Rauner, Emanuel both likely to be tagged with United Steelworkers strike

Oil refinery workers represented by the United Steelworkers union across the nation – including at the BP refinery in Whiting, Ind., near the Illinois/Indiana border – have been on strike for more than a month; and that could become an issue that our top political people are likely to get tagged with if the Chicago Teachers Union gets its way.

The teachers union issued a statement Monday saying it fully supported the striking union members, who walked off the job Feb. 1 when they were unable to come to agreement on new health and safety regulations at the refineries.

THE LABOR DISPUTE began in Texas and has spread to 15 facilities across the country. None are technically within Illinois, although that Whiting refinery is capable of generating a stink that sometimes can be sensed – depending on how the wind blows – at the far southeast corner of Chicago.

The teachers union decided to show labor solidarity by reminding us that our new governor is not all that sympathetic toward organized labor and that Bruce Rauner “attacks Illinois unions and worker compensation laws that keep workers safe.”

The union didn’t mention Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Monday’s statement, but I’m sure it is just a matter of time before they start smacking him with anti-union cries – considering how clear union President Karen Lewis has made it that she wants "Anybody But Rahm" to be mayor and that she supports the bid of Jesus Garcia in the April 7 run-off election.

“It is incumbent upon Illinois political and business leaders to reject the race to the bottom promoted by the anti-union attacks of Gov. Rauner and instead recognize the rights of workers and the importance of their unions to mitigate negative externalities in the workplace and beyond,” the union wrote.

I’M SURE THAT Rauner (and Emanuel) backers will contend that this particular strike doesn’t impact Illinois and ought to be considered irrelevant to our local issues.

But when one comes across as hard-core anti-labor as Rauner does, it is only natural that he’s going to get bashed by some of this strike’s particular trash talk.

Particularly if they think it can result in political support from people who already are wary of trusting the new governor and the incumbent mayor.

“Illinois political leaders can address the widening gulf between rich and poor in the state and the nation by actively promoting unionization, halting the attack on worker pensions and demanding higher taxes for the wealthy,  an approach that has dramatically improved state budgets for the people of Minnesota and California,” the union wrote.

ALTHOUGH I WONDER if bringing up those states is counter-productive, since the kind of measures Rauner has mentioned to bolster the Illinois economy seem to be moving us toward the “right-to-work” laws in places like Mississippi and Alabama – which imposed them out of an ideological belief that the existence of unions WAS the problem that business interests should not have to address.

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the teachers union would find some solidarity with the steelworkers union. One of the teachers union’s area vice-presidents is Susan Garza – who also is the 10^th Ward aldermanic candidate in the April 7 run-off and the daughter of long-time United Steelworkers local President Ed Sadlowski.

They will keep up the rhetoric meant to fight back against the governor’s rhetoric that is meant to demonize labor. Even if it means bringing up a strike that technically isn’t local.

I’m just waiting to see and hear what they will say if it turns out that gasoline prices wind up increasing significantly in coming weeks since about one-fifth of the nation’s refining capacity is impacted. It’s Rauner’s fault that we could be paying near $4 per gallon for gasoline, except for the part of the equation that can be blamed on Rahm!

  -30-

Obama should be thankful he got this far without significant blame for BP oil spill

President Barack Obama says he plans to pre-empt our television programming Tuesday night so he can speak to the nation about the grave environmental mess created some two months ago when a BP oil rig began spewing the substance into the Gulf of Mexico.

Of course, the conservative pundits are going to try to find ways to trivialize the moment – hence Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., going on the Sunday morning network talk shows and saying it wouldn’t have taken him more than 50 days to want to kick some “A-double-S” on this issue.

YET OBAMA OUGHT to consider himself lucky in one sense, because the public thus far has had the sense to see this as a problem caused, and compounded, by the one-time British Petroleum.

