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In 1998 the World Bank notified the Bolivian government that it would
refuse to guarantee a $25 million loan to refinance water services in
the Bolivian city of Cochabamba unless the local government sold its
public water utility to the private sector and passed on the costs to
consumers. Bolivian authorities gave the contract to a holding company
for US construction giant Bechtel, which immediately doubled the price
of water. For most Bolivians, this meant that water would now cost more
than food. Led by Oscar Olivera, a former machinist turned union
activist, a broad-based movement of workers, peasants, farmers and
others created La Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida (the
Coalition in Defense of Water and Life) to deprivatize the local water

In early 2000 thousands of Bolivians marched to Cochabamba in a showdown
with the government, and a general strike and transportation stoppage
brought the city to a standstill. In spite of mass arrests, violence and
several deaths, the people held firm; in the spring of that year, the
company abandoned Bolivia and the government revoked its hated
privatization legislation. With no one to run the local water company,
leaders of the uprising set up a new public company, whose first act was
to deliver water to the poorest communities in the city. Bechtel,
meanwhile, is suing the government of Bolivia for $25 million at the
World Bank's International Centre for the Settlement of Investment

Even shrunken from its high point, the Teamsters union is a major force
in the American labor movement--for both good and ill. On the plus side,
building on its celebrated UPS strike of 1997, the union just negotiated
respectable wage increases for full-time workers, though as
BusinessWeek concluded, the agreement "doesn't deliver for
part-timers." On the downside, Teamsters' failures to organize
effectively hold back organized labor's drive to grow. In any case, much
of the credit for the rise from its nadir under mob control goes to a
1989 consent decree with the Justice Department, which has removed
hundreds of mob-influenced or otherwise corrupt leaders and given
members the right to elect major officers directly. Now Teamsters
president James Hoffa Jr. has made ending the consent decree and its
institutions--like the Independent Review Board (IRB), which
investigates and punishes corruption--his top priority.

That would be a bad move. It would risk undoing the good that pressure
from federal oversight has wrought, including gains in formal democracy
that surpass those at many other unions, such as last year's revision of
the constitution to mandate direct elections by members. But neither the
IRB nor internal union efforts at reform have yet succeeded in
establishing "a culture of democracy within the union," which the judge
overseeing the Teamsters identified as one of the two main goals of the
consent decree. Hoffa's internal structure to investigate and punish
corruption, RISE (Respect, Integrity, Strength and Ethics), so far has
only codified rules and done historical research, and Hoffa plans to put
it in action only after government oversight ends. Union democracy
experts, like professors Clyde Summers of the University of Pennsylvania
Law School and Michael Goldberg of Widener Law School, as well as the
Association for Union Democracy, argue that RISE is not sufficiently
independent to do the job and that top Teamsters brass could easily
override it. The Teamsters are certainly not the only union lacking a
robust democratic culture, but the Teamsters' unique history makes it
crucial that reforms are solidly secured.

The risks of backsliding are not just theoretical. In May the IRB
permanently barred from the union two of Hoffa's closest associates,
William Hogan Jr., president of Chicago's Joint Council 25, and Dane
Passo, Hoffa's former Midwest campaign manager and special assistant.
They were disciplined for trying for two years to force the Las Vegas
local to permit a mob-linked labor broker (of which Hogan's brother was
vice president) to provide low-wage, nonunion workers for convention
setup work, thus threatening to undermine the Teamsters contract and
displace union members.

Although the IRB did not reprimand Hoffa, he was distressingly close to
the corrupt deal-making. He knew the character of Hogan, who was Hoffa's
initial pick as running mate until the IRB charged Hogan with nepotism
and corruption. Passo had a history of physically attacking dissidents.
Hoffa also admitted receiving a "general overview" of the proposed deal
in a Chicago lunch meeting with Hogan and the broker's president. He
agreed to Passo's requests to put the local into trusteeship and later
to fire the assistant trustee and then the trustee when they resisted
the deal. But in March 2001 Hoffa rebuffed Hogan's bid to negotiate the
Teamsters' convention-industry contract in Las Vegas "because of the
background of all the things that have happened with the IRB," he told
investigators. Attorney Matt Lydon, who is appealing Hogan's expulsion,
said, "I don't know of anything that was kept secret from Hoffa or
anyone else about what [Hogan] was doing."

Union spokesman Brian Rainville argues that the initial aim of the
consent decree has been accomplished, and that continuing it simply
costs too much. But much of the expense would have occurred under any
regime that conducted democratic elections and investigated internal
wrongdoing. The Teamsters must demonstrate that RISE can do the job and
establish a final review board independent of Teamsters officialdom
before the IRB can be eliminated. "Of course, the Teamsters should
become a union like other unions," said Teamsters for a Democratic Union
organizer Ken Paff. "Rather than just complain about the IRB, prove you
can do it. Clean up your own house."

