not least because a lot of suburbanites who might be willing to hire them as nannies or to be served by them at restaurants don't necessarily want them as neighbors. In June 2005 authorities in the town of Brookhaven, in Suffolk County, Long Island, launched a series of raids to shut down overcrowded homes in which immigrants lacking other affordable options were renting rooms. County Executive Steve Levy, a Democrat, declared that the evictions were necessary to "preserve suburbia as we know it." At 196 Berkshire Drive, a powder-blue clapboard house that was raided, immigrants protested by setting up tents in the backyard and sleeping outside. Others who were evicted wound up sleeping in the woods on plastic sheets, their belongings stowed under bushes. In a special report on housing on Long Island, Newsday likened the packed, often filthy quarters where many immigrants live - a dozen boarders crammed into a basement flooded with sewage, adults sleeping in the closets of houses on tree-lined streets in nice neighborhoods - to "turn-of-the-century tenements."

Other counties have introduced anti-soliciting laws to drive away day laborers like the ones I met outside the Home Depot in neighboring Nassau County, another sign that being poor in the suburbs comes with the added burden of being made to feel you don't belong. Several of the workers I met told me they've been called "parasites." Some day laborers have had rocks thrown at them. At one point, the Mexican man I spoke with motioned toward a red car that circled by, driven, he said, by a security guard from Staples who patrols the area to make sure he and his fellow laborers stay on the edge of the parking lot, so customers won't be disturbed. In September 2000 two immigrants were picked up by what they thought were contractors, taken to an abandoned warehouse and nearly killed. (They survived by dashing onto the Long Island Expressway.)

Such incidents may be viewed as a product of racism or of something else: a sense of anxiety about the future that extends far beyond the ranks of the poor. "I do think middle-class people here feel squeezed, and if leaders don't offer solutions, they'll look for people to blame," says Workplace Project's Marin-Molina. As in Howard County, evidence of this insecurity is not hard to come by. In 2004 more than 40 percent of Long Island homeowners spent more than one-third of their income (the conventional definition of a "cost burden") on housing, a report published last year by Adelphi University found. In recent years the typical starting job in the region has paid $24,000, far short of the $60,780 the Economic Policy Institute has estimated a family of four would need to cover basic living expenses.

Unravel the thread linking suburbs to prosperity and something else begins to come undone: the story Republicans have told about how people living there, particularly those in the fastest-growing, furthest-outlying communities, are their natural constituents. "Democrats stink in the exurbs" is how conservative columnist Brooks put it some years ago, pointing to the strip-mall zones around Orlando, strong Jeb Bush territory, and to Mesa, Arizona, a booming area east of Phoenix. In these rapidly expanding communities, places where the parking lots of megachurches fill up every Sunday with SUVs, liberals just don't have a clue what matters to people, Brooks implied. In the 2004 election, it appeared he was right: Republicans swept such areas, carrying a startling ninety-seven of the 100 fastest-growing counties in the country. In Democratic circles, panic ensued.

It turned out the panic was premature. In last year's midterm elections the GOP's advantage in the exurbs narrowed considerably. Democrats won 60 percent of the vote in inner suburbs, 55 percent in the next ring and a majority of the overall suburban vote. They would not control either the House or Senate today were it not for these gains.

In part, the shift reflects widespread disillusionment with the war in Iraq. But it may also be a sign that Republicans have become the clueless ones when it comes to decoding the concerns of suburbanites. The GOP's presumed edge with these voters rested on the assumption that new suburban growth centers were filling up with prosperous middle-class professionals who care most about low taxes and being left alone to raise their kids. A lot of suburbs now appear to be filling up with a different social type: stressed-out parents worried about healthcare, college tuition and paying their mortgage. Political scientist Jacob Hacker has referred to such people as "office-park populists," folks who "aren't necessarily buying smash-the-system rants against free trade and immigration ... [but] are skeptical of corporate promises and concerned about their security."

Addressing the concerns of such people is, of course, not necessarily synonymous with tackling the predicament of the suburban poor. (As the raids on immigrants in Nassau County show, suburban populism can cut two ways.) Nor is the party affiliation of low-income suburbanites necessarily so easy to predict. In North Carolina I met numerous people who fumed about the scandalously low minimum wage or about NAFTA - and then told me they were Republicans. Others complained about the exorbitant cost of healthcare - and about how the government is giving it away free to undocumented Mexicans. But still others nodded when asked about John Edwards's assertion that there are two Americas today. "We do have two Americas," said Ada Wells of Rockingham County, "and they don't understand each other." Many suburbanites I spoke with seemed interested in issues - affordable housing, a higher minimum wage, universal health insurance - that progressive Democrats have long argued should be at the center of the party's agenda, and that both Hacker's "office-park populists" and the people who clean those offices for a living have a stake in. Granted, the affluent software engineers flocking to emerging suburbs might still care more about lower taxes. But more than half the people in emerging suburbs don't have a four-year college degree. The African-American population in such places surged by 50 percent in the 1990s. "If you look at emerging suburbs, they're becoming rapidly more diverse," says the Democratic pollster Ruy Teixeira. "And they're full of people who don't make a lot of money."

Beyond altering voting patterns, the dispersal of poverty to the suburbs has the potential to upend a larger idea: that the interests of suburbanites and city dwellers are diametrically opposed. This has been the guiding - if often unspoken - premise driving regional development for decades, one that has played no small part in fueling residential segregation and sprawl. But if cities and suburbs increasingly face many of the same problems, wouldn't it make sense for them to work together?

One proponent of this view is David Rusk, former mayor of Albuquerque and a longtime advocate of more equitable regional development. "In order to deal with the problems of poverty and economic decline reaching across cities into many suburbs, you have to get states to lay down some strong directives with regard to balanced regional housing development and some form of regional tax-base sharing," he says. To illustrate why, Rusk cites the case of southern New Jersey, in particular the area surrounding Camden. "This is an area of roughly 1.75 million people, and the ten fastest-growing municipalities, in terms of job creation, are all third-ring suburbs," he says. "They saw the creation of about 42,000 jobs in the 1990s, but the construction of only 1,200 low-income housing units. Meanwhile, the ten areas that were the biggest employment losers saw 25,000 jobs disappear, but 16,000 price-controlled housing units built. It's a mirror opposite of what's needed - where the job supply is growing, there's no affordable workforce housing. Where it's vanishing, it's all piled in."

Rusk has coined a motto that a growing number of advocacy groups and regional leaders are coming to embrace: "If you're good enough to work here, you're good enough to live here." It is with this principle in mind that New Jersey reformers are rallying behind the idea of repealing an unsavory practice known as a Regional Contribution Agreement, or RCA, an innocuous-sounding term for the Machiavellian deals that enable one municipality - typically an affluent, high-growth suburb - to circumvent its obligation to build low-income housing within its boundaries by paying another municipality - typically a poor city desperate for money - to construct the units instead. The not-so-subtle purpose is to enable suburbs to prevent the "wrong" kind of people from moving in. New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine has said he thinks RCAs are detrimental, but he has yet to endorse legislation introduced in the State Senate that would abolish them.

