Those Zany Activists

It started out as a pretty funny hit-and-run video of direct action .  A cross-section of anti-poverty-anti-hunger activists stormed the office of US Representative Paul Ryan on Tuesday, December 10 to insist on a budget for the poor, homeless and hungry to be funded by a 50% cut in military spending. This was the day of the less-than-historic announcement of a bi-partisan budget deal by Ryan and Senator Patty Murray. The hand-held camera followed demonstrator Cheri Honkola as she invited her train of fellow travelers into the office: “Come on in everyone.  Come on in, everyone.”  A staffer quickly approached and pointed out “We don’t allow any photography … ” and another  “no, we don’t have room… we don’t have room … we can meet outside, we can meet outside please” as the unscheduled visit deteriorated into a spectacle of cat-herding.  The scene was apparently repeated with another crew at Murray’s office.

I certainly recognized two of the participants in the activities of that day - Cheri Honkola and Jill Stein.  Honkola is achieving mythic proportions in a long career.  If you have to pick a date it all started, it must have been about 24 years ago - that’s using the math from the best origins story about her when she and her 9-year old son were freezing out on the street.  Summarized in Wikipedia:

After living in an apartment in Minnesota, Honkala and her young son were forced to move out and live out of their white Camaro. She and her son became homeless after the Camaro was demolished by a drunk driver. Honkala could not find a shelter that would allow them to remain together that winter. To stay together and keep from freezing, Honkala decided to move into an abandoned Housing and Urban Development (HUD) home. She would later comment, "I chose to live, and I chose to keep my son alive." She called a press conference, in which she said, according to her, "This is me, this is my nine-year-old son, and we're not leaving until somebody can tell us where we can live and not freeze to death."

This has become a pretty reliable tactical model.  Philadelphia has tens of thousands of vacant properties - many or most of which are owned by the city.  Cheri guides homeless clients on how to takeover carefully targeted individual properties, how to navigate vagaries in the law and employ the harsh glare of public opinion to successfully settle-in these pioneer families as squatters.

Cheri’s bonafides are many and varied.  She is co-founder of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union;  co-founder of “P-perk”, Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign.   I’ve heard that Cheri’s enterprises don’t bother to apply for non-profit status because the gray-area legality of some of her modes of operation might pose a sticking point in the application process or hinder their organization’s effectiveness.  Cheri has run for Sheriff on a platform of not carrying out evictions.  During the last presidential campaign, Cheri was vice presidential candidate for the Green Party on the ticket with Jill Stein as candidate for President.  Apparently Cheri has spoken to UN delegates about poverty.  According to the Philadelphia Weekly she has been arrested over 200 times - usually being released within hours.  (Another source said she’s only ever been convicted three times, but that was by 1999.)

Other documented perps of the action are listed by opednews (first link):  

At a press conference before the office visits, speakers representing a Budget for People, Peace and the planet spoke to the media. Speakers at the news conference included the following: Jill Stein, Green Shadow Cabinet; Cheri Honkala, Liz Ortiz, and Glen Davis of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign; David Swanson, Roots Action; Mark Dunlea, Hunger Action Network of New York State; Dr. David Schwartzman, Professor Emeritus Howard University and community activist.

Why do these adults participate in these self-indulgent and theatrical charades?  Again, I think opednews sums it up just fine, this from the narration of the video:

Now, because this broad coalition included over a hundred peace, anti-hunger, anti-poverty, environmental and community groups it is almost universally ignored within the walls of Congress.

A record to examine

Governor Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania is running for re-election. With his impressive record, he has left a considerable footprint on the landscape of Pennsylvania.  It is worth a second look to fully appreciate the width and depth of that record.

The governor cut more than a billion dollars from education statewide in three years resulting in the elimination of 20,000 public school positions.  In Philadelphia, the cuts in state funding created a $304 million hole in the school budget that was partially addressed by closing 23 schools. Some of the funding has been withheld by Corbett in a deliberate hostage-taking ploy to wrest $103 million in concessions from the Philadelphia teachers union. Of the funding crisis in Philadelphia schools, Aaron Kase of Salon sums up “The pattern has become clear: defund the schools, precipitate a crisis and use that as an excuse to further attack the schools, pushing them closer and closer to a point of no return.”  Corbett is a consistent fan of public school “reform” that would drain funds from the public schools (vouchers) and open them up to private contractors (charter schools, tax credits).

