The year began with another in a string of disappointing legislative sessions. None of labor’s four priorities — choice of doctor, prevailing wage, open-scope bargaining and fair share — garnered the 51 votes needed in the Iowa House to pass, despite a 56-44 Democratic majority that organized labor helped build.

Then the economy crashed, creating a gaping hole in the state’s budget that was filled with across-the-board cuts. The group most affected by these cuts was public sector employees, who agreed to re-open their contracts in order to avoid nearly 500 layoffs.

Now, with the 2010 General Assembly set to gavel into session next week, more budget cuts are on the horizon. So while their four principal legislative goals remain unchanged, the focus has shifted to ensuring legislators make sound budget decisions and avoid massive layoffs.

“Because of what we went through the last couple months with having to sit down with the governor to come up with an understanding and then having a statewide vote by our members to take five unpaid days to save 479 jobs, our priorities have shifted somewhat,” said Danny Homan, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Iowa Council 61.

AFSCME’s members are understandably concerned, Homan said, and “some are probably very pissed off.” The bulk of what has been done to this point to balance the state budget “has been done on the back of the state’s employees,” and now they are worried about what will happen to them in the next fiscal year.

“At some point, doing more with less just breaks down, and I think we’re at that point,” he said. “I think we have to figure out how to keep what we have, because we just can’t keep doing more with less. The less is running out.”

Homan said one of the first goals would be to work out an early retirement package so that some state workers can leave their jobs voluntarily instead of being forced out. The union is also going to push for a comprehensive overhaul of the state’s workforce.

“The system right now is heavy on management,” he said. “We want to go in and take a look at the level of management we have in state government and make sure that’s at an appropriate level and come up with ways to, instead of always laying off the folks who do the front-line work, maybe eliminating some middle management positions that have grown during good times.”

The hardest work, though, will be reworking Iowa’s tax system to make it fairer, said Ken Sagar, president of the Iowa Federation of Labor AFL-CIO.

“We are at one of those critical points where we as a state are going to have to decide how we’re going to do things in the future,” Sagar said. “Are we going to continue to give tax breaks to people so they can buy airplanes, or, are we going to take those tax breaks back and fund education?”

Legislators, especially in the wake of the film tax credit scandal, have already vowed to look at all tax credits offered by the state to evaluate their worth. Homan said that while no one wants to pay more taxes, there are obvious examples of tax breaks that benefit the few that could be eliminated.

“You don’t pay any sales tax on ostriches,” he said. “Somebody that goes out and buys an airplane, they don’t pay a sales tax on an airplane, nor do they pay sales tax on the parts to repair that airplane. Clearly, legislators don’t want to raise taxes, but there are things they can do that won’t raise a single tax on a large majority of Iowans.”

Another example of smart budgeting would be combined corporate reporting, which would close a tax loophole allowing multi-billion dollar corporations that do tens of millions of dollars of business in Iowa to avoid paying Iowa income taxes, said Marcia Nichols, political and legislative director for American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Iowa Council 61.

“For a corporation to come in here and make money off of Iowa citizens and pay no taxes, we’ve been harping on that for eight years now,” she said. “That’s not going to affect the average citizen, but it will put more money in the state government to allow us to continue to provide services to the most vulnerable citizens and education of our children.”

Four principles

Despite an historic budget crisis, Nichols said labor will still be working to pass the four principles it has been advocating for many years. While the votes are there in the state Senate, in the House a handful of Democrats have blocked the passage of labor’s priorities. And when a bill expanding collective bargaining rights of public employee unions cleared the legislature in 2008 it was vetoed by Gov. Chet Culver.

Republicans and business groups like the Association of Business and Industry have been adamantly opposed to labor’s agenda. House Minority Leader Kraig Paulsen, R-Hiawatha, told the Mason City Globe-Gazette that as long as the labor bills remain on the table, some employers would not invest in Iowa or its work force.

Sagar points to one of the four bills — changing Iowa workers’ compensation law to allow employees the right to designate a doctor to treat them for workplace injuries — as an example of the hypocrisy of the opposition.

“When people were opposing health care reform, one of the principal things they talked about is that ‘By God, we have to make sure you don’t lose the ability to choose your own health care provider,’” he said. “And yet, here in Iowa it seems to be almost sacrilegious for people to choose their health care provider if they happen to be injured on the job. This doesn’t make any sense to me.”

One unlikely ally labor has garnered is Steve Deace, the host of a Christian program on Iowa’s largest radio station and an influential voice in the social conservative community. While he doesn’t necessarily support labor’s agenda, he called Republicans “hypocrites” for opposing things like “choice of doctor.”

“They don’t want to let the little guy go to the doctor of his choosing, yet they’re also concerned the Mitt Romney-[Barack Obama] health care omnibus bill is going to allow the government to dictate what health care you can get and from whom,” he said. “Huh?”

