Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Rise, like lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you- Ye are manythey are few.

Shellys Masque of Anarchy has been a spectral presence for nearly two hundred years, summoned at climactic moments of civil warfare. Composed to memorialize the 1819 Peterloo massacre, the poem commemorates the sixty thousand people who gathered at the very dawn of the industrial revolution to demand a radical expansion of suffrage, especially to those laboring in Englands dark satanic mills. Dozens died, hundreds were wounded.

The poem wasnt published for over a decade, until the Chartist movement took it up in 1832. Another ten years after that, it became the anthem of an almost nationwide general strike. Participants referred to the time leading up to that moment and the strikes that preceded it as holy days.

Since then Ye are manythey are few has inspired rebellion, resistance, and liberation again and again. The New York garment worker strikes of 1911, the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, May 1968 in Paris, and, most recently, the pro-democracy congregations during the Arab Spring and the Occupy uprisings of 2011 are all etched in our collective memory.

There are also largely unknown, but hardly less remarkable, general strikes: not just those that shut down Winnipeg and Seattle in 1919, London and the Midlands in 1926, and San Francisco in 1934, but also Amsterdam under the Nazis in February 1941 and again in April 1943, Turin and Milan on April 25, 1945 which Italians now celebrate as the penultimate moment of their liberation and the Algerian general strike of January 1957, which closed schools, shops, and factories in support of the independence movement. In 1972, Quebec saw a series of province-wide general strikes that linked a quest for national identity with a cross-class protest against austerity.

The general strike in Poland, which lasted just half a day on March 27, 1981, engaged more than twelve million workers and citizens. It announced to the world and to the thin strata of Communist functionaries still in power that Solidarity constituted a majoritarian and national movement. From that moment on the elite had but two choices: military repression, which it invoked later that year, or a regime-changing, world-historic capitulation, which finally came in 1989.

Shellys immortal lines were not heard during the recent calls for a Womens Strike or General Strike against the Trump regime or even as planning proceeds for the upcoming May Day strikes, which a number of trade unions in New York, Illinois, and California have endorsed. But what is sometimes loosely called the resistance certainly gestures in that direction. Its as if something in the air evokes the unvanquishable number, the lions shaking chains to earth like dew.

How else can we explain the sudden announcements of general strikes when nothing on the ground suggests that they might happen? Less than a decade ago, elements within Occupy Wall Street issued regular calls for mass action without any chance of realizing their plans. Novelist Francine Proses call for a general strike in January went viral before fading another immaculate conception, subsequently aborted.

The idea that something radical and forceful must be done persists in the most unlikely places. In February, fifty Hollywood writers, producers, and creatives held a house meeting in Hancock Park, California, to plan their response to the Trump administration. A strike, general or otherwise, was high on the agenda.

After listening to two labor historians brief them on past insurgencies, the organizers announced that they had already hired a PR firm to write a press release and organize publicity for their movement. The firms suggested slogan Strike for Democracy isnt bad, even if the aging leftists in attendance blanched at their method for coming up with it.

Three weeks later, Salud Carbajal, Santa Barbaras newly elected House representative, held a district meeting that new locus of resistance politics. The event was packed with constituents who cheered the spokeswoman from Planned Parenthood, expressed solidarity with advocates for immigrant rights, and heartily denounced GOP efforts to gut the Affordable Care Act.

But when he tried to answer what is to be done, Carbajal got an exceedingly cool reception. He told the energized crowd to write and e-mail Congress and then prepare for the off-year elections. A veteran of the 1960s, now retired after a distinguished career as a UCLA physician, objected, recalling the years when he and his comrades at Columbia shut it down. The crowd agreed.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. But then again, this desire to conjure up something forceful could still produce results maybe not a general strike, which demands a high level of organization and preparation, but perhaps upsurges, rebellions, boycotts, demonstrations, protests, and job actions of the most varied and unexpected sort.

Surprisingly, these recent calls for strike come primarily from middle-class activists, usually without the faintest connection to the labor movement. They summon people to deploy a weapon linked, since Peterloo, to an oppressed working class in revolt while decrying what they understand as white working-class backlash. The very incongruous timing and social location of these calls makes them odd, awkward, and naive, but also socially and culturally imaginative.

After all, what remains of the organized labor movement has avoided strikes like the plague for a long time; unions are simply too weak to conduct them. As late as 1975, each year witnessed more than four hundred strikes, involving more than a thousand workers. Today, ten or fifteen work stoppages occur, mostly for defensive reasons to preserve pensions, wages, or health insurance against an aggressive employer.

Strikes have cropped up among unorganized, low-wage workers, sometimes assisted by outside unions. The Fight for $15 movement has generated a good deal of social energy and achieved some legislative success on the state and local level. But as important and even heroic as such struggles are, these strikes-cum-referendum-campaigns hardly disturb the countrys economic machinery.

Critics have blamed an ossified trade union bureaucracy, a Democratic Party elite that has marginalized the interests of the working class, and a growing conservative hegemony openly hostile to workers, regardless of the pseudo-populist rhetoric its spokespeople sometimes trot out.

However we account for it, the strike as a theater of combat has faded. As a mythic ideal, however, it is flourishing.

This years calls for work stoppages have relinquished their once-organic connection to the work site and relegated the labor movement to the margins. Nevertheless, this new, often middle-class sensibility resurrects the strike in a kind of hyperactive afterlife. It has become the newly powerlesss dream state in the wake of an election from hell.

Unlike its working-class antecedents, todays strike does not arise out of relationships formed on the factory floor, at the water cooler, or near the checkout counter. On the contrary, todays would-be picketers have highly atomized working lives, pervaded by notions of self-fulfillment both on and off the job. Contemporary labor has dissolved solidaritys connective tissue, damning the strike before it even begins.

For decades, the working class has been forcefully reminded how little it counts in the affairs of the nation. The political and cultural right has captured and channeled this disillusionment, not only in the North American Rust Belt but also in Britain, France, and other polities where social democracy once flourished.

