More on China’s Crackdown in Tibet

The Times Online is reporting Chinese security forces are rounding up Tibetans who they believe are organizing a boycott of Losar (Tibetan New Year) celebrations.

Police in Lhasa have arrested dozens of Tibetans suspected of supporting a campaign against celebrating the Tibetan New Year. The protest has been organised to commemorate last year’s anti-Chinese demonstrations.

Witnesses told The Times that uniformed and plainclothes police and members of the paramilitary People’s Armed Police were involved in the sweep, which began on Monday. They raided tea houses, which are popular with young Tibetans, and picked up people of all ages in the street.

Many of those detained were accused of “spreading rumours”, sources in the Tibetan capital said.

The sweep appeared to have begun in the district around the Ramoche temple in the old city, where peaceful demonstrations in support of the exiled Dalai Lama burst into violence on March 14 last year, with protesters rampaging through the streets, setting fire to shops and offices. At least 18 people died in the violence and, over the next few days, dozens of demonstrations swept neighbouring provinces and troops opened fire on protesters.

Tibetans campaigning against celebration of the New Year, or Losar, on February 25, say that the day should be a time of remembrance. They have issued appeals on the internet and sent text messages putting their case.

One text message says: “To mourn those Tibetans who died in 2008, those many heroes who gave their lives, to show sympathy for all Tibetans, we should have no New Year and join hands to show our solidarity.”

Hand-made posters have been pasted on walls in ethnic Tibetan areas of western China urging people not to celebrate. One reads: “One thousand people have been arrested, 1,000 people have disappeared. We others, Tibetans who are living safely, if you have a good heart please do these two things. Do not sing, dance or play and do not set off fireworks. These two actions only. Let us remember the dead and pray for the living.”

I recently received an emailed translation of the poster referenced above. I received a copy of the posters that are being put up and circulated in Ngaba, Amdo. A copy of the poster was received by Kirti Monastery in Dharamsala on January 27th, 2009, which is translated below:

“To the Tibetans of the three provinces; monks, nuns, lay men and women:
Let us unite our strength and let us not surrender to this invasive system of oppression.
Let us hold our hands across all three provinces and share our joys and sorrows.
We must never forget that those killed (in the uprising) did not die fighting for their own interests;
They died fighting for our just and noble cause and for the freedom of the Land of Snows.
For that matter, we must not celebrate Losar this year.
So long as you are Tibetan, you must not celebrate this Losar.
Do you want to be reunited with your guru?
Do you want Tibet to be free?
If yes, then you should cancel Losar celebrations, as a political act.
Dear brothers and sisters, do not despair.”

These are powerful words, distributed by Tibetan patriots who knew they actions could lead to detention and imprisonment by Chinese forces. After all, expressions of desire for Tibetan independence are thought crimes in occupied Tibet.

Epic FAIL

Surely this is a preview of what the Michael Steele-run GOP will look and act like. A month ago Steele said:

Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.

Evan Robinson of the Group News Blog points out how wrong Steele is:

While we might wish that George W. Bush had not had a job for the previous eight years, this statement that our soldiers, sailors, and airmen, whether overseas or here at home; the cops and firefighters who keep our streets safe; the teachers who determine “is our children learning”; and all the doctors, nurses, and nurses aides who work in public hospitals aren’t jobs is just stunning.

Having a job means working for a living, right? So that means that, according to the Republican party, all these people don’t work for a living. You can’t say that about our armed forces, or our teachers, or our police and firefighters. You just don’t. It’s appalling.

This quote should be put over pictures of the rescue workers at Ground Zero, planes taking off from aircraft carriers, soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and cops on the beat. It’s unbelievable.

Of course Evan forgets that Steele and the GOP will get away with this crap because they’re big into flag lapel pins. Or something.

