Nathan Newman offers a good reason to like Kerry. Mickey Kaus offers several reasons not to. As I see it, Kerry's greatest offense of the past months has been telling Eric Alterman in early December Eric, if you truly believe that if I had been President, we would be at war in Iraq right now, then you shouldn’t vote for me and then using the capture of Saddam Hussein to argue Howard Dean was weak for opposing the war.

Teenagers with bats seriously beat one of the striking clerks in LA yesterday. He was sent to the Hospital; they were questioned and sent home. As Nathan Newman observes: Anti-union propaganda always harp on "union violence" but they rarely talk about the violence employer-related thugs regularly inflict on peaceful picketers...Like the hyping of "union corruption"- rarely more than pissant embezzling by a few isolated officials, a pale reflection of the mass looting by Enron and other corporate officials, the hype of "union violence" while ignoring employer and government violence is one of the Big Lies by the Lying Liars of the rightwing to undermine public support for unionism. Don't hold your breath waiting for conservatives to condemn the "cultural explanation" and "media influence" behind this particular crime, or to explore how it is that we convince sixteen-year old boys that standing up for a living wage is a provocation worthy of violent retribution.

Dean has locked down the SEIU and AFSCME endorsements. As I noted before, I have my reservations about parts of Dean's policy record, but out of the current crop of candidates he's distinguished by full and unapologetic rejection of each of the major outrages of the Bush administration, his willingness, deftness, and passion in articulating an alternative vision for this country, and his capacity to organize effectively around it. And as Nathan Newman notes: I'm left a bit stunned at what could be a consolidation quite early of Dean's innovative online organizing with the powerhouse on-the-ground operations of SEIU and AFSCME (along with the other unions that will soon fall into place). Janitors and computer jockies organizing together is an amazingly powerful idea. And we ain't seen nothing yet. We are a year from Election Day, yet Dean is starting with an online organization of over 500,000 people, while the SEIU, for example, has already held multiple national meetings of thousands of their top activist organizers to be sent back into the field to mount the largest political mobilization in history. Thousands of SEIU members will be taking a one-year leave of absence to go organize in swing states on the payroll of the union's political operations-- a cross-state organizing effort that's never been done and being started orders of magnitude earlier than any previous political year...

Nathan Newman offers a new report on declines in unionization by state, and makes - by ranking states by unionization and coding them by 2000 election results - what should be a succinct, compelling, and visceral arguments for why progressives should prioritize unions and unions should prioritize organizing so that both can build over the next decades. Much of the recent coverage of the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides has contextualized them as a last-ditch effort by an anemic American labor movement to scrounge for new members and national attention. They're right perhaps to the extent that a departure from the priorities and strategies of the old CIO bears partial responsibility (along with hostile governments, destructive international trends, and such) for the weakening of American labor over the past few decades. What the corporate media tends to miss is that what the rides represent, as much as anything else, is a historic return to the values and approaches which have brought every triumph that labor has acheived - organizing the unorganized, whoever they are, wherever they work, and building durable coalitions based on common interest and shared vision. Has a sense of crisis in the AFL-CIO played a role in making the "old guard" receptive to the focus on organizing and political mobilization that Sweeney - who won the first contested race for his post in a while - and even more so the "New Unity Partnership" - represent? Certainly. But they stand for is an old idea, not a new one, and in returning to it, the AFL-CIO is only catching up with the locals that compose it. This is the future of the labor movement.

Nathan Newman has a nice round-up of Labor Day news nationally. In local interest, the teachers at my high school, Akiba Hebrew Academy, had a strike vote tonight - I'll keep you posted.