Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Let's be specific: defeat the re election bids of, say, the weakest, most venal 5 of the CAFTA 15.

How?

By fully funding "peace and jobs" independent runs in these five districts. Split the bastards' base. Run a charismatic martyr, maybe a long haired peace and foliage gal, or a minority bobcat, or a lunchpailer. Run them straight onto the ballot with all the money you've got and find celebrities to be their campaign managers. How hard can it be to find five Hollywood or sports ex-spotlight hounds willing to set up camp in these districts, for a few months of national attention?

Nothing constructive about this at all, of course -- that's the beauty of it. It should be seen as pure punishment: "Regardez, all you big-D whores out there... this may be your fate next time. Wise up or we're coming for ya."

Real political short run consequence on the downside: Zero. More beauty. This is not a spoiler op. The Dems, short of a second '29 in '06, won't retake control of the House anyway. A slightly nearer miss is no better then a mile, with all those yellow dogs on the big-D side of the looking glass anyway.

Major consideration here: don't fall for the age-old Gomper-room BS getting batted around these days by little Jimbo Hoffa, to wit, that organized labor ought to "reward Republican friends." Skiing down that crud slide is nothing but folly. No: we must focus our limited funds where it can have maximum effect, croaking a few of our fondest, nearest enemies.

In case anybody doesn't remember the CAFTA 15, here they are, with my picks for the initial carthago-delenda list in boldface:

Melissa Bean, Illinois (8th District):
Jim Cooper, Tennessee (5th District);
Norm Dicks, Washington (6th District);
Henry Cuellar, Texas (28th District);
Ruben Hinojosa, Texas (15th District);
William Jefferson, Louisiana (2nd District);
Jim Matheson, Utah (2nd District);
Gregory Meeks, New York (6th District);
Dennis Moore, Kansas (3rd District);
Jim Moran, Virginia (8th District);
Solomon Ortiz, Texas (27th District);
Ike Skelton, Missouri (4th District);
Vic Snyder, Arkansas (2nd District);
John Tanner, Tennessee (8th District);
   and... and.. and... egregious beyond the power of words to express:
Edolphus Towns, New York (10th District).

Check this out:

The AFL-CIO is spending $40 million in 2006 and building a massive, sophisticated, voter contact and turnout program to get pro-worker candidates elected to the Senate, House and state-level offices and as governor. Some ask: Why not put all that time, energy and money into organizing drives, to increase the size, and therefore power, of our unions?

...unions must participate in politics and work to elect legislators who will protect our freedom to form unions. We cannot believe in the false dichotomy of organize or politicize.

Let me say if your idea of class politics starts and stops with feeding one or the other head of Orthrus -- i.e. playing two-party politics -- for my buck, you suck, chief.

Tot up the money spills of our august house of labor and you get this lame donk echo.

Like the pwog dance on the supreme court's evil clout, that tewwible destroyer of civil liberty, jobsters face the national labor relations board, the executioner of toilers' dreams, destroyer of all organizing abilities, etc. Inference: elect donks today and they'll appoint yer pals to these key star chamber seats.

Lesser claims:

We pay to help the people of our sovereign states choose gubners that let public workers strike. We also pay candidates that will do their level damnedest to repeal all anti-union state laws. Bottom line: we can buy you a gubmint, with your dues, that will make it 1937 all over again.

Sum up: Forty million dues dollars for Rahm Emanuel and St Hill.

Down with the Sweeney machine! Movement politics si! Party politics no! -- and organizing a job site action -- el supremo!

Easily forgotten is how close 15 of the Republicans’ victories were in 1994. Had Democrats in key districts won a combined 52,000 more votes, there would have been no “Speaker Gingrich.”

... You can be sure that on Nov. 8 there will be another list of races decided by such small margins. It’s up to us whether those names will deliver change or more of the same.

Hacker's knees knock rather disappointingly on single-payer health -- because the unions are against it! Instead he's for another hodgepodge combo, another turkey rope that confriggulates a higher super-shuffle biz-fed partnership.

What a fuzzlement, what a waste, what a union-backed pile of horse apples.

Hey I'm union all the way down to my deepest declivity, but it's pure piecardery for unions to stay in the "better fringe benefit" biz.