Brexit and Trumps electoral victory may have made a substantial proportion of the white working class feel momentarily powerful, but the rest of the working class immigrants and people of color as well as the cosmopolitan and once-solid middle class saw the election as illegitimate, profoundly disempowering, and an affront to their moral sensibilities.

They now face the kind of insecurity and exclusion that Americas alienated and unorganized blue-collar workers have long experienced. High school teachers, retired architects, and medical professionals all feel as disrespected and insecure as Walmart clerks and McDonalds grill cooks.

They earn a lot more money, but these energized middle-class workers especially among that cohort labeled millennial is nevertheless affronted by the profound inequities, self-seeking, and imperial arrogance of the new ruling elite. At least under Obama, they could recognize parts of themselves in the coalition. Now, to many, electoral democracy and the conventional institutions of political life appear hollowed out, corrupt, fake.

If power is no longer accessible through party politics, if the system rolls on unperturbed, glacially indifferent to the well-being not only of the working class but also of the vanishing middle classes, then reaching back to a more combative past seems imperative.

This is happening not out of the blue, but at a moment when mass action has become a flesh-and-blood reality once again. The 2006 Day Without Immigrants was a revelation; it resembled an actual strike and conjoined political, economic, and cultural identities and desires. In Greece and all though Central and Western Europe not to mention Latin America and the Middle East social conflict has escaped the boundaries of conventional politics or carved out new spaces on the electoral map, making way for insurgencies that didnt originate in the voting booth. Reveries of recaptured power might be nurtured in this soil, where the strike implies more than a commercial impasse and becomes synonymous with taking a stand.

Strike, Strike, Strike, the closing chorus of Clifford Odets 1935 play Waiting for Lefty carries its chanters beyond the pedestrian realm in which hours and wages are negotiated. Likewise, todays strike appeals have less to do with a specific organizational form than with creating a pathway to power.

In this, they recall a time when the strike was multivalent a tactic to be sure, but also a manifestation of a fundamental social antagonism.

This hasnt always been true. Radical social reformers of the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century eschewed strikes. They saw them as selfish, fixated on the parochial needs of one class.

The socialists of that era hunted bigger prey. They sought a complete overhaul of society that would reestablish or, rather, establish for the first time the harmony of all. Hence, the founders of utopian communities like New Lanark and Brook Farm or the Shakers of the Oneida commune tried to purge their experiments of all forms of social conflict.

Industrialization imposed a different reality. Strikes became commonplace, nowhere more so and nowhere more violently than in the United States. Marx and Engels considered the strike a form of class struggle, a kind of guerilla warfare that would steadily advance from the slogan a fair days wage for a fair days work to the abolition of the wages system. Even when defeated, strikers feel bound to proclaim that they shall not be made to bow to circumstances, but social conditions ought to yield to them as human beings.

Radicals socialists, anarchists, populists, even champions of the Cooperative Commonwealth like the Knights of Labor welcomed strikes, encouraged them, led them, and theorized and mythologized about them. Why?

First, the strike sparked fierce resistance in employers, often abetted by the governments coercive arm. Blood was spilled; protesters lost their lives. Whatever particular grievance precipitated the strike, it ultimately struggled against the new and profoundly disruptive system of wage labor.

This seemed inherently radical. Talk of wage slavery and other incendiary metaphors were common even in the most common strikes. The frequency with which governments police, state and federal troops, courts, governors, even the president intervened on behalf of the ownership class immediately raised the stakes; strikes took on a political meaning even when conservative unionists like Samuel Gompers or a youthful Eugene V. Debs eschewed radicalism.

Underlying indictments about wage slavery had spread so far that every local encounter became the potential site of a mass movement.

We tend to think of the trade union strike as a finite event between two parties arguing over limited, if sometimes intractable, issues. The rest of the world stands by and, for the most part, watches. But something quite different was happening during the formative stages of industrialization, as millions of people were being converted into the countrys founding proletariat.

All through the late nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth, events sometimes called mass strikes embraced multitudes. They enlisted not only those immediately involved in a particular strike, but a whole social universe that included other sympathetic workers, neighbors, families, shopkeepers and handicraftsmen, merchants, clergymen, newspaper editors, writers and artists, nearby farmers, and even local militiamen unwilling to fire on their friends and coworkers.

The Great Railroad Uprising of 1877, the Haymarket Massacre of 1886, the Homestead Strike of 1892, the Pullman Strike of 1894, the Uprising of the 20,000 in New York in 1911, the Lawrence and Paterson strikes in the following two years, the Great Steel Strike and Seattle General Strike of 1919, the San Francisco and Minneapolis general strikes of 1934, the sit-down strikes later that decade all stand as landmark moments in American history. As they unfolded, they laid bare the mass strikes rhythm and social reach. These are only the most noted; in the years following the Civil War and into the new century, many localized mass strikes erupted in towns and small cities nationwide, eliciting what has been called a strange enthusiasm.

The mass strike came much closer to turning the world upside down than an ordinary strike. Transgressive by nature, these events were widespread and open ended. They shattered and then recombined dozens of more local attachments. They exploded at a thousand points, leaping across boundaries of skill, gender, nativity, ethnicity, and race, winning the support of even those whose economic interests did not depend on the outcome.

Often enough, the mass strikes momentum sufficed to win concessions on wages, hours, and other working conditions although they might be provisional, not inscribed in contracts, and subject to being violated or outright ignored when law and order returned.

The mass strikes intense heat fused disparate elements into something ever more daring and generous. Indeed, its tactical repertoire which relied on the boycott and the sympathy strike embodied that vision. These weapons fit a worker-citizen movement whose social character and capacious programmatic embrace made it look like the kernel of a new commonwealth.

Boycotts and sympathy strikes expressed solidarity as an organized social emotion, as palpable reality, the spirit come to life. The form of the mass strike was its content, the medium the message.

Everything about them was unscripted. They had a rhythm all their own, syncopated and unpredictable as they spread from workplace to marketplace to slum. There was no central command, nor were they the result of some mysterious instance of spontaneous combustion. Each had dozens of choreographers, all directing local uprisings that remained elastic enough to cohere with one another while remaining distinct.

