“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP MAY BE KILLING BEES: “A team of entomologists from the University of Illinois has found a possible link between the practice of feeding commercial honeybees high-fructose corn syrup and the collapse of honeybee colonies around the world.” Read.

ZUCKERBERG’S NEW LOBBYING OUTFIT DROPS CASH FOR OIL DRILLING: “Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group, which bills itself as a bipartisan entity dedicated to passing immigration reform, has spent considerable resources on ads advocating a host of anti-environmental causes — including driling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and constructing the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.” Read.

(And Facebook rejected an ad slamming Zuckerberg for this. Read.)

PANKAJ MISHRA ON THE FORGOTTEN ROLE OF THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL: “I think the very fact that we have to ask this question about intellectual responsibility shows how serious the problem has become in our time, and how much of a dodo the unaffiliated intellectual has become. Even writers and intellectuals with a great deal of integrity and courage have become too professionalized, too career-oriented, and too concerned not to upset their peers, not to mention those they regard as their more famous and successful superiors … This professional docility and its codes of omerta are what allow people like [Niall] Ferguson to flourish.” Read the interview.

THE CIA KILLS THOUSANDS IN PAKISTAN: The operation that led to Osama bin Laden’s death may yet kill hundreds of thousands more. In its zeal to identify bin Laden or his family, the CIA used a sham hepatitis B vaccination project to collect DNA in the neighborhood where he was hiding. The effort apparently failed, but the violation of trust threatens to set back global public health efforts by decades. Read.

HARVARD’S PURGES: In 1973, economist Samuel Bowles wrote an essay in The Crimson explaining why it was “hardly a surprise” that he and his colleague were fired from Harvard. “Underlying the theoretical shortcomings of the conventional economics is the definition of the professional role of the economist: as teacher and researcher alike, the economist is seen as developing analytical tools to aid corporate or government decision makers in resource allocation problems,” he wrote. Read.

LESS IS MORE: At The New Republic, Tim Wu makes the case for less in life and society: “We think of scarcity problems as real, and surplus problems as matters of self-control.” Read.

___

“I’m a free market guy. But I’m not gonna let this economy crater in order to preserve the free market system” – George W. Bush, December 17, 2008

At the heart of the present debate on how to address the continuing political stalemate and economic decay in America are some fundamental misconceptions about the nature and operation of the current system. Many Americans—and not just avowed conservatives—have been led to believe that it is possible to have a “free market” economy, and that the quest to reach it will generate greater prosperity and better social outcomes. Both beliefs are false.

It is highly unlikely that in the entire course of human history there has ever been a real-world economy comprised of completely “free” markets—that is, one in which all economic exchanges take place in the absence of any form of “coercion,” be it coercion between two parties (such as withholding information, fraud, corruption, non-payment, theft, slavery, price-fixing, etc.) or so-called “legal coercion” in the form of government taxation, regulation, subsidies, and so on. Certainly there are no examples in the modern capitalist era.

While pure mathematic models that control for variables and make certain assumptions (such as perfect competition) can suggest that in certain cases free markets may be optimal, in reality the notion of “peaceful competition of producers and suppliers…in which everyone benefits and where everyone’s living standard flourishes,” as the late Austrian School economist Murray Rothbard described it, has no historical basis. It ignores real-world power relationships, and is arguably completely unattainable given human nature. (i)

However, since the mid-1970s this free market myth has risen to dominance in economic and political decision-making in United States and has been exported around the world to developing countries and those transitioning out of communism. In the process, “government” has been labeled as the prime impediment to the achievement of this free market utopia. Thus deregulation, privatization, and market liberalization have been relentlessly pursued while moderate social democratic achievements such as retirement security, workplace safety, union rights, anti-trust enforcement, and public healthcare systems have been vigorously attacked. What has been the result?

The past four decades in the United States have been marked by starkly deteriorating social and economic trends: Income disparity has spiked; most people’s wages have stagnated; wealth has become more concentrated; personal debt has ballooned; poverty and child poverty have increased; incarceration rates have skyrocketed, and the list goes on. (ii) Compared to much of the developed world (and even parts of the developing world), the United States now has far worse health, educational, and environmental outcomes. De-regulated financial markets have contributed to an increase in the number and severity of financial crises, culminating in the 2008 crash that cost the United States $2.6 trillion in lost GDP, $19.2 trillion in household net worth, and nearly nine million jobs. (iii)

Moreover, as George W. Bush demonstrated during the financial crisis – much like Ronald Reagan before him, during the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s – when private corporations get into trouble and put the whole economy at risk, as is inevitable given the amount of profit-driven coercion occurring between private parties in a deregulated “free/r” market, the only entity that can save the system from collapse is the state. In essence, in so-called free market economies, profit becomes privatized while risk is socialized. Moreover, to pay for public bailouts of private corporations and system stabilizing interventions, the proponents of free markets subsequently insist on heavy doses of “austerity” to reduce deficits and debt—proposals that inevitably include further attacks on workers’ rights and the social safety net.

William Simon, President Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, once famously observed of those who preach free markets while rushing to the public treasury: “I watched with incredulity as businessmen ran to the government in every crisis, whining for handouts or protection from the very competition that has made this system so productive…always, such gentlemen proclaimed their devotion to free enterprise and their opposition to the arbitrary intervention into our economic life by the state. Except, of course, for their own case, which was always unique and which was justified by their immense concern for the public interest.”(iv)

THE PUBLIC OWNERSHIP ALTERNATIVE

The free market utopia is in fact a banana republic, an individualistic Randian society in which a small group of extremely wealthy individuals, hidden away in gated communities and protected by their disproportionate influence of key functions of the state (the courts, political parties, and so on), control the vast majority of productive wealth and property while the rest of the population is forced to fight for an ever shrinking share of whatever scraps are left on the table. We are well on our way to this dystopia. The top 400 individuals in the United States now own a greater share of wealth than the bottom 180 million Americans put together. The top 1 percent now receive almost 20 percent of the nation’s income (up from around 10 percent in 1980). (v)

But if privately owned corporate capitalism produces such unpalatable results, what is the alternative?

