Will an East Coast Strike Derail Obama's Re-election Bid?

 Historically, followers of presidential campaigns have looked for an “October Surprise” – a news event with the potential to change the course of the election.  Over the past few decades, the “October Surprises” have included a false announcement of the Vietnam War winding down by then-President Johnson during the 1968 Humphrey-Nixon-Wallace contest; Henry Kissinger’s announcement that a Vietnam peace was “at hand” just before the 1972 Nixon-McGovern election; the 1992 (Bush-Clinton) breaking of the Iran-Contra affair; and the release of George W. Bush’s drunken driving arrest just before the 2000 Bush-Gore election.

But sometimes, the ‘surprise’ comes from elsewhere…such as when Iran announced that they would not release the American Embassy hostages just before the 1980 Carter-Reagan election.  And that could well be the case this year.

Yes, Mitt Romney might release his Tax Returns (or they may be released to media sources by hackers claiming to have obtained them).  

Or perhaps Benjamin Netanyahu will decide to launch a surgical strike against Iran’s nuclear complex, forcing President Obama into the position of taking a hawk-like military stance (which will disappoint progressives, but not be good enough for Neo-con Republicans).

Or maybe it will come in the form of a looming longshoremen’s strike that has somehow evaded news reports, but which could shut down 14 ports and 95% of all shipping traffic on the east coast.

On September 30, the employment contract between the U.S Maritime Alliance (representing container carriers and port operators) and the  International Longshoremen’s Association expires.  Talks for a new contract broke down on Aug. 22 over wages and benefits, with no clear path to agreement in view. The union had requested a "last best offer” from Management, and the Alliance Management refused.  The union said last week that it was now “making preparations” for a possible strike on Oct. 1.

At the urging of the Retail Industry Leaders Association and the National Retail Federation, President Obama has ordered mediators to reopen talks between the groups.  The breakdown in talks comes in the midst of a concerted effort by Philadelphia area port operators, in an alliance with Del Monte Brands, to transfer dock operations away from ILA workers and towards lower-paid laborers.   

“Many companies are making contingency plans, but clearly even the best plans will be problematic in the event of a full- scale shutdown at East and Gulf Coast ports,” said Peter Gatti, executive vice president of the National Industrial Transportation League this week.  “Even the potential shift of that freight will put extraordinary demands on all modes of transportation, particularly for rail.”

In 2002, U.S. West Coast ports closed for 10 days after the Pacific Maritime Association locked out members of the International Longshore and Warehouse union, who it said were intentionally slowing down work.  President George W. Bush ordered an end to the shutdown under the Taft-Hartley Act, but the short lock-out cost the U.S. economy more than $1 billion a day. 

The resolution – or not – of this situation could well be the “October surprise” for 2012.  If the President is able to secure a negotiated settlement, it will earn him political capital.

But if an agreement is not reached, it puts the President in a no-win situation: as long as the strike continues, the economy will be further depressed, and Republicans will seize on the opportunity to criticize the President and unions.  If the President steps in and orders the dockworkers back to work, he will be seen as betraying blue collar workers, unionists, and progressives.

I fully expect Obama to win re-election, based on today’s numbers and sentiments.

But if this is the “October Surprise,” all bets could be off - especially in the three critical coastal swing states of Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida...and heavily unionized states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

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Montréal: Student, Labor and Citizen Protests Grow

It started three months ago as a student-initiated protest against university tuition hikes.

By American standards – in fact, even by Canadian standards – the tuition that Québec students pay is very low. But the protest is not about the actual tuition figure, as much as it is about the principle of what education means in Québec society. The province’s notoriously low tuitions were instituted during the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s as a means of ensuring greater accessibility, especially among the francophone population that had long lagged behind the rest of Canada. Borrowing from the pages of America’s “Occupy” movement and the “Arab Spring” halfway around the world, the protests have come to embrace a wide spectrum of causes….and is coming to be known as the "Printemps Érable,” the “Maple Spring.”

And it is a movement that was launched by students – and by all measures, its growing.

Last week, the government negotiated an agreement with student leaders in an effort to end the 13-week walkout that included at $250 increase in tuition. But across Québec, the students who have been asked to approve the agreement are rejecting it in overwhelming numbers. As the possibility of finishing this semester looks less likely each day, students are delivering a message to the governing Liberal Party that they are not going to settle for a poor deal.

“I am surprised to see the impact on the semester is not the major preoccupation of students,” said Léo Bureau-Blouin, President of the Fédération Étudiante Collégiale du Québec (The Québec College Student Federation) “I didn’t realize how far they were willing to go to solve this crisis. Students are ready to make real sacrifices.”

Observers blame Education Minister Line Beauchamp for extending the crisis by not responding more quickly to concerns that were raised about the agreement. Worse, students say that government officials bragged that they had won on the tuition issue, which outraged students who had negotiated in good faith.

As the protests grow, they take on more of the look of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Signs have appeared opposing oil sands drilling, supporting gender equality, opposing the privatization of public services, and opposing the government’s plan to extract resources in the northern Québec wilderness (“Plan Nord”).

And now, political parties and labor unions have joined the students. Concordia political science professor Bruce Hicks described it this way:

“There has been an element involved in the student strike all along that I think grew out of the Occupy movement….the student protest movement has tapped into outrage over the economy and society and government from more moderate individuals, creating a sort of hybrid between an anarchist movement, but also a socially progressive protest vote.” (Precisely the sometimes uneasy but purposeful alliance that has characterized the American movement).

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the spokesperson for CLASSE, the largest and most militant of the three student federations orchestrating the strike, stated from the beginning that students’ fight was with Québec’s “greedy elite,” and that the strike would lead to a “much deeper, much more radical challenge of the direction Québec has been heading in recent years.”

Two major parties - the Parti Québécois and Québec Solidaire - have endorsed the student protests. Québec unions have donated C$60,000 to the student groups. The Ontario branches of the Canadian Union of Public Employees gave an additional $30,000.
“They can continue to count on our support in the future, we are against the tuition increase,” said Louis Roy, president of La Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux (CSN), one of the province’s largest unions.

Roy said his union, along with the Fédération des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Québec (The Worker’s Federation of Québec) and the Centrale des Syndicats du Québec (CSQ), have been working with the students for more than 18 months. The unions and the student federations are part of a group called the Alliance Sociale, which was formed in the fall of 2009 to oppose the Liberal government’s budget.The unions have also provided sound systems for demonstrations and organizational support.

Roy applauded the student’s negotiating skills with the government.

“Their ability to communicate is very good. They are young, but they are not children. They don’t need to be held by the hand.”
They also know how to leverage Montréal’s transit system.

Just as Twitter, Facebook, and text messages have become communication catalysts, the Métro has become the student’s trump card for physical movement. Police complain that protesters are able to shift their actions from one part of the city to another more quickly than police motorcycles or squad cars can move through city streets.

The Police have responded by posting helmeted transit security agents at the Métro station entrances and exits, donning riot gear, brandishing nightstick, and holding police dogs. But tens of thousands of Montréalers who use the line for commuting have grown disgusted – not with the students, but with police lines deployed at each station.

Insp. Alain Larivière, head of the Montréal Police Dept.’s Métro division, claims that Police are merely protecting commuters from protesters.

“The métro may be open, but we can’t just let (passengers) go out while a demonstration’s been declared illegal, while there’s an intervention in progress by the officers or the cavalry…”

Larivière later admitted that all of the demonstrations that have taken place within the Métro have been peaceful. In fact, of the 190 demonstrations staged during the protests, not once has the subway system’s operations being disrupted by the students.


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