Global

Mansfield, Ohio’s locked-out AK Steel workers celebrated “One Year of Solidarity” on September 9 by staging a rally and throwing a picnic for a few thousand friends and supporters.

On September 1, 1999, AK Steel, formerly Armco, commemorated Labor Day by locking out some 620 members of United Steelworkers of America Local 169 after their contract expired. Barbed wire and paramilitary thugs with jackboots and billy clubs greeted the night shift workers who tried to enter the plant.

The locked-out workers report that these so-called private security guards continue to follow Local 169 members and their families around Mansfield, to and from the Union Hall and even like to stake out local schools in an obvious attempt to provoke violence and intimidate the workers.

AK Steel is also employing the use of “slap” lawsuits against the Union, its members, city officials and even a local police officer, in a blatant effort to financially pressure the Union and its supporters. The company has even sought an injunction to prevent the locked-out workers from requesting public information from the Ohio Department of Commerce.

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Jobs with Justice

In the rich tapestry of our young adult lives, we have added another thread -- the one that ties us, the youth, with labor, community, and the environment in the struggle against injustice.

Very fine words, you say, but what do they mean?

Eager to oust Slobodan Milosevic from power, the U.S. government has funneled millions of dollars to media projects in Yugoslavia. A lot of hypocrisy is involved. And we might wish for some kind of reciprocity.

"Charges of Chinese influence-buying in the 1996 U.S. presidential campaign caused a political storm in Washington that has yet to fully abate," the Washington Post noted recently. "By some measures, however, that episode pales by comparison to American political interference in Serbia." The announced tab for aid to foes of Milosevic during the just-ended fiscal year was $25 million. For the next year, the budget is $41.5 million.

We're told that the cash from the U.S. Treasury is necessary because unfair obstacles block opposition candidates as they try to communicate with the Yugoslav public. "The largest share of that money goes toward 'civil society' programs, such as those that support independent media," the Post reported. The newspaper added: "U.S. officials say they are seeking only to level the playing field."

Nothing has been more comical that Gore's "populist" posturings about the Republicans being the ticket of Big Oil, and he and Lieberman being the champions of the little people.

This is the man whose education and Tennessee homestead came to him in part via the patronage of Armand Hammer, one of the great oil bandits of the twentieth century, in whose Occidental Oil company the Gore family still has investments valued between $500,000 and $1 million.

At the Los Angeles convention, the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee were located on the 42nd floor of the Arco building, and the symbolism was apt. In 1992 Arco loaned the Clinton-Gore inaugural committee $100,000. In that same year, it gave the DNC $268,000. In the '93-'94 election cycle it gave the DNC $274,000. In the '95-'96 cycle it ponied up $496,000, and has kept up the same tempo ever since.

The collapse of the government's case against Wen Ho Lee last week represents one of the greatest humiliations of a national newspaper in the history of journalism. One has to go back to the publication by the London Times of the Pigott forgeries in 1887 libeling Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish nationalist hero, to find an equivalent debacle.

Yet, not a whisper of contrition, not a murmur of remorse, has, as yet, agitated the editorial pages of the New York Times, which now righteously urges the appointment of a "politically independent person of national standing to review the entire case."

No such review is required to determine the decisive role of the New York Times in sparking the persecution of Wen Ho Lee, his solitary confinement under threat of execution, his denial of bail, his shackling, the loss of his job, and the anguish and terror endured by this scientist and his family.

AUSTIN, Texas -- A hearty round of congratulations to all concerned in this year's presidential race for three weeks of politics at their finest.

First, we had the great debate over whether the vice president smooched his wife for too long at the Democratic National Convention -- a matter of burning moment to the republic -- complete with exegesis of the smacker as to whether or not he frenched her. Comparison of the candidates' economic plans was shelved for that week.

Then we had the Debate on Debates, a subject gripping the nation and affecting the very lives of all who dwell herein, with the referees in solid concert that W. Bush's ploy to make Al Gore look slippery was too cute by half and only succeeded in underlining Bush's gutlessness. Consideration of global warming was postponed.

Next we had a reprise of that old favorite, the Open Mike Gotcha, with Bush calling a New York Times reporter a major-league casserole. Although it can be argued that Bush's failure to apologize was major-league tacky, the matter necessitated shelving all questions related to economic globalization.

AUSTIN, Texas -- When I was in my 20s, the subject of insurance was so vastly boring that it was a way to describe a bad date: "like talking to an insurance salesman." It's still sort of like your teeth -- something you'd rather not think about but have to take care of -- so let's plunge in.

As Jonathan Cohn pointed out in the May 1 New Republic, the object of health insurance is to get as many people as possible into one big pool, mixing the sick with the healthy. This way, the healthy pay a little more than they otherwise would, but those who get sick pay a lot less.

Since everyone gets sick eventually, if only from old age, it works out fairly. Your chances of never being sick a day in your life and then dropping dead of an undiagnosed heart condition at an early age are less-than-lottery-slim.

Within the past two weeks, we've a report from the FBI on the "school shooter" threat profile, which again strains to make a link between popular culture and teenage mass murderers. We've had a report from the Federal Trade Commission lacerating the entertainment industry for marketing violence to minors. The Senate Commerce Committee, on which Senator Joe Lieberman sits, is scheduling hearings on these issues later this month.

For their part, Al Gore and Lieberman have told the entertainment industry that it has six months to clean up its act or, once installed in the White House, the next Democratic administration will draft laws to compel Hollywood, the computer and video companies and the music industry to mend their ways.

Grandstanding about the entertainment industry has been a specialty of Al and Tipper Gore since Al first entered Congress in 1977 (a year in which the couple were formally born-again.) Tipper was part of a Congressional wives' club agitating against violence and sex on TV shows, and then, in the mid-1980s, came Tipper Gore's famous campaign, abetted by her husband, against explicit rock 'n rap music.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The "case" against Wen Ho Lee of the Los Alamos Laboratory is disgraceful. The man was held for nine months over a "case" that never even rose to the level of contempt. And by and large, the media have been culpable as well.

One need know very little about nuclear weapons to realize that the likelihood of Lee's having given away the "crown jewels" of our nuclear secrets was extremely remote, starting with the fact that the W-88 technology is more than 20 years old. Science just doesn't work like that. I suppose this is another indication of how short the American media are in trained science writers.

Nor was it difficult to discern from the beginning that the case, qua case, was quite rank. Wen Ho Lee was busted and smeared all over the front pages for something that we knew almost immediately was not that unusual, and we knew that the same thing had been done by the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who was not accused of treason.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Let's all take a long step back and then look at this again: Is the human race just another species in the long history of Earth that's too dumb to adapt and survive?

We clever upright primates have so far outstripped everyone save the cockroaches, but we seem to be forgetting what knocked off so many of the other major species: climate change. And if we're not smart enough to learn from that, it's our turn to go extinct.

Nothing like a couple of days of 110-degree heat to remind us that global warming has nothing to do with the end of the Cold War. According to the fossilologists, the Big Ones, like the Ice Age, may have had a proximate cause -- meteor hit, giant volcano eruption blotted out sun ... something happened. But in your relatively short tens of thousands of years, all you get is a more or less cyclical back-and-forth. Now coral reefs in the Pacific that are a thousand years old are dying. This is not cyclical.