The Hightower Report

LABOR LAW LAWBREAKER

The Bush regime is so hostile to the rights of labor that Bush's own National Labor Relations Board is refusing to obey our nation's labor laws.

The NLRB – the agency responsible for protecting employee rights – is flagrantly violating the bargaining rights of its own employees. Here's the story: In 2005, NLRB employees petitioned an administrative law authority for the right to organize themselves into a union bargaining unit within the labor agency. NLRB officials opposed this, but the authority ruled in favor of the employees.

Having jumped through all the legal hoops and been certified, the union set out to bargain with NLRB management – but the labor agency's top officials refused! The union went back to the authority, which investigated the situation and now has ruled the NLRB is in violation of federal law. That should have been that, but Bush's handpicked head of the labor-rights agency, Ronald Meisburg, said to hell with labor rights. He is contemptuously refusing to bargain with the employees.

Meisburg is pulling a stall tactic that corporate violators routinely use, hoping to outlast the unionizing effort. By defying the ruling, he is forcing the issue into federal courts – a process that he smugly estimates will delay any bargaining past the expiration of his term in 2010.

Will it surprise you to learn that the guy Bush chose to protect the rights of workers from corporate abuse has spent most of his career in service to corporate employers who seek to undermine workers' rights? Corporate bias is one thing, but this is lawlessness! By blatantly violating the rights of NLRB employees, Meisburg is signaling to all employers that contempt of labor laws is OK – go ahead and stiff workers with impunity.

When the law enforcer becomes the lawbreaker, he's not fit for the job. To demand Meisburg's ouster, call the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions: 202/224-5375.

HEY, CLINTON: BE A DEMOCRAT!

Good grief! What is it about corporate Democrats that makes them such meek and weak Democrats?

Oh, yeah – I guess it's that corporate yoke they wear.

Take the party's present front-runner for president, Sen. Hillary Clinton. Facing a hobbled and dispirited Republican opposition, she has a chance to stand forthright for America's workaday majority, to rally ordinary folks to take their country back from the moneyed elites, and to move America forward with a bold vision of grassroots economics.

So, who has she turned to for an economic brain trust? Wall Street! BusinessWeek magazine reports a handful of investment bankers are meeting regularly to "refine" Clinton's position on key economic issues.

This might explain the senator's recent major policy speech, in which she essentially promised to be a milquetoast, don't-rock-the-boat, cautious insider if she gets elected. She pledged to "work within the system" and to make "principled compromises." Wow. That'll really excite America's hard-hit working stiffs, won't it? Those are Republican-lite code words to reassure Wall Street – not to launch a resurgence of democratic progress.

Bizarrely, Clinton cited FDR and LBJ as her models of political pragmatism and accommodation. "They got big things done," she declared, "because they knew it wasn't just about the dream, it was about the results."

Actually, no. They got big things done because they dared to dream big, dared to go right to the people with their big dreams, and dared to take on the power elites to realize those dreams. In fact, Roosevelt earned the bitter enmity of Wall Street with his populist proposals. But instead of trying to appease the bankers and speculators by waving the flag of compromise, FDR said, "I welcome their hatred."

Come on, Senator; come on Democrats – it's time to be Democrats again!