On the night of Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress – a rarity for any sitting president – we dragged an old tv into the waiting room to show the assembled patients and staff Obama’s speech and get their reactions. Here Robert Taylor and Sheon Slaughter, both uninsured, offered their thoughts. Highland Hospital volunteer Lucy Ogbu and Certified Nurse Assistant Amy Johnson also discuss the implications of the speech.
Highland Hospital is in Oakland, CA. For more information—and for many more video clips from the hospital—check out The Waiting Room.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 20, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Grand Casino, Biloxi, MS, five months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Mississippi.
On August 29, 2005, the eye of Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Waveland, Mississippi, and the western side of the storm grazed New Orleans. Five months after the storm, I visited the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
According to a National Hurricane Center report on Katrina, “in many locations, most of the buildings along the coast were completely destroyed, leaving few structures within which to identify still-water marks.” The center’s researchers estimate that the hurricane produced a storm surge as high as 27 feet in some locations.
It was dumbfounding to drive along the coast in Biloxi and find the Grand Casino on the north side of Highway 90. Before Katrina, the casino was on a barge, docked off the beach, south of the highway. The storm surge lifted the casino barge out of the water, over the beach and over the highway. If you stand at the western end of the barge and look east, you can see the yellow and blue neon sign, a half mile down the road, where the barge originally sat. The same thing happened to two other casino barges—the President Casino in Biloxi, which landed on top of a Holiday Inn, and the Gulfport Grand Casino….
The national media have covered the near-total destruction of Bay St. Louis and Waveland. Driving along Beach Boulevard in the two towns, I saw a few people who had returned and were living in trailers on their plots of land, but practically everything was deserted. All that remained were the merest remnants of homes and the things that had been inside them….
In each place I visited along the western half of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, the look of the destruction was a little different, but it was consistently total. And surprisingly, the destruction in the coastal areas of Pascagoula, at the eastern end of the state, is comparable. I remembered George W. Bush’s promise to rebuild another “fantastic house” for Trent Lott on the Pascagoula beachfront. I did not know that 95% of the city’s residential areas went underwater or that 65% of the city’s homes remain uninhabitable. Northrop Grumman Ship Systems’ facility in Pascagoula, which before Katrina employed 19,800 people, was all but obliterated.
Hurricane Katrina wiped out the entire Gulf Coast of Mississippi. The scale of the destruction is difficult to comprehend. All along the coast—mile after mile—just about anything that was there is now gone.
But this is only part of the story. According to the National Hurricane Center, the surge “penetrated at least six miles inland in many portions of coastal Mississippi and up to 12 miles inland along bays and rivers. The surge crossed Interstate 10 in many locations.” Interstate 10 runs east-west, four miles or more north of coastal Highway 90.
Gayle Tart’s brother Sam and his son John died in Pass Christian during the hurricane, on John’s second birthday. Tart explained that father and son had drowned inside their own home.
“Water never came down there [before Katrina]. That’s across the track. [With Katrina] that water came in and that water went out, and the velocity was unbelievable,” Tart said. “The first boundary was the beach and the next boundary was the highway. The day after the storm, you saw neither—no beach and no highway.”
Small rental and workforce housing progress has fallen dramatically short of State predictions, and so Mississippi has asked HUD for additional funds to temporarily subsidize lower-income residents in market rate rentals….
Mississippi has allocated just over half its funds on housing, and has lowered its commitment to housing by over $800 million in the past 2 years. Louisiana has allocated over 85 percent to housing programs and increased its commitment over the same period.
Mississippi has spent just under half its funds, while Louisiana has spent almost 68 percent of its funds, widening its lead over Mississippi.
Mississippi diverted $600 million from its housing program to a port expansion, while Louisiana intends to reinvest $600 million in unused Road Home funds for housing assistance for low-income residents.
Mississippi took longer to spend less later for low-income residents than for wealthier residents.
A family photo rests on the foundation slab of a home obliterated by Hurricane Katrina in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
I emphasize Mississippi in this blog post because I know that nearly all of the fourth anniversary coverage of the ongoing Katrina aftermath, will focus myopically on New Orleans. The situation in New Orleans is still dire. The housing crisis is dire. But there will not be an adequate recovery until the interconnectedness of regions and issues becomes a fundamental insight that drives policy.
