My sister sent this to me. It's making the rounds, apparently. I don't think it's real, but I do think we're not that far from the time when it will be. In any case, I thought you'd get a chuckle out of it.

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a Texas A & M University chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different Religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you", and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct...leaving only Heaven thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God."

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A"

I should think so.

An internal memo shows that Porter Goss has made it official: the politicization of the CIA is now his policy.

"As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies," Mr. Goss said in the memorandum, which was circulated late on Monday. He said in the document that he was seeking "to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road."

Oh, they're clarified. Beyond doubt.

1. Intel that doesn't match Administration policy will be buried


2. Analysis that doesn't 'support' Admin goals will be trashed


3. The services of agents, analysts, and assets who can't come up with information supporting Admin policies--no matter how loopy, Admin beliefs--no matter how disconnected from reality, and Admin goals--no matter how anti-democratic or Imperial, will be dispensed with


4. Following Bush policies in other areas of govt, screw-ups, incompetence, massive failure, and being immensely wrong will now mean promotion and success


5. Using raw, unconfirmed data that can be interpreted in the Admin's favor will be encouraged; it will not be confirmed because it favors the Admin view and must, therefore, be true, so confirmation won't be considered necessary
   

Another word for this is 'propaganda'.

Yes, it's true that Director-Hack Goss included this:

"We provide the intelligence as we see it - and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker.''

--but it's a meaningless sop, a transparent attempt to stop the flow of blood from the coup, and everybody knows it. Bush wants the CIA brought under his heel. The new templates are C-TEG and OSP--propaganda units run by naive amateurs who 'support' the Emperor by telling him what he wants to hear--and anybody who doesn't 'get it' will be gone. The professionalism in the agency that John Deutsch worked so hard to create is history and the cowboys of the Nixon era are back, only this time as fantasists and fairy-tale writers.

In comments to my last post on this issue, Eric Martin of TIA posted a letter from a friend of his that said, in part:

I am afraid the President will not heed your suggestion to inform the CIA that he wants only information from it. This is because the President has already defined what he wants from the intelligence community, and, much to the dismay of any thoughtful American, it isn't information. Information is what the intelligence community tried to provide, and the Administration refused to accept. Rather, the Bush Administration wants the CIA to act as an advocate on behalf of Bush's policies, regardless of what the information that the CIA gathers suggests about whether those policies are wise or unwise.

The intelligence community does serve the Executive. But it does so by gathering information, not by advocating for the Executive's policies. The American public is better served by a CIA whose role is to gather all the intelligence relevant to proposed Executive policies and present it for consideration than by a CIA whose role is to gather only intelligence that supports the President's policy aims and ignore, even discard, intelligence that does not. Even a lawyer, whose job it is to advocate for one position regardless of the facts, cannot simply ignore or discard inconvenient facts. Why would we want our intelligence community (or even our President) to do so?

David Kinnecome (New York)

That about covers it. But Mr Kinnecome doesn't make it plain what 'advocacy' really means, so I will: it means the CIA is now nothing but a propaganda agency. It will exist to serve up excuses and phony analysis. Networks will be dismantled--who needs them? Nobody's listening anyway, and besides, we've got all these neat gadgets like satellites and stuff, so we don't really need human intel. In fact, we don't need intel at all. We'll just do what Chalabi did and make stuff up--tell the neocons what they want to hear and they'll believe anything. They're so gullible, those guys. Really. Makes you wonder how they manage the wherewithal to be up and around.

So the Agency is about to be sent back into the Dark Ages of Allen Dulles' obsession with the Soviets and his insistence that his agents provide proof of his paranoid fantasies about them, only instead of the Commies being at the center, it will be 'state-sponsored terrorism' because that's what Laurie Mylroie blames. The mischief Dulles did has never been completely understood, unfortunately, but you can lay at his feet all the 'supporting material' that bolstered the Cold War:

1. The so-called 'missile gap'? Dulles made it up. It didn't exist. In fact, his own agents were reporting that the US had a 2-1 advantage in numbers and an even bigger advantage in another way--our missiles worked.


2. The Soviet 'plans for world domination'? They didn't exist. They were forgeries. Dulles had them made up when his agents couldn't find any such plans because there were no such plans. As Hedrick Smith and ex-Ambassador Averill Harriman tried to tell us, the Russians have a historic fear of being 'encircled' by enemy states; they had no plans to dominate anything, it was all rhetoric designed for the home market--you know, like a Bush stump-speech. But that didn't suit Dulles' faith-based belief so he chucked it and invented material to prove what he believed.


