The national & international news has been a LOT the past week and I doubt this week will change that. I just want to draw your attention to a hyper local election that happened over a month ago and what it might mean for the CA recall and other races going forward.
August 27th I had the “honor” of attending a rally outside the Sacramento Capital building. It’s not abnormal for me to attend a rally, I’m often there to document things. This was a first, though. How in the heck was I there to cover a labor event that seemed to also be an anti-mask, anti-vax, Larry Elder fan meet-up? I did a little digging and, hey, it’s kind of a funny story.
A while back, SEIU Local 1000 had an election and the outcome was quite curious. Long time president, Yvonne Walker lost her bid for a 14th term to a newcomer, Richard L. Brown, who’d never held office before. The turnout was ridiculously low – less than 8k votes out of a possible 55k eligible voting pool of the 96k membership. Not everyone who benefits from union membership actually decides to be a dues paying member but unions seem to forget that not every dues paying member is pro labor. They’re pro themselves. It seems that Freedom Foundation dipped their grubby anti-union paws into the SEIU Local 1000 election. In fact, they gloated about it. Full disclosure, while many members suspect that Freedom provided campaign funds, there’s no proof. Also, even if there was, I didn’t see anything in the bylaws that said outside orgs couldn’t fund candidates.
This week, our outreach efforts paid off in a big way when it was announced that long-time president Yvonne Walker was unseated by a self-proclaimed “outsider.”
You heard right. Walker’s 13-year reign of terror over the largest state employee union in California is officially over, and it is a direct reflection of Freedom Foundation’s success in the Golden State.
Walker is now the third SEIU local president, after David Rolf (SEIU 775) and Kim Cook (SEIU 925), to either leave or lose their job after we conducted sustained outreach efforts to their members.
Freedom Foundation blog – Rachel Wiegel, June 2, 2021
So, that’s how a progressive union wound up holding an apolitical rally about not being able to negotiate a vaccination or testing mandate for their workers that also seemed to feature a lot of pro-recall signage, anti-vax signage (loved the one comparing it to rape) and speakers that wouldn’t wear masks including one that felt that things were gestapo like. And it still didn’t beat the new president telling the mostly Lassen county crowd that the Susanville Correctional facility wouldn’t be closing if they were Black people. Yes, he’s saying that this red county was being punished for supporting Trump & being 2nd amendment, God-fearing white people. Does he have proof? No. Does he need proof? Also, no. They ate it up. In fact, they’re delighted by him. He’s got a rock star quality in their eyes. For once, the union is being represented by the kind of conservative that’s normally fighting the unions. He won with 33% of the vote. I have to admit, when I read that in my research, all I could think of was Kung Fu Monkey’s 27% Crazification Factor. If the vote wasn’t split between a bunch of more progressive people, it’s doubtful R. L. Brown would be president. But, let’s be honest, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the idea of winning with a committed 30% of the vote. It’s just the first time it’s been successful.
SEIU Local 1000 is, or rather, was a very politically active chapter of of SEIU and my personal feeling is that this was a very well timed loss that put a pretty active, organized group out of commission just in time for a recall. Odd coincidence that both the recall and this hyperlocal election seems to have been affected by outside money. We’ll see how the loss of their manpower affects things.
Local 1000’s social media pages are fairly contentious nowadays. The union president having a chummy video chat with a libertarian anti-union activist certainly seemed to raise eyebrows. However, I think most of the membership is just trundling along, blithely unaware of whom is at the helm and will continue to be, until something goes very wrong.
This is the 3rd SEIU union leader ousted by Freedom Foundation and all they had to do was target the conservative members who would hang together as a group way more than everyone else, who will be derailed by future leaders feeling it’s their time, older leaders still clinging to power and the way folks on the middle and left who tend to fall into fanhoods. What’s worse is that there’s no real way to prevent this. This is internal. Any member can run for office. Anyone. If conservative dark money groups can undermine union organizing and political power, cut off the flow of not just political donation money, but union workers putting time in for getting out the vote – we on the left will not just be hamstrung, but gutted. Many other writers are pointing out the astroturfing going on right now with attacks on school boards, but I hope international union heads are paying attention to this. Every election matters. Just ask Local 1000 members astonished that the union filed a cease & desist to insist on a meet & confer over mandating vaccines. Whether he won with less than 3k votes or with 30k votes, Brown is president. You either voted for someone else, for him or you allowed him to be president by not voting at all. Complacency & apathy are dangerous. I hope workers are paying attention. Gonna be interesting to see how this plays out. Happy Labor Day.
