The Snake Slithers Past The Senate As It Hisses Its Approval

We have a president and cabinet that lies then attacks those that point it out. They lied to invade a country on false charges and murdered thousands in the process while getting over 1300 of our people killed and maiming thousands. What's more the country did NOT attack us, we attacked them using the entire U.S. military like hired thugs. It was a power grab (as outlined by Dick Cheney and other neocons in a paper written ten years before). This administration advocated changing the rules so they could torture people. This doesn't make America safer it creates the terrorists of tomorrow. It was only 19 people that highjacked planes on 9/11 and Bin Laden says his aim is to bankrupt America. Well, we're not only going deeper in debt every second to foreign banks but our sense of decency is being twisted into an ugly wound that festers instead of healing. With the Senate approval of Gonzales as attorney general we are putting the worst possible candidate into the office at the greatest time of danger to our liberties and sense of being for the nation. The only reason for it is that Bush plans even more hideous transgressions against our Constitution and our American values.


February 4, 2005
NY TIMES EDITORIAL
The Senate and Mr. Gonzales

The confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general yesterday was depressing. The president deserves a great deal of leeway in choosing his own cabinet. But beyond his other failings, Mr. Gonzales has come to represent the administration's role in paving the way for the abuse and torture of prisoners by American soldiers and intelligence agents. Giving him the nation's top legal post is a terrible signal to send the rest of the world, and to American citizens concerned with human rights.

The 60-to-36 vote for confirmation was also preceded by a depressing debate. There was the usual comic opera of these Senate votes, with the president's party piously denouncing all opposition as outrageous politicking and the opposition piously denying it. But this debate had a sinister overtone as well: in a ham-handed way, the Republicans tried to portray a vote against Mr. Gonzales as an act of bigotry.

Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, declaring that "I love the Hispanic people," warned that Hispanic Americans were "sensing there's something unfair going on." Using that "more in sorrow than in anger" tone that senators reserve for their most blatantly political comments, he added, "I suspect there's more than politics being played here."

Mr. Gonzales has the kind of life story that all Americans should admire, and that many can find in their families. The value of diversity in the cabinet is indisputable. But it is also irrelevant here. Mr. Gonzales was a bad choice for attorney general because of his record, not his ethnic background.

It was Mr. Gonzales who asked for the original legal advice from the Justice Department on the treatment of prisoners in the "war on terror." There was no need to go through that exercise; the rules were clear. But Mr. Gonzales gave the president the flexibility he wanted, first in the Justice Department memo outlining ways to make torture seem legal, and then by offering the Orwellian argument that the president can declare himself above the law and can order illegal actions like detaining prisoners without a hearing and authorizing torture.

Republican senators made much of the fact that the White House repudiated the original memo on torture - after it became public. But this is not just a matter of historical interest. Mr. Gonzales testified that he agreed with the substance of the original torture memo, and he still takes the view that the president can declare himself to be above the law. In written responses to senators' questions, Mr. Gonzales argued that intelligence agents could "abuse" prisoners as long as they did it to foreigners outside the United States.

Republican senators argued that it was unfair to say Mr. Gonzales was personally responsible for the specific acts of torture and degradation at Abu Ghraib. That would be a fair defense if anyone were doing that. The Democrats simply said, rightly, that Mr. Gonzales was one of the central architects of the administration's policy of evading legal restrictions on the treatment of prisoners. He should not have been rewarded with one of the most important jobs in the cabinet.

Marines Fail To Make January Recruitment Goals

Marines don't make quota for recruits...but first this analysis:

Bin Laden said in his last video taped speech right before the election that Al Qaeda's goal is to BANKRUPT AMERICA. To do this he said they would blow up a building somewhere in the world and throw up an Al Qaeda flag and the U.S. would rush to send its military there and spend billions of dollars. Think about it. They started a huge U.S. military escalation with only 19 men taking over a few planes. We're spending billions and blowing things up and killing people and getting our people killed but the goal of Al Qaeda is to keep running up our national debt and thus, start choking off our efforts to keep our homefront system running smoothly. In the meantime we run up more foreign debt borrowing money and paying interest on it (Red China).

Meanwhile our military is feeling the strain. We haven't given our troops the proper armor and support it needs. The National Guard and Reserves are stretched to the breaking point. Bush has forced them to serve in dangerous ways they aren't trained for while forcing them to extend their service in combat. We've had open rebellion at various Guard and Reserve units.

Don't get me started on how utterly overwhelmed and underfunded our homeland security is.

And now the Marines are beginning to feel the pinch. A few more terrorist attacks like on 9/11 (a dirty bomb here and there to create panic and fear or even a very small bio-attack to cause billions of dollars to be thrown IN REACTION as opposed to a proper DEFENCE) and Bin Laden will eventually win or continue to cripple America.

If you have any draft age kids graduating from high school soon aren't you glad you voted for Bush?

February 3, 2005 NY TIMES
Marines Miss January Goal for Recruits
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 - For the first time in nearly a decade, the Marine Corps in January missed its monthly recruiting goal, in what military officials said was the latest troubling indicator of the Iraq war's impact on the armed services.

The struggles of the Army, the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard to recruit and retain soldiers have received national attention in recent months. But the recent failure of the Marines, who historically have had the luxury of turning away willing recruits, is a potential problem for the service.

The Marines missed their January goal of 3,270 recruits by 84 people, or less than 3 percent. The Marines last missed a monthly goal in July 1995, and 1995 was also the last full year in which the corps fell short of its annual recruiting quota, said Maj. Dave Griesmer, a spokesman for the Marine Corps Recruiting Command.

Richard H. Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina, said, "It's most troubling because the Marines tend to attract people who are the most macho, seek the most danger and are attracted by the service most likely to put them into combat."

Senior Marine personnel officials say that one month is hardly a trend, that the Marine Corps is slightly ahead of pace for the fiscal year beginning last October and that they fully expect to meet their overall goal for the year. But senior officers acknowledge that the drop in January - and close calls in November and December - could be linked to the widely publicized risks in Iraq.

"Do Iraq and Afghanistan have an impact? Yes," Brig. Gen. Walter E. Gaskin, the head of the Marine Corps Recruiting Command, said in a telephone interview. "But I am very optimistic we will meet our goal over all."

On Capitol Hill on Wednesday, senior Army officers warned of worrisome recruiting trends and told of steps they were taking to address them. Lt. Gen. Roger C. Schultz, the chief of the Army National Guard, told the House Armed Services Committee that the Guard was retaining many of its top soldiers but failing to meet goals for recruits. In January, he said, the Guard met only 56 percent of its quota. Both the National Guard and the Army Reserve are increasing the number of recruiters in the field, officers said.

In a reflection of the difficult market for Marine recruiters, the service offers bonuses of up to $30,000 to retain combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than relying mainly on replenishing its infantry with troops fresh from boot camp. About 75 percent of enlisted marines leave the service after their first tour, requiring a steady stream of recruits moving through training centers in San Diego and Parris Island, S.C.