IRB decisions have not been beyond criticism. Supporters of former
president Ron Carey, for example, say that Carey's acquittal last
October on federal charges that he committed perjury in denying that he
knew about the scheme to embezzle union funds for his election raises
questions about the IRB's decision to expel him from the union. But
without some independent outside force, there would have been less
progress in reforming the Teamsters.

Ultimately, democracy should make the Teamsters and the labor movement
stronger. The union's desperate focus on ending the consent decree is
doing the opposite. It has partly driven their courtship of Republicans,
from their full-throated but failed support for Bush's plan to drill in
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Hoffa's recent vote against
funding the AFL-CIO's successful political mobilization, because he
wants to give 30 percent of his support to the GOP. Also, unlike unions
such as the letter carriers and utility workers, Hoffa supports Bush's
controversial Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), which
would try to turn UPS workers into government informers. Although a new
dues increase will boost funds for organizing and strike pay, members
have more reason to worry about proliferating multiple salaries for
officers and about the decline in organizing victories and expenditures
than about the costs of federal oversight. Ending the consent decree
wouldn't have salvaged a failed organizing strike against the ruthlessly
antiunion Overnite, but it might have let a sweetheart deal undermine
Las Vegas Teamsters. Democracy, including ferreting out corruption, is
worth the price, and democracy in the Teamsters still needs outside

dizzying events are not an occasion for champagne music because the
bursting bubbles have cast millions of Americans into deep personal
losses, destroyed trillions of dollars in capital, especially retirement
savings, and littered the economic landscape with corporate wreckage.

Economic liberalism prevailed from the New Deal forward but broke down
in the late 1960s when it was unable to resolve doctrinal failures
including an inability to confront persistent inflation. Now market
It can neither explain the economic disorders before us nor remedy them
The bursting bubbles are not accidents or the work of a few
larceny-prone executives. They are the consequence of everything the
conservative ascendancy sought to achieve--the savagery and injustice of
unregulated markets, the blind willfulness of unaccountable

even take some years before politicians and policy thinkers grasp that
rearguard defensive actions for nearly thirty years, but now they have
to learn how to play offense again. Though still marginalized and
ignored, progressives will determine how fast the governing ethos can be
by mainstream conservatives or the Republican Party but by those
improbably, that their ideas would prevail.

necessary reforms, like the Sarbanes bill already enacted, must
basically restore principles and economic assurances that Americans used
destroyed or severely damaged by right-wing deregulation and corporate
corruption of government. Pension funds, for instance, lost horrendously
in the stock market collapse and face a potentially explosive crisis
because corporate managers gamed the pension savings to inflate company
profits. Employees of all kinds deserve a supervisory voice in managing
this wealth, but Congress should also ask why corporations are allowed
such privileged control over other people's money. Broader reform will
confront the disgraceful fact that only half the work force has any
pension at all beyond Social Security and set out to create tax
incentives and penalties to change this.

Another major reconstruction is needed in antitrust law, to restore and
modernize the legal doctrine systematically gutted by the Reagan era
(and only marginally repaired under Clinton). The financial debacle
includes scores of companies concocted by endless mergers that pumped up
the dominance of oligopoly and have succeeded across many sectors.
Spectacular failures include AOL Time Warner and the airline industry.
Skepticism of unlimited bigness needs to be renewed and should start
with the banking industry--reining in those conflicted conglomerates,
Deal's wise separation of commercial and investment banking.

progressive thinking requires a recognition that returning to the New
Deal framework is essentially a retrograde option (and not only because
greatest triumphs, like the law establishing the rights of working
people to organize, have been perverted into obstacles for the very
people supposedly protected. In short, this new era requires
impossible questions about how to confront enduring social discontents
and economic injustice.

how might corporations be reorganized to reduce the social injuries? Is
the government itself implicated in fostering, through subsidy and
tax-code favoritism, the very corporate antisocial behavior its
considering penalizing those companies that moved to Caribbean tax
havens yet still enjoy US privileges and protection. That's a good
starting point for rethinking the nature of government's corporatized
turning them into leverage for public objectives. To explore this new
by a reinvigorated labor movement, environmental and social reformers
and ordinary citizens who yearn for serious politics, significant

order of capitalism, the financial system is supposed to serve the
and other governing institutions are implicated, but so are the media
and other institutions of society.

bankruptcy bill for passage. This amounts to selling out principle and
loyal constituencies before the election, instead of afterward. Of
left that can say, They just don't get it.

Reversing the nation's deformed priorities will be a hard struggle but
has renewed promise now that the stock market bubble and other New
family, work, community and many other rewarding adventures and
obligations. The larger purpose of the economic order, including Wall
to undermine and destabilize them. If that observation sounds quaint,
our progressive objectives are deeply aligned with what people truly
seek and need in their lives, the ideas will prevail.

"Creative accounting" is something we hate.
From now on your numbers will have to be straight.
No taking of options for stock you contrive
To dump when insiders can tell it will dive.
And loans? If you want one, then go to the bank.
These sweetheart loans stink! They're disgusting! They're rank!
This type of behavior we strictly forbid.
Just do as we say now, and not as we did.

