Disgust ~ Survival’s Ick Factor

I share this article because for a long time, I've felt we live with a deeply repressed disgust for many of the values, concepts and ideals imposed upon us by the dominant culture. I find that disgust is healthy, as it's a subtle indication that we're dealing with something that doesn't sit right with us.

Often times we can't even identify where these feelings of disdain, discomfort and desire for distance originate, but conscious people more enlightened than I suggest that it is our own 'in-dweller' or our highest Self, our inate knowing of what's appropriate, letting us know that what we're thinking, or are doing is out of synch with Cosmic Wholeness. Yet we continue with the behaviour or attitude, and ignore the inner truth we hear or feel, because that's what we've been programmed to do.

I hope reading this and the article below will stimulate you to think deeply and free your repressed disgust. Express what you don't care for, want or believe in, so that your true Self's ideals, values and preferences may take their rightful place in your Dear Life, and 'way of Being in the world'. It takes some time and requires we keep our attention on what we think, say and our actions, before we do them. But we can release old thinking, and this allows our True Self to come back into activity, directing and guiding us from within.

I mean if you're a teen, and you know looking at someones' rusty butt crack , or dirty funky shorts hanging out of their jeans is disgusting... why would you want to Be that image? A little off the track, but it seems we have allowed ourselves to become a culture that embraces our weakest moments and hold them up as badges of pride. With Academy Award performances, we play the negative, demeaning, needy and small roles that those that don't care for us, know or understand us, hold and use to give the world their version of who we are.

So today, we are a major part of our own dis-service. We are choosing things, ideals, solutions and habits that we don't really like. And we're making this our Life, and who we are.

Rather, let's get back on the track of Who and What we really are, and develop an authentic identity. This means that we stop taking our cues from outside of ourselves. We quit allowing the media, psychological marketing and mass culture with it's mindless trends and fads, to use us for their profits, scapegoats and amusement. Instead let's develop a sense of self that is inwardly defined and determined by how much more we can be of the Realized potential, which lives within each of us from birth.

Read that sentence again. It's saying that you've achieved some of your potential, and you're continuing to move forward to transform into an even more expanded expression of those great possibilities that we always knew were contained within you. There's always more that we can Be...no matter how old we are, our circumstances or conditions. Something new, something profound, something great, which all Life, our people and the human community are needing, that can only come forth through each of our lives. So we must keep transforming, into our Best version of our True Self in these times.

Lastly Beloveds, don't think for a minute that I'm talking about a lot of hard difficult work. I've written about this in earlier blogs. My experience is that when you get in the flow of what's right for you ~ not for the economy, the nation, or the comfort of other people ~ things start to fall into place. You find the right help, at the right time, and because you're in touch with Being your highest Self, there's mystical protection where the Power of the invisable realm of Life joins in. Your new found joy and happiness are true, and your smile radiates from your Heart. Your attention on what the media is saying fades, because you have connected with a source of Goodness, that no matter what they say is going on, All is well in your world!

This is what I want for you Beloveds. Your confidence, peace, joy, prosperity and wholeness intact, and undisturable. Being aware of what disgusts you, is a step into that realm.

lovu,
Kentke

January 23, 2012
By JAMES GORMAN

Disgust is the Cinderella of emotions. While fear, sadness and anger, its nasty, flashy sisters, have drawn the rapt attention of psychologist, poor disgust has been hidden away in a corner, left to muck around in the ashes.

No longer. Disgust is having its moment in the light as researchers find that it does more than cause that sick feeling in the stomach. It protects human beings from disease and parasites, and affects almost every aspect of human relations, from romance to politics.

In several new books and a steady stream of research papers, scientists are exploring the evolution of disgust and its role in attitudes toward food, sexuality and other people.

Paul Rozin, a psychologist who is an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer of modern disgust research, began researching it with a few collaborators in the 1980s, when disgust was far from the mainstream.

“It was always the other emotion,” he said. “Now it’s hot.”

It still won’t wear glass slippers, which may be just as well, given the stuff it has to walk through. Nonetheless, its reach takes disgust beyond the realms of rot and excrement.

Speaking last week from a conference on disgust in Germany, Valerie Curtis, a self-described “disgustologist” from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, described her favorite emotion as “incredibly important.”

She continued: “It’s in our everyday life. It determines our hygiene behaviors. It determines how close we get to people. It determines who we’re going to kiss, who we’re going to mate with, who we’re going to sit next to. It determines the people that we shun, and that is something that we do a lot of.”

It begins early, she said: “Kids in the playground accuse other kids of having cooties. And it works, and people feel shame when disgust is turned on them.”

Some studies have suggested that political conservatives are more prone to disgust than liberals are. And it is clear that what people find disgusting they often find immoral, too.

It adds to the popularity of disgust as a subject of basic research that it is easier to elicit in an ethical manner than anger or fear. You don’t have to insult someone or make anyone afraid for his or her life — a bad smell will do the trick. And disgust has been relatively easy to locate in the brain, where it frequents the insula, the amygdala and other regions.

“It is becoming a model emotion,” said Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia, a disgust pioneer with Dr. Rozin.

And the research may have practical benefits, including clues to obsessive compulsive disorder, some aspects of which — like excessive hand washing — look like disgust gone wild.

Conversely, some researchers are trying to inspire more disgust at dirt and germs to promote hand washing and improve public health. Dr. Curtis is involved in efforts in Africa, India and England to explore what she calls “the power of trying to gross people out.” One slogan that appeared to be effective in England in getting people to wash their hands before leaving a bathroom was “Don’t bring the toilet with you.”

Disgust was not completely ignored in the past. Charles Darwin tackled the subject in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” He described the face of disgust, documented by Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne in his classic study of facial expressions in 1862, as if one were expelling some horrible-tasting substance from the mouth.

“I never saw disgust more plainly expressed,” Darwin wrote, “than on the face of one of my infants at five months, when, for the first time, some cold water, and again a month afterwards, when a piece of ripe cherry was put into his mouth.”

His book did not contain an image of the infant, but fortunately YouTube has numerous videos of babies tasting lemons.

Human beings are complex, of course, as evidenced by the behavior of parents who give their babies lemons and record their distress on video, and the lemon face is not exactly that of adult disgust.

It is, however, generally accepted that disgust evolved partly to avoid putting bad things in the mouth, an idea already put forth when Dr. Rozin tackled disgust. He and his colleagues developed the idea that disgust was then elaborated by cultural evolution to include other forms, one of them based in a dislike for reminders of the animal nature of humans. Sex, death, feces and bad food all smacked of animality.