Even if Corzine comes around, it's perhaps naïve to imagine that such practices will altogether cease: The suburbs were created, after all, precisely to erect spatial barriers between rich and poor. This is surely part of the reason new ones keep springing up in ever more remote areas, away from the crime and squalor (read: poor brown and black folk) in urban locales. But it is also a fact that less affluent people are slowly but surely finding their way into suburbs anyway. Jonathan Lange, an organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation, works in two of the wealthiest areas in the country: Maryland's Howard and Montgomery counties. The poverty in both places is "discreet, hard to get your hands on and extremely difficult to organize," he says. Nevertheless, it's there. Not long ago, a pastor Lange knows discovered that there are scores of homeless kids at Oakland Mills, a Howard County high school. Some of the kids sleep in cars, others in cheap motels, the pastor was told, an experience unimaginable to many of their classmates, perhaps, but increasingly emblematic of the suburban population these days.


Alan L. Maki
58891 County Road 13
Warroad, Minnesota 56763
Phone: 218-386-2432
Cell phone: 651-587-5541
E-mail: amaki000@centurytel.net


Check out my blog:

http://thepodunkblog.blogspot.com/

The Grand Rapids Press, Peter Secchia, & Casinos

Peter Secchia, the wealthy Republican Party big-shot, recently wrote an op-ed piece about casinos in the Grand Rapids Press--- a self-professed pro-war, anti-union, racist Republican Party rag. Actually, as it turns out, Secchia did not even write the op-ed piece himself... his friend Conrad Black--- with help from his wife--- penned the op-ed piece.

The op-ed piece was written to try to explain why Peter Secchia has withdrawn his support for opposition to plans by an international casino venture to construct a new casino in Southwest Michigan using the "sovereign" status of the Gun Lake Band to add another property to its already very profitable portfolio.

In the tens of thousands of words that have been published in the Grand Rapids Press about this new casino venture the only subject relating to casinos that has never been written about once is the plight of those workers who will be employed in this new casino venture.

However, irregardless of who actually wrote the op-ed piece, Secchia argues that Grand Rapids, Michigan now needs its own casino in order to raise funds to support just about every public service from the schools and public libraries to the public swimming pools and for fixing the pot-holes in the roads.

The Grand Rapids Press is every bit as interesting as Secchia himself as it is the only newspaper in the United States that can boast of having an editor that worked two part-time jobs at one time... one job as a reporter, the other as an informant for the FBI's "Red Squads." That both Secchia and the Editor of the Grand Rapids Press would continue to ignore the plight of casino workers is nothing new. What is a bit strange is that unions like the UAW would remain silent as a labor-backed governor supports an agreement with another casino operator with plans to build a new casino in Southwest Michigan employing more than 1,800 workers who will go to their poverty wage jobs in a smoke-filled casino without any rights under state or federal labor laws under the most Draconian conditions enforced by a mean and ruthless management team that hides this injustice behind the cover of "sovereignty."

Actually, I am surprised that neither Secchia or the Grand Rapids Press have taken advantage of these "benefits" provided under the guise of "sovereignty" for their own businesses.

I don't know of any other sovereign nations which are allowed to abuse the most elemental, basic and fundamental human rights of working people without strong and vigorous objections.

Ron Gettelfinger and the members of the UAW along with other unions may want to keep in mind that having tens of thousands of workers employed in these casinos under such atrocious and Draconian conditions across Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa serves the same purpose as any union buster's mace and billy club.

Come to think of it, if Secchia, Rich DeVos, Fred Meijers, the Big Three, and the pharmaceutical, chemical, mining, power generating, and forestry companies were adequately taxed to the hilt as they should be, there wouldn't be any problem at all providing an adequate level of public services for all Michigan communities... I guess Secchia's friend Conrad Black once again left out a pertinent point in something emanating from his corrupt little fingers that taint everything he touches... including Secchia's op-ed piece in the Grand Rapids Press.

Actually, there is another thing besides the deplorable conditions that will be awaiting casino workers that has never been mentioned in any of the articles in the Grand Rapids Press... this is the fact that the Grand Rapids Press stands to gain tens of thousands of dollars from advertising revenues promoting this casino.

It is no wonder that Peter Secchia dropped his opposition to the Gun Lake Band's intent to front for Las Vegas mobsters looking to get their clutches on the pay-checks of West Michigan workers through a new casino in Southwest Michigan after attending a Michigan State University football game with the Grand Rapids Press' Op-Ed Page Editor in Chief, Joe Crawford, the son of an auto corporation executive. Had the two families--- Secchia and his wife, and Crawford and his wife--- not been involved in a ghastly rear end collision of the type the media just loves that totaled the car they were so cozy in which made the nightly news, we would never have known of any of this. It is also no coincidence that Secchia and his editor friend were seated with one of the biggest sports bookies from Las Vegas at the Michigan State University football game in East Lansing, Michigan; a bookie who uses casino operations throughout the Midwest to conduct his illegal gambling ring as police agencies including the local police, the state police, and the FBI wring their hands claiming that "sovereignty" prevents their intervention. Secchia and Crawford enjoyed their seats at the game courtesy of this bookie.

As we all know... anytime there is so much money to be made by everyone from mobsters to newspapers, poverty wages and the plight of working people will always be ignored; after all, it is in paying these poverty wages to workers who have no right to organize that fortunes have always been made... the casino industry is not an exception to any other industry; labor creates all wealth, but at every turn only receives a pittance of its creation... this is all just par for the course... I am sure Peter Secchia and his well-heeled country club chums understand this all too well even if Michigan's labor-backed Democratic Party Governor and her legislative colleagues don't... or, maybe they--- like the well-heeled country club crowd--- smell some campaign contributions coming their way?

United Auto Workers Union (UAW) and "Interest Based Bargaining" (IBB)

Working people are having a hard time understanding why, when they voted so overwhelmingly for peace and social justice on November 7, the Democratic Party has not made any legislative progress--- as promised. The failure of the Democrats to deliver has been at the local, state, and federal levels. Not by coincidence union members are wondering why their unions are not taking up struggles to defend their interests during the collective bargaining process and with employers engaged in another round of plant closings after years of concessions have been endured in order to save American jobs in the auto and manufacturing industries... obviously, "concessionary bargaining" did not provide the claimed results; neither will "IBB" which is no more than an extension of the present rotten political process into the collective bargaining arena.

I had the opportunity to discuss this with a group of UAW members who are employed at Bradford-White in Middleville, Michigan a couple weeks ago where a union leadership supported by the national president of the union, Ron Gettlefinger, shoved what is probably the very worst union contract in American history down the throats of the membership in the name of "saving jobs" and "middle-class" status for the union members. The local president, Terry Delp, was quoted as saying, "We are ready to become the poster child of the IBB process." "IBB" stands for "Interest Based Bargaining;" a "bargaining process" that in essence creates a "company union" where management and union officers including union stewards receive their "training" side-by-side with management and supervisors.

For years now, beginning with Walter Reuther, the UAW has been going downhill in accepting concession after concession from managements while employing the same losing tactics in the political arena; tactics which have not improved living standards for the working class nor protected the jobs of members. All this has been done while couched in militant sounding rhetoric as the leadership fails to bring the membership into struggle with the corporations and their political stooges in state and federal governments.

