Just a couple weeks to election day, and Americans will see
how far Big Money can determine the political future of this nation.
The world has changed since the U.S. “Corporate” Supreme
Court’s Citizens United ruling two
years ago. Reporter Lee Fang told
the story of that change in a recent edition of The Nation magazine.
In the pharmaceutical industry alone, spending on federal elections
jumped from $200,000 in 2008 to nearly $10.4 million by the very next election
cycle. Fang says 98 percent of it came “from undisclosed corporate sources.”
Money can’t by everything. After all, a $222 million
payroll, the fattest in all of major league baseball, couldn’t buy the New York
Yankees entry into the World Series this year. In fact, the Yankees utterly
flopped in the American League Championship Series, losing 0-4 to the
pennant-winning Detroit Tigers and their venerable manager, the great Jim
Leyland.
Of course, we’re talking politics, not baseball.
I plan to be writing at greater length about the election in
the days ahead, looking at the billionaire Koch Brothers and whether they have
enough cash to buy the White House as well as assessing other issues such as
former President Bill Clinton’s role in the Obama candidacy.
Unlike nearly all of my Democratic and liberal friends, I am
absolutely no fan of Bill Clinton. He and his old club, the Southern-dominated
Democratic Leadership Council, nearly cut the heart and soul out of what was
left of FDR’s Democratic Party, charting a centrist, Republican-like path that
paid scant attention to labor and working-class voters while raking in big
bucks from Wall Street.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, always full of hagiographic praise
for Clinton, will be the first to tell us the former president deserves a ton
of credit if Obama wins. I won’t buy it. If Clinton does indeed have the magic
appeal to working class folks that Matthews claims, it certainly doesn’t have
to do with anything he ever accomplished on behalf of working people.
Working people don’t have a lot of political leaders who’ll
fight the good fight for them. Obama comes a lot closer to such a leader than
Clinton ever will. Still, by and large, working people have to get out and do
the fighting themselves.
And they are.
Arkansas-based Walmart, already fending off protests and
worker walkouts in a dozen or more states, now faces a possible class action
lawsuit for allegedly breaking federal minimum wage and overtime laws. A suit
was filed this week in a federal court in Illinois claiming, among other
things, the giant retailer failed to maintain accurate records of its
employees’ working hours, and that employees from Walmart’s staffing agencies
weren’t paid for work that they did.
A group called OUR Walmart is helping organize another walkout just one day after Thanksgiving. Walmart typically does more business that day than any other day in the year, the Associated Press reports.
Down in Louisiana, a hundred workers with the Carey Salt company
of Cote Blanche won a victory with the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB
ruled that the company “forced the miners into an unfair labor practices
strike, and then illegally refused to take them back when the miners,
represented by the Steelworkers, offered to return to work,” according to labor
writer Mark Gruenberg in People’s World.
Carey Salt is a salt mine operation whose parent company is
North American Salt.
The NLRB’s 3-0 (including the board’s Republican member!)
ruling forces the company to go back to the bargaining table with workers’ representatives
to work out a new contract. It also requires that Carey get rid of the workers
it hired to replace union members, put those union workers back on the payroll,
and give them back pay.
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