The program resisted easy codification. At one moment, it was about free speech, at another about a foremans chronic abuse, here about the presence of scabs and armed thugs, there about a wage cut.

Ranging effortlessly from a change in the piece rate to the nationalization of the countrys infrastructure, the mass strike defied the new order. Blunt yet profound, it defined the irreducible minimum of a just and humane civilization.

In so far as the mass strike had an ideology, it was ecumenical and apocalyptic. These early twentieth century syndicalist upheavals, from Brussels to Barcelona, St Petersburg to Seattle, constituted a freedom movement, bending the arc of social justice toward equality, solidarity, and emancipation.

During the Industrial Workers of the Worldled Paterson strike in 1913, Emma Goldman sent a message to the workers, promising that [w]hen all the textile workers, machinists, taxi cab drivers . . . join you in the general strike . . . which to all appearances is but a question of a few days, that would be death knell of the commercialism which has tried to crush human sympathy.

During World War I, all the combatant countries experienced a flood of strikes, some industry-wide, some convulsing whole cities. In the United States, Helen Keller advocated a general Strike Against the War.

This supercharged atmosphere gave rise to speculative thinking about how the strike could inaugurate a new world.

Talk of general strikes, political strikes, and mass strikes ran through all the left literatures: syndicalism, anarchism, socialism, and communism all devised various formulations that described an impending revolutionary crisis in which the strike performed heroics beyond the modest work-a-day improvements we now associate with Western trade unionism.

Big Bill Haywood, a founder of the IWW, explained how the strike functioned in the syndicalist schema. His 1911 pamphlet The General Strike compared it to the Paris Commune of a generation earlier.

The strike, he wrote, gives the vote to women, it re-enfranchises the black man, and places the ballot in the hands of every girl and boy employed in the shop. Wobblies advocated a peopled strike, a form of passive resistance on the job, and outright sabotage: two strategies for moving toward industrial democracy.

While committed to electoral politics as the leader of the American Socialist Party, Eugene Debs made no bones about the fact that the Pullman strike made him a socialist: through the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle, the class struggle was revealed and the whole apparatus of the state implicated. His comrade AM Simmons agreed: strikes, boycotts, lockouts, and injunctions are the birth pangs of a new society . . . and thereby rulership and slavery shall pass from the off the earth.

Rosa Luxembourg became the mass strikes seminal theorist, drawing heavily on the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution. She referred to the soviets the Russian word for popular assemblies as a political mass strike for freedom against absolutism. She wanted her experiences to serve as a corrective to the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which drew a sharp distinction between the political and economic struggle and insisted on a central command structure.

Luxembourg drew a sociological correlative: in periods of heightened social fracture, she argued, the unorganized elements of the working class proved to be the most radical-minded. The mass strike, she wrote, on the whole does not proceed from the economic to the political struggle, or even the reverse.

In a letter to Karl Kautsky, a theorist close to the SPD leadership, Luxembourg saluted the European workers quiet heroism for their solidarity with their Russian compatriots and for their efforts to form worker-elected factory committees to run things without the help of trade union or party hierarchs. The German trade union establishment, however, saw the general strike as general nonsense.

George Sorel went furthest in transforming the strike into a kind of permanent apocalypse. By the time Reflections on Violence was published in 1902, the general strike had become a well-established part of working-class life.

Sorel recognized the general strikes transcendent character, which he thought leapt beyond the boundaries of the More, the incremental economic advances that chained the Left to bourgeois norms, a prisoner of envy and resentment. Mass strikes were simultaneously the moral equivalent of earlier forms of proprietorship, and the pathway to a heroic conception of life an epic state of mind.

Sorel and others felt that the modern worlds disenchantment expressed a deep human need for social dreams. Emotion and the poetry of life produced wisdom, not the rationalism so celebrated by utilitarian society, a faith in reason that much of the oppositional left also held. What Sorel admired in Marx was his catastrophic conception, his refusal to block out in advance some socially engineered model of the future society.

Revolutionary syndicalism, of which there were various renditions, was often understood to dispense with parliamentary methods in favor of violence. Instead, revolutionary violence served purely tactical purposes. Sorel and others, like Haywood, saw the general strike as a vehicle of democratic takeover, one that would avoid empowering a new managerial class, even a socialist one.

There was a millenarian thinking undergirding these conceptions. Like the Christian apocalypse, the general strike especially for Sorel carried moral inspiration, nurtured devotion, and would curb meaner instincts; a living myth through which virtue could take root. It would serve as a last judgment on what capitalism had wrought. The struggle needed no fixed objective; it served as its own justification. And it had the additional appeal that it refused compromise, rejecting equivocation and delay.

The strange enthusiasm continued to light up the labor movement through the Great Depression. Leon Trotsky praised the mass sit-down strikes in the United States not merely as a shrewd stratagem that would make it harder for the police and National Guard to direct violence against the workers, but also as a movement that would shake up the principle of bourgeois property.

Indeed, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) again and again drew on the support networks in communities, among workers, and between merchants, neighbors, coreligionists, ethnic fraternal societies, and other organs of working-class life. The last truly general strike in the United States took place in Oakland, California in 1946. It began among low-paid women retail workers and, after 130,000 stopped work for two days, called for the unionization of the whole city.

From the 1930s onward, employers and the politicians who support them have ghettoized the strike, routinized and limited its political and social meaning and consequences. This was no easy task the labor movement and its opponents have both tried to enlist the state as an ally and weapon in such combat.

The incident that touched off the Oakland General Strike, as was true in just about every other mass conflict from 1877 onward, involved employer efforts to enlist the police and militia to tilt the balance of power toward capital. Management enlisted the police with the enthusiastic support of right-wing city fathers, strongly backed by William Knowlands Oakland Tribune as escorts for trucks and scab workers resupplying downtown department stores.

Luckily for the strikers, the resultant traffic jam stopped streetcars and buses, and their unionized drivers were soon outraged by the scab-herding police. All transport came to a stop, stores and factories closed, and jukeboxes were hauled onto the street to create a festive, communal air.

