In These Times

(Image courtesy IAVA)

By Michelle Chen

The tragedy at Fort Hood may strike Americans as a singular, incomprehensible horror. But the shock of the killings may recenter Americans' perspectives on the quieter challenges that befall military men and women every day, even when they're stateside.

Countless soldiers are returning from the battlefield to a world that seems alien to them, and a hostile economy often impedes their reintegration into civilian life.

According to federal data, unemployment for post-9/11 era veterans in the past year has surged past of the national rate, to over 11 percent.

Despite the military's promises of upward mobility, unexpected hardships pushes many vets into a devastating downard spiral. For some, being back home doesn't mean having one. The Washington Post reports that, according to federal data, “Roughly 131,000 of the nation's 24 million veterans may be homeless on any given night, and about twice as many are homeless each year.”

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Yesterday's rally of rabid "Tea Baggers" denounced health care reform with venomous attacks on President Obama, complete with a prominent sign of dead concentration camp victims likening the plan to Dachau, just the latest sign of a GOP surrendering to its fringe elements. At the same time, the GOP has offered a new so-called alternative health plan that cannot be taken seriously: it continues to allow insurers to deny those with pre-existing conditions and would likely offer insurance to only three million uninsured Americans, leaving 52 million uninsured.

If that's what Republicans are for, yesterday's rally showed just how much extremism is driving what they're against. As David Corn reported in Politics Daily:

The angry folks at the protest -- which attracted several thousand conservatives -- held up signs with messages of hate: "Get the Red Out of the White House," "Waterboard Congress," "Ken-ya Trust Obama?" One called the president a "Traitor to the U.S. Constitution." Another sign showed pictures of dead bodies at the Dachau concentration camp and compared health care reform to the Holocaust. A different placard depicted Obama as Sambo. Yes, Sambo. Another read, "Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds" -- a reference to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory holding that one evil Jewish family has manipulated events around the globe for decades.

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By Leo Gerard, USW international President

Taking candy from a baby: A consortium of Chinese and American companies goes to Washington and announces plans to build a $1.5 billion windmill farm in West Texas using $450 million in U.S. Stimulus funds, which will create 2,330 jobs – 2,000 of them in China.

The baby – Washington — doesn’t cry or whine or spit in the consortium’s face. That’s what’s really wrong with this story.

So accustomed to being bought and sold, Washington simply begins processing forms so it can hand over your tax dollars to create jobs in a turbine factory in the city of Shenyang, China at a subsidy of $193,133 each.

It’s like these bureaucrats live in Wonderland. Or an America where the unemployment rate isn’t 10.2 percent. Or where 40,000 American manufacturing facilities didn’t disappear in the past decade. Or where banks didn’t repossess nearly a quarter million American homes in the past three months.

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By Roger Bybee

The recovery must be here. After all, what more proof is needed than the fact that Goldman Sachs is setting aside $16 billion for bonuses for 2009?

Of course, conditions are not quite so swell at the bottom of the economic pyramid, as unemployment moves past the dreaded 10% level and wage cuts spread throughout the workforce. "[P]ay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression," reports Louis Uchitelle, author of The Disposable American.

Moreover, this trend follows directly after an extended period in which American workers' real wages stood at 18 percent less in 2007 than they were in 1973. And foreclosures are at 10 times their daily rate during the Depression, according to Nomi Prins, author of It Takes a Pillage: Bailouts, Bonuses and Backroom Deals.

Democrats are not offering solid solutions to these huge, systemic problems, even as Wednesday's defeat of Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia indicate that Democrats need to get moving on jobs.

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Breaking News Breaking Down, a film by journalist Mike Walter, explores how journalists are affected by reporting in danger zones like lower Manhattan on 9/11, pictured above.   (Photo courtesy BreakingNewsBreakingDown.com)

By Kari Lydersen

John McCusker was living his dream as a photojournalist covering his beloved and colorful hometown of New Orleans. Then came Hurricane Katrina, which put McCusker in the dual role of victim and journalist, one of the relatively few journalists who understood the city better than the hordes of reporters who soon flocked in from around the world.

He worked tirelessly throughout the storm, part of the team that later won the Pulitzer Prize for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He lost his home, nearly all his belongings and his long-time neighbors, who scattered across the country. During the flooding and immediate aftermath he managed to keep the stress and trauma at bay enough to focus on his job, shooting photos seen around the world.

But as the anniversary of Katrina approached, he couldn’t hold it together any longer. Having struggled to access quality mental healthcare, one day he took two anti-anxiety pill...and woke up in the Orleans Parish prison in shackles.

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By Lindsay Beyerstein

Big news from last week largely overlooked by the mainstream media: The United Steelworkers will join forces with MONDRAGON Internacional, S.A., the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world, to start worker-owned factories in Canada and the United States.