Deace also pointed to prevailing wage, which would require contractors to pay the same hourly wages and benefits on public projects as they would pay on private sector projects, as an example of Republican hypocrisy.

“A lot of the same Republicans railing against things like prevailing wage also have no problem with raiding taxpayer money for their corporate buddies,” he said. “For example, how many of the top Republican donors in Iowa are getting rich off of taxpayer-subsidized industries like ethanol or state-sanctioned gambling?”

If corporations and millionaires are going to be allowed to “raid the treasury, then it’s only fair to let the little guy who does most of the living and dying in this state get his cut as well,” Deace said.

Election year power

In recent years, national and international unions have played a significant role in Iowa elections. In 2008, AFSCME International donated $346,000 to the political action committee of its Iowa local, AFSCME Iowa Council 61. Among other big unions donors were the Service Employees International Union, which donated $125,000 to its local, and the Laborers’ International Union of Illinois, which contributed $200,000 to the Great Plains Laborers’ Council Iowa PAC.

That money helped Democratic candidates and county parties around the state, and Democrats expanded their majorities in both the House and Senate.

But after Democratic majorities failed to move key components of organized labor’s agenda from 2007 to 2009, some Democrats are quietly concerned that national labor groups won’t direct resources to Iowa, instead moving on to other states where large investments seem more likely to pay dividends.

Homan said who the union ultimately supports will be up to the members, just like it has always been.

“Who our members want to go out and work for are the candidates we will work for,” he said. “Frankly, it’s never been about how much money this union gives. It’s about people we can put in the streets working for candidates. We will work for candidates who will work for working people issues.”

Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, said during a time of economic trouble, labor bills would help bolster the state’s middle class.

“We’d like to grow the middle class in Iowa and we think those issues will help strengthen the voice of ordinary people in the work place, and that’s important,” he said. “It’s hard to tell whether the votes are there to pass them. I can’t say I know at this point what the best opportunities are, but if we find the votes we will certainly go forward with them.”

The program, which erroneously indicates that Elliott is from Ohio, recreates a controversial exercise that the school teacher used 40 years ago in Riceville to teach grade school students about racism called “blue eyes, brown eyes.”

Jane Elliott

When students protested, Elliott explained that there was a link between the melanin responsible for creating brown eyes and intelligence and ability. Shortly thereafter, the students who had been deemed as superior began acting in ways that suited their newly discovered status, even to the detriment of classmates that they had previously considered equals and friends.

Those students labeled as inferior also changed, and not for the better. Their academic and social standing suffered as they became more timid and subservient during the course of the experiment.

The following day, Elliot reversed the experiment, making those with brown eyes superior, but it seemed that students who had been taunted the day prior had little appetite for bullying others as intensely as they had experienced.

Although the experiment was met with skepticism locally, the students, who wrote directly to Coretta Scott King and had their reports published in the local paper (and picked up by national press), hugged one another once it was complete.

Through the experiment, Elliott came to believe that the students treated each other differently — something she had not told them to do — based on prejudices and examples that had been set by parents and other adults in their lives. She continued to to do the experiment each year in Riceville until her retirement in 1984, and won national acclaim for the process — even appearing on the “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson and being the focus of an ABC television documentary.

Locally, however, Elliott and her family was shunned and forced into bankruptcy. Even her parents, who ran a local store, were boycotted by locals who did not agree with the anti-racism experiment she had invented. Now, however, she is considered to be on the forefront of diversity training, and has modeled programs for major corporations and government agencies including the U.S. Postal Service. Much of what she has developed has become standard practice at the nation’s universities as they discuss inclusion and anti-racism, and was the subject of the PBS documentary “A Class Divided.”

Even so, there are some in Iowa who believe that Elliott’s exercise brought still unknown harm to the children she taught in Riceville. Heritage Foundation analyst Carl F. Horowitz, one of the teacher’s staunches critics, said Elliot engaged “in a Torquemada-style quest to eradicate racism, real or imagined, from every nook and cranny of American life” and that “everytime a corporation forces new employees — at least Caucasian ones — to endure intensive and prolonged anti-bias training, it is ratifying the legacy of Jane Elliott.”

The exercise in Britain, according to Channel 4, was observed by psychologists, Dominic Abrams and Funke Baffour. British leaders have instituted a program aimed at equality in hiring practices called “Equality Essentials.” The program is believed to have been greatly influenced by Elliott’s work, and is also not without critics who believe the primary purpose is for “ritual humiliation of whites in front of black audiences.”

The Ryan White Act, a federal program that provides basic care, treatment, education and support services related to HIV/AIDS, is scheduled to sunset on Sept. 30 unless Congress reauthorizes the program. U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, who is now chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he is confident that the reauthorization will be completed.