After shutting down the city for more than two days, the union movement turned its energies to politics. The resultant reforms did not quite represent a municipal revolution, but they did exemplify the close relationship of midcentury unionism and political power.

The same dynamic appeared on an even bigger scale in Detroit a year later when the United Automobile Workers (UAW), then the United States largest and most dynamic union, flooded Cadillac Square with more than a quarter million workers to protest the Taft-Hartley Act. Laborites called the new legislation a slave labor law; it curbed strike power and disqualified radicals from labor leadership.

Then as now, the demonstrations leaders were divided over tactics. The Left wanted to shut down factories so that American unions could deploy, as one top officer put it, the kind of political power which is most effective in Europe. More cautious unionists, led by the ex-socialist UAW president Walter Reuther, agreed on a huge demonstration, but wanted one that began after workers clocked out for the day.

Capitalizing on these internal divisions, and on the early Cold War hostility to labor radicalism and political insurgency, the auto companies took their pound of flesh. They fired key militants and ended the tradition of working-class strike demonstrations in industrial cities for the rest of the twentieth century.

Plenty of big strikes have taken place since then, but, for both employers and workers, they have been self-contained, insular affairs, whose impact no longer resonated with the social movements and currents still roiling the American landscape. This represented a huge victory for conservatives and employers, who no longer feared that the labor movement would enlist the community or even decisive elements thereof, such as feminists, Latinos, or African Americans.

Indeed, the consignment of unions to an economic interest group all too frequently put these institutions into opposition with the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s that sought to expand the content and scope of American democracy.

By the time Ronald Reagan smashed the PATCO strike in 1981, the unions had become isolated and vulnerable. The flight of capital out of production into finance and out of the country into the low-wage global South helped neuter work stoppages and collective bargaining.

The labor movement shrank in size and potency, emboldening conservatives to further undermine union power, as the wave of so-called right-to-work laws enacted over the past few years in several Midwestern states attests. During the last decade, unions have called only 143 strikes, compared to 3,500 during a similar time frame forty years ago.

And yet we cannot divorce politics from the quest for economic and social democracy. Even as the strike and collective bargaining have become almost entirely devalued, the same issues that animated radicalism a century ago remain front and center: economic justice and liberation, social inequality, the meaning of citizenship, and the democratic character of our governing institutions.

In the 1960s, even as intellectuals like C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse began to turn away from the labor metaphysic, the strike in its classic, proletarian form still retained an imaginative grasp on leftists and reformers from Memphis to Paris. Martin Luther Kings very last campaign came in the form of a black municipal workers strike, the meaning of which transcended the stolid boundaries of midcentury collective bargaining and the outlaw struggle for union recognition in the public sector.

King wanted to create a transracial organization of the poor, using weapons honed not only in the civil rights movement but borrowed from radical labors arsenal as well. As he told the striking garbage men on the eve of his assassination, You may have to escalate the struggle a bit . . . just have a general work stoppage in the city of Memphis.

Six weeks later in Paris, a fleeting alliance of students and workers seemed like the manifestation of every transformative dream to emerge from the sixties. The events of MayJune 1968 shut down Paris and swept eleven million workers into its orbit.

George Sorel, relegated to infamy thanks to Mussolinis fondness for the theorists mystifications when he was remembered at all, suddenly appeared on everyones reading list, but now with a hedonistic flavor. Under the cobblestones, the beach! chanted the Parisian students who saw utopia in distinctly Californian terms.

A year later, even the liberals who had enlisted in and assumed leadership roles in the American antiwar movement deployed a strike ethos to advance their agenda. The 1969 Moratoriums to End the War in Vietnam, among the largest demonstrations of that decade, had originally been planned as shut-it-down strikes, scheduled for a workday.

The sixties passed half a century ago; the Wobblies more than a century. But ideas of popular resistance, collective power, strike action, and Ye are many they are few are enjoying a remarkable renaissance. The May Day strike is winning support not only from many unions but also from immigrant groups and others seeking to demonstrate the power of a resistant citizenry.

This action may have the wherewithal to translate the wishful thinking of the Occupy militants, of Francine Prose and Womens Strike organizers, of Black Lives Matter allies, and of all the grassroots mobilizing against the Trump regime into a more robust reality. The proletariat remains a powerful force even if its ranks and spirit have been severely depleted.

Indeed, these mobilizations may signal the awakening of a new proletariat, one less like the industrial workers of the twentieth century than the ancient Roman proletariat the discarded and disempowered, cast-off by postindustrial society. Like the unorganized in Rosa Luxembourgs imagination, they are ready for action, neither backward nor bourgeois. Working classes both the well and poorly rewarded, both the remnants of the organized and the sea of unorganized might yet launch a mass strike that can deliver a new and humane future.

Read this article:

Which Way to the Barricades? - Jacobin - Jacobin magazine

The topic of the day is pre-existing conditions: namely the fact that the latest version of the Republican health care bill guts Obamacare's guarantee that insurers have to insure all customers at the same price. It's what everyone is talking about.

Wait. Did I say "gut"? National Review editor Rich Lowry disagrees:

The Phrase Pre-Existing Conditions Leads to the Suspension of All Thought

The moderates are abandoning the health-care bill largely because it makes it possible for states to get a waiver from the pre-existing condition regulation in Obamacare. This is being distorted as an abolition of that regulation, with the moderates either contributing to the misunderstanding or being carried along by it. Ramesh ably explained the other day why this isnt true. But apparently all you have to do to win the debate over Obamacare repeal is say pre-existing condition, regardless of whether you have any idea what you are talking about. I dont think anyone wants to go back to the pre-Obamacare status quo on this issue, but....

The Ramesh Ponnuru post that Lowry links to is worth a read, though I think Ponnuru downplays the real effect of the waiver clause. I'm also pretty sure that, actually, lots of people would like to go back to the pre-Obamacare status quo. That's especially true of people who really understand how health insurance works. After all, once you accept that people with pre-existing conditions should be allowed to buy health coverage at the same price as everyone else, you pretty much have to accept both the individual mandate and the federal subsidies in Obamacare. You can call them "continuous coverage" and "tax credits" if you want, but they're the same thing.