One option would be a returned focus on establishing, preserving, and strengthening public ownership—broadly defined as forms of collective ownership that democratize wealth and or prioritize providing goods and services that benefit society (rather than ownership focused on exchange values and the profit motive). Traditionally, public ownership has been primarily conceptualized as ownership on different levels within the state. Such forms of public enterprise are in fact alive and well, and should be freed from the undeserved calumny of “free market” propagandists. However, in practice, there can be other forms of collective ownership outside of the state, organized around different “publics” at a variety of scales within the system. Such an expanded definition would encompass cooperatives and employee owned firms.

Despite being the epicenter of the modern free market myth, public ownership has a long history in the United States. Leaving aside the hundreds of millions of Americans who participate in collectively owned enterprises outside of the state, public ownership is widespread throughout the local, state, and federal levels of governance. Along with the Tennessee Valley Authority, 2,000 local public utility companies provide—together with cooperatives—around 25 percent of the nation’s electricity. (vi) On the federal level, two of the most cost-effective health care entities in the United States—Medicare and the Veterans’ Administration—are run by the U.S. government. The largest pension manager in the country is also publicly owned: the Social Security Administration.

On the state and regional level, public ownership of highly successful commercial enterprises such as ports and airports are common. Similarly, the profitable and community benefiting Bank of North Dakota has been publicly owned since its formation in 1919 and has contributed more than $300 million in revenues to that state over the past decade. (vii) Publicly owned roads, transportation networks, water systems, landfills (and methane capture plants), parks, hotels, loan funds, housing, schools, land management and development, investment funds, and so on exist in virtually every community in every state in the nation. And because they benefit the community in a variety of ways, keeping many of these activities in public ownership remains popular amongst local populations—even in traditionally conservative areas.

However, it is not sufficient to simply defend public ownership from privatization or even expand public ownership to other sectors of the economy and society. The criticisms leveled at large-scale public ownership historically by conservatives and capitalists were not without a grain of truth. Andrew Cumbers, a professor of geographical political economy at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom and a leading expert on public ownership, writes that “past and existing forms of public ownership have done little to deliver genuine economic democracy and public participation because they were, on the whole, over-centralized, bureaucratic, and lacking democratic participation.” (viii) “Forms of public ownership in the future,” Cumbers concludes, “must be imagined and constructed [with] democracy at their heart.” (ix) Without question, public ownership needs to be re-shaped and re-invigorated to reflect the values that serious progressives and socialists are fighting for—including democracy, participation, pluralism, transparency, and sustainability.

POSSIBILITIES FOR PUBLIC OWNERSHIP IN THE 21^ST CENTURY

In recent years many new economic models with a strong worker-ownership/management component have emerged from real-world practice both as an alternative to the current corporate capitalist system and as a viable way to increase economic democracy and participation (see, for instance, Rick Wolff’s Democracy at Work and David Schweickart’s After Capitalism). However, in order to be genuinely pluralistic and systemically transformative, worker-ownership/management centered models must take into account the interests and rights of the wider community as well as issues of scale and planning.  Here, incorporating other forms of collective ownership—including state-centered public ownership and community ownership—will be critical.

In this regard, one interesting new systemic model was recently proposed by Seth Ackerman in Jacobin magazine. In Ackerman’s model, publicly-owned investment funds and banks would operate a “tamed” capital market, thus resulting in autonomous companies that “no longer have individual owners who seek to maximize profits. Instead, they are owned by society as a whole, along with any surplus (“profits”) they might generate.” (x) Within this system of public ownership, firms could operate on appropriate scales and be managed in a variety of ways that could increase democratic participation—including management by their workers.

Another option builds upon recent real-world experiences. During the financial crisis and Great Recession, the U.S. government took over the failing private automaker General Motors, and reconstituted it in a way that involved public ownership (via the U.S. government, the Canadian government, and the Ontario government) and pseudo-worker ownership (via the United Auto Workers’ retiree health care VEBA). In the future, when the public is forced to bailout private corporations, the resulting publicly owned (or joint public-worker owned) companies could be restructured in ways that expand economic democracy and public participation and are re-oriented towards important, socially benefiting tasks; perhaps, for example, the domestic manufacturing of vehicles needed for the necessary expansion of high-speed rail and other mass transit networks. Such an orientation would reduce the country’s carbon emissions and fossil fuel usage, while at the same time providing stable, anchored, well-paid jobs in declining former auto producing communities.

In the wake of the most crippling economic downturn in 70 years, free market mythology is reaching its limits. Despite the fact that economic and political elites cling to the theories that have served them so well for so long, the utopian promises of the free market ring increasingly hollow and its contradictions and limitations have been laid bare for all to see. By contrast, a return to public ownership, especially in more pluralist forms, offers a demonstrably realistic alternative as well as a pathway towards the long-term development of a more just, equitable, and sustainable economic system.

Thomas M. Hanna is the Senior Research Assistant at The Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland. Certain material in this paper is adapted from the article he co-authored (with Gar Alperovitz) titled Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not So Wild a Dream, which appeared in The Nation in May 2012. He can be reached for comment or questions at: tmhanna@democracycollaborative.org.

Everyone except me calls The Neoprogressive a blog. I have given up on trying to steer people away from the term, because it’s nobody’s fault but my own that this website is visually indistinguishable from one.

Why do I not want The Neoprogressive to be a blog? Well, I’ve written before about why we should not trust people who write as often as they think. I view most blogs as self-indulgent, hyper-incremental, mindlessly conversational, careless. The compulsion that drives both bloggers to blog and their readers to read so manically has created a perfect storm that destroys the twin lights of enlightenment and instruction, and leaves in its path a reading ethic of purposeless gluttony. If both you and I are always reacting to what catches our attention in the moment, neither of us will get anywhere we need to.

Initially the way I envisioned a response to blog culture was to make this a careful, minimalist enterprise: Only one piece of writing a week, fairly polished and often long. While I knew this would not be a recipe for traffic, it is consistent with my skepticism toward the excesses of the Internet.