There are many variations in how scientists now view disgust, but one new approach by evolutionary psychologists was captured in a December special issue of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, “Disease Avoidance: From Animals to Culture,” and in a conference on “The Evolution of Disgust” this month in Bielefeld, Germany, where many of the same scientists appeared.

Dr. Curtis contributed to the issue and the conference, and emphasized above all disgust as an adaptation to avoid disease-causing microbes and parasites that involves not only taste and smell but also sight and touch.

“To me the story is quite simple,” she said. The animal origins of disgust involve all sorts of ways that diseases are spread, includin fleas, so there are a variety of signs of disease and types of disgust.

“It’s not all oral,” Dr. Curtis said.

Under that evolutionary umbrella, however, there is still the question of what kinds of disgust there are. Dr. Haidt, Dr. Rozin and Clark McCauley of Bryn Mawr College claim nine different domains of disgust for North Americans. Dr. Curtis proposes seven categories. Joshua Tybur of VU University in Amsterdam proposed three domains of disgust, three separate psychological programs, for disease avoidance, mate choice and moral judgment.

“People who are sensitive to one type of disgust are not necessarily sensitive to another,” he said. For example, he said, earlier claims that political conservatives (self-identified) were more sensitive than liberals to disgust were overly general. Research that he and his colleagues did suggested that conservatives were more disgusted by sexual topics, but were similar to liberals in the domains of disease avoidance and moral judgment.

Still, it’s not always easy to say in which domain a form of disgust fits, and there is no reason that more than one can’t operate at the same time, given the right stimulus. Jeffrey Dahmer killed and ate people he had had sex with — a disgust trifecta if there ever was one.

Researchers have also been trying to pin down details about the mechanisms and evolutionary value of disgust. Daniel Fessler, an anthropologist at the Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles, investigated with his colleagues why pregnant women were more sensitive to disgust. What they found was that as progesterone levels went up, so did sensitivity to disgust. That was true in the first trimester of pregnancy, when derailing fetal development would have the most dire effects. In very recent work, Dr. Fessler said, the researchers found that even in women who weren’t pregnant and were not suffering nausea, disgust increased with the levels of progesterone.

An important function of progesterone, Dr. Fessler said, is that it dials down an early-warning part of the immune system, inflammation, which might prevent the embryo, or conceptus, from implanting itself in the placenta. The eight-cell embryo “actually destroys tissue as it burrows in,” Dr. Fessler said. “Left to its own, the maternal immune system would destroy the conceptus.” So, he and his colleagues reason, while the body turns down the dial on one kind of protection, it turns it up on disgust, another kind of defense.

Whatever the fine points of disgust, its power to affect behavior is unquestioned, and that power ought to be put to good use, Dr. Curtis said. So, in one of her projects, she has worked with an Indian public relations agency to come up with a disgust-based campaign to encourage hand washing among mothers in small villages, which could save countless children’s lives lost to diarrhea and other diseases.

REVOLTING

In India, the power of disgust to improve villagers' hygiene is being tested. Center of Gravity, a Bangalore agency working with Valerie Curtis, a disgust researcher, created skits including this role, Laddu Lingam; he makes treats of mud and worms and never washes his hands. Another character, Supermom, shows the proper behavior.

The result, now being tested, is a skit involving two characters, one a supermom and the other a disgusting, dirty man. The man makes sweets using mud and worms, stops in the middle of the performance to rush off because he has diarrhea, never washes his hands and does everything possible to be revolting. Supermom is scrupulously clean. Her children don’t get sick, the skit makes clear. In fact, her baby grows up to be a doctor. She washes her hands all the time.

The prominence of diarrhea in the skit is no accident. One thing about studying disgust, Dr. Curtis said, is that it makes you realize how important it is to talk about the very things that disgust us, because they often present dangers to public health.

Exhibit 1 is excrement. “We need to talk about” excrement, she said, using a punchier single-syllable word for maximum effect — a word she is unapologetic about using, as befits a disgustologist.

“Which is worse?” Dr. Curtis asked. To talk about it, “or to make kids die?”



This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 23, 2012
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the institution where Valerie Curtis works. It’s the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Come On In the Room

Don't know how your day is going, but I just lucked up on this. Well not actually...

Accessing free music from youtube, I brought sound into the room after a long and very fulfilling awakening session spent inwardly focused by first listening to Gary Bartz' Song of Loving-Kindness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HRziCXRqPA&feature=BFa&list=AVGxdCwVVULXdxFshSHjM8bFuOAvN2MstP&lf=list_related

I then moved to find one of my favorites, Maybe God is trying to Tell you Something, from the film soundtrack of The Color Purple. (please pardon the 5 sec. ad)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ8XkY6Too0

You may not need this reminder from the Come on in the Room video today, but save it for a 'rainy day'......And ofcourse to suit my personal consciousness, I expand the lyrics abit...."The Divine Cosmic Mind writes out my prescriptions, and gives me all my medicines..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnXMSAa1qW4&feature=related

After listening you might understand how it helped me realize that one reason why I've been able to stay in these small spaces of the last few years. They are like a closet....and definately closely contain all the energy I pray, chant and meditate up really well. That's why this way of life is mandatory for me....I feel so well armoured, prepared, fortified, joyfull and fulfilled, when I go out the door to deal with the world. It's also why I'm late often, and sometimes just choose to stay in. Lots of good stuff going on in here.

Life....is so good, when we can take the time to relax into it, and receive it's grace.
So follow my journey by clicking the links and enjoy Beloveds.....

lovu,

Kentke

Song of Loving Kindness - Gary Bartz

God is Trying to Tell you Something - soundtrack from The Color Purple, Tata Vega vocalist

Come On In The Room - The Georgia Mass Choir

George Lucas says Hollywood Won't Support Black Films‎

George Lucas has invested $93m (£60m) of his own money into the movie

12 January 2012 Last updated at 08:50 ET

Director George Lucas says it took 20 years to get his latest film made, "because it's an all-black movie".

Speaking on The Daily Show, Lucas said he had to self-fund Red Tails, the true story of a group of African-American pilots who fought in World War II ( The Tuskegee Airmen http://www.tuskegeeairmen.org/ ).

He claimed major film studios would not back the movie because "there's no major white roles in it at all".

"I showed it to all of them and they said, 'No. We don't know how to market a movie like this,'" he said.

"They don't believe there's any foreign market for it, and that's 60% of their profit," he added.
Lucas co-wrote and produced Red Tails, which which was directed by Anthony Hemingway.
It features several well-known names - including Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding Jr, Terence Howard and R&B star Ne-Yo - and shows how the pilots were segregated and kept on the ground for most of the war, until they were called up to fight for their country.