Even as the Marine Corps strains to meet its recruiting targets, the Air Force and Navy are flush with recruits and are actually shrinking their overall ranks. Military personnel experts say there are indications that young people interested in joining the military may be turning to the Air Force and Navy, which have suffered relatively few casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. In contrast, the Marines make up about 21 percent of the fighting force in Iraq now but have suffered 31 percent of the military deaths there, according to Pentagon statistics.

"It's not surprising that the Navy and Air Force would be doing just fine," said Professor Kohn. "Kids getting a start in the military will migrate to the physically safer services, and it seems to them that they'll get more technical training there."

General Gaskin said that despite missing January's goal, which was first reported by ABC News on Tuesday night, the Marine Corps was in no danger of running out of recruits for boot camp. Because of strong recruiting last year, the Marines entered the current fiscal year having already signed up 52 percent of their 2005 quota, he said. Typically, a recruit is sent to boot camp several months after signing an enlistment contract.

The Marines are devising recruiting strategies and offering signing bonuses of $2,000 to $5,000 for specialized jobs, like linguists and avionics technicians.

Sgt. Kimberly Leone, a marketing and public affairs representative at the Marine recruiting station in Chicago, said one new recruiting strategy would involve sending the Marine Corps Band from San Diego to high schools across the country.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Gretchen Ruethling from Chicago.

There is no tomorrow

There is no tomorrow
by Bill Moyers

Published January 30, 2005


One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true -- one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index.

That's right -- the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its "biblical lands," legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.

As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man." A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed -- an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 -- just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer -- "The Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election -- 231 legislators in total and more since the election -- are backed by the religious right.

Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought.

And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"

Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, "America's Providential History." You'll find there these words: "The secular or socialist has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece." However, "[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's earth ... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people."

No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.

It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think of the market?"I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."

I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe that -- it's just that I read the news and connect the dots.

I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration:

• That wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to judge beforehand whether actions might damage natural resources.

• That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport-utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.

• That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.

• That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting, coal-fired power plants and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies.

• That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.

I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend $9 million -- $2 million of it from the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council -- to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.

I read all this in the news.

I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends at the International Policy Network, which is supported by Exxon Mobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is "a myth, sea levels are not rising" [and] scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are "an embarrassment."

I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.

I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer -- pictures of my grandchildren. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do." And then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice?

What has happened to our moral imagination?

On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?" And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"

I see it feelingly.

The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free -- not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma -- the science of the heart ... the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.

Believe me, it does.

Bill Moyers was host until recently of the weekly public affairs series "NOW with Bill Moyers" on PBS. This article is adapted from AlterNet, where it first appeared. The text is taken from Moyers' remarks upon receiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

THE NEW BOSS

Long, but worth the read. We can't rely on clinging to the past. Yet we must also be wary of change just for change's sake. I'm a little leery of Stern for the fact that he "allowed" (face it, he MADE them do it) his union, the Service Employees International Union, to endorse Dean BEFORE the primaries (a huge mistake on his part that cost the union lots of wasted time, money and in the end, some clout on showing good sense) but that doesn't mean he's necessarily on the wrong track concerning re-organzing for labor and the Democratic Party's future.

January 30, 2005

The New Boss
By MATT BAI

Purple is the color of Andrew Stern's life. He wears, almost exclusively, purple shirts, purple jackets and purple caps. He carries a purple duffel bag and drinks bottled water with a purple label, emblazoned with the purple logo of the Service Employees International Union, of which Stern is president. There are union halls in America where a man could get himself hurt wearing a lilac shirt, but the S.E.I.U. is a different kind of union, rooted in the new service economy. Its members aren't truck drivers or assembly-line workers but janitors and nurses and home health care aides, roughly a third of whom are black, Asian or Latino. While the old-line industrial unions have been shrinking every year, Stern's union has been organizing low-wage workers, many of whom have never belonged to a union, at a torrid pace, to the point where the S.E.I.U. is now the largest and fastest-growing trade union in North America. Once a movement of rust brown and steel gray, Big Labor is increasingly represented, at rallies and political conventions, by a rising sea of purple.

All of this makes Andy Stern -- a charismatic 54-year-old former social-service worker -- a very powerful man in labor, and also in Democratic politics. The job of running a union in America, even the biggest union around, isn't what it once was. The age of automation and globalization, with its ''race to the bottom'' among companies searching for lower wages overseas, has savaged organized labor. Fifty years ago, a third of workers in the United States carried union cards in their wallets; now it's barely one in 10. An estimated 21 million service-industry workers have never belonged to a union, and between most employers' antipathy to unions and federal laws that discourage workers from demanding one, chances are that the vast majority of them never will.

Over the years, union bosses have grown comfortable blaming everyone else -- timid politicians, corrupt C.E.O.'s, greedy shareholders -- for their inexorable decline. But last year, Andy Stern did something heretical: he started pointing the finger back at his fellow union leaders. Of course workers had been punished by forces outside their control, Stern said. But what had big labor done to adapt? Union bosses, Stern scolded, had been too busy flying around with senators and riding around in chauffeur-driven cars to figure out how to counter the effects of globalization, which have cost millions of Americans their jobs and their pensions. Faced with declining union rolls, the bosses made things worse by raiding one another's industries, which only diluted the power of their workers. The nation's flight attendants, for instance, are now divided among several different unions, making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to wield any leverage over an entire industry.

Stern put the union movement's eroding stature in business terms: if any other $6.5 billion corporation had insisted on clinging to the same decades-old business plan despite losing customers every year, its executives would have been fired long ago.

''Our movement is going out of existence, and yet too many labor leaders go and shake their heads and say they'll do something, and then they go back and do the same thing the next day,'' Stern told me recently. He is a lean, compact man with thinning white hair, and when he reclines in the purple chair in his Washington office and crosses one leg over the other, he could easily pass for a psychiatrist or a math professor. He added, ''I don't have a lot of time to mince words, because I don't think workers in our country have a lot of time left if we don't change.''

A week after the election in November, Stern delivered a proposal to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. that sounded more like an ultimatum. He demanded that the federation, the umbrella organization of the labor movement, embrace a top-to-bottom reform, beginning with a plan to merge its 58 unions into 20, for the purpose of consolidating power. If the other bosses wouldn't budge, Stern threatened to take his 1.8 million members and bolt the federation -- effectively blowing up the A.F.L.-C.I.O. on the eve of its 50th anniversary. Stern's critics say all of this is simply an excuse to grab power. ''What Andy's doing now with his compadres is what Vladimir Putin is trying to do to the former Communist bloc countries,'' says Tom Buffenbarger, president of the union that represents machinists and aerospace workers. ''He's trying to implement dictatorial rule.''

Stern says he is done caring what the other bosses think. ''If I don't have the courage to do what my members put me here to do, then how do I ask a janitor or a child-care worker to go in and see a private-sector employer and say, 'We want to have a union in this place'?'' Stern asks. ''What's my risk? That some people won't like me? Their risk is that they lose their jobs.''