In fact, I contend it's precisely these fat-cat "look for the union contract difference" meows that isolates the shrinking unionized high-wage kulaks from the growing mass of us Wal-Mart clipped "restock and smile" type jobblers.

Where have you gone, Sidney, where have you gone...?

Item one:

http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/11/10/report-fair-trade-a-winning-issue-nov-7

The effect of "free trade baiting" on Dem runs in socially conservative districts with job-loss hot spots. Example first among equals:

NC Demmer Heath Fooler, running hard as a "fair trader", whips job-exportin' CAFTA scumsuckin' repug stooge.

Item two:

http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/11/22/new-congress-to-bring-fresh-wind-to-trade-issues/

More on fair trade and this November's ballot box. Notice, in this piece the farmer is thrown in with the factory worker, in typical pie-head cross-back lobby-scratchin' mishmash, quoting a Michigan pie chief in a think column for the Detroit News: "For the manufacturing worker it's "will my job be outsourced next?" For the farmer it's "will another trade agreement put yet another crop into worldwide price-cutting competition?" And for the rural small business person the worry is "when my customers suffer, how long before I am next?" My takeaway: support the agri lobby's phoney Farmer Brown front for expediency max, and widening out to the whole job nation.

What is to be done? According to the AFL, that is:

• Slow President Bush's rush to negotiate new bilateral free trade agreements.
• Review all current agreements.
• Reform the current trade regime so that we can renew our commitment to participating in a just global economy, one that works for working families and not just to boost the profits and power of multinational corporations

Item three :

http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/11/21/afl-cio-calls-on-bush-to-shut-down-school-of-americas/

My favorite -- a spotlight on heros aqnd martyrs records the bold participation of a big face pie-card at an actual demostration somewhere not too far from the school for Latin American torture.

Why yer fave, Paine?

The post -- for balance, one suspects -- goes on to cite a "blistering" report on the academiy of manslaughter by nothing less then the brass hat school's old friend, and big labor's own winsome cold war mastodon, the AFL-CIO "Solidarity Center." Yes, that little shop of dirty foreign tricks, the nexus of nasty itself for all AFL-CIA class-backward interventions since Stalin wore argyles.

Ah, life's little ironies.

Here's a specimen -- it's the steel and rubber union prez foaming at the mouth:

...there is no better evidence than at Goodyear, where 15,000 of our members have been forced out on strike by a company that has announced it plans to increase its tire imports ten-fold from Communist China, where workers are routinely oppressed.

Our manufacturers here at home are finding it harder and harder to compete against an economic system in China that is built on oppressed workers, subsidized inputs and capital, stolen intellectual property and other unfair advantages.

But here's the best:

China also keeps its currency value artificially low, making its exports cheaper and imports more expensive.

This boughten fool has turned reality on its head, and let his members' real enemies right off the hook. Sure, we need to stop the job export boom -- but we need to put the blame where it belongs, and keep it there.

Amidst all the hugger-mugger by both branches of organized labor, where's the shorter job week movement? Are the so overstuffed with the heath-bennie trip they can't recall their greatest triumph?

Knocking off the axiom that Saturday is job day number six, like the eight-hour premium barrier, are class wide jobbler progress. Raising the minimum wage and tying it to an index, hey, that's grand, but it don't cut to the quick, brothers and sisters -- hour Maxie is wage Minnie's hot fraternal twin.

http://counterpunch.com/ely01262007.html

It's about Smithfield Food's full-court union bust, complete with undoc raids and all the shapes and sizes of class struggle in post 9/11 America, and its epicenter is right in Johnnie's home state:

On Wednesday, January 24, agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, (ICE) staged a raid of the largest pork processing plant in the world -- Smithfield Food's massive operation in Tar Heel, North Carolina. This plant has been the site of intense struggle throughout the last year, with over a thousand workers striking in November against the firing of undocumented workers. According to the first press reports, this raid arrested 21 workers -- in a plant where the federal authorities are demanding the firing of over 600 workers for being undocumented.

http://www.aflcio.org/joinaunion/voiceatwork/efca/

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/02/19/activists-heat-up-for-employee-free-choice-act-week-of-action

As members of Congress return home for the Presidents Day recess, working families are launching a Week of Action to push for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

• Establishing stronger penalties for violation of employee rights when workers seek to form a union and during first-contract negotiations...
• Providing mediation and arbitration for first-contract disputes....
• Allowing employees to form unions by signing cards authorizing union representation...