Corbett eliminated state subsidized health insurance coverage for more than 40,000 low-income working adults. He is presently promoting a plan which would reject a mostly federally funded expansion of Medicaid and have 500,000 poorer Pennsylvanians participate instead in a plan paying co-payments and premiums to private insurers. His plan to close 26 of 60 state health centers  across Pennsylvania is being challenged in a suit brought by SEIU.  All of this activity is in addition to the 90,000 children who were removed from Medicare coverage by Corbett.

Eating became problematic for poor Pennsylvanians in 2012.  As reported in Philadelphia City Paper:

Republican Gov. Tom Corbett has announced a major assault on the food stamp program that feeds 1.8 million Pennsylvanians, including 439,245 in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania's Department of Public Welfare announced that on May 1, people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings or other assets will be barred from receiving food stamps. People over 60 would have a $3,250 cap.

The bar to owning assets means poor people will have to choose between, say, eating or buying medicine - this at a time when the social safety net is being shredded from every direction.  Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars points out:

Eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” is an old and recurrent refrain from those who seek to dismantle the country's social welfare system. But it's a cynical ruse: 30 percent of those eligible for food stamps in Pennsylvania don't receive them. According to federal data, the Inquirer notes, Pennsylvania has a fraud rate of just one-tenth of 1 percent.

There is not only coal in that Santa’s bag this Christmas season.  There’s natural gas - or at least hundreds of millions of dollars of tax breaks to the corporations who are frakking that Pennsylvania landscape for petroleum products. Other goodies for the industry include using public funds to create domestic markets and export opportunities for gas, or tax incentives for a Brazilian plastics manufacturer.

I dunno.  I kinda hope he loses.

Portland Non-profits

We are distracted and amazed by the relentless campaigns to silence, disenfranchise, impoverish or marginalize most of us to assure the lavish comfort and gated security of a precious few of us.  But there are other stories out there.  Portland, Oregon is probably unremarkable in its active, mostly invisible, community of non-profit organizations of people who are trying to help.

The Southwest Community Health Center, in their own words, is a safety-net-clinic providing basic health care to low-income uninsured individuals. They solicit donations.  They write grants.  An anonymous donor recently provided a matching challenge grant of $20000.  Last year, SWCHC provided 1711 patient visits to 812 unduplicated uninsured individuals.  You don’t have to scratch very deep to understand their effect on people’s lives.  Here is an on-line review from a client:

I've been living the under-payed uninsured lifestyle basically, since, forever. I had OHP or private insurance through my mom for periods of time as a child, but once I turned 18 was SOL (hopefully the new reforms about keeping dependent adult-children on family plans will stick around). 

For people like me, the Coalition Clinics are life-savers. SWCHC is a part of the Coalition Clinic Network. They provide medical treatment to people who don't have money or health insurance to see a regular doctor and need to manage chronic or even acute health problems. It can take a few weeks to get an appointment, but if you do, it's a blessing. They take payment on a sliding scale, and if you make under $800 a month they only ask for $5. I've been examined after injuries, had a physical and got an order for routine blood work (which is covered when they refer you) to manage a few health concerns I needed to keep on top of.

The clinic is staffed by volunteer doctors and medical interns from all the local medical groups (like OHSU, Providence, etc). Your doctor will vary from visit to visit. Services that are provided can vary based on what group is volunteering that month. I saw a few different doctors while I was going here, and each of them were friendly, professional and, most of all, compassionate.

Ethos Music Center was conceived in response to relentless cuts over the years to music and arts education in Oregon.  The vision is hardly revolutionary – per Wikipedia, the Greeks used this word to refer to the power of music to influence its hearer's emotions, behaviors, and even morals. Ethos is a startlingly effective non-profit founded in 1998. They are headquartered in an underserved area of Portland targeted by other non-profits as well.  Ethos is all about making music lessons accessible and they are available in a multiplicity of configurations – private, group, full-priced (low), on a sliding-scale, subsidized by scholarship or, in the public schools but paid for by AmeriCorps; formats comprise “music lessons, multicultural performances and workshops to more than 7,000 students a year” for many on free or reduced price lunches.