3. The 'space-based weapons'? A Dulles fantasy. They didn't exist, they were nowhere near existing. He made it up.

That's what we can look forward to from now on: national policy, especially foreign policy, that's based on and built on lies and manufactured 'evidence' that the CIA--and other intel groups; Condi will be doing the same thing at State--will be expected to produce whether or not it actually exists.

And the media will no doubt continue to swallow the fantasies whole and help BushCo get the nation all worked up over imaginary 'threats'.

Canada's looking better and better, isn't it?

This is Old friends Week for the ABWA, and cul is one of the oldest.

I met cul heath months ago in the comments on Phaedrus' late, lamented No Fear of Freedom blog (and wherever you are, P, we hope you're doing well), which I think may be typical for cul--he writes comments on a lot of other people's sites, even here occasionally. He doesn't write a lot on his own blog, ratboy's avil, but what he does write is pithy and passionate. On the new website that lets people hunt and shoot animals--from their computer:

Why I Hate Humans #3261

This has got to the the stupidest, cruelest, most socially unredeemable and most perfect example that Texas is the nest for the world's most fucked up individuals I've seen yet....How about we set up an internet site that allows people to remotely drop bombs on this guys head with the click of a mouse?

He digs out a lot of overlooked items like that. His blog is always loaded with news clips and whole articles, and one way or another they all focus on man's inhumanity to man. In his own, quiet, unshowy way, cul uses ratboy's anvil to harp on blatant injustices but also on all those little everyday, soul-killing cruelties that go largely unnoticed but do so much damage to the people involved.

I go there every day for a double-dose: a shot of humanity and a soupcon--or more--of humor, laced with a dash of justifiable outrage, and I'm never disappointed. ratboy's anvil is a treasure, and cul heath somehow comes along with it. It give me great pleasure to present cul heath and ratboy's anvil with the Alley's

Third 'Awesome Blog of the Week' Award

ratboy's anvil

The Bush Admin and Rumsfeld's DoD is trying to conscript 4,000 members of the Independent Ready Reserve for active duty in Iraq. Two thousand of them are fighting the call-up.

The Army has encountered resistance from more than 2,000 former soldiers it has ordered back to military work, complicating its efforts to fill gaps in the regular troops.

Many of these former soldiers - some of whom say they have not trained, held a gun, worn a uniform or even gone for a jog in years - object to being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan now, after they thought they were through with life on active duty.

They are seeking exemptions, filing court cases or simply failing to report for duty, moves that will be watched closely by approximately 110,000 other members of the Individual Ready Reserve, a corps of soldiers who are no longer on active duty but still are eligible for call-up.

In the last few months, the Army has sent notices to more than 4,000 former soldiers informing them that they must return to active duty, but more than 1,800 of them have already requested exemptions or delays, many of which are still being considered.

And, of about 2,500 who were due to arrive on military bases for refresher training by Nov. 7, 733 had not shown up.

Almost a thousand of the remaining half have said they would report but would refuse to go to either Afghanistan or Iraq. The back-door draft is beginning to hit home, and I guess people don't care for it. Fancy that.

Randi Rhodes and Air America raised over $100,000 to pay for an independent vote count in Ohio (the state says the cost is $10/precinct). Sec of State Blackwell promptly upped the ante. Using the excuse that the cost to the state was 'outdated', he's now demanding $1.6Mil to count the vote.

On Saturday, David Brooks trashed whatever credibility he may have had left as an 'independent' voice rather than a Bush Admin mouthpiece when he savaged the CIA's attempt to defend itself against the assault of blame marshalled by the BA to get itself off the hook for its refusal to respond to their warnings before 9/11 and its analysts' conclusions that Iraq posed no threat. The neocon cabal, in thrall to nutbag Laurie Mylroie and her whacko conspiracy theories of Saddam as the Professor Moriarty of terrorism, set up, out of Cheney's office and under Doug Feith's supervision, two agencies--the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group (C-TEG) and the Office for Special Planning (OSP)--to do an end-run around the CIA's experienced analysts by 'stovepiping' raw, unconfirmed intelligence straight to them. Whatever they found that fit Mylroie's tinfoil-hat paranoia, they believed without question and made policy without bothering to confirm whether or not it was true, which explains how ace con-artist Ahmad Chalabi came to dominate the neocons' unreal version of Iraq's reality.