The real-life airmen featured in the drama were given a Congressional Gold Medal by then-President George Bush in 2007.


'Invisible' Audience

Lucas put $58 million (37.8 million) of his own money into the movie. It will be released by his company Lucasfilm, and distributed by Twentieth Century Fox.

He is putting a further $35 million (£22.8 million) towards the distribution costs, said trade paper The Hollywood Reporter.

"It's a reasonably expensive movie," Lucas told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. "Normally black movies, say Tyler Perry movies or something, they're very low budget.

"Even then, the [Hollywood studios] won't really release his movies, it goes to one of the lower, not major distributors.

"This [film] costs more than what those movies make," Lucas added.

Director and actor Perry, whose movies include Why Did I Get Married and the Madea series, is one of the most profitable film-makers in the US.

However, he retains the rights to all his work - which plays almost exclusively to black audiences - and has previously stated that his fans are "invisible" to the Hollywood mainstream.
Lucas's comments echo those of Spike Lee, who criticised the lack of black faces in Hollywood war movies in 2008.

Speaking about Clint Eastwood's movies Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, Lee said: "He did two films about Iwo Jima back to back and there was not one black soldier in both of those films".

"I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know."
Eastwood later justified his choice of actors on Flags Of Our Fathers, saying that the African-American troops who did take part in the battle of Iwo Jima were not involved in the key incident in the film - where US marines raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi.
The veteran actor argued that if he had deliberately "put an African-American actor in there, people would go: 'This guy's lost his mind'".

Lucas insisted that Red Tails was nothing like preceding war films, including 1989's Glory which, although it starred Denzel Washington, featured "a lot of white officers running these guys into cannon fire".

If his film does well at the box office, Lucas said he had a prequel and sequel planned.

After reading this, I hope you all will support this film by going to see it in a theater. Take all your family and especially your friends that are not of African descent so they can experience one chapter from our long history of contributing to the good of America. My uncle, (James) Peter Thompson, who passed in Sept. was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, and was one of those honored by the nation in 2007 with a Congressional Medal of Honor.

Kentke

Low Country Boil from the West Coast Gullah

West Coast Gullah's Low Country Boil full of fresh prawns, oysters, clams, black bass,

sweet potates, carrots, okra, and cabbage.

In early November, I went to St. Helena Island, and the city of Beaufort in South Carolina, to connect with my roots on my Dad's side. Yep! We Geechee, or Gullah, whichever you prefer. I journeyed to the 29th Annual Gullah Heritage Festival, held at the Penn Center, which is the site of one of the country's first schools for freed Africn slaves. The link is below to learn more about this fascinating place.

Seafood, which was always a big part of our diet in my Los Angeles home, is a staple of the African people that cultivated rice and indigo in the Sea Islands off the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia. So the dish I had at the Gullah Heritage Festival was basically shrimp, potatoes, spicy sausage, and corn. I also discovered that oysters are also a huge part of the Gullah diet. Our family had fried fish almost every Friday for dinner. Fried oysters were always accompanied by sand dabs, catfish, and Louisiana Buffalo, but we'd always save a few of the oysters to eat raw.

As I grew older and developed into a full fledged lover of raw oysters and clams, I attributed this craving to my Dad, who'd grown up in Newark, New Jersey. I just thought it was the influence of the Italian culture that'd planted this love of raw oysters and clams in him, which he'd passed on to me. Well this recent visit revealed that his love of oysters came from his own heritage, for harvesting and eating oysters is definitely a part of Gullah culture.

Now because the other side of me, my Mother's people, are also exquisite cooks, who get alot of their seasonings and spices from our Native American heritage, as I'm whirling about in the kitchen I also have to surrender to their urgings. My grandmother's mother was 1/2 Indian, and her husband, my grandfather's father was a full blood Comanche.

So I add sage, bay leaf and thyme to my Low Country Boil. Can't forget the gumbo file, which is sassafras, an herb my sister used to love as a tea when she was a child. I bring my own love of veggies to it, by adding carrots, almost a full head of cabbage, and to deepen the African soul of the dish, I add okra. And ofcourse, all this is built upon a bulb of sauted garlic following the holy trinity (onions, bell peppers and celery) which gets the fragrances and flavors going.

As far as seafood, besides fresh shrimp, I add oysters and clams. Last batch I even added crab. To honor my Uncle Wendell, who taught me how to fish, ring a chicken's neck and love the outdoors, I place a nice piece of black bass on top almost at the end so that it doesn't fall apart. Bass was one of his favorite fish, and my middle name is derived from his name.

The dish is lighter than gumbo because it is not started with roux. A roux, made from flour and water is a thickener, and I like that my Gullah ancestors liked to 'keep it light', because the dish is really very low in calories and as I make it, totally healthy.

I use all organic veggies, and the freshest fish from Chinese fish markets. I find Chinese markets always a better source for fish than Whole Foods, or any other markets. Daily fresh catches, often wild caught, and all for dollars less per pound than traditional supermarkets. A slightly hot smoked sausage made of beef and chicken (my favorite choice is James' BBQ sausage) just contrasts the fish with a kick that's satisfying in itself.

A couple of last notes....I use Rooibus, the African red tea that is higher in anti-oxidants than green tea as my liquid base. To prepare it I boil at least 2 tsps in a quart pan and start my Boil with that. Later I add more water to the Boil making sure everything is covered. The Boil is actually a seafood, sausage and vegetable soup, so enough water is critical, as the broth is just as delectable as the ingredients.

And yes, sea salt....never that iodized salt. I remember that at the Penn Center, this dish was HOT! So I make sure mine is also by using what the Jamaican Ital chefs call a Scotch Bonnet pepper. And I also added about 1/8 of a tsp of cayenne pepper (30,000 scoville units).

Lawd Have Mercy....Deeelicious~

Kentke

I just ruined all that good eating by snacking out on Trader Joe's Cocoa Drizzled Kettle Corn!!! OMG that stuff is good! And they even had the nerve to price it cheap~ only $1.99.

Now if you really want a taste organism, add sweet raisins and dry roasted salted p-nuts. Dr. Carver would approve. It makes a great party mix, or movie/video snack.

