The Bushites continue to shape a new American empire by inciting and feeding on the national state of siege sentiments born of September 11^th.  United States unilateralism and war mongering abroad privileges American corporate interests over all others.  It prepares the ground for real conflict with the business and financial entities of our one-time allies.  The new foreign policy makes the world safe for the export of genetically modified food, for U.S. oil interests, and for the enrichment of domestic weapons manufacturers.  Foreign nations, even wartime allies, need not apply.

Sparing no effort in the aid of U.S. capital, the Bush administration has, on the domestic legislative front, managed to heap tax breaks on the super rich.  This, while denying the child tax credit to the poor, defunding even his own No Child Left Behind initiative, and bleeding the states of the finances that enable them to provide even the minimal vital services they do. 

As the 2004 election season approaches, labor’s political presence and influence have reached a new low.  The frightening adventurism of the administration’s foreign policy and the impending collapse of our domestic economy nonetheless present the labor movement with a grim opportunity and a grave responsibility.   As our government continues its saber rattling, further enflaming anti-American sentiments and attacks, and as the economic suffering of millions of Americans deepens, labor and its progressive allies could find the wherewithal to begin to dismantle an empire built on very shaky ground.

In this issue of New Labor Forum, we endeavor to analyze the character and potential debilities of the new empire.  In an article on the unruly economics of empire, Walden Bello argues that the Bush administration has created a Pax Americana, which controls subordinate nations through the threat of military force in the service of domestic, rather than global, corporate interests.  This Pax Americana, Bello suggests, contains particular inherent weaknesses that expose it to attack from without by subordinated populations, and may give rise to increased domestic and international opposition.

The other, yet only partially exposed, flank of the Bush administration is our dangerously weak economy, with rising unemployment, decreasing consumption and deep stagnation. Two articles in this issue take the measure of the domestic suffering embodied in the Bush administration’s economic policies.  In the first, James Parrott examines the economic crises faced by state governments throughout the country as they confront the worst economic downturn in decades, further exacerbated by decreased federal aid to the states.  In the second article, David Hilfiker reviews the relentless, and little discussed, legislative initiatives of the current administration that amount to full-blown class warfare.  Making the public aware of these initiatives will prove crucial to progressive efforts to turn the political tide.

If labor is to play any role in these endeavors it will need to represent much more than the current 13.2 percent of U.S. workers.  It will need to organize millions, rather than thousands, of workers each year of the foreseeable future.  Better organizing strategies, no matter how sophisticated or well-endowed, argues Dan Clawson, will not enable labor to do that.  Only the building of a movement suffused with a broad vision and the energy of huge numbers of people willing to invent new forms of protest, suggests Clawson, will enable labor to reinvent its lost power.   This article is the second in an on-going series of essays designed to raise the most fundamental theoretical, analytical, and organizational questions, to take nothing for granted in addressing the dire straits of the American labor movement.

The work/family tensions that squeeze so many families, and especially working mothers, may provide an issue upon which the labor movement could rebuild itself. Labor could reach the hearts and minds of the American public by spearheading bold efforts to keep working parents from having to choose between their children’s well-being and their own job status and security.  Here, Sue Cobble discusses the history and current condition of labor’s efforts to weigh in on the work/family dilemma.

While work/family pressures might help ignite a labor-backed social movement of the sort Clawson calls for, that or any movement will depend upon new kinds of leaders, politically experienced and audacious enough to take the necessary risks.  Roger Toussaint, President of Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union, may prove just such a leader.  Here, Kim Philips-Fein analyzes Toussaint’s origins as a Trinidadian radical, his immigration to New York City, activism as a local 100 dissident, and subsequent rise to lead the recent high-profile negotiations of the country’s biggest mass transit system. 

In our last issue, we published a provocative argument by Stephen Lerner, urging the restructuring of the house of labor along industrial lines to facilitate massive organizing victories.  In the current issue we seek to stimulate discussion of this important proposal by running a series of responses to his article by Jane Slaughter, Elizabeth Bunn and Simon Greer; and Lerner’s replies to his critics.   We open this dialogue to our readers, inviting letters and ideas for further articles on this topic.

Also by way of call and response, we publish two reactions by Bob Muehlenkamp and Jeremy Brecher to an article in our last issue by Peter Rachleff on the near demise and uncertain future of the strike as premier tool in labor’s arsenal.  Rachleff presents his counter reply here, and will lead a panel on the strike for New Labor Forum at the North American Labor History Conference this fall at Wayne State University.

In our Books and the Arts section, the American political landscape resurfaces in a review by Nelson Lichtenstien of The Emerging Democratic Majority.  So too, the question of the strike reappears, in the form of a review by Robert Ingalls of Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth Century America.  We are also pleased to run a commentary by Paul Buhle accompanied by a selection of Walker Evansesque photographs from Julia Clinker’s A Life in Coal, a poignant photo-memoir of her own West Virginia mining community.  Switching gears, you’ll also find reviews by Ian Blecker of SUVs¾The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way; by Nancy DellaMattera of two recent books on labor education, Education for Changing Unions and Teaching for Change: Popular Education and the Labor Movement; and by Patrick McCreery on the role that race, class, and gender played in The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction.  All this, plus a film review of Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing by Leonard Quart and a selection of working-class poetry, makes this an abundant cultural offering.