Tri-County Sentry
Friday
Commentary
President Obama’s 54 Problems
Lee A. Daniels the court’s three female justices, said they have stripped women workers of any guarantees that contraception coverage will automatically be part of their health insurance. That’s because these rulings aren’t about “religious liberty.” They actually have an entirely different purpose: jerry-rigging a legal framework around the efforts of the white Christian right to impose its religious beliefs on other Americans. The Christian Right has been pursuing that goal, of course, for decades. But it’s become clear in recent years that it was losing control on two of its most important issues: women’s reproductive rights, and the rights of gays and lesbians, especially regarding same-sex marriage. So, now they’ve re-cast themselves as “victims” whose “freedom” to adhere to their religious beliefs is being violated. It’s a scam the conservative political movement is pushing in brazen fashion—as exemplified by a strikingly apt word in the Hobby Lobby opinion written by Justice Samuel A. Alito. That word is “fiction.” On page 18 of the majority opinion, Alito acknowledges that defining corporations as persons in legal terms is a “fiction,”
Harry C. Alford
but asserts that “the purpose of this fiction is to provide protection for human beings … When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of those people.” A moment later, Alito defines “those people” in this way: “And protecting the free-exercise rights of closely-held corporations thus protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control the companies.” As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank pointedly noted two days before the Wheaton College decision, that sentence does not contain any mention of the rights of these corporations’ employees. In other words, in declaring that a family-owned corporation – which, after all, is an artificial entity created in accordance with governmental regulations – can, in effect, take on the religious coloration of “those who own and control” it, the court’s conservative bloc was indulging in another of the “fictions” by which it’s been trying to SCAM, See page 12A
In 2008 the whole world applauded the United States for electing its first African American president. No part of the world was happier than the continent of Africa with its 54 nations. After all, this president was half Caucasian and half Kenyan. He was a direct child of Africa not just a descendent. But to everyone’s surprise and disappointment, President Obama during his first four years showed very little love for his father’s homeland. In fact, when African heads of state (President/Prime Minister) would request a meeting with this new president they were denied. Even the First Lady of Kenya requested a short meeting with our First Lady and she was told in so many words, that will never happen. As we would visit various nations in Africa we noticed that the disappointment started morphing into anger. We all thought that relations between Africa and our business entities would improve based on who was elected to lead the largest economy on earth. No, it didn’t happen. China, India, Pakistan, Turkey, etc. saw their relationships with African nations improving. It is only natural that you love the one who loves you
Marian Wright Edelman lost four, plus a sister who was crippled in a fight over pills and was pushed off a roof in the projects. But the others all died from poverty and violence as well. My mother was shot as well, and all the years you would go through that stuff, and all of our neighbors were going through that stuff, we were strangled by this code of silence where you were never able to talk about it. You weren’t allowed to talk about this stuff because our neighborhood was controlled by organized crime, but also because the neighborhood was in a state of denial, choosing to believe what the media says—that this stuff doesn’t happen here, this stuff happens ‘over there,’ to ‘those people.’ “That’s Black and Latino people, in particular. [South Boston] is very well known for the race riots of the 1970s, when the neighborhood broke into racist riots over desegregation in the city of Boston, but had an awful lot in common with those neighborhoods that we were trying to keep out—an awful lot in common in terms of class.” Michael knew the code of silence in his neighborhood very well because it was the way he was brought up. In his own family, he was “the quiet one” of the
back. So, the billions of annual dollars that Africa trades with started to go at an increasing rate to nations other than America. What really woke us up is when our Millennium Challenge Account awarded $800 million to Ghana to build a national highway. They named the highway the George W. Bush Highway in honor of the president who gave them the funding. However, when it came to selecting a construction company for this project they chose a Chinese firm at the request of the President of China. This denotes the anger in the leaders of Africa. With the United States having an African American president, our business competitors picked up their game. China kicked it off with an “African Summit”. Their president invited every African president to come to its capital Beijing and receive heavy love. They entertained them lavishly. Even gave one big State Dinner in the historical Great Hall. They gave them $20 billion in financial aid with a promise of another $10 billion. The president of China promised to provide financial loans for every major project they plan as long as a Chinese firm was perform-
ing the contract. Next came Japan who hosted its African Summit in Tokyo. The Japanese president gave fifteen minutes of personal time with each of the 46 participating heads of state. The nation chipped in $30 billion in financial aid plus the funding of 10,000 internships for young African entrepreneurs and students. India and the European Union had their African Summits also. Even Russia is now getting into the “Love Africa Movement”. They are providing financial aid and lending power to the continent. They are leveraging this positive relationship to gain needed votes at the UN as they start attacking their neighboring nations. Yes, everyone jumped into the game ahead of us. We cannot get mad any time we hear of China, India or whoever else doing gigantic business with the richest continent (natural resources) on earth. They worked it and deserve it at this point. We have been so stupid. It is a major embarrassment and it is hurting PROBLEMS, See page 12A
Supreme Court Seeks to Gut Labor Unions