Honest Reporting, Or the Lack Thereof

BoingBoing is one of my favorite blogs and normally quite progressive — Xeni Jardin in particular has done phenomenal coverage of Tibet and China over the last few years. However it’s disheartening to see a guest post today by a journalist named Charles Platt. Platt takes a job at Wal-Mart in a journalistic effort to see how bad Wal-Mart workers really have it. Surprisingly Platt sees Wal-Mart as something of a workers’ paradise, undeserving of its bad reputation.

The main thing to understand is that Platt really talks past the issues in his post. He thinks he’s rebutting Wal-Mart criticism by discussing his particular work training and job flexibility. But I’m fairly sure the desire to unionize workers at WalMart or criticize its executives’ exorbitant pay are not at all tied to issues of worker training, display creation, or employee policies that honor federally mandated break time. The attack is not on the quality of a service-industry job at all.

Platt doesn’t say how long he worked (he calls it a “brief experience”) or if he was able to survive, pay rent, make car payments based on his low wage, nor does he discuss if had adequate healthcare coverage, pension benefits, 401k, etc. He clearly made no effort to organize his coworkers into a union, so he has no perspective on what the response would be if he did so. All he did was get a job for a short period of time as a thought experiment. To even suggest that this “brief experience” is representative is at minimum disingenuous  and could very easily be called intellectually dishonest.

The post does make me think of the Discovery Channel show “Dirty Jobs.” In it the host goes around the country and does dirty jobs for a day at a time. Does he get a sense of what the job entails? Sure, but he also doesn’t make claims of knowing what being a chimney sweep for 40 years is like. However long Platt was working at Wal-Mart, it’s absurd for him to claim that he has an adequate or even real sense of what Wal-Mart employees go through based on his “brief experience.”

What’s most odd is Platt’s contention that his “brief experience” is enough to rebut critiques of unions like SEIU or United Food and Commercial Workers International Union are only around because the unions want to organize Wal-Mart workers and collect their dues. Platt seems to miss the point that unions always seek to organize workers for the benefit of the workers; sometimes that includes using the collective force of the union to go beyond contract negotiations, which is only possible through union dues.

It’s problematic that BoingBoing gave this guy space to run this crap, but it’s such a bad, misleading post that it’s become an opportunity for substantive rebuttal. Commentors in the thread are very pro-labor and make some good points. Warlord writes:

I’m living well in retirement because my building trades union negotiated wages and benefits from decent employers who were not afraid to cede power and money to an entity that suppied skilled labor that they could send out to their customers. Done right there is a synergy in the exchange between equals

Sadly Walmart is not willing to share their wealth with those who make it possible

Sadder still is the automatic dismissal of the union as a way for the worker to gain power making the trade of labor for money more equitable for all concerned

Sam C. goes hard after Platt:

Mr Platt makes three obviously false assumptions in the OP:

1) That Wal-Mart’s treatment of its employees is entirely down to the cuddly, affectionate nature of its management, and nothing to do with the ongoing efforts of unions and of whistleblowers like Ehrenreich.

2) That a few Horatio Alger-style anecdotes about success somehow refute the huge weight of evidence about structural disadvantage and injustice.

3) That everyone is like him – white, male, educated, mentally and physically healthy – or could become so if only they tried hard enough.

I expect this kind of ignorance, fantasy, and other-blindness in (some of) the teenagers I teach, but from a senior journalist, it’s just embarrassing. People’s lives are deeply shaped by social structure and by bad luck over which they have no control, and for which they are therefore not to blame. The attempt to shift the responsibility for poverty onto the poor isn’t just morally ugly – although it is that – it requires an astonishing level of self-deception. Wake up, Mr Platt.

Also worth note is A.B.’s push-back on Platt’s odd conclusions about union interest in Wal-Mart:

If Mr. Platt’s agenda or bias weren’t already obvious, this snn question revealed his anti-Union stance. Only a die hard anti-Union writer would ascribe bad motives to organizations that are fulfilling their explicit mandate.

Mr. Platt’s rhetorical question is as malicious as asking “why do hospitals have ambulances? I bet it’s so they can get patients to get millions in medical bills.” Or, more topically, “why do the Steelers players try to score touch downs? I bet it’s so the organization can make more money from the fans.”