While poor and minority survivors and activists will agree (if anyone asks them) that they face multiple, interconnected disasters in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, this basic local insight goes largely unrecognized. Government failure is certainly most responsible for a “recovery” that has been arbitrary, resource-driven, and slow rather than holistic, need-driven, or effective. But no one, progressives as a group included, has adequately depicted, let alone offset, that failure. Narrowly focused aid has often segregated otherwise related issues, making one or another worse and masking the lack of an overall plan. Residents of the region feel tremendous gratitude to the tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of volunteers whose countless hours of labor, along with their financial contributions, are primarily responsible for what rebuilding has occurred. However, this individual good will is no substitute for the kind of comprehensive, coordinated, and sustained response that is needed from government at all levels.
Unfortunately, no thoughtful and coordinated response will occur without a compelling grassroots push for community visibility, multi-issue awareness, and broad social justice for Gulf Coast survivors. Our region today remains in a cultural, environmental, economic, and human rights crisis no less severe than its more frequently discussed housing crunch and extending far beyond the parishes of its famed city, New Orleans. The media, policymakers, academicians, and private funding groups repeatedly fail to recognize regional connectivity or to challenge the basic invisibility of the Gulf Coast’s multiply wounded communities and ecosystems—together, its very soul. [P]iecemeal analyses and responses … are moving social justice and equitable recovery nowhere fast.
a hybrid model to partner directly with communities in planning, overseeing and administering recovery projects to assist the survivors of these disasters, provide communities with tools to build resilience against the impact of future disasters and revitalize the region economically. The bill would create a minimum of 100,000 prevailing wage jobs and training opportunities for local and displaced workers on projects reinvesting in infrastructure and restoring the coastal environment utilizing emerging green building techniques and technologies. This program would empower residents to realize their right to return with dignity and create stronger, safer, and more equitable communities.
This video is from a film by my friend Pete Nicks, who is the guy with the camera in my banner image, above. The film, The Waiting Room, is a timely documentary about our health care system, as seen at The Alameda County Medical Center in Oakland, CA.
THE WAITING ROOM will follow three people waiting in their own way: Wright Lassiter, the hospital’s CEO, who is struggling to run an under-funded public hospital while waiting for the health care system to change, Lydia Vasquez, a young uninsured woman waiting for the birth of her first child, and Kevin Washington, a young uninsured man who has slipped through the cracks, waiting for a miracle after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. These narratives will be punctuated by content interstitials culled from the social media space, both user-generated and produced: videos submitted online, blog posts cinematically dramatized, conversations between patients and policy makers in Washington, DC, photos and stories from the front lines of the hospital waiting room.
It’s not just a film; it’s a project. Read the rest to find out more about it.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 24, 2009 at 2:31 am
August 18, 2009
Contact: Linda Pinkow, (617) 447-2177, ext 204, linda@dollarsandsense.org
New Anthology Explores the State of Labor
Real World Labor
Edited by Immanuel Ness, Amy Offner, Chris Sturr, and the Dollars & Sense Collective
In this time of rapid economic change, the power of organized labor seems to be in decline. But new organizing strategies are emerging to challenge corporate power and the globalization of capital. Real World Labor examines the most pressing issues facing workers today: fundamental changes in the nature of work and wages; new legal impediments to union organizing; the persistence of racial and gender discrimination; migrant workers’ struggle for dignity; militarism and its harmful effects on the working class; union responses to the global financial meltdown; and new forms of rank-and-file organizing and resistance.
Real World Labor provides up-to-date, accessible, and penetrating analysis of the most significant theoretical, historical, and practical issues confronting labor unions and workers on a national and global level. This collection includes 70 authoritative essays by leading writers and scholars of the labor movement, drawn from the pages of Dollars & Sense magazine, Working USA, and Labor Notes.
Real World Labor is an antidote to the misinformation, false arguments, and faulty analysis so common in the mainstream media and among orthodox economists. An excellent classroom resource.