The Company rapidly became the scapegoat for the Admin's refusal to face facts after Dick and W's Excellent Adventure in Iraq turned into a quagmire of quicksand, and the Mighty Wurlitzer of the right-wing Noise Machine was only too happy to trumpet that political twist. I said months ago, after the notorious outing of CIA covert-op Valerie Plame by the Bush Admin for political reasons, that the CIA wasn't going to stand for watching itself be politicized out of existence and its operatives blown for a few quick political brownie points. The absurd, not to say insane, appointment of GOP hack Porter Goss to head the CIA was bound to intensify the hard feelings and petrify the polarization between old hands who believed the CIA's analysis role was to be as non-partisan and accurate as possible, and the neocon newbies from C-TEG and OSP who saw analysis as another word for 'rationalizing what the Admin wants to do'.

And they didn't stand for it. When Porter Goss began to do the job he was appointed to do--turn the CIA into an Imperial foreign-policy spin machine--they began to fight back. Brooks makes not the slightest attempt to so much as acknowledge that they might have had some legitimate reasons to protect themselves from this politicization. No, to Brooks, the CIA's only job is to 'serve the president', and they should be ashamed of themselves for serving the truth instead.

President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies. His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Over the past several months, as much of official Washington looked on wide-eyed and agog, many in the C.I.A. bureaucracy have waged an unabashed effort to undermine the current administration.

At the height of the campaign, C.I.A. officials, who are supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy, served up leak after leak to discredit the president's Iraq policy. There were leaks of prewar intelligence estimates, leaks of interagency memos. In mid-September, somebody leaked a C.I.A. report predicting a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior C.I.A. official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in the Arab world.

Oh goodness me, the dastardly crime of 'undermining' the Emperor's Admin by defending oneself against its on-going assaults and scapegoating to cover its own mistakes and blindnesses is one we should never have to suffer in the Imperium. Why, the Imperial Viziers actually felt they had to hide their political agenda for fear the CIA would out them because they were all, you know, Kerry moles.

White House officials concluded that they could no longer share important arguments and information with intelligence officials. They had to parse every syllable in internal e-mail. One White House official says it felt as if the C.I.A. had turned over its internal wastebaskets and fed every shred of paper to the press.

... Langley was engaged in slow-motion, brazen insubordination, which violated all standards of honorable public service. It was also incredibly stupid, since C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory.

'Insubordination'? What an odd word to use. And 'brazen' at that. Oh, and the truth 'violate[s] all standards of honorable public service'. Uh-huh. Right.

Ordinarily this would be a typically laughable piece of Brooksian idiocy and a good example of why I haven't bothered to read him but 3 or 4 times since the NYT caved under Grand Vizier Rove's insistence that they hire him, but his fawning over Imperial policy toward the Company and his automatic acceptance of its rank politicization are the above-the-water tips of icebergs looming off the Imperial bow.

Newsday reported yesterday (link thanks to The Agonist) that Goss has been ordered to 'purge the agency' of any officers considered 'disloyal to Bush'.

WASHINGTON -- The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

Brooks' job on Saturday was to lead this story away from its Soviet-style 'off with their heads' quality into Imperial Spinland where it could be interpreted as punishment for 'brazen insubordination', and now we can begin to understand why he chose that word. The Bush Admin is going to use the blame-the-CIA-for-9/11-and-Iraq meme as an excuse to turn the whole agency into a larger version of C-TEG and the OSP: an NKVD-style political network whose job is to 'serve the Emperor' and his Presidium by endorsing--and enforcing--what they've already decided to do.

Given this, it would make sense if the first old CIA hand to go was the covert op director who kept telling them his Iraq network couldn't find any evidence that Hussein had WMD's or any capability to produce them, and that everything Chalabi was telling them was false. And guess what?

One of the first casualties appears to be Stephen R. Kappes, deputy director of clandestine services, the CIA's most powerful division. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Kappes had tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Goss' chief of staff, Patrick Murray, but at the behest of the White House had agreed to delay his decision till tomorrow.

But the former senior CIA official said that the White House "doesn't want Steve Kappes to reconsider his resignation. That might be the spin they put on it, but they want him out." He said the job had already been offered to the former chief of the European Division....

