John Nichols | The Nation

Protesters rally at the Wisconsin State Capitol, March 12, 2011. (Reuters/Allen Fredrickson)

The makers of We Are Wisconsin—the critically acclaimed documentary about the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising and its aftermath—are sponsoring screenings of the film Monday in communities across the country as part of a National Day of Recommitment to labor rights.

“The day is the second anniversary of the signing by Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin Act 10, which ended 60 years of progress for Wisconsin workers,” note the filmmakers. “The Walker assault led to battles all over America, challenging us all to stand up for working families, and to organize to put our country back on the right track.”

“Recommitment” is a well-chosen word.

Despite the battering that unions have taken in recent years—not just in Wisconsin but nationally—a recommitment to labor rights is really a renewal of ideas and values that America once exported to the world.

There was a time, within the living memory of millions of Americans, when this country championed democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the rights of labor in the same breath.

When the United States occupied Japan after World War II, General Douglas MacArthur and his aides worked with Japanese citizens to write a Constitution that would assure Hideki Tojo’s militarized autocracy was replaced with democracy. Fully aware that workers would need to have a voice in the new Japan, they included language that explicitly recognized that “the right of workers to organize and to bargain and act collectively is guaranteed.”

When the United States occupied Germany after World War II, General Dwight David Eisenhower and his aides urged German citizens to write a Constitution that would assure that Adolf Hitler’s fascism was replaced with a democracy. Recognizing that workers would need to have a voice in the new Germany, they included a provision that explicitly declared: “The right to form associations to safeguard and improve working and economic conditions shall be guaranteed to every individual and to every occupation or profession. Agreements that restrict or seek to impair this right shall be null and void; measures directed to this end shall be unlawful.”

When former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the International Commission on Human Rights, which drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that would in 1948 be adopted by the United Nations as a global covenant, Roosevelt and the drafters included a guarantee that “everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”

For generations, Americans accepted the basic premise that labor rights are human rights. When this country counseled other countries on how to forge civil and democratic societies, Americans recognized that the right to organize a trade union—and to have that trade union engage in collective bargaining as an equal partner with corporations and government agencies—must be protected.

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Now, with those rights under assault, it is wise, indeed, to recommit to the American ideal that working people must have a right to organize and to make their voices heard in a free and open society. As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., said fifty years ago:

History is a great teacher. Now everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.

History remembers, as should we. A recommitment to labor rights is a recommitment to ideals that enlarged America and made real the promise of democracy.

(As part of the National Day of Recommitment, We Are Wisconsin showings will be held across the United States. For more information on National Day of Recommitment events, go to: wearewisconsinthefilm.com/.)

TAKE ACTION:  Take the Pledge to Stand Up for Workers' Rights

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder presents his third state budget before the state Legislature, Thursday, February 7, 2013. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

Recalling the partial meltdown of a nearby nuclear power plant a decade earlier, and a book that revealed the extent of the crisis, Gil Scott Heron sang in 1977, “We Almost Lost Detroit.”

The city survived, and remains home to 700,000 Americans and the symbolic center of the nation’s auto industry. But after decades of neglect by federal and state officials, and a meltdown of American manufacturing, Detroit is facing hard economic times.

Detroit is up against plenty of threats. But the most pressing one today is political.

If Michigan Governor Rick Snyder gets his way, Detroit runs the risk of losing democracy.

Snyder, a Republican who led the charge for Michigan’s enactment of an anti-labor “right-to-work” law last year, is targeting Detroit for a state takeover that will disempower the elected mayor and city council and give authority over the city’s finances, service delivery and direction to an appointed “emergency manager.”

The dramatic move, which is opposed by local officials and community activists, seems all but certain to be made within days. Snyder signals that he is determined to go ahead, employing the authority that he has taken up for himself to disempower local elected officials and replace them with an appointee who can impose cuts to public services, toss out policies established by the voters and their elected representatives and trash contracts with unions representing municipal employees.

As significantly, the emergency manager has the power to begin bartering off Detroit’s assets in a frenzy that could privatize waterfront recreation facilities, museums and public utilities.

The Reverend D. Alexander Bullock, a prominent local pastor who serves as president of the Detroit chapter of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, tells local reporters that Snyder’s intended move is nothing less than “the death of democracy in Detroit.”

His point is well taken. Detroit City Council member Ken Cockrel Jr. says “strong, independent-minded [citizens] want to help the city” by seeking and holding local elected positions have every reason to ask: “Why should I run for public office in the city of Detroit if the only thing I’m going to have the authority to do is pass out resolutions and kiss babies because an [emergency manager] is the one calling all the shots?”

