Here is the problem with Chris Lehane going to work for the studios for me. Working for Democrats and Democratic causes means we are working to improve the lives of the many not the few. Going to work for these massive media conglomerates is the opposite. We are for people not profits. Unfortunately Chris Lehane has done this before and rather likes working for corporations. The huge piece of research on the Chris Lehane blog starts off with this quote:
"I like dealing with CEOs. I like taking strategies and tactics we used in the White House and applying them to the corporate world."
Chris Lehane decided that he was going to work for the huge movie studios and television companies and work to bust the union during a strike. You just don't do that as a Democratic operative. It is incompatible with Democratic values and impossible to justify. The studios were the ones who walked away from the negotiating table. Look, there is no way I and others would not be this riled up about a Democratic operative simply taking a gig working for any old corporation. It is the union busting that is an enormous problem. Undermining solidarity during a strike is the cardinal sin.
Now under Lehane's direction, the studios are attempting to divide the WGA membership and they are not being subtle about it. How else to describe the counters they have up on the newly redesigned AMPTP site. I first spotted them on a LAT banner ad. If you notice, the second banner is about the IATSE, whose leadership has not been supportive of the writers. They are modeled after the ones on the United Hollywood blog.
(Notice that the TNS survey they are crowing about on the top of the website is a "internet" survey and has absolutely no statistical value.)
This is part of a pattern of behavior from Chris Lehane, which Jane picked up on at Fire Dog Lake, but I want to pick up on the section titled: Lehane and the Bay Bridge Welders. It illustrates quite well Lehane's disregard of workers. This time it was not over being paid a fair wage, but over the worker's basic safety.
Guess who just hired Chris Lehane, the former Gore aide and consultant on the official "Fair Election Reform" (the Stephen Bing funded push against the Dirty Tricks Initiative)? Well, if you guessed the Film and TV Producers, you're right:
Seeking to shore up its flagging public image, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has turned to veteran political advisors from both sides of the aisle to guide its public relations battle with Hollywood's striking writers.
The alliance announced today that it had retained Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane, who have served as senior aides and advisors to President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore and other Democrats across the country. The group also said it hired Steve Schmidt, a close advisor to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who served as his campaign manager in 2006. (LA Times 12.05.07)
Apparently some Democratic consultants are willing to sell their services to the highest bidder regardless of the values wrapped up in those decisions. Fun times to be a Democratic consultant, huh?
As you may have noticed from recentposts, I'm a big fan of Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine. It's one of the best books published this decade, and provides perhaps the best overview of the last 30 years yet offered. Her argument is essentially this:
The shock doctrine, like all doctrines, is a philosophy of power. It's a philosophy about how to achieve your political and economic goals. And this is a philosophy that holds that the best way, the best time, to push through radical free-market ideas is in the aftermath of a major shock. Now, that shock could be an economic meltdown. It could be a natural disaster. It could be a war. But the idea, as you just saw in the film, is that these crises, these disasters, these shocks soften up whole societies. They discombobulate them. People lose their bearings. And a window opens up, just like the window in the interrogation chamber. And in that window, you can push through what economists call "economic shock therapy."
She also links this to torture - quoting from CIA interrogation manuals that explain how the application of shock can open a window in which the subject is weakened and suggestible, a window that torturers or free market economists can use to push through a radical agenda that might otherwise be resisted. This works on individuals, societies...and labor unions.
It's in this context that two recent posts from the United Hollywood blog should be understood. In it, they explain the basics of management, union-busting strategy - that a successful anti-union strategy relies on precisely these tactics of terror, disorientation, and shock to destroy worker solidarity. That the writers appear to understand this could give them a powerful advantage in their ongoing strike, and these insights not only suggest how unions can win, but how the shock doctrine and union busting are inextricably tied together.
