Are there winners on this Election Day? I don't know, but there sure are a lot of losers

The Coney Island subway yard seemed a much happier election evening destination than the traditional tubeside Election Night vigil.

"[I]t was revealed last week (by David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for The New York Times) that the incomes of the very highest earners in the United States, a small group of individuals hauling in more than $50 million annually (sometimes much more), increased fivefold from 2008 to 2009, even as the nation was being rocked by the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
"Last year was a terrific year for those at the very top. Professors Hacker and Pierson note in their book that investors and executives at the nation’s 38 largest companies earned a stunning total of $140 billion -- a record. The investment firm Goldman Sachs paid bonuses to its employees that averaged nearly $600,000 per person, its best year since it was founded in 1869."

-- Bob Herbert, referencing the book Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of Berkeley in his NYT column today, "Fast Track to Inequality"

"This is the essence of an economy that has broken down, where people become desperate, where they do things to preserve their lives and their families they wouldn't normally do. For a great number of Americans out there, it's everyday reality. And the new regime that swept into power on January 20, 2009 has not materially changed their circumstances."

--David Dayen, in an FDL post today telling "The Story of the Election"

by Ken

Happily, I'm going to be otherwise occupied this evening. Other-than-election-result-watching, I mean.

I wish I could credit myself with smart planning, but sometimes the smarter things I do are done with a minimum of thinking. The New York Transit Museum tour of the massive Coney Island subway yard was offered on two different dates, which only recently occurred to me represented a choice between the evenings of Election Day and Pearl Harbor Day. I really wasn't weighing the relative disaster content of the two dates, or the freshness of those disasters. As best I can remember, I simply picked the earlier date. Now I'm pretty happy about the timing, which has turned out unintentionally smart.

I'll have to leave work a little early to trek out to Coney Island in time for the start of the tour. Afterward, it's a long schlepp home to (way) Upper Manhattan, and I won't be rushing it. Since I'll be in Brooklyn anyway, I thought of stopping off on that long way back to join the local contingent of Drinking Liberally who'll be gathering at Fourth Avenue Pub (76 Fourth Avenue), but now I don't think so. 

If I do any stopping off to break up the long trip, it's likelier to be non-election-related, preferably election-proof -- i.e., no place where there's apt to be a TV or radio playing. And when I do get home, I'm going to try to focus on the accumulation of unwatched TV treasures on the DVR. Maybe take a look at this newfangled Sherlock Holmes thing.

It's not, after all, as if the election is going to go away. It'll still all be there when I decide I'm ready to deal with it, and by then, with luck, we'll actually know what's what, more or less, and I'll spare myself those long, awful hours of making believe that stuff is "happening," when all that's really happening is that they're counting votes that have already been cast.

This election has me pretty worked up, partly of course the unnecessarily stupid and hard-to-defend position the lordly ranks of the Democratic Party have put us in, having to defend a whole host of policy decisions and nondecisions we've been screaming bloody murder about the whole time. But more because of the utter depravity and delusionality of the marching forces of right-wing hooliganism and delusion. It's hard to control my rage that all over the country people who should be in prisons or mental institutions, people who should be spat upon by anyone with a modicum of sense or decency, are poised to be elected to positions they will disgrace. What kind of country has a half-electorate who would even think about voting for such degraded specimens of humanity?

In this mood maybe the last thing I needed was Bob Herbert's NYT column today, taking off from Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's book Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (all emphasis added):

"Over the last generation," the authors write, "more and more of the rewards of growth have gone to the rich and superrich. The rest of America, from the poor through the upper middle class, has fallen further and further behind." . . .

Something has gone seriously haywire in the distribution of the fruits of the American economy.

This unfortunate shift away from a long period of more widely shared prosperity unfolded steadily, year after year since the late-'70s, whether Democrats or Republicans controlled the levers of power in Washington. "Winner-Take-All Politics" explores the vexing question of how this could have happened in a democracy in which -- in theory, at least -- the enormous number of voters who are not rich would serve as a check on policies that curtailed their own economic opportunities while at the same time supercharging the benefits of the runaway rich.

The answer becomes clearer when one recognizes, as the book stresses, that politics is largely about organized combat. It's a form of warfare. "It's a contest," said Professor Pierson, "between those who are organized, who can really monitor what government is doing in a very complicated world and bring pressure effectively to bear on politicians. Voters in that kind of system are at a disadvantage when there aren't reliable, organized groups representing them that have clout and can effectively communicate to them what is going on."