Bon Appetite Darlings~

http://www.penncenter.com/

WAKE UP PEOPLE - American Workers Could Lose the Right to Organize Jan 1, 2012

It is said that soon after his enlightenment the Buddha passed a man on the road who was struck by the Buddha's extraordinary radiance and peaceful presence. The man stopped and asked,

"My friend, what are you?Are you a celestial being or a god?"
"No", said the Buddha.
"Well, then, are you some kind of magician or wizard?"
again the Buddha answered.
"No."
"Are you a man?"
"No."
"Well, my friend, then what are you?"
The Buddha replied,

"I am awake."

Sorry friends for the introduction, but when I read the article below describing the crucial moment which American workers face, and decided I wanted to share it with you, this story I learned almost 40 years ago came to mind.

Just think, wouldn't it be nice if American companies no longer had to send their businesses and factories overseas to get the cheapest labor possible? Yea, I mean, if they could only pay the same wages as they do overseas, and loose all the restrictions and benefits they have to shell out...corporate America and multinationals could keep their business right here in America and use American workers!

When are the people here in America going to wake up? Where's the Occupy Movement when you need it?!? Efforts to diminish the importance of the Occupy Movement always bring up the fact that the Movement doesn't focus on a particular issue. Well here's one ready for them to confront that could also bring more American workers into action.

By the way, the most beautiful sights in Oakland at Frank Ogawa City Hall Plaza, on the day of the Nov. 2nd Occupy Oakland General Strike were the groups feeding the people. This was led by the SEIU Local 1021 workers providing free food (hamburgers and hotdogs), and distributing water to the thousands gathered to march that day. Their particpation, leadership and acts of generosity were stunning and inspiring demonstrations of true solidarity.

Next to their tables, lines formed to receive free plates of delicious chicken and rice and Afghani naan from Kamdesh, a downtown Middle Eastern restaurant.

This is how we must move forward. With everyone contributing from their gifts, freely sharing our abilities and talent, we become an unbeatable force.

A luta Continua~
The Struggle Continues
Kentke

Crippling the Right to Organize

By WILLIAM B. GOULD IV
Stanford, Calif.


UNLESS something changes in Washington, American workers will, on New Year’s Day, effectively lose their right to be represented by a union. Two of the five seats on the National Labor Relations Board, which protects collective bargaining, are vacant, and on Dec. 31, the term of Craig Becker, a labor lawyer whom President Obama named to the board last year through a recess appointment, will expire. Without a quorum, the Supreme Court ruled last year, the board cannot decide cases.

What would this mean?
Workers illegally fired for union organizing won’t be reinstated with back pay. Employers will be able to get away with interfering with union elections. Perhaps most important, employers won’t have to recognize unions despite a majority vote by workers. Without the board to enforce labor law, most companies will not voluntarily deal with unions.

If this nightmare comes to pass, it will represent the culmination of three decades of Republican resistance to the board — an unwillingness to recognize the fundamental right of workers to band together, if they wish, to seek better pay and working conditions. But Mr. Obama is also partly to blame; in trying to install partisan stalwarts on the board, as his predecessors did, he is all but guaranteeing that the impasse will continue. On Wednesday, he announced his intention to nominate two pro-union lawyers to the board, though there is no realistic chance that either can gain Senate confirmation anytime soon.

For decades after its creation in 1935, the board was a relatively fair arbiter between labor and capital. It has protected workers’ right to organize by, among other things, overseeing elections that decide on union representation. Employers may not engage in unfair labor practices, like intimidating organizers and discriminating against union members. Unions are prohibited, too, from doing things like improperly pressuring workers to join.

The system began to run into trouble in the 1970s. Employers found loopholes that enabled them to delay the board’s administrative proceedings, sometimes for years. Reforms intended to speed up the board’s resolution of disputes have repeatedly foundered in Congress.

The precipitous decline of organized labor — principally a result of economic forces, not legal ones — cemented unions’ dependence on the board, despite its imperfections. Meanwhile, business interests, represented by an increasingly conservative Republican Party, became more assertive in fighting unions.

The board became dysfunctional. Traditionally, members were career civil servants or distinguished lawyers and academics from across the country. But starting in the Reagan era, the board’s composition began to tilt toward Washington insiders like former Congressional staff members and former lobbyists.

Starting with a compromise that allowed my confirmation in 1994, the board’s members and general counsel have been nominated in groups. In contrast to the old system, the new “batching” meant that nominees were named as a package acceptable to both parties. As a result, the board came to be filled with rigid ideologues. Some didn’t even have a background in labor law.

Under President George W. Bush, the board all but stopped using its discretion to obtain court orders against employers before the board’s own, convoluted, administrative process was completed — a power that, used fairly, is a crucial protection for workers. In 2007, in what has been called the September Massacre, the board issued rulings that made it easier for employers to block union organizing and harder for illegally fired employees to collect back pay. Democratic senators then blocked Mr. Bush from making recess appointments to the board, as President Bill Clinton had done. For 27 months, until March 2010, the board operated with only two members; in June 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that it needed at least three to issue decisions.

Under Mr. Obama, the board has begun to take enforcement more seriously, by pursuing the court orders that the board under Mr. Bush had abandoned. Sadly, though, the board has also been plagued by unnecessary controversy. In April, the acting general counsel issued a complaint over Boeing’s decision to build airplanes at a nonunion plant in South Carolina, following a dispute with Boeing machinists in Washington State. Although the complaint was dropped last week after the machinists reached a new contract agreement with Boeing, the controversy reignited Republican threats to cut financing for the board.

In my view, the complaint against Boeing was legally flawed, but the threats to cut the board’s budget represent unacceptable political interference. The shenanigans continue: last month, before the board tentatively approved new proposals that would expedite unionization elections, the sole Republican member threatened to resign, which would have again deprived the board of a quorum.

Mr. Obama needs to make this an election-year issue; if the board goes dark in January, he should draw attention to Congressional obstructionism during the campaign and defend the board’s role in protecting employees and employers. A new vision for labor-management cooperation must include not only a more powerful board, but also a less partisan one, with members who are independent and neutral experts. Otherwise, the partisan morass will continue, and American workers will suffer.


William B. Gould IV, a law professor at Stanford, was chairman of the National Labor Relations Board from 1994 to 1998.

You can also click this link to read my Sept. 10, 2010 blog post, which gives some background on today's labor movement.
http://knewzfrommeroewest.blogspot.com/2010/09/after-life-in-labor-union-leader.html


Union support bolsters Occupy Oakland strike
http://www.whec.com/news/stories/s2354738.shtml

al-Qaida in Mali ---- Can Africa Get a Break ????

Or in the vernacular...."Can a brotha, and a sistah get a break????"