AJ
Wow
Thanks for the detailed account. I feel sick learning of this.
It seems like an incredibly important story. I wonder if any of the Taking Points Memo folks have heard about it and would follow up with credit to you obvs.
rikyrah
Excellent story from the ground. Thanks for alerting us to this issue.
feebog
Interesting. So, you just need a plurality of votes to win according to their by-laws and they don’t have any restrictions on who funds candidates. Sounds like a recipe for just this kind of disaster. One thing you did not mention was terms. How long is this guy going to be in charge?
Mary G
They are attacking everywhere, like cockroaches. SEIU is a huge source of GOTV efforts here in CA, or it was, anyway.
MobiusKlein
Run-offs? Ranked choice? There has to be some way to reduce the ratfucking
Chetan Murthy
I was reluctant to post this in the previous threads, b/c ….. they were somewhat respite, etc. But now that we’re back to politics and discussing the illegitimati ….. it seems ivermectin may cause male infertility. This is my shocked face.
https://twitter.com/jeek/status/1434693778246340610
For normal fertilization to occur the sperm functions must meet the minimum required sperm functional capacity as shown in table 1[10] which serve as normal control in this study. From the results obtained, it is evident that ivermectin therapy has significant adverse effects on the sperm functions of male onchocerciasis patients so treated. There was a significant reduction or drop in the sperm counts of the patients after their treatment with ivermectin. Furthermore, the study showed a significant and remarkable drop in the sperm motility of the patients after their treatment with ivermectin. As for the morphology of the sperm, there was a rise in the abnormal sperms after treatment compared with the morphology before the commencement of treatment. These changes no doubt are as results of the effects of the drug on the sperm function of the patients.
Damien
The biggest thing I’ve taken away from the pandemic is that people, on the whole, are so ungodly ignorant of anything that happened outside their direct experience that they might as well be bipedal golden retrievers. All the shit people take for granted, like the very concept of labor having value AT ALL, stems from decades of battle, sometimes very literally. This is true not only for labor rights, but ask people how we discovered DNA and they’ll talk about Watson & Crick like those jabronies did the actual research that led to the idea instead of coming up with the structure on acid. Oswald Avery is a name no one knows, but he is the reason we know DNA and it’s function.
Along with almost galactic levels of obliviousness, the pandemic has revealed how selfish a huge proportion of our fellow citizens are. These two things combine in toxic ways, and we are watching the degradation of important institutions because of their very effectiveness.
What happens next is a good question, but given the drooling borg’s continued assimilation of everything that stands in their way, I’m not sure it’s good.
And fuck Larry Elder
Chetan Murthy
@Damien:
I finished watching The Good Place during the pandemic (last winter, IIRC). And I remember very well the phrase (from a book title) “What We Owe To Each Other” as a kind of thru-line to the entire series. How ….. fitting then, that (as Damien notes) we’ve spent the last year-and-a-half reveling (some of us) in completely abrogating any sense of duty to each other, any sense of duty to the weakest, to the old, to the young, to anybody except (for some) our own selfish damn selves. “What do we owe to each other?” “Nuthin'”.
Jesus wept.
Mary G
Bannon’s got Bolsonaro pulling a Jan. 6th rerun in Brazil and looks like it could be working:
h/t Valdivia on Twitter
trollhattan
Thank you.
This stunk of a get-the-weirdo-on-the-school-board-and-see-what-happens scam and now here we are. Richard Brown is a piece of work and probably not easy to pry from the job, now that he’s taken it.
Yutsano
@Mary G: Guess what all the responses are to that tweet?
Brachiator
What a wild story.
Thank you very much for this.
Ian R
@feebog: Presumably one year terms, based on the “thirteen year reign of terror” that the propaganda tweet talked about.
opiejeanne
Ruemara, thanks for the report.That is infuriating for the politically engaged to witness.
I watch California from Seattle and worry because California will always be my home state, and I appreciate intelligent reporting on what the RW bastards are up to.
Mary G
Origuy
If Bolsonaro’s autogolpe succeeds, and it looks like it might, we will see what Trump wanted to achieve on Jan 6.