The book describes an "organizational revolution" that took place over the past three decades in which big business mobilized on an enormous scale to become much more active in Washington, cultivating politicians in both parties and fighting fiercely to achieve shared political goals. This occurred at the same time that organized labor, the most effective force fighting on behalf of the middle class and other working Americans, was caught in a devastating spiral of decline.

Thus, the counterweight of labor to the ever-increasing political clout of big business was effectively lost.

'We're not arguing that globalization and technological change don't matter,' said Professor Hacker. 'But they aren't by any means a sufficient explanation for this massive change in the distribution of wealth and income in the U.S. Much more important are the ways in which government has shaped the economy over this period through deregulation, through changes in industrial relations policies affecting labor unions, through corporate governance policies that have allowed C.E.O.'s to basically set their own pay, and so on.'

This hyperconcentration of wealth and income, and the overwhelming political clout it has put into the hands of the monied interests, has drastically eroded the capacity of government to respond to the needs of the middle class and others of modest income.

Nothing better illustrates the enormous power that has accrued to this tiny sliver of the population than its continued ability to thrive and prosper despite the Great Recession that was largely the result of their winner-take-all policies, and that has had such a disastrous effect on so many other Americans.

Still and all, how can it be that so many people are prepared to vote for candidates who by hook or by crook are witting or unwitting creatures of the oligarchy that feeds off the rest of us?

But somewhere in there I read our friend David Dayen's post this morning at FDL, in which he references Zaid Jilani's ThinkProgress account of Jennifer Cline, a Michigan woman "lucky" enough to receive a hand-written note from the president (links onsite).

In January of this year, Obama read a letter from Jennifer Cline, a 28-year-old woman living in Monroe, Michigan. Cline informed Obama that she and her husband had both lost their jobs in 2007 and fallen on hard times as a result. "I lost my job, my health benefits and my self-worth in a matter of five days," she wrote. Following the loss of her job, Cline "was diagnosed with two types of skin cancer, and she had no health insurance. She signed up for Medicaid, and treatment was successful. She went back to college after her unemployment benefit was extended." She hoped that in "just a couple of years we will be in a great spot."

After reading the letter, Obama chose to reply with a handwritten note on White House stationary. He wrote, "Thanks for the very kind and inspiring letter. I know times are tough, but knowing there are folks out there like you and your husband gives me confidence that things will keep getting better!"

But things, unfortunately, did not get better. Crunched by the costs of a down payment on her home and cancer treatments, Cline has been forced to sell her letter from the president to earn some money. She is selling the letter to autograph dealer Gary Zimet for $7,000, who will then sell it on his website momentsintime.com, which markets autographs.

D-Day comments in his post (again, links onsite):

Jennifer Cline is selling the letter to pay for a mortgage payment and medical bills. She got the help she needed from the President, in a manner of thinking, but not nearly the way she wanted to. Her hope had to turn into currency, the belief in a President turned into raw commerce.

Zaid Jilani adds that Cline's circumstances are not unique. Cline fares better than most in this economy because at least she came into possession of something of value to sell. For many others, it's their most cherished longtime assets, the last items they can scrape together, that comprise what they can exchange for money to keep them going. This is the essence of an economy that has broken down, where people become desperate, where they do things to preserve their lives and their families they wouldn't normally do. For a great number of Americans out there, it's everyday reality. And the new regime that swept into power on January 20, 2009 has not materially changed their circumstances.

Obama's done some things and it's important not to lose sight of them. But outside the political junkie class, he is measured on whether he brought a positive development in the lives of the great mass of people. Unfortunately, people are still unemployed, they're still losing their homes, they're still getting screwed by their loan servicers and they still have little recourse in bankruptcy. They are on the brink; their sacrifice and their struggle demands an overwhelming policy response. They got tinkering around the edges.

We did get our first "blame the whiny Left" column today, and I eagerly anticipate many more. But that's a stupid debate among elites. You can blame the lack of material economic improvements for the circumstances that occur today. Some of these were because of the depths of the crisis, some because of serious policy misjudgments, some because of an unwillingness to take on the forces of power who caused the problem. But it's this truth, the story of Jennifer Cline and her struggle to survive, that has brought us to this point.

People in Jennifer Cline's position are seriously kidding themselves if they imagine that voting for Republicans will help them. But it's not hard to understand why they would think long and hard before voting for Democrats.

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