It turns out this is not an entirely realistic goal. The Neoprogressive is not a full-time project, but something I do on the side. It would seem then that one piece a week should be perfect! Ironically, it is precisely because there is so much pressure to create something long and serious with a beginning and an end for a weekly post that I struggle at times. This struggle is natural and healthy, but not necessarily the best expenditure of my mental resources for an unpaid side gig.

For this reason, I intend to loosen my self-imposed publishing guidelines. While I hope to continue to write some long-form meditations, I am now open to writing very short posts. I sincerely hope to resume Tuesday posting, but right now I want to experiment with the idea of posting more or less than that (ideally more). If all this means that The Neoprogressive will begin to resemble more of a “blog” and less of a “politico-intellectual journal,” then so be it. In the meantime, I will take measures to showcase the more substantial reportage and essays for long-term visibility (such as the recently added “features” function on the home page) and to organize major ideas that contribute to the cumulative nature of this project (such as through the “theses” tab at the top of the website).

The idea here is not to provide myself with license to become intellectually reckless, but to explore the possibilities for hybridity. I can promise that whatever happens, this space will never be used to churn out thousands of words a day about daily ephemera, and publishing will never be reflexive or purely a means for maximizing traffic.

As it is so often, improvisation is the critical principle here. I can’t wish away concerns about how the medium is the message, but I can set them aside; for now I will experiment with different ways of writing without fear of labels.

By many accounts, it is the passage of time that makes the greatest mockery of human endeavor. The folly of Ozymandias, the king of kings who famously taunted humanity to look at his works and despair, was his short-sightedness; little did he realize that his rule would not only end but also be forgotten.

The inevitable decline and disappearance of status, however, is not necessarily the the most immediate case against pursuing it single-mindedly. Well before reckoning with mortality and the inability to control legacy, people experience self-doubt and new anxieties at every level of accomplishment in social status. A compelling longitudinal study of the super-rich shows how millionaires immediately develop concerns about becoming multimillionaires and billionaires. Billionaires compete to make it into the top 100 of the The Forbes World’s Billionaires list; then the quest is to become the richest person earth for longer than the other richest people on earth. A successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur needs to become a successful serial entrepreneur. American senators, easily among the most powerful politicians in the world, often agonize over getting a shot at the presidency. Every president dreads being kicked out of office after only one term. The first term is about the second term, then come calculations to ensure a powerful post-presidency. All these aspirations precede anxiety over how posterity will judge them, and if they will be ranked among history’s greatest figures.

The problem with conceiving of fulfillment of ambition as ascent is that there is no top of the ladder, and humans have an infinite capacity to acclimate to new altitudes, which always furnish new sets of aspirations and paths to loss. In this sense, the will the power is unquenchable.

The political implications of this are obvious, but there are also lessons for any individual who views career fulfillment as a climb toward “the top” — as long as one seeks derives worth in a way that is entirely contingent on external social cues and established metrics of power, there is no likelihood of contentment. It is hackneyed – but not without merit – to state that there is no arrival – only the journey. But I would add to this that, aside from reasonable material standards, the goals set should be determined by a commitment to a certain way of life rather than a certain position. This includes everything from learning how to make sure that that the work is more ethical to figuring out how to balance priorities outside of work. Since there is always something better, it’s best to try to figure out what can be done to turn today’s life into the most virtuous and ideal kind of life. Sometimes this can involve radical decisions that involve looking sideways rather than up.

In 1962, Arkansas businessman Sam Walton opened the first Walmart discount store, setting in motion the rapid ascendance of a corporate giant that would redefine markets around the world. With its focus on competitive prices and vast distribution networks that revolutionized the industry, Walmart grew over the course of the 20th century to become the world’s largest company.

Today, its retail empire covers 15 countries with over 8,900 stores employing 2.2 million people. Like all empires, its success is built on contradictions and exploitation.

It’s no secret that Walmart’s low-cost business model relies heavily on paying its employees what can reasonably be called poverty wages. The average worker makes about $8.80 an hour. A full-time employee makes roughly $15,500 per year. Walmart’s low pay and poor-to-nonexistent benefits forces many of its workers to turn to public assistance in order to survive.

These conditions extend beyond the boundaries of Walmart’s own business. As a dominating force in the global economy, Walmart is a standard bearer across multiple industries. Its model of cost-cutting and squeezing workers has been adopted by competitors, suppliers and contractors alike.

Substandard wages are just one facet of the Walmart economy – just as notably, its stores have beaten back their American employees’ attempts to unionize for their entire history. A recent wave of strikes by workers at Walmart stores and warehouses in the U.S. has challenged the mega-retailer’s sophisticated anti-union machinery, which runs on a combination of intimidation, harassment, illegal firings, court injunctions, and systematic anti-union inoculation.

But the latest surge of labor unrest may signal a turning point for Walmart and its workers – and the labor movement.

Walmart has sparred with many groups that have raised concerns about its business practices, including community organizations, environmental groups and class actions. But robust “union avoidance” has been at the center of its operations for decades. A 1997 manual titled “A Manager’s Guide to Remaining Union-Free” instructs managers to be on constant alert for any signs of organizing among store associates, and derides labor unions as “a big business.”

In 2000, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) successfully organized meat cutters at a Walmart store in Texas. The company responded by closing its 180 meat counters and replacing them with prepackaged cuts. Walmart staved off other organizing efforts by UFCW and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in the 1990s and 2000s, and it quashed an earlier Teamster campaign to organize drivers the 1980s.

Then something different started happening in 2012.

In June, workers at CJ’s Seafood, a Walmart supplier in Louisiana, went on strike against wage theft and threats by management. The workers’ bold action forced Walmart to drop the supplier, while the Labor Department ordered CJ’s to pay over $200,000 in back wages. This spark ignited a much larger and unprecedented wave of strikes that spread through Walmart’s supply chain and hit hundreds of its stores nationwide.

