Time to fight back

Retiree Steve Harris, a former Grover Cleveland HS chapter leader, was among the thousands to attend the One Nation Working Together rally.

Pollsters and pundits cite mounting evidence to support the prediction that the upcoming November general election will result in an even greater midterm correction than is historically normal for the political party in power.

If the talking heads are correct, Democrats may be facing a bloodbath of losses.

Democrats benefited from voter unhappiness in 2006 and 2008. Now, Republicans seem about to become the beneficiaries of that dissatisfaction.

Back in 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of the few presidents not to experience some midterm losses but this year is shaping up to be more like Bill

Clinton’s losses in 1994 when Republicans took both houses of Congress — a 54-seat swing in the House and an eight-seat loss in the Senate.

Will the political pundits be correct or will there be some surprises in store? Time will tell, but in the meantime we must be realists and not sugarcoat the depth of voter dissatisfaction.

We must look at our own interests in this election from a labor point of view. Though not officially part of either political party, our sympathies on the national level are obvious when we study our retirement concerns and the economic and professional issues facing all of us.

Organized labor has always supported government intercession to regulate the economy and stimulate job growth. The recent actions of the Obama administration — TARP, the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program to curb the financial crisis, and the 2009 stimulus package with $288 billion in tax cuts, $224 billion to extend unemployment benefits and aid education and health care and $275 billion in job creation — were designed to do just that and very successfully did. But economic indicators show we still have a long, long way to go.

Unfortunately, employment is always the last economic indicator to bounce back and when people don’t have the dignity of work, their anger and outrage grow and historically they strike out at the “ins.”

While RTC members are not out of work or losing homes, we can’t afford to take a back seat in this election. I’ve written about the “entitlement committee” that is gunning for our benefits and we know there are scores of Republican candidates — Sharron Angle of Las Vegas and Tea Party-backed Cathy O’Donnell of Delaware, for example — who are dying for the chance to privatize Social Security and Medicare and anything else they can get their hands on.

Right now, scores of conservative attorneys general have begun lawsuits to dismember our hard-won health care reform and Tea Party candidates are all for wiping out government agencies like the Department of Education. And everywhere defined pensions like ours — the kind that provide dignified retirement — are being wiped out.

Labor animus is at fever pitch. One of the latest media attacks on unions is the much-publicized documentary “Waiting for Superman.” It is an unrelenting attack on tenure and blames teacher unions as the cause of all of education’s ills and is a paean to charter schools. Former UFT President Randi Weingarten has vehemently criticized the movie for not including a single interview with a public school teacher.

What can we do? Thousands of UFTers, inservice and retired, marched in the One Nation Working Together rally in D.C. on Oct. 2 to call attention to the needs of working-class families. But as one marcher said, “None of this will matter if we don’t go home and get out the vote.”

The hedge-fund millions that were spent to unseat UFT-supported incumbents were roundly defeated by community awareness and voter turnout in the recent primary. We need to continue that model and convince others to do the same.

The recent Supreme Court decision that OK’d unlimited corporate spending in political campaigns is resulting in unprecedented spending without any requirement for transparency. Millionaires like Carl Paladino running in New York for governor and Linda McMahon running for the senate in Connecticut, Meg Whitmore running for governor and Carly Fiorino running for the U.S. Senate, both in California, can spend their way to victory. Sarah Palin has announced the 20 Democratic incumbents she’s targeting for, among other things, voting in support of health care reform.

We must fight back with votes, get voters energized and aware of just what’s at stake and support the candidates we can rely on.

Here in New York City, freshman Congressman Michael McMahon is fighting to retain his seat and one of UFT President Michael Mulgrew’s top priorities is helping him to win. McMahon was recently endorsed by the state AFL-CIO and is considered a moderate, supporting such things as aid to public education and labor goals such as the Labor Free Choice Act, and has been an ally with retirees on Social Security and Medicare.

Want to help? Call the RTC office and pitch in.

Richard Miller, coordinator of the RTC Las Vegas section, is mobilizing voter turnout to save Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s seat from Republican/Tea Party challenger Sharron Angle who, he said, “considers Social Security beneficiaries welfare recipients and would like to wipe it out along with Medicare.”

In Florida, RTC Coordinator Kenneth Goodfriend is rallying members to work on getting out the vote for Democratic Senate candidate Congressman Kendrick Meek who gets a 100 percent voting record score from the Alliance for Retired Americans and is in a three-way race. Goodfriend warns that Republican-turned-Independent Charlie Crist’s veto of a bill that would have eliminated tenure for Florida teachers was a political move that doesn’t fit with his pro-voucher, prayer-in-school, pro-charter school support.

As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said recently, “We will either rebuild a fundamentally different economy that values hard work and a strong middle class or turn back toward one that puts corporate interests before people.”

This 2010 election cycle may seem to be about political parties which, of course, it is. But for us, it is about the rebound of progressive, labor-friendly government we’ve witnessed since 2006. Let’s do everything we can to keep that momentum and those gains endangered by an all-encompassing rage that threatens to reverse all we have worked for. Together, the good guys can prevail.

We must fight back. We must do all we can to get out the vote.