July 2, 2004

Last Saturday I went knocking on doors in Lancaster, Penn., with the AFL-CIO to talk about the election. We knocked on only union household doors, but a tragic 34 percent of union members who voted in 2000 voted for Bush, and recent polls have shockingly suggested no change in that figure. So I didn’t know what to expect.

Every single person who told me and my door-knocking partner who they were voting for was for Kerry, and all of their household members were for Kerry. No one read more

July 6, 2004

Dear Senator John Kerry,

You may have already chosen your running mate, but I’d like to ask you to reconsider.

Do you remember when the pundits who pass for journalists in this country said that you’d have to vote for an illegal aggressive war if you wanted to run for president? Do you remember that they were wrong, that you had to campaign against your own record during the primaries and tie yourself in knots to explain your vote against more funding for the same illegal read more

Recently the two biggest stories in the U.S. news media have been the war in Iraq and the presidential election campaign. Labor unions have been part of a number of major stories on the presidential campaign, especially stories about Senator Kerry’s selection of John Edwards as a running mate.

But labor has not been part of stories on the war. There was some reason for that up until a few weeks ago. The AFL-CIO has not taken a position on the war, and most of the international unions have read more

July 27, 2004
If Kerry is a “flip-flopper” because he won’t end the war (or the “Patriot Act” or NAFTA or private health insurance) even as he speaks against these horrors, what do we have to call Kucinich, who insists on ending these things even as he endorses Kerry? And what can we expect Dennis to say on Wednesday when he delivers a Kerry-approved speech to the Democratic National Convention? Will he speak against the war, as he told “Democracy Now”‘s read more

By David Swanson, ILCA Media Coordinator
Part of the Media Blackout series on underreported labor stories

While illegal violations of the right to organize a union — such as the firing of employees who express support for a union — are routinely underreported by the corporate media, the past 60 days have witnessed the underreporting of a serious new threat to the right to organize, a threat raised by the National Labor Relations Board. Nexis searching finds no mention of this story read more

By David Swanson
August 3, 2004

In 1935 the National Labor Relations Board was created for the purpose of encouraging collective bargaining – that is, unionization. The NLRB is not some radical left-wing group. It’s the U.S. government body that oversees labor and management relations. But it was created in a different era and no longer serves its intended purpose.

Within the past two months, the NLRB has decided by a 3-2 vote along party lines
1) that graduate students working read more

August 14, 2004
There’s a line of thinking I keep running into that goes something like this: Because John Kerry supports Bush’s illegal and unpopular war, we should stop focusing on the election and concentrate on building a grassroots movement. This argument has a number of variations in which it’s maintained that we should focus on building a third party, or changing the system to allow third parties to be built, or threatening to withhold our votes from Kerry until read more

Underreport Violence by Police Against Union Members, Others
By David Swanson, Media Coordinator, International Labor Communications Association
Part of the Media Blackout series on underreported labor stories
August 16, 2004

In the nearly five years since the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, at which union members and other peaceful protesters were manhandled by police, the U.S. media have established a pattern of underreporting the militarization of police at protests, of portraying read more

By David Swanson, Media Coordinator, International Labor Communications Association
Part of the Media Blackout series on underreported labor stories

In the nearly five years since the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, at which union members and other peaceful protesters were manhandled by police, the U.S. media have established a pattern of underreporting the militarization of police at protests, of portraying police actions as reactions to threats from violent protesters, and of focusing read more

August 24, 2004
On August 18, 2002, the Washington Post’s ombudsman Michael Getler complained about the Post’s war mongering. On August 22, 2004, the Washington Post’s media critic Howard Kurtz complained about readers complaining about the Post’s war mongering. Such is progress in the heart of media darkness in downtown D.C.

In the movie “A Fish Called Wanda” a character struggles to say “I’m sorry,” resorting to meditation in his fruitless read more