Political strategist James Carville, widely regarded as the architect of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential victory, once said, "I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everyone."

Carville's remark hits home these days given the damage wrought worldwide by financial markets in general. How can one not help but be "intimidated" by the overall havoc in the global economy, with its obvious ramifications for local economic conditions, that seems less the product of any one actor or cause than the seemingly unavoidable consequence of markets so volatile and chaotic that all stand virtually powerless before their onslaught?

A near collapse of the financial system in Greece, a country hardly thought to carry much weight politically or economically, recently threw European markets into a tailspin which, in turn, caused the Dow to fall below 10,000 for the first time in months. The New York Times described what seemed to be the pathetic efforts of Greece's public employee unions taking to the streets in protest against the government's call for drastic cuts to public worker wages and benefits in response to the fiscal crisis: there was a "sense of resignation that megaphones were no match for volatile financial markets."

Closer to home, the impact of the market's freefall in 2008-09 has come to be felt acutely in the rising contribution rates that state and local governments find themselves now having to pay in order to keep their public employee pension systems fully funded. San Francisco projects that because of market losses it will need to contribute an additional 20.7 million in pension contributions next year and further projects that within four years approximately 675 million will be required annually to keep the pension fund in sound financial health - a figure that represents 27.3% of total payroll and is more than what it takes to run San Francisco General Hospital for a year. In San Jose, market losses to the pension system of approximately a quarter of the fund's value resulted in initial projections of an additional 38 million to the City's current annual contribution of 138 million dollars. Such is the real world impact of financial market movement - the product of forces that we can scarcely comprehend, let alone influence in any meaningful way.

And so what is to be done? To borrow a metaphor from a friend and colleague, how does one walk or even stand upright, so to speak, in the midst of such ferocious market winds that threaten to bowl us over with every fierce new, economic blast?

The answer most relevant to those of us who regard organized labor as the primary means available for human beings to confront adverse economic forces, be they large or small, lies, I believe, in labor's famous watchword: "Solidarity." Solidarity has time and again provided succor and support to a beleaguered rank and file when faced with daunting economic challenge.

But here, we can run immediately into problems. One of the least attractive features of our current age is the primacy given to a cynical, glib cast of mind over a more forthright, earnest approach to the world. Allowing a word like "solidarity" to escape one's lips almost instantly invites a patronizing rejoinder, replete with the by-now cliché dismissal of the speaker as a mere purveyor of "Kum-Bah-Yah" style naivetés.

It wasn't always this way. Not so long ago there practically existed an article of faith that you didn't cross a picket line. (I, for one at least, remember that sentiment growing up near the steel mills of northwest Indiana in the 1970's.) The seriousness of purpose and commitment to a cause larger than oneself that attend such a worldview are today regarded as almost the quaint relics of a bygone era.

But far from being sentimental mush, the solidarity embraced, for example, by the striking workers in Poland's Gdansk shipyards and whose eponym graced the dockworkers' own union, "Solidarnosc," was nothing short of iron courage. It had to be in order for it to have hastened the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980's.

We may count ourselves blessed that we have not had to face trials anywhere near as grave as those of Gdansk's ship workers. But that does not diminish the value of solidarity. On the contrary, principles of solidarity are critical to meeting the challenges posed by our new world of careening, out-of-control financial markets. Indeed, solidarity with others in the face of the common threat of unbridled economic volatility may be the only real defense we possess.

It may border on the perverse to compare our current struggle with Poland's dockworkers against a totalitarian state that was the Soviet Union circa 1980, but in some sense, the Poles' plight was more straightforward. At least, they could locate the enemy they had to fight. For us, the task is far more complex, as blind, irrational market forces can hardly be "fought" in any traditional sense.

And yet, solidarity - solidarity with each other, solidarity in the face of adversity - remains. If deliverance is to be found anywhere, surely it resides in Solidarity.

"Roll the Union On . . ."