The Emperor is, in sum, wasting no time consolidating his power, and in a few short months, we'll all have forgotten that there was ever a difference between the CIA and the KGB.

No wonder the Emperor got along so well with Putin. Birds-of-a-feather.

CONGRATULATIONS!!


You Did It!

The phone bill will be paid next week. Thanks to you, the crisis is over and the Alley is back in business.


Click the picture for Thank You card

The PayPal button will remain at Reality Check, and any further donations will be applied to the same cause. Normal blogging will re-commence on Monday after I recover.

I was offline Thursday due to a computer glitch--something called 'MSDDHelpWndClass' wouldn't load and it's responsible, somehow, for making the dialing program that hooks me to the internet work. When I finally got it to boot, I opened my mail hoping for maybe enough in donations to wage a vicious negotiation with Verizon over a new payment plan to keep the line up and me connected.

What I found was enough to guarantee I could get this monkey off my back, at least for a month. But you weren't done. Thanks to Kathy and eRobin who put notices on their sites and some old friends riding to the rescue, by Friday morning when I got home from work there was enough to pay half the phone bill. HALF. I called Verizon and told them what I could pay by Tues or Wed next week, and they said, 'Fine. How are you going to take care of the balance?" and that was that. It was the easiest conversation I have had with a creditor in months.

I don't know how to thank you. I don't know how to tell you what it means to me that near-total strangers were willing to help out in a crisis. I can't tell you what it felt like to see a small community come together on my behalf. I can honestly say I've never been here before.

I've been an outsider all my life. Partly that's because I was always looking under the rocks nobody else wanted to look under, which makes you weird after a while (people would rather not get too close to you) and partly it was by choice. As a writer, I've always been more comfortable on the outside looking in; you see more clearly when your emotions aren't invested. I was always willing to pay the price--some loneliness, the lack of a support group--in order to maintain that clarity. I wanted to see everything as honestly as I could from my own perspective, whatever that was. I went to churches from time to time but was never a member. I worked in a lot of places and socialized with co-workers but I was never part of an identifiable group or clik--I was a floater. When you connect with everybody, you connect with nobody, that's how it goes. In the theater or on the films where membership is foisted on you whether you like it or not, I joined in but only because they're irreductibly ad hoc--temporary connections that only last as long as the show lasts. That I could deal with.

I came online mostly because I am one of the most long-winded, opininated curmudgeons (the description of a good and great friend who never pulled her punches) on the face of the planet, and a writer. Blogs were a natural fit. I expected to be what I had always been--an outsider pissing against the wind. Instead, I found a lot of people who didn't automatically assume I was looney-tunes, people who listened and responded, people who appreciated and whom I appreciated right back. Without quite realizing what was happening, I became, for the first time in a my life, an actual, more-or-less-functioning member of a genuine community, and I didn't even know it.

I know it now. In my old age, after sailing through the 60's avoiding the communalism that was so rampant and which I so much admired, if from a distance, I have discovered what it feels like to be on the inside instead of the outside, and I can understand the attraction.

But I am also aware now of a sense of responsibility to that community, a sense I had always previously reserved for individuals alone. When a community reaches out to you, you reach back. It means giving up a kind of freedom--the freedom to bail out. But as I have been trying to process this over the past 24+ hours (which wasn't easy; you people threw a major monkey-wrench into my whole world-view), I can see the outlines of a different kind of freedom opening up right as the other closed down.

This is probably old news to most of you--you'll likely be saying to yourself, 'Jeez, Mick, you're just figuring this out now? Little slow on the uptake there, ain'tcha, pal?', and you'll be right--but bear with me just a tad.

I have avoided being on the inside because over and over again what I saw seemed to prove that 'insidership' required the suppression of individuality to maintain the coherence of the group. That was unacceptable to me. Still is. But what has been dawning on me slowly over the past few months (and probably led to the Great Experiment of joining the PBA) is that there is a completely different membership paradigm in the blogosphere than anything I'm used to. It's a framework in which individuality is not only tolerated but actively encouraged and rewarded, yet--as you have shown me so convincingly--it is still a community, a place where people come together, help each other out, share ideas and chores without demanding obedience or conformity in return.

It's a paradigm that I used to think was impossible, against the laws of human nature. Yet I see it operating here every day. The internet, because it is based on the written word rather than irl interpersonal relationships, seems able to foster just enough distance for everybody to remain their own boss, yet breaks down the barriers between people by affording them a means of personal expression they often have to suppress in their daily lives.

