Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Roaring Back

Andrew Sullivan wrote:

“I wonder if this attack will be in some ways a reverse Pearl Harbor, when Britain rouses itself to a fuller commitment to the war that was already underway elsewhere, the way America finally threw its full weight behind Britain in 1941. Britain, of course, has already been deeply involved, in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this war has now struck home – in one of the most diverse and liberal and dynamic cities in the world. May the lion roar back.”

I would dearly love to know exactly what this “roaring back” would entail. Britain has already been, as he points out, roaring in Afghanistan. And it has been roaring in Iraq. It has roared in tandem and on command to everything the Bush administration asked of it.

I’m genuinely curious about this. Who should the coalition of the willing attack in retaliation for this? Where should we invade? How do the Brits go about “rousing itself to a fuller committment” … and to what?

They helped us gin up phony evidence to invade Iraq and were with us all the way. They helped us invade Afghanistan to topple the government that supports al Qaeda. They have turned a blind eye to abduction, rendition, imprisonment and torture of suspected terrorists. They support our decision employ the most coldhearted realpolitik imaginable in propping up friendly dictators in places like Uzbekistan and necessary military dictators in Pakistan.

What exactly is the macho, codpiece wielding “roaring back” plan this time? What, pray tell, is our next military move in the global war on terror?

Update: I see that Matt Yglesias is already on this. He quotes Sub-commandante Rich Lowry of the 101st keyboarders:

There should be retaliation. Find a terror camp somewhere and hit it. Terrorists should, for these purposes, be treated as one nation, and all should be held responsible for any one attack.”

I think we are a little bit past that, don’t you? We’ve already held an entire country that had nothing to do with terrorism responsible, invaded it and occupy it today. Simple missile attacks against some unassociated terorist camp sounds positively Clintonian.

No, if our response to terrorism is to continue to try to impress these terrorists with our big swinging machismo we have raised the stakes quite a bit after our little Iraq adventure. It hasn’t worked out very well as a showcase for our Imperial dominance. The only way to up the ante now is to invade a strong military country that had nothing to do with the attacks and attempt to kick their asses to show what will happen if anybody fucks with us. Russia maybe? Maybe that would “send the message” that we are too tough for terrorists to mess with. That is assuming we can do it without fucking it up, of course. Unfortunately, our track record in this regard isn’t so hot.

We might need to rethink the “retaliation” against uninvolved parties plan. It hasn’t exactly been a winner so far.

JohnS in the comments writes:

Here’s a quote from one of Sullivan’s emailers suggesting a fairly reasonable form that the “roaring” could take:

Londoners (Brits) will fight back. That is obvious. Always have always will. One thing I’ve got to disagree with you on is that there will be a push for policy change but not for the reason Galloway and others suggest. Brits will demand that we hand over the calm south to Iraqis and move troops (in particular SAS) to Afghanistan. There are some people in the mountains that we need to settle a score with.

I don’t think anybody could argue with that. Like most traitorous liberal america-haters I’ve always thought it was logical to actually go after the perpetrators instead of locking up cab drivers in cuba and invading other countries for no apparent reason. If Britain decides that they havd to go and finish the job we screwed up in Afghanistan — and pull out of Iraq to do it — I don’t find that unreasonable.

But this whole question reminds me of this interesting little tid-bit from Juan Cole’s recent article in Salon:

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Washington on Sept. 20, 2001, he was alarmed. If Blair had consulted MI6 about the relative merits of the Afghanistan and Iraq options, we can only imagine what well-informed British intelligence officers in Pakistan were cabling London about the dangers of leaving bin Laden and al-Qaida in place while plunging into a potential quagmire in Iraq. Fears that London was a major al-Qaida target would have underlined the risks to the United Kingdom of an “Iraq first” policy in Washington.

Meyer told Vanity Fair, “Blair came with a very strong message — don’t get distracted; the priorities were al-Qaida, Afghanistan, the Taliban.” He must have been terrified that the Bush administration would abandon London to al-Qaida while pursuing the great white whale of Iraq. But he managed to help persuade Bush. Meyer reports, “Bush said, ‘I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.'” Meyer also said, in spring 2004, that it was clear “that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn’t be to discuss smarter sanctions.” In short, Meyer strongly implies that Blair persuaded Bush to make war on al-Qaida in Afghanistan first by promising him British support for a later Iraq campaign.

Sadly, we didn’t actually finish the job in Afghanistan did we? And Blair got punked.