How has this deplorable situation come to be? First it started with Reuther and his gang joining the Big Three automakers in smashing the militant rank-and-file membership in the UAW. Reuther created disunity in the labor movement as he advanced the idea that he would win health care through the collective bargaining process for the membership rather than through a political struggle that would make health care available to all as was being advocated by most of the CIO unions. Universal, national health care was the rallying point for organized labor coming out of World War II and was the focus of the left in the labor movement. Walter's brother, Victor, shortly before his death, acknowledged that the Reuther brothers had done the dirty work for the corporations, the FBI and the CIA in the U.S. and in international labor movement under the guise of appearing to be "progressive." The chickens have now come home to roost on the health care issue; just as they have on concessions, job losses, and plant closings. Reuther bought into the capitalist system--- lock, stock, and barrel; and, every UAW administration since has bought into this losing proposition with the Gettlefinger administration bowing to their corporate masters more than any others before them.

On the one hand we now hear UAW President Gettlefinger talking big about organizing the unorganized; while on the other hand promoting "Interest Based Bargaining" in the workplace and failing to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for destroying the living standards of American workers as the Big Three take the profits they have gained from the exploitation of American workers and now invest these profits overseas as they exploit workers where wages are even cheaper and government services next to nil. Of course, Mr. Gettlefinger does not acknowledge this inherent problem with capitalism because to do so would mean that employees and employers do not share a common interest in just about anything... in fact, I can't think of an area where employers and employees have anything in common.

Workers won't participate in organizing drives in order to participate in the "IBB" process that leaves them with a "contract" at the mercy of management.

The United Auto Workers have been engaged in a collective bargaining process that put forth the notion that employers and employees had a common interest in bargaining long before this "class collaborationist" Interest Based Bargaining was given its present name. Workers and management never have had any common interests.

In taking the UAW in this reactionary direction the leadership--- from Reuther to Gettlefinger--- gave up the very rights to which working people are entitled: the right to public ownership of industries, a socialist concept that Gettlefinger and company, pun intended, are afraid of. Yet, public ownership is the only alternative available to working people in the face of plant closures like what is taking place at the St. Paul, Minnesota Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant... there quite simply is no other solution to keeping these plants open.

What good does it do to engage in collective bargaining where workers give up a good share of their standard of living in return for "labor and environmental sustainability" which are long-term objectives that obviously don't mean anything if the plant closes?

Now the UAW leadership says it is for "universal health care" but is still playing games with "single-payer, universal health care" just like Andy Stern of the SEIU, the AFL-CIO leadership, and Change To Win. Just as those politicians who the UAW has supported with membership dues in getting them elected has been given a pass on single-payer, universal health care, so to does the UAW leadership give the politicians a free pass on plant closings by not holding politicians accountable to put forward Public Ownership, at least in part, as a joint venture with private capital as the only solution to a plant closing. Let us be very frank... those mill, mine, and plant closings that have been halted through partnerships with the Chinese government are in fact Public Ownership ventures with this socialist government.

Public Ownership of industries has worked well for Chinese workers and it will work well for American workers. But, in order to pursue Public Ownership and begin saving American jobs and the U.S. auto industry this will require a well organized left-wing rank-and-file action movement in the UAW and other unions. UAW members will have to take the lead in fighting back against the present intensified corporate drive to destroy the standard of living of American workers.

If any worker wants to know where the present "class collaborationist" leadership that thinks of collective bargaining as "Interest Based Bargaining" and where this process will lead to, I would suggest that UAW members look at the "labor-management" relationship (actually it is a management dictatorship) that has been allowed to develop by organized labor and their politicians in the casino industry where casino workers are employed at poverty wages without any rights in the workplace under state or federal labor laws. Already, the building trades unions are sending their members to work in constructing these casinos with the general contractors enforcing health and safety standards rather than state and federal inspectors.

Let us make no mistake about this relationship that exists in the casino industry. Neither Mr. Gettlefinger nor any of the politicians he bankrolls with membership dues has raised any objection to such Draconian working conditions as state legislators have approved casino operation after operation going into business. In fact, Mr. Gettlefinger's favorite governor--- Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm--- has just approved another casino operation for... guess where?... the Middleville, Michigan area! Not a whimper from this international union president about the lack of rights for 1,800 workers who will be employed in this casino. No doubt some former Bradford-White, Delphi, Ford, and General Motors employees will end up working in this casino as these unemployed autoworkers now make up a large share of casino employees across Michigan... all of whom have no rights nor a voice at work in their places of employment. No doubt, Ford workers from the Twin Cities Assembly Plant will be finding employment under similar circumstances here in Minnesota.

Right now, many auto workers and those who have lost their jobs in the forestry and mining industries go to jobs in these casinos under thee most Draconian working conditions in these smoke-filled casinos across Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Indiana... so much for "labor and sustainability" when it comes to a collective bargaining process where labor is eager, willing, and ready to go along to get along with "Interest Based Bargaining"... all in the interest of the employer. Perhaps Mr. Gettlefinger would like to discuss health conditions in these smoke-filled casinos that his members will find themselves in. So much for bargaining when it come to environmental conditions in the workplace.

No one should find it strange that both Mr. Gettlefinger and the Democratic Party politicians at the local, state, and national levels in his stable refuse to use the term "working class," but rather, choose to use the term "middle class."

Walter Reuther helped Hubert Humphrey and company, again, pun intended, to destroy the real Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party which had no fear of taking up the question of public ownership of major industries including banking, power generating, auto, forestry, and steel. Just as the rank and file movements were destroyed, so too were the political movements created by these rank and file movements destroyed. This is why working people are so powerless today. The Reutherites can talk all they want about the need to defend in the political arena what is won at the bargaining table... in fact, these are nothing more than mere words without any substance much like President Gettlefinfinger trying to shift to the subject or organizing the unorganized as an excuse for not having to come to grips with massive employment terminations and plant closings... the typical crap by which one evades addressing a problem... by focusing attention on another problem in order to avoid one's lack of leadership and direction where it is really needed; the UAW has a miserable record when it comes to organizing the unorganized these past 60 years.

Empowerment of working people requires working people to organize rank and file movements around issues in the workplace and in their communities... issues that come to mind are peace, public ownership, single-payer, universal health care... real collective bargaining with employers and their politicians from a position of strong rank and file movements... on the shop floor, and in local communities.

Working people are paying a terrible price for sitting in silence as Ron Gettlefinger sits with his finger up his ass as Ford and the Big Three close plants and set themselves up for their largest profit orgy in history at the expense of the working class.

Instead of discussing "Interest Based Bargaining" UAW members would be better off talking about whether or not public ownership might be the way to go.

The President of the UAW Local at Bradford-White responded to a spoiled ballot during the vote to endorse "IBB." The spoiled ballot had written across it, "All members of the bargaining committee should hold their heads in shame and resign." The President had the unmitigated gall to suggest that the person who wrote this across his or her ballot should run for President of the local. One-third of the membership, to its credit, voted against this atrocious "IBB" inspired contract which the Local president says will end the "adversarial relationship" between labor and management. Not so ironically, the Local president and members of the bargaining committee invoke the name of Walter Reuther to the IBB process.