Snyder is preparing to do by fiat what he and his political allies could not do at the polls: take charge of local government in Michigan’s largest city. In the 2012 election, Democrat Barack Obama received 98 percent of the almost 300,000 votes cast in Detroit, while Republican Mitt Romney took just over 2 percent. No Republican contender for federal, state or local office won more than 6 percent of the vote in the city.

Yet, now, a Republican governor will set the city’s agenda as part of a statewide power grab. If the Detroit takeover is implemented, it is estimated that almost 50 percent of Michigan’s African-American population will live in communities that are run not be local elected officials but by gubernatorial appointees.

Michigan voters rejected Snyder’s approach last fall, voting in a statewide referendum to scrap the emergency-manager law. But Snyder and the Republican legislature turned around and wrote new legislation that gives the governor authority to—in the words of state Representative Rose Mary Robinson, a Detroit Democrat—make moves “without debate, without democratic involvement, without the people’s involvement.”

Detroit is Michigan’s largest city, and the governor’s plan has drawn national notice.

“In this particular case, you have to in some degree look at it as a hostile takeover,” explains David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political Studies. A veteran scholar of urban affairs who has tracked the rise of African-American elected officials in America, Bositis argues that “Detroit is a very Democratic city and it’s being taken over by a very Republican and conservative state government.”

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Snyder says the move is necessary because—like many great industrial cities that have lost the factories that provided employment and tax revenues—Detroit’s finances are in rough shape. That’s true enough. And it is true that local officials have had a very hard time dealing with the issues that arise when a city’s tax base is disappearing.

But what Snyder does not mention is that the state he runs has played a role in Detroit’s decline by withholding financial assistance that is due to the city.

The Detroit News notes that the city’s elected representatives are angry with the state for failing to provide over $220 million in revenue-sharing payments.

The money was supposed to be paid the city after it capped income tax rates. But even as Detroit’s economic circumstance worsened, Snyder refused to provide the needed assistance.

“Why not give the city its revenue sharing?” asks State Representative Brian Banks, a Democrat whose district takes in a portion of Detroit’s northeast side. “Why not start giving a portion of it?”

“The governor won’t admit that the state is culpable in why and how Detroit has got here,” State Senator Bert Johnson, a Highland Park Democrat, told the News. “If you cut revenue sharing, you cut money for the Police Department that has to manage the 139 square miles that is Detroit.”

Why?

The concern on the ground in Detroit is that Snyder is not really interested in stabilizing Detroit’s finances.

For all the hits it takes in the media, Detroit is a city with tremendous public assets, including Belle Isle, a 982-acre island park in the Detroit River, which is managed by the Detroit Recreation Department. It’s got public utilities, such as the Detroit Department of Water and Sewerage. Even the Detroit Institute of the Arts, which has an art collection valued at more than $1 billion, could be up for grabs.

As the Metropolitan AFL-CIO noted, the governor’s move “will benefit out of town creditors and make our communities less livable.”

And it will all happen without the approval of the voters or their elected representatives.

That’s the fundamental challenge.

In tough times, under pressure from lenders and taxpayers, cities often make cuts. They even privatize services and sell off public facilities.

But under Snyder’s emergency manager law, Detroit’s elected officials won’t be making any of those calls.

An appointee of a Republican governor will be doing do.

This is not what the voters of Detroit asked for. Last fall, they had an opportunity to vote on whether the state should maintain the emergency manager law. Eighty-two percent of Detroit residents voted “no.”

“When times are tough,” local union officials said in a statement released after the governor’s announcement, “it is especially important that decisions are made democratically and locally.”

That’s an essential American principle that Governor Snyder seeks to abandon with a power grab that should unsettle Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. What’s happening in Detroit is not what democracy looks like.

Who’s to blame for debt and economic disarray? As Allison Kilkenny writes, Occupy activists are shifting the debate—while also helping people recoup their losses.

The Federal Palace of Switzerland, which houses parliament and other government offices. (Wikimedia Commons)

Does anyone seriously doubt that, if America had the same national referendum system that Switzerland does, voters in the United States would vote just as aggressively as the Swiss have to curb CEO abuses?

Actually, the 68 percent support for Sunday’s Swiss referendum that gives shareholders broad new powers to curb excessive pay for bankers and corporate executives might well be shy of the mark that the US could hit.

Polls of American voters have regularly shown that over 70 percent favor restrictions on executive compensation, with even self-identified conservatives registering majority support for clamping down on CEOs.

And rightly so. It is not jealousy that motivates concerns about CEO pay. As the AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch campaign notes, when CEO pay rises so too does income inequality. In 2010, as the United States emerged from the depths of the Bush recession, a study by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez found that the top 1 percent of Americans captured 93 percent of the growth in income.

