As one of their major constituencies unravels, Democratic politicians are worried -- and with good reason. But even if it's obviously not good news for Democrats, the split might turn out to be a manageable problem, maybe even delivering some benefits in the long run.

The initial anxiety is well founded, however. Unions lopsidedly support Democratic candidates with money, troops for the political ground war and votes. Although only 13 percent of America's workforce are union members, exit polls showed that 24 percent of voters in the last election came from union households. And polls taken for the AFL-CIO, still the umbrella federation of most unions, showed union members to be far more Democratic than comparable voters with a similar profile -- even those members who were white males, gun owners and regular churchgoers.

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Pratt, wearing a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt, ticked off a litany of reasons for his decision to plunge into electoral politics. First, he objects to the war in Iraq, undertaken simply to avenge President Bush's father, he believes. "Bush lied to the country and killed thousands, and nobody is talking of impeachment?" he said incredulously. "In my opinion, it's murder. He should have gone after the person who attacked our country." And by spending money on the war, Pratt said, the government has neglected needs at home, like healthcare. His wife, who runs her own small business, has had cancer, and neither can afford health insurance. Now they also worry about paying rising heating bills as winter approaches. The Bush tax cuts "didn't do me a lick of good," Pratt said, and Bush's "trickle-down" economic policies have meant that "it's impossible for us to operate our businesses. Nobody wants to spend money on new products."

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The suburb's residents are largely aging, white, working- and middle-class families, many of whom have bumped through long layoffs and wrenching job changes as global economic forces and unsupportive public policies have roiled the highly skilled manufacturing industries of southeast Wisconsin. While their economic interests and worries may tilt them toward the Democrats, concern about taxes, social conservatism (especially opposition to abortion) and now anxieties about war or terrorism tilt many to the Republicans.

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Though Kerry and Sen. John Edwards will fight it out in a dozen states in this week's Super Tuesday presidential primaries, there's little drama in the vote. Polls show Kerry leading his main challenger by 20 points or more in Ohio, California and New York. Far from being complacent, though, many here are already locked on to the fall campaign, certain that Ohio will be one of a handful of battleground states that could, in the end, determine the outcome of the race.

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"There were lots of anti-Bush comments and anger all day," said the Rev. Vince Lavieri, chairman of the party in Montcalm County, where Greenville is located. "But everybody seemed upbeat. They seemed to be thinking, now we're getting this process going. We're beginning to do something." Defeating Bush was clearly that something.

Yet as Kerry's solid victories in the caucuses in both Michigan and Washington consolidated his front-runner position, some political analysts worried that Kerry's support might prove to be a bubble that could be pricked, much like Howard Dean's early support, and that the damage might come after the primary season. Most voters are not very familiar with Kerry or his record, and the accelerated primary schedule and absence of a stiff challenge from a single leading opponent have let Kerry through without the kind of tough review that could test whether he really is the strongest candidate.

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Until then, many local Democrats had been focused on the war in Iraq and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, explains the Rev. Vince Lavieri, chair of the Montcalm County Democratic Party. But after the announcement, that changed, Lavieri says. "Everyone began thinking: Where am I going to find work?"

With the economy and the "jobless recovery" topping concerns of voters nationwide, it's no surprise that Michigan Democrats heading to their caucus polling sites this Saturday are overwhelmingly focused on their economic future. After all, Michigan is tied with Oregon for the second highest unemployment rate (7.2 percent, compared with 5.7 percent nationally), and the state has lost more than 300,000 jobs -- including nearly 200,000 in its crucial manufacturing sector -- over the past three years. This is a huge reversal from the late 1990s, when Michigan was actually adding substantial numbers of highly skilled, decently paid manufacturing jobs, and its jobless rate was well below the national average.

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This week, with more attention to his Cleveland roots in a poor, transient, blue-collar family, he gave speeches relaunching his campaign with an equally undiluted progressive message as he flew around the country.

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As the third hijacked plane plowed into the Pentagon, spokespeople for a broad coalition of corporate globalization critics were preparing for a press conference to formally announce a week of protests during the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings in the last week of September. The groups involved -- drawn from labor, environmental, religious, world anti-poverty and anti-corporate movements, including the AFL-CIO, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, Rainbow Coalition, Feminist Majority and dozens of others -- had planned to detail their demands, including canceling the debts of poor countries, fully funding international efforts against AIDS and blocking "fast track" trade-negotiating authority for President Bush.

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"For those who want to shut down trade," Bush said before the G-8 meetings, obviously alluding to the expected protesters, "I say you are hurting poor countries." Echoing the theme, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times cheerleader for globalization, tried to divide the protesters into two camps, one composed of anarchists and Marxists along with naive students duped by "protectionist" trade unions who simply oppose globalization, and another made up by environmentalists, anti-poverty groups and others who "understand that globalization, properly managed, can be the poor's best ladder out of misery."

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The leaders came here to negotiate the Free Trade Area of the Americas -- an agreement that would lift protections and tariffs on imports and exports among just about every country between Canada and Argentina, creating the world's largest free-trade zone. Wrapping up on Sunday a meeting that was more pomp than circumstance, they agreed to proceed with FTAA negotiations on schedule -- not at the accelerated pace President Bush had hoped for -- and to require that countries participating in future summits be democratic. But the real focus this weekend was on how well the anti-globalization movement has aged since its dramatic debut in Seattle less than two years ago.

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Even if families work hard at multiple jobs, they often have a hard time making ends meet -- especially after paying for high-cost housing. Technology drives the area's economy, but the industry leaves many people behind.