If working people are looking for anything to change in the workplace or the political arena without the participation of active rank and file organizations I would encourage these people to think again because the rank and file workers who organized the unions didn't have concepts like "IBB" in their minds at the time; and, contrary to popular belief and false labor history, it wasn't the Reuther brothers who organized the UAW... they simply were opportunists who stepped into the battle just in time to gain control of the union apparatus others had built up... they and their bunch have been tearing the union movement to shreds ever since with those who pay their salaries getting the shaft... It is time to stop making excuses for these opportunists who have more in common with the bosses than with the workers paying their big salaries.

I would like to hear from UAW President Ron Gettlefinger and the Local Leadership of Bradford-White what they see as a solution to plant closings... if not public ownership; then what? If not single-payer, universal health care; then what?

Every time I walk into a casino and see a UAW member wearing a jacket emblazoned with the UAW logo sitting at a slot machine without one iota of concern for the workers employed in these casinos under such Draconian conditions my heart sinks… knowing, that had the UAW stayed the course as advocated by those rank and file activists like Phil Raymond, Wyndham Mortimer, Bob Travis, Bud Simons, and Bill McKie the UAW would be a much different union today, much healthier and more vibrant, and the membership would be active and immersed in the day to day politics and the life of local communities in a way that justice would prevail.

Perhaps someone will pass this blog posting on to President Gettlefinger so he can find out about the real pioneers who built the UAW and the rank and file action they stood for.

Ethics and Morality

This statement was distributed to a group of people who came together to discuss ethics and morality at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Friday, March 23, 2007 in the Hekman Library.


A Question of Ethics and Morality

By: Alan L. Maki, Director of Organizing; Midwest Casino Workers Organizing Council

Contact E-mail: amaki000@centurytel.net

Ethics and morality of income distribution in the casino industry.

The Associated Press circulated a story that appeared in the Grand Rapids Press on Monday, March 19, 2007 [Page B6] which was rewritten from a story in the Kalamazoo Gazette written by Michelle Miron. Chris Knape covers this topic for the Grand Rapids Press. Not once has a union organizer been quoted in the “news” stories.

As everyone is fully aware, many newspaper articles have appeared concerning this Allegan County casino that is in the works which has been shamefully approved by Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm who intentionally refused to address the issue of the rights of casino workers; this “agreement” is now awaiting legislative approval.

To date not one single newspaper article has mentioned the working conditions under which some 1,800 workers will be employed in this casino operation. Everyone is too busy focusing on money and profits.

In fact, these 1,800 casino workers will be employed at poverty wages, without real benefits, without a voice in the workplace, in a smoke-filled casino without any rights under Michigan labor laws, federal labor laws, or the National Labor Relations Act; just like the more than 250,000 casino workers presently employed in the “Native American owned and operated” casinos across the Midwest.

The average casino worker in the Midwest presently makes less than $8,000.00 per year; far from the $40,000.00 figure the news media touts.

The majority of casino workers are women of child-bearing age whose health is most affected by second-hand smoke and for whom this government imposed poverty is a severe hardship while impoverished seniors are also employed. In addition, women casino workers routinely subjected to sexual abuse on the job by casino management personnel have no rights of redress under any laws--- state, federal, or tribal.

These casino operations make money hand over fist twenty four hours a day, three-hundred and sixty-five days a year.

Casino workers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa are being fired left and right as they try to organize into a union to protect their rights.

Workers’ rights are human rights.

That Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, the media, church leaders, casino patrons, and the general public would continue to ignore the plight and rights of casino workers requires an in-depth discussion on ethics and morality of not only income distribution, but, workers’ rights in the casino industry--- including the media and public officials. Obviously, if the general public is not made aware of the truthful facts that these casino workers will have no rights and the overall Draconian conditions of their employment, the general public has no chance to try to influence the Governor and State Legislators; this is a question of ethics & morality; it is also a question of democracy.

Many casino workers have been forced to join the National Guard in order to supplement their incomes and are presently deployed in these immoral, illegal, unjust imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Casino workers are victims of health insurance scams and schemes like AFLACK promoted by casino managements who profit from each individual policy sold to casino workers… AFLACK is hawked by Wayne Newton, along with his quacking white duck on behalf of shysters and racketeers.

Casino workers are dragged into everything from loan sharking and drug dealing to prostitution and illegal gambling operations by casino management personnel who engage in these ventures as a “sideline.”

You have the opportunity to bring this issue involving the rights of casino workers before Michigan Legislators… I urge you to contact your state legislators without delay.

You have the opportunity to open up a direct dialogue on these issues of ethics and morality of income distribution which includes casino workers’ wages/benefits in the casino industry with reporters covering this casino story… Kalamazoo Gazette reporter Michelle Miron can be contacted at: 269-388-2733; Grand Rapids Press reporter Chris Knape can be contacted at: 616-458-8853. For too long the media has not been held accountable by the people… these issues involving the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan together with the rights of working people are but the very tip of the unethical and immoral conduct of the media and “public” officials… we need only look at the way the media and public officials have approached the entire health care mess as they evade any discussion of single-payer, universal health care and socialized health care in our country; not to mention the lies-- unchallenged by the media-- used by Bush to drag our country into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the Democrats have acquiesced.

Something to keep in mind: A good union contract is better than any government anti-poverty program and a whole lot cheaper for tax-payers, too; however, it is just about impossible for casino workers to organize unless casino workers are protected by the same state and federal labor laws and legislation protecting all other workers; the organization of industrial unions in our country bears this out.

The Midwest Casino Workers Organizing Council has placed before casino managements and operators a very basic contract proposal that would only cost the industry four rolls of quarters, per hour, per employee… Anyone who has ever set foot in any casino understands that this is a very modest and legitimate proposal. Any school child understands poverty cannot be eliminated while workers are paid poverty wages. “The market” will not resolve this problem.

I would ask you to keep these issues in mind as you discuss ethics and the morality of income distribution. Please don’t allow another casino to go into operation until the workers who will be employed in this casino are assured that they will be protected by the same rights all other workers are protected under. If Governor Granholm can negotiate a monetary “take” for the state, the Governor and Michigan State Legislators can negotiate these rights for workers into the agreement, also.

The 1,800 workers who will be employed in the Gun Lake tribe casino operation in Allegan County are your fellow human beings who are entitled to the same rights all other workers have; they may be your relatives, friends, neighbors, or displaced auto workers. Don’t let anyone from the media, or any politician or supporter of this casino operation tell you that this issue involving the rights of working people who will be employed in this casino will be “taken care of later.” In fact, more than 250,000 casino workers and those employed in related hospitality industries have not been taken care of “later.” This ethical and moral question requires resolution before this casino deal is approved by the Michigan legislature.

* A bogus issue that frequently surfaces: “sovereignty” of Indian Nations. “Sovereignty” is not a license to deny working people their basic human rights. No nation on earth is entitled to deny working people their rights. The Governor, State Legislators, Tribal governments, and industry must be held accountable when it comes to the rights of casino workers. Anything that obscures the issue of the rights of casino workers is a diversion from ethical and moral standards involving media, public officials, and casino investors, owners & operators as well as being a diversion from the moral question of income distribution. The fact that Governor Granholm negotiated with, and Michigan legislators must approve this casino deal, is proof that “sovereignty” does not exclude the issue of protection of casino workers’ rights--- workers, who, like all other workers, produce the wealth of their industry. Labor produces all wealth; yet, labor receives only a pittance of the wealth it creates.