But for a moment let's put that all aside, because there's a more fundamental question here. Like it or not, Obamacare does protect people with pre-existing conditions. Insurers have to accept anyone who applies and they have to charge them the same premiums as anyone else. This has no effect on the federal budget, which means it can't be repealed in a reconciliation bill.1 Unless someone kidnaps the Senate parliamentarian's dog and threatens to kill poor Fido unless they get a favorable ruling, any attempt to repeal Obamacare's pre-existing conditions ban will be tossed out of the bill. And keep in mind that Obamacare's ban is absolute. As long as it's around, insurers have to take all comers at the same price no matter what any other legislation says.

So all the limitations regarding pre-existing conditions in the Republican bill are just kabuki. What's the point?

1Oh sure, you can gin up a case where it has some small effect. But that doesn't work. Reconciliation bills are limited to things that directly affect the budget. Incidental effects don't count.

Continue reading here:

Republicans Are Playing Pre-Existing Conditions Kabuki - Mother Jones

The Washington Post's Anna Fifield and Yoonjung Seo sat down with Moon Jae-in, the Democratic Party candidate and clear front-runner to become South Korea's next president in a snap election to be held on May 9. Here is a transcript of the interview, translated from Korean.

WASHINGTON POST: Let's start with THAAD. The U.S.has brought in the THAAD system very quickly and ahead of schedule. Do you view this as the Americans interfering with the election?

MOON: I dont believe the U.S. has the intention, but I do have reservations. It is not desirable for the South Korean government to deploy THAAD hastily at this politically sensitive time with the presidential election, without going through the democratic process, an environmental assessment or a public hearing.

One of the biggest problems with this THAAD deployment decision was that it lacked democratic procedure, and it has resulted in a wide division of the nation and aggravated foreign relations. If the South Korean government were to push this issue further, it would only make matters worse, and it would be more difficult to find a solution to this problem. I hope the U.S. government will fully consider these issues.

If the same were to happen in the U.S., would this have happened just by the administrations unilateral decision without democratic procedure, ratification or agreement by Congress? If South Korea can have more time to process this matter democratically, the U.S. would gain a higher level of trust from South Koreans and therefore the alliance between the two nations would become even stronger.

If this matter can be reviewed by the next administration, the new government would look for a reasonable solution based on the alliance between South Korea and the U.S. that can secure the national interest as well as a national consensus.

South Korea and the U.S. share common interests with regard to the North Korean nuclear issue, so I promise that South Korea will fully consult with the U.S. on the deployment of THAAD.

WP: In the policy document you released at the weekend, you said that nothing is more dangerous than letting another country decide for you. Is that an indication that you want to rebalance the alliance? Do you feel that the U.S. has too much say over what happens in South Korea?

MOON: The answer is no. I believe the alliance between the two nations is the most important foundation for our diplomacy and national security. South Korea was able to build its national security thanks to the U.S., and the two nations will work together on the North Korean nuclear issue. However, I believe we need to be able to take the lead on matters in the Korean Peninsula as the country directly involved.

I do not see it as desirable for South Korea to take the back seat and watch discussions between the U.S. and China and dialogues between North Korea and the U.S. I believe South Korea taking the initiative would eventually strengthen our bilateral alliance with the U.S.

However, when I say take the initiative, I do not mean that South Korea will approach or unilaterally open talks with North Korea without fully consulting the U.S. beforehand.

WP: You said in an interview last December that you would go to Pyongyang [in North Korea] before you would go to Washington as a sign of the importance of the North Korean issue. Do you still stand by that today?

MOON: First of all, that news report is absolutely not true. I intended to say that, if it would help resolve the nuclear issue, I could go to North Korea after sufficient prior discussions with the U.S. and Japan.

I do not know when I will be able to have talks with the North on scrapping its nuclear program, but if I become the president I believe I need to meet with President Trump first to discuss the issue in depth and reach an agreement with him on the measures to abolish North Koreas nuclear program.

With that agreement we can, on the one hand, put pressure on and attempt to persuade North Korea and on the other hand, seek cooperation from China, so we can try to resolve the nuclear issue with the U.S. In that process, I could sit down with [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un, but I will not meet him for the sake of meeting him. I will meet Kim Jong Un when preconditions of resolving the nuclear issue are assured.

I think I am on the same page as President Trump. President Trump judged the Obama administrations policy of strategic patience as a failure with regard to North Korea, so he has stressed the need for a change in North Korean policy.

WP: I didn't come here today expecting you to agree with Trump!

MOON: Trump talks about strenuous pressure, sanctions and even the possibility of a pre-emptive strike, but I believe his ultimate goal is to bring North Korea back to negotiations for the [abolition] of its nuclear program. In that respect, I share the same opinion as President Trump. Both the Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations completely failed in resolving the North Korean nuclear issue. I agree with President Trumps method of applying sanctions and pressure to North Korea to bring them out to negotiate. If that happens, I would meet with Kim Jong Un to secure the [abolition] of its nuclear program.

I believe President Trump is more reasonable than he is generally perceived. President Trump uses strong rhetoric towards North Korea but, during the election campaign, he also said he could talk over a burger with Kim Jong Un. I am for that kind of pragmatic approach to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue.

We need to take a staged approach to resolve this problem. The first stage is for North Korea to not engage in any further nuclear provocations such as additional nuclear tests.

The second stage is preventing the North from advancing its nuclear capability any further.

Finally, the third stage is for North Korea to completely scrap its program. I think President Trump would agree with these measures.

WP: What would you say in your first call or meeting with President Trump, especially regarding how to deal with North Korea?

MOON: I suppose hell congratulate me for being elected to the presidency, so I would thank him for that. I would tell him that I would like to meet with him at the earliest possible opportunity to discuss measures for scrapping North Koreas nuclear program so that North Korea completely gives up its nuclear ambitions.

WP: What do you say to the peoplein Washington, sitting there and thinking back to the Roh Moo-hyun era and looking at you as a liberal, soft-on-North-Koreapolitician. What is your message to them?