This is both empowering and freeing. In a way, it's the best of both worlds, and if respect is part of the equation (I don't have to tell you it isn't always), it makes certain types of communication between people possible that have never been possible before: a protected intimacy, totally open and yet with strict boundaries controlled by each individual. The potential for building communities whose members can speak as frankly and as passionately as they wish--or not--without suffering the usual sets of consequences for disturbing the accepted social hierarchy, carries within it, it seems to me, the promise of a genuinely new social interaction modality that approaches--gingerly and on tiptoe, but nevertheless--the old utopian ideal of direct heart-to-heart conversation.

It is fear of reprisal that does most people in when they try to express themselves. Take that away, as we do in the blogosphere, and a whole different communications mechanism can open up.

See what you started? Ain't you sorry now?

I haven't worked this out yet; that's about as far as I've got up to now. You'll probably be hearing more about this now that I can sort of see the edges of it. The only immediate response I have to what I can see is the necessity to facilitate the connections between the members of the community, give them a place where the conversations that take place in isolation on each blog can bump up against each other, give the conversation some perspective.

To that end, I'm going to be starting a webzine (what the hell; thanks to you I'm here to stay, or so it appears) that will re-publish some of these isolated conversations in the same space. Hopefully, that will help both the connections and the dialogue to develop. That's what I see as part of fulfilling my new responsibilities to this community I seem to be inside of.

The zine is called Blog Tower at the moment, and I'm just stealing things I run across that I like. It will be published sometime in the next couple of weeks, and y'all will be the first to know. Some of you will be surprised to find out you're in it....

To sum up: You have just created a Frankenstein. How does it feel?

'The disclaimers stem from a petition drive begun in 2002 by Marjorie Rogers, a creationist. Rogers collected 2,300 signatures of supporters....'

The Plaintiff: Your Honor, I have 5612 verified signatures here, every one of them in favor of these disclaimers. We 're not saying astronomy shouldn't be taught, only that the composition of the surface of Pluto is at this point a theory, and we should make it plain that there are other theories.

The Judge: You mean your contention that the surface of Pluto is composed of orange beach balls and six kinds of lime Jello?

TP: There's no proof it isn't. And I have the signatures of over 5000 god-fearing people who will swear that that's what they believe.

TJ: But it's still only a belief.

TP: It's a competing theory, Your Honor. That's different.

TJ: Really? How?

TP: We have evidence.

TJ: Do you? What evidence?

TP: Legitimate scientific authorities who say that that business about the rocks and dust is just nonsense. This photograph shows conclusively that the surface of Pluto is made of a layer of orange beach balls. This second photo, taken from a privately-financed spacecraft--

TJ: Financed by whom, may one ask?

TP: The General Foods Corporation. This second photo--

TJ: Excuse me. And the General Foods Corporation makes...?

TP: (inaudible)

TJ: I'm sorry? Speak up, please.

TP: Jell-O, Your Honor. This second photo--

TJ: Uh-huh. Lime jello. I see it. This is your 'proof', is it?

TP: It's not proof, Your Honor, it's evidence. This is a theory.

TJ: And you want this taught in our schools alongside astronomy, is that it?

TP: Oh no, we're not asking that. Yet. No no, we just want the schools to put a disclaimer in the books saying that the composition of Pluto is just a theory and that there are...alternative theories. Out there. That's all.

TJ: That a planet is composed of orange beach balls and lime jello.

TP: That's what we're postulating, yes sir.

TJ: And you think this is equivalent to the scientific evidence astronomers have for the make-up of the Plutonian surface?

TP: We think it...will be.

TJ: When?

TP: When we find enough gullible--um, intelligent people to believe it. After all, a theory is just a theory until people believe it. It's the belief that's important when you don't have facts. When enough people believe a thing, then it's true.

TJ: Whether it's true or not.

TP: Exactly. I see Your Honor grasps the concept very quickly. You see, it's our position that science changes every day--something that was true on Tuesday could be completely discredited on Thursday. But dogmatic belief, now there's something you can count on. Steady as a rock. It never changes. There are no doubts or questions, and you never have to change your mind. That's what we want: consistency. We just want people to have an open mind about closing their minds.

TJ: You lost me, there. Say what again?