Health care is a human right

Single-payer, universal health care is the only solution, short of socialized health care, to the present health care mess we are confronted with.

I don't know why it is so hard for the United States Congress and Minnesota legislators to understand this... the rest of the world understands... but, then again, the rest of the world understands that this dirty war in Iraq is wrong, too.

In the past week first we saw the "progressive think tank" headed up by Robert Borasage and Roger Hickey abandon single-payer, universal health care. A few days ago the national leadership of the AFL-CIO refused to support single-payer, universal health care in spite of the mounting movement for single-payer from the rank and file members who pay the dues. Now we have Minnesota's DFL legislators advocating for what would be the most regressive and reactionary health care "plan" in the industrial world.

Here are the facts:

The overwhelming majority of people here in Minnesota and across the nation are for single-payer, universal health care; ask anyone and chances are they will tell you they want what Canadians have been very satisfied with for many years.

Here where I live up in northern Minnesota, the Roseau County Convention of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party voted unanimously for a resolution supporting "no-fee, comprehensive, all-inclusive, single-payer, universal health care" that would be, "publicly funded and publicly administered."

For over four years I fought to get single-payer, universal health care up for debate on the floor of the State Convention of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party. Finally, at this last convention it got to the floor for a vote... the DFL delegates voted by an overwhelming majority to support single-payer, universal health care... 72% of the delegates voted for it. No other health care proposal has ever garnered such overwhelming support from delegates.

Now, along come a couple DFL legislators bought and paid for by the HMO's, the insurance industry, the American Medical Association and they come up with this sham "health care reform" that members of the Minnesota DFL have never even discussed.

Becky Lourey was the first DFL'er considered to be "progressive" who backed away from single-payer. She derives her income from those who profit from health care so this was not surprising; as does DFL'er State Rep. Thomas Huntley. DFL'er Senator Linda Berglin has been playing us all for fools on this issue for a long time. None of these people ever got up before the state convention with the proposal they now want to shove down our throats to protect their friends who make big profits from health care. That Republicans concoct these schemes is not strange in the least.

The same thing goes for the top echelons of the leadership in the AFL-CIO, and Change To Win... many of these people make big bucks from sitting on all kinds of boards over-seeing health and pension funds that are controlled by the insurance industry and Wall Street coupon clippers... and many of these union pension funds are invested in insurance companies.

Working people know what we need and want... we want single-payer, universal health care; many of us would rather we were discussing socialized health care but we were willing to make the compromise and accept single-payer, universal health care.

This present scheme being proposed is only going to make a really bad situation even worse for most people as the doctors, hospitals, HMO's, pharmaceutical, and insurance companies continue to stuff their pockets as they laugh all the way to the bank on their way to the country club and their castles on the North Shore.

They just don't get it; health care is a human right, not another feeding trough to get rich from.

I nominate Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party State Representatives Thomas Huntley and Bernie Lieder for the "Golden Pig" award... does anyone want to second the nomination?

A North American Labor Assembly on Climate Crisis: Building a Global Movement for Clean Energy

Union leaders and activists from around the world will be convening a conference--- A North American Labor Assembly on Climate Crisis: Building a Global Movement for Clean Energy




Click on the title [with the white arrow set in a small orange box] to check it out.

I hope our proposal to save the St. Paul Ford Assembly Plant will be discussed at this conference.

Appeal To Minnesotans For Public Ownership Of The Ford Plant

By:

Alan Maki Of Save Our Bog



And

Christine Frank Of The Climate Crisis Coalition Of The Twin Cities

Christine Frank (on right) with Minnesota State Legislator Bill Hilty and wife Laurie



[Aerial view of St. Paul, Minnesota Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant]



The HISTORY OF THE FORD PLANT

As we are all too painfully aware, Ford’s Twin Cities Assembly Plant is slated to close in 2008. The economic and environmental consequences affect everyone in the state, and for that reason, a concerted effort should be made to keep it open. Yet, city, county and state officials are throwing up their hands and helplessly accepting the situation as a fait accompli. It was the promise of cheap hydroelectric power that prompted Henry Ford to build an automotive assembly plant in St. Paul. The initial dam on the Mississippi River was completed in 1917 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the plant went up in 1924 and a major upgrade was finished on the dam in 1929 for the benefit of the automaker. The St. Paul facility is the oldest Ford plant in operation, and to this day, is still run by renewable hydropower, which is to the benefit of the surrounding community and the natural environment. The onsite availability of high-quality sandstone, making it possible to produce windshield and lamp glass, was another feature that attracted Ford to the area.

The plant first made Model As & Ts. Later, with the advent of World War II, the U.S. witnessed one of the greatest crash militarization programs ever undertaken, and Ford wasted no time in retooling for military production. The plant in St. Paul made T17 armored cars used by the British army and U.S. military police and M8 howitzers, which were light tanks. Local autoworkers also did precision machining on pistons, cam supports and pump gears for Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines. This enabled war profiteer Henry Ford to make money hand over fist. Being blatantly anti-Semitic and pro-fascist, he produced equipment for both the U.S. Army and the German Wehrmacht in his American & European facilities. The main lesson here is that in its 82 years of operation, the local Ford plant has been retooled many times, producing over 20 different model vehicles for peace- and wartime purposes. There is no reason why this cannot be done again for the good of the community.


THE ECONOMIC NECESSITY OF SAVING JOBS

In the face of increased competition from foreign automakers and in the interests of the bottom line, Ford’s president and board of directors have made a conscious decision to divest capital in areas they deem unprofitable and reinvest elsewhere. This is at the cost of 30,000 jobs nationwide. The St. Paul factory is one of the strongest components of what remains of Minnesota’s industrial base.



Its 1,885 hourly & salaried employees, who have given many years of loyal service, along with their families need the jobs, benefits and pensions that have been promised to them. The wages they earn are a vital part of the economy. If the plant closes and they do not have the opportunity to transfer to another Ford facility, they will lose everything. Plus, future generations will never have the chance to work at these good-paying, productive jobs because they will be gone forever. Turning the land over to the highest bidder for development is not the answer either because that will only make a wealthy few richer in the long run. These jobs must be saved to prevent the members of UAW 879 from being thrown onto the scrap heap.


THE ECOLOGICAL NECESSITY OF KEEPING THE FORD PLANT OPEN

With global warming and climate change threatening Earth with ecological disaster, we must take measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in every aspect of our lives. This includes transport. We can no longer afford to get from Point A to B in private automobiles. The vast quantities of materials used and waste stream generated are taxing the planet’s finite resources beyond sustainable limits. With only ten years left to put things right, producing hybrids at this point is not enough. In fact, it is a case of too little, too late. If the automakers had begun manufacturing them in the early ‘70s when carbon dioxide concentrations really spiked, then we might have something to show for it now, but that is not the case.