MOON: When we reflect on the Roh Moo-hyun administration, South Korea decided to dispatch troops to Iraq and sealed the Korea-U.S. [free trade agreement], which broadened the bilateral alliance from a military alliance to an economic alliance.

Also, the six-party talks reached an agreement for completely abolishing the North Korean nuclear program under the close cooperation between South Korea and the U.S.

Although the agreement has not been properly implemented since the Lee Myung-bak administration, I would like to stress that our two nations reached an agreement on the North Korean nuclear issue during the Roh administration. Therefore, I would like to stressthat the Roh administration brought South Korea and the U.S. closer in that era, contrary to the general perception in Washington.

Continued here:

Interview with Moon Jae-in, set to become South Korea's next president - Washington Post

McDonald says 'IRA court' must be scrapped, but backs its verdict

Independent.ie

Sinn Fin's deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald is standing by her demand for the abolition of the Special Criminal Court - despite publicly welcoming the conviction of her former protg.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/mcdonald-says-ira-court-must-be-scrapped-but-backs-its-verdict-35668416.html

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Sinn Fin's deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald is standing by her demand for the abolition of the Special Criminal Court - despite publicly welcoming the conviction of her former protg.

Ms McDonald has found herself at the centre of fresh controversy following the conviction of ex-Sinn Fin politician Jonathan Dowdall, who "waterboarded" and "tortured" another man.

The all-judge Special Criminal Court was originally set up to hear cases involving suspected IRA members, but in recent times has been used to deal with a wider range of charges.

Last week, the court heard how the former councillor threatened to feed his victim, Alexander Hurley, to dogs and burn his head at the stake.

Mr Hurley, who has prior fraud convictions, pleaded for his life as Mr Dowdall covered his face with a cloth and doused his head with water, while his father Patrick Dowdall threatened to cut his fingers off with pliers "knuckle by knuckle".

The court heard how Jonathan Dowdall told his victim he was a "stupid dumb f*** to mess with the head of the IRA".

The father and son, who pleaded guilty to threatening to kill their victim, are due to be sentenced later this month.

But Ms McDonald has now found herself at the centre of a political row after she released a statement welcoming the ruling of the Special Criminal Court - despite repeatedly calling for it to be scrapped.

She has also been accused of "a new low" after she tweeted pictures of Mr Dowdall in the company of her constituency rival and former lord mayor Christy Burke.

Ms McDonald is one of a number of Sinn Fin politicians who have called for the abolition of the juryless Special Criminal Court.

Despite her party's demand for its abolition, Ms McDonald released a statement backing last week's verdict in relation to her former close ally.

"I welcome the conviction of Jonathan Dowdall," she said. "The details of the attack perpetrated by him are deeply shocking. I hope the sentence reflects the seriousness of the offence and the trauma endured by his victim."

Last night, Fine Gael TD Noel Rock said the case clearly illustrates Sinn Fin's links to criminality. He accused Ms McDonald of hypocrisy.

"It's incredible Sinn Fin now finds one of its former councillors in the dock for waterboarding and torturing a member of the public. He's on trial, in fact, in the very same Special Criminal Court that Mary Lou McDonald's Sinn Fin wanted to abolish," Mr Rock said.

"It's quite clear that with Sinn Fin past and present, you are not far from criminality. It's simply unbelievable that it wanted, and still wants, to abolish the Special Criminal Court."

Last night, a Sinn Fin spokesperson said: "Deputy Rock is playing cheap politics with a serious crime. Sinn Fin's concerns with the operation of the Special Criminal Court are shared by Amnesty International, the ICCL and the UN Commission on Human Rights. Perhaps Deputy Rock opposes these groups as well."

Ms McDonald's statement last week was followed by a tweet which showed Mr Dowdall in the company of Mr Burke.

Cllr Burke accused his constituency rival of stooping to a "new low" and said he has been approached by Sinn Fin supporters who expressed their disgust at her actions.

Ms McDonald yesterday defended the tweet and reiterated her backing for the court's decision.

"It is a matter of public record that Mr Dowdall left Sinn Fin, went on to support and work for Cllr Burke and campaigned against Sinn Fin.

"The photographs I posted reflect those facts. Cllr Burke needs to make clear his position on the actions of Jonathan Dowdall," she said.

Irish Independent

Originally posted here:

McDonald says 'IRA court' must be scrapped, but backs its verdict - Irish Independent

'Amendment ignores key aspects of child welfare' The Hindu They need an environment where they are willing to learn, else they will drop out and get back to work again, he said. To help abolish child labour, CACL has also proposed a draft Child Labour System (Abolition, Prevention and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2017. and more »

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'Amendment ignores key aspects of child welfare' - The Hindu

30 Apr 2017, 1 p.m.

Regional Express (Rex) is furious about the elimination of 457 visas.

Rex's CEO has said the company will be affected by the elimination of 457 visas.

Regional Express (Rex) has warned the federal government that its ruling on professional work visas will affect services in regional Australia.

The Department of Immigration and Border Protection announced changes to the immigration program, including the abolition of the temporary work visas (subclass 457).

The changes see two occupations utilised by Rex completely removed from the official list of eligible occupations aeroplane pilot and aircraft maintenance engineer.

Two other occupations are now only allowed short term visas and are ineligible for residency.

As a small regional carrier, Rex has been forced to conduct expensive recruitment exercises in South Africa, the United States and Europe to bring in experienced captains, Rex chief operating officer Neville Howell said.

Read the original here:

Rex to be affected by 457 scrapping - Daily Advertiser

The Boston Police Department will be stepping up its campaign targeting online sex trade customers with Facebook ads, with a new increased grant from an advocacy group.

The BPD is set to receive a $41,000 grant from Cambridge-based Demand Abolition, which awarded the department a $30,000 grant to fight the sex trade last year. The grants are coming as part of Bostons CEASE initiative, which is attempting to cut online demand for sex trafficking.