The implications of Stern's crusade stretch well beyond the narrow world of organized labor and into the heart of the nation's politics. The stale and paralyzed political dialogue in Washington right now is a direct result of the deterioration of industrial America, followed by the rise of the Wal-Mart economy. Lacking any real solutions to the growing anxiety of working-class families, the two parties have instead become entrenched in a cynical battle over who or what is at fault. Republicans have made an art form of blaming the declining fortunes of the middle class on taxes and social programs; if government would simply get out of the way, they suggest, businesses would magically provide all the well-paying jobs we need. Democrats, meanwhile, cling to the mythology of the factory age, blaming Republican greed and ''Benedict Arnold C.E.O.'s'' -- to use John Kerry's phrase -- for the historical shift toward globalization; if only Washington would close a few tax loopholes, they seem to be saying, the American worker could again live happily in 1950.

About the last place you might expect to find a more thoughtful and compelling vision for the global age is in the fossilized, dogmatic leadership of organized labor. But Andy Stern is a different kind of labor chief. He intends to create a new, more dynamic kind of movement around the workers of the 21st century. And if some old friends in labor and the Democratic Party get their feelings hurt in the process, that's all right with him.

The Old Boss

Earlier this month, Tom Buffenbarger invited me down to the machinists' union's training facility on the Patuxent River in southern Maryland, about a 90-minute drive from Washington. The little campus features 87 hotel rooms, a library, a theater and a dockside dining room. There was no training going on that week, and as I wandered the empty halls, I peered into glass cases containing some of the products made by the heavy-machine operators and plant workers who make up much of the union's rank and file: a parking meter, aluminum soda cans, a Winchester rifle, a box of animal crackers. There were black-and-white photos of the union's past presidents with Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey and Ted Kennedy. I glimpsed an exhibit meant to celebrate what the machinists apparently considered a triumphant moment: the Eastern Airlines strike that began in 1989 and ended, two years later, with the destruction of the company. It was as if I had wandered into the industrial economy's version of Jurassic Park: ''Welcome to Laborland, U.S.A., and please be careful -- there are actual union leaders wandering around.''

At its zenith, in 1969, the machinists' union was about a million strong, but that was before robots supplanted assembly-line workers and Chinese factories began replacing a lot of American plants. The union now has some 380,000 active, dues-paying members. Buffenbarger told me that the union had lost more than 100,000 members in the last four years alone -- members whose jobs were eliminated or moved overseas -- for which he placed the blame squarely on free-trade deals and the Bush administration. Buffenbarger looks like what you would probably imagine a union boss to look like. He is a big, fleshy man with a bald crown and ursine hands. He began his career, decades ago, as a tool-and-dye apprentice. Now he flies around in the union's very own Lear jet. ''We couldn't do what we do without it,'' he explained unapologetically.

Buffenbarger said that Andy Stern is wrong in his central point about the labor movement: in fact, unions have as much power as ever. The problem, as Buffenbarger sees it, is one of public relations and messaging. All the unions need to do to reverse their fortunes, Buffenbarger said, is to speak up louder. To that end, Buffenbarger has proposed that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. spend $188 million to create, among other things, a Labor News Network on cable TV. ''There is no bigger organization than the collective labor movement,'' he told me. ''Even the N.R.A. doesn't have 13 million members. But they act like they do, and I think that's where we fall down. We need to act like we do.''

In a speech earlier that morning, Buffenbarger took on Stern, portraying him as an arrogant usurper and comparing him to ''a rather small peacock.'' Buffenbarger, of course, stands to lose clout if the A.F.L.-C.I.O. meets Stern's demands, since the machinists might well be forced to merge with other unions, some of whom might not see the need for a private jet. But I sensed a reason for his resentment that went beyond simple self-interest; underneath his rhetoric, you could detect the fault line between an industrial economy and a service economy, between old labor and new. Buffenbarger sneered at Stern's Ivy League education -- Stern got his degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where he spent his freshman year studying business -- and mocked him for setting up a blog. What Buffenbarger didn't like about Stern is that he looked and sounded so much like management.

''He's trying to corporatize the labor movement,'' Buffenbarger said. ''When you listen to him talk, it's all about market share. It's about loss and gain. It's about producers and consumers.'' He wrinkled his face when he said this, as if the words themselves tasted sour in his mouth. ''I think he's enamored of all the glitz and hype of the Wall Street types. He must be a fan of Donald Trump. I think he wants his own TV show.''

Re-engineering the Union

Stern, it's true, is about as far from a tool-and-dye man as you can get. His father built a profitable legal practice in northern New Jersey by catering to small Jewish businesses, helping their owners make the jump from corner store to full-service retailer. After college, where, by his own account, he mostly avoided thinking about classes or the future, an aimless Stern took a job with the Pennsylvania welfare department, compiling case histories for aid recipients. The department's social-service workers had just won the right to collective bargaining, and a group of young idealists, Stern included, seized control of the local union.

Nothing in Stern's prototypically suburban background made him a natural candidate for organized labor -- for many affluent college kids of his generation, the notion of unions brought to mind images of dank social halls and cigar-chewing thugs -- but this was the early 1970's, and when you had a genuine chance to scream truth to power, you took it. Soon he went to work full time for the union. Stern and his cadre got the pay increases and better benefits they demanded -- and went on strike anyway. ''Most of us were just playing union,'' he says now, laughing. ''We'd watched enough movies so we could figure it out.''

Unlike most union bosses, who rise up through the administrative ranks, ploddingly building alliances and dispatching their enemies, Stern spent most of his career as an organizer in the field, taking on recalcitrant employers and bargaining contracts. In 1984, John Sweeney, then the president of the S.E.I.U., summoned Stern to Washington to coordinate a national organizing drive. When Sweeney ran for president of the entire A.F.L.-C.I.O. in 1995, Stern helped run his campaign; after Sweeney won, the brash and ambitious Stern maneuvered to replace him as head of the S.E.I.U. The ensuing drama was a classic of labor politics. Before an election could be held, Sweeney left the union in the hands of a top lieutenant, who wasted no time in firing Stern and having him escorted from the building. As Stern tells the story, he vowed that he wouldn't set foot back in the L Street headquarters unless he was moving into the president's fifth-floor office. Six weeks later, his reform-minded allies in the locals helped get him elected, and he became, at 45, the youngest president in the union's history.

Having grown up around his father's small-business clients, and having spent much of his adult life at bargaining tables, Stern had learned a few things about the way business works. He came to embrace a philosophy that ran counter to the most basic assumptions of the besieged labor movement: the popular image of greedy corporations that want to treat their workers like slaves, Stern believed, was in most cases just wrong. The truth was that companies in the global age, under intense pressure to lower costs, were simply doing what they thought they had to do to survive, and if you wanted them to behave better, you had to make good behavior viable for them.

Stern's favorite example concerns the more than 10,000 janitors who clean the office buildings in the cities and suburbs of northern New Jersey. Five years ago, only a fraction of them were unionized, and they were making $10 less per hour than their counterparts across the river in Manhattan. Stern and his team say they were convinced from talking to employers in the fast-growing area that the employers didn't like the low wages and poor benefits much more than the union did. Cleaning companies complained that they had trouble retaining workers, and the workers they did keep were less productive. The problem was that for any one company to offer better wages would have been tantamount to an army unilaterally disarming in the middle of a war; cheaper competitors would immediately overrun its business.