The use of E85s powered by ethanol are problematic as well. Ethanol is a hydrocarbon whose production wastes grains needed for food and creates air pollutants and whose burning adds to CO2 concentrations. Therefore, we must convert immediately to clean mass transit systems powered by renewable energy. Given its past history, St. Paul’s Ford Plant could easily be retooled for the production of electric train engines and carriages that are driven by green wind & solar power. Just imagine convenient and efficient rail systems criss-crossing the entire country carrying passengers and freight and what an aid that would be to Earth’s ecosystems.

INSTEAD OF THE BOTTOM LINE, LET’S TALK ABOUT THE POLITICS AND ECONOMICS OF WORKERS’ LIVELIHOODS FOR A CHANGE.

PUBLIC OWNERSHIP IS THE ANSWER

The auto-makers and other Carbon Barons are largely to blame for the dilemma we are in. It was they who destroyed the electric street car systems in the early 20th century in order to build more roads, sell more automobiles and burn more fossil fuels. This proves that they do not run their operations with the welfare of the planet or the rest of us in mind. If Ford’s management and stockholders are unwilling to keep the plant open for either clean or dirty transport, then let’s put it under public ownership. It is not unheard of. The Manitoba provincial government took over the Ford tractor factory in Winnipeg in order to prevent its closing. Let’s go them one better by using a green-powered plant to produce environmentally-friendly mass transit for the health of the planet and us human beings. Being some of the most progressive and ecologically-minded union members in the state, the leaders and ranks of UAW 879 would no doubt be proud to work in such a plant and support this campaign.


HOW WILL WE PAY FOR IT?

We should keep in mind that Ford Motor Company has made billions from war profiteering, government bailouts and subsidies and tax breaks. Being granted its own hydroelectric power is a perfect example of the free ride Ford has gotten. That dam, for all practical purposes, belongs to the community and generates 5 mWh of excess electricity that is sold to Xcel for $4 million a year so, in a sense, the operation already helps pay for itself. In order to make money available to purchase the factory, we can end state-funded corporate boondoggles and development schemes that benefit only the rich, demand that less money be spent for war and more for jobs & the environment, tax corporate polluters and halt waste on every level by reducing, reusing and recycling at the point of production.







In fact, there are many creative ways the project could be funded that are financially sound and ecological—including increasing the taconite tax since keeping the St. Paul Ford plant operating will save mining jobs on the Iron Range too.



It is merely a matter of redirecting our priorities and asserting our societal will. So let’s join together to achieve a worthy goal--retool the Ford plant to produce green mass transit and not only save Minnesota jobs but ultimately Earth!

REAL JOBS at REAL LIVING WAGES !

SAVE THE ST. PAUL FORD ASSEMBLY PLANT !

THE SOLUTION IS PUBLIC OWNERSHIP !


*************

A joint venture with the Chinese government should be explored in order to keep the plant open. Joint ventures like this one in Eveleth, Minnesota with the Chinese have been very successful in keeping mine open and saving jobs:



*************

Union members discuss how to save the planet


Author: Barbara Kucera


People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/01/07


ST. PAUL, Minnesota. (PAI) — Saying the future of the planet is at stake, union members and their allies gathered at a Labor and Sustainability Conference here Jan. 19-20 to discuss strategies to address the climate crisis and promote healthy development.



Organizers of the conference included members of United Auto Workers Local 879, who will soon lose their jobs when Ford Motor Co. shuts down its Ranger truck plant in St. Paul. The plant is run on hydroelectric power from the Mississippi River. It’s one of the few green manufacturing facilities in the nation.

Conference events were held in the training center adjacent to the plant and at the Local 879 hall across the street.

The Minnesota conference is just the latest development in what has become a stronger alliance between organized labor and environmental groups in the last decade, where unions push job creation in environmentally friendly ways.

Led by the Steelworkers, unions are pushing a 10-year, $300 billion plan to invest in new U.S. plants to create environmentally friendly products, such as hybrid cars and solar panels. The Apollo Alliance would also bring new high-paying factory jobs to areas of the U.S. hard hit by the loss of 3 million manufacturing jobs — half of them unionized — since 1999. Minnesota workshop topics included proposals for future green manufacturing at the Ford plant, the campaign for zero greenhouse gas emissions, conversion to wind power, effects of climate change on the region and confronting corporate globalization.

The theme of the conference was “a just transition from our present fossil-fuel economy to one that is based on clean, renewable energy,” said Local 879 Health and Safety Director Lynn Hinkle. “This rests on the notion that we can have both a healthy environment and good-paying union jobs in a green economy.”

Author Jack Rasmus, a former union organizer who has done extensive research on global warming, outlined the scope of the crisis in his keynote address. The frozen Arctic Ocean could be completely melted by 2040, and scientists say Greenland is melting twice as fast as previously predicted, Rasmus said. Massive ice melts will cause major climate changes and create a cycle of heavy rainfall in some areas and drought in others.

As sea levels rise, it’s estimated 300 million people will become refugees as coastal cities are submerged around the world. Many species of animals and plants also are threatened by the climate changes.

In addition to the human and environmental cost, global warming would have huge economic cost — as much as 20 percent of the world’s total economic production, or nearly $10 trillion, Rasmus said. That’s more than the economic cost of World Wars I and II and the Great Depression combined, he explained.



While the projections are bleak, the good news is that many people are waking up and starting to act, he added. “The reality is so overwhelming now that the tide has turned” and “there’s a new political phase opening up” in Congress and at state and local levels, Rasmus said.



Unfortunately, proposals in the past GOP-run Congress focused almost entirely on creating incentives for businesses to cut emissions, such as the “cap and trade” approach that lets companies sell environmental “credits” if their production falls below carbon dioxide emission limits, he added. The Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency also favors “cap and trade” plans. That practice, now used in Europe, has done little to reduce emissions because the limits are not stringent enough, Rasmus said.

Barbara Kucera writes for Workday Minnesota.

*************

Ford workers call for ‘green’ jobs

Author: Barbara Kucera


People's Weekly World Newspaper, 03/01/07





ST. PAUL, Minnesota. (PAI) — Minnesota’s United Auto Workers are taking their fight to save jobs at the St. Paul Ford plant to the state Capitol, where proposed legislation would require the company to maintain the facility so it could be used for other manufacturing.

State Sen. Richard Cohen (D), who represents the Highland Park neighborhood where the plant is located, introduced legislation in early February to help deal with the looming closure. He said state Rep. Carlos Mariani (D-St. Paul) is introducing a companion bill in the state House.

The legislation requires Ford Motor Co. to “maintain the plant and related facilities in a saleable condition for at least five years” after operations end. Ford has said it will cease production of Ranger pickup trucks in 2008. Already, one shift has been shut down and nearly half of the approximately 2,000 employees have been laid off.

The looming end of the St. Paul plant is part of Ford’s multibillion-dollar downsizing, which includes other closings nationwide and the decision by at least 30,000 UAW members to take buyouts or early retirement packages.

Plant runs on hydroelectric

But the legislative response is not typical. In other such cases, both in the auto industry and other industries, local officials have tried to keep plants open while manufacturing the same products. That wouldn’t necessarily be the case with the St. Paul Ford plant.