TP: You see, Your Honor, it's our belief that every American should be free to believe whatever they want to believe about anything, including science. To be American means having the Freedom to believe that what you believe should be what everyone else believes so things don't get too confusing. When we're confused, we're weak, sloppy. We're liable to take the trash out on the wrong day or forget to put the milk on our Cheerios. Science demands that we be confused, whereas if we open-mindedly consider closing our minds, we have clarity, and clarity is strength.

TJ: Couldn't we achieve clarity by all agreeing with the scientific evidence of rocks and dust?

TP: Oh, no, sir, and that's precisely my point. Whenever you're tied to facts, you have to change your mind whenever the facts change. But if you're tied to belief, why the facts can change as much as they like. They're irrelevant. Nothing ever changes. That's how you achieve clarity, strength, resolve, and a Rolls-Royce in your garage.

TJ: What's your name again, Counselor?

TP: Alberto Gonzales, Your Honor.

TJ: And you represent...?

TP: Well, usually I represent Enron and Torturers-R-Us, but today I'm representing the Amalgamated Rubberized Plastic Industry Council of...America!

TJ: They wouldn't make orange beach balls, by any chance?

TP: Only on Saturdays when no one's looking. Sir.

This was to have been today's post at Dispatch from the Trenches, but I've exceeded my bandwidth (all those damn pictures everybody likes) and they've closed me out, so you're getting it here instead.

The disagreement among unions about how to deal with the Bush policy of turning the US government into a corporate subsidiary has been simmering under the surface for months. It broke into the open briefly during the Democratic convention when Andy Stern, President of the largest and fastest-growing union in the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Bruce Raynor, President of Unite Here, criticized Kerry and the Democratic Party for their tepid response to the assault on workers from the Bush Administration.

"The Democrats have to decide where they stand on economic issues," Mr. Stern said in an interview on the convention's first day. "John Kerry's positions are fine, but they don't go far enough to deal with the issues that are facing people who go to work every day."

Raynor directly attacked the old-style unions' strategy of trying to hold on to what little thay've got left rather than devise aggressive plans for the future.

He said the structure of organized labor was outmoded, asserting that unions were too fractured, small and poorly structured to contend with global corporations.

"The labor movement needs to confront these issues, but not in a backroom," Mr. Raynor said. "We're not the Kremlin. It's not like people don't know that our ability to protect American workers has been weakened. We have to turn that around, and to some degree that debate has to be done publicly."

Well, it's public now. Andy Stern posted his demands on the SEIU website, then sent them in the form of a letter to the 54 members of the AFL-CIO Executive Council along with a threat: if the organization doesn't change to suit the times, he's ready to pull his 1.6 million members out of the AFL-CIO.

Unite To Win

American workers are at a crossroads.

For generations, America was a land of opportunity. When working people united our strength and spoke with one voice, we were able to create the broadest middle class in the world. Many people could support a family by working one job, not two or three, and together we won the security of affordable health care, paid time off, job training, a safe work place, and a pension on which you could retire with dignity.

Today, global corporations threaten American jobs, families, and the hopes of future generations. The middle class is shrinking, health care is becoming unaffordable, and guaranteed pensions are disappearing, yet corporate profits are booming and the rich are richer than at any time in history.

Yet now, when we need new strength and unity the most, working people find ourselves divided as never before. We are divided into union and nonunion as nearly 9 out of 10 workers are not part of the labor movement at all. We are divided within industries and employers as union members who do the same work often are divided into multiple unions that do not have a coordinated strategy. We are divided into a more unionized North where workers try to maintain hard-won gains, and an almost entirely nonunion South where employers can drive down standards virtually unchecked.

The need to adapt the labor movement for the 21st century has been discussed for years, but previous leaders failed to act, and workers paid the price. American workers cannot afford to wait any longer.

The reelection of President Bush creates new challenges for working people. We must be bold enough, strong enough, and courageous enough to give ourselves the best chance to win. To change workers' lives, union members must be involved in changing what is within our control, uniting our current strength, and then uniting millions more workers in each industry to grow stronger. That is essential to building a grassroots, democratic labor movement; taking on today's employers; and uniting a true pro-worker majority in this country.

American workers can win again, but only if we decide to act now. Our future is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice.

At the top of Stern's list is the immediate taming of Wal-Mart.

