The Transit Workers - Which Side Are You On?

Dec 21, 2005

Come all you good workers,
Good news to you I'll tell
Of how the good old union
Has come in here to dwell.

CHORUS:
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

My daddy was a miner,
And I'm a miner's son,
And I'll stick with the union
'Til every battle's won.

They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there.
You'll either be a union man
Or a thug for J. H. Blair.

Oh workers can you stand it?
Oh tell me how you can?
Will you be a lousy scab
Or will you be a man?

Don't scab for the bosses,
Don't listen to their lies.
Us poor folks haven't got a chance
Unless we organize.

CLICK ABOVE TO PLAY BILLY BRAGG'S version.


CLICK ABOVE TO PLAY the orignal WEAVER'S version.

My advice to New Yorkers - get a supply of cotton wadding and stick it in your ears. This will help you resist the onslaught of intense, anti-union, corporate media diatribe to which we are being subjected.


Closed. But a good opportunity for walking and biking and...supporting the just cause of Local 100 and its members.

I refer to the press coverage of what is a just and noble strike by NYC transit workers and their union -- workers who have been beaten down and treated as if they were robotic machines and not the hard-working human beings that they are. They are abused by a truly-selfish and corrupt MTA, which just a year ago was the target of news stories exposing its cynical deceipt and corruption as they foisted a fare increase on New Yorkers based on phony pleas of poverty and justified by the keeping of a secret set of books.

"They are greedy thugs," shriek Billionaire Boss Bloomberg, Prince of Darkness Pataki and King Kong Kalikow. Pathetic. When the likes of MTA-Chair Kalikow, who is a giant landlord, acquired his billions by bilking tenants with exorbitant rents, he's lauded as "Bold! Daring! A good businessman." But workers who want to be treated with dignity and respect and who want to raise their standard of living (not to mention resist the reduction in those standards) are selfish. But what is selfish about resisting cuts to their living standards from the meager levels that were legally acquired in previous contracts? And what is selfish about saying NO to the never-ending give-backs that the MTA demands of its workers and which will be used to set the pattern for the other city workers and indeed, workers throughout the city, state and country? In my dictionary those actions are defined as courage not selfishness.

The fury that pervades the membership of Local 100 is anger born of decades of abuse at the hands of an aristocratic and scornful MTA. The workers, having been pushed to the wall, are saying enough is enough and they're saying it loud and clear. Roger Toussaint and the union leaders are listening to their membership. They've called a strike in the face of unacceptable demands for givebacks by the MTA. A strike is never to be taken lightly as it causes immense pain and suffering to the very workers who are striking as well as to the public. But to cave in to the pressure of the wealthy elite that run this city is to acquiesce to the further decline of organized labor.

Story after story can be told of the very trying conditions these workers toil under. In the December 12th Daily News, columnist Errol Lewis describes such conditions:

The great and growing disconnect between white-collar and blue-collar workers in our town makes it hard for office workers to see, understand or respect what is at stake in this labor standoff. Few riders know, for instance, that transit workers have to ask for a day off 30 days in advance. Back in October, in an annual ritual, some MTA workers slept on cots in bus depots so they could be first on line the next morning to ask for permission to take Thanksgiving off.

Such accumulated humiliations fuel much of the fury leading up to Tuesday's threatened strike. Train operators complain about the fear of driving through tunnels filled with debris; female workers recently went public with descriptions of the rusted, filthy, freezing bathrooms provided for them.

And again in the News today, columnist Juan Gonzalez writes:

There is, of course, never a good time for any strike.

The timing was especially tough for Casiano, who landed his mechanic's job at the MTA after the 1980 transit strike.

On Monday, his doctor broke the news that the cancer in Casiano's spine had spread to his lung. He's already endured months of grueling chemotherapy. Now he faces applying to the MTA for disability.

What happened to this sick worker and to so many other employees at the MTA is as much the reason for this strike as a wage increase, pension or health care benefit.

"Ever since I started missing work for chemo treatments, my supervisor's been accusing me of chronic sick-leave abuse," Casiano said.