Worse yet, CEOs use their money to game the system so that they get richer while the great mass of Americans are squeezed. More than 120 CEOs are currently supporting billionaire Pete Peterson’s “Fix the Debt” campaign, which is chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. A deficit-reduction plan proposed by Bowles and Simpson last month would slash cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients while at the same time reducing the top marginal tax rate for corporations and the wealthy.

In Switzerland, anger at “golden handshake” and “golden parachute” deals for executives who ran corporations poorly and seemed to be more concerned for their own good than for the long-term economic prosperity of their country, led by small businessman and parliamentarian Thomas Minder to mount a populist campaign to increase the authority of shareholders to regulate errant CEOs.

As in the United States, that’s the sort of proposal that gets a lot of talk but that was not likely to go far in the corridors of political power in Switzerland. Luckily, Switzerland has a long history of allowing citizens to initiate and implement legislative changes. Under Swiss law, any issue can be put to a national referendum if supporters of a vote attain 100,000 petition signatures seeking the test. In recent years, the Swiss have voted on people’s initiatives to guarantee “six weeks of vacation for everyone,” to put an “end to the limitless construction of second homes” that crowd Alpine villages, to expand the ability of tax-supported building society savings to finance energy saving and environmental measures, and to require money gained from maintaining casinos be used for the public interest.

Minder, who has been campaigning for years to address excessive pay for executives he refers to as “losers of the century” and “studs in pinstripes,” was elected to the Swiss Senate as an independent (who has since sided with conservatives on some issues and the Greens on others) in 2011. He agitated on the inside of government for moves to empower shareholders, but quickly turned to the referendum route. Condemned as a “loner” and criticized for being uncompromising, Minder went up against the political and economic establishment in Switzerland, a country that has long been a haven for multinational corporations and banks. His “Minder Initiative” drew aggressive opposition from prominent business and political leaders. But it made sense to voters, especially as Minder explained: “I never said that my goal was the reduction of salaries. I just want shareholders to take responsibility for the levels of remuneration. If the shareholders want to waste company money by paying exorbitant amounts, that’s their problem.”

At the very least, the sweeping victory for reform in Switzerland has sent a signal. One of the leading newspapers in the banking center of Zurich, Tages-Anzeiger, observed Monday morning that the decision was “a vote in favour of decency and fair salaries.” The vote “does not above all express envy,” the newspaper’s editorial continued, “but a feeling that company managers have been ransacking the coffers at the expenses of society.”

The Minder Initiative serves as an important model for US discussions about increasing shareholder rights. And that discussion can and should go well beyond the question of CEO pay.

In 2010, the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling removed barriers to unlimited corporate spending on US political campaigns. At the same time, highly compensated CEOs are among the biggest direct donors not just to individual campaigns but to so-called “Super PACs” that flood the airwaves with negative advertising.

The Citizens United ruling will ultimately need to be addressed either by a reversal of the court’s decision or by a constitutional amendment. But of the immediate fixes that have been proposed, one of the best is the suggestion that shareholders be given the right to vote on corporate political expenditures. Britain has such a law. But the United States does not. As a result, notes the Brennan Center, the “Citizens United decision opened a loophole in which one group of Americans—shareholders in publicly traded companies—must routinely support political goals that they may reject. Under Citizens United, corporations can spend directly from their treasuries to influence elections. When shareholders’ invested money is spent on politics, millions of Americans are stuck unknowingly contributing to political causes they may not themselves support.”

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In 2011, Congressman Michael Capuano (D-MA) introduced an American Shareholder Protection Act to empower shareholders to vote on whether to allow CEOs and corporate boards to spend company money on political campaigns. “Shareholders—not the CEO and not the board of directors—are the real owners of any publicly traded corporation, and the decision should be theirs,” argued Public Citizen in campaigning for the measure, which attracted forty-nine co-sponsors.

Public Citizen has also led the campaign to get the Obama administration to crackdown on federal contractors that use corporate money—from accounts padded with taxpayer dollars—to fund campaigns. Which raises an interesting question: Could the president issue an executive order giving shareholders of companies that contract with the government the authority to decide whether those firms should play politics with corporate money?

The Swiss vote for the Minder Initiative is drawing a lot of attention in the United States.

That’s good. Hopefully, it will lead to greater pressure for reducing excessive CEO pay.But it is essential to recognize that simply regulating CEOs is not enough.

Shareholders should be empowered in the US, as they have been in Switzerland. “The shareholders are the owners of the company,” explains Julie Goodridge, CEO of NorthStar Asset Management of Boston, a socially active investment firm. “They need to be voting on these kinds of contributions.”

That’s right.