Breaking the Code of Silence Michael Patrick MacDonald is a storyteller. Michael recently encouraged the crowd of young leaders at the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools’® National Training to understand the power of storytelling to create change. His first book, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, became a national bestseller and won an American Book Award. All Souls and its follow-up, Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion have captivated readers with their accounts of his childhood in South Boston’s Old Colony housing project and the poverty, crime, and addiction that devastated his Irish Catholic neighborhood and killed four of his siblings. He said All Souls begins with a description of an event he organized in his own community: “I organized an All Souls Day vigil to get the neighborhood to start to come out and to tell the truth about all the deaths in the neighborhood, from murders, overdoses, all of the things that we didn’t talk about, all of the things that we pretended didn’t exist. South Boston held the highest concentration of White poverty in America, and I grew up in the housing projects there in a family of 11 kids. Of the 11 kids, we
Page 11A
Beyond the Rhetoric:
The Supreme Court’s ‘Religious Freedom’ Scam Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two decisions that the Court’s conservative majority and the larger conservative movement pretended were about “religious freedom.” In the one case, involving the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores and the Conestoga Wagon Specialties company, which makes wood cabinets, the majority ruled that a federal law guaranteeing “religious freedom” means family-owned corporations don’t have to provide insurance coverage for contraception under the Affordable Care Act. That decision, which the Court issued on June 30, seemed to leave in place the law’s provision governing nonprofit organizations in place. The law allowed nonprofit organizations to, if they wished, transfer the delivery of free contraception to others. However, in the second ruling, which the Court handed up on July 3 and specifically involved Illinois’s Wheaton College, a conservative Christian institution, the court majority temporarily exempted it from having to comply at all with the contraception provisions of the law. Critics of the decisions, which produced extremely sharp dissents from
JULY 18, 2014
Bill Fletcher
11 children, and as each of his four brothers died he initially, felt “kind of stunned speechless.” But when he started working “over there” in some of Boston’s other neighborhoods he realized he wasn’t the only one holding a story inside – and learned how much more power people had when they started letting their stories out and sharing them with each other. He said, “I decided to write a memoir after years of doing community organizing, especially with a lot of mothers of murdered children, from around the city of Boston – from Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, the Black and Latino neighborhoods, as well as eventually South Boston and Charlestown, the poorer White neighborhoods . . . and I would organize these press conferences or rallies, and I’d push them to the microphone to get them to tell their stories. I saw what happened to them when they told their stories in whatever amount that they wanted to and were capable of telling—how it changed them, and it was also changing the world.” SILENCE, See page 12A
The Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Harris v Quinn essentially means that personal care attendants who are represented by a union do not need to pay a service fee that would cover the cost of representing and advocating on their behalf. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority justified this decision purportedly on the basis of freedom of speech. What is clear is that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has a sniper’s scope trained on workers and unions. They will soon aim to eliminate the ability of labor unions to collect service fees from non-members to cover representation. The implications of this are profound but a little context is necessary. In the public sector, there are many states, counties and municipalities that permit union membership and collective bargaining, but do not require that employees in a given agency join the union. While they may join the union, they are obligated — if there is such an agreement– to pay a service or agency fee. The idea here is that regardless of whether one is a union member or not, the union is obligated by law to represent fairly and fully all workers in what is called a “bargaining unit,” which is a recognized body
of workers who share similar interests. This means that whether a given worker likes the union or not, if they have any challenges, the union must represent them. As you can imagine, representation costs money, including legal fees, cost of staff, administrative costs, etc. Additionally, the union lobbies on behalf of those workers around salaries, benefits and working conditions. Thus, in the absence of a fee, a worker can benefit from all that the union brought about but pay nothing. This is why agency or service fees are permitted. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is trying to say that this is a violation of free speech. Thus, using the Supreme Court’s logic, a person working in a given situation who gains the benefits of a labor union and can be guaranteed representation, should not have to pay anything. This is frequently called “right to work,” but a more accurate description is freeloading. Think about it for a moment. Is there any other institution in the U.S. that permits this? If you do not agree with the policies of a government, can you choose not to pay taxes yet gain the benefits of public education, water, police
and fire? Of course, not. So, why should it be different in a collective bargaining context? The answer is simple. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, along with other forces on the political Right, simply wish to gut labor unions. It is really that simple and that deadly. And, unless they are stopped, they will succeed in doing just that. I was wearing a T-shirt the other day from the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. A guy sitting next to me on a plane said to me: ”Yes, we really need unions. At a time when there is such a polarization of wealth, we really need unions to fight for us.” I smiled. It is not rocket science. Which is precisely why the forces of wealth and greed are so determined to bring about an extinction moment for unions. Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a racial justice, labor and global justice writer and activist. He is the author of “They’re Bankrupting Us” – And Twenty Other Myths about Unions. Follow him on Facebook and at www.billfletcherjr.com.