Of course, it’s important to point out that this terrorist attack may have had nothing whatsoever to do with Afghanistan. This genie is out of the bottle and it may very well have been a home grown operation with minimal direction or guidance from the “top brass” of al Qaeda. Which is why we really, really need to shut down the bloodlust right now and start thinking. The fact that this is called a ‘war” does not mean that there is an appropriate military solution. Unfortunately, that may lead to other equally ineffective and toxic solutions.

Ironically, Sullivans’ quote above was (confusingly)in response to an excerpt from this post by Johann Hari. The piece to which he refers is about the fact that the bombs were exploded in arab neighborhoods. Sullivan fails to quote this last part of Hari’s piece and it’s the most important point:

But another fight began yesterday: to defend our civil liberties – and especially those of the decent, democratic Muslim majority – in an age of terror. I headed for the East London Mosque – a few minutes’ walk away from the bomb in Aldgate – to watch afternoon prayers. Chairman Mohammed Bari said, “Only yesterday, we celebrated getting the Olympics for our city and our country. But a terrible thing happened in our country this morning… Whoever has done this is a friend of no-one and certainly not a friend of Muslims. The whole world will be watching us now. We must give a message of peace.” Everybody in attendance agreed; many headed off to the Royal London Hospital to give blood. But they were afraid the message would not get out: several people were expecting attacks on the mosque tonight.

Since the “retaliation” against other countries have not quelled the terrorist danger, as we knew it wouldn’t, I will not be surprised if we begin to see the fighting keyboarders begin looking closer to home.

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Brave People

Londoners are no strangers to terrorism.

London terror attacks of the past 25 years

In the past 25 years London has been rocked by regular attacks, mostly by Irish republican groups but today’s bombing is by far the most bloody with at least 33 people killed and hundreds injured.

The last attack was a car bomb in Ealing Broadway on August 3, 2001. The explosion, blamed on the Real IRA splinter group, caused no fatalities but injured seven people on a street full of restaurants and pubs.

Earlier in the same year, there were three separate attacks by the Real IRA. In mid-April and then early May, two small incendiary devices exploded at exactly the same spot outside a postal depot in Hendon, North London. No one was injured in the first attack but one passer-by was hurt in the second.

A month earlier, a bomb exploded outside the BBC Television Centre in Wood Lane, West London. The device, which was planted inside a black cab, detonated as bomb disposal experts attempted to carry out a controlled explosion. One person suffered minor injuries in the attack and the landmark building was badly damaged.

In September 2000 the Real IRA fired an anti-tank rocket at MI6’s headquarters in Vauxhall Cross, South London, causing damage to the intelligence service building but no injuries.

In the summer of 2000, bomb disposal experts performed two controlled explosions on a device planted on the Tube line near Ealing Broadway underground station. The incident was just a month after an unsuccessful attempt to blow up Hammersmith Bridge.

These attacks were the first by Irish republicans since the IRA renewed its ceasefire in July 1997.

London was not free of terrorism in the intervening years because in May and June of 1999 the capital’s ethnic and gay communities were hit by three nail bomb attacks.

Dozens were injured and three people were killed in the space of two weeks when neo-Nazi extremist David Copeland planted the devices in Brick Lane, Brixton and Soho.

Before the nail bomb attacks, London had not suffered a terrorist incident since the IRA attempted to blow up Hammersmith Bridge for the first time in April 1996.

The bomb contained 32lb of Semtex making it the largest high-explosive device ever planted on the British mainland but only the detonator went off saving possibly hundreds of lives.

Two months earlier, in an incident similar to today’s explosion in Russell Square, Edward O’Brien, a member of the IRA, was killed when the bomb he was transporting exploded prematurely on a bus in the Aldwych in central London. The bus driver, another passenger and eight passers by were hurt in the explosion.

The incident came just a week after the IRA spectacularly ended its ceasefire with a massive bomb attack on Canary Wharf in east London’s Docklands area in February 1996.

Two local newsagents were killed in the attack and more than 100 injured. The bomb caused more than £85 million of damage.

Two years earlier the IRA launched a series of mortar rockets at Heathrow airport. The three separate assults, which occurred within the space of a week, caused widespread disruption but nobody was killed.

In the previous three years, between February 1991 and February 1994 the IRA launched 30 separate attacks in and around London. The most high profile was a mortar attack against Number 10, Downing Street when Prime Minister John Major was in residence. One of the rockets exploded in the garden injuring one person.

The most deadly attack was in April 1992 when a car bomb near the Baltic Exchange in the Financial District killed three people and injured 80 others.