— MICHAEL YATES
associate editor of Monthly Review,
author of Why Unions Matter
For any labor studies course, Real World Labor is the most comprehensive and accessible book available today. Written by authoritative scholars of the labor movement in the United States and worldwide, no book compares to this work in its breadth of coverage and scope of analysis. This is the only collection that provides an in-depth overview of labor issues in an accessible manner to anyone interested in understanding the most significant issues facing workers and the contemporary labor movement. I highly recommend this book to all!
— THOMAS J. KRIGER
Provost, National Labor College
Real World Labor, like decades of Dollars & Sense books, is bound to be a great guide to labor issues, with a wide range of perspectives for both union members and students.
— LARRY COHEN
President, Communications Workers of America
Order an exam copy (pdf’s as well as hard copies are available), and browse our catalog of economics books at www.dollarsandsense.org, or call (617) 447-2177.
Real World Labor
Edited by Immanuel Ness, Amy Offner, Chris Sturr, and the Dollars & Sense Collective
ISBN: 978-1-878585-55-4
Publication date: August 2009
Pages: 330
Price: $34.95 Contributors include: David Bacon, Kim Bobo, Heather Bouchey, Roger Bybee, Aviva Chomsky, Steve Early, Bill Fletcher Jr., Staughton Lynd, Arthur MacEwan, John Miller, Immanuel Ness, Thomas Palley, Frances Fox Piven, Robert Pollin, Paddy Quick, Peter Rachleff, Alejandro Reuss, Jane Slaughter, Lucien Van Der Walt, and others.
Contents:
Chapter 1 – Labor Law, Policy, and Regulation
Chapter 2 – Wages and the Labor Market
Chapter 3 – Employment and Unemployment
Chapter 4 – International Labor Movements
Chapter 5 – Discrimination by Race and Gender
Chapter 6 – Immigration and Migration
Chapter 7 – Unions and Organizing Strategy
Chapter 8 – Competing Forms of Management
Chapter 9 – Labor, Globalization, and Trade
Chapter 10 – Labor and Economic Crisis
Chapter 11 – Labor and Militarism
My google alerts on “Hungry Blues” sometimes turn up interesting things. Steven Taylor of the Fugs has written a song that is also called Hungry Blues. It’s very much in the spirit of the original song that my blog is named after. It’s not quite as good, but it’s a tall order to be asked to measure up to Langston Hughes and James P. Johnson. May the visions of both songs come to pass.
If you’re new to this blog or just have never checked out the song on my About page, here’s the Hughes/Johnson composition. More info about it is available on the About page (scroll to the end).
If you are in Massachusetts, please vote NO on Question 1 this Tuesday. Question 1 is a dangerous, binding proposal to repeal the state income tax, effectively cutting the state budget by $12 billion or almost 40%.
HAVANA, Cuba – Gustav has grown to a Category 4 hurricane with 145 mph winds, U.S. forecasters said Saturday, as the storm pummeled a Cuban province, threatened Havana and led to the evacuations of more than 240,000 Cubans.
…KATRINA STRENGTHENS TO CATEGORY FOUR WITH 145 MPH WINDS…
A HURRICANE WARNING IS IN EFFECT FOR THE NORTH CENTRAL GULF COAST FROM MORGAN CITY LOUISIANA EASTWARD TO THE ALABAMA/FLORIDA BORDER…INCLUDING THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS AND LAKE PONTCHARTRAIN. A HURRICANE WARNING MEANS THAT HURRICANE CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED WITHIN THE WARNING AREA WITHIN THE NEXT 24 HOURS. PREPARATIONS TO PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY SHOULD BE RUSHED TO COMPLETION.
The hurricane is still expected to hit the US Gulf coast on Monday or Tuesday, anywhere between east Texas and west Florida. Experts say the most likely area lies between Houston and Mobile, Alabama.
I saw a few people who had returned and were living in trailers on their plots of land, but practically everything was deserted. All that remained were the merest remnants of homes and the things that had been inside them….
In each place I visited along the western half of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, the look of the destruction was a little different, but it was consistently total. And surprisingly, the destruction in the coastal areas of Pascagoula, at the eastern end of the state, is comparable. I remembered George W. Bush’s promise to rebuild another “fantastic house” for Trent Lott on the Pascagoula beachfront. I did not know that 95% of the city’s residential areas went underwater or that 65% of the city’s homes remain uninhabitable. Northrop Grumman Ship Systems’ facility in Pascagoula, which before Katrina employed 19,800 people, was all but obliterated.