Nelson Rivera, shop chairman for the 300 mechanics and car cleaners at 207th St., says Casiano is not the only worker penalized for illness. Another mechanic with 30 years on the job recently had a heart operation.

"When the guy came back to work, the MTA demoted him to security guard instead of giving him light duties," Rivera said. "Since then, he's been disciplined twice and is now facing a possible dismissal in 30 days."

Local 100 President Roger Toussaint has repeatedly complained that the MTA issued a phenomenal 15,000 disciplinary actions against his members last year.

When so many workers are being punished and harassed daily by management, something is deeply wrong with the people at the top of that agency.

This is the ugly era of Bush and Bloomberg with its vicious attacks on working Americans and their attempt to cut every social benefit that Americans have fought for over the years. On the national level, multi-nationals, particularly the oil companies and the hi-tech "defense" contractors, are given free reign. They earn obscene profits derived from illegal wars of domination, loot the Treasury of our tax dollars and would despoil the pristine Alaskan wilderness in a quest for more oil, all while health care and hurricane victims go wanting. The Oil President and his minions, willing servants of those corporations, are curtailing our Constitutional liberties, destroying social programs and sending our youth to fight in wars against people who never threatened our country. Talk about greed! Billions of dollars for Haliburton. But no money for our transit systems or the workers who operate them daily.

We should not be deceived. The fight on the local level is the very same fight between the very same forces. The mogul real-estate developers like Trump and Forest City RATner are having a field day with the Stadium Mayor who serves their interests like a glove fits your hand. They would re-make our city in their image and are turning it into a haven for rich people only - others, keep out!

Viewed in that context, it becomes apparent that this strike is symbolic of much more than simply 38,000 workers protecting their livelihoods and standard of living. Our country is at an important crossroads and the strike is taking place in the middle of the intersection. Progressive forces can still the hand of Bush and we can take the path of democracy and peace. The labor movement is, perhaps, the most important and certainly the strongest and best organized component of that coalition. It is a very important ingredient to stopping the Bush-driven path to fascism, endless war and repression. That is why it so very important for people of good conscience and progressive values to support the strike and this union with every bit of their energy. Now is the time to speak to family, friends and colleagues; to organize petition drives; to urge people to phone and write Bloomberg (tel: 311), Pataki (tel:518-474-7516) and the MTA (tel: 212-878-7274) with angry messages urging them to respect the workers and settle the strike fairly. Please leave your comments with any additional ideas you have. Let's get going!

The NY Times -- Redux

Dec 15, 2005

Apropos of the Times story in my post of yesterday, my friend, Henry Foner, sends me a copy of a letter (unpublished) that he sent to them regarding their editorial on Hugo Chavez, the popular leader of Venezuela and one of Bush's (and, apparently, the Times' as well) new evildoers. It seems that Hugo has angered George II, the Oil President, because, as head of his country's nationalized oil industry, Chavez has been using profits to pay for programs to lift his people out of poverty. Sets a bad example, it seems, for the likes of Exxon and Sunoco.

Here's Henry's letter:

Your editorial, "Hugo Chavez and His Helpers" (Dec. 10) missed the opportunity to condemn Venezuela's president for other terrible misdeeds.

Not only has he, in your words, "been able to use high oil prices to increase funds for popular social programs for the poor, making him electorally unassailable" -- a flagrant misuse of power -- but he also has the unmitigated gall to provide oil at reasonable prices for the poor people of the Bronx.-- an unforgivable act of interference in the internal affairs of another nation, as well as an attempt to upset the preordained order of things.

If the oil companies want to charge skyrocketing prices, who is Chavez to interfere with that right?. Well, what do you expect from an elected president who refuses to yield power when the opposition -- with the covert support of our government -- tried to overthrow him through an ineptly planned and executed coup. On that occasion, your cries of outrage were strangely muted. Is that what is known as "selective outrage?" - Henry Foner


Popularly elected Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez.