The traditional way for a union to attack this problem would be to pick the most vulnerable employer in the market, pressure it to accept a union and then try to expand from there. Instead, Stern set out to organize the entire market at once, which he did by promising employers that the union contract wouldn't kick in unless more than half of them signed it. (Getting the first companies to enter into the agreement took some old-fashioned organizing tactics, including picket lines.) The S.E.I.U. ended up representing close to 70 percent of the janitors in the area, doubling their pay in many cases, from minimum wage to more than $11 an hour. Stern found that by bringing all of the main employers in an industry to the table at one time, rather than one after the other, he was able to effectively regulate an entire market.

Stern talks about giving ''added value'' to employers, some of whom have come to view him, warily, as a partner. At about the time Stern took over the union, his locals in several states were at war with Beverly Health and Rehabilitation Services, an Arkansas-based nursing-home chain. The company complained that cuts in state aid were making it all but impossible to pay workers more while operating their facilities at a profit. Stern and his team proposed an unusual alliance: if Beverly would allow its workers to organize, the S.E.I.U.'s members would use their political clout in state legislatures to deliver more money. It worked. ''I do believe Andy's a stand-up guy,'' says Beverly Health's C.O.O., Dave Devereaux.

At the same time Stern was employing inventive labor tactics to work with business, he was also using new-age business theory to remake the culture of his union. When Stern came into power, the S.E.I.U. represented a disparate coalition of local unions that identified themselves by different names and maintained separate identities. This was the way it had always been, which was fine in an era when employers and unions were confined to individual markets. To Stern, however, this was now a problem. If his members were going to go up against national and global companies, they were going to have to convey the size and stature of a national union. ''You know your employer is powerful, so you want to believe you're part of something powerful as well'' is the way he explained it to me.

Stern hired a corporate consulting firm versed in the jargon of the new economy and undertook a campaign to ''rebrand'' the union. He used financial incentives to get all the local branches of the union to begin using the S.E.I.U. name, its new logo and, of course, its new color. In some respects, the S.E.I.U. now feels very much like a Fortune 500 company. In the lobby of its headquarters, a flat-screen TV plays an endless video of smiling members along with inspirational quotes from Stern, as if he were Jack Welch or Bill Gates. The union sold more than $1 million worth of purple merchandise through its gift catalog last year, including watches, sports bras, temporary tattoos and its very own line of jeans. (The catalog itself features poetry from members and their children paying tribute to the union, along with recipes like Andy Stern's Chocolate Cake With Peanut-Butter Frosting.)

In all of this, Stern's critics in other unions see a strange little cult of personality. Another way to look at it, though, is that Stern understands the psychology of a movement; workers in the union want to feel as if someone is looking out for them. When he and I walked into the S.E.I.U. campaign office in Miami shortly before the presidential election, the union's activists greeted him with hugs or shy smiles. Stern took a moment to chat with each member. ''I got to have my picture taken with you once before, you know,'' one man told him proudly. ''You mean I got have my picture taken with you,'' Stern replied with the timing of a politician.

As the S.E.I.U. was soaring in membership and strength during the late 90's, much of big labor was seeing its influence further erode. And there were those who thought the S.E.I.U. wasn't doing enough for the movement as a whole. Cecil Roberts, president of the mineworkers, personally challenged Stern to follow the example of the mineworkers' legendary leader John L. Lewis, who helped build up the entire labor movement in the 1930's. But Stern demurred. Just running the union was taking all of his time, and what was left he wanted to spend with his son, Matt, and his daughter, Cassie. There would be time later, when his children were older, to think about reshaping the future of American labor.

Then, all at once, Stern's personal world collapsed. A little more than two years ago, Cassie, 14, who was born unusually small and with poor muscle tone, became ill after returning home from a routine operation, stopped breathing in her father's arms and died. In the aftermath, Stern's 23-year marriage to Jane Perkins, a liberal advocate, unraveled. He rented an apartment in northwest Washington and shed most of his furniture, hurling himself into his work at the union. He is very close to his 18-year-old son, but his son splits his time between his parents' homes. On weeks when Stern is alone, he told me, he looks forward to stopping by the Dancing Crab, a local bar, to eat dinner alone and read the paper. ''I'm in a very transitional moment of life,'' he says.

Often, when Stern talks about his daughter, he wanders off, without really meaning to, into a story about a union member he has met somewhere who reminds him of Cassie, or whose own daughter -- ''someone else's Cassie'' -- is stuck in a failing school. The recollections bring him to the brink of tears. It is as if he can't help conflating the fate of workers with the fate of his daughter. Time has become a paradox for him; on one hand, he has more of it than ever before, and yet, he can't escape the panicky feeling that time is running out.

''When Cassie died,'' Stern said, ''it was like: 'I'm 52 years old. How many more years am I really going to do this? Why am I so scared to say what I really think?' '' If he were a religious man, Stern told me, he might think that it was not a coincidence that he was given, through his loss, so much free time and clarity at the very moment when organized labor was in crisis. He says it would be comforting to believe he has been chosen for a mission. It is clear, from the way he says this, that part of him believes it anyway.

Big Labor's Big Brawl

Stern's plan to rescue the American worker begins with restructuring the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Since the 1960's, a lot of struggling unions have chosen to merge rather than perish, to the point where there are half as many unions in the federation today as there were at its height. Stern argues that this Darwinian process, so lamented by labor leaders, is in fact healthy, and hasn't gone far enough. Unions, he says, work best when they're large enough to organize new workers at the same time as they fight battles on behalf of old ones, and when they represent a large concentration of the workers in any one industry. Smaller unions lack the muscle to organize entire markets the way that the S.E.I.U. has been able to do with janitors and home health care workers. At the same time, some unions have desperately scrambled to maintain or increase their memberships -- and thus their revenue -- by signing up workers well outside their core areas. So the United Auto Workers ends up representing graduate students, and the machinists represent park rangers. This is self-defeating, Stern argues; all it does is divide labor's strength.

Stern's 10-point plan would essentially tear down the industrial-age framework of the House of Labor and rebuild it. The A.F.L.-C.I.O., he says, would consist of 20 large unions, and each union would be devoted to a single sector of the 21st-century economy, like health care or airlines. Ever the apostle of field organizing, Stern wants these restructured unions to put more time and resources into recruiting new members in fast-growing exurban areas -- in the South and the West especially -- where a new generation of workers has never belonged to a union. His plan would slash the amount that each union pays in dues to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. by half, provided that those unions put some of the money back into local organizing. This is not a small idea; it would, essentially, take resources away from the federation's headquarters, which uses it for policy studies and training programs, and give it back to the guys who set up picket lines and rallies.

The basic strategy is to take the same principles Stern demonstrated organizing New Jersey's janitors and make them the model for the entire American labor movement. If only two or three large unions represented all the nation's health care workers, they could go into a growing market -- Reno, say, or Albuquerque -- and bargain with all the hospitals at the same time. Labor would be able to focus on setting standards for entire industries, as opposed to battling one employer at a time.

Stern's plan has incited fury within a lot of smaller unions, whose members don't seem to think the movement needs a self-appointed savior. The proposed reorganization would sweep away a lot of small unions as if they were debris on the factory floor. ''Andy is impatient, and he sprang this on his peers without any discussion,'' says John Sweeney, Stern's former mentor. ''I think he needs to stand still for a minute and listen to what other people think, and learn from other experiences as well.''