Between evil despots, mentally sick political demigods and military factions, Chinese and eternal Western neo-colonial greed for raw resources, now al-Qaida has established a foothold on the continent. And like a cancerous invader, it is intent on imposing it's ideology, religion and Arab culture.

May our brothers and sisters see through these and all acts of calculated 'kindness' and remain true to their own ways. May the guidance of the highest understanding inspire and lead them safely into the fullest expression of their autonomous realized potential...as individuals, communities and nations.

May Africa again lead humanity. Lead us now into new ways of being that start with the harmonious existence, health, prosperity and governance of the people of the continent. May enlightened living flow like the rivers, nurturing and restoring animals, plants, the land and all life, by the grace of right relationship.

Ashe!

Kentke

(AP Photo/ Martin Vogl, File)

In this May 17, 2010 file photo, a boy in Sokolo, Mali rides a donkey cart. A majority of Sokolo’s population make their living either in the fields of rice to its south or in the forest to its north, where they take their herds to graze. It’s in this same forest that an offshoot of al-Qaida has taken root.

Candy, cash _ al-Qaida implants itself in Africa

Dec 3, 10:39 AM (ET)By MARTIN VOGL and RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

(AP Photo/Alfred de Montesquiou, File)

In this May 17, 2010 file photo, a nomad from the Tuareg tribe of the Sahara Desert brings his herd for vaccination to a team of U.S. Special Forces in the Sahara Desert handing out aid near the town of Gao in northeastern Mali. With almost no resistance, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, is implanting itself in Africa's soft tissue, choosing as its host Mali, one of the poorest nations on earth. Although AQIM's leaders are Algerian, it recruits people from Mali, including 60 to 80 Tuareg fighters, the olive-skinned nomads who live in the Sahara desert, according to a security expert who spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter.

SOKOLO, Mali (AP) -

The first time the members of al-Qaida emerged from the forest, they politely said hello. Then the men carrying automatic weapons asked the frightened villagers if they could please take water from the well.

Before leaving, they rolled down the windows of their pickup truck and called over the children to give them chocolate.

That was 18 months ago, and since then, the bearded men in tunics like those worn by Osama bin Laden have returned for water every week. Each time they go to lengths to exchange greetings, ask for permission and act neighborly, according to locals, in the first intimate look at how al-Qaida tries to win over a village.

Besides candy, the men hand out cash. If a child is born, they bring baby clothes. If someone is ill, they prescribe medicine. When a boy was hospitalized, they dropped off plates of food and picked up the tab.

With almost no resistance, al-Qaida has implanted itself in Africa's soft tissue, choosing as its host one of the poorest nations on earth. The terrorist group has create a refuge in this remote land through a strategy of winning hearts and minds, described in rare detail by seven locals in regular contact with the cell. The villagers agreed to speak for the first time to an Associated Press team in the "red zone," deemed by most embassies to be too dangerous for foreigners to visit.

While al-Qaida's central command is in disarray and its leaders on the run following bin Laden's death six months ago, security experts say, the group's 5-year-old branch in Africa is flourishing. From bases like the one in the forest just north of here, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, is infiltrating local communities, recruiting fighters, running training camps and planning suicide attacks, according to diplomats and government officials.

Even as the mother franchise struggles financially, its African offshoot has raised an estimated $130 million in under a decade by kidnapping at least 50 Westerners in neighboring countries and holding them in camps in Mali for ransom. It has tripled in size from 100 combatants in 2006 to at least 300 today, say security experts. And its growing footprint, once limited to Algeria, now stretches from one end of the Sahara desert to the other, from Mauritania in the west to Mali in the east.

The group's stated aim is to become a player in global jihad, and suspected collaborators have been arrested throughout Europe, including in the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, England and France. In September, the general responsible for U.S. military operations in Africa, Army Gen. Carter Ham, said AQIM now also poses a "significant threat" to the United States.

The answer to why the group has thrived can be found in this speck of a town, where homes are made of mud mixed with straw and families eke out a living either in the fields of rice to the south or in the immense forest of short, stout trees to its north.

It's here, under a canopy stretching over an area three times larger than the city of New York, that Sokolo's herders take their cattle. They avoid overgrazing by organizing themselves into eight units linked to each of the eight wells, labeled N1 through N8, along the 50-mile-long perimeter of the Wagadou forest. They pay $5 per year per head of cattle, and $3 per head of sheep, for the right to water their animals.

When the al-Qaida fighters showed up about 1 1/2 years ago with four to five jerrycans and asked for water, they signaled that they did not intend to plunder resources. They stood out in their tunics stopping a little below the knees, small turbans and beards, a foreign style of dress associated with the Gulf states and bin Laden.

"From the moment you lay eyes on them, you know that they're not Malian," said 45-year-old herder Amadou Maiga.

They started to come every four or five days in Land Cruisers, with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. At first they stayed for no more than 15 to 20 minutes, said the villagers, including herders, a hunter and employees of the Malian Ministry of Husbandry who travel to the area to vaccinate animals and repair broken pumps. If on Monday they took water from one well, on Wednesday they would go to another, always varying their path.

Fousseyni Diakite, 51, a pump technician who travels twice a month to the forest to check the generators used to run the wells, first ran into the cell in May 2010, when he saw four men in Arab dress inside a Toyota Hilux truck, all with AK-47s at their feet.

He said the men come with medical supplies and try to find out if anyone is sick.
"There is one who is tall with a big chest - he's Arab, possibly Algerian. He's known for having an ambulatory pharmacy. He goes from place to place giving treatment for free," Diakite said.
They venture into the camps where the herders sleep at dusk and hand out cash to villagers who join them for prayers, he said - bills of 10,000 West African francs (about $20), equal to nearly half the average monthly salary in Mali.

Most of the herders sleep in lean-to's in camps at the forest's edge. Because these are temporary settlements, they do not have mosques, unlike most villages in this nation twice the size of France that is 90 percent Muslim.

In Boulker, a hamlet near the forest, the fighters left 100,000 francs (around $200), instructing locals to buy supplies and build an adobe mosque, Diakite said.

"They said that for every population center with at least 10 people, there should be a mosque," he said.

Along with its poverty, Mali has an enormous geography and a weak central government - not unlike Afghanistan, where bin Laden first used the charm offensive to secure the loyalty of the local people, said Noman Benotman, a former jihadist with links to al-Qaida, now an analyst at the London-based Quilliam Foundation.

"We used to teach our people about this. It's part of the military plan - how to treat locals. This is the environment that keeps them alive," said Benotman, who first met bin Laden in Sudan and who spent years fighting alongside al-Qaida in Afghanistan. He said bin Laden gave his fighters specific instructions on how to conduct themselves: Don't argue about the price, just make the locals happy. Become "like oxygen" to them.

