A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement (Century Foundation Books (Cornell Paperback))

A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement (Century Foundation Books (Cornell Paperback)) Review

A Century Foundation Book In A New New Deal, the labor movement leaders Amy B. Dean and David B. Reynolds offer a bold new plan to revitalize American labor activism and build a sense of common purpose between labor and community organizations. Dean and Reynolds demonstrate how alliances organized at the regional level are the most effective tool to build a voice for working people in the workplace, community, and halls of government. The authors draw on their own successes to offer in-depth, contemporary case studies of effective labor-community coalitions. They also outline a concrete strategy for building power at the regional level. This pioneering model presents the regional building blocks for national change. A diverse audienceboth within the labor movement and among its allieswill welcome this clear, detailed, and inspiring presentation of regional power-building tactics, which include deep coalition-building, leadership development, policy research, and aggressive political action. A New New Deal explores successful coalitions forged in Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, San Jose, New Haven, and Atlanta toward goals such as universal health insurance for children and sensible redevelopment efforts that benefit workers as well as businesses. The authors view partnerships between labor and grassroots organizations as a mutually beneficial strategy based on shared goals, resulting in a broadened membership base and increased organizational capacity. They make the innovative argument that the labor movement can steward both industry and community and make manifest the ways in which workplace battles are not the parochial concerns of isolated workers, but a fundamental struggle for America's future. Drawing on historical parallels, the authors illustrate how long-term collaborations between labor and community organizations are sowing the seeds of a new New Deal.

Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement

Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement Review

Nowhere in the world has organized crime infiltrated the labor movement as effectively as in the United States. Yet the government, the AFL-CIO, and the civil liberties community all but ignored the situation for most of the twentieth century. Since 1975, however, the FBI, Department of Justice, and the federal judiciary have relentlessly battled against labor racketeering, even in some of the nation's most powerful unions.

Mobsters, Unions, and Feds is the first book to document organized crime's exploitation of organized labor and the massive federal cleanup effort. A renowned criminologist who for twenty years has been assessing the government's attack on the Mafia, James B. Jacobs explains how Cosa Nostra families first gained a foothold in the labor movement, then consolidated their power through patronage, fraud, and violence and finally used this power to become part of the political and economic power structure of Twentieth century urban America.

Since FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's death in 1972, federal law enforcement has aggressively investigated and prosecuted labor racketeers, as well as utilized the civil remedies provided for by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) statute to impose long-term court-supervised remedial trusteeships on mobbed-up unions. There have been some impressive victories, including substantial progress toward liberating the four most racketeer-ridden national unions from the grip of organized crime, but victory cannot yet be claimed.

The only book to investigate how the mob has exploited the American labor movement, Mobsters, Unions, and Feds is the most comprehensive study to date of how labor racketeering evolved and how the government has finally resolved to eradicate it.

Iran, The Green Movement and the USA: The Fox and the Paradox

Iran, The Green Movement and the USA: The Fox and the Paradox Review

Iran, The Green Movement and the USA presents the dilemma that the West faces in dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran and their nuclear armament, and how the unfolding civil rights movement in Iran (the Green Movement) will be affected by this interaction. Iranian scholar and author Hamid Dabashi argues that if Obama negotiates with Ahmadinejad, he will further strengthen the IRI regionally and legitimize Ahmadinejad's otherwise troubled presidency internationally; and if he were not to do so and opt for further economic sanctions and/or military strikes, he will paradoxically strengthen the IRI regionally and altogether destroy the domestic opposition and the budding Green Movement. This elegantly written book presents an Iran weak in domestic affairs, but strong in regional geopolitics, providing the reader with a dynamic picture of the region, and a purposeful analytic of how to understand and deal with it. It also features a short history of how the US and Iran were placed in this confrontational position and who their respective allies in the region are.