In addition to its Urban Outreach Program there is the Ethos Rural Outreach Program.  For example, through Ethos outreach, the tiny communities of Metolious, Madras and Warm Springs in Central Oregon each have a whole fte, college-trained music teacher in their elementary schools.  The individual districts have no budgets for music.  The programs are supported through a miracle patchwork of federal programs, grants and community in-kind participation.

It’s nice to know that human nature can force a dandelion through the cracks no matter how thick the layers of asphalt.

blogalink – Krugman’s column – A War on the Poor

Paul Krugman certainly needs no introduction from me.  He can speak for himself – or for me, for that matter.

Please read his latest Op-Ed piece in the New York Times.

A War on the Poor  By Paul Krugman October 31, 2013

blogalink – The fraud of “new revenue” from PERS “savings”

Governor Kitzhaber recently orchestrated a “grand bargain” to increase revenue for schools and other services in the Oregon state budget.  This happened in spite of ample testimony revealing the fraud and hypocrisy of the proposal.

Here is a link to testimony provided by Tony Crawford, Vice President of the Oregon Education Association.

a letter to the Joint Interim Committee on Special Session of the Oregon legislature, September 26, 2013

That Which Is Left Unexplained

We actually understand a lot about the Sequester, the Shutdown and, most recently, the threat of default on the federal debt (“the Debt Ceiling”).  These are sad – tragic by their effects – failures by our leaders to govern responsibly at the federal level.

The Sequester came about because of a political miscalculation by President Obama.  It provides for “across-the-board” (arbitrary) cuts of the same percentage from every government program, without regard to importance or priority.  The proposal was made to buy time; it was supposed to be so transparently wrong as to guarantee that congress would work out compromise alternative spending decisions in most categories across the entire federal budget.  But guess what: the raw Sequester stuck.  It would take a majority of Republicans in the house to pass any change in the Sequester law.  The conservative wing (read “Tea Party”) controlled the agenda and there was no movement forthcoming to restore sequester cuts.  For a catalogue of people damaged by the mindless cuts – including 57,000 Head Start students, thousands of food stamp recipients, hundreds of thousands of federal workers, scientific researchers and participants in countless scaled back programs – go here.

The Shutdown has been accurately characterized as “hostage taking”.  The strategy was crafted and enabled by a handful of Tea Party Republicans, mostly in the House of Representatives.  The idea is to bypass the Constitutional model of developing legislation through negotiations in each house of the legislature and to replace it with a non-negotiable demand backed up by a threat to “shut down” the government.  The precise mechanism for shutdown is by withholding passage of a Continuing Resolution needed to fund the government past the expiration date of authorized spending.  The demand was to de-fund (kill) Obamacare.  Other intended participants in the new negotiation model responded by not participating and the crisis unfolded.  Like the Sequester, seemingly-acceptable collateral damage includes thousands who have been “furloughed” (laid-off indefinitely) and clients of hundreds of federal programs which are not currently staffed.

Of course those are only considerations of what happens to ordinary people.  If you want to talk about some real damage, playing chicken with the Debt Ceiling goes to the heart of what really counts: the full faith and credit of the United States (or the comfort and security of the holders of US Treasury bonds) and the stability of markets.  To be sure, those caught in this net include effectively everyone - not just bondholders or financial movers and shakers.  Included are people with retirement accounts or home equity; or people who will lose their job as the recession re-ignites; or incalculable losses to everybody from inflation as the dollar exchange rates turn against us.

These are all predicted and well-understood effects of actions that have been taken deliberately.  To cut to the chase, all of these turns of the screw have been engineered by Tea Party Republicans, mostly in the House of Representatives.  Speaking of hostage taking, House Speaker John Boehner has been totally Shanghaied by these members of his own party.  He is trying an impossible balancing act of placating the radical end of his party while still acting as a credible agent and leader of that party.  He can’t do both.

Who are these guys (with a gender-non-specific nod to Michelle Bachman) and why do they do what they do?  The much-referenced Tea Party Republicans are actually Libertarians - whether self-identified or not. The central belief of Libertarianism is about the role of government - minimal and practically invisible.  I’ve also read that Libertarians are not ready to compromise on principle for strategic reasons, and that they are indifferent to, if not outright hostile to, party politics.   But their principles overlap enough with conservative Republican values that so-called Tea Party Republicans have made a home of convenience in the Republican party.  There are forty or more Tea Party Republicans in the House and about six in the Senate.  Of crucial importance is the fact that the Republicans in the House only have a majority if they have the support of their Tea Party members.

