I am in Amherst, MA for my yearly class teaching economics to union members. I hate the constant grey of the east in winter, but there is no snow on the ground, which is nice. We took a walk from the UMass campus where we stay into town. We met some people we know, and I mentioned that enrollments seemed low. We were told that it is getting harder to recruit students. One reason for this is that unions seem no longer willing to pay the tuition for their members. These are regular college classes, so it is true that tuition has risen over the years (I have been teaching in the program for about 15 years). But it is remarkable that unions, most of which pay their officers and staff a good deal of money, which own a ton of valuable property, and which spent tens of millions of dollars on that champion of the ruling class and ace warmonger, Barack Obama, and will no doubt do so again, won't pay tuition for a few members to get a masters degree. The classes here are good, the teachers are excellent, the students make valuable contacts and friends, and the students do good things after they leave (well, most of them do. I have had a few who were as bad as their union presidents and one at least who was a CIA operative). I get sick to death of hearing that the climate for unions is awful, everything is stacked against labor, and so forth. Power is built by workers from the ground up, in mass struggle. Education is an important part of this, or any, struggle. Maybe if unions paid attention to their members' education, unionized sanitation workers in NYC wouldn't have been the ones to dump all those OWS books (including some of my own) into the trash. Instead they act like Somoza in Nicaragua, who said he wanted oxen not men in his country. In this connection, I recommend highly Frank Bardacke's monumental book on the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, Trampling Out the Vintage. Chavez distrusted his rank and file, fearful that they would want to run their own union and might actually see the union as a way to have a better, more prosperous life, rather than one of poverty and sacrifice like his own (but certainly not his kids and relatives, who now run the union as a quasi racket). He once said they were like pigs in their greed! Oxen, pigs! Give me female lions and hyenas and wolves. They fight in packs, together.