“Pan’s Labyrinth” is a sort of gothic fairy-tale for adults and weird little kids. Like Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth” and “Dark Crystal,” this beautifully shot Spanish language film from Guillermo del Toro guides a ten year old girl through a dark fantasy world full of monsters and ghouls with questionable motivations. The world of the labyrinth exists largely in the imagination of the girl, Ofelia (Ivama Baquero), who is interpreting the far more horrific real world she inhabits, in which Franco’s Fascists are exterminating the remaining rebels in the dreary spring of ’44. In a bit of a cop-out, the filmmakers allow the audience to imagine that Ofelia’s fantasy world might be real, thus dulling the impact of a surprisingly sad ending. Sergi Lopez is almost cartoonish in his villainy as the Captain, which is fine by me. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my Fascists all snarling and evil. His brutality, as well as the brutality of his well-deserved comeuppance, had me wincing in my seat, a rare and oddly enjoyable experience.
Dr. Robin Hood
Dean Robinson’s “Health Politics and Inequality” class has taken some surprising turns. Jill Quadagno’s book, “One Nation, Uninsured” served as an efficient history of how we got the lousy system of health care that we have, so the questions of how and what kinds of alternatives we ca have were neatly dispensed with.
Basically, the “simplest” and fairest universal system would be to simply expand our already existing Medicare system to cover everyone. That would give us the Canadian “single payer” system (which, coincidentally, is also called Medicare). Of course, to fund the program, the government would have to institute a new payroll tax on employers. For employers who already pay around a quarter of an employee’s salary in insurance premiums, this would essentially replace those premiums and would probably lower their costs and improve their market position, as it would serve to “take health care out of competition” by equalizing their equalizing their costs with those of employers that do not currently provide health insurance for employees (and for whom such a payroll tax would be a new and unwelcome development). Business, being business, would likely seek to take the cost of health care off its ledger and dump it on the public in the form of tax income tax increases – which would naturally be controversial. Yes, polls show that Americans are willing to pay higher taxes for more social services. But, the millions of Americans who already receive health care through their employers do not want to pay for what they already have. This would not be a tax increase, as much as it would be a pay cut. The combination of such anti-business tax agendas with the fact that such a “Medicare For All” solution would necessarily be a frontal assault on the rich private insurance industry creates a powerful coalition of capitalist opposition to universal health care that is built in to the problem. This is to say nothing about the potential to energize the religious right over the issue of public financing of reproductive health services. Clearly, it will take a rock-solid coalition of “the good guys” if we have any chance, and the labor movement must take a leading role in forming such a coalition.
Where Dean’s class has taken an interesting turn is the presentation of Ichiro Kawachi’s research of the effects of inequality on health. The research presented in his book, “The Health of Nations: Why Inequality is Harmful to Your Health,” basically finds that the level of inequality in a given society has a direct relationship with average life expectancy, disease rates and infant mortality. Kawachi controls for income levels, access to health care and a host of other factors one might expect to explain these numbers. Holding all other things equal, a person who lives in a country that has a large gap between the rich and the poor is unhealthier than his direct counterpart in a more equitable country. This is the same for rich people as it is for the poor.
You might expect a socialist to love this report, but I find it troubling. The problem is that wealth redistribution is just so…un-American. In my past life as a teenage mutant ninja socialist, going on speaking tours and doing media interviews for the Socialist Party, I’ve always de-emphasized the Robin Hood aspect of socialism. What’s most important to talk about is, first, what we as working people need and deserve: Meaningful work at good pay; decent, affordable housing; health insurance, vacations and pensions. Second is what’s preventing so many of us from having these things: the capitalist system of production for profit and not for need. I’ve always differentiated between private property and personal property. What we want is to publicly own and control the basic companies and industries, not to share your toothbrush and wife. Taking away mansions and yachts from the rich is not crucial to the functioning of the economy, and would not be the first step of a socialist revolution. But I don’t talk about it because Americans don’t like the idea. They want to believe that anyone can “earn” such ostentatious wealth (as if the Waltons and the Hilton’s “earned” their daddies’ money!). But, if Ichiro Kawachi’s research is correct, those ostentatious displays of wealth are terrible for our health. Watching “MTV Cribs” could literally kill you (and the rich idiot with the air-conditioned display room for his hats).
In many ways this is a moralistic argument for socialism, and I hate those. I’m a materialist, and prefer to focus on jobs, peace and freedom. But, Robin Hood was right, and we need more people like him.
Another Terrifying Labor Statistic
The Center for Economic and Policy Research has released a report that finds that one in five union activists can expect to be fired during an organizing campaign under George Bush’s watch. Overall, a pro-union worker had a 1.4 percent chance of being illegally fired for his sympathies in 2005. An organizer’s gut reaction to authors John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer’s paper might well be, “Oh, great, just what my organizing committee needs to hear!” The fact is that workers already know that organizing is risky (and organizers don’t suger-coat the risk).