It would be a comfortable assumption to say that Tea Party Republicans are tools of monied interests - the Koch brothers or Rupert Murdoch come to mind. That’s probably not fair or accurate. They are just willing recipients of piles of cash for something that they’d do anyway.  I’ve referenced the best illustration of Libertarian philosophy before in another context.  Grover Norquist spoke of shrinking the government down to the size where “you could drown it in the bathtub” (see the cover of Mother Jones).  

None of this gets the Republicans off the hook.  It has been their choice to ally themselves with true wreckers.

Charitable Giving as Conspicuous Consumption

Poof - I made you a billionaire.  No - hypothetically, you did it yourself.  You stood on the shoulders of giants; you reconfigured some great ideas and some promising startups and came up with the next greatest thing. The people love it and they love you too. Now your net worth is exactly one billion dollars.  The first question is, How much do you need to look and feel unquestionably wealthy and comfortable for the rest of your life?

Of course you’ll need to provide for your children - and your children’s children. You wealthy folks have families with 2.3 children. (I made that up.  It sounds reasonable.)  With the good health and long life that you can afford, you will probably enjoy a warm relationship with at least one great-grandchild.  Let’s create a $10M trust fund for each of the kids - all 12.167 of them. Hopefully, with good financial management, those nest eggs will have appreciated handsomely by the time they are ready to hatch.

That was very generous of you but it decreased your principal - your $1B - by $121.7 M.  You are now only an 878.3-millionaire.  Not only that, your investments are doing poorly - lately only a 1%/year rate of return on your principal, giving you, this year, passive income of only $8.783 million dollars.  For political and public relations reasons you only accept $2M/year as chairman of your corporation but with that $10.783M/year, you should be able to scrape by without touching your principal.

In your position you have to keep up appearances.  I’m not talking about expensive suits and runway fashions.  I’m talking about noblesse oblige.  Phil Knight is the 24th richest man in the US and currently worth about $16.3B.  Bill Gates is, well, much richer. Wikipedia says of Bill and Melinda Gates, “As of 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates were the second-most generous philanthropists in America, having given over $28 billion to charity; the couple plan to eventually donate 95% of their wealth to charity.” If Bill and Melinda reach their goal, their fortune will have shrunk to a mere $3.6B based on Bill’s current net worth.

Phil Knight just pledged a $500M challenge grant to Oregon Health Sciences University - or 3.1% of his current net worth.  Good suits aren’t cheap.  What if you did that?  You’re not even in his league.  You’d be reduced to a mere 378.3-millionaire.  

And what if the apocalypse came and your effective tax rate became 75%?  Well, that would only affect your miserable pittance of an income and not your net worth.  Now, you might take a heavy hit with a 75% estate tax but you’d be dead.  Hopefully, your kids could eke out  a living on the trust funds and the $94.6M worth of crumbs left over after estate taxes. Considering that Doomsday scenario, the $500M pledge would be worth it.  That kind of gift giving buys you a lot of credibility.  You are among the magnanimous rich - a pillar of your community and a benefactor to the world … and not nearly as prominent a target.

Will it buy off the peasants with pitchforks, screaming for tax revenue for schools and health care? Apparently it does.  If you didn’t have to pay a 75% effective tax rate or a 75% estate tax, then you - now only a $378.3-millionaire - could pick and choose and orchestrate your grand gestures, look good, and live large.  About Phil’s $500M gesture: I applaud OHSU’s good fortune and I know they will give back vital services to the community.  But if they were in a lineup with food-stamp clients, students, the elderly, the sick, and the homeless, would they get all $500M?  That kind of distribution is inefficient, unfair, undemocratic, even whimsical, since it is based entirely on a single person’s choice.

But you and Phil and Bill earned it, right?  This is America and you have the right to do whatever you want with your money - all billions and billions of it.  That brings us to the second question:  How much is enough?

The Teachable Moment of the Shutdown

Jimmy Kimmel performed a great public service when he made a person-on-the-street interview for his show on October 1 – the first day of the Shutdown.  Kimmel is a late-night talk show host.  His teaching was brilliant.  A few things were revealed, among them, the power of pejorative labels like Obamacare.  Also, people liked the particulars of Obamacare when they were separated from the concept, Obamacare.  Another critical part of the discussion on the merits and demerits of Obamacare:  people did not know that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act were the same thing.  They liked Obamacare when it was called the Affordable Care Act.  They didn’t like it when it was called Obamacare.