Hurricane Katrina wiped out the entire Gulf Coast of Mississippi. The scale of the destruction is difficult to comprehend. All along the coast—mile after mile—just about anything that was there is now gone.
But this is only part of the story. According to the National Hurricane Center, the surge “penetrated at least six miles inland in many portions of coastal Mississippi and up to 12 miles inland along bays and rivers. The surge crossed Interstate 10 in many locations.” Interstate 10 runs east-west, four miles or more north of coastal Highway 90.
Gayle Tart’s brother Sam and his son John died in Pass Christian during the hurricane, on John’s second birthday. Tart explained that father and son had drowned inside their own home.
“Water never came down there [before Katrina]. That’s across the track. [With Katrina] that water came in and that water went out, and the velocity was unbelievable,” Tart said. “The first boundary was the beach and the next boundary was the highway. The day after the storm, you saw neither—no beach and no highway.”
“I am strongly, strongly encouraging everyone in the city to evacuate,” Mayor C. Ray Nagin said in a news conference Saturday afternoon. “Start the process now. Go north if you can because the storm may continue to turn a little bit west.”
Mr. Nagin said that if the hurricane continues on its current path, a mandatory evacuation will be implented — probably about 8 a.m. Sunday.
Hotels were closing, and the sound of boards being hammered over windows could be heard. The state police on Saturday morning reported moderately heavy traffic on a principal highway north, Interstate 55, and a voluntary city-organized evacuation plan for the poor, elderly and sick — the principal victims in Hurricane Katrina — was in full swing.
Dozens waited outside for buses at 17 collection points all over the city to take them to the Union Passenger Terminal, the train station downtown. From there they will be taken by bus and train to cities in north Louisiana — Shreveport, Alexandria and Monroe — and to Memphis. They clutched duffle bags, plastic shopping sacks, small children and overstuffed suitcases, vowing to avoid at all costs the still-vivid nightmare of Katrina.
The buses arrived promptly at 8 a.m. — a sharp contrast to the chaos and disorganization of three years ago, when the only plan was to jam thousands of people without cars into the Superdome and let others fend for themselves.
“I refuse to go through that again,” said Roxanne Clayton, a photo technician at Walgreens, who was waiting in the Irish Channel neighborhood with her teenage son and 10-year-old daughter. She recalled being stuck in her attic for two days during Hurricane Katrina. “I’d rather play it safe than sorry, because I know what sorry feels like,” Ms. Clayton said.
A neighbor from the larger houses up Louisiana Avenue brought doughnuts for those patiently waiting, and many said they were simply grateful for the ride out of town.
In the Tremé neighborhood, bordering the French Quarter, large families without cars, and some who were simply homeless, waited for buses that quickly filled. “If you’ve been through Katrina, it’s time for you to go,” said Marion Colbert, a powder room attendant at a French Quarter restaurant for more than three decades. “You never know about these storms if you’ve been living in the city 80 years.”
In the Central City section, families, elderly men and the visibly infirm — people in wheelchairs and with canes — lined the sidewalk along Dryades Street for half a long block. “After going through Katrina, that ain’t no joke,” said Jody Anderson, who spent seven days in the Superdome. “It’s not worth it, trying to stay,” said Ms. Anderson, an unemployed former cashier….
State officials prepared an elaborate system of contraflow lanes on interstate and federal highways leading out of southern Louisiana, staging the plans so that those farthest south could exit first. In St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, officials ordered a mandatory evacuation beginning at 4 p.m. Saturday, warning residents that curfews would be enforced. The parish was one of the hardest hit in Hurricane Katrina, and many of its residents never returned.
Yet not everyone is rushing to leave:
Still, there were few signs of a mass exodus, though gasoline stations were crowded. With forecasters not predicting a direct hit on New Orleans, some here had made the decision to stay. “My sense from talking to citizens is that they are either in an extreme state of ‘anxious to leave,’ or they’re just tired and ‘I don’t want to be bothered,’ ” Mayor Nagin told reporters late Friday.