“We see today’s agreement as a historic first step towards making union co-ops a viable business model that can create good jobs, empower workers, and support communities in the United States and Canada,” USW International President Leo W. Gerard said. "We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”

Under the historic agreement, signed October 27, USW and Mondragon will try to integrate collective bargaining with Mondragon's collective practices. The two sides have also pledged to explore new approaches to bargaining in order to encourage worker participation and labor/management cooperation.

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By R.M. Arrieta

As we reported two weeks ago, janitors of SEIU Local 1877 continue to call attention to the need for “green” cleaning standards at Safeway, Lucky’s and Save-Mart supermarkets in Northern California.

The Service Employees International Union has been collecting testimony from workers who say they’ve been affected by the harsh chemicals in the cleaners they use.

In October, Local 1877 proposed that the stores adopt green standards and replace toxic cleaners with environmentally-friendly Green Seal-certified cleaning products, safety training, goggles, masks and gloves to protect workers.

So far, there’s been no movement on the part of supermarkets and their contractors to make the change.

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A Cuban worker prepares tobacco leaves on a tobacco plantation in February 2009 in San Juan y Martinez, Pinar del Rio province, Cuba.   (ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP/Getty Images)

By Akito Yoshikane

Few issues warrant discussion at the United Nations for 18 consecutive years. But that's what happens when a country refuses to scrap a foreign policy relic from the Cold War.

Last week, the General Assembly overwhelmingly voted to condemn the U.S. embargo against Cuba, in what has become an annual rebuke of an antiquated policy criticized for hurting the country's economy and standard of living.

The Cuban-sponsored resolution was approved 187-3—only Israel and Palau joined the United States against the measure, although the Marshall Islands and Micronesia abstained. The resolution, which is not enforceable into law, comes at a time when delegates were optimistic about President Barack Obama's potential to warm relations with the Caribbean nation.

Yet a recent UN report says there has been little progress with the new administration as the embargo continues to hamper Cubans' healthcare and job prospects, hurting working people.

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Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Flor.) listens to Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke testify during a House committee hearing on Capitol Hill on October 1, 2009.   (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

By Roger Bybee

The late Saul Alinsky, the scrappy Chicagoan who translated unionizing methods into a systematic approach to community organizing, often remarked, "A liberal is the kind of guy who leaves the room when an argument turns into a fight."

Alinsky was drawing out the fundamental difference between people willing to express principles and those willing to fight for them. Of course, these days, it is clear that much of the Democratic Party, even after shedding its Dixiecrat wing, does not qualify as liberal, much less a progressive fighting force.

They won't even get into a serious argument, much less a fight with Republicans; as Paul Krugman has pointed out, the Democrats have yet to seriously repudiate and bury trickle-down economics once and for all.

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By Emily Udell

A rule proposed by the federal National Mediation Board Monday could go a long way toward easing the organizing barriers airline and railroad workers face.

If the rule is approved, a majority among votes cast in an election would decide whether workers could join a union. Currently workers in these sectors face elections in which any vote not cast counts as a vote against the union.

The AFL-CIO's Transportation Trades Department asked the NMB, which governs labor relations in the airline and rail industries, to change the election procedures back in September.

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Security staff of the US-owned car parts supplier Molex prevent employees from entering the plant in Villemur-sur-Tarn, southern France, in September 2009.   (REMY GABALDA/AFP/Getty Images)

By David Moberg

French workers who “boss-napped” three managers last April to protest the closing of their American-owned factory tried to take their fight to corporate shareholders in the Chicago suburbs late last week.

But even though they had valid proxies, Molex officials kept them out of the stockholders’ meeting in Lisle, Ill., on Friday. Just the day before, customs officers at O’Hare airport detained and questioned them for more than four hours.

Molex, an electronics company, bought a French auto parts plant in Villemur, France, in 2004. The new U.S. owners took it through a rocky period that brought restructuring and layoffs but no new product lines before they announced in October 2008 that they would close the factory, eliminating 283 jobs.

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Frank Moore, who lives off disability payments, stands in his trailer in May 2009 in Fluker, La. As of May, the state's poverty rate was 19.2%, the second highest rate in the nation behind Mississippi.   (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

By Stephen Franklin

You’re sure we’ve been sliding downhill, steadily downward into greater poverty. But you wonder how much.

Well, we learned from the government in September that median household income, adjusted for inflation, fell 3.6 percent from 2007 to 2008. That decline was the largest one-year drop since the government’s record-keeping began in 1967, according to Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

We also know that the poverty rate, again as reported by the government in September, climbed from 12.5 percent in 2007 to 13.2 percent two years. Again that was a stunning increase and the largest one-year hike in poverty since 1991, the EPI said.

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