Walmart warehouse workers in Southern California and Illinois launched a historic campaign in September. Under the banners of Warehouse Workers United and Warehouse Workers for Justice – two groups formed by the Change to Win labor federation and the United Electrical Workers (UE), respectively – workers and activists engaged in a series of walkouts and acts of civil disobedience highlighting dangerous working conditions, wage theft and intimidation.

Although it does not directly employ the striking warehouse workers, Walmart was the target of worker protests because it dictates industry standards for contractors in its network of distribution centers. This month, a California judge named Walmart as a defendant in a class action suit over wage theft at contractor warehouses, boosting warehouse workers’ claim that Walmart is responsible for conditions at supplier facilities. After 21 days on strike in September, Illinois warehouse workers won their principal demand for an end to company retaliation and received full back pay for the days they were out on strike.

Acting Like a Union

Inspired by this victory and the new vulnerability of Walmart that it exposed, store employees struck at 30 locations in 12 states in October. More job actions at other stores the following month helped to build momentum for the big day of action on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year.

The Black Friday Rebellion was a massive step forward for the movement to change Walmart. Hundreds of store employees and thousands of supporters in 46 states took part in walkouts and rallies, demanding living wages, better conditions and respect on the job. The actions were buoyed by the effective use of traditional and social media that helped spread the walkouts and win public sympathy for the strikers.

Even while company spokespeople diminished the strikes and called them mere “publicity stunts,” Walmart filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, arguing that the rolling pickets were illegal because the workers had not begun working toward an NLRB election for union representation. But the new worker-powered formation that coordinated the Black Friday strikes has been clear that is it separate from UFCW. The Organization United for Respect at Walmart, or OUR Walmart, is not a union. Although it is supported by UFCW and its community coalition, Making Change at Walmart, OUR Walmart’s protests are aimed at pressuring Walmart to improve working conditions, not unionization.

This is perhaps the most important thing to understand about the recent strikes at Walmart stores and what sets them apart from previous campaigns: Workers and labor organizers know that Walmart has mastered the process of cutting down traditional union organizing drives; now they are attempting to apply a different model of workplace organizing that circumvents the typical roadblocks built in to U.S. labor laws, a regime tilted against employees and one which Walmart is an expert at manipulating.

The alternative organizing strategies being attempted by Walmart workers could have implications throughout the labor movement. In particular, their emphasis on industry-wide mobilizing, disruptive tactics, and self-organization could help inject a new militancy into labor struggle.

OUR Walmart’s approach also differs from previous coalition efforts to change Walmart, which were focused more on disrupting its glossy public image. Union-backed groups like Wake Up Walmart and Walmart Watch ran campaigns in the 2000s that were less focused on worker involvement, and more dedicated to media messaging designed to expose Walmart’s bad practices.

In contrast, OUR Walmart is a membership-based organization whose strength is defined by the size and activity of its membership rather than foundation funding and non-profit expertise. It began a year and a half ago with fewer than 100 members. Today it has over 1,000 members in chapters across 43 states. While it’s still too small to have a decisive impact on Walmart’s operations, its rapid growth and appeal among Walmart workers joining its ranks is remarkable.

Using management retaliation charges as the basis for work stoppages, OUR Walmart is able to secure some legal protection for non-union workers who otherwise have little recourse in taking collective action against their employer. Ultimately, OUR Walmart members would like to unionize Walmart stores, but that isn’t the immediate goal. For now, organizers are focused on growing an organization which they describe as “open source” in that it functions as a network providing tools for workers to self-organize.

“Workers can engage in actions that both make them feel powerful and that impact the company, and they don’t need to just spend their life waiting for some [government-supervised] processes to demonstrate they want a union,” former SEIU organizer Stephen Lerner told The Nation. Lerner, the originator of the Justice for Janitors campaign, argues that what’s important about OUR Walmart is that it’s acting like a union.

Striking back against the war on workers

Another critical part of the new Walmart campaign is the climate in which it’s unfolding.

Over the past two years, the labor movement has been under the gun of anti-union right-wing ideologues and austerity-driven politicians in both parties. Unions have suffered massive setbacks in states like Wisconsin, where tea party conservatives won an effort to strip collective bargaining rights in the public sector.

In 2012, two new states joined the ranks of so-called “right to work” states, bringing crippling restrictions on the collection of union dues to a region that has historically been a stronghold for labor. If the passage of right-to-work-for-less legislation in Indiana earlier in the year was a painful strike against unions, its recent and sudden passage in Michigan, the birthplace of the modern labor movement, was a devastating body blow.

In the meantime, working-class living standards continue to decline, as they have for decades. While income inequality has soared to levels not seen since the 1920s, the shrinking union movement has been largely on the defensive. The war against workers has accelerated since 2011 as unions find themselves embroiled in state-level battles in which their very existence is at stake.

Against this backdrop, it is significant that Walmart workers have chosen to go on the offensive. Workers are being battered in the private and public sectors, and unions have been making huge concessions in industries that have typically been more union-friendly in the past. Walmart workers have linked arms with allies in the labor movement to mount a highly organized and aggressive campaign in an environment that is quintessentially anti-labor.

“Walmart has designed a particular business model that demands inhumane and unsustainable working situations and poverty wages,” says UE Political Action Director Chris Townsend. “At a certain point, workers rebel, they push back. Walmart and the employers who imitate Walmart rely on astronomical turnover as a safety valve. But when workers stay on the job – now because of sheer desperation – more and more will choose to fight back rather than quit.”

Walmart isn’t the only place where workforce turmoil has given way to tenacity. On November 28, some 200 fast food workers from dozens of New York City restaurants staged a flash strike. Protesting the notorious low wages of fast food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King and Taco Bell, workers risked retaliation and walked off the job in a rare strike targeting a mostly non-union industry. With the support of New York Communities for Change, the workers formed the Fast Food Workers Committee and have been aided by other community-based groups and SEIU.

Unlike OUR Walmart, the fast food workers are explicitly demanding a fair process to unionize at their restaurants. But the workers, most of whom make little more than minimum wage, are also asking for a raise to $15 an hour. It’s a bold demand, but it’s one that Townsend argues is desperately needed if labor is going to survive as a movement.