Using targeted internet ads as a way of curbing online sex trafficking is intended to hit potential johns with the consequences of their behavior, an advocate said, making them realize the damage theyre causing.

Its been normalized and accepted through internet access, without having to leave their home, with the click of a button they can buy somebody, said Cherie Jimenez, founder of anti-sex-trafficking group The EVA Center. This shifts people, gets people to think about this.

We want to see this shift and this is a great tool to use, Jimenez said.

The second round of funding comes during an increased push from state and local officials to crack down on the internet-based sex trade that has expanded to all corners of the state.

A Herald roundtable held Monday of law enforcement officials, advocates and survivors, moderated by Attorney General Maura Healey, described sex trafficking as worse than ever, but officials have been cracking down as well. The AGs office recently charged 29 alleged sex buyers from Barnstable to Northampton in a series of stings designed to target johns.

And johns are the focus of the BPDs initiative as well. Lt. Michael McCarthy said police used the first round of funding to work with Demand Abolition to create a profile of potential buyers 18- to 64-year-old men within 25 miles of Boston browsing online between 2 and 3 p.m. and target a Facebook ad to those people.

The ad shows a man in a prison cell with the text Think buying sex is cheap? It can cost you everything and links to a BPD website with information about penalties for people charged in sex trafficking and links for sexual addiction treatment. McCarthy said police believe the ad was effective and that police would use the new round of funds to create video ads for Facebook as well.

The use of social media is an effective way to deliver targeted messages which amplify the risk to current and would-be buyers by putting them on notice that this illegal and harmful activity will not be tolerated and that law enforcement is on the lookout for offenders, said Dhakir Warren, director of network learning and engagement for Demand Abolition. This also allows us to raise awareness, among the general population of men, to the harm and consequences associated with purchasing individuals for sex.

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Boston police put out word: Buying sex can cost you big - Boston Herald

The Australian government has reassured international students they are still welcome in the country, after announcing changes to its temporary worker visa last week caused concerns among prospective and current students.

Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced via a video on Facebook that the government would be abolishing the 457 skilled work visa held by some 95,000 workers.

Any perceived tightening of migration conditions may discourage some students from choosing Australia as their study destination"

The changes, which will see the 457 temporary skilled work visa replaced with a more stringent Temporary Skill Shortage visa in March 2018, will not directly affect student visas or the post-study work rights visa scheme. However industry stakeholders have reported a level of confusion from overseas colleagues.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull unexpectedly abolished the scheme last week and saidits replacementwill ensure that Australians, wherever possible, where vacancies are there, where job opportunities are there, Australians will be able to fill them.

Several providers have identified uncertainty among students and education agents regarding how the changes will affect students work opportunities after study, while several overseas media outlets have been identified as providing inaccurate information on the changes.

Australias Department of Immigration and Border Protection clearly did not see it as their role to communicate who would not be affected by the changes to 457 visa settings, IEAA chief executive Phil Honeywood told The PIE News.

Wherever possible, where vacancies are there, where job opportunities are there, Australians will be able to fill them

It quickly became apparent that international students were making extensive use of social media to express their concerns about possible impacts, he added.

Honeywood said those concerns prompted education minister Simon Birmingham to tweet, Fact. Australia is open to educating the world, with an accompanying graphic which has been circulated by Australian educators accounts.

At this stage, the minister has not released a formal media statement on the impact of the changes to international students.

Indirectly, fewer international students will be eligible for the upcoming TSS visa than for the 457 skilled worker visa program, as the upcoming schemerequires applicants have a higher level of English, a minimum two years work experience in their skilled occupation, and the list of eligible occupations will also be reduced.

The move remains in line with the Australian governments efforts to separate ties between its overseas study visa program and skilled migration, after concerns of widespread fraud at the turn of the decade.

It is a very responsive approach, but the fundamental difference is, it is focused relentlessly on the national interest and on ensuring that temporary migration visas are not a passport for foreigners to take up jobs that could and should be filled by Australians, said Turnbull.

But educators aired their concerns that any changes could have a mild dampening effect on student enrolments.

While the reforms do not have a direct relationship to education, international students do consider future employment opportunities in choosing study destinations, ACPET chief executive Rod Camm said in a statement.

Any perceived tightening of migration conditions may discourage some students from choosing Australia as their study destination, he added.

While the abolition of the 457 visa system has caused anxiety among students, the number of student visa holders moving to a 457 visa has been gradually decreasing over the past three years.

Since 2012/13, the number of student visa holders who moved onto a 457 visa shrunk by almost 35% to 11,696 in 2015/16, despite student numbers hitting a record 554,179 in 2016.

Conversely, the post-study work stream of the 485 temporary graduate visa, which provides up to four years work depending on level of qualification completed, saw a marked increased in 2015/16, more than doubling from 9,400 to 21,300 from the previous year.

It is unclear if the removal of the 457 visa could mean fewer international students move in the opposite direction, converting from a temporary skilled worker visa to a student visa, as DIBP does not publicly provide those figures, but Honeywood estimated the numbers would be low.

Australia has a competitive advantage right now amidst uncertainty in many other parts of the world we need to safeguard that advantage and not undermine it in any way

Meanwhile, Universities Australia also expressed concern the TSS could affect Australias university system and prevent them from recruiting the best and brightest minds from around the world.

In particular, UA said the work experience requirement would prevent universities from recruiting recent PhD graduates and also requested university lecturers and tutors be restored to the medium term skills list.

Australia has a competitive advantage right now amidst uncertainty in many other parts of the world we need to safeguard that advantage and not undermine it in any way, UA chief executive Belinda Robinson said in a statement.

The ability of our universities to bring brilliant minds into Australia is crucial to the global research collaborations that will help us to create new jobs and new industries for Australians.

Immigration minister Peter Dutton subsequently vowed to take a broad view of what constitutes work experience, with his office telling the Australian Financial Review experience may vary depending on occupation, such as research and teaching experience accumulated by PhDs.

More:

Australia abolishes popular 457 skilled worker visa - The PIE News

The coalition government ensuring Aussie workers have priority for Aussie jobs abolishing the 457 work visa.