In the 1980s, there were nine IRA attacks on London, the most deadly being the bombing of Harrods in December 1983. Three police officers and three civilians were killed and 90 people injured.

The 1980s also saw two other high-profile terrorist attacks on the capital. In 1984 WPC Yvonne Fletcher was killed and ten people injured after shots were fired from the Libyan People’s Bureau in central London.

WPC Fletcher had been helping control a small demonstration outside the embassy when she received the fatal stomach wound.

Three years earlier six gunmen held 26 people hostage at the Iranian embassy in London. After a six-day standoff, the SAS stormed the building killing five of the hostage takers and arresting one other. All bar three of the captives were freed unharmed. One died and two were injured in the cross-fire.

We need to remember that terrorism wasn’t invented on 9/11. Londoners have been putting up with this sick fear and horror for a long time. They are survivors.

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Thickening

More interesting stuff on Plamegate from TalkLeft and O’Donnell. Both point to one interesting piece of evidence in the court documents that indicates Fitzgerald is actually pursuing a serious crime rather than some sort of “send a message” perjury rap. O’Donnell first gives all the reasons why it’s hard to prove that Rove broke the law and then says this:

In February, Circuit Judge David Tatel joined his colleagues’ order to Cooper and Miller despite his own, very lonely finding that indeed there is a federal privilege for reporters that can shield them from being compelled to testify to grand juries and give up sources. He based his finding on Rule 501 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which authorizes federal courts to develop new privileges “in the light of reason and experience.” Tatel actually found that reason and experience “support recognition of a privilege for reporters’ confidential sources.” But Tatel still ordered Cooper and Miller to testify because he found that the privilege had to give way to “the gravity of the suspected crime.”

Judge Tatel’s opinion has eight blank pages in the middle of it where he discusses the secret information the prosecutor has supplied only to the judges to convince them that the testimony he is demanding is worth sending reporters to jail to get. The gravity of the suspected crime is presumably very well developed in those redacted pages. Later, Tatel refers to “[h]aving carefully scrutinized [the prosecutor’s] voluminous classified filings.”

Some of us have theorized that the prosecutor may have given up the leak case in favor of a perjury case, but Tatel still refers to it simply as a case “which involves the alleged exposure of a covert agent.” Tatel wrote a 41-page opinion in which he seemed eager to make new law — a federal reporters’ shield law — but in the end, he couldn’t bring himself to do it in this particular case. In his final paragraph, he says he “might have” let Cooper and Miller off the hook “[w]ere the leak at issue in this case less harmful to national security.”

Tatel’s colleagues are at least as impressed with the prosecutor’s secret filings as he is. One simply said “Special Counsel’s showing decides the case.”

All the judges who have seen the prosecutor’s secret evidence firmly believe he is pursuing a very serious crime, and they have done everything they can to help him get an indictment.

Talkleft had brought up these documents earlier and pointed to this passage, which I agree is quite telling. Apparently Cooper had at some point used the excuse that he wasn’t culpable because he had exposed the fact that the White House was outing Plame in his article. Here is what Judge Tatel wrote in his concurring opinion:

In essence, seeking protection for sources whose nefariousness he himself exposed, Cooper asks us to protect criminal leaks so that he can write about the crime. The greater public interest lies in preventing the leak to begin with. Had Cooper based his report on leaks about the leaks—say, from a whistleblower who revealed the plot against Wilson—the situation would be different. Because in that case the source would not have revealed the name of a covert agent, but instead revealed the fact that others had done so, the balance of news value and harm would shift in favor of protecting the whistleblower. Yet it appears Cooper relied on the Plame leaks themselves, drawing the inference of sinister motive on his own. Accordingly, his story itself makes the case for punishing the leakers. While requiring Cooper to testify may discourage future leaks, discouraging leaks of this kind is precisely what the public interest requires.

It’s possible that they are only talking about perjury or lying to the FBI a la Martha Stewart. But O’Donnell is right that it’s hard to believe that a judge who is inclined to create a federal shield law would find this case so particularly distasteful that he refuses to use this precedent to do it. That passage above indicates quite clearly that, based upon the evidence he’s seen, the leak itself was criminal.

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Squealer

I think that David Corn may have nailed the Robert Novak conundrum.