AQIM is taking the lesson to heart. Soon after they began taking water, one of the bearded fighters approached a shepherd at the pump to buy a ram. The fighters were looking to slaughter it to feed themselves. The shepherd offered it to him for free - too afraid to ask for money, said Maiga, the man's friend.

But the stranger refused to take the ram without payment, and immediately handed over a generous sum.

"They seem to know all the prices ahead of time. They point to a ram and say, 'I'll buy that one for 30,000 cfa ($60),'" said Maiga, quoting the highest sum a herder could expect to get for a ram in these parts. "They never bargain."

AQIM grew out of the groups fighting the Algerian government in the 1990s, after the military canceled elections to stave off victory for an Islamist party. Over the next decade, they left a trail of destruction in Algeria. Around 2003, they sent an emissary to Iraq to meet an al-Qaida intermediary, according to Benotman. Three years later, the insurgents joined the terror family, in what second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri called "a blessed union."

Since then, their attacks have taken on the hallmarks of al-Qaida. A pair of explosions this August killed 18 people as they tore through the mess hall of Algeria's military academy, with the second bomb timed to hit emergency responders.

Al-Qaida in turn appears to be learning from its affiliates, which have used kidnappings for ransom in Algeria, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. After bin Laden's death in May, investigators found files on his hard drive showing plans to turn to kidnapping to compensate for a decline in donations.

AQIM in particular has perfected what analysts call a "kidnap economy," drawing on its refuge in Mali, according to diplomats, hostage negotiators and government officials. In 2003, the group kidnapped and transported 32 mostly German tourists from southern Algeria to Mali, where, according to a member of Mali's parliament, they struck a deal with local authorities that is still in effect today.

"The agreement was, 'You don't hurt us, we won't hurt you,'" said the parliament member, formerly involved in hostage negotiations, who asked not to be identified because of the danger involved.

The government of Mali denies these accusations, but officials cited in diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks make the same assertion. The president of neighboring Mauritania, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, told his American counterparts in 2009 that Mali is "at peace with AQIM to avoid attacks on its territory." Whereas the al-Qaida cell has captured more than 50 foreigners in Algeria, Niger and Mauritania, hardly any of the violence has touched Mali.

The cell has also managed to recruit local fighters, including 60 to 80 Tuaregs, the olive-skinned nomads who live in the Sahara desert, according to a security expert. And villagers say they have seen black-skinned sub-Saharan Africans in the pickups speaking the languages of Mali, Guinea and Nigeria.

"The situation in Mali is they have become locals - they are not foreigners," said Benotman. "This is really, really very, very difficult to do, and it makes it very hard to get rid of them."
One thing still stands in al-Qaida's way: Its hardcore ideology does not gel with the moderate Islam practiced by Mali's nomads. Most of them said they were afraid, caught between need for the money al-Qaida offers and wariness of its extremist beliefs.

When bin Laden died, the members of the local cell went from well to well to ask people to pray for his soul, according to Amaye ag Ali Cisse, an employee of the Ministry of Husbandry who travels twice a month to the wells to oversee the vaccination of animals.

"Everyone is uncomfortable," he said. "This is a religion that doesn't belong to us."
The herders say the fighters have not tried to impose their ideology by force. Instead, they say that the AQIM members wait until they have seen a herder at least a few times before broaching the subject.

"It was the third time that I saw them that they started preaching to me," said Maiga. "They said that everything they do is in order to seek out God."

Herder Baba Ould Momo, 29, said he tries to come up with an excuse to leave when the pickup trucks arrive at the well, because he's afraid the terror cell will pull him in. He said they backed off when they noticed he wasn't interested.

"The first thing they try to do is invite people to join them in the forest. If they see that the person is wavering, it's then that they start preaching - saying everything is transitory," said Momo, who like most of the herders wears plastic flip-flops, with a robe of wrinkled cloth. "But if the person is categorical in saying 'No,' they leave them alone."

In June, Mauritania and Mali led a rare joint attack on the al-Qaida cell in the Wagadou Forest. However, herders say that a week earlier, the al-Qaida fighters told them that an attack was imminent and that they had laid down land mines in the forest. Mauritania blames Malian officials for tipping off AQIM.

The herders said that for around two weeks, they didn't see the bearded fighters. Then they returned with a new fleet of Hilux pickup trucks, and with more men. Since then, the fighters' tracks have been all over the forest floor, in a map of constant movement, said 60-year-old hunter Cheickana Cisse. They no longer sleep in the same place.

Just as Cisse was taking a drink of water at the N7 pump on a recent evening, two pickup trucks mounted with anti-aircraft cannons and loaded with combatants drove up. The men had chains of ammunition strapped across their chests, and belts loaded with cartridges.

They laid their AK-47s in a circle on the ground to create a space to pray, like a symbolic mosque. One of them asked Cisse if he had heard of bin Laden.
"He said, 'We're like this with bin Laden,'" Cisse explained, intertwining his right and left index fingers like a link in a chain. "He said, 'We're al-Qaida.'"

The elderly hunter tried to slip away just as one of the fighters made the call to prayer.
"And they said, 'You? Aren't you going to pray?' They told me to come into the circle. I could feel them watching me," he said.

The men kneeled inside the circle of weapons. Four others guarded them, including one who climbed on the roof of the truck. Cisse tiptoed inside and began going through the prayer. "I kept stealing glances to see if they were doing the same moves as me," he said. "I know the words, but I was scared."

When the group had finished, the four who had kept vigil took their turn inside the circle. Cisse quietly walked away.

They didn't try to stop him.

Newsweek Champions Anita Hill 'Surviving Clarence' | NewsBusters.org

Twenty years after her testimony in the Clarence Thomas confirmation mesmerized the nation, Hill shifts her focus from the public forum to the private. As today’s families are being devastated by the subprime mortgage crisis, Hill speaks out for a new understanding about the importance of home and its place in the American Dream.

Newsweek Champions Anita Hill 'Surviving Clarence' NewsBusters.org

click this link for article

Anita Hill is a professor of social policy, law, and women's studies at Brandeis University, where she teaches courses on race and the law, and gender equality. After graduating from law school she worked as the attorney-advisor to Clarence Thomas at the U.S. Department of Education. In 1991, she testified at the Senate confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas. She is the author of Speaking Truth to Power, in which she wrote about her experience as a witness in the Thomas hearings. Hill has written widely on issues of race and gender in publications such as the New York Times, Newsweek, the Boston Globe, Critical Race Feminism, and others.