As Public Citizen notes, “Anyone with a 401(k) invested in stocks or mutual funds—nearly half of all households today—has a stake in how the corporate money in those funds is spent. Passage of a Shareholder Protection Act would help the public hold corporations accountable for their political behavior.”

And, make no mistake, if the United States had a national referendum model like Switzerland, we would not have to wait for Congress to act. The voters would pass a Shareholder Protection Act. And probably by a wider margin than Switzerland’s 68 percent.

The Obama administration has been a revolving door for corporate leaders. Read Josh Eidelson and Lee Fang’s analysis of Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget—the president of the Walmart Foundation.

Robin Kelly celebrates her special primary election win for Illinois' 2nd Congressional District. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Robin Kelly, who as a young state representative sponsored gun-safety legislation with state Senator Barack Obama, swept to victory Tuesday night in an Illinois US House primary that sent a powerful signal about the National Rifle Association’s dwindling influence within the Democratic Party.

Kelly won 58 percent of the vote in a crowded field, easily defeating former Congresswoman Debbie Halvorson and other Democrats to win the nomination to replace former Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., as the representative from Illinois’s 2nd district.

In a multiracial district that includes parts of Chicago, as well as suburbs and rural regions of a district that stretches across northeastern Illinois, Halvorson began the race as the front runner. In addition to her status as a former House member, she was the only white candidate in a field where the African-American vote was divided among more than a dozen contenders.

After the Newtown, Connecticut, shootings focused the attention of the country—and Illinois—on the gun debate, however, Kelly made support for gun-safety legislation central to her campaign.

Kelly’s “Help Me Fight Gun Violence” message united African-American and progressive white voters against Halvorson, who had accepted NRA support in previous races and who continued to support NRA positions on many issues.

Though President Obama, who has made te fight for gun-safety legislation a priority of his second term, stayed out of the race, Kelly promised to champion legislation backed by the president—who her ads noted she had worked with a decade ago, when they both served in the Illinois legislature.

As she claimed victory Tuesday night, Kelly told her backers, “Today you did more than cast a vote. You did more than choose a Democratic candidate for Congress…You sent a message that was heard around our state and across the nation; a message that tells the NRA that their days of holding our country hostage are coming to an end.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has pledged to fight the NRA’s political influence nationwide, used his Independence USA political action committee to air more than $2 million to oppose Halvorson and back Kelly.

The Illinois Rifle Association, an NRA affiliate, backed Halvorson with late-stage mailings.

But it was Kelly’s steady focus on the gun debate that gained her the upper hand in the race.

The NRA and its apologists will, of course, claim that the Illinois district was a bad battleground for the group and its message. Illinois is not West Virginia or North Dakota, after all. And the Chicago area has bitter experience with gun violence, as Kelly noted in a campaign that focused on the anger and pain felt in neighborhoods where too many young lives have been lost to shootings.

But advocates for tougher gun laws recognized the significance of the Illinois result.

“Robin Kelly’s victory tonight is a withering blow to the NRA and others who think we shouldn’t do anything to prevent the gun violence that took the lives of 20 children in Connecticut in December and ravages the streets of cities like Chicago every single day,” announced Arshad Hasan, the executive director of Democracy for America, which backed Kelly. “This was the first time since the tragedy of Newtown that advocates for gun violence prevention have taken on the NRA and their allies—and we won. We’re incredibly proud of the over $15,000 and hundreds of volunteer hours Democracy for America members contributed to Kelly’s win tonight, because we know she’ll fight in Congress for the stronger, common sense gun laws that most Americans support.”

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Whatever the dynamic of the district and the state, there is no question that Halvorson had initial advantages that were undone by her association with the NRA and by Kelly’s decision to run on a five-point pledge that declared she would work to:

1. Pass a comprehensive ban on assault weapons.

2. Eliminate the gun show loophole.

3. Pledge never to receive support from groups that oppose reasonable gun safety legislation.

4. Ban high capacity ammunition magazines.

5. Support laws that prohibit conceal-and-carry permits.

“While we don’t know who will represent Illinois’ second district in Congress, we do know that addressing the issue of gun violence will be among the very first issues they face,” Kelly declared early in the campaign. “I believe we need more leaders in Congress addressing the issue of gun violence in our cities and our communities. For this reason, I believe we must all speak with one voice on this urgent matter.”

Primary voters in the 2nd district of Illinois spoke with that united voice Tuesday. And they said “no” to the NRA. Loudly. Perhaps so loudly that Democrats in Congress, many of whom have been cautious gun-safety advocates, will help Robin Kelly fight gun violence.

Why won't Rahm Emanuel apologize for police brutality in Chicago? Read Flint Taylor's take.