Close to 3,000 progressive activists from all walks of life joined Jim Hightower for his third "Rolling Thunder/Down-Home Democracy Tour" in Tucson on July 26.


Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.

really took off with the leveraged buyouts and mergermania, assisted by
tax laws that favored capital gains over stockholder dividends and
allowed corporations to write off interest payments entirely.

bought by nonfinancial corporations. At the end of this spree the
debt-laden corporations withdrew to their tents for three years of
necessary restraint and repose, until in 1994 they roared into action
once more, plunging themselves into debt to finance their share
purchases. This was the start of the options game.

Between 1994 and 1998 nonfinancial companies began to load themselves up
executive class in the history of capitalism.

For these and ensuing reflections and specific figures, I'm mostly
indebted to Robert Brenner's prescient The Boom and the Bubble,
published this spring with impeccable timing by Verso; also Robin
and future of pensions, Banking on Death.

Why did these chief executive officers, chief financial officers and
boards of directors choose to burden their companies with debt? Since
stock prices were going up, companies needing money could have raised

by the unstinting efforts of legislators such as Senator Joe Lieberman,
they were spared the inconvenience of having to report to stockholders
the cost of these same options. Enlightened legislators had also been
of issuing stock options could be deducted from company income.

Democrats now lashing Bush and Cheney for the way they made their

part by the helium of bubble accountancy.

Computer Associates International, who got $650 million in restricted
manufacturing worker.

The executive suites of America's largest companies became a vast hog
wallow. CEOs and finance officers would borrow millions from some
thereby inflating the value of their options. Brenner offers us the
memorable figure of $1.22 trillion as the total of borrowing by
corporations used just 15.3 percent for capital expenditures. They used

Blackburn cites the packages of two departing Lucent executives, Richard
employees was dealt with in less than a page of Lucent's quarterly
year, departing with almost $5 million).

should Washington reward those who speculate in paper, instead of those
(Bill Clinton's in 1992).

wallow with loot. Here in the United States privatization of Social
Security has been staved off only because Clinton couldn't keep his hand
for the ethics of private enterprise have taken a fierce beating.

voted against a measure that allows life sentences for "malicious
permitted the present deceptive treatment of stock options. Not just Joe

Popgun populism is not enough. Socialize accumulation! Details soon.

Events in Washington are potentially momentous, but hold the applause.
political indicator these days. Even Federal Reserve Chairman Alan
and thus in Washington, the ingredients are present for an ideological
sea change in American politics. But not yet.

Democrats, newly awakened to the potency of Enron-like financial
scandals, are throwing smart punches at the business-friendly White
convinced than Republican maverick John McCain). The passage of Senator
Sarbanes's legislation is meaningful, but Democratic leaders choked on
managing their own pension savings. Why mess up fundraising with those
people? Majority leader Tom Daschle, who lamely promised a vote
directors have more courage than he. Likewise, Senator Joseph Lieberman
can doubtless raise millions from Silicon Valley for his presidential
which party will have him.

President Cheney's stewardship as CEO of Halliburton. Republican zealots
and their attack-dog newspaper, the Wall Street Journal,
exhausted the nation with their pursuit of the Clintons on Whitewater.
Stonewalling by the Bush White House promises to make these far more
serious financial matters a permanent theme of the Bush presidency.

Republicans--stubborn maneuvering and guile designed to stall real
subsides. But Democrats have a historic opening far greater than this
fall's elections--the opportunity to revive their role as trustworthy
this could be the beginning of something big.


Recently-released WikiLeaks cables reveal that Haiti's self-appointed guardians—the US, EU and UN—supported an election in the country despite obvious evidence that it was severely flawed.

June 24, 2011

The Senate heard emotional tales of struggling middle-class families Thursday—but it‘s not clear they can do anything about it.

June 23, 2011

Republican senators and the right-wing echo chamber did everything they could to prevent unionization of airport screeners. The union drive succeeded anyway.

June 23, 2011

Liza Featherstone explains how Wal-Mart systematically discriminates against women, resists unionization and underpays its workers.

June 21, 2011

The Court says that the nation's largest private employer can't be taken to task for discriminating against women because that discrimination appears to have taken place on a massive scale. Say what?

June 20, 2011

Gov. Walker's new budget grants him broad power to remake state health programs, a power grab that concerns individuals whose coverage might be altered or dropped under the new plan.

June 20, 2011

While his colleague Michele Bachmann mounts a vanity campaign for president, Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison is mounting a serious campaign for American jobs.

June 18, 2011

Senate Budget Committee chair Kent Conrad had a good, old-fashioned prairie-populist idea for addressing deficits: Impose a surtax on millionaires. His colleagues should have embraced it.

June 18, 2011

With Washington fixated on Weiner's Roast, Gingrich's implosion, and questions over the debt limit, citizens must mobilize and call on Congress to address a reality lost in the hubbub: the worsening job market.

June 16, 2011

It's official—the high court of Wisconsin has re-instated Scott Walker's union-busting "Budget Repair Bill" as the law of the land. 

June 15, 2011