The road ahead to "job choice" will only shorten when these union cadre get out of the lobby and over to the job site. Only when they themselves are willing to get their own fat asses arrested for doin' a little direct de facto enforcement of workers' rights, will the tower boys take notice and the public respond.

Job sites are like lunch counters and front seats on the bus -- you got to occupy 'em and not budge, if you expect to have any chance of making them yours by right.

In this light: mock dKos update:

"Hoo hoo hoorah, all but two Democrats in the House voted for card check class struggle." Yes, brothers and sisters of the great unorganized, the Employee Free Choice Act passed the House with flying blue colors yesterday:

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/03/01/house-passes-employee-free-choice-act/

and will now sail into a full and final stymie as it hits the big check -- namely, the fine old aforementioned filibuster

Mr Peabody observes: "Yes, Sherman -- the cliff-hanging drama and ultimate defeat of card-check unionization -- 'twill be another instance of the grace and balance of our bicameral legislative branch. Nothing hasty, nothing rash, nothing faddish. Of course the chronic humiliation of the labor movement, splendid as that is, can't compare with the Senate's greatest historic achievement, the life-support of segregation. Why the filisbuster kept lynching alive, for an extra 30 years at least. Speaking of checks, Sherman, you might even call our legislative system a rubber check democracy."

PS: Here is a nice story of the piecard jack ass dance on this from Carter through Clinton:

http://labornotes.org/node/664

As recently as 2000 the AFL-CIO was disinclined to support labor law reform in any fashion, still smarting from the disappointment and embarrassment of the failed labor law reform push of 1977-78.

This labor-led reform drive during the Carter presidency ultimately crashed on Senate rocks after winning passage in the House. Carter eventually threw in the towel on this issue, leaving labor and the reform legislation hanging.

The angry reaction of many union leaders and rank-and-file members to what was perceived as a Democratic Party failure at minimum -- and betrayal at worst -- played a part in the collapse of the Carter regime and the election of the notoriously anti-union Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Significant sections of top union officialdom resolved to never again broach the labor law reform subject and risk another electoral debacle.

In recent years, the AFL-CIO refused to seriously support labor law reform, privately fearing that it would serve only to expose Democrats who were happy to accept labor's support while doing nothing to address the labor rights catastrophe. Promotion of labor law reform by organized labor was minimal-to-non-existent throughout the Clinton years, being routinely dismissed as "unrealistic."

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/04/18/russias-new-wave-of-organizing/#comments

Indy unions sprouting right in mother Russia's TNC groin? Hmmmm, what can this mean? Better call that stalwart of the struggle, Herb Sorrell III, grandson of the famed Hollywood slugger hisseff, the king of the pickets, Herbert K Sorrell, scourge of Walt Disney, Ronald Reagan, etc. Thus his grandson on the phone to me, (maybe after a few jars):

"Oh, that! Fuck, Owen -- the jobster struggle in Russia needs those pixie dust dancers and their new "independent" unions about as much as I need my balls slapped with a pine paddle. Ahh, the poor Slav dupes, listening to voices from Solidarity House USA, that fuckin' CIA cutout -- AFL-CIO, AFL-CIA -- change one letter is all it takes, pal.

"To get to the truth here, this stinker is the CIA, baby, the CIA -- forwarding the global class struggle? Real unions? Does that sound like the guiding mission of the CIA to you?

"Yeah, sure, the Sweeney pack supposedly cleaned out the cold war stables -- but just contact the Hurricane Hugo movement. Ask them about the "independent" oil union down there, and its ties to the "solidarity center".

"The real mission is, any foreign gubmint party or union opposing Uncle's empire games gets shit on. That's about as plain as Tony Bennet's nose, and the AFL piecards know it.

"We tried moving the last federation convention to close that CIA-infested shithole, that filthy house of spook wax, and we got a a groundswell goin', till suddenly this invisible wall comes between us and the rank and file conventioneers, and we're in Nowheresville. A little later one of the top piecards tells us, 'Guys, this just ain't your night.'"

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/06/02/freedom_to_unionize/

Seems he's got a message for the rest of us. Pathetically, only the Boston Globe, not the Washpost or NYT, found it fit to print. I suspect this lead shows us why:

"AMERICA'S WORKING families today are running faster than ever to keep up, and still falling behind. "

....disposable income is now part of the "good old days."