“One of the tragedies of the current moment is that just at the time when wages have hit sub-poverty levels, the labor movement as a whole is afraid to ask for a raise, or even resist the wage-cutting offensive of the employers,” he says. “Asking for a raise has been replaced by elaborate begging for ‘shared sacrifice.’ That’s not going to inspire anyone to join a union. Militant struggles demanding a raise are long overdue, especially in low-wage industries like retail and fast food.”

A new era for organized labor?

The organizing model being pursued by both OUR Walmart and the Fast Food Workers Committee – using strikes to raise workplace demands prior to unionization – could point to a new era for organized labor in the U.S. as it adapts to an increasingly adversarial corporate and political environment.

Under the NLRB structure, unions gain recognition to represent workers based on exclusive representation of an entire worksite after majority support is demonstrated. Companies like Walmart easily use this structure to their advantage in blocking union drives, and the penalties they suffer for breaking the law are negligible at best.

That’s why organized labor and Walmart workers have turned to a model that resembles what’s known as minority unionism, a strategy that involves collective action to press for change before majority support among the workforce has been reached. It also relies on the collaboration among different unions to mobilize workers on a regional basis.

As labor reporter Josh Eidelson writes, union leverage under this model doesn’t hinge on majority representation at a single worksite. Instead, Walmart workers and organizers “are hoping that aggressive strikes will make majority support possible, rather than the other way around.”

However, the minority union model at Walmart is still experimental and its paradigm-shifting possibilities are yet to be seen.

“Most of the work is shaped and led in NGO form, and not traditional union form,” says Townsend. “That’s not necessarily a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ issue, but as is the case with all  organizing, the ultimate goal is to construct union organizational structures which can continue as effective forces once the initial paid staff and NGO staff move on.”

Townsend argues that not many of the organizing efforts being undertaken – including UE’s – could stand for long without outside support, owing to Walmart’s fierce anti-union attacks.

Certainly, the wave of walkouts and protests in 2012 mark only the beginning of what will necessarily be a years-long campaign for justice at Walmart. But the workers have already made history by putting their jobs on the line and standing up against a juggernaut.

If there is a tipping point in the struggle between corporate America and workers, then we are surely on the verge of breaching it. Workers are being backed into a corner and increasingly have little to lose in fighting back. While companies like Walmart and McDonald’s have been abusing employer-friendly labor laws for decades to keep wages low and unions out of their businesses, corporate lobbyists and conservative billionaires have teamed up with politicians to chip away at the few protections and rights afforded to workers under existing labor law.

Walmart workers – who for so long have stood outside of the labor movement – may be clearing a new path toward a revived labor movement in the U.S. If they should fail, the race to the bottom for workers will continue uninterrupted.

But if they win, it will mean nothing less than the surrender of an empire and a path-breaking comeback for the working class.

Brian Tierney is an independent labor journalist in Washington, D.C. Read more of his work at Subterranean Dispatches and follow him on Twitter @BTierDC.

Like the loss of any innocent life, the loss of twenty-seven to a gunman for no outward reason is a sad event. The fact that twenty of them belonged to children is heartbreaking. And the emerging discussions over gun control and mental health services are laudable – in fact, it’s refreshing to see that the issue has finally overcome the barrier to entry for this recurring unnatural disaster to be understood in sociopolitical terms. There are clear regulatory solutions to America’s exceptional violence among affluent nations.

But where I depart from the consensus among the media class and the rituals of mourning that are flooding the public sphere is the assumption that this is an unrivaled tragedy, which, as The Onion puts it, gives us all license to spend all day “curled in fetal position.” It doesn’t strike me this way, because everyday children lose their lives needlessly. The public’s unanimity in expressing this event as unacceptable is not simply about protection of the most vulnerable members of our society; the national discourse has also valorized which kinds of deaths we should find acceptable, and which kinds of deaths we should not.

Inhuman I am not: I understand the visceral impact of the extraordinary event; the rapid, simultaneous demise of twenty innocent beings who had just begun their lives is staggering. It is precisely the unfathomability of the occasion that generates that rare moment of monomania in the media, in which all media outlets devote all their most valuable space to make sense of one event in extreme, often inappropriate, detail.

But it is imperative for the observer to not confuse a singular event with the notion of singular tragedy. The broad consensus that this event constitutes the height of tragedy implicitly casts light on the way so many other children die silently in United States daily. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no coverage of the thousands of children suffering and dying regularly from poor or nonexistent health care, malnutrition and food insecurity, child abuse, stray bullets from gang violence, and a host of other preventable reasons rooted in  failures of institutions and economy. If we extend the frame of inquiry to international media coverage, which itself has paid immense attention to this event, and has triggered vigils for Newtown as far away as Pakistan, then the contrast grows starker: how much coverage is devoted to the manner in which six million children die a year from starvation; 1.4 million die a year from disease preventable by vaccination; tens of thousands have died from American wars of choice and drones in the last decade.

The American press and BBC News cover the shooting with fury, interview everyone affected, and suggest how society should move forward, but they will nearly omit the child deaths of other causes.

If one extends the utilitarian logic of more death as more tragic – the main reason many say that the death of 20 children at a time garners exceptional coverage – then there would be more coverage of health care-related deaths. Lack of insurance may have figured into the deaths of almost 17,000 childhood deaths in America. No, the numbers don’t take us very far. But there are other reasons that one type of death is highlighted and the other ignored, which apply both to the incentives and composition of the media class and the core reading public.

First, the spectacle: mass shootings are real-life horror stories, a natural narrative with a mysterious monster, a gruesome story arc and clean ending.

Second: There is universality to the story, from the perspective of the demographics most likely to publish and consume it. The media class and reading public have all attended school and can relate to the specter of a violent adult who threatens a generally safe day-to-day life. The race and class tendencies of these groups predispose them to fear the infinitesimal odds that their children are the victim of such an act more than, say, the concern that their child will be eaten up by the dangers that inner city youth face daily.