You would imagine, given how often Stern's critics have called him arrogant, that he'd be used to it by now, but clearly the word still stings him. He is a man who prides himself on his emotional connection with janitors and nursing aides, and he almost cannot bear the suggestion that he thinks he's smarter than everyone else. Stern prefers to see himself as a man who gets along with all kinds of people, whether they drive the limousine or ride in the back. (''I actually was the most popular person in my high-school class,'' he once told me.)

During an airport layover, I saw him open his laptop and peruse the Unite to Win blog. (Stern actually contributes from time to time to three separate blogs, including Purpleocean.org, an S.E.I.U. site designed for like-minded people who aren't even in a union.) Stern established the online forum so that everyone in the labor movement -- whether supportive of his plan or opposed to it -- could tell him exactly what they thought of his ideas. They haven't held back. ''Sometimes I really hate this,'' he said in the airport lounge, wincing slightly. ''I don't like seeing my name there and people calling me an arrogant idiot.''

Even Stern's allies admit that his ultimatum to big labor is a little high-handed. John Wilhelm, co-president of the union that represents hotel, restaurant and garment workers, is supportive of Stern, and Wilhelm is said to be considering a challenge to Sweeney when he runs for another term as A.F.L.-C.I.O. president this year. But he said he disagrees with Stern's idea of merging unions against their will. Because Stern's union is so powerful, Wilhelm told me, Stern doesn't always feel the need to tread as softly as he might. ''Frankly, he doesn't have to be as diplomatic as others do,'' Wilhelm said. ''There's a thin and perhaps indiscernible line between a person who comes across as arrogant and a person who tries to tell the truth even when it's unpleasant. And the truth about our labor movement is unpleasant.''

When I first started talking to Stern about his controversial plan last summer, he seemed to regard it more as a provocation to big labor than as a proposal that might actually be adopted. He talked as if he were resigned to the idea that the S.E.I.U. would ultimately break from the federation. But as the next meeting of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive board in March draws near, there seems to be in union headquarters around the nation the faintest stirrings of a revolt. Stern's ideas have become the basis for an entirely new debate about the future of labor, and now several unions have offered their own, more modest versions of a reform plan in response. The biggest surprise came in December, when James P. Hoffa, president of the famously old-school Teamsters, weighed in with a set of recommendations quite similar to Stern's.

Increasingly, the question for Stern is not whether he is prepared to leave the A.F.L.-C.I.O., but how much of his plan has to be enacted in order for the S.E.I.U. to stay. It is a question he evades. ''What I won't do,'' he said, ''is pretend we made change. It's not worth having this fight or discussion if, in the end, you can't look people in the eye and say we really have taken a big step forward.''

Workers of the World, Globalize?

Even if big labor eventually does come to be made up of bigger unions, Stern sees a larger challenge: can you build a multinational labor movement to counter the leverage of multinational giants whose tentacles reach across oceans and continents? The emblem of this new kind of behemoth, of course, is Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer. Wal-Mart has, in a sense, turned the American retail model inside out. It used to be that a manufacturer made, say, a clock radio, determined its price and the wages of the employees who made it and then sold the radio to a retail outlet at a profit. Wal-Mart's power is such that the process now works in reverse: in practice, Wal-Mart sets the price for that clock radio, and the manufacturer, very likely located overseas, figures out how low wages will have to be in order to make it profitable to produce it. In this way, Wal-Mart not only resists unions in its stores with unwavering ferocity but also drives down the wages of its manufacturers -- all in the service of bringing consumers the lowest possible price.

''What was good for G.M. ended up being good for the country,'' Stern says. ''What's good for Wal-Mart ends up being good for five families'' -- the heirs to the Walton fortune. Stern's reform plan for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. includes a $25 million fund to organize Wal-Mart's workers. But as a retail outlet, Wal-Mart doesn't really fall within the S.E.I.U.'s purview. What Stern says he is deeply worried about is what he sees as the next generation of Wal-Marts, which are on his turf: French, British and Scandinavian companies whose entry into the American market threatens to drive down wages in service industries, which are often less visible than retail. ''While we were invading Iraq, the Europeans invaded us,'' Stern says. Most of these companies have no objection to unionizing in Europe, where organized labor is the norm. But when they come to the United States, they immediately follow the Wal-Mart model, undercutting their competitors by shutting out unions and squeezing paychecks.

Take, for instance, the case of Sodexho, a French company that provides all the services necessary to operate corporate buildings, from catering the food to guarding the lobby. In Europe, Sodexho is considered a responsible employer that works with unions and compensates its employees fairly. In the United States and Canada, where the company employs more than 100,000 workers, Sodexho's policy is to discourage its employees from joining unions. As a maneuver to get Sodexho to the bargaining table, last year the S.E.I.U. resorted to taking out ads in French newspapers, shaming the company's executives in their own country, where the idea of scorning unions is considerably less chic. Stern says Sodexho has started negotiating.

Stern's big idea for coping with this new kind of multinational nemesis is to build a federation of unions, similar to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. except that its member unions would come from all over the world. As Stern explained it, a French company might not be so brazen about bullying American workers if it had to worry about a French union protesting back home. The point, he said, is to force companies like Sodexho to adhere to the same business standards in New York and Chicago as it does in Paris, by building a labor alliance that is every bit as global as modern capital.

At first, this global vision sounded a little dreamy to me, as if Stern might have been watching too many ''Superfriends'' reruns. Then he invited me, just before Christmas, on a one-day trip to Birmingham, England. The occasion was a meeting of Britain's reform-minded transportation union. Tony Woodley, the union's general secretary, flashed a broad smile and threw his arm around Stern when Stern arrived, after flying all night, to give the keynote address. Two S.E.I.U. employees were already on hand; it turned out that Stern had dispatched them to London temporarily to help Woodley set up an organizing program.

As we drank coffee backstage, Stern and Woodley told me about the case of First Student, a company that in the last few years had become the largest, most aggressive private school-bus company in the United States. The company had become a target of S.E.I.U. locals in several cities because it wouldn't let its drivers unionize. ''We keep seeing these things about them in the union newsletter,'' Stern said. ''And it starts nibbling at your brain. I said: 'Who are these people, First Student? What's going on here?' And then we do a little research, and we find out what idiots we are. This is a major multinational company. They're 80 percent unionized in the United Kingdom. So we write a letter to the union here, and we say, 'Can you help us?' ''

Woodley sent British bus drivers to Chicago to meet with their American counterparts. Then the American bus drivers went to London, and lobbyists for the British union took them to see members of Parliament. They also held a joint demonstration outside the company's annual meeting. Woodley told me that First Student -- known as First Group in Britain -- was now making a bid for rail contracts there, and his union intended to lobby against it unless the company sat down with its American counterparts in Florida and Illinois.