The amount of rhetoric that seeks to blame Obama for the situation in the gulf – oil washing ashore in Louisiana and along the Florida coast, thereby killing the tourist trade that many of those communities rely upon for their economic survival – has mostly come from such hard-core partisan nutcases that real people have enough sense to dismiss it as trash talk.

How much longer will this last?

Probably not much longer. After all, many people were desperate to believe that the company itself could control the situation before it could become an environmental disaster of historic proportions. Obviously, they failed.

SO NOW, WE’RE in a case where on top of all the other problems and situations our federal government must address, it seems they’re also going to have to deal with restoration of the gulf – which likely will suffer for decades before things are restored to what they once were.

That is, if they are ever fully restored.

If anything, I see this particular Obama speech as an attempt by the president to pre-empt criticism from regular people. (The nutcases will always behave like malcontents).

Just last week, the Gallup Organization released a poll saying that 40 percent of people surveyed approved of the way Obama was handling himself with regards to the oil spill, while 46 percent disapproved. Not that this issue dominates the way people think of the president – Gallup also had Obama with a 47 percent approval rating overall, compared to 44 percent who disapprove of his job performance.

IT SEEMS TO be a partisan thing – 18 percent of Republicans approved of Obama’s handling of the oil spill, and 14 percent of his job performance overall. Among his so-called Democratic allies, 62 percent approved of Obama and the oil, while 75 percent approved of his job performance.

Among those who insist on calling themselves political “independents” (a.k.a., too wishy-washy to pick a political party), the figures are 35 percent backing Obama on oil and 43 percent backing him overall.

As the poll itself notes, the biggest dropoff is from Democrats. My guess is that Obama wants to appear to be doing something so as to keep that 13 percent gap of Democrats who like his job performance but think he’s screwing up in the gulf from getting larger – just like the blotches on various weather report radar screens are doing these days when they show us just how big the oil spill has become.

I must admit to being appalled whenever I see those projections of just how large the contaminated area will become – particularly when they show an oil spill headed south down the Florida coast and then swinging around and headed into the Atlantic Ocean and up the U.S. coast, possibly as far as Washington itself.

YET I FIND it hard to believe that there was much more the federal government could do in those early days. Which is why I am reluctant to dump all over the president. He may be screwing up on other issues, including immigration reform, but he hasn’t blown this one.

Yet!

It’s just that I can’t help envision how nasty the Republican and conservative rhetoric would have been had the Environmental Protection Agency immediately rushed to the area to strong-arm the situation away from BP.

We’d have heard the same conservative nitwits who have engaged in what trash talk has taken place complaining that the federal government was meddling with the affairs of business, and possible acting in ways that would exacerbate the problem and screw up the BP public image in ways that would hurt their future profitability.

WE’D HAVE HEARD all the talk about Obama being a socialist who should learn that the “American Way” includes backing off and not presuming that government can “fix” the problem.

Of course, that is all ridiculous. In fact, this situation may very well show us the type of incident where federal government is best positioned to address a problem – one that has spread across so many states (I just read a report about how Utah thinks they will be affected) that it would be ridiculous for us to expect each one to have its own policy for handling cleanup.

Particularly if this spill also winds up spreading south and west toward Mexico and the Caribbean islands. Then it becomes an international issue. Do we really want Mississippi state officials doing our negotiating?

So now, we get to wait until Tuesday when Obama gives us his address that causes a segment of our population to rant and rage that “there’s nothing good” on television, then we will get the punditry analyzing his every word for days thereafter.

WILL THE PRESIDENT give us an address similar to his comments in the days following the “discovery” of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright – which many remember as an eloquent, but honest, assessment of race in our society today?

Or will it be some rhetoric likely to enrage Rush Limbaugh into a more vitriolic rampage on air than Wright ever gave from the pulpit of his South Side church?

-30-

Trophy for bragging rights? How lame!

I used to think that the Sweet Sioux Tomahawk was just about the lamest athletic trophy in existence.

It was the token given to the winner each year of the football game played between Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That strikes me as getting all worked up over which team finishes 10th place and which one winds up in 11th place in the Big Ten Conference.