... a major factor that often remains hidden.... Corporations have systematically riddled workers' freedom to improve their lives through unions, and our nation's labor laws are too weak to stop them.... union workers earn 30 percent more than workers without a union and are much more likely to have healthcare and pensions

But how we do that is not so obvious, since according to John, anyway, we gotta first make legal union recognition and contracts doable under the present system of laws and regs. 'Cause as it stands now:

companies routinely violate workers' basic right to form a union.... Unfortunately, these nasty methods of threat and coercion work for the employer.... In more than 90 percent of union elections a majority of workers indicated in writing that they wanted a union at the beginning of the process. However, unions won less than half of these elections, after months and years of employer intimidation.

Fortunately, there is legislation in Congress that will give workers the real freedom to join a union.... the Employee Free Choice Act.... a crucial first step to rebuilding the middle class and ensuring that working people can once again share in our nation's prosperity.

The free-to-choose line is pure bird crap and I bet swino John knows it in his heart of hearts. But he's got to keep the wheels of his gristmill turning, right?

Mates, I say with Father Smiff -- stop traffic!

http://labornotes.org/node/910

...as incarnated by the proud new owners of Chrysler Motors, namely Cerberus Capital Management:

In its 15 years of operation, Cerberus has bought up companies in a range of industries, from real estate to governmental outsourcing services to firearms to transportation .... Cerberus .... institutes cost-cutting measures and sells the restructured companies back to investors at big profits.... Last year it began making bids for a number of pieces of the U.S. auto industry.... GM's lucrative financing arm, GMAC, Tower Automotive, and Delphi.... GDX Automotive, CTA Acoustics, Guildford Mills, and Peguform....

Mark this gimmick down: you're likely to see it a lot in the next few years, at least until Uncle Sam sweeps all this unfunded corporate liability onto the taxpayers' plate. (BTW, "GM and Ford have sought similar agreements in the last two years.")

To get an idea of the money at stake if this Big Three offload on to the UAW goes through, "the UAW'S VEBA would assume an estimated $95 billion in current and future health care costs." Result: "the UAW could be forced to administer health care concessions to its own members."

So much for the treaty of Detroit, eh? Can it get any richer, uncle Walt?

I doubt it. So is our noble UAW ready to rumble -- ready to take all those fuckin' plants down with 'em, if that's what it takes?

Do you have to ask? Seems Gettlefinger's gang of lawful resolutes prefer -- drum roll please -- a vigorous legal gambit. Their model: those paragons of hard-biting, bare-knuckle struggle, the steelworkers, who though not having conducted any "successfully waged full-scale fightbacks", have had none the less "some limited success in using" -- grip something well bolted down now -- "strong successorship language in contracts"! Oh, and they've come forth to battle fire-breathing "financial tactics" too!

Oh sister Flynn, where be the likes of Big Bill and Jolly Joe Ettor when the mates really really need 'em?

Over the past 40 years or so, I doubt the People's Republic could easily find many Yankee friends with a significantly greater love and respect for the New China than resides, has resided, and will continue to reside for as long as it beats, in the heart of yours truly, Owen F. Paine.

But that being proclaimed, let me now proceed to toy with the dragon's wrath, as I plunge into my topic for today's post:

Not only do we need to reduce our bilateral trade gap with China as soon as practicable and by all means necessary; we need to liberate ourselves from her wares, as close to entirely as makes common sense.

Let's start with just two numbers: 9 and 180. Each element of the first number can have, all to itself, 20 counterparts in the second number. Yes, the second number is twenty times as big as the first number, and that's apparently the cold quantitative difference -- measured in dead souls -- between two recent coal mining tragedies, the one out west here, and the other over there, inside China.

Can we seriously doubt these two numbers roughly reflect the difference in working conditions here and there?

Now I ask you humanitarians out there, in light of this: where -- at the economists' infamous margin -- should the globe's coal get dug? Here at home -- or over there in China? Moreover: where should that extra coal, once dug, get consumed, to produce more goodies for the globe's most consumer-crap-mad middle classes? In fact, where -- at the margin -- should your goodies, my goodies, our goodies, come from? China, or here at home?