That brings me to my best guess of what did happen: Novak told Fitzgerald a story that helps his sources. It went something like this:

Yes, Mr. Fitzgerald, Bush Aide X and Bush Aide Y both told me that Valerie Plame worked at the CIA and that they suspected she had sent Joseph Wilson on his now-infamous trip to Niger where he determined it was highly unlikely that Iraq had been shopping there for uranium to be used in a nuclear weapons program. But neither one of these two fine Americans told me that she was an undercover operative at the CIA. If you will again look at what I wrote, I referred to her as an “Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” I never reported she was in a secret position. In fact, the use of the word “operative”—which I suppose could connote a clandestine position but does not necessarily do so—was mine alone. These sources merely said to me she was employed at the CIA. As a newspaper columnist, I used the most evocative term I could think of at the time. I take full responsibility for that.

And to make everything neat and tidy, Bush Aide X and Bush Aide Y each essentially said the same thing to Fitzgerald:

I heard hallway chatter that Valerie Plame was at the CIA and that she had something to do with Wilson’s trip to Niger. I passed this on to Novak and Time magazine. I was never aware that she was working undercover or that by sharing this gossip I would be disclosing confidential information that identified a covert official. After all, as you know, Mr. Fitzgerald, not every CIA employee is a clandestine official.

Voila. No crime. A thuggish act of political retribution that destroyed a CIA officer’s career and undermined national security, yes. But no crime.

He goes on to then explain why Fitzgerald, who may have seen phone records or heard other testimony that made him suspicious, wanted to “verify” this little scenario with Cooper and Plame who clearly had contact with someone in the white house during this period..

Robert Novak would lie for his sources in a minute. He’s that much of hack. And the thing is, this is exactly what he said on the air shortly after the controversy began. He claimed that it all depends on what the meaning of “operative” is.

What’s interesting here is that Fitzgerald obviously doesn’t believe him.

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The End Of The Rationale

So, we’re fighting the terrorists in Iraq — and London — so we won’t have to fight them here?

I think the flypaper’s lost its stick.

Update: Kevin wishes that the blogosphere could not politicise this for just one day, out of respect for the dead, which I understand. I struggled with whether I should write this post for those very reasons.

But I don’t think we have the luxury of doing that, sadly, because the Bush administration has made exploiting terrorism their primary mode of governance and because of that we continue to see horrific scenes like today. Bush and his spokesmen are wasting no time is spinning this terrible event to their advantage once again.

I would like to see this as simple tit-for-tat political one upsmanship because it would mean that it wasn’t all that important. But Bush’s incompetence IS all that important and we can’t afford to let him crawl over the backs of any more dead people to boost his political fortunes.

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It’s Out There

Arianna has the hot gossip on Plamegate and it’s very intriguing:

Chatter about the Rove story has come to dominate the downtime at the Aspen Institute’s five-day Ideas Festival. Whenever participants are not in sessions, they’re gathering in small groups and dissecting, analyzing, and speculating about the outcome of this surprisingly slow-breaking scandal.

One such discussion took place just after David Gergen had finished a conversation with Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, which has sold 25 million copies in hardback! A cluster of high-powered media insiders quickly switched over to “The Gossip-Driven Reality.” The well-informed suppositions were flying faster than the peloton at the Tour de France. I can tell you what was said, I just can’t tell you who was saying it (Just look at it as an anonymous twist on the HuffPost BozBlog).

According to the players, the key to whether this story has real legs — and whether it will spell the end of Rove — is determining intent. And a key to that is whether there was a meeting at the White House where Rove and Scooter Libby discussed what to do with the information they had gotten from the State Department about Valerie Plame being Joe Wilson’s wife, and her involvement in his being sent on the Niger/yellowcake mission. If it can be proven that such a meeting occurred, then Rove will be in deep trouble — especially if it is established that Rove made three phone calls leaking the info about Plame and her CIA gig… one to Matt Cooper, one to Walter Pincus, and one to Robert Novak.

Other than intent, the other big legal question raised was: will Rove be able to get away with claiming that he did not know Plame was an undercover agent?

We all know what happened after Rove placed those calls. The question is, what will happen now?

I don’t know if Arianna just slipped that in about the State department being the source of the information on Plame, but if that’s considered a known fact among the cogniscenti then we may well be looking at Bolton or one of his Jesse Helmsian minions. And this notion of a meeting between Libby and Rove is also very interesting. I’ll be curious to see if anything more about that emerges as the lid comes off the insider DC gossip, which seems to be happening despite the mainstream media’s apparent wariness. (And lord only knows what Judith Miller’s role in all this is.) Arianna continues:

From the way they’ve acted so far, the mainstream media would rather this scandal just go away (bloggers take note).