I asked Woodley, who looks like Rudy Giuliani with more hair, why he would use his own union's political capital to help the S.E.I.U. He nodded quickly, in a way that suggested that there were a lot of people who didn't yet understand this. He explained that it worked both ways; his union was suffering at the hands of multinationals, too, and Stern would be able to return the favor by pressuring American companies doing business in Britain. Moreover, Woodley went on to say, if European companies get used to operating without unions in America, it might be only a matter of time before they tried to export that same mentality back to Europe. ''I don't expect miracles,'' Woodley said. ''I don't expect international solidarity to bring huge companies to their knees overnight. But we've got to do a damn sight more than we're doing.''

Stern invited the top executives of about a dozen unions from Europe and Australia to a meeting in London this April, which will be the maiden gathering of what he says he hopes will become a formalized global federation. He recently met with union leaders in Beijing too. Most labor experts assume that the Chinese unions are tools of the business-friendly government, but Stern says he came away believing that they are as jolted by the global economy as workers in America. ''You have to understand, they're just seeing something new,'' he says. ''These are public unions that are used to health benefits and real discussions, and suddenly they're meeting these huge corporations -- like Wal-Mart -- that, because the executives can make a phone call to someone in the local government, won't even talk to them. It's all new.''

There are, however, painful questions inherent in globalizing the labor movement. At a recent meeting with his executive board, Stern mused out loud about the possibility of conducting a fact-finding mission to India, along with executives from one of the companies outsourcing its jobs there. Perhaps that could be a first step, he thought, toward raising the pay of Indian workers who have inherited American jobs.

Then Stern stopped himself and considered a problem. Sure, there was an obvious logic to unionizing foreign phone operators or machinists: American workers won't be able to compete fairly for jobs until companies have to pay higher wages in countries like China and India. But how would it look to workers in America? How would you avoid the appearance that you were more worried about the guy answering the phone in Bangalore than you were about the guy he replaced in Iowa? John Kerry and other Democrats had been railing against the C.E.O.'s who outsourced American jobs -- and here was Andy Stern, considering joining forces with those very same C.E.O.'s to make sure their Indian workers were making enough money.

''The truth is that as the living standard in China goes up, the living standard in Ohio goes down,'' Stern said. ''What do you do about that? Are we a global union or an American union? This is a hard question for me to answer. Because I'm not comfortable with the living standard here going down. This is a question I think we need to think about going forward, but I don't think that means we should be scared.''

The idea of a global union isn't entirely new. But the concept has never been translated into a formal alliance, and experts who study labor think Stern may be onto something important. I realized during our brief time in Birmingham why Stern seemed ambivalent about whether the A.F.L.-C.I.O. approved his reform plan, or whether his union even stayed in the federation. In a sense, no matter how the conversation is resolved, it is bound to lag a full generation behind the reality of the problem; it is as if the unions are arguing against upgrading from LP's to compact discs while the rest of the world has moved on to digital downloads. Even if the leaders of big labor do kill off half their unions and reorganize the rest, all they will have done, at long last, is create a truly national labor movement -- at exactly the moment that capital has become a more sprawling and more obstinate force than any one nation could hope to contain.

Re-engineering the Party

The more Andy Stern looks at organized labor and the Democratic Party, the more he sees the parallels between them. Like big labor, the modern Democratic Party was brought into being by imaginative liberal thinkers in the 1930's and reached its apex during the prosperity of the postwar industrial boom. Like the union bosses, Democratic leaders grew complacent in their success; they failed to keep pace with changing circumstances in American life and didn't notice that their numbers were steadily eroding. Now, Stern says, Democrats and the unions both find themselves mired in the mind-set of a bygone moment, lacking the will or perhaps the capacity to innovate or adapt. What you see in both cases, Stern told me, borrowing from the new-age language of business theory, is ''the change pattern of a dying institution.''

The big conversation going on in Democratic Washington at the moment, at dinner parties and luncheons and think-tank symposia, revolves around how to save the party. The participants generally fall into two camps of unequal size. On one side, there is the majority of Democrats, who believe that the party's failure has primarily been one of communication and tactics. By this thinking, the Democratic agenda itself (no to tax cuts and school vouchers and Social Security privatization; yes to national health care and affirmative action) remains as relevant as ever to modern workers. The real problem, goes this line of thinking, is that the party has allowed ruthless Republicans to control the debate and has failed to sufficiently mobilize its voters. A much smaller group of prominent Democrats argues that the party's problems run deeper -- that it suffers, in fact, from a lack of imagination, and that its core ideas are more an echo of government as it was than government as it ought to be.

Virtually everyone in the upper echelons of organized labor belongs solidly to the first camp. Stern has his feet firmly planted in the second. The economic policy of the Democratic Party, he says, ''is basically being opposed to Republicans and protecting the New Deal. It makes me realize how vibrant the Republicans are in creating 21st-century ideas, and how sad it is that we're defending 60-year-old ideas.'' Like big labor, Stern says, the party needs to challenge its orthodoxy -- and its interest groups -- if it wants to put forward a program that makes sense for new-economy workers. Could it be that the Social Security system devised in the 1930's isn't, in fact, the only good national retirement program for today's wage earner? Is it possible that competition is the best way to rescue an imperiled public-school system?

''I'm not convinced that you can do this from the inside,'' Stern told me at one point. Just as he is willing to strike out from the A.F.L.-C.I.O., he doesn't rule out a split from the Democratic Party. ''I feel like we have to do everything we can within our power to get both the labor movement and the parties in this country to represent workers the way they should,'' he said. ''And if we can't, then we have to decide what our strategy is. Do we spend all our money running ballot initiatives and forget about candidates? Do we look for people to create an independent worker party? I don't know.''

Stern isn't the only Democrat in Washington making this case -- but he may be the most powerful and connected. Among his friends and allies he counts at least two billionaires: the financier George Soros and the philanthropist Eli Broad, who is talking with Stern about ideas to reform Los Angeles schools. Stern was one of the founding members of America Coming Together, the largest private get-out-the-vote effort ever assembled. His top political aide, Anna Burger, who is the S.E.I.U.'s secretary treasurer, recently took a seat on the board of the Democracy Alliance, a network of wealthy liberal donors. How Stern wields this influence -- and his union's money -- can have a real impact on the direction of the party.

Other union leaders can spend their money on Buffenbarger's news network if they want, but Stern seems bent on leveraging his money against the party establishment. Last year, while he campaigned as many as six days a week for Kerry and other Democrats, Stern nevertheless undertook a series of actions that infuriated party leaders. First, with his encouragement, the S.E.I.U.'s locals voted to endorse Howard Dean before the primaries. Then Stern gave more than $500,000 to the Republican Governors Association because, he said, some of the G.O.P.'s gubernatorial candidates had better positions for workers. As if that wasn't provocative enough a signal, Stern chose the moment of the Democratic convention in Boston to remark publicly, in an interview with The Washington Post, that it might be better for the party and the unions if John Kerry lost the election.

Stern told me he had been partly inspired, oddly enough, by the example of Stephen Moore, the arch-conservative ideologue who, until recently, ran the Club for Growth. The club, which is anathema to both Democrats and moderate Republicans in Washington, raises millions from corporate anti-tax crusaders, then spends it not only against Democrats (Tom Daschle was a prime target) but also against Republican incumbents who aren't deemed sufficiently conservative. Moore has infuriated some Republican leaders, who say he divides the party, but the Club for Growth has helped push the party to the right, putting moderates on the defensive and making Republicans think twice before they cast a vote against a tax cut.