You can find these words on immigration minister Peter Duttons website superimposed over a picture of a giant muddy backhoe, digging dirt in some remote-looking location.

The first weird thing is, not one category of machine operator or driver was eligible for a 457 visa, even before Duttons announcement. So the backhoe picture is simply part of the theatre, a fictional prop for a bullshit so-called solution to a discriminatory, anti-worker visa category of the Liberals own creation. The effect of this theatre is to leave the core of the problem intact, and in some ways make it worse, while kicking off a wild bout of flag waving to mask more severe threats such as the Turnbull government itself.

Even the least attentive media commentators have picked up on the large element of make-believe in Dutton and Turnbulls breathless announcement that 457 employer-sponsored visas will be abolished in March next year. For starters, theres the fact that 457 visas will be instantly replaced by two new visas that work on exactly the same principles of employer sponsorship (the Temporary Skills Shortage or TSS visas).

Much media, union and political commentary has mocked Turnbull and Dutton for posing as mighty friends of the working class by saving Australia from some alleged influx of employer-sponsored goat farmers, magistrates and tribunal members some of the occupational categories that employers can no longer sponsor under these latest reforms.

The bullshit goes much deeper than this, however.

The threat to workers in Australia from the 457 visa, and similar schemes, has never depended on the size of occupational categories under which workers can be sponsored. Rather, the problem with 457 visas is built into the visa itself.

Employer-sponsored temporary work visas such as the 457 severely limit the most fundamental right that a worker can have under capitalism our right to quit one job and search for another. This right is what is meant to mark out capitalist free labour from slavery, serfdom and other forms of bonded labour. The 457 visa is a serious attack on that right. Any worker employed under a 457 visa who is sacked or who leaves their job has a limited period currently just 60 days, reduced from 90 days late last year to find a new employer (who must be approved to employ workers on a 457 visa) or face deportation.

Its this that gives the whip hand to the employer in what is already an unequal relationship. Throughout history and around the world, when a worker depends on the boss for their immigration status, the door is wide open for gross exploitation, regardless of the supposed protections built into the visa.

So its no surprise to find widespread abuses of workers on 457 visas, or on the working holidaymaker 417 visas, in which an extension of the visa depends on regional or rural employers attesting that the worker has completed 88 days work in primary industry or construction. Similarly, workers on student visas face sharp restrictions on the number of hours that can be worked. To make ends meet, international students are often forced to work beyond their visa limitations, pushing them into the jobs black market and leaving them open to exploitation. And workers on seasonal worker programs can be employed only by a restricted group of bosses, limiting their ability to quit bad jobs and find new ones. In all of these cases, restrictive visas along with employer self-monitoring and light touch regulation (which amounts to the privatisation of the border) lead to gross and systematic exploitation.

The solution isnt to keep workers out its to have full work rights for all migrant workers, dramatically reducing the scope for employer coercion. At one stroke, this would significantly lessen the pressure that the exploitation of migrant workers puts on the whole labour market. However, this is exactly not what is on the federal governments agenda in these latest reforms. In 2006, Liberal then immigration minister Amanda Vanstone gloated that the 457 visa undermines the unions ability to exploit high wages amid the skills shortage. The ruling class want to keep it that way, which is why fundamental reform or actual abolition of restrictive, anti-worker visas is not on the cards from either major party, despite the ritualised huffing and puffing.

The changes announced by the government arent just political theatre, however. One of the better informed commentators, journalist Peter Mares, points out that the Dutton-Turnbull changes are likely to make the pathway from temporary to permanent status longer and harder or, in some cases, to close it altogether. A recent Productivity Commission report notes that the average migrant going through a multi-step migration process already takes 6.4 years, and more than three visa grants, before they become a permanent resident.

Thats a huge amount of time to survive as a precarious worker on various types of exploitative visas and its about to get longer. Tighter English language requirements, a new requirement for two years work experience before getting a temporary visa, and the fact that workers on temporary employer-sponsored visas will have to wait three years before applying to be sponsored for a permanent visa, up from the current two years all of this will lead to a longer period as a precarious worker. As Mares points out, the result will be a larger body of migrants who live, work and pay taxes without accruing any of the rights and entitlements that come with membership of the political community.

This is obviously an attack on the migrants themselves. And by extending the period in which migrants are tied to their boss, it facilitates gross exploitation and wage cutting for workers on temporary visas. The point of this, as Vanstone explained, is to produce downward pressure on wages which, the ruling class hopes, would leave all workers worse off.

However the primary motive of the governments pronouncement on 457s and the accompanying frenzy of flag waving, tub thumping and fake memes featuring backhoes is political. The 457 issue was deliberately chosen to kick off a renewed wave of government-sponsored anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hysteria, two weeks out from the budget. The government wants to use the 457 issue to distract from its attacks, and to convince us that a vicious political campaign against migrants and Muslims is somehow in workers interests. As usual, with anything that comes from Turnbull and his gang, nothing could be further from the truth.

Read more from the original source:

Turnbull's 457 visa fraud - Red Flag

On 18 April 2017, the government announced that the Temporary Work (Skilled) visa (subclass 457 visa) will be abolished and replaced with the completely new Temporary Skill Shortage (TSS) visa in March 2018.

The TSS visa programme will be comprised of a Short-Term stream of up to two years and a Medium-Term stream of up to four years, will support businesses in addressing genuine skill shortages in their workforce and will contain a number of safeguards which prioritise Australian workers.

The changes, which commence in stages from 19 April 2017 are designed to reduce the number of non-residents who are able to obtain working rights in Australia. With immediate effect the list of occupations has been reduced by 200 and applications for nominations and linked visas can no longer be granted to applicants in those occupations. This is likely to affect sponsoring employers who have commenced the nomination process in one of those occupations. Details about the retrospective effect of these changes will need to be assessed before sponsors make final decisions on withdrawing such applications.

There are a number of other relevant changes and requirements and we recommend you seek advice before entering into any material discussions with job applicants regarding their employment in Australia.

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Migration Alert Abolition of 457 Visas! - Lexology - Lexology (registration)