In education as in comedy, timing is crucial.  You can bet that language arts and social studies teachers across the nation abandoned their tried-and-true curriculum for at least a day and focused on the Shutdown.  Presidential elections may come every four years but terrorism, natural catastrophe or celestial events are more or less serendipity.  Even in the blandest retelling of this story – working like a contortionist to be “objective” – folly, recklessness, self-absorption, and worse, form themselves and leave a lasting impression. This fable will not play out well for the authors.

Unfortunately for those most active players in this farce, that which would have remained obscure becomes, if not familiar, at least recognizable.  Gerrymandering?  Years of partisan-led redistricting (redrawing the boundaries of voting districts to gain a majority) have created enclaves of true believers, and a representative from such a district will face a bruising primary challenge if he or she won’t toe the party line – at any cost.  A strong disincentive against compromise and negotiation means brinksmanship is a rational choice. 

The mysteries shrouding Obamacare drop away if you bother to study it closely to find out why it is so terrible as to warrant hostage taking.  There may be problems or worrisome possibilities in a plan so ambitious.  But neither sinister intent nor the maw of disaster seem to be leering back at us. Do those screaming the loudest have something to lose?  Privilege?  The mantle of infallibility?  Tax breaks?  Where is all that noise coming from?

 

And with all this fidgety rumination, some paranoia does seep through:  What if they are afraid that people will love Obamacare and that everybody will want even bigger and more expensive government programs?

We are learning a lot.  Nobody will come out looking entirely clean in the bright sunlight.  The revelations will be stark.  But seeing what we are up against gives us a fighting chance.

Who Are the Puppet Masters?

I suppose it is a tremendous missed opportunity but I’m glad I was unavailable to comment during the run-up and starting bell of the Shutdown.  I am saved from being stridently indignant and shrill.  Anything I could say at this point about the transparent and irresponsible behavior of the House Republicans would be redundant.  I couldn’t possibly make a difference by adding to the stunning pile of invective shoveled onto that hapless crew.  Rather than gulping bitter draughts of rage, I can return to a state of serene wonderment.  How could the Tea Party pirates so completely Shanghai the House Republicans? 

For those coming out of hyperdrive suspended animation, the House of Representatives did not pass the (usually) routine Continuing Resolution to continue funding the government beyond the end of the fiscal year.  As a practical matter, that means that 800,000 government workers get “furloughed”;  make no mistake, that means their livelihood has ended abruptly and the reset date is unknowable.  There must be a compelling reason for such a cruel and hostile procedural maneuver against them.  There are other inconveniences as well: shuttered national parks, curtailment of numerous boring but urgent bureaucratic functions.  The hostage-taking metaphor has been used a hundred times and it’s apt.  The majority in the House will not allow the CR to pass unless their demands are met.  The ransom is to surrender Obamacare.  That object is almost incidental.  It’s the tactic itself that’s reprehensible.  Stop. I promised myself I wouldn’t go there.

  

House Majority Leader John Boehner comes out looking decidedly the worse for wear.  See the video link for – relatively speaking – the majestic utterances of a statesman. Published on YouTube on September 28, in it, Boehner accedes to the unalterable fact that the Affordable Care Act – I mean, Obamacare – is the law of the land:  it’s not actually a bill to be negotiated in a conference committee.  Now you don’t see any sign of that understanding.  What a difference five days can make.  That must have been one helluva party.  Something must have bitten him.

Class Warfare - It's a SNAP

Class Warfare is jargon that was originally associated with Das Kapital, Karl Marx’s epic analysis of economic history.  In it, he identified players – lords, serfs, bourgeoisie, proletarians, capitalists and others in a seemingly endless cycle (actually – his  cycle ended at Communism) of destruction and reformation, as humankind’s primitive responses evolved toward perfection. 

Marx had ideas that stuck.  Though the ideas are quaint or discredited today, their stamp is indelible and their power remains through the words they left behind.  Class warfare is the idea of eternal conflict between haves and have-nots.   In our current folklore, Marx has nothing meaningful to say and any argument can be debased if one can characterize it as being tainted  - somehow - by such monstrous thoughtcrime as exampled by ideas of Socialism or Class Warfare.

