"You see, Obama is running a re-election campaign using Occupy Wall Street’s language. He won’t say the 99% or 1% outright. That would be too divisive, or so the media owned by the 1% say. But the attacks on Bain capital outsourcing and Romney’s secret tax returns are tapping into the volcano of anger that Occupy gave life to. Late last year an official in the AFL-CIO’s national office told me that Romney was their 'dream candidate,' and in April Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn told me that Mitt Romney was 'Mr. 1%.' Unions like SEIU and liberal groups such as MoveOn and Rebuild the Dream carry the water in flogging the message that Romney will be the president of the 1% who will turn the screws even harder on the rest of us.
"That assessment is not untrue. The right would unleash a world of pain on most Americans. But the nature of our endless electoral process, which sucks all the oxygen out of the brain, blinds most Obama supporters to how the Democratic Party is complicit in pushing our politics to the right.
"With close to one third of the population in or on the cusp of poverty, 46 million on food stamps , 51 million uninsured , a 'real' unemployment rate stuck at 15 percent , millions of families doubled up and millions of homes still entering foreclosure, Obama can’t run on his economic record. Sure, much of the fault is the guy before him, but that excuse wears thin after four years. Particularly because Obama rode into office with a congressional super majority and a road paved with political capital.
"But just as Clinton turned Reagan-era extremism into a bipartisan consensus, Obama doubled-down on the 'war on terror,' and endorsed cutting Social Security and Medicare and enacting austerity policies within a year of taking office. Obama thus helped enable the next stage of right-wing extremism that he is now running against.
"So it’s not really ironic that Obama has swiped the language of Occupy, even as his FBI and Homeland Security have made Occupy’s anarchists into Public Enemy #1. That’s how politics work." - Arun Gupta, The 99% Take on the Republican National Convention
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"The Republican vision of the 21st century--one part austerity, one part reactionary social policy, one part latent racial resentment--doesn't seem like a winning gameplan. The fact that Romney has a chance is testament only to the weakness of a neoliberal Obama adminstration." - Bhaskar Sunkara, 10 Planks the GOP Doesn’t Want You To See
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"Trumka still had a tough sell ahead: AFL-CIO’s endorsement of Obama. Many in organized labor fault Obama for opening the attacks on public sector workers. In a famous speech at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 2009, the president called for the getting rid of 'bad teachers'; the next year, he endorsed the mass firing of unionized teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Campaign for America's Future Co-President Bob Borosage has likened Obama's decision to freeze the pay of federal workers to Reagan's devastating 1981 break-up of the air traffic controllers' strike, which opened the door for more demands for cuts from other workers. Most recently, the president signed a bill in February making it more difficult for airline workers to unionize, which resulted in an unprecedented anti-union ruling by a federal district court that blocked 10,000 American Airlines customer service agents from holding an election.
"Moreover, the rally was initially seen by many as a protest of the DNC, a notion that participating unions had attempted to dispel. Union members were upset that the Democrats chose to hold their convention in Charlotte, N.C., a right-to-work state with the lowest union density of any in the country (2.9 percent). North Carolina also has in place a law dating from the Jim-Crow era that denies public employees the right to collectively bargain. The law, which has been condemned by the UN's International Labor Organization, forbids union dues from being voluntarily deducted from public employees' paychecks. Its effect is similar to one of the most controversial provisions of Scott Walker’s anti-union bill, which a federal judge recently ruled unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
"In advance of the DNC, public-sector workers in Charlotte’s United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 150 are campaigning to get Mayor Anthony Foxx to help Charlotte’s public workers gain union representation. The UE says that non-union sanitation workers in Charlotte are already being forced to work dangerous amounts of mandatory overtime in order to prepare for the convention. In contrast, the Republican National Convention is being held in Tampa, Fla., where public employees who are helping put together the convention do have collective bargaining rights." - Mike Elk, At 35,000-Member Rally, AFL-CIO Attempts the Herculean
Barf barf barf.