For my Southern Cal family~ This Free event is now full, but everyone everywhere can access the program later from this link~ http://lfla.org/aloud/past.php

Check the list of previous speakers, as you may find others you'd like to hear. Also a good notification list to be on for future speakers.

lfla.org/aloud

[ALOUD] at Central Library
Thursday, October 27, 2011 7:00 PM

ANITA HILL
In conversation with Patt Morrison, L.A. Times columnist & radio host, KPCC, 89.3 FM
Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home

Directions/Parking: Unless otherwise indicated, ALOUD programs take place at the Los Angeles Central Library's Mark Taper Auditorium, 630 W. Fifth Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071.

You'll never guess who painted this....

Van Gogh, Picasso, Pollock, and ... Serratia marcescens?

- October 20, 2011

Although they can't pick up a brush, bacteria have created their own painting for the first time.
Simon Park, a microbiologist at the University of Surrey, notes that many people – including Alexander Fleming – have painted with bacteria. But now, in collaboration with watercolourist Sarah Roberts, he says the bacteria themselves have been turned into painters.

“We prepared a standard agar plate, about 20cm by 20cm,” he explains. “Sarah chose some pigments – some of which she thought might be toxic, some of which she thought the bacteria might like and painted circles on the agar. Then we inoculated the agar with a red pigmented bacteria and incubated it overnight.”

The result was the image you see above. As the Serratia marcescens bacteria (the red colour) grew, they moved over the surface and “picked up the paint [the other colours] and moved it around according to their own ‘desires or whims’”, says Park.

The result makes visible some of the results of the bacteria’s movement, swarming, communication and even coordinated behaviour.

Park says he hopes this – and other outreach work – will help the public understanding of bacteria.

“I sit in a laboratory and work with what I think are some of the most wonderful things out there, but the public all they ever see of bacteria are the horror stories when people are selling bleach. They very rarely look at the good side,” he told Nature.

Image: Park / Roberts / S. marcescens

This is a Day of Completion ~ On the Third Anniversary, We Cease Publishing the Knewz from Meroe West

Thank you to all that commented, shared and encouraged.

Today just happens to be exactly the date we began three years ago with this effort.

Your love, support and enjoying what's been presented has been appreciated.

The grace to write and express myself, .....to find images of beauty and interest that reflect the power of the visual to affect us.......to imagine that I'm reaching another Heart, out there in our world, ....offering something substantial that can inspire, uplift, clarify and add to another's day, or their way~

To the Source of All of this ......I give thanks~

Everyone.....have fun! Fearlessly BE, the Love you are. Continuously expand and transform.

lovu,

Kentke

New Ways of Being Love

Many years ago, I began to request of Cosmic Consciousness, the grace to experience new ways of Being in love. I asked to see love in 'new faces, and new places'. This request has led me, into whole new realms of greater and fresh understanding of this elusive and fundamental quality of Life. And it never stops. The lessons are constantly expanding.

For the most part, I relate it to all else I'm learning and attempting to practice about the principles of the quantum realm of Life. In light of that, I'd say that the article below is interesting, and has it's merits in sharing with us the data from relationships that follow a Newtonion structure. Newton's physics is all about what you can see, and quantify. What you can count and measure. That's why the article will even refer to the 'number' of friends that a person can supposedly have in their Life.

In truth, I would have liked to see the article below entitled, "Falling in Love CAN Cost You Friends", so that we the readers would understand that it's simply a very strong possibility. It's important for folks to know that it doesn't have to lead to that result.

Quantum physics is baffling to science, because it refuses to submit to the those defined perimeters - that something is valid only if it can be measured and counted. And for me, that's where quantum physics - current science- gets close to the realm of the subtle qualities of Life. What some call the 'spiritual.' Paying attention and noticing the invisable aspects of existence, I put them all together, and label them the qualities of the Divine, or Cosmic Consciousness. Some may call it God, Allah, or Universal Force.

Now the article below, describes a phenomena that I'm familiar with. Ususally I attribute what the article talks about to females, but I've seen males exhibit this too. You may remember as a young woman or man, that when your girlfriend, or one of the guys in your posse, got involved with someone special, you no longer saw your friend as frequently. Their new relationship had a magnetic effect on them, and more and more they were pulled away from your companionship or spending time with the group. This is because they were being drawn into a closer union with the object of their affection.

New ways of Being in Love for me, means to balance and sometimes resist this movement to a certain degree. It means to stay centered and grounded in who and what I Am. It means to respect and allow the other person to do the same. Staying grounded in my Life, keeps me from being too swayed out of my orbit, or off my destined path. It means that I still have the benefit and joy of my wholesome habits and those beloved friends, that have been there thru thick and thin, and who know me well. I benefit from their counsel, and they benefit from mine. And with those for which there is a deep affinity, our shared joy, fun and laughter is a priceless gift I would never choose to lose.

In truth, when I meet new friends, I immediately think of how they will enjoy and get along with those that I already love and are a part of my life. For the quantum example again, is one of expanding Universe, expanding wholeness and good. And that means my heart and mind also have to expand, to include this new love, along with the love of those friends that I still walk in harmony with on my life's journey.

How about release? The Cosmic principle of letting go, releasing and eliminating that which is no longer relevant or healthy as a part of who one is today? In friendship and love, this can be painful, or have a sting, but that ususally is because we are again like Newton, afraid of the space that will be left by someone's absence. Our 'clinging, clutching and holding' can often extend discomfort because we are not accepting that something, or someone in our life has run it's course.

What's that old saying about why someone comes into your life? For a Reason, For a Season, or Forever....? That makes so much sense, and gives us permission to not continue to hold on to that which is meant to be released.

Long round about way to introduce this article.....Hope it's made sense....Guess I needed to express the above.

Please receive it with the Love, it flows upon~

Kentke

Falling in Love Costs you Friends

By Jonathan Amos

15, September 2010

Science correspondent, BBC News

Falling in love comes at the cost of losing two close friends, a study says.

We probably all know that a passionate new relationship can leave you little time for others, but now science has put some numbers on the observation.

Oxford University researchers asked people about their inner core of friendships and how this number changed when romance entered the equation.

They found the core, which numbers about five people, dropped by two as a new lover came to dominate daily life.

"People who are in romantic relationships - instead of having the typical five [individuals] on average, they only have four in that circle," explained Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford.

"And bearing in mind that one of those is the new person that's come into your life, it means you've had to give up two others."

The research, which has only recently been submitted for publication, was presented to the British Science Festival at Aston University.