“Staff [members] have been working on the Ryan White bill for some time now, and we have a mark-up scheduled for next week,” Harkin said Thursday by phone.

“I’m hopeful it will be a smooth mark-up. We have reached out to Republican members of the committee — and I’m doing so even now — to get a bill that will be broadly supported.”

U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, who serves on a House committee that has been holding hearings on the reauthorization, expressed both confidence that a bill would be passed and hesitation that it would be without controversy, given the current partisan political climate in Washington.

While Harkin is also keenly aware of the party-line divides among lawmakers, he said that in relation to this bill he “hasn’t detected any” partisan contention yet.

During each of the past three fiscal years, more than $2 billion in federal funding has been distributed through the Ryan White Act. In fiscal year 2007, Iowa received roughly $4.5 million in assistance that was used to provide medications, education, early intervention and support services.

Camp Hertko Hollow, which offers residential camping opportunities for diabetic youth between the ages of 6 and 18, received a grant in the amount of $5,000 from The Jonas Brothers’ Change for the Children Foundation. The money will be used to provide 2009 ‘camperships.’

For fans of the pop group the grant will come as little surprise. Nick Jonas, the youngest member of the Jonas Brothers, was diagnosed with type 1 (insulin dependent) diabetes in the fall of 2005, and partnered with Bayer Diabetes Care in the summer of 2008. The foundation, which received an initial large donation from Bayer, was designed to “provide support to programs that motivate and inspire children to face adversity with confidence, determination and a will to succeed.”

“Nearly every day I hear from someone like me who says that I make them feel it’s OK to have diabetes and that’s really cool that I can do that,” Nick Jonas said during the announcement of the partnership. “I know I’m lucky because I have a family that encourages me a lot. I want to give that same inspiration to other kids with diabetes, and working with Bayer lets me do that.”

The goal of Camp Hertko — named after 1968 founder Dr. Ed Hertko — is to teach and educate children afflicted with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes how to effectively manage their illness so that they can live long and health lives. Two one-week sessions are planned this summer, one for youngsters ages 6 to 11 and another for teens ages 11 to 18.

In addition to the more than 375 campers that attend each summer, more than 100 health care professionals also volunteer their time to provide education opportunities and to oversee the safety of the campers. Roughly one-third of those who volunteer also have diabetes themselves.

“I think this [situation] says a lot about how bad the Justice Department got under President [George W.] Bush,” Harkin said during a conference call with reporters today. “It became a haven for ideological right-wingers for one thing, and it also became sort of a rogue institution with no supervision, no guidance [and] no direction.”

Stevens, 85, was convicted last fall of seven counts of lying on disclosure forms to conceal $250,000 in gifts and home improvements from an oil industry executive and others. The following week he was narrowly defeated for reelection to a Senate seat he had held since 1968.

This week U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, a member of the Obama administration, dropped the corruption case against Stevens, citing previous prosecutors’ neglect to share evidence with the defense. The indictment has been dismissed and the U.S. Department of Justice will not seek a new trial.

The government’s motion to dismiss will be heard on April 7 before U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan, who has repeatedly delayed sentencing while criticizing trial prosecutors. Holder made his decision to request dismissal when the new team he assembled in February discovered additional prosecution notes that had not been turned over to Stevens’ defense team.

“You read about what some of these prosecutors did in this case… it was almost like the prosecutors were hoping that they would fail,” Harkin said.

When asked why prosecutors would behave in such a manner, Harkin replied, “Maybe they didn’t want to convict Stevens.”

“When you look at all the nonsense that was going on, it was just inviting the judge to throw the case out,” Harkin said.

“My reading of this case is that Stevens had done a lot of bad things. I think it was clear that he had done a lot of unethical things, and, as the case unfolded, probably illegal things. But I thought the case was just terribly mismanaged.”

Because the metro area did not vote as a bloc, only those areas that passed the local-option tax will see an increase. For instance, Cedar Rapids merchants will collect the additional penny in sales tax. Merchants in Marion, where the voters defeated the proposed tax, will not.

The Cedar Rapids City Council has passed a resolution promising that 90 percent of all the revenue collected during the five-year term will be used for flood-affected housing — buyouts, rehabilitations and relocations. The remaining 10 percent has been earmarked for property tax relief, although property taxes in Cedar Rapids are still expected to climb.

Dale Todd, co-chair for the Vote Yes For Your Neighbor advocacy group that supported the tax, said he’s glad voters in Cedar Rapids approved the tax. More importantly, however, he’s hopeful that the coalitions formed during the election push remain strong. Advocates were able to garner support from organizations that typically find themselves on opposite sides of issues — unions and the local chamber of commerce, for example, supported the tax increase.