“If it’s like Katrina, they might not let us back,” says the 52-year-old old Wal-Mart cashier, her eyes baggy and smudged with worry. “They might put a fence around the whole parish and say, `Go away.’”In places like St. Bernard, the Lower 9th Ward, and trailer parks along the Gulf Coast, those still reeling from Katrina are now the most vulnerable to Hurricane Gustav.
I’m wondering what is being done to reassure evacuees that their return home is guaranteed. I’m also wondering why Mississippi, which may yet again be the state hit by the eye of the storm, is not already mobilizing on the same scale as Louisiana.
George Bush has declared a state of emergency in Mississippi, as requested by the state’s governor, Haley Barbour. So far mandatory evacuations are only directed at the most vulnerable Mississippi residents, who are still living in FEMA trailers, Katrina cottages and in low lying areas.
In Harrison and Hancock counties, evacuations of residents from trailers and cottages will begin Sunday morning and they will be bused north to Jackson. Because there are fewer trailers and enough shelters in Jackson County, residents of trailers and cottages there won’t be evacuated until Monday, Barbour said. Residents in low-lying areas and anyone who signed up for the state evacuation plan also will be moved out beginning Sunday morning.
These most vulnerable people should for sure be evacuated. But the people Barbour is making sure to evacuate are the same people he has been tacitly telling to go to hell while he spends CDBG money, intended to alleviate their homelessness, on other things like a $600 million port expansion expansion scheme. Barbour has realized since at least 2006, that it would be a public relations disaster for him if the world watched as another hurricane washed these same neglected Mississippi residents into the Gulf of Mexico.Even if you are not as cynical about Barbour as I am, remember: when Katrina hit Mississippi, flooding devastated communities ten miles inland. I saw the destruction with my own eyes and talked to people whose loved ones drowned inside their own houses. But Barbour and Homeland Security’s Michael Chertoff are not rushing make sure Mississippians will be safe.
“We have not made a decision for any sort of mass evacuations,” said Barbour….
“We’re trying not to pull the trigger too quickly on evacuations,” Chertoff said. “There may be some shifting in the direction of the storm,” and the other officials urged residents to take personal responsibility for their safety by getting together food, water, first aid kits, flashlights and radios.
Since I started writing this post earlier today, Mayor Nagin has issued a mandator evacuation order for New Orleans. As the people of New Orleans once again flee a deadly storm, they can at least feel reassured that the local, state and federal authorities they have taken measures to ensure that the city is not again destroyed by flooding—actually just to make sure that some parts of the city are not again wrecked by flooding.
[F]loodgates have been constructed at the end of city drainage canals leading to Lake Pontchartrain, the principal conduits for the fateful surge during Hurricane Katrina. Still, there is no such arrangement on the Industrial Canal, the surge from which destroyed the still-empty Lower Ninth Ward.
My friend Alycia drove me through the lower 9th ward in her four-wheeler, navigating the twisted, pot-holed roads like a pro. It looked basically like abandoned territory, dozens maybe hundreds of blocks of weed-filled vacant lots. Alycia slowed down, pointed out the window at vacant lot after vacant lot and said “Home, home, home, home.” Sure enough, if you looked carefully through the weeds and garbage, you could make out the foundations of what were once houses.
“Holy cow,” I said, suddenly getting it. The people I saw on TV two and a half years ago in the filth of the Superdome … they once lived here. “Where did all these people go?” I asked, absently, stupidly, insultingly.
Alycia just shook her head as if to say, “People who don’t live here just don’t get it.” And she’s right.
But seeing it first-hand at least puts a human face on the familiar litany of statistics. Almost two thousand people dead. Eighty percent of the city under water for an average of fifty-seven days. Four hundred thousand jobs lost. Two hundred and seventy-five thousand homes destroyed.
And a list of intractable problems so long that it gives you a headache. There’s soil contamination, for one, and serious safety problems with some FEMA trailers, for another. And then there’s something that a guy I met called, “the Katrina cough” – a dry heave he said his doctor couldn’t diagnose, but which just got worse and worse for the whole six months he was working in neighborhoods with severe water damage. Finally, he just had to stop. “After a while, you don’t even want to breathe, the cough hurts so much,” he said.
But Patel turns from this to embrace an optimism about proposed solutions that are harming thousands of low-income, predominantly African-American students in New Orleans.