The answer, I think, is obvious: we need to make our consumer shit right here in the land of liberty. At least we damn well oughta try to -- that is, if my beloved class struggle and your good green earth are really really our top priority.

Isn't it obvious and simple? The battle for our red/green future oughta start and finish right here in our backyard, where both these milliennial contests can be fought out with greater chances of victory.

I submit to your considseration the following proposition: sustainable earth, Inc., can only get incorporated under the red, white, and blue: and that's because, at least as of now, it's here -- not China, not India, not Mexico even -- that we little people of earth have a better set of rules of engagement.

et me throw you a further simple synthetic deduction: it's far better strategy to restore our industrial platform and start building more of our goodies back here at home, than trying to export our rules over there. And by making as much of our stuff here as we can, in the process we'll import a nice big slab of their little people, to help us build it all the right way, the clean way, the green way, the high-wage, high-employment way.

Yup, our fair and stalwart nation oughta return to its post-Civil War promised-land gilded-age nation-building paradigm -- updated of course, and controlled this time 'round by the mass of we the people, precisely for the direct immediate benefit of the crass sweatin' mass of us, not by and for the corporate elite.

Here's a nice irony of history: the same type of silk-hat smokestack jackoffs that today profit handsomely from exporting our jobs and importing low-wage foreign substitutes, back then refused to open our markets to the outside world's industrial products. Yes, with true Hamiltonian vigor, the predecessors of today's barons of industry blocked the entry of alien procducts, not alien people! And as a result, in just 65 years, the relatively brief span between the freeing of our 6 million African brothers and sisters from slavery, on the one end, and running smack-dab into the catacysm of 1929, on the other -- in that short 65 years, humble weebles, many flooding in from around the world, built the largest industrial platform on earth.

I suggest we do it again, but this time with a fair-trade, balanced-trade dollar and a chock-full employment job policy.

And note well -- once we get really rolling again here, like we did in 1940, we'll welcome the help of more hands and brains from outside our borders.

Just like back in the day.

Called a “single payer health solution” for America's big three auto families, the proposed grand health VEBA is really just one big corporate rip dip and shift -- a massive Enron-scale financial fraud that will end up sticking it to workers one way or other, either through direct charges to workers or in a bailout by corporate field-dog, Uncle "Fetch and Carry" Sam.

http://labornotes.org/node/1248

What's a VEBA, comrades? Stands for Voluntary Employees Beneficiary Association. It takes some solemnly-promised stream of benefit payments off the books of corporate America -- in this case, the future wage-employee health payment obligations of Chrysler, Ford and GM -- for a one-time, good-faith, duly-diligent, fairly and squarely discounted lump-sum pay-in to a very specially chartered nonprofit -- in this case union-administered – fund. And what happens then? Well, it's all in the numbers really.

Looking with gimlet eye at this auto VEBA, I'd say it's likely to become the absolutely biggest bust yet. Despite the union's heroic efforts to "responsibly" offload as much as possible of the upcoming payment stream back on the retired workers themselves, the time will come when the fund goes bump in the night. Enter Uncle Sap.

By that point the workers will, by honest accounts, have paid for it all at least twice already -- first up front, in corporate promises in lieu of wages, and at the back end, in passthrough charges in lieu of funds. And the “health” industry will no doubt manage to extract a third payment from the man in the striped suit. What remains unpaid out of the bills overcharged, will prolly in a burst of state generosity -- after a union leadership heartswelling sturm-und-drang worthy of Rock Hudson -- end up on Uncle's famous riskless tax-backed people's credit card.

PS:

My favorite mild underlining in the labor notes story linked above: "Business analysts claim... under-funding is one of the key advantages of a Big-3 VEBA solution." Care to give a better working definition of a corporate welfare state?

This chum at Counterpunch thinks he knows:

http://counterpunch.com/macaray01102008.html

1. "The hollowing-out of the country's manufacturing base and, with it, a decline in those industry jobs which, historically, had not only been strongly organized but well paid."

2. "Government has assumed custody of key union provisions."

3. "Changes in demographics and culture"

"There is a decreased respect for the role of organized labor, for its founders, its battles, its overall narrative, and an alarming lack of interest in labor's political and social implications."