Stern invited Moore to speak at an S.E.I.U. meeting in Chicago a few years ago -- which is roughly the equivalent of Michael Moore being asked over to the National Rifle Association for lunch. Now Stern has begun to emulate the club's model; last year, the S.E.I.U. ran its own candidate, a union ally, against the Democratic House speaker in Washington State, because the speaker voted against a health-benefits package for home health care workers. The union's challenger lost -- but only by about 500 votes. ''I think we need to spend more time running candidates against Democrats,'' Stern says matter-of-factly.

This approach holds some risk for a union boss. Most of Stern's members, after all, are lifelong Democrats. Will they be O.K. with a leader who's willing to entertain an overhaul of Social Security? Would they support Stern if he crossed the teachers' unions and came out for school vouchers? Stern seems convinced that his members want new solutions to these problems, not dogmatic answers, and he is betting that they're more loyal to him and the union than they are to the party. He seems poised to fill a space -- between the world of organized labor and the world of social and economic policy -- that hasn't been filled since Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers, advised the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson on civil rights. ''There's been no analog to Andy in the last 30 or 40 years in America,'' says Simon Rosenberg, who heads the New Democrat Network and is running for Democratic Party chairman. ''There's been no labor leader who has emerged as a thought leader as well.''

This spring, Stern plans to convene an eclectic group of Democrats to begin outlining a new economic agenda. ''We don't want it to be the same old people,'' Stern told me. ''We want people who might say, for example, 'Maybe privatization isn't such a terrible thing for people,' even if that's not what the Democratic Party thinks. Or, for example, 'Wal-Mart isn't the worst thing for the economy after all.' '' He laughed heartily at that one. ''We need to shock people out of their comfort zone and make them think.''

The Big Questions

Stern is not the first giant of the labor movement to talk about breaking up big labor or the Democratic Party. Reuther and the United Auto Workers stormed out of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. in 1968 and formed a new alliance with the Teamsters. A few labor leaders, furious at Harry Truman's treatment of workers, followed Henry Wallace out of the Democratic Party in 1948. Neither venture lasted long enough for anyone to remember much about it. Reuther died suddenly in 1970, and the new alliance barely outlived him; Wallace's Progressive Party finished fourth in the 1948 election, behind the Dixiecrats, and faded away. Arguably, the lesson of these and other rebellions is that the threat of building new workers' institutions usually proves more potent than the reality.

The question that Stern's detractors ask is this: What is Andy Stern really after? Does he long to be the Reuther of his day, phoning presidents and holding forth to rooms full of reporters?

''I don't like politics,'' Stern said more than once. ''After the last election, a lot of people called me and said everything from 'You should run for president' to 'You should be chairman of the D.N.C.' And neither of them had the slightest bit of reality or held any interest for me.'' That Stern can mention this casually -- that someone suggested he not merely phone a president, but run for president -- would indicate that he is as susceptible to self-glorification as the next guy, and maybe more so. But if what Stern really wanted was to run the world, he could surely spend his nights in more powerful company than that of the bartender at the Dancing Crab. When I asked what he envisioned himself doing in his 60's, Stern said, ''I hope I find someone to fall in love with and travel with and watch my son have grandkids.''

His adversaries will say this is disingenuous, but, as so often happens in public life, they may be misunderstanding the human factor that compels Andy Stern. Everyone who knows him well will tell you that he is driven by an authentic passion for workers. And yet, at the same time, it doesn't take a psychology degree to see that he lives these days in a state of suspended agony. Stern gives the impression of having been shaken loose from conformity by the death of his daughter and the end of his marriage; nothing can hurt him more than he has already been hurt, which breeds in him the kind of abandon that can be dangerous to the status quo.

This is how history often changes; it's the people who are running from something worse who are willing to hurl themselves into walls that others won't scale. The facts of our time are clear enough: a ruthless kind of globalized economy is upon us, and it is not going away. Many American industries are bound to be surpassed by leaner competitors, and the workers left behind by this tectonic shift have little power to influence the decisions of corporate barons whose interests know no national boundaries. More Americans now hold stock -- often in a 401k -- than are members of a union. And the institutions that have, for the last century, protected the ideal of the American worker -- organized labor and the Democratic Party -- are clinging mightily to structures and programs born in the era of coal and steel, perhaps out of fear that innovation would somehow discredit the things they have worked for all these years, or perhaps for the simple reason that no one knows what to do next.

The visionary men who built big labor and the modern Democratic Party met the challenges specific to their moment. What Andy Stern is doing, in his own way, is provoking an argument more relevant to our moment. Can American workers ever be secure in a global market? Can a service economy sustain the nation's middle class? And are we brave enough to have the conversation?

Matt Bai, a contributing writer, covers national politics for the magazine.

Seymour Hersh: "We've Been Taken Over by a Cult"

Wednesday, January 26th, 2005

Seymour Hersh: "We've Been Taken Over by a Cult"

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AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, author of the book, Chain Of Command: The Road From 9-11 to Abu Ghraib. He spoke recently at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York.


SEYMOUR HERSH: About what's going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of what's been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed -- I don't know whether he thinks he¹s doing God's will or what his father didn't do, or whether it's some mandate from -- you know, I just don¹t know, but George Bush thinks this is the right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. So, he's inured in a very strange way to people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and believe me, though he got 58 million votes, many of people who voted for him weren¹t voting for continued warfare, but I think that's what we're going to have.

It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of silly to, but the question is: How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can you do to maybe move him off the course that he sees as virtuous and he sees as absolutely appropriate? All of us -- you have to -- I can¹t begin to exaggerate how frightening the position is -- we're in right now, because most of you don't understand, because the press has not done a very good job. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the new bill that was just passed, provoked by the 9/11 committee actually, is a little bit of a kabuki dance, I guess is what I want to say, in that what it really does is it consolidates an awful lot of power in the Pentagon -- by statute now. It gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has been wanting to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing them before they kill us, as Peter said. ³They did it to us. We¹ve got to do it to them.² That is the attitude that -- at the very top of our government exists. And so, I'll just tell you a couple of things that drive me nuts. We can -- you know, there's not much more to go on with.

I think there's a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you one thing. Let's all forget this word ³insurgency². It's one of the most misleading words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the people we started the war against. We are fighting the Ba'athists plus nationalists. We are fighting the very people that started -- they only choose to fight in different time spans than we want them to, in different places. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because be won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're very actively fighting. The frightening thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it's -- it's -- it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what they're doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against two and three-man teams. We estimated the cells operating against us were two and three people, that we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don't know what's coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific communications. Somebody told me, it's -- somebody in the system, an officer -- and by the way, the good part of it is, more and more people are available to somebody like me.

There's a lot of anxiety inside the -- you know, our professional military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do -- there's a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways -- one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside -- the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. There were people -- serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That's what's happening. The real target has been ³diminish the agency.² I'm writing about all of this soon, so I don't want to overdo it, but there's been a tremendous sea change in the government. A concentration of power.