1. Build New Strength by Stopping the "Wal-Marting" of Jobs

Good jobs are the foundation of strong and healthy families and communities. But today the Wal-Mart business model of providing low wages and few benefits, shifting jobs overseas to exploit workers under poverty conditions, and viciously opposing workers' freedom to form unions is setting a pattern that undermines good jobs for all working people at home and abroad.

Principle: A key function of the AFL-CIO should be to support a strategy to win good jobs in America that is larger than the members of any one union could accomplish on their own. The AFL-CIO should establish a center to support such projects and should allocate to the center all of its $25 million annual royalties from Union Plus credit card purchases. Challenging Wal-Mart should be its first project.

Regular readers of this site don't have to guess how we feel about that: we think Stern's exactly right and that it should have been done years ago before WM had a chance to dig itself so deeply into American communities. The WM model is destructive of everything the American Dream used to stand for and the leader in forcing a Race to the Bottom in wages and benefits: as long as they can get away with it, every corporation in the country is going to try to find a way to increase its profits by stripping its workers of their hard-won gains.

But an all-out campaign against WM's predatory labor practices is only the beginning. Stern has clearly been listening to his membership because #2 on his list is the issue I've been harping on continually for months: health care. It's the biggest expense we face and everybody's pulling out of doing anything about it, from the Bush Administration--which wants to pretend it's all because of 'frivolous lawsuits' so it can cap damage awards arising from shoddy and dangerous products sold by the corporations it works for--to employers who are focused merely on shifting more of the burden to their employees--preferably all of it, and getting out of the business of providing health care altogether. Emergency rooms are once again becoming our 'primary care provider' because we can't afford anything else. Stern seems to realize this:

2. Build New Strength by Leading a National Campaign for Quality Health Care for All

Out-of-control health care costs and declining quality have become one of the leading threats to every family in America. At any given time, 45 million people have no coverage at all, and even those that do see needed improvements in wages and other benefits undermined by the rising cost of health care. Health care costs are now a leading issue in virtually every strike or lockout.

Principle: The AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions and allies should unite behind an all-out national strategy to win access to quality health care for all. The AFL-CIO should lead a grassroots campaign for this purpose with dedicated funding, campaign staff, and other necessary resources.

Furious at both his criticism of their methods and his challenge to re-structure their way of doing things, leaders of the old-style unions have blasted Stern's letter, and one oif them has even threatened to pull out of the AFL-CIO if Stern wins.

Mr. Stern's call for broad restructuring has fueled fierce divisions, even causing one union, the International Association of Machinists, to warn that it might quit the A.F.L.-C.I.O. if Mr. Stern prevails in his push to remake the federation.

Adding to the tensions, some labor leaders say that a close ally of Mr. Stern, John W. Wilhelm, the longtime president of the hotel workers' union, might challenge Mr. Sweeney, who is up for re-election next year.

In an interview, Mr. Wilhelm declined to say whether he would run against Mr. Sweeney, who says he will seek a new four-year term at the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s convention in July.

"We have to do things much differently in the labor movement because of all the challenges that we face," Mr. Wilhelm said. "Organized labor right now is obviously in trouble because we continue to decline as a percent of the work force."

Mr. Sweeney, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s president, called today's meeting to discuss proposals to reshape the union movement and to assess labor's political efforts this fall.

He, too, sent a letter to labor leaders yesterday, saying that unions needed to reshape their movement "to better take on corporate America and win power for working families in today's economy." He added, "We should be big enough to discuss our different positions with respect for each other and without restoring to an 'us against them' stance."

Bush's election--and the inability of an all-out union effort to rule election day--has galvanized the labor movement in a way I've never seen in my lifetime. As Newt Gingrich's attempt to destroy PBS and NPR was the best thing to happen to them since their formation, energizing their audiences and involving them in saving public broadcasting, so may Junior's election prove to be a dynamic turning point in the history of the American Labor movement, forcing the changes that should have come 40 years ago and transforming Labor from a moribund movement in full retreat to an activist movement energizing and giving a much-needed structure to the Resistance.

After reading the letter and other material at SEIU's site, I must admit in the interests of full disclosure that I've just become an Andy Stern fan. I only wish I was going to be around to stick my 2 cents' worth in as the fight develops. But Jordan (Confined Space) and Nathan (Labor Blog) will no doubt be all over this like white-on-rice, so keep track with them.

If I don't see you again: Keep The Faith.