And still, President Scott Cowen of Tulane University, who gave a remarkable afternoon keynote address at the Clinton Global Initiative, said that he’s never been so optimistic about the city. Before Katrina, it had the worst school system in America, serious crime and corruption problems, a profoundly inadequate infrastructure. And now, the city leaders along with common residents are dreaming about what a model 21st century city would look like. What kind of public education system should it have? What kind of health care delivery? And perhaps most daringly, how can all of it be done on an entirely green basis – from working-class parts of town to tourist areas.
“This is the greatest social experiment in America,” President Cowen said.
Yes there is a social experiment going on, but not one that justifies Patel’s title, “New Orleans: Recover, Rebuild, Rebirth.” New Orleans attorney Bill Quigley writes:
There is a massive experiment being performed on thousands of primarily African American children in New Orleans. No one asked the permission of the children. No one asked permission of their parents. This experiment involves a fight for the education of children.
This is the experiment.
The First Half
Half of the nearly 30,000 children expected to enroll in the fall of 2007 in New Orleans public schools have been enrolled in special public schools, most called charter schools. These schools have been given tens of millions of dollars by the federal government in extra money, over and above their regular state and local money, to set up and operate. These special public schools are not open to every child and do not allow every student who wants to attend to enroll. Some charter schools have special selective academic criteria which allow them to exclude children in need of special academic help. Other charter schools have special admission policies and student and parental requirements which effectively screen out many children. The children in this half of the experiment are taught by accredited teachers in manageable size classes. There are no overcrowded classes because these charter schools have enrollment caps allowing them to turn away students. These schools also educate far fewer students with academic or emotional disabilities. Children in charter schools are in better facilities than the other half of the children. These schools are getting special grants from Laura Bush to rebuild their libraries and grants from other foundations to help them educate. These schools do educate some white children along with African-American children. These are public schools, but they are not available to all public school students.
The Other Half
The other half of public school students, over ten thousand children, have been assigned to a one-year-old experiment in public education run by the State of Louisiana called the “Recovery School District” (RSD) program. The education these children receive will be compared to the education received by the first half in the charter schools. These children are effectively what is called the “control group” of an experiment Ð those against whom the others will be evaluated.
The RSD schools have not been given millions of extra federal dollars to operate. The new RSD has inexperienced leadership. Many critical vacancies exist in their already-insufficient district-wide staff. Many of the teachers are uncertified. In fact, the RSD schools do not yet have enough teachers, even counting the uncertified, to start school in the fall of 2007. Some of the RSD school buildings scheduled to be used for the fall of 2007 have not yet been built.
In the first year of this experiment, the RSD had one security guard for every 37 students. Students at John McDonough High said their RSD school, which employed more guards than teachers, had a “prison atmosphere.” In some schools, children spent long stretches of their school days in the gymnasium waiting for teachers to show up to teach them.
There is little academic or emotional counseling in the RSD schools. Children with special needs suffer from lack of qualified staff. College-prep math and science classes and language immersion are rarely offered. Classrooms keep filling up as new children return to New Orleans and are assigned to RSD schools.
Many of the RSD schools do not have working kitchens or water fountains. Bathroom facilities are scandalous. Teachers at one school report there are two bathrooms for the entire school – one for all the male students, faculty and staff and another for all the females in the building.
Danatus King, of the NAACP in New Orleans, said “What happened last year was a tragedy. Many of the city’s children were denied an education last year because of a failure to plan on the part of the RSD.”
Hardly any white children attend this half of the school experiment.
These are the public schools available to the rest of the public school students.
I first read this passage by Bill Quigley in Steven Miller and Jack Gerson’s report, “The Corporate Surge Against Public Schools,” which I’ve posted in full, below the fold. Miller and Gerson discuss what is happening in New Orleans in detail and put in the context a dangerous national trend which is leaving our schools more unequal than ever. I urge you to read it.
While there is still some attention to Hillary Clinton’s role in the 1990s US foreign policy in the Balkans, I think we ought to be discussing untruths much more significant than her fib about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire.