On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts. We can¹t win this war. We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we¹re operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There¹s no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq -- some of you remember Vietnam -- Iraq is being turn into a ³free-fire zone² right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.¹s, and he picked up the phone and he said, ³Welcome to Stalingrad.² We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it.

We have a President that -- and a Secretary of State that, when a trooper -- when a reporter or journalist asked -- actually a trooper, a soldier, asked about lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the President then gets up and says, ³Yes, they should all have good equipment and we're going to do it,² as if somehow he wasn't involved in the process. Words mean nothing -- nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say again and again, ³well, we don't do torture.² We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see anecdotally. We all understand in some profound way because so much has come out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C. The ACLU put out more papers, this is not an isolated incident what¹s happened with the seven kids and the horrible photographs, Lynndie England. That's into the not the issue is. They're fall guys. Of course, they did wrong. But you know, when we send kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we send our children to war is the officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in the military is to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets and being blown up, but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with a weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle of these people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half months only stopped when one of their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you need to know, how many officers knew. I can just give you a timeline that will tell you all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this year. In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful lot about what was going on there. At that point, between January and May, our government did nothing. Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle of January on it and told the President. In those three-and-a-half months before it became public, was there any systematic effort to do anything other than to prosecute seven ³bad seeds², enlisted kids, reservists from West Virginia and the unit they were in, by the way, Military Police. The answer is, Ha! They were basically a bunch of kids who were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put in charge of a prison. They knew nothing. It doesn't excuse them from doing dumb things. But there is another framework. We're not seeing it. They¹ve gotten away with it.

So here's the upside of the horrible story, if there is an upside. I can tell you the upside in a funny way, in an indirect way. It comes from a Washington Post piece this week. A young boy, a Marine, 25-year-old from somewhere in Maryland died. There was a funeral in the Post, a funeral in Washington, and the Post did a little story about it. They quoted -- his name was Hodak. His father was quoted. He had written to a letter in the local newspaper in Southern Virginia. He had said about his son, he wrote a letter just describing what it was like after his son died. He said, ³Today everything seems strange. Laundry is getting done. I walked my dog. I ate breakfast. Somehow I'm still breathing and my heart is still beating. My son lies in a casket half a world away.² There's going to be -- you know, when I did My Lai -- I tell this story a lot. When I did the My Lai story, more than a generation ago, it was 35 years ago, so almost two. When I did My Lai, one of the things that I discovered was that they had -- for some of you, most of you remember, but basically a group of American soldiers -- the analogy is so much like today. Then as now, our soldiers don't see enemies in a battlefield, they just walk on mines or they get shot by snipers, because It's always hidden. There's inevitable anger and rage and you dehumanize the people. We have done that with enormous success in Iraq. They're ³rag-heads². They're less than human. The casualty count -- as in Sudan, equally as bad. Staggering numbers that we're killing. In any case, you know, it's -- in this case, these -- a group of soldiers in 1968 went into a village. They had been in Vietnam for three months and lost about 10% of their people, maybe 10 or 15 to accidents, killings and bombings, and they ended up -- they thought they would meet the enemy and there were 550 women, children and old men and they executed them all. It took a day. They stopped in the middle and they had lunch. One of the kids who had done a lot of shooting. The Black and Hispanic soldiers, about 40 of them, there were about 90 men in the unit -- the Blacks and Hispanics shot in the air. They wouldn't shoot into the ditch. They collected people in three ditches and just began to shoot them. The Blacks and Hispanics shot up in the air, but the mostly White, lower middle class, the kids who join the Army Reserve today and National Guard looking for extra dollars, those kind of kids did the killing. One of them was a man named Paul Medlow, who did an awful lot of shooting. The next day, there was a moment -- one of the things that everybody remembered, the kids who were there, one of the mothers at the bottom of a ditch had taken a child, a boy, about two, and got him under her stomach in such a way that he wasn't killed. When they were sitting having the K rations -- that¹s what they called them -- MRE¹s now -- the kid somehow crawled up through the [inaudible] screaming louder and he began -- and Calley, the famous Lieutenant Calley, the Lynndie England of that tragedy, told Medlow: Kill him, ³Plug him,² he said. And Medlow somehow, who had done an awful lot as I say, 200 bullets, couldn't do it so Calley ran up as everybody watched, with his carbine. Officers had a smaller weapon, a rifle, and shot him in the back of the head. The next morning, Medlow stepped on a mine and he had his foot blown off. He was being medevac¹d out. As he was being medevac¹d out, he cursed and everybody remembered, one of the chilling lines, he said, ³God has punished me, and he's going to punish you, too.²

So a year-and-a-half later, I'm doing this story. And I hear about Medlow. I called his mother up. He lived in New Goshen, Indiana. I said, ³I¹m coming to see you. I don¹t remember where I was, I think it was Washington State. I flew over there and to get there, you had to go to ­ I think Indianapolis and then to Terre Haute, rent a car and drive down into the Southern Indiana, this little farm. It was a scene out of Norman Rockwell's. Some of you remember the Norman Rockwell paintings. It's a chicken farm. The mother is 50, but she looks 80. Grizzled, old. Way old ­ hard scrabble life, no man around. I said I'm here to see your son, and she said, okay. He's in there. He knows you're coming. Then she said, one of these great -- she said to me, ³I gave them a good boy. And they sent me back a murderer.² So you go on 35 years. I'm doing in The New Yorker, the Abu Ghraib stories. I think I did three in three weeks. If some of you know about The New Yorker, that's unbelievable. But in the middle of all of this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working class, lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of -- The sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games in the January of 2004. In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different person. She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for -- you know, these -- some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia. This not -- this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment in another city and began working a different job. And moved away from everybody. Then over -- as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly -- over her body, the back, the arms, the legs, and her mother was frantic. What's going on? Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her daughter, ³Were you there?² She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother then goes -- the daughter had come home -- before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies, you know, while she was overseas, sort of a -- I hadn't thought about it, a great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said I went and looked at the computer. She knows -- she doesn't know about depression. She doesn¹t know about Freud. She just said, I was just -- I was just going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn't say anything more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up, and sure enough there was a file marked ³Iraq². She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs. They were photographs that became -- one of them was published. We published one, just one in The New Yorker. It was about an Arab. This is something no mother should see and daughter should see too. It was the Arab man leaning against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs, two shepherds, remember, on each side of him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large photograph. What we didn¹t publish was the sequence showed the dogs did bite the man -- pretty hard. A lot of blood. So she saw that and she called me, and away we go. There's another story.

For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes a core of -- you know, we all deal in ³macro² in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, ³Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?² Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over -- by cultists. Anyway, what's going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and these stories get around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost, as the kids come home. And the wounded ones come back, and there's wards that you will never hear about. That's wards -- you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about the vegetables. There's ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries to extremities. We're going to learn more and I think you're going to see, it's going to -- it's -- I'm trying to be optimistic. We're going to see a bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What happened with the soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of that. I'm not suggesting we're going to have mutinies, but I'm going to suggest you're going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe -- Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody -- it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit -- our -- we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he¹s going to do between then and now is enormous. We¹re going to have some very bad months ahead.