Third: Unpredictability. While conspicuous mass shootings happen far more often in the U.S. more than in most countries of comparable wealth, they don’t occur according to any particular rhythm, and they manifest in different forms. Every story has a new twist and psychoanalytic angle.

Fourth, and maybe most critically: It is agentive, not systemic. The death of children by bullets in a mass shooting is traceable to a lone individual who can be condemned. Deaths by starvation, poor health care, and a collection of other phenomena associated either with domestic or global poverty, are seen as the product of the workings of a system. A mass shooter can be  condemned without changing anything about one’s own life; engaging with the global economy’s poor distribution of resources has serious implications – including complicity – for the individual exercising judgment.

I am happy that there is a serious, action-oriented conversation about solutions to the horrific American phenomenon of mass shootings. But I also think that it is tragic that we rarely, if ever, have serious, action-oriented conversation about the various ways that other children die in ways that are also preventable.

To suggest that this is an immutable function of human nature where people are always likely to invest more attention in the shocking or things that afflict in-groups is sloth disguised as realism. Both the media and readers are composed of human beings who make decisions about what is important and are capable of reconditioning themselves in countless ways. I have discovered no evidence that systemic issues can’t be broken down into compelling narratives; that no media outlet has the budget to humanize child starvation in central Africa; or that every single person who reads a newspaper will only read about children whose lives have been lost to mass shootings instead of bombs. Habits of mind can be broken, and it is our responsibility to do so with the bad ones.

2012′S MOST LOOKED UP WORDS WERE “CAPITALISM” AND “SOCIALISM.” Merriam-Webster reports that its website’s most looked-up words of 2012 are capitalism and socialism, for which traffic doubled from the year before. “Socialism was looked up more frequently than was capitalism, ‘but since the trend pattern of capitalism so closely matches the moments when socialism was spiking, they form a natural pair.’” This phenomenon drives home the openness people have to systemic thinking during times of crisis, and it’s tragic to think of the total failure that progressives and the left have experienced in fundamentally reorienting public thinking about how we understand economic life. Read.

OBAMACARE ARCHITECT LEAVES WHITE HOUSE FOR BIG PHARMA. For some people there isn’t even a revolving door; there’s just a massive hole in the wall that one can walk through as he or she pleases. Elizabeth Fowler once worked at the nation’s largest health insurance provider, then served as Sen. Max Baucus’s chief health policy counsel where she drafted the Obamacare legislation, oversaw its implementation while working for the Obama administration, and is now returning to the private health care industry. Read.

WHY ISRAEL DIDN’T WIN. An excellent broad overview of the consequences of the latest flare-up in Gaza that extend throughout the region. “Victory in war is not measured solely in terms of body counts, however. And the ‘jungle’ – the Israeli word not just for the Palestinians but for the Arabs as a whole – may have the last laugh. Not only did Hamas put up a better fight than it had in the last war, it averted an Israeli ground offensive, won implicit recognition as a legitimate actor from the United States (which helped to broker the talks in Cairo), and achieved concrete gains, above all an end to targeted assassinations and the easing of restrictions on the movement of people and the transfer of goods at the crossings. There was no talk in Cairo, either, of the Quartet Principles requiring Hamas to renounce violence, recognise Israel and adhere to past agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority: a symbolic victory for Hamas, but not a small one. And the Palestinians were not the only Arabs who could claim victory in Cairo. In diplomatic terms, the end of fighting under Egyptian mediation marked the dawn of a new Egypt, keen to reclaim the role that it lost when Sadat signed a separate peace with Israel.” Read.

PAYING TUITION TO A GIANT HEDGE FUND. “Harvard’s own endowment has annually grown by five or ten or even twenty times [the rate of its increase in tuition], rendering net tuition from those thousands of students a mere financial bagatelle, having almost no impact on the university’s cash-flow or balance-sheet position. If all the students disappeared tomorrow—or were forced to pay double their current tuition—the impact would be negligible compared to the crucial fluctuations in the mortgage-derivatives market or the international cost-of-funds index.” Read.

ROLLING JUBILEE. Perhaps the biggest Occupy-related policy initiative to gain traction across the Internet in the past year. The basic idea is to raise money from supporters and use their money to buy debt from collection agents and then abolishing it. The official website, with basic explanation, is here. Doug Henwood’s widely circulated critique of the project asks: rolling where?. Finance blogger Felix Salmon likes it. Naked Capitalism has called it well-intentioned but criticized it as inferior to distributing the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual and argues it puts borrowers at risk.

WALMART & MCDONALD’S UPRISINGS. Josh Eidelson has been covering labor unrest with great speed and dexterity as of late. His explains how on Black Friday, “for about twenty-four hours, Walmart workers, union members and a slew of other activists pulled off the largest-ever US strike against the largest employer in the world.” Read. After the Black Friday actions at Wal-Mart, New York City fast-food workers walked out of the workplace, challenging a nearly union-free industry. Read. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explains how these unprecedented actions are intimately linked to all the concern about the fiscal cliff in Washington.

THE PETRAEUS LEGACY: A PARAMILITARY CIA A few weeks ago there was a great deal of fuss over Gen. David Petraeus’s sexual relationship with his biographer, the kind of story that many in the media fantasize about because they don’t have to make up excuses for rendering politics as a soap opera. But of course there are bigger things to pay attention to, as Jeremy Scahill points out: Petraeus, an instrumental player in the power struggle between the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, leaves behind a CIA that has strayed from intelligence to paramilitary-type activities. “A considerable part of the CIA budget is now no longer spying; it’s supporting paramilitaries who work closely with JSOC to kill terrorists, and to run the drone program,” Philip Giraldi, a retired career CIA case officer, told The Nation. One current State Department liaison who has also worked extensively with JSOC describes the CIA as becoming “a mini-Special Operations Command that purports to be an intelligence agency.” For all the praise Petraeus won for his counterinsurgency strategy and the “surge” in Iraq, he says, his real legacy is as a “political tool,” an enabler of those within the national security apparatus who want to see a continuation of covert global mini-wars. Read.