Unions have the explicit goal of organizing and protecting workers. Monitoring the activities of an anti-Union organization, which is not only the largest retailer in the United States, but (from the Union’s point of view at least) underpays its workers and treats them poorly, would obviously be something one would expect of a Union.

Mr. Platt wrote this article in bad faith. [This comment has been partially disemvoweled (presumably by Platt and not a regular BoingBoing editor. I have edited some vowels back in to make it more legible.]

Again, I’d say the comment thread is largely critical of Platt’s piece, which is refreshing. It’s disappointing to see BoingBoing hand over space to such anti-union drivel based on anecdotal reporting of a journalist under cover. That said, this sort of reporting is easy to beat back. It always help when the enemies of change do a shoddy job in their resistance to workers’ rights.

Disclosure: I’m proud to work for the Service Employees International Union. This post was neither approved by nor written with the knowledge of SEIU. It represents my views alone.

McCaskill, Long & FDR

Via Alex Thurston at The Seminal, Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill is putting forward legislation to cap salaries of executives at companies receiving bailout money at $400,000 per year. This stands in stark contrast to David Brooks’ foray into class warfare in today’s NY Times.

McCaskill’s legislation is reminiscent of Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth campaign, which gained steam during 1934 in the heat of the Great Depression. Among the proposals in Long’s platform were a cap on net assets, annual income, and inheritance size. In his “Share Our Wealth” speech, Long proposed:

1. The fortunes of the multimillionaires and billionaires shall be reduced so that no one persons shall own more than a few million dollars to the person. We would do this by a capital levy tax. On the first million that a man was worth, we would not impose any tax. We would say, “All right for your first million dollars, but after you get that rich you will have to start helping the balance of us.” So we would not levy and capital levy tax on the first million one owned. But on the second million a man owns, we would tax that 1 percent, so that every year the man owned the second million dollars he would be taxed $10,000. On the third million we would impose a tax of 2 percent. On the fourth million we would impose a tax of 4 percent. On the fifth million we would impose a tax of 16 percent. On the seventh million we would impose a tax of 32 percent. On the eighth million we would impose a tax of 64 percent ; and on all over the eight million we would impose a tax of 100 percent.

What this would mean is tat the annual tax would bring the biggest fortune down to $3 or $4 million to the person because no one could pay taxes very long in the higher brackets. But $3 or $4 million is enough for any one person and his children and his children’s children. We cannot allow one to have more than that because it would not leave enough for the balance to have something.

2. We propose to limit the amount any one man can earn in one year or inherit to $1 million to the person.

3. Now, by limiting the size of the fortunes and incomes of the big men, we will throw into the government Treasury the money and property from which we will care for the millions of people who have nothing; and with this money we ill provide a home and the comforts of home, with such common conveniences as radio and automobile, for every family in America, free of debt.

Long created the Share Our Wealth Society as a national organizing platform (which would have theoretically been the precursor to a presidential campaign run), gaining over 7 million members in short order. Long’s ideas received huge following and were the source of the strongest pressure from President Franklin Roosevelt’s left.

In 1942, long after the assassination of Huey Long, FDR proposed that no American should take home a net annual income of greater than $25,000. This came just as the US was entering World War II and still in the midst of hard economic times. Sam Pizzigati at TomPaine.com writes:

All Americans were asked to pay more in taxes during World War II, and the wealthy were asked to pay the most of all, more in taxes than any Americans had ever before paid. In 1943, America’s most affluent households faced a 93 percent tax rate on all their income over $200,000. The next year, 1944, the nation’s top tax rate would rise even higher, to 94 percent on income over $200,000—the highest rate in American history.

A 94 percent tax? We scan this figure today with no small measure of disbelief. We who live in an era where politicos routinely equate taxes with tyranny cannot imagine a Congress of the United States ever imposing a tax rate so lofty. But here’s the truly incredible part. Back during World War II, many Americans, including the president of the United States, wanted our nation’s top tax rate to rise even higher.

