The NY Times has an article about the proposed Ledbetter bill to reverse the decision by the Supreme Court which severely restricted the ability of civil rights plaintiffs to file discrimination lawsuits. Here's a reality that goes against conventional wisdom-- the problem of Congress having to reverse decisions by the Court hostile to civil rights is nothing new. From the article:

In 1883, the Supreme Court struck down a law that barred racial discrimination by hotels, theaters and railroads, saying Congress had exceeded its power. In 1988 and 1991, Congress expanded civil rights protections that had been curtailed by the Supreme Court.

In September, Congress repudiated several Supreme Court decisions that had undercut the Americans With Disabilities Act.

"There's a historic pattern of the court's being hostile to civil rights statutes and Congress stepping in to overturn those narrow court rulings," said Deborah L. Brake, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Aside from ideological public policy concerns, the fight over whether to spend more of the stimulus on highways versus mass transit may also come down to the interests of those making asphalt versus steel, according to this piece in the NY Times:

The industry, in response, is lobbying the Obama transition team for infrastructure projects that would require big amounts of steel. Mass transit systems are high on the list, and so is bridge repair..."If the president-elect really follows through, he'll fund a lot of mass transit projects," said Wilbur L. Ross Jr., the Wall Street deal maker who put together the steel conglomerate known as Arcelor Mittal USA. "All the big cities have these projects ready to go."

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Early last century, the press corps attacked Bill Haywood, leader of the leftwing "Wobblies" labor union, for smoking expensive cigars. Mocking their demand for hairshirt ascetiscm, Haywood declared, "Nothing's too good for the working class." Even as the press worships luxury and excess by the titans of industry, the smallest luxuries by labor leaders or even their members are treated as proof of the moral degeneracy of unions.

Such is the most recent attack on the United Auto Workers, the rightwing moral condemnation of their education and retreat center at Black Lake, Michigan. The horror is apparently that the UAW would own a $33 million asset; of course, this asset is 1000 acres with 27 miles of shoreline. Oh yeah, and this education center was used by 10,000 visitors last year-- as opposed to many a $33 million private home owned by a "master of the universe" living in and around New York and other financial capitals. Oh yeah, and to make the UAW crime complete, there is actually a golf course on those 1000 acres; working class folks actually have the audacity to enjoy a round of golf occasionally.

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In many ways, it is remarkable how much more pro-labor the Obama administration is compared to the Clinton administration, at least in its rhetoric. Obama himself has often talked about the importance of the right to organize for unions, something Clinton almost never did.

Compare the incoming cabinet members. Back in 1993, the Clinton cabinet's support for unions was at best lukewarm:

"The jury is still out on whether the traditional union is necessary for the new workplace," Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich said in an interview.

"Unions are O.K. where they are," said Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown. "And where they are not, it is not clear yet what sort of organization should represent workers."

And then you have Obama's nominees.

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In yesterday's thread, there was some good discussion on corporate accountability, but I want to more explicitly emphasize that not only are alternatives to traditional private shareholder ownership possible, but that they regularly are used in our economy and in other countries' economies -- and that solving many of the current problems of corporate accountability could be solved by extending them. They range from direct government ownership to variants on government equity stakes to creation of non-profit governance structures to employee ownership.

Let's start with the varieties of government ownership:

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During the auto bailout thread, JohnW1141 made the point that my discussion was focusing on "Wall Street" and "corporations" instead of the executives.  As he argues, "Wall Street, Corporations, Banks, etc. are abstract words that I think most of the public rarely connects to the people that run these entities. AIG didn't rip the public off, the executives at AIG did."

I think this is actually wrong and reduces the problem just to "bad apples."  Greedy executives do what greedy executives are structurally allowed to do and in fact are rewarded for doing.  Almost all of what those who perpetuated the financial meltdown did was completely legal so to argue that it's the fault of those being paid to do their jobs, rather than the system that enabled them seems to miss the point.

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There's a bit of discussion now on if the whole financial bailout "worked." For all the progressive polarization around whether the bill should have been passed in its original form, the division between those in favor (say myself or Kevin Drum) or those opposed, like Dean Baker or my colleague David Sirota, were often more tactical than ideological, meaning some folks thought it was the best deal to be gotten right then and others thinking defeat would lead to a better deal.

But here's the thing-- given the craziness of challenges coming, a general blank check for the executive branch was probably the best course. The rightwing filibustering of the auto bailout is a good example of the problem. In the best of times, the filibuster is an anti-democratic monstrosity that retards progressive change. In times of economic crisis, it is literally a tool for rightwing minorities to use blackmail to assert corporate demands as the price for avoiding chaos and destruction.

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The article is from wacko WorldNetDaily, but it's making the rounds of rightwing sites, so assume your average Fox News reader will soon take it as gospel.

And hey-- what was one of the top proofs cited of her connections to the ongoing Communist conspiracy:

Greg Sargent, a writer for the radical left-leaning Talking Points Memo blog quoted Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, stating the person who best knows Solis is Vice Chair of the DSA Harold Meyerson.