Just look at the way Newsweek handled the Rove-outed-Plame story in this week’s edition. The editors obviously knew they had a hot story and could have pushed it hard. Instead, it’s clear that they lawyered it within an inch of its life — a bunch of legal eagles with faint hearts removing any juice and most of the meat from it.

As one of the Aspen wags put it: “Once Newsweek flushed the Koran down the toilet, you can bet they’ll think twenty times before they pull down the handle again.”

On the other hand, Norah O’Donnell is reported to have said today on MSNBC (via The Daou Report):

“This has the potential of being a HUGE scandal in Bush’s second term. This involves several senior members of the White House staff. This case has been on the verge of blowing up for several months now but this story COULD BE HUGE.”

Arianna makes a very good point when she says that bloggers should take note of the fact that the mainstream media seems very uncomfortable with this story. Perhaps it is just because they are gunshy after the Rather and Eason Jordan scalpings and they’ve become confused because this story features them in an unflattering and bewildering light. They aren’t exactly profiles in courage in the best of times.

It is, therefore, a good time for the blogs to keep pushing. I believe that we were part of the reason that the DSMs finally gained some traction — enough to make the administration nervous anyway — and I think we can have an effect on this story as well. Nobody should ever forget that Drudge was fed quite a bit of his information during the Clinton scandals by journalists who were trying to find a way to get the story into the ether so they could say “it’s out there.”

This is a strange case. The administration used the press to spread a smear and is now counting on their integrity to keep quiet. But these very same people set the precedent of funneling gossip and innunedo through alternative media in order to promote scandal and give the media an excuse to report it. Integrity is no longer necessary in order to keep one’s resume respectable. The model they created may just do them in.

One of the things we have to remember is that putting pressure on the White House is an end unto itself. When they are off their game they cannot fuck things up with as much precision. They are already having to deal with a restive right wing — and because of that it is very much to our advantage to keep Karl in the crosshairs. The religious freaks are his babies. I’ve never gotten the impresion that he’s particularly cool under pressure.

More importantly, perhaps, we might just have a remote chance to force this guy’s resignation if the heat becomes too much, regardless of the frog marching fantasy we are all harboring. You never know where these scandals are going to go. They often take on a life of their own. And Arianna draws our attention to one potential pressure point — Scotty:

This is all the more significant because of the role McClellan may eventually play in Rove’s fate. As Newsweek reported and I blogged about, when this story began heating up, McClellan went out of his way to defend Rove — saying that he’d been “assured” that Rove was not involved in the leaking.

“Rove will have no compunction about lying through his teeth to save himself, counting on the fact that Cooper’s e-mails are, apparently, not cut and dried,” one of the group said. And it doesn’t hurt that Rove’s underlings would rather fall on their swords than tell the truth… which, in the Bush White House, is seen as selling out. All of which would leave McClellan to “take one for the team and eat major crow about all the assurances he’d given the press.” Of course, if they continue to avoid asking him about it, he may not even have to do that.

I’ve often said that if you want to kill the snake you have to cut off its head. The Republicans, in my opinion, are a three headed hydra — DeLay, Rove and Norquist. All three of them are being chased by scandal. We should be asking ourselves what the Republicans would be doing if the situation were reversed. I think we know the answer.

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Logline

Joseph Wilson writing over on TPM cafe about Judith Miller’s incarcertaion frames the issue correctly.

It’s about accountability and cover up:

President Bush’s refusal to enforce his own call for full cooperation with the Special Counsel has brought us to this point. Clearly, the conspiracy to cover up the web of lies that underpinned the invasion of Iraq is more important to the White House than coming clean on a serious breach of national security.

The press is masturbating over the Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper issues but this is the way partisans should talk about this debate. This is the story we need to tell every chance we get.

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Syncope For The Devil

This is just weird. When are people going to start asking why the president falls down all the time? It isn’t normal.

Scott confirmed that POTUS collided with a police officer during his bike ride. He was about 45 minutes into his ride, Scott said, when the accident occurred. The officer was in a security detail on the grounds of Gleneagles. The President slid on the paved surface, suffering scrapes on his hands and arms that later required treatment and bandaging by his White House physician. The officer was taken to a local hospital as a precaution, Scott said. The extent of his harm wasn’t immediately clear, although he might have an ankle injury. The president had been riding — speed undetermined — on the road.