Joke Headline of the Day

The front page of today's NY Times

Dec 14, 2005
If this war weren't such a tragedy of human lives lost and a civilization destroyed, it would be the stuff that the Joke of the Day website could use as a daily source of material. Take today's headline in The New York Times. The story, reported straight-faced, deals with the recent revelations that the Iraqi government is rounding up Sunni citizens and imprisoning and torturing them in prisons around the country. That government's police force is apparently being run by militias belonging to various fanatical sects with close ties to Iran. These militias have been summarily rounding-up Sunni men, kidnapped from their houses and communities, jailing, abusing and, perhaps, disappearing them.

The incredible part is that the Bush Administration, which installed this "democracy" in the first place and which controls its every action is going to "inspect", (according to the Times), the Iraqi prisons to deter further incidents of torture. Now just you wait a darned second! This paper wants us to accept at face value that the same bunch responsible for the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo infamies is going to put the kibosh on their Iraqi underlings? Letter to the Editor: Did you mean this to be news or satire?

Each day the war grinds on with fresh revelations of the depravity and brutality of the bunch running our country. It seems the worse things get, the more the corporate-controlled media bows down to distort the truth and provides a cover for their dastardly deeds. The charade that the U.S. stands for freedom and democracy, which both Times and Bush so loudly propound, has long ago been seen by most of the world's people for what it is - propaganda to cover the truth. That truth, plainly stated, is that this country, as the playwright Harold Pinter so aptly said in his Nobel prize acceptance speech last week (buried in a blurb way back in the Times of December 7th), "supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship" over the last 50 years.

The American people, despite the media's attempt to keep the truth from them, are beginning to see through the lies. The truth will eventually prevail. As Dr. Martin Luther Kings, Jr. said, "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant." Let it be so.

P.S. On Hillary

Dec 7, 2005

And by way of an appropriate postscript to my previous post on Hillary The Hawk, here is today's Times editorial regarding her new, more conservative incarnation as she prepares to run for President in 2008.

NY TIMES EDITORIAL December 7, 2005

Senator Clinton, in Pander Mode

Hillary Clinton is co-sponsoring a bill to criminalize the burning of the American flag. Her supporters would characterize this as an attempt to find a middle way between those who believe that flag-burning is constitutionally protected free speech and those who want to ban it, even if it takes a constitutional amendment. Unfortunately, it looks to us more like a simple attempt to have it both ways.

Senator Clinton says she opposes a constitutional amendment to outlaw flag-burning. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that flag-burning was protected by the First Amendment. But her bill, which is sponsored by Senator Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, is clearly intended to put the issue back before the current, more conservative, Supreme Court in hopes of getting a turnaround.

It's hard to see this as anything but pandering - there certainly isn't any urgent need to resolve the issue. Flag-burning hasn't been in fashion since college students used slide rules in math class and went to pay phones at the student union to call their friends. Even then, it was a rarity that certainly never put the nation's security in peril.

The bill attempts to equate flag-burning with cross-burning, which the Supreme Court, in a sensible and carefully considered 2003 decision, said could be prosecuted under certain circumstances as a violation of civil rights law. It's a ridiculous comparison. Burning a cross is a unique act because of its inextricable connection to the Ku Klux Klan and to anti-black violence and intimidation. A black American who wakes up to see a cross burning on the front lawn has every right to feel personally, and physically, threatened. Flag-burning has no such history. It has, in fact, no history of being directed against any target but the government.

Mrs. Clinton says her current position grew out of conversations with veterans groups in New York, and there's no question that many veterans - and, indeed, most Americans - feel deeply offended by the sight of protesters burning the flag. (These days, that sight mainly comes from videos of the Vietnam War era; the senator's staff did not have any immediate examples of actual New York flag-burnings in the recent past.) But the whole point of the First Amendment is to protect expressions of political opinion that a majority of Americans find disturbing or unacceptable. As a lawyer, the senator presumably already knows that

We Won't Support You Hillary While You Support the War!

