The Professional Staff Congress and Revolutionary Unionism

The temperate, prudent, courageous, just and of course virtuous Sharad Karkhanis has written an excellent issue of Patriot Returns. Karkhanis named his newsletter after our Patriot missles, which shot down Iraqi Scuds in 1991. With a circulation of 13,000, Karkhanis's newsletter aims to shoot down the Scuds of the perverse CUNY faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) and hopefully blow the PSC leadership back to Cuba, although I doubt that even Castro or his brother would want them. Maybe North Korea's Kim Jong-il would welcome them since they seem to aim to give the CUNY faculty a North Korean-style wage-and-benefit package, but even he might find them tiresome.

In the early twentieth century there were alternative models of unionism being proposed. The mainstream AF of L, created by Samuel Gompers and Adolph Strasser, advocated a form of unionism that labor scholar Robert F. Hoxie called business unionism. Business unionism does not question the underlying assumptions of the capitalist economy and resorts to political gamesmanship only in order to "reward friends and punish enemies". Its emphasis is improving wages, benefits and working conditions, not changing the world. Gompers expressed the pro-capitalist essence of business unionism when someone asked him: "What does labor want?" Gompers responded: "More". Like any profit-maximizing capitalist, and any red-blooded American, business unionists aim to advance themselves economically. In contrast, models of unionism that were prevalent during the early twentieth century included the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) and the communist unionism of the Socialist Labor Party's Daniel de Leon's Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance and others. American workers rejected what labor scholar Hoxie called revolutionary unionism in favor of business unionism. The gulf between the "New" Left and the business unionists reached a crescendo during the Vietnam War in 1965 when AFL-CIO president George Meany announced his support for the Vietnam War.

Inverting the historical pattern, the PSC leadership has rejected business unionism in favor of revolutionary unionism. Its repeated calls for demonstrations; the anti-Iraqi War protests several years ago; the endless radical rhetoric that has alienated New York's political establishment (social democratic thought it be); and the utter contempt with which the PSC's leadership treats economic and workplace issues all suggest that the PSC does not operate as a mainstream union. The low contract numbers that Karkhanis decries result from the PSC's leadership's strategic choice to favor revolution over selfish gain, or even selfish keeping your head above water and avoiding the bankruptcy judge.

Perhaps the the PSC leadership does not need to worry about electric, heating, gasoline and food bills. Perhaps like Professor Ros, they live in high rent apartments on six figure incomes. Perhaps they can afford to contribute $5,000 to the Obama campaign.

If so, isn't it time to get back to reality and rocket this crew back to Cuba via one of Karkhanis's Patriots?

Raquel Okyay on Oil

Raquel Okyay points out that close to 70% of voters agree with Senator McCain:

"that the ban on offshore drilling should be lifted to ease the price of oil. Leading Democrats are still trying to prevent oil companies from offshore drilling, even with the high poll numbers against them."

Okyay points out:

"We want drilling because it makes sense to exploit our own resources instead of paying for oil elsewhere. There is a way to accomplish this goal without losing sight that renewable energy is the way of the future. Pelosi apparently has other things on her mind when determining whether offshore..."

The oil debate is an example of how America's commitment to socialism has crippled it economically. There ought not to be public debate concerning how to best obtain energy. The reason that we do not use alternative energy is that state and federal policy has inhibited the building of wind mills and has made risky investments difficult to make through regulation, inflation, taxes and other penalties to inventors. America becomes increasingly poorer as our Congressional Neros fiddle in Washington, dabbling in oil investing and exploration, subjects about which they know little. It is time to de-regulate the energy markets and stop penalizing inventors by taxing and harassing them when they succeed.

Barack Obama, the Teapot Dome and America's Parrot-Brained Media

Is Barack Obama going to be our next Warren G. Harding, the president whose cabinet was implicated in several corruption scandals, most famously the Teapot Dome scandal? Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs (hat tip Larwyn) has been analyzing Obama's campaign contributions and finds an extraordinarily long list of foreign contributors, including one, Jeanne McCurdy, who has made multiple contributions on a single day. Pamela writes:

"There are numerous individuals who are "bundling" contributions, some are smaller from the same person on same day, not to mention lots "unemployed or student". Further, there's a ton of foreign service and State Department admissions.
lots and lots of multiple entries.

"lots of foreign service, diplomat entries.

"lots of military analyst types.

"lots way over any $200 non-reporting caps.

Other overseas contributors are making multiple small donations ostensibly in their own names over a period of a few days, some under maximum donation allowances, but others aggregating in excess of the maximums when all added up..."

Read it all here.

Is the media asking questions about the rather odd goings on such as Obama's cover-up of his birth certificate and unusual patterns in campaign contributions? Is the media questioning why Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs employees are overwhelmingly in favor of Mr. Obama? Is it merely because investment bankers favor change--or do they prefer $100 bills? Is the media asking questions, or is it functioning as a parrot-brained cheering squad for Mr. Obama, failing to ask even the most elementary questions that a competent mass media would ask?

Louis Hartz on Jefferson's Error

"(W)hat Jefferson was doing when he assailed the industrial worker was overlooking the magical alchemy of American life which was responsible for the very small liberal farmers that he loved. That alchemy, in addition to transforming passive peasants into dynamic liberal farmers, was going to transform bitter proletarians into incipient entrepreneurs. Jefferson emphasized the concrete fact of ownership of property which to be sure was not a characteristic of the industrial worker. But this was a kind of Marxian mistake, emphasizing economics at the price of thought, for the French peasant also owned property and he was far from being the enlightened liberal yeoman that Jefferson relied so heavily upon. The fact is, the liberalism of the American farmer was largely a psychological matter, a product of the spirit of Locke implanted in a new and nonfeudal world; and this spirit, freed as it was of the concept of class and the tyranny of ancient tradition, could infect the factory as well as it infected the land...Indeed, the irony of Jefferson's fear of an urban 'mob' is that he himself became its philosophic idol when it began to develop, and not merely in a general egalitarian sense: in the sense also of his theory of agrarian independence. The labor literature would not give up the old idea of yeoman free-holding..."

Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955, pp. 122-3.