Does anyone remember this one from 1999? It’s dangerous to people’s health to be in the vicinity of Captain Klutz:

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican presidential front-runner, sustained minor injuries to his right leg and hip Monday when he dived to avoid a truck trailer that overturned near his jogging path.Bush was treated at the scene and later traveled to New Hampshire for a scheduled campaign swing, said Linda Edwards, Bush’s press secretary.Bush said he felt fine. “If I needed to I could go out and run three miles,” he said after arriving at the Berlin Airport in Milan, N.H.Staff Sgt. Roscoe Hughey, a 39-year-old Texas Department of Public Safety agent who was accompanying Bush on a bicycle, received bruises to his left side, DPS spokeswoman Tela Mange said. He was treated at the Brackenridge Hospital emergency room and released about four hours later, said hospital spokeswoman Stephanie Elsea.Bush was running on the hike-and-bike trail around Town Lake downtown when the accident occurred about 12:06 p.m., according to Ms. Edwards and the Austin Police Department.A truck pulling a dumpster-like trailer was traveling on the street that parallels the jogging trail when it overturned. Debris — including chunks of concrete and wood — were dumped across the jogging path.”I was at the end of a three-mile run when I heard the noise, looked back, saw it start to tip and my instincts were to dive,” Bush said by telephone from New Hampshire.He said he scraped his right leg and hip when he dived behind a bridge support, but was not struck by debris from the truck.”I’ve got a significant strawberry,” Bush said.He said he was pleased to learn that Hughey was not seriously injured.”I’m very lucky and so is the DPS agent. I was very concerned about him,” Bush said.

Or this one:

President Bush took a spill during a Saturday afternoon bike ride on his ranch, suffering bruises and cuts that were visible later on his face just two days before he was to deliver a major prime-time speech on his Iraq policy.

The president was nearing the end of a 17-mile ride on his mountain bike, accompanied by a Secret Service agent, a military aide and his personal physician, Richard Tubb, who treated him at the scene, said White House spokesman Trent Duffy.

And then there was the pretzel.

He scraped himself up again today according to the article so we can probably expect to see another round of this. Am I the only one who thinks it’s downright strange that a president has been scraped up and bruised three separate times in five years?

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

In the post below I criticized the attitude I saw among liberals toward unions on The TPM Labor site. I wish that instead of characterizing the attitudes of the new Yorkers who criticized the stadium deal I had let the posters on the thread speak for themselves:

My question is what have the unions done for me lately? Union membership is waning. Fewer and fewer workers are members of Unions, and I have to question their utility in the modern economy.

A union is certainly useful when you have large numbers of poorly educated and unsophisticated manual laborers who may be subject to economic coercion in the form of employer-determined wages. But what good is a union when the laborers involved are individuals with a bachelors degree or graduate work who do mental work, i.e. not physically taxing work, all day and receive relatively high compensation and benefits?

I’m all for reforming workplace association laws. We need to provide people the freedom to engage in such activities if they see fit. I just don’t think they will.

You should also consider that unions can’t possibly claim to be universally progressive or liberal. A significant portion of union members are Republicans. And unions alone won’t deliver the votes necessary to put Democrats back in the White House or in control in the Senate.

[…]

We aren’t living in the economy of the 1930s or 40s or 50s, or even the 1980s. Our society is different now, and employment often requires more skill than the ability to swing a hammer. In the early part of the 20th century, jobs didn’t demand much more–the labor ‘market’ was broader and employers could easily force down wages. While there are plenty of manual laborers out there still, we must recognize that many college educated workers have the ability to demand more from their employers due to the simple fact that they have more skills and there aren’t as many people who can do that work.

If anything we need to invest in adult education and worker training in order to make more laborers fungible so that they can trade up in employment. Give people the skills necessary to have a better job, and they will make more money.

Why are unions necessary to do that?

[…]

Free Trade facilitates the evolution by applying competitive pressures that force different economies to focus on industries in which they have a comparative advantage. Industries where they lack such an advantage suffer and many people are laid off. But the productivity gains are enormous, and this enhances growth and, in the long run, employment.

Certain workers, however, do loss jobs. Therefore, labor unions oppose free trade. Unions oppose the general will of society in favor of parochial interests. Teacher unions demand tenure for bad teachers and rigid pay structures that discourage our best and brightest from becoming teachers.

I support workers rights to collectively bargain and join unions. But I’m very suspicious of the demands they make of government. And I don’t think you can ride labor to electoral victory without supporting them on thinks like the jets’ stadium, protectionism, and tenure, which I’m unwilling to do.