How high? In 1942, only a few months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a 100 percent top marginal tax rate. At a time of “grave national danger,” the president advised that April, “no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year. Roosevelt was proposing, in effect, what amounted to a maximum wage—at an income level that would equal, in our contemporary dollars, about $300,000.

McCaskill’s proposal strikes me as more similar to FDR’s annual income cap than Long basic ideas, but both grow from the same place — the hard-nosed progressivism of Huey Long, which enabled FDR’s tax proposal to be palatable years after Long built a national campaign around shared wealth for public good.

Bias in Journalism?

This is really wanky. Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times has a pearl-clutching piece about the fear that the Obama administration’s hiring of two journalists will lead to bias in favor of Obama across the entire media. Despite pointing out that the Bush administration brought journalists into the house (see: Tony Snow) and that the McCain administration would have been “a job destination for mainstream journalists in 2000,” it’s Obama that is producing a fear of bias. Rutenberg even goes to the absurd length of getting Jay Carney to defend joining the administration as Biden’s communications director with claims of non-partisanship. Because it would be so unethical for someone to work for a politician they wanted to succeed, or something.

Rutenberg never explains how having journalists in the Obama administration will actually lead to bias in coverage by the media still reporting. I don’t know if it is Rutenberg’s fear that Time will give Obama a pass because Carney is on Biden’s staff or if the magical presence of one Beltway journalist on the administration payroll will mean Fox News, Washington Times, and the Wall Street Journal will feel compelled to pull their punches. Most likely the presence of Carney and Linda Douglass in the administration will not mean a single thing regarding the tone and depth of coverage Obama receives in the press. To the extent that there is any bias in journalism favoring the administration, I’d think it more likely that tough-minded journalists at Time and CNN will feel obligated to give Carney and Douglass a harder-than-usual go in order to avoid any accusations of bias. But I doubt Rutenberg and the Times would see much news value in that story, as it fails to further the narrative that the media is biased towards Democrats.

IRR

Alex Horton of Army of Dude is, in my opinion, one of the best writers in the blogosphere. He’s a veteran of the Iraq war and a contributor at VetVoice. His posts on his time in Iraq, often filled with photos and videos, have been one of my most important windows into the war, free of media filter. Alex has a post up today about the Individual Ready Reserve, which he and two of his best friends moved to when they left active duty. He describes the decision as playing Russian Roulette, which seems to be tragically accurate. His post today points out that his two friends have both been called up to active duty. Alex writes:

I was at work when my pocket sent out a cheerful tone alerting me of a new text message. I pulled out my phone to see a new message from Steve. I figured it was some trivia question. I could tell he carried his debating persona back home from the messages he sent me. He asked about actors in movies and lesser known points of history that must have come up in discussions with his friends. I opened it to see that it had nothing to do with trivia.

“I just got official orders to go back dude.”

My knees almost gave way after reading and rereading the message. I called him right away to offer any kind of help I could. As the phone rang, I looked down at my silver KIA bracelet and ran my fingers over the etched lettering – CPL BRIAN L. CHEVALIER 14 MARCH 2007 BAQUBAH, IRAQ.

A thousand miles away, Steve was wearing the same bracelet.

I relayed to Steve all the information I had gathered on the IRR. I spent countless hours hunched over my computer researching IRR callups, a challenge considering the intentionally scant information put out by the DoD and Army Human Resources Command. I told him to sign up for any classes, get a doctor’s note for any condition, anything that could delay or exempt him from mobilization. There is no shame in it. Steve volunteered during a war, knowing that he would be sent into combat. Not only combat ensued, but the bloodiest fight in Iraq since Fallujah. Steve did his time, and more. His place is at home, not on the battlefield anymore.