"High school history and civic textbooks of the Baby Boomer generation (and the one preceding it) routinely included accounts of the achievements of labor leaders such as Samuel Gompers, John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, et al, mentioning them in much the same way they mentioned political leaders and social reformers Today, it would be ludicrous to expect a high school history text to single out specific contemporary labor leaders who've made a difference-unless it was something scandalous or bizarre (e.g., the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa). "

"We've also witnessed a marked decline in our sense of community.... Today, everybody seems to want to call himself an independent.... Working people... prefer to think of themselves as incipient, yet-to-be-realized entrepreneurs rather than proletarian toilers."

Moral of the tale:

".... working people don't have the core respect they once had. Simple as that."

The chap that wrote this is one David Macaray. Brother Mac is "a Los Angeles playwright and writer" and former "president and chief contract negotiator of the Assn. of Western Pulp and Paper Workers, Local 672, from 1989 to 2000."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-welsh/the-glorious-future-that-_b_82241.html?view=print

Unions in America have been in a decline for over 60 years....

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), created by the Wagner Act in 1935 as independent agency of United States Governments holds the official mandate to conduct elections for labor union representation and to investigate and remedy unfair labor practices. Under the Bush administration, the NLRB has:

• made it impossible for large numbers of workers to join unions(pdf);
• potentially reclassified many workers as supervisors (including many nurses) in order to remove them from unions;
• passed numerous rulings which treat employers in one way, and unions in another.

Now one of the things that strikes me about this graph is that the decline has been monotonic since 1955, through Democratic and Republican years alike. So Ian Welsh's focus on the last seven years seems a little, um, tendentious.

Ian, however, would like us to draw a very specific conclusion:

Another 4 or 8 years of a Republican presidency could doom American unions...

Unions, even more than the US itself, need a new FDR. Without FDR unions would have never had their day... absent a President who really cares about unions there's no reason to believe that decline will stop.

The amazing thing here, of course, is the claim that unions gained ground in the Thirties because they had a nice sympathetic President. This is sheer mythography. The causal arrow runs the other way, in fact: the President was sympathetic because Labor was ready to hang Capital from the nearest lamppost, and Capital got the message. Ian's message is a little different:

What government took away, fertile conditions for organizing and pro-union policies, government can give back... the most important factor for the fate of unions ... is who the President is.

With the right President, and the right NLRB, the union movement can have it's renaissance....

John Edwards has spent the last four years working with unions....

The "most important factor" is... the President? Now you've made me mad, Ian. What ever became of the people's own agency? Can they only act through a President? What became of all those lampposts?

He's a union econ-con mouthpiece and I like that too. He's calling for billions in construction dollars for immediate public infrastructure projects -- low tech, hard hat division -- what's better than that? Green designs, sure, but who can wait for the blueprints? We gotta get the nailguns and sheetrock flying:

http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/speakout/lawrence_mishel.cfm

"The average age of public school buildings is roughly 40 years, and they need a total of at least $17 billion a year in maintenance and rehabilitation. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Transportation has found more than 6,000 major bridges that need to be repaired or replaced. On the environmental front, more than $4 billion in wastewater treatment projects are ready to go to construction, if funding is made available. Let’s provide the money for all these needs—schools, bridges, sewage treatment plants and more. Every $1 billion of construction spending creates 14,000 to 47,000 new jobs — and these should be good-paying union jobs — and also generates up to $6 billion in additional economic activity."

But is that bad per se? I mean a rigged convention.

Okay, I must admit, all the hullaballoo about bottom-up participation and rank-and-file this or membership that often does smack of stale process over novel product. But don't ya think a big time union movement that has no product worth a toot to begin with at least oughta strive for some first-class process?

Here's Steve Early making a rather tepid bid to rally some indignation against these "union leaders" using their "heavy handed" methods on brave progressive insurgent groups:

As history has repeatedly shown, the rulers of “one-party states” rarely concede power gracefully or quietly. When organized opposition emerges, such regimes often resort to a strategy of disinformation and intimidation to maintain their grip on power, whether the battleground is a nation or—closer to home—a national union.

Only because he's the latest pinup in a line of rebels from within that have launched on dear Andy, here's Sal Rosselli, president of the biggest chunk of Andy's SEIU, to cry nyet, no mas, forget about it, at the purple duce's top-down "corporate" unionism.

As mentioned here before, he's still getting hustled toward the exits by the piecards, without a fists-flying convention floor showdown, worthy of any halfway decent two-fisted Popeye of a union man.