A number of commentators in yesterday's post said that if liberals were to take labor issues seriously, they needed more education on them. Since I've been trying to do that on and off here at TPM and before on my own blog, I thought I'd compile a sampling of posts in one place as a start. Many of them have links to other resources on labor that folks will hopefully explore.

Start with Why Unions? Labor 101- a compilation of older labor posts I put together over at DailyKos to explain carefully why liberal activists should take union issues seriously, as a human rights issue, as a way to increase wages for workers (both in and outside unions), how unions strengthen the overall economy, why overall progressive policy depends on a strong labor movement, how labor historically supported the advance of civil rights, and the legal and economic challenges facing labor that liberals should take more seriously.

Then jump below the fold to a sampling of other more recent posts I've linked to on labor as a human rights issue, the brilliance of labor strategies that liberals don't know about, right wing myths about unions, and labor and trade debates

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I'll admit that part of my annoyance at the full court obsession with FISA is that it reflects the broader liberal blog obsessions with goo-goo process issues, as opposed to a populist focus on the core economic and social justice issues that matter in most peoples' lives. Doug Kendall, who I have the most serious respect for, has the best critique I've seen (written with Dahlia Lithwick) of Obama's defensive responses to the guns and death penalty cases at the Supreme Court. However, his point is that Obama should have played offense by highlighting the pro-big business decisions of the Supreme Court this session-- something most of the blogs haven't done either.

As I noted last week, state regulations of business lost out in nearly every single case decided, and even the "liberal" Justices joined many if not most of the major decisions.  Which reflects modern elite liberalism too well that you can distinguish liberals from conservatives on a death penalty case, but when corporations are trashing workers rights, suddenly the differences can get a little fuzzy.

And what really annoys me is that in the major union decision of the term, Chamber of Commerce v. Brown, one of the most anti-union results in decades, there was essentially zero commentary across the blogs.

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We've been seeing in the blogs and otherwise a lot of beating up on Obama for "moving to the center", which is odd statement about a candidate who in the last few weeks has:

• Come out against the California gay marriage amendment
• Promoted details of a tax plan which would taxes for the working poor and middle class by thousands of dollars each, while massively increasing taxes on the wealthy
• Condemned bad trade deals, enough to raise the ire of the news pages of the Wall Street Journal (which under Murdoch are morphing into as rightwing as the old editorial pages) which characterized his stance as "likely to rile allies."
• And just yesterday called for overhaul of the 2005 bankruptcy bill and denounced McCain for his support of the bill and the banking industry "at the expense of hardworking Americans.''

This is all pretty straight up populist positioning, something I argued Obama should have done more of in the primary earlier, which might have shortened that race considerably, something I think David Sirota would probably agree on in thinking about the economic anger rising across the country.

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