Ford has spurned attempts by UAW Local 879 and local officials to discuss alternative uses of the plant. The facility is unique because it draws its power totally from a hydroelectric plant on the nearby Mississippi River.

‘Shabby treatment’ of workers

Cohen said his legislation was born out of a sense of frustration.
“The UAW members who work at this plant have been treated quite shabbily by the company,” he said. “Whatever respect I’ve had for this company has been lost as this process unfolds.”

Cohen’s bill is similar to one adopted in 2001 when LTV mining closed its Iron Range mining operation in far northern Minnesota.



Keeping the Ford plant “in saleable condition” would require a skeleton crew of workers to operate the hydroelectric plant and a boiler and maintain the exterior of the facility, said Bob Killeen, Local 879 financial secretary. News reports say Ford is in talks to sell the hydroelectric plant. Cohen said he expects legislative action on his proposal within two months, even though hearings have not been set yet.

Local 879 Health and Safety Director Lynn Hinkle has spearheaded the union’s attempt to find other manufacturers that could take over the Ford plant.

Hinkle said the process of forcing Ford to sell the plant to a manufacturer — as opposed to tearing it down and selling the land to developers — will be difficult. But “there are incredible opportunities,” he added. Use of the plant to produce, for example, wind turbines would provide a huge spur to “green” manufacturing throughout the state, he added.

Ecologically friendly manufacturing

Conversion of older closed factories to newer ecologically friendly manufacturing is one plank in the Apollo Alliance energy independence program pushed by the Steelworkers. For example, a historic former steel plant near Pittsburgh now makes turbines for a Spanish-owned windmill firm — and its workers are USW members.

Noted Killeen, “We are committed to maintaining good manufacturing jobs in the city of St. Paul.”

Barb Kucera writes for Workday Minnesota.

*************

Union Members & Environmental Activist Discuss Climate Crisis

by David Jones / February 2007

ST. PAUL, Minn.—A two-day conference here hosted by United Auto Workers Local 879 brought some 200 union members and environmental activists together for a pioneering discussion on the mounting global climate crisis from a working-class perspective.



The Jan. 19-20 Labor and Sustainability Conference began with a keynote session that filled Local 879’s meeting hall, located across from Ford Motor Co.’s Twin Cities Assembly Plant, where the local’s nearly 2000 members work. The meeting was chaired by Phyllis Walker, president of AFSCME Local 3800. Walker is a native of New Orleans, where her mother and sister still live, and has spoken publicly on the catastrophic results of Hurricane Katrina.

Keynote speakers Jack Rasmus, a former union organizer who has done extensive research on global warming, and Bill Onasch, a veteran union leader in both the Minneapolis/St. Paul and Kansas City areas, addressed the heating up of the planet, driven by increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Charles Griffith and Claudette Juska from the Auto Project of the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., also spoke.

The amount of CO2 has doubled in the last 200 years, with most of the growth occurring in recent decades, Rasmus said.



The frozen Artic Ocean could melt completely by 2040, and scientists say Greenland is melting twice as fast as previously predicted. Massive ice melts will cause major climate changes and create a cycle of heavy rainfall in some areas, drought in others.

Saturday’s 10 workshops covered a wide range of topics, including sustainable agriculture, wind power, sustainability in union contracts, the campaign for zero greenhouse gas emissions, and technology conversion for “Green Operation.”



Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1005 President Michelle Sommers spoke on “The Need to Expand Clean Mass Transit,” suggesting conversion of the soon-to-be closed Ford plant to the production of hybrid-fuel buses.

Other workshop speakers with union affiliations included Phil Qualy, director of the United Transportation Union’s Minnesota Legislative Board, Dennis Levendowski from Millwrights Local 548—who reported on the increasing employment opportunities for of building trades workers in construction of wind power generators—Jon Malek, vice-president of United Steel Workers Local 1938 on the Minnesota Iron Range, and Bernie Hesse, Special Projects Organizer for UFCW 789.

Christine Frank, IATSE Local 12, a co-convenor of the conference and writer on environmental issues, spoke on the mounting global climate crisis.

Lynn Hinkle, Health and Safety Director for UAW 879, and a conference co-convenor, welcomed conference participants to the union’s meeting hall and training center, where workshop sessions were held.

The Twin Cities Assembly Plant, which Ford has announced will close permanently in 2008, is justly celebrated for its total reliance on energy from its hydro-electric dam located adjacent to the factory on the Mississippi River. The dam and power station were essentially a gift from the state when Henry Ford began assembly operations at the newly constructed site in 1923.



Ford’s recent decision to close 15 plants, including this state-of-the-art production facility, one of only a few in the industrial world that operate with their own hydro-electric station, has prompted proposals for saving the plant for conversion to green production of environmentally friendly products such as wind-generating turbines and hybrid vehicles.

Christine Frank and environmental activist Alan Maki have authored a widely-circulated proposal for public ownership and operation of the plant in green production. A workshop entitled “Saving the Ford Plant Through Green Manufacturing,” led by Hinkle, addressed the campaign for alternatives.

Increasing awareness of and activity around the global-warming crisis combined with Ford’s abrupt decision to shut the plant and eliminate some 2000 jobs led to the convergence of environmental and union concerns that prompted the conference. In what is apparently one of the first, if not the only, union-initiated convocations to seek to address these matters jointly with a broad range of environmental activists, the conference organizers sought the widest possible participation of the rank and file of both movements.

“Workers have a fundamental human right,” the organizers said, “to remain in their historic communities with a guarantee of no loss of good-paying, union-protected employment. In order to avoid having solutions imposed by others with no sense of obligation to the communities that they impact, labor must develop its own program and solutions than can equitably balance justice for workers with the need to preserve our natural heritage.”

The conference was endorsed by Minnesota State Federation of Labor, the Minneapolis and St Paul central labor councils, and other labor and environmental groups. Buoyed by the positive response to the conference, a continuations committee is in formation to pursue further education and action. More information is available at the conference website: www.laborandsustainability.org/



*************

Labor & Environmental Movements Are Natural Allies

by Bill Onasch / February 2007



The following is the text of prepared remarks to the Labor and Sustainability Conference, held in St Paul, Jan. 19-20. Due to time constraints, the actual oral presentation was somewhat shorter.

Bill Onasch is a retired bus driver, a former vice president of ATU Local 1287 in Kansas City. He represents Midwest Chapters on the Labor Party Interim National Council.

One aspect of the environmental crisis that probably does not get sufficient attention is what became known as urban sprawl.

My hometown of Kansas City is the perfect poster child for this blight. The official metropolitan area encompasses seven counties in two states. The population is a little under two million. We have the most freeway lane miles per capita of any major city in the world.

But business development promoters have expanded this metro definition even further to take in no less than 17 counties, extending as far west as Topeka, Kan., and as far north as St Joseph, Mo. This area is about 150 miles east to west and 100 miles north to south, about the size of Belgium.

While we are among the most extreme examples, we are hardly unique. Most major cities—including the Twin Cities—have gone through a similar process. While the growth of this sprawl has been largely unregulated, it is not unplanned. It is the consequence of conscious decisions made after World War II by those who rule America.