Professor Dunbar's group studies social networks and how we manage their size and composition.

He has previously shown that the maximum number of friends it is realistically possible to engage is about 150. On the social networking site Facebook, for example, people will typically have 120-130 friends.

This number can be divided into progressively smaller groups, with an inner clique numbering between four and six.

These are people who we see at least once a week; people we go to at moments of crisis. The next layer out are the people we see about once a month - the "sympathy group". They are all the people who, if they died tomorrow, we would miss and be upset about.

In the latest study, the team questioned 540 participants, aged 18 and over, about their relationships and the strain those relationships came under when a new romantic engagement was started.

The results confirmed the widely held view that love can lead to a smaller support network, with typically one family member and one friend being pushed out to accommodate the new lover.

"The intimacy of a relationship - your emotional engagement with it - correlates very tightly with the frequency of your interactions with those individuals," observed Professor Dunbar.
"If you don't see people, the emotional engagement starts to drop off, and quickly.

"What I suspect happens is that your attention is so wholly focussed on your romantic partner that you just don't get to see the other folks you have a lot to do with, and therefore some of those relationships just start to deteriorate and drop down into the layer below."
Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

A Picture Worth a Thousand Words

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton looks on as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, right, and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands as she hosts the re-launch of direct negotiations, Thursday, Sept. 2, 2010, at the State Department in Washington.

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

After a Life in Labor, a Union Leader Retires, Frustrated by the Movement

Anna Burger at an economic meeting during President Obama’s campaign. Ms. Burger is retiring as chairwoman of Change to Win and secretary-treasurer of the service employees’ union.

I am not familiar with Anna Burger's history, policies or style of leadership, but I offer this article because what happens within the labor movement is crucial to the expansion of prosperity within our communities, nation and the entire working world.

I appreciate the issues she raises here, and heartily agree with many of her statements. I too have long been frustrated by the inability of working people to significantly alter and direct their own destiny in the work place, as well as effect the role of business and corporations in our world.

Kentke

Anna Burger dedicated her life to building the labor movement, but it has nonetheless grown smaller, even during this time of stagnating wages.

By Steven Greenhouse
Published: September 4, 2010

WASHINGTON — After 38 years as a gung ho trade unionist, Anna Burger is retiring — with unmistakable frustration — from her post as the highest-ranking woman in American labor movement history.

Ms. Burger, 59, is frustrated because she has dedicated her adult life to building the labor movement, but it has nonetheless grown smaller and weaker. Beyond stepping down as chairwoman of Change to Win, a federation representing 5 million union members, she is also retiring from her job of 14 years as secretary-treasurer of the powerful Service Employees International Union, representing nearly 2 million janitors, hospital employees and others workers.

Ms. Burger said many women still had far too hard a time balancing job and family. She is also frustrated that union membership continues to shrink even when workers should in theory be flocking into unions during this time of stagnating wages. And the labor-friendly Democratic majorities that unions fought so hard to elect in the House and the Senate could disappear in this November’s elections.

“The labor movement gave me a chance for a better life,” said Ms. Burger, the daughter of a Teamsters truck driver. “I worry whether the labor movement will continue to be able do that for a lot of people.”

Within labor, many critics say that Ms. Burger, like Andy Stern, the former service employees’ president, was a divisive figure. She, like Mr. Stern, is often faulted for fomenting the schism in the A.F.L.-C.I.O. five years ago and for often bragging that the S.E.I.U. is the fastest-growing union with the biggest political war chest.

Ms. Burger, who first joined a union as a social worker in Pennsylvania, boasted, for instance, that were it not for the service employees’ multiyear push, the health care overhaul would never have been enacted.

“We’re the most successful union out there,” she said. “There are times people resent us for that.”

Ms. Burger had campaigned to succeed Mr. Stern after he announced his retirement in April. Viewing Ms. Burger as too top-down, many S.E.I.U. officials rallied behind a union executive vice president and the eventual winner, Mary Kay Henry. Ms. Burger quit the race, but stayed on as No. 2, although it seemed only a matter of time before she stepped down.

Ms. Burger was hazy about her future. She dropped hints that she hoped to land a job that brought unions together with other groups to build a progressive political majority — a vision that clashes with the nation’s recent rightward shift.

“For me,” she said, “there’s an urgency to try to make sure we take advantage of having the best president we’ve had in my lifetime to make this country and make the world work best for everyone.”

Randel K. Johnson, senior vice president for labor policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce, said that Ms. Burger was not going to get her progressive majority, and that it was partly labor’s fault.

“They certainly were successful in electing a more pro-union House and Senate,” Mr. Johnson said. “But their advocacy of the unpopular health care bill will mean losses this November for many House and Senate members who have traditionally supported unions.”

Ms. Burger has been an outspoken member of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. She has urged President Obama to appoint a jobs czar “who would focus on jobs, jobs, jobs” and to adopt an industrial policy to rebuild America’s sagging manufacturing base. She supports establishing a federal infrastructure bank that would spend hugely over the next decade to build roads, bridges and mass transit, creating millions of jobs.

Ms. Burger offered an explanation of why American workers were not rushing to embrace unions despite the tough economic times.

“They’ll flock to unions when they don’t feel so intimidated about supporting a union,” she said. “There’s still a total assault by corporations to stop workers from having unions.”
Many union officials remain bitter that Ms. Burger helped lead the 2005 split in the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which many say embarrassed and weakened labor.

Ms. Burger is unrepentant. “I don’t have any second thoughts,” she said, asserting that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. had lacked energy and vision.

She said that forming the breakaway federation fueled more union organizing by the Teamsters, for instance, among port truck drivers in Los Angeles. She also said that without the creation of Change to Win, Mr. Obama would never have won the presidency. She said that federation’s endorsement of Mr. Obama in April 2008 was pivotal to his defeating Hillary Clinton in several crucial primaries.

Change to Win has fallen far short of its proclaimed goal of organizing 750,000 workers annually. “There hasn’t been the big increase in union membership that they had called for,” said Peter Dreier, a labor expert at Occidental College.

Ms. Burger has often championed women’s causes. She noted that while women were half the work force, they did far more than half the work because they not only work on the job, but do most of the cooking, cleaning and child-rearing at home.

“We have not developed public policies that support working women the way we should,” she said. “When women can be forced to work mandatory overtime when they have children at home and don’t have access to child care, that’s a huge problem.

“We’re still lacking a lot of support mechanisms for women,” she added. “We’re the only industrial nation that doesn’t have paid maternity leave. Many businesses haven’t stepped up, so the government needs to.”