Those who opposed the tax were obviously not pleased with the result, but were resolved to closely monitor distributions of the additional revenues. One of their largest complaints about the referendum was that the ballot language was written too loosely to ensure officials would spend money on housing.

The approved tax will take effect April 1 and will sunset June 30, 2014.

As expected, Councilmen Dave Ferris, Brent Hoffman and Aaron Rochester voted for the measure. Mayor Mike Hobart and Councilman Jim Rixner voted against it. Hobart and Rixner emphasized they do not support gay marriage but believed the council did not have legal standing on the issue.

The resolution was first proposed in December but was tabled in order for the council’s attorney to determine if the city had legal standing to take this type of action. However, Ferris told the Sioux City Journal he didn’t want to wait for a legal opinion and had an obligation to his Roman Catholic faith to pursue the matter.

The resolution is an entirely symbolic move since cities lack authority over marriage. But one councilman said the new law would direct city departments, boards and commissions to stay in line with the council’s position despite the fact that the council voted in March to add sexual orientation as one of the protected classes of citizens to bring the city’s Human Rights Commission in step with state civil rights code.

“You have to enlarge the pie and the voting bloc,” he said.

Rants served as leader of state House Republicans since 2002. But three straight elections that saw the GOP not only lose seats but lose control of the chamber to the Democrats caused his party to select Kraig Paulsen to replace him last week. Rants told the paper that new leadership must work hard to register more voters to try and overcome the Democrats widening margin. He also said the party needs to do a better job of promoting early voting.

“When they are voting early, they are voting straight ticket,” he said.

However, Rants isn’t opptimistic.

Rants said he doubts the Republican Party of Iowa will quickly respond. The state party doesn’t recognize the problem, he said, and further doesn’t have much money. He said the state party relies too heavily on the national party for funding.

“My little project for the future is to see if I can’t find people of a similar mindset — that agree with me that this is a problem and that this is the way to fix the party — and see if I can’t enlist their aid in trying to deal with this,” Rants said.

In a separate story, the Journal reports that Rants is still mulling a run for governor in 2010.

Rants said the leadership demotion won’t hasten his departure from the House. He’s mulled a run for governor previously, but said Thursday he hasn’t made any decisions on running for governor in 2010 or another position like Congress.

Barry Goldwater lost one of the great landslides of American history in 1964. But the 2008 numbers aren’t at landslide levels, at least not yet. Chuck Todd of MSNBC thinks an Obama popular vote win is a certainty, since Obama does way better in red states than John Kerry did, but a McCain electoral college win is still possible.

But CNN reported yesterday that McCain bailing out of Iowa, New Mexico and Colorodo yesterday. McCain, who’s known to be a gambling man, needs to draw to an inside straight, run the table, hit the superfecta… choose your long-odds gambling metaphor, and insert Pennsylvania as your long-shot horse.

Steven Stark at Real Clear Politics argues that, rather than 1964, 2008 more closely resembles 1968 or 1932 — a year of realignment to be followed four years hence by the landslide:

Parties decisively thrown out of power usually spend the next campaign turning to their fringe, on the theory that “if we had only stuck to our principles, instead of compromising, we would have won.” Already we can see numerous Republicans mouthing that mantra. If followed to its conclusion, the result in 2012 will be the same as it was in 1936 when the Republicans nominated Alf Landon after the FDR landslide in 1932, and in 1972 when the Democrats nominated George McGovern after the GOP won the White House in 1968.

Read Iowa’s Republican blogs and you’ll see that already: the state convention Republican National Committee election where party stalwarts were replaced by the heads of the Iowa Christian Alliance and Iowa Right to Life, the complaints that longshot U.S. Senate Candidate Chris Reed and 1st District congressional nominee Dave Hartsuch are being undercut by the “Romney Party of Iowa,” the Iowa Christian Alliance’s call for a no vote on all judges unless they get answers on “whether the judge leans to the left or to the right.” They’re convinced that the road to victory starts with a hard right turn.

If they do that, Stark argues, other forces will come into play:

But beyond that, the Republicans could face an even greater challenge. In times of economic turmoil, American history teaches us that voters usually seek out a populist alternative. The greatest political threat to FDR in the early ’30s came not from the Republicans but from his own party’s Huey Long, with his “share the wealth” economics.

The Kingfish, of course, was removed from the equation with his 1935 assassination. But Stark — now that’s funny, Long was semi-fictionalized as “Willie Stark” in “All The King’s Men — Stark argues that the populist of the 2010s may be a revived Pat Buchanan, or fellow talking head Lou Dobbs playing the immigration card.

One could add Ron Paul to that list. Though he’s running for re-election to Congress as a Republican, the one-time presidential candidate and internet phenomenon has endorsed Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party for president, and in a post-apocalyptic Republican landscape, Paul and his massive fundraising and contact lists could be a key player.