Combined with threatened and actual plant closures, terminations and employer animus are the greatest reasons why half of all union representation elections lose and so many more campaigns never even come to election as activists are fired as a chilling example to their coworkers not to step out of line. The report’s numbers are based on cases where the National Labor Relations Board found a termination to be illegally motivated by anti-union animus and ordered that the employee be reinstated with back pay. This remedy is hardly punitive, since the boss is not fined or jailed for willfully violating the law, and, indeed, the back-pay that he must make up are the wages he would have paid anyway minus any other wages that the employee earned from other employers in the meantime, which at an average of $2,749 per fired worker is a huge discount if the firing successfully discourages the rest of the workers from pursuing their organizing campaign.
The authors utilize NLRB data for their report, which ignores a world of activity beyond an increasingly archaic and anti-union process. Public sector employees, who are governed by state laws, are far less likely to face termination for their union activism, a fact that Kate Bronfenbrenner and Tom Juravitch cited in an earlier paper as a reason for the higher win percentage for unions in public versus private sector campaigns. And many innovative unions are bypassing the NLRB election procedure for pressure campaigns leading to card check recognition. Union activists are probably less likely to be terminated during such a campaign, but it’s impossible to gather numbers. Instead, the authors estimate the number of workers organized through such procedures and add them to the universe of their study, which produces a very conservative figure for the likelihood of a pro-union worker to be fired.
Schmitt and Zipperer perhaps should have ignored these cases entirely and focused on the NLRB process. What their paper would be then is yet another convincing argument that the National Labor Relations Act is broken; that, on the whole, it serves management’s interests and provides a legal roadmap for a campaign of terror to beat back most union organizing campaigns, and, as such, is in desperate need of reform or repeal.
Labor law reform is on the agenda, with the Democrats newly in control of Congress, although mostly as a wedge issue for the coming presidential contest since Bush is likely to veto anything that the Congress passes on labor (save, perhaps, for a narrow tweaking in response to Kentucky River). The prospect of a Democratic presidency coupled with the Democratic Congress, absent a groundswell of political pressure, should not inspire too much optimism. After all, labor law reform was on the agenda the last time the Democrats controlled Washington (and the situation was, in some ways, worse – a worker was more likely to be fired for union activity during the Reagan years), but two years of studies and commissions produced nothing.
A Press More Bumbling Than the Dead Prez
If Gerald Ford was trying to live down his image as a bumbler, he made a curious choice of dying right after Christmas when most of the half-way decent reporters must be on vacation. On a good day, the New York Times annoys the crap out of me, but a couple of doozies slipped in that have really driven me nuts.
In a television column that itself comments on how substitutes are reporting the news of Ford’s death, reporter Alessandra Stanley notes:
On “Today” the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell mentioned that she last spoke to Mr. Ford in California last February, “when he came over to see me, and we had lunch.” (It is hard to imagine a former president in his 90s going out of his way to meet a television reporter, so it was hard not to suspect that Mr. Ford was going out of his way not to invite Ms. Mitchell over to his house.)
How clever? What a fucking idiot! Either she doesn’t know that Andrea Mitchell is married to the then-Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, or else she was intentionally obscuring how cozy journalists and official Washington can get. Either way, it’s outrageous.
More outrageous is Sam Roberts’ attempt to exonerate Ford for his role in New York City’s fiscal crisis. Yes, it’s technically true that, just as Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake,” Ford never told New York to “Drop Dead,” but their actions and policies made clear the contempt that was summed up in the better copy that the journalists of their day (far better than this sorry lot) screamed in headlines. His defenders may insist that he “liked New York,” but insisting that the city raise the subway fare (part of the completely separate and solvent MTA budget), raise CUNY tuition, end rent control and hack away at public hospitals, museums and social services showed real – I’ll say it again – contempt for what New York stood for politically and for its heroic effort to be more than a playground for the rich and famous.
Roberts finds a number of people to praise Ford’s neoliberal hatchet job, mostly the politicians who subsequently turned New York into a playground for the rich and famous, but makes no attempt for balance. There is no questioning the wisdom of drastic cuts in public spending, nor the dubious “fact” that the crisis was the product of “inevitable hemorrhaging inflicted by bankrupt liberalism” (rather than a conspiracy of a handful of big banks that encouraged the city’s debt and then without warning demanded their money back).
The only voice of dissent slips in, almost by accident, from 30 years ago in DC37 chief Victor Gotbaum’s witty complaint that the Ford administration aimed to shrink government down to just police and fire protection, “and he’s not sure about fire.”