Coloradoguy
@Origuy: Mass murder.
bjacques
@Mary G: Jesus. Bring in the SWAT teams to disable the trucks and drivers. The stopped trucks will block the rest of the parade. Deploy other troops to guard the Supreme Court abd Chinese Embassy (!). Even if the protesters are white, for local values of white. They must be. They’re not wearing masks; yet another superspreader event.
The SEIU Local 1000 election reminds me of the Harris County Democrats installing as chair in the late 1980s one Claude Jones, a follower of Lyndon LaRouche, because his name sounded more “American” than that of his opponent who should have won but for member apathy. Fortunately, they found a way to handicap him until he quit or finished his term, I forget which.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I don’t know, a Libertarian Government Union sounds about right. My experience most Libertarians hold government jobs.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Off topic, but according to one study In 2011 Ivermectin causes sterility in men who take it . Now there is something to mention to your crazy uncle the next family get together.
https://www.scholarsresearchlibrary.com/articles/effects-of-ivermectin-therapy-on-the-sperm-functions-of-nigerian-onchocerciasis-patients.pdf
Tony Jay
Happens all over, including over here on the Island of Lost Marbles. Following the Right taking over the Labour Party the next step was to slide their placeman into the top post at the UNITE Union, which has been Labour’s biggest funder and had recently threatened to turn off the money hose in disgust at the Party’s hard rightwards turn and general political and financial incompetence. In a three-way race the ‘moderate-centrist’ candidate got a ton of free coverage in the Murdoch media slamming his opponents as ‘the radical Left’ (now where have I heard that before?), while the good old Guardian openly gloated over the prospect of a right-wing candidate slipping through with 1/3 of the Union vote. They appear to have shot themselves in the foot with the premature victory celebrations, though, since the Righty candidate came third and the Not Quite As Left Wing As The Other Guy But Still ‘Radical Left’ candidate became UNITE’s first female leader. Labour’s ‘anonymous Party official’ (for some reason these people never want to put a name to a statement) was reduced to telling the Guardian that this was still too a victory for the forces of Moderate-Centrism, because while the victorious candidate had spoken at length about targeting the Union’s cash at legal rather than political battles, she wasn’t going to do it as quickly and as openly as the evil radical leftist scum would have, so something, something, something, we’re all winners here, right?
Pricks.
Anyway, to balance out the justified contempt I have for that shitty rag and its garbage coverage of politics, the Guardian also has this article pointing out the vile abuse female Tennis players receive on social media. Hard to avoid the trolls when your professional status actually requires you to have a social media presence, as in, no social media presence, you can’t take part in these events or make any money. Since we can’t all be independently wealthy scions of Goodblood dynasties who choose to play purely for the love of the game, that’s a problem that clearly needs a root and branch solution ASAP, or talents like Osaka are going to be driven out of the sport.
Personally I shudder to think of the crap that’s going to be thrown at Britain’s 18 year old wunderkid Emma Raducanu if she ever stops winning matches at the US Open. Right now she’s young, brilliant and unstoppable, and it certainly doesn’t hurt her profile that she’s pretty as a picture, but when she “lets us all down” by failing to win the whole thing in straight sets you just know that the knives will come out for this Canadian born, Sino-Rumanian half-breed who thinks she can come over here and take all of our Tennis playing talent. Who does she think she is, and have you seen those pictures of her in The Sun parading her body around on that private beach? Dirty little strumpet, etc.
What a bloody world.
Ten Bears
I put a lot of money into SEIU: Oregon, I was there for them. But when harassed by a religiously racist, misogynous, homophobic, old testament authoritarian, dominionist no doubt Trump voting sure as hell looks, sounds and smells like it bigot with half my education and half my experience but none-the-less in a position to get away with harassing and ultimately forcing me to quit the career I had worked fifteen years and invested tens of thousands of dollars in educational expenses to have …
… they weren’t there for me.
prostratedragon
@bjacques: Similar thing happened around that same time in a race for Lt. Gov. of Illinois, where the party choice also had a long, German- or Austrian-sounding name:
Great was the mortification in the land, though unfortunately it had worn off by 2014 when Bruce Rauner was elected Gov. Noting that Thompson was a popular incumbent who would have been difficult to unseat at best, the alternative strategy worked well enough to prove the concept.