[…]

What’s the advantage to the community, to the government, to the company itself of unionized labor? Is it true that wages pushed up by union membership will stifle job growth? If not, why? If so, who suffers from this and how can unions work to remedy it? Call this a concession to the capitalist pigs if you like, but that’s the current climate, and it ain’t likely to roll back to the 40’s and 50’s.

[…]

“At the height of their power, unions were unable to match the negotiating power of a non-unionized knowledge worker acting alone, and so the belief that unions are effective at achieving their goals is in doubt.”

[…]

I don’t see, and didn’t hear, any argument for how a progressive or liberal could have supported this stadium project on its merits.

But you know what? The construction unions were solidly behind it, for obvious reasons — their own jobs. They threw their support behind Bloomberg and threatened any pol who wouldn’t go along. And so, you see, these unions were interested in only one thing: their own pockets. Broader progressive politics be damned.

I don’t think this was an isolated incident. At least, my impression of unions is, they often are looking only for what’s in the immediate pecuniary interests of their members, and what’s in the immediate power interests of the union bosses. I don’t think I’m alone in that impression, either. If I’m wrong, I hope that you’ll educate me otherwise, and that’s one of the reasons why I look forward to your joining this blog. But to the extent I’m right, then I think it’s unions who are as much to blame as anyone else for their exclusion — if they can’t see the broader forest rather than the trees of their own pocketbooks, they’re not entitled to be considered part of a broader progressive movement.

You can actually feel the condescension dripping from those voices.

I am, as a general rule, against all these stadium boondoggles and I assume that the Jets deal was as fucked up as they all are. I certainly take the word of New Yorkers like Steve Gilliard that the unions were unhelpful to the community and uninterested in the greater concerns of the residents. It does not, however, surprise me that at certain times there are going to be clashes between unions and other Democrats just as there are clashes between religious folks and secularists or pacifists and hawks, workers and environmentalists. Coalitions sometimes have competing interests. That doesn’t mean that unions aren’t “entitled” to be part of a broader progressive movement.

That attitude is absolutely lethal. Working people often think about their pocketbooks above the broader progressive movement. They have to. They don’t have a lot of money. And if people aren’t “entitled” to be part of the broader progressive movement because they worry about their jobs over other concerns then we have a very serious problem, indeed. The idea that unions’promotion of the “pecuniary interests” of their members somehow makes them greedy is to play right into the hands of WalMart and other corporations that consider cheap labor the backbone of their business plans.

Last year, here in southern California we had a long and painful grocery worker strike. It came about because Wall Street was demanding that the national chains involved lower their labor costs for bigger profits at the same time that WalMart was attempting to move into the area and undercut them. The workers were in danger of losing much of their health care and seeing entry level workers denied much of the job protections and benefits they had for themselves. There weren’t a lot of easy answers.

When the workers went on strike a surprising thing happened. Customers abandoned those stores and shopped in much more expensive ones that were uninvolved with the strike. It cost a little bit of coin to do that and quite a bit of inconvenience. The clerks that we usually saw everyday stocking the produce section were walking picket lines on the sidewalk and we all honked and cheered as we drove past. It went on for several months. But maybe it was because we interact with these folks all the time or that they are middle class workers, but customers actually seemed to see the human side of this union and most of us supported them. And it was a beautiful thing.

Contrary to what some of those posters I quote above seem to think, grocery clerks and hotel maids and construction workers and teachers and cops are not obsolete. They are still quite necessary to civilization, even here in the first world USA, and as long as people have attitudes such as those expressed in that thread, unions are more important than ever.

Furthermore, as I wrote below, political parties need outside institutional support. The republicans very wisely worked the conservative evangelical churches and have turned them into an electoral machine. The K Street lobbyists are more powerful and numerous than ever before, basically turning the government into an arm of big business. If we do not embrace labor, we are sunk. You cannot get out the vote with blogs.

The Republicans have been very successful lately at convincing people that their economic interest lies with the owners and the most important thing that government does is control the culture’s moral climate. That’s awfully convenient for the people who make all the profits isn’t it? But it isn’t actually true and we have been failing, big time, to make the right arguments to convince these people which side their bread is really buttered on. I remember hearing a guy say on Rush one day that he was really rooting for his boss to get a tax cut because that meant he might get a raise. Rush, of the 250 million dollar contract, applauded his good sense. Clearly, we are failing to properly argue for these people’s interests if that is what they are reduced to believing.

Nathan Newman says in his article to which the above comments are linked:

You can talk about a range of issues — whether child care or health care or whatever — and the bottom line is they cost families money. And conservatives have a simple message: they’ll cut your taxes so middle class families can afford more of all of it.