So all you radical left-leaning readers of TPM are just links in the chain to Soviet America. It's only going to get worse, unfortunately, as the paranoia and militia-language on the right wing sites is starting to acellerate.

Obama's nomination of Hilda Solis to be Labor Secretary was designed to please pro-labor supporters given her strong pro-labor record. Whether Obama meant her nomination to deliver a message, she is a special symbol of the power labor has been willing to exercise within the Democratic Party to hold candidates accountable. As Harold Meyerson recounts in the LA Times:

And in 2000, she did something else that career politicians just don't do: She challenged an entrenched incumbent from her own party for his congressional seat. Marty Martinez, a nine-term incumbent who thought he was cruising to his 10th, was much more conservative than his constituents. He had voted for NAFTA, backed the extension of the 710 Freeway through South Pasadena and opposed abortion rights.

Against the wishes of the party's national legislative leaders, who never like to see their members challenged, Solis ran against Martinez and, with the assistance of the L.A. labor movement, defeated him by a stunning 69% to 31%.

Her election put all Democrats on notice that labor would not give incumbents a pass if they voted against labor. Some would argue that labor hasn't supported enough Solis-style challengers, but there is little question that putting her at the Labor Department will help reinforce the message that labor will hold Representatives and Senators accountable for their votes.

When the U.S. Senate killed the auto industry rescue bill last week, some conservative commentators saw it as payback for Michigan voting the wrong way in the November election.  William D. Zeranski at the popular rightwing American Thinker site argued, "We know which way those 17 Electoral College votes will go.  So, how does helping bailout the Big Three help the GOP?" 

Local Michigan Republican leaders themselves began worrying that national party leaders would begin ignoring state concerns after McCain lost the Great Lakes states.   As Republican pollster Steve Lombardo said after the election, "It's a matter of worry...It may be that Republicans begin to write off Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota."

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A lot of folks take the fact that most high-tech industries appeared in the modern period of anti-union rules and thus there are few unions in such industries to mean that unionism itself doesn't "work" for high tech, high-skilled workers. But then you have one of the original high-tech industries-- modern aviation -- and a massive union of engineers and technical workers who just approved their contract with Boeing:

Nearly 21,000 engineers and technical workers for The Boeing Co., most of them in the Puget Sound area, have approved new labor contracts that will give them more say in the company's controversial outsourcing decisions and the use of contract workers. They also will receive more for retirement and a pay raise that will average about 20 percent over four years.

I've never quite understood the logic that says that blue-collar manual workers have something to gain from more democratic say over their wages and conditions of work, but higher-skilled workers don't.

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Yeah, the stock meltdown of 401Ks is making the Bush-McCain proposals for social security privatization look idiotic, but the Wall Street Journal of all places has a nice quantification of how valuable social security is for most families:

The U.S. government pledges that you will receive those payments, adjusted for inflation, for as long as you live...This kind of bond has a name: an inflation-adjusted immediate annuity...The implicit bond of Social Security makes up about 40% of the total assets of the average household on the verge of retirement...

So most families have the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets that are untouched by the financial crisis.

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I'll hopefully have time to post on why allowing the U.S. auto industry to die without help would be a catastrophic mistake, but let me note a more basic political issue for progressives, of helping the UAW save their members jobs. The United Auto Workers has been a stalwart ally of progressives for going on seventy-plus years, from helping build the New Deal to supporting progressive government for years (thanks for Michigan, guys!) Without going through the longer list, let me just remind folks of the central role of the UAW in the civil rights movement. No organization gave more financial and political support to Martin Luther King Jr.'s movement.

* Few remember, but before the famous March on Washington in 1963, there was a precursor march in Detroit, backed by the UAW, where 200,000 folks marched down Woodward Avenue led by King and Walter Reuther, head of the UAW.

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So some folks will say, hey labor law sounds good, but don't the business lobbies have a point that the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) proposed by labor and its supporters will undermine democracy by eliminating the secret ballot. I'll have a post soon about how the secret ballot will be fine and more used in workplaces if EFCA passes, but let's take the basic corporate argument headon. Under EFCA, instead of holding an election with a secret ballot, workers can also choose a union alternatively by a majority of workers signing cards asking to have their union recognized.

Horrors, the business lobby cries, weeping for the lost democratic voice of their workers (as they threaten to fire anyone who supports the union during the election), but here's the thing-- an NLRB election recognizes the union if a majority of THOSE VOTING support the union, while the card check option requires support from a majority of ALL WORKERS IN THAT COMPANY OR VOTING UNIT.  So the latter option is harder and actually is more guaranteed to reflect the will of the workers.  Follow below the fold to imagine how this would play out in a federal Presidential election.

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In comments on my last post, Resistance writes that it's union members' faults for the anti-union legacy of Reagan because they supported his election: "Union workers cut their own throats; the movement was destroyed from within, I remember the election of Reagan and was so angry that Union workers voted for him."

Except this was a myth; sure some union members did support Reagan, as some did Bush, but the large majority supported Carter back in 1980.  But it's not surprising that this myth persists, because it was a major rightwing propaganda operation to create the illusion of pro-union support for Reagan.

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