By way of Lt. Nixon, Thomas Ricks notes a Pentagon study that reveals troop levels have remained relatively the same since 9/11. A more alarming statistic: 6% of active duty troops have served more than 25 months in a combat zone while 74% have less than twelve months in. The study concludes that the lower to mid enlisted and company grade officers are carrying the most burden. Senior officers and NCOs are hiding like cockroaches in the cracks of TRADOC posts and non-deployable slots while lower level soldiers march to the steady drumbeat of repeated deployments, failed marriages and ever-mounting cases of suicide. On top of that, the IRR continues to mobilize soldiers that have moved on, going to school or beginning careers and families. The only way to lessen the burden is to grow the size of the force. One idea: take the database of the newly minted Red State Strike Force members and dump them into mobilization slots. Those pathetic goons want to wear patches styled after special forces to fight on a battlefield of snark. They want to organize. I can think of no better way to organize than a shout of, “Dress right, dress!” The slack has to be picked up somewhere, lest our forces remain so broken that we must rely on involuntary callups to get bodies to the fight.

Steve’s future hangs in the balance. School has been put on hold until a review board decides if he is fit to go back to Iraq. I have described the looming threat of recall as an ubiquitous afterthought, constantly degrading the sense of normalcy and safety as the days pile on. Now that recall has manifested itself as a clumsy destroyer of futures, the feeling has changed. Not only mental, the dread has become physical, hanging in my stomach like a sharply cornered anvil. My old infantry sore spots – back, knees and ankles – throb in a dull ache. The burden is back squarely on my shoulders, but I cannot imagine what Steve is feeling right now. I just know that as his best friend, a thousand miles away, I must carry some for him.

VetVoice has a list of resources on IRR. I’m reprinting them below for anyone looking for more information.

IRR Information

Educating on Employee Free Choice, Part 16

Steve Rosenthal has a must-read piece up on Huffington Post today documenting ten “violations of democracy” that exist under current NLRB organizing regulations for union formation. Given how hard big business lobbyists have pushed the “Employee Free Choice ends the ‘secret ballot'” canard, Rosenthal’s piece is essential. Here are violations one through three from Rosenthal’s piece:

Violation of Democracy #1: In order to have a union election, 30% of workers need to sign cards calling for an election. If that principle were applied to American presidential elections, we would have needed 70 million Americans to sign cards calling for last November’s national election.

Violation of Democracy #2: Once 30% sign cards calling for an election it can take months – sometimes years, sometimes never – because of arcane rules that allow companies to file objections that lead to countless electoral delays, before the workers actually have a chance to vote in an election. It’s usually in the interest of companies to sap the momentum from an organizing drive and delay an election as long as possible. Imagine if a candidate kept trying to push off Election Day in the hopes that the political climate would become more favorable or his opponent would give up – that’s what the current process allows companies to do. In fact, it took a 15 year organizing battle to finally unionize the Smithfield Packing slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, NC.

Violation of Democracy #3: During the run-up to the election the union is not allowed to campaign on the company’s property – which can mean not only the workplace but company-owned property such as parking lots. Meanwhile, the company is free to campaign anywhere it wants and can paper the workplace with anti-union messages. Imagine an election for president where one candidate is allowed to wander freely across the land talking to voters, while the other candidate and their campaign is banned from America and can only stand in Mexico and Canada hoping to speak to voters as they cross the border.

If you can stomach seeing how difficult it is to organize unions under current NLRB law, keep reading Rosenthal’s list of violations of democracy.

Liberals on the Supreme Court

While it is likely that President Obama will have to fill a Supreme Court seat during his term, it will almost certainly be to replace one of the more liberal members of the court. If moving the court to the left is a priority at all for the Obama administration, then he should appoint someone is more liberal than the person that judge replaces. However I find it highly unlikely that such a thing would happen. The freak-out from the right over the appointment of someone more liberal than, say, John Paul Stevens would likely be more than a post-partisan administration could handle. The press assaults would be deafening and concrete assertions about how a justice would rule on issues would be pressed for in a way unseen with Alito or Roberts, to say the least. I’d love to be proven wrong, but in the early going of the Obama administration getting things done seems to be a higher priority than getting things done along a particular ideological line.