Once upon a time, progressives had an even simpler alternative. Support workers rights to demand higher wages and they’ll have even more money and benefits for everything they need to take care of their families.

I know we are supposed to appeal to people’s better natures and all, but really, that’s only a part of the picture. You also need to offer people a better deal than the other guy. For many working people, unions offer a better deal. For all working people, unions raise the bar on wages, benefits and workplace safety. If we want to win elections we’d better start realizing that.

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Which Side Are You On, Boys?

There’s an interesting internecine debate over onTPM’s Labor Blog about whether the Democrats should actually give a damn about labor. I’m not kidding.

There’s quite a bit of back and forth about “what has labor done for me lately” (presumably besides clean your house, fix your food, build your buildings and raise your kids.) And there’s quite a bit about how labor seems to, you know, challenge the proper role of the meritocracy and what have you.

Why should Democrats support labor? I’ve got one word for you.

Arnold.

If you want to know what happened to Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, it’s that he fucked with the public employees unions and they’ve fucked him back. Hard.

Here’s Arnold’s answer to the challenge:

During the course of the short call one of Schwarzenegger’s media advisors outlined the team’s plan to create a “phenomenon of anger” that would turn voters against employee unions, which have sharply criticized the governor for his budget cuts to education and health care programs.

A representative from Wells Fargo advised the governor’s team to focus its ire on public employee unions to avoid angering labor unions for private industry, and a representative from Associated Builders and Contractors Inc. urged the governor to announce his support for a ballot initiative that would make it harder for unions to use member dues to support legislative lobbying.

These are middle class American workers who have not, contrary to Republican lies, become lazy, fat and opportunistic with their huge salaries that pay oh, 50k a year. These are cops, firemen, nurses and teachers who are trying to work in increasingly difficult circumstances without any hope of ever getting rich. Indeed, many of these people chose their jobs because they actually give a damn. And they tend to support Democrats for a reason — because Democrats support them. You don’t have to have a Phd from MIT to understand how this thing works.

And by the way, this plan of Arnold’s to create a “phenomenon of anger” so far has only driven him further into a ditch. People are angry all right. They’re angry at him.

The change of fortune for Governor Schwarzenegger is broad-based. Perhaps not surprisingly, 83% of Democrats and 88% of Liberals say they are not inclined to support his reelection bid. But solid majorities of non-partisans and other party identifiers (61%), and ideological moderates (60%) now say they are not inclined to support Schwarzenegger’s reelection bid. Close to one quarter (23%) of Republicans, and almost a third of Conservatives (30%), admit they are not inclined to support Schwarzenegger in 2006. Women are more opposed to Schwarzenegger’s reelection than men (63% of women not inclined to support his reelection, 51% of men), and Latinos are strongly opposed as well (72% not inclined to support him).

From what I gathered in the TPM Cafe thread, a lot of new Yorkers are awfully disappointed in labor’s position on the new stadium. Apparently, needing work is just not a good enough reason to inconvenience the residents with traffic and parking problems. It was a slap in the face to the fine liberals who support their tawdry pecuniary concerns and it won’t be soon forgotten. O la dee da.

Maybe Democrats in the blue enclaves (like mine here in LA also) forget what it takes to put together a winning coalition, but somebody obviously needs to remind them, quickly. Labor is the only existing liberal institution that we have that can be mobilized for issues and voting. I love the netroots as much as the next person, but let’s face facts. We’re a long way from being able to rival the evangelical lock step machine that the right has built over the last 25 years. Even the unions are a pale imitation of what they used to be — but let’s not throw the baby out with bath water. The institution of labor unions is one of our best and most useful constituencies. To even contemplate the idea that we should abandon the working class to ivy league Republican blather about meritocrisy and expect workers to care about rich people’s traffic congestion over their own ability to put food on the table is incredibly myopic.

And I won’t even go in to the clear moral obligation we have to fight for those at the bottom end of the income scale — many of whom in places like Los Angeles are gaining a modicum of dignity and financial security through the hard work of unions who are organizing the service industry — the single biggest employer of poor people in this country, many of whom are women and immigrants. (Ask yourself why the restaurant industry is one of the biggest Republican contributors out there.) And interestingly, when they become unionized, they also become politically active. They vote.

No political party can afford to abandon a huge slice of workers because those workers need things that the rich don’t care about. Like financial security, for instance. Republicans are offering them a phony dream and a place in the afterlife. It’s our job to offer them something a little bit more tangible right here on earth.

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