WereBear
@Ten Bears: That’s devastating. Not living up to any ideals.
Starfish
@Chetan Murthy: I wish you and others were aware of the history of what is going on here and not amplify stuff like this.
The history of the anti-medicine movement is “everything causes infertility.” This mostly pops up in response to things that prevent diseases that are transmitted by sex. The pill, antibiotics to treat syphilis, and the HPV vaccine are all things that were said to cause infertility because some religious folks really needed everyone else to be punished for sex. If they can’t punish people for enjoying sex, then where would Christianity be?
Anyway, those discussions from people who do not want anyone to have any fun ever spread to oppose vaccines in general.
Hitting the folks with the same nonsense that they spread based on one study is talking to stupid people in a language that they are accustomed to. However, amplifying this is going to lead people who need to take ivermectin for legitimate reasons to hesitate and ask about their fertility based on a single study.
I am going to have some tea to see if it causes infertility.
Woodrow/asim
Thank you, for saying this.
There’s a line of thought around how mostly male-identifying think about fertility that I think isn’t true. First: we (at least in my American-based observations/experience) are taught that we’ll always have fertility, and to never worry about it. From condoms are too much of a pain” to “I’ll always be fertile” to “the blue pill’ll take care of any problems,” we get fed a stream of crap about this for decades, that’s hard to penetrate, no matter your political alignment.
Moreover, to this people: They aren’t taking in any negative news at all, y’all, about this stuff. They aren’t going to be persuaded by facts, or even counter-lies. The stream of lies and word-of-mouth is something I suspect a lot of us outside of it just cannot comprehend; it’s like a secret language, which in itself helps lock us out, and them into spirals of belief and denial.
Unless you’ve got a talent for what is effectively deprogramming, I’d throw a caution on any play that seeks to bring truth and light into these situations.
What can happen, though, is what Starfish defines, above. And it feels, for a real-world analogue, similar to how the abuse of the polio vaccine in Pakistan to get Bin Laden has led, from what I hear, to a host of issues around any vaccine efforts in that country, or elsewhere in the region.
That does not seem a wise course, to emulate.
MomSense
First rate reporting, Rue. Thank you!!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Oh something the article brought up, the reason why the Walker, the former SEIU was so stridently pro-Democrat, even though she clearly had issues with booth Brown and Newsome, Arnold tried reducing the state employees to minimum wage. Walker just knew who the enemy was. Before that there was Pete Wilson who thought teachers were overpaid at 15 usd an hour.
“Government workers are overpaid” is a cornerstone of the California conservatives, not just the wingnuts, so if Richard Brown gets his wish in this recall he isn’t going to be too happy.
Is it conspiracy or is it stupidity, I am inclined towards stupidity so I think Richard Brown there is dumb enough to think the Republicans will see him and as a good German. After all he is a libertarian.
PaulWartenberg
it sounded like there was a lack of voter turnout in the first place.
there should be a rule for any local election that the turnout should be over 50 percent of the available voting population for it to count, to ensure you get a majority/plurality of support for the person winning that election.
AJ
@Mary G: thanks for raising this. I lived there almost a year and it breaks my heart and makes me so pissed to see this.
laura
I was on staff during the hostile corporate take over by what became Local 1000 and man, did Yvonne Walker hate us staff. It’s a sprawling organization that represents the majority of the state bargaining units. The inherent problem is that there is scant community of interest accross the units and unit 1 has always bristled against the union because of the computer science workers feel like they dont need a Union and because they are special unlike the rest of the workforce. And the freedom foundation fuckers now have direct access to public sector workers at work email addresses and they’ve spent every single minute since Janus was overturned urging opting out. As such, Local 1000 was primed for a Larry Brown and he’s taking the Local all the way down. I feel bad for the Membership as no good will come of this foolishness. If the Local isn’t in receivership by the international SEIU by year’s end, I’ll eat a bug because the mothership moves on per capita funds.
surfk9
I was a member of SEIU 1000 when I retired. I have no love for the leadership. My mother was an area president for the retired chapter of CSEA. She fought tooth and nail to try to prevent the hostile takeover of CSEA. As soon as they took over SEIU more than doubled the dues. I was not a fan.
glory b
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I’m okay with these people not reproducing, myself.