The country was just emerging from more than 15 years of uninterrupted depression or war. There was already a big housing shortage and tremendous pent-up consumer demand when the baby boomers started arriving on the scene in big numbers.

Instead of renovating the somewhat shabby urban cores, as was done in Europe at the time, developers decided to take advantage of relatively cheap land prices to build brand new suburbs. Government-guaranteed VA and FHA loans lured much of the white working class out of the bustling urban cores into brand new single-family houses, where the birds sing and the flowers bloom.

Now what’s wrong with that? It turns out plenty was wrong. That cheap land surrounding the cities used to be where our milk and eggs came from every day, along with much of our fresh fruit and vegetables in season.

Locally produced food has become a boutique industry today. Most items in our grocery stores were transported hundreds, even thousands of miles.

In addition to removing acreage from productive farming, in many cases wetlands were destroyed, leading to a host of new, sometimes deadly problems, such as those described by the Chair [Phyllis Walker, president of AFSCME Local 3800] in the Katrina storm surge in New Orleans.

In many cities, Kansas City included, part of the sales pitch for the new developments was racially motivated. Bank red-lining, and sometimes covenants attached to home deeds, insured that most of the new suburbs were white. Conversely, what remained of the urban core was largely Black.

Most inner cities faced a declining tax base, leading to deterioration of basic services. The Kansas City School District has lost its accreditation.

The fall-out from sprawl has had enormous social and economic, as well as environmental, consequences. Abandoning the established urban infrastructure meant a whole new one had to be created, spanning vast areas with new water, sewer, electrical, telephone, and gas lines.

While the old cities were usually well served by mass transit, a vast new road network had to be built—at taxpayer expense—to access the new housing. No transit service to speak of was expanded to these areas.

It was that factor, not some “American love affair with the car,” that made us car-dependent. Once you were out in the new suburbs, if you didn’t have a car you were marooned.

Most people started spending a good chunk of their lives commuting to work in their cars. Lacking the corner stores that were so abundant in the cities, they became accustomed to driving to the nearest filling station or strip mall just to buy a quart of milk.

There is no group of workers more in touch with the problems of urban sprawl than transit workers. We see all sides of it through the passengers we carry, to the traffic we drive in, to the fight for public funding.

Kansas City has a proud transit heritage. We had the first electric-powered streetcar. We once had an extensive network of streetcar lines, which included many miles of exclusive right of ways. In the 1930s this was supplemented with electric trolley-bus lines.

At its peak, during World War II, the system carried nearly 400,000 passengers a day in a city that at the time had a population of only 400,000. Such a system would cost many billions to replicate today.

Then KC not only got hit by the general trend of postwar sprawl. We were also one of a number of cities targeted by General Motors, who covertly acquired transit systems in order to destroy them. The streetcar and trolley-bus lines were eliminated. They paved over tracks and sold the overhead wires for scrap.

They did this on an even grander scale in Los Angeles. Different forces brought a similar outcome to the Twin Cities and, ultimately, nearly every major city.

In 1969 Congress passed the Urban Mass Transit Act. With the help of federal funding, the failed private transit companies were reorganized into quasi-public bodies. While this saved mass transit from extinction, it recast its role. Instead of a vital, commonly used public service in need of expansion, it was designed to primarily provide bare-bones transportation to those unfortunates without access to a car.

Diverting transportation funds from highways to transit was always like pulling teeth. What funding that was available was usually for big-ticket capital projects—such as building subways or light-rail systems where there was money to be made by construction contractors—while operating funds needed to provide day-to-day service shrank.

In 1992, in response to lost operating-fund assistance, the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority initiated a downsizing strategy that included, for the first time in many years, lay-offs of bus drivers. Some of us approached our local union president and sold him on the idea that we should organize a public fight against the cuts in service.

A Community Outreach Committee was launched that enlisted support from community, student, and environmental groups. Our committee submitted a petition with 8000 signatures protesting the cuts to the Kansas City, Mo., city council, who passed a resolution of support.

In Kansas City, Kan., we bused angry transit users to city council meetings whenever there was any talk of further cuts, and their sometimes rowdy interventions kept the status quo in place for several years. We held rallies and organized community meetings. We published a position paper putting transit in the sprawl crisis context.

We did win some short-term reprieves of service, and put transit on the agenda for discussion. But we didn’t have the political clout to do much more.

Then we heard about an initiative by a most remarkable union leader, the late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union. He had convinced his union to sponsor Labor Party Advocates. We thought a Labor Party sounded like a good idea in general, and we were particularly attracted to the environmental stance LPA was staking out.

ATU Local 1287 became an early endorser of LPA, and activists in our Community Outreach Committee took the initiative in setting up a Kansas City LPA chapter, as well as a Labor Party Transit Club in our local union.

Mazzocchi was generally credited with being the principal leader of the successful drive to get OSHA passed in 1970. He worked with Karen Silkwood, whose life and death as a Kerr-McGee nuclear fuel plant worker was made famous by Meryl Streep’s film portrayal.

Tony also had a long history of collaboration with the broader environmental movement, working closely with figures such as Ralph Nader and Barry Commoner.

Tony had confidence in the working class. He believed that, told the truth and given reasonable options, we generally do the right thing. That’s what encouraged him to take environmental issues to the membership of a union whose bosses were among the top polluters.

It was within the old OCAW, now part of the Steelworkers, that the concept of Just Transition, incorporated from the beginning in the Labor Party program, was initially formulated. Just Transition rejects the counterposition of jobs versus the environment. We want, and believe we can have, good jobs while repairing and reversing the environmental destruction caused by corporate polluters.

Certainly some union jobs—including UAW jobs—would face elimination as we reorganize economic activity to tackle the enormous environmental crisis—above all global warming. The Labor Party approach to Just Transition is to provide retraining to all such displaced workers and to assist them with incomes and benefits to maintain middle-class living standards until they are placed in new suitable work. Nobody will be left behind.

This program would be largely paid for by a tax on corporate polluters—similar to the Super Fund tax used to clean up environmental messes created by irresponsible industries.

Some will say this Just Transition is socialistic pie-in-the-sky that can never be realized. We’d better rally around our employers to save our jobs. Well, let’s look at just one example from history concerning UAW members.

In 1942 all auto production in the USA came to an abrupt and total halt, not to be resumed for nearly four years. Did this lead to disaster for UAW members? Quite the contrary. The numbers in the plants swelled considerably, and there was more overtime available than even the greediest could work.

Those plants were put under government control, and virtually all capital and operating expenses were guaranteed by the federal government. It was a triumph of industrial mobilization.

Of course, in this example, the product was planes, tanks, and jeeps for the war effort. We don’t need such things today. But can’t such plants, along with their workers, be converted to serve a new green economy?

As a matter of fact, one proposal for using the plant across the street being abandoned by Ford is to build clean mass transit vehicles—and we need a lot of those if we are serious about global warming.

The labor movement needs to recognize that environmentalists are not our enemy. Our adversaries are the employers who care nothing about either the environment or our jobs.

The union movement and the environmental movement are in fact a natural fit as allies.

We need to unite to educate, agitate, and organize in our workplaces, campuses, and communities. This conference is a good step in that direction.