IF YOU’RE 27 OR YOUNGER, YOU’VE NEVER EXPERIENCED A COLDER-THAN-AVERAGE MONTH. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration summarizes October 2012: ‘The average temperature across land and ocean surfaces during October was 14.63°C (58.23°F). This is 0.63°C (1.13°F) above the 20th century average and ties with 2008 as the fifth warmest October on record. The record warmest October occurred in 2003 and the record coldest October occurred in 1912. This is the 332nd consecutive month with an above-average temperature.’” Read.

MOVEON UNDERGOES RADICAL STRATEGIC OVERHAUL. Move-On is attempting to move away from its inside game strategy and distributing more of its power to its activist base. It seems to be interested in becoming more decentralized, locally-oriented, and going beyond the online petition model, which has been widely replicated. Read.

Rather than just complain about the poverty of discourse on the issue while the skirmishes carry on, I offer a modest proposal: Abolish the use of the prefixes “pro” and “anti” prior to the words “Israeli” and “Palestinian,” so common in all media reports. While the terms do happen to capture the irrepressibly tribal dynamic of the issue, they obscure more than they illuminate.

Assuming that observers, supporters and participants are operating in good faith in the struggle for peace (which, granted, many aren’t), distinctions in stance on Israel and Palestine should be along inclination toward certain means toward that end, rather than a wholesale endorsement of a nation’s actions. “Pro” and “anti” are often used not only in a way that expresses position crudely — they are also employed selectively in a way that makes progressive stances harder to defend.

If one is a fan of Israeli belligerence toward Palestinians, then they shouldn’t be “pro-Israeli” — they should be labeled Israeli foreign policy hawks, because they have faith in violence as an effective foreign policy measure. The commonplace conflation of hawkishness and being “pro-Israeli” implicitly suggests that Israelis who prefer to have the IDF used less often or not at all are less committed to national interests; a penchant for solving things with guns becomes patriotism. (I could’ve sworn I’ve seen this somewhere else.)

Conversely, criticism of Israeli force is often deemed “anti-Israeli,” a category that frequently is grouped together with the sentiment that Israel’s existence is illegitimate, or that it’s disintegration is desirable. What could be referred to with precision as critical of Israeli foreign policy or uncomfortable with disproportionate force and its “collateral damage” is rendered as tantamount to calling for the state’s negation.

The fact that “anti-Palestinian” is hardly ever seen compared to “anti-Israeli” should also provide a clue as to the hierarchy of legitimacy regarding violence in popular discourse. Too often attacking Palestine is about national security, and attacking Israel is hatred of Israel.

No intelligent, moral actor is pro- or anti- a state or institution regardless of what it does; they are in favor of or against certain values that underlie its conduct. Insofar as progressives see some formulation of coexistence as a necessary condition for a path forward in the region, language that divorces default stances on issues from identity can serve as a small step toward understanding that what should divide many shouldn’t be this arbitrary affinity for Israel or Palestine over the other, but differing notions of ownership and control and propensities for violence. Since in fact many people do just endorse their team unconditionally, repudiating the term “pro-” can strip them of a shield used against admitting the kinds of policies and ethics they endorse.

Using the terms “pro-” and “anti-” before Israeli and Palestinian are lazy shorthand that undermines the real range of opinions available to Israelis, Palestinians and others who wish to face the issues on the table. There is really no excuse for media outlets to use the term.

Today, a special edition of State of the Left. Pakistan is often understood by outsiders as a nasty problem that needs to be dealt with. But when you’re looking through the crosshairs of a drone, the concept of “problem” is rather limited, and “solution” even more so. Ghazal Farrukhi walks us through the political prospects of a country on the brink, surveying reasons for hope and pessimism as Pakistan takes unprecedented steps in committing to the democratic process.

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Election fever is in the air in Pakistan. In February 2013, the democratically elected members of the country’s National and Provincial Assemblies will step down after five years, in preparation for general elections 60 days later under the aegis of a caretaker government. Many governments have come into power in Pakistan since 1947, several of them elected. Yet in 65 years of independence, this will be the first time that a democratically elected government is able to complete its tenure in power. What, if anything, does this mean for Pakistan, and its current trajectory?

Liberal Democracy, and Its Alternatives?

BLOODY CIVILIANS

The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) came into power in 2008 after a sustained mass movement, known as the Lawyer’s Movement, to unseat military dictator Pervez Musharraf. In the years since, the civil-military balance has remained tense. It remains difficult to know who really controls certain areas of government such as foreign policy and counter-terrorism strategies. How much real power the government has in either case is debatable. Although the elections mean that progress has been made, a major battle for the next government will continue to be simply remaining in power against the possibility of another military coup.

JUDICIAL ACTIVISM AND SUPREME COURT RAJ

The final piece in post-Musharraf Pakistan has been the almost unprecedented wave of judicial activism by the Pakistan Supreme Court, in particular the Chief Justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry. The Lawyer’s Movement of 2007 was in part led by a popular movement to restore the Chief Justice after he was removed by Musharraf. Since his restoration to the post of Chief Justice in 2008, Pakistani courts have witnessed an upsurge in the suo moto cases picked up by the Supreme Court—issues of law that the Court notices on its own rather than responding to a petition filed in court. The Supreme Court has gone from strength to strength, with many in the country cheering the Chief Justice on as he tackles issues as varied as the price of fuel to the ‘corruption case’ against the president. The latter in particular even led to the dismissal of Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gillani in early 2012 for contempt of court.

Earlier, the judges were criticized by some commentators for appearing to target the sitting government and ignoring any issues or breaches of the law by the army. Recently, however, this assumption too was challenged as the Asghar Khan Case was heard in court. In an unprecedented step, the verdict openly accused former heads of the national security agency, the ISI, of rigging elections in the 1990s by buying off politicians. The Supreme Court has now challenged both other key players in Pakistan’s power set-up, the military and the parliament. While the Chief Justice certainly took on many issues with populist overtones, how much of a real, tangible solution can self-selecting judicial activism be? The implications of the Supreme Court’s deployment of its power can only become clearer in the future. What is already apparent, however, is that far from being an aloof and apolitical branch of state, the Pakistani judiciary is as much a political player in the country as the elected legislators and the Army.