Interestingly, while wealthy President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was constructing the New Deal, he was accused by the small, privileged – er – class of holders of great inherited wealth as being a “traitor to his class.”  Ever since then, whenever a voice calls for what amounts to progressive taxation – having the rich pay more – these same critics accuse the maker of invoking Class Warfare, trying to drive a wedge artificially between parts of the actually harmoniously unified whole of American society.

Recently  billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg lambasted opponent mayoral candidate, Bill de Blasio for running a “class-warfare and racist” campaign.  President Obama is frequently accused of raising up class warfare to promote his agenda as in this September 17 article in Forbes:

The President claims that income inequality is fraying our social fabric.  In truth, it is government policies, especially our economic policies, which are tearing us apart.  One such culprit is our federal income tax system, which in some sense pits the portion of society that doesn’t pay income taxes against those that do.

…  In recent years, that division has become more and more public and is encouraged by this President’s class warfare and his phony talk about income inequality. 

The House just passed the Nutrition Reform and Work Opportunity Act of 2013. It still has to go to the Senate.  It proposes to slash $39 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps.  As reported by NEA:

Millions of Americans ... would go hungry without this program, nearly half of whom are children. It would also undermine the enrollment of low-income children in school meal programs, and 210,000 children would lose access to nutritious meals at school.

“Class Warfare”, by the rich against the most vulnerable sector of the society, in this case is an understatement.  This is the nuclear option used against a tribe armed with wooden spoons.  Food stamp recipients are 45% children, 20% disabled and 7.5% elderly (72.5% totaled).

Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan are the primary architects of the bill.  Cantor says the bill is about fairness:

“And we’re going to bring a bill forward … that actually says about food stamps, we want the people who need those food stamp benefits to get them. But you know what? It’s an issue of fairness. If they are able- bodied people who can work, they ought to do that in order to receive a government benefit. That’s the proposal we are bringing forward.”

In this case a label of Class Warfare is a little too academic and bland.  If you want to use a more closely congruent literary allusion in your language, slaughter of the lambs would be better.

Lies, Damned Lies and Suppressioin

How about this one:  Voter ID laws are meant to address rampant voter fraud; so are laws to restrict polling hours and early voting.  Conveniently, this lie was exposed by the perps themselves when the 2012 elections were barely over.  Former Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer admitted that the voter fraud line was, in his words, “a marketing ploy”. The real goal was Republican victory by limiting access to early voters and others who overwhelmingly vote Democratic.  This assessment was corroborated by ex-Governor Charlie Crist.

Here’s another one:  Laws to curb unions from collecting union dues through paycheck deductions are just addressing a  straightforward civil rights and fairness issue.  If we can believe Grover Norquist, the so-called “paycheck protection” strategy may have started as early as 1998:  "This all started with a group of three guys in California. …  My contribution has been to take it nationwide …”

The three guys and their backer ran a pro-voucher conservative Christian group and they were frustrated by the power of  the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers to defeat their political initiatives.

There seems to be a preponderance of  mainstream opinion that the civil rights/fairness claim for “paycheck protection” is cynical and fraudulent.   A federal judge recently struck down Arizona laws on “paycheck protection” and restricting the right to picket, saying such laws were unconstitutional.  In a January 7, 2012 editorial, the New York Times described the eagerness for Republican administrations to use “model bills” engineered by ALEC:

Many Republican leaders are adopting model legislation proposed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a national corporate-financed conservative organization that is also assisting the Republican push to require voter identification cards to suppress the vote of minorities, young people and other constituencies that tend to favor the Democratic Party.

There is little doubt that politics is also behind the Republicans’ push for right-to-work laws: they see an opportunity to further weaken unions, which are far more likely to support Democrats — as well as health care reform and a higher minimum wage — by slashing their funding and their donating power.

The Oregonian and Jill Gibson Odell both promote the fairness/worker choice rationale for limiting the power of unions to collect dues.  The Oregonian’s stance is lamentable and spurious.  Odell is the author of Initiative Petition 9 – the most threatening of the “right to work” initiatives that may end up on the ballot in 2014.  The Oregonian reports: 

 What is currently known as Initiative Petition 9 wasn't motivated by anti-union sentiment, insists Odell, who once served as legislative director for Oregon House Republicans. It is, rather, "a civil rights issue."