WHOOP-DEE-DO!

Of course, we no longer have the tomahawk, which was retired a couple of years ago after more than a half-century of service. We now get the Land of Lincoln Trophy, which replaced the tomahawk in terms of lameness – at least until this week.

For now, we local sports fans can get ourselves worked up into an athletic frenzy over the very notion of the BP Crosstown Cup.

The what?!???

I WISH I were kidding. But that is the new prize announced Monday that will be given to the Chicago professional baseball team that manages to win the most games in head-to-head competition each season.

In short, we’re talking about the City Series, the Crosstown Classic, the Sox versus Flubs, or whatever tag you use to describe those six games each year (out of 162 overall) when the Chicago White Sox take on the Chicago Cubs.

The Chicago Tribune used its website Monday to report about the creation of the cup, which supposedly will be a three-foot-tall trophy that will be given to the team that wins the most games each season. If, by chance, each team manages to win three games (which does happen quite often), then there will supposedly be tie-breaker factors meant to put one ballclub ahead of the other.

In short, we’re now going to get the sight of an official trophy presentation each year – even in years when both of Chicago’s ballclubs are managing to stink up the joint even moreso than the Union Stockyards ever did and there isn’t anything else to brag about.

THAT COULD VERY well be this season, since the White Sox who some think have a shot to contend for a division title and playoff spot were as of Monday the team with a record of 8-11. Shut up, Cubs fans. Your preferred ballclub was only one game better at 9-10.

Excuse me for thinking this is too gimicky to take seriously. The whole idea of a serious athletic rivalry is that it happens, and usually is long-lasting enough that it can span across generations.

Trying to jump-start it by creation of trophies or other nonsensical rhetoric is little more than absurd.

If anything, Sox/Cubs is one of those aspects of our Chicago society, tying in closely with the whole South Side versus North Side that does determine a lot of our cultural aspects (I have known people who consider themselves devoted Chicagoans who have never set foot south of Roosevelt Road or north of Fullerton Avenue (and then only to check out DePaul University as a possible college to attend, before determining the place to be too “North Side-ish” to consider).

EVEN IN THE cases of people living outside the respective ballclub’s “region,” it usually becomes a sign that a person wants to adopt some sort of sympathy with the other.

Northwest Siders rooting for the Sox are merely displaced South Siders, while Southwest Siders rooting for the Cubs are self-hating nitwits (just kidding, they’re merely lost, and deserve our sympathy for being so misguided).

This kind of thing can’t be bolstered with a “Cup,” which I’m sure will wind up becoming the subject of ridicule by fans of both ballclubs. Could that be the reason that the cup’s creation was announced without a mockup of what it could possibly look like?

Somebody knew that hard-core Sox fans would find something to mock about it, no matter what it looks like.

THESE ARE THE people, after all, who took to calling their favorite ballclub’s stadium, “The Cell” (as in prison) because they didn’t want to have to continually give reference to the corporate entity that back in 2003 bought the naming rights to the building – which, surprisingly, remains in business, so the structure at 35th Street and Bill Veeck Drive hasn’t gone through multi-corporate names during its two decades of existence.

Which is why I find it hilarious that even the new cup that supposedly will pay tribute to the winner of Sox/Cubs each year has a corporate name.

For the record, it is the one-time British Petroleum Co., whose green-and-yellow BP signs can be seen on non-discount gas stations throughout the Chicago area. So now, we can say that the best of Chicago baseball each year gives us gas.

Somehow, that seems all to appropriate – particularly for the South Side ballclub that some people are still holding out hope can turn things around and not be completely embarrassing (that’s what kind of thoughts a three-game sweep against Seattle will put in one’s head).

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: June 11-13 at Wrigley Field, and June 25-27 at U.S. Cellular Field. That is when too many baseball fans will be overserved, and when our city’s two century-plus ballclubs will act as though they are in some sort of collegiate rivalry.