TSUNAMI OF CHANGE

The current unpopularity of the PPP and its coalition partners among large portions of the population—in particular the urban middle classes—appears to be matched only by despair at the alternatives on offer. The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) currently sits as the largest party in Opposition, and also rules the largest of Pakistan’s four provinces. The party that wins Punjab wins Pakistan, they say, and the PML-N ought to be confident here. Yet alternatives are, very slowly, creeping up. The first of these is the much-vaunted ‘tsunami’ of change led by Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). Imran Khan, a former cricket superstar who has won many over with conspicuous philanthropy projects, demonstrated his arrival as a serious contender last October with major rallies in Lahore, Karachi and other urban centres. His campaign platform is a mixture of fierce and principled opposition to the ‘war on terror’ and drone attacks in the northwest, and a promise to root out entrenched elites, corruption and ‘inefficiency’ to solve Pakistan’s various internal ailments. He cemented this stance with a well-publicized ‘march to Waziristan’ to protest against the drone attacks, claiming to be the first national-level politician who has gone to FATA. Yet as the elections draw closer and the PTI’s rather populist rhetoric comes under closer examination, Imran Khan’s tsunami appears to be ebbing. There are concerns that Khan’s comfort with the Pakistani Taliban goes beyond advocating for an end to the war, while others worry that he is far too close to the Army.  It remains to be seen not only how much of a real alternative he can offer to the mainstream political parties, but also whether he will be in a position to provide that alternative at all.

STAR, CRESCENT, HAMMER, SICKLE

Other voices, too, have now dusted off their claims to the revolution Imran promises. Various factions of Pakistan’s dormant Left have very recently reunited, with the intention of harnessing the desire for real change much of the country still asks for five years after overthrowing dictatorship. Once a vibrant political force, socialist and Communist parties were repressed by the state during the late 1970s and 1980s, and consigned to the sidelines of Pakistan’s politics. As the Awami Worker’s Party attempts to consolidate itself over time as a party with mass appeal and political clout, it will position itself as a third alternative between “an anemic democratic camp” and anti-democratic forces. While the party’s focus perhaps ought to lie in the post-elections period considering the recentness of the merger, the re-awakening of the Pakistani Left’s ambitions can only be a welcome addition, both as a voice to the working classes neglected by the country’s feudal and neo-liberal elite, and also as a fresh entrant to the rather tired political discourse currently on offer.

Recommended reading: Return of the left: Will the hammer and sickle be enough?

New governments, old problems

Achieving liberal democracy has been a hard-fought battle in Pakistan, and as suggested, there is still a long way to go. Yet even modern liberal democracy has its limitations, it appears. Several challenges will remain for the next government. Whether they are on the election agenda or not, it remains to be seen whether real, radical change can be effected for these pressing issues.

BALOCHISTAN

Balochistan’s many grievances been so badly mishandled by the establishment since the present uprising started in the early 2000s that full-fledged separatist sentiment is now almost everywhere in the province. Bodies continue to pile up in Pakistan’s largest, least populated and historically neglected province, and activists and political workers continue to ‘go missing’. The leaders of the movement are slowly disengaging themselves from the various processes of the Pakistani state. When Akhtar Mengal, a former Chief Minister and head of the Balochistan National Party, presented a six-point manifesto to the Supreme Court a few months ago, what was seen as a wakeup call for Islamabad, was in fact criticized in Balochistan itself in many circles for even suggesting that the federation could be preserved in any circumstance. While almost all mainstream political parties pledge ‘brotherhood’ for the Baloch, there appears to be an almost total lack of trust and perhaps even willingness on the part of the establishment to resolve the situation. The whispers of 1971 are only getting louder.

Recommended reading: Balochistan within and without

PAKISTAN’S SECURITY STATE

Bombs go off in Pakistan with a pattern. Eid, Moharram, other occasions of ‘heightened sensitivity’. With security a real and growing concern, the government has given itself the power to issue fiats suspending cell phone services temporarily in major urban centres, like Karachi, and Quetta, and also attempted to ban motorbikes, which are ubiquitous on roads as the vehicle of the Pakistani working and middle classes, when a greater-than-usual risk of terrorist attacks is felt. The government argues that terrorists use cell phones to detonate bombs, and motorbikes are often also used in such attacks. Both claims have been met with widespread public derision, and yet the sporadic bans continue by executive fiat in the name of ‘security’. While these crude attempts at a legitimate counter-terrorism policy on the part of the government are clumsy to say the least, they point to the worrying rise of the Pakistani security state, with state control over essential elements of daily life. Further, as the state gives itself these powers in the name of security against terrorists, what is truly worrying is the other purposes it has already begun to put these powers to. The anti-terror laws that were put in place during Musharraf’s time, meanwhile, do not look like they are going anywhere. It is unfortunately unlikely that any new government will give back these powers in the name of ‘national security’.

HOW TO THINK ABOUT MALALA YUSUFZAI

Malala Yusufzai, a 15-year-old girl who narrowly survived being shot in the head by the Taliban in October for her work as a grassroots activist, has since garnered enormous global attention. It seems as if Malala has been appropriated by now for almost every possible agenda relating to Pakistan out there, whether she agrees or not. What is most worrying is the use of her name to further the pro-war agenda in the northwest, by both American and Pakistani armies—an agenda Malala herself has stated she opposes. How should true progressives think through her shooting?

Recommended reading: The Propaganda War

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Change is afoot all over Pakistan in a thousand different ways. The State of Pakistan’s Left is intertwined with the state of our democratic project. What remains to be seen is how the two continue together past February 2013.

Ghazal A. Farrukhi is a Teaching Fellow at a university in Karachi, Pakistan. She can be followed on Twitter here.