Sen. Clinton’s other honesty problem this week came with revelations that, while she claims to have been an internal NAFTA critic in the administration, she actually gave several presentations in favor of NAFTA at the time it was passed. But, to be fair, this may not be a deception. People are often called upon to advocate for decisions in public that they opposed in private. The NAFTA controversy suggests other concerns, such as: If she were such a vehement critic, and the administration backed it anyway, how important was she? And, how can she claim credit for the good deeds of her husband’s administration and yet take no responsibility for its problems?
Still, Clinton’s handling of the NAFTA question certainly raises concerns. Especially troubling is her campaign’s work to spread rumors of Obama sending back-channel messages to the Canadians suggesting their anti-NAFTA rhetoric was all talk — when, according to a high-level Canadian source, her campaign had done that.
So let’s go back to some other statements of Hillary Clinton and to some other features of the US military presence in the Balkans.
Last year, earlier on in her campaign, Clinton said
she would limit the Bush administration practice of hiring private companies to perform government functions and would work to boost the performance of key agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which she said performed well during her husband’s White House years. “People are rightly disturbed by what they see as the incompetence and corruption in this administration. And that’s undermined confidence in government, which makes it very difficult for us to meet the challenges we face today,” Clinton said.
As she reflects back on the US military presence in the Balkans under her husband’s administration, and on her role in forming and carrying out his policies, Hillary Clinton needs to speak about the Bill Clinton administration’s “practice of hiring private companies to perform government functions.”
In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein observes that Halliburton, with Dick Cheney at the helm, made its first major expansions in the area of privatizing government functions in the Balkans—under Bill Clinton.
In the Balkans, where Clinton deployed nineteen thousand soldiers, US bases sprang up as mini Halliburton cities: neat, gated suburbs, built and run entirely by the company. And Halliburton was committed to providing the troops with all the comforts of home, including fast-food outlets, supermarkets, movie theaters and high-tech gyms…. As far as Halliburton was concerned, keeping the customer satisfied was good business—it guaranteed more contracts, and because profits were calculated as a percentage of costs, the higher the costs, the higher the profits…. In just five years at Halliburton, Cheney almost doubled the amount of money the company extracted from the US Treasury, from $1.2 billion to $2.3 billiion, while the amount it received in federal loan guarantees increased fifteenfold. (292)
Under the Clinton administration, we also saw the privatization of information technology divisions of the US government.
In the mid-nineties, Lockheed [Martin] began taking over information technology divisions of the US government, running its computer systems and a great deal of its data management. Largely under the public radar, the company went so far in this direction that, in 2004, the New York Times reported,
Lockheed Martin doesn’t run the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it…. It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all of this happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft. (293)
And whom do we find on the board of Lockheed Martin during this period?
The push to expand the service economy into the heart of government was, for Cheney, a family affair. In the late nineties, while he was turning military bases into Halliburton suburbs, his wife, Lynne, was earning stock options in addition to her salary as a board member at Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor. (293)
So, yeah, I’m concerned about the “practice of hiring private companies to perform government functions”—concerned that new private corporate inroads into government functions were pioneered under Bill Clinton and expanded wildly under George Bush. I am concerned that the corporate takeover will not be reversed unless there is a formal plan to accomplish this reversal. As far as I can see, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama has such a plan.
In his Blueprint for Change, Obama champions the return of appropriate government regulatory functions, from the Labor Relations Board to the Department of Justice, but he sidesteps the new roles of private corporations in government function. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has claimed to be a standard bearer for the fight against these destructive economic policies, and it is nothing but a cynical lie.
If Hillary Clinton is going to continue to stake claims on her husband’s presidential legacy, then we should be concerned that she may be as friendly to Dick Cheney’s economic vision as George Bush is.
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
In this time of rapid economic change, the power of organized labor seems to be in decline. But new organizing strategies are emerging to challenge corporate power and the globalization of capital. Real World Labor examines the most pressing issues facing workers today: fundamental changes in the nature of work and wages; new legal impediments to union organizing; the persistence of racial and gender discrimination; migrant workers’ struggle for dignity; militarism and its harmful effects on the working class; union responses to the global financial meltdown; and new forms of rank-and-file organizing and resistance.
While there is still some attention to Hillary Clinton’s role in the 1990s US foreign policy in the Balkans, I think we ought to be discussing untruths much more significant than 
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