Dec 7, 2005

It was two tales of the city last night on a dark and cold street on Manhattan's West Side. The wind blew off the Hudson but that didn't deter a small crowd of protesters from turning out at the Hillary Clinton fundraiser held at Crobar, a hip night site just off the Hudson on West 28th Street. On one side of the street, throngs waited in line for hours for a chance to see and listen to former President Bill Clinton expound on the need to reelect his wife as Senator from our state. But on my side of the street, a much smaller group gathered. We wanted to know why, when the majority of the American people are demanding an end to the war in Iraq, our U.S. Senator was supporting the President and the war in vote after vote and, in some respects, outdoing Bush by calling for even more troops to be sent to that debacle.

"Don't support Hillary while she supports the war" was the battle cry and there's reason to suspect that it had a dramatic impact on at least some of the attendees lined up across the street. A few even came over to congratulate us and express their support for upping the pressure on Clinton who typically portrays herself as a moderate but who, on many issues, has moved to the right as she contemplates a run for the Presidency in 2008.

Recently, she has softened her support for the war as the protests have mounted and polls have shown a marked shift in public opinion against Bush and his war. That just proves the point the old adage that "the people must lead and the leaders will follow." Hillary Clinton has disappointed too many of her constituents on this question. Cindy Sheehan eloquently articulated that disappointment when she said at Brooklyn Parents for Peace's Peace Fair, "I can't support a candidate who doesn't oppose this war."


"I cannot support a candidate who doesn't oppose this war."

The Clintons seem to believe that ignoring the question of Iraq will make it go away. A recent questionaire/fund-raising letter, sent out by the Clinton campaign, asked responders to check off a list of their major concerns. Amazingly, the word "Iraq" didn't make it onto the list.

Typical of the Clinton waffling on the issue are these pearls which Clinton said to CNN in May, "You know, I am not one who feels comfortable setting exit strategies. We don’t know what we’re exiting from. We don’t know what the situation is moving toward…. How do we know where we’re headed, when we don’t know where we are?"

After meeting recently with Cindy Sheehan, Clinton told the Village Voice, "My bottom line is that I don’t want their sons to die in vain." (Sound familiar?) And, trying to stake out a nuanced, pro-war line, she added, "I happen to think that fighting for freedom is a noble cause. There are lots of things wrong with how Bush did it. I believe we should have gone through with the inspection process and acted through the U.N. But I believe that standing up against someone as dangerous as Saddam was a good goal.”

Some believe that putting pressure on Clinton is wrong because it is attacking the wrong foe - we should be keeping the fire on Bush, the main culprit, they say. But in my view and the view of many others, the Democratic party, in general, and the party leadership (under the aegis of the Clintons), in particular, are complicit in this war. By giving Bush the votes for an illegal war based on lies and distortions (we and the world knew they were lies in 2003; how come the Dems couldn't or wouldn't see that?) and maintaining that support for the last few years; by remaining totally silent in the face of all the increasing evidence, they have cast themselves as junior partners in the crime. It is an oft-stated question not only on the talk shows but in the streets as well, "Where are the Democrats?" This silent complicity must be pointed out to the people who desperately want to see leadership on exiting Iraq. Not mealy-mouthed waffling, but leadership and articulate oppositon to a war that has killed or maimed tens of thousands of our youth, destroyed the lives and homes of thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqis and turned their homeland into a living hell of bombs, bullets, torture chambers and civil strife. Without pressure on the Democrats, they will simpy continue on their safe and silent road to political suicide and the Republicans will be able to continue their dastardly deeds.

That's why some 50 of us stood in the cold last night outside the Crobar. And more and more will pursue that option (just as we have marched time and again against Bush and his war). We want to know - "Hillary, are you listening?" And we will tell her, loudly and clearly, that we cannot support her while she supports this war.


Outside Crobar last night, dozens protested Hillary's pro-war stand.


Many groups participated - The Raging Grannies, Code Pink, Brooklyn Parents For Peace and Brooklyn Peace Action.


Big ears....to help Hillary listen.