Concepcion Garay, 49, lives in Silicon Valley. After 21 years of working in the factories of companies like Control Data, Sperry Univac, Amdahl and Fuji Optical -- most of which moved to Asia or Mexico -- she's now working for $8.40 an hour as a home healthcare aide. It's less than she was making years ago in the factory -- despite the big boost in pay and benefits that came after she and fellow aides organized into a union.

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But Stiglitz's criticism finally proved too much for the powerful global financial institutions, especially after they endured raucous protests last month at their spring meetings. Last week, even as he was traveling to drought-stricken Ethiopia on a bank mission and his replacement had not yet taken office, the World Bank announced that he would no longer serve as special advisor.

Defenders of the IMF and World Bank could denigrate the credentials of some protesters, but it has been hard to attack the widely published former Stanford professor who also served as chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors. His candor made him an unlikely intellectual guru to the world trade protest movement. But while his criticism enhanced the credibility of the protesters, it also prompted new pressure -- some of it from the U.S. Treasury Department -- to quiet him, he told Salon, even as the global financial institutions were promising critics they would be more open and transparent.

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The Illinois moratorium, imposed by Republican Gov. George Ryan at the end of January, largely resulted from the extraordinary exoneration of 13 men sentenced to die after Illinois reinstituted the death penalty in 1977. (It had been invalidated in 1972 as a result of a United States Supreme Court decision in a Georgia death case.) During the same period, 12 men were executed. All 13 overturned convictions resulted from campaigning by people outside the criminal justice system, with seven cases involving academic and student investigators.

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The economy's problem isn't inflation in general, but prices could be out
of control in one sector: the stock market. If that's true, it makes sense for the Fed to try policies that more precisely dampen the "irrational exuberance" of some stock speculators, rather than end the good times just when more people are beginning to feel the benefit. One place to start: Make it harder to borrow money to speculate on stocks by raising what's called the margin requirement.

Nobody knows the mixture of mania and solid performance that underlies the stock market. But there's reason to be concerned about whether the boom will continue when people start to borrow heavily to buy shares in the expectation that the market will keep rising indefinitely, then using their stock gains to underwrite more borrowing and buying, which in turn drives up the market. Such borrowing "on margin" helped to fuel the rise and crash of the stock market in the 1920s.

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It was easy to understand the hyperbole as the protests unfolded Tuesday morning, preventing the opening of formal WTO activities. Ten years ago, who would have thought that Teamsters and kids in dreadlocks would be marching together, let alone under the banner of "fair trade"? The WTO has united labor and the radical, countercultural left in a way the anti-war movement never could.

Things turned uglier Tuesday night, when police charged protesters who refused to disperse after Mayor Paul Schell declared a 7 p.m. to dawn curfew in the city. Many of the trained non-violent protesters and labor activists who'd descended on Seattle had left for dinner, or a well-attended WTO debate featuring Ralph Nader.

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The WTO is under wide-ranging attack for sins of omission and commission -- from
neglecting poor countries and worker rights to endangering old forests and
sea turtles and trampling on democracy. But there's serious disagreement on a wide range of issues among WTO member countries themselves. Despite months of talks at the WTO's sedate headquarters in Geneva, leaders could not agree on a pre-conference statement of intentions for a new round of negotiations to reduce tariffs and change trading rules, for instance. Now even this new round of talks -- which the big economic powers all endorse in some form -- is in jeopardy.

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The deal, on the basis of preliminary information, opens up market
opportunities for U.S. high-technology and business consulting firms as well
as American agriculture on terms that appear slightly improved from those
the Clinton administration rejected last spring. With those concessions in
hand, the Clinton administration can more easily ask Congress to OK
China's entry into the WTO, thereby granting China the equivalent of
permanent "most favored nation" (MFN) status.

Most business groups applauded the deal and the prospect of China entering the
WTO. Peter Morici, senior fellow at the Economic Strategy Institute, a
think tank that promotes the interest of American export firms, argued that
the trade deal "should create many more opportunities for Americans than for
Chinese," especially in high technology, logistics, software, business and
legal consulting, and telecommunications services.

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"Nobody has had more problems with trade than the Steelworkers union,"
lamented Becker, a tenacious and intense crusader on behalf of industrial
workers. Becker had been deeply disappointed with the Clinton
administration's policies on trade. He would have been a strong supporter of
House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt if he had decided to run, but despite a
half-dozen meetings with the vice president in recent months, Becker had
not been persuaded by Gore's labor pitch. "We were prepared to sit this one
out," Becker said. "That's not my nature or the Steelworkers' nature."

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The idea has caught hold with some of the most conservative members of Congress as well as with the most liberal. Much of the credit goes to a loosely knit, grass-roots global campaign based primarily in churches and anti-poverty groups.

Operating under the banner of Jubilee 2000 -- recalling religious traditions of "jubilee" years when debts are wiped out -- these citizen campaigns have argued that enforcing payment of the heavy debts of very poor countries is immoral. In many cases the debts were incurred by illegitimate governments, like Mobutu's dictatorship in Zaire or South Africa's apartheid regime, and they are paid at a price of great human suffering by people who never benefited from them. They argue that it's bad economics. There is no way that countries can grow or reduce poverty if they are sending so much of their income -- typically 30 percent of the national budget -- to rich creditors. Finally, nearly everyone realizes that the debts are not collectable. If the countries were businesses, they would have declared bankruptcy years ago, and creditors would have written off the loss.

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The string of economic crises over the past two years in Asia, Russia and Brazil pushed the IMF into the spotlight and provoked waves of criticism, not simply from angry workers and students in the streets of some crisis countries but also from high-powered economists -- like Jeffrey Sachs at Harvard and Paul Krugman at MIT -- think tanks on both the left and right and nongovernmental watchdog groups. Even more surprising, criticism also came from the World Bank itself, especially senior vice president and chief economist Joseph Stiglitz.

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