Why Democrats Interested In Taking Back The House Should Be Overjoyed Kevin de León Is Running For The Senate, Boosting Likely Latino Participation

The DCCC can't get anything right. When Pelosi appointed Rahm Emanuel chairman in 2005, he implanted his DNA deep in its structure and it has presided over the destruction of the congressional Democratic Party ever since as one pathetic Pelosi-appointment after another chaired the committee and stuck closely to Emanuel's losing script of recruiting Republican-lite candidates-- often actual Republican candidates superficially pretending to be Democrats. Rank and file members finally rebelled against Pelosi last year and demanded a chance to elect the DCCC chair and a suite of regional vice chairs. Pelosi had no choice but to acquiesce if she was going to hold onto her own role as Leader. But then no one ran against her pathetic nominee, vapid and incompetent New Mexico closet case Ben Ray Lujan. As far as the regional vice chairs, there's been no sign of life in any of them except for the West Coast's Ted Lieu. (Lujan made sure that Texas, the second most important state for a Democratic takeover in the House, doesn't even have a regional vice chair.)

Lieu's bright spot, California, can reasonably provide 7 of the 24 seats the Democrats need to win back from Republicans this cycle and Lieu-- unlike the DCCC in general-- has been scrupulously neutral in the primaries, offering support to all the Democratic candidates running in the state's jungle primary. Friday's L.A. Times included a piece by American Prospect editor Harold Meyerson pointing out that "nearly one-third of the congressional districts represented by Republicans that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016 are in the Golden State, and if the Democrats are to regain the gavel in the House, they’ll need to win most of those districts. A passel of Democratic challengers have already announced they’re running against the Republican incumbents, and thousands of activists from such groups as Indivisible have begun mobilizing voters. The outcome of these elections, however, will be determined not only by the appeal and resources of the candidates, the mobilizations on their behalf, and President Trump’s unpopularity. A host of other factors-- California’s top-two primary system, the likelihood of viable Latino candidates for governor and U.S. senator, the probability of a gas-tax repeal initiative, and the efforts of Democratic candidates for statewide office to win Republican voters-- will likely play a crucial role in deciding the congressional contests the Democrats need to win."

Midterm elections are invariably about turnout: The party that does the better job of getting its voters to the polls is usually the winner. That will present a massive obstacle to California Republicans next November, inasmuch as their membership has so shriveled in recent years that they can no longer field competitive candidates in statewide races. What compounds their challenge is the state’s bizarre jungle primary, in which the top two finishers, regardless of party, advance to the November runoff.

That means that potential Republican voters a year hence (if recent polls are even marginally accurate) will likely be confronted with two Democratic candidates for governor, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and two Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate, incumbent Dianne Feinstein and State Senate President Kevin de León. These are not choices that will spur many Republicans to bother going to the polls, which could have a significant effect on the GOP’s efforts to hold its embattled congressional and state legislative seats.

Compounding the Republicans’ challenge will be the probability of heightened Latino turnout. Trump’s broadsides against fictitious “Mexican rapists” and his heightened efforts to deport people in the country illegally have understandably bestirred California Latinos. Should these factors not suffice, however, the 2018 gubernatorial and senatorial contests will also see the first serious bids by Latino candidates-- Villaraigosa and De León-- in modern California history. (Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez’s campaign for the Senate in 2016 was perfunctory and underfunded.)

Their campaigns will be anything but identical: Villaraigosa is already campaigning for Republican votes against the more liberal Newsom, while De León is clearly running to Feinstein’s left . But the likelihood that both will appear on November’s ballot is almost certain to boost Latino turnout to record levels for a midterm election. That doesn’t augur well for Republican members of Congress in districts with growing Latino populations (and virtually every one of California’s 53 congressional districts has a growing Latino population).

So which are the 7 most winnable California districts? If my predictions about a massive wave are borne out-- and the Tax Scam vote really helps make a wave into a tsunami-- these are the seats the Republicans can expect to give up. The best challengers are listed on the Blue American California congressional page you'll reach by clicking on the ActBlue thermometer on the right. Please consider contributing whatever you can to any-- or all-- of these excellent candidates.

• CA-49, Darrell Issa
• CA-25, Steve Knight
• CA-39, Ed Royce
• CA-21, David Valadao
• CA-48- Dana Rohrabacher
• CA-10, Jeff Denham
• CA-45- Mimi Walters

Extra credit for extraordinary circumstances:

• CA-22, Devin Nunes
• CA-50, Duncan Hunter
• CA-23- Kevin McCarthy

Why Progressives Want To Replace DiFi With Kevin de León-- And Why Establishment Conservatives Don't

Past/future of California

Ro Khanna (D-CA) was right this week when he wrote a Sacramento Bee OpEd calling for California voters to jettison Dianne Feinstein in 2018. Sadly, most California Democratic electeds privately agree with his reasoning and conclusion but have neither the integrity nor courage to say so in public. "If the 2016 election taught us anything," he wrote, "it is that voters are looking for new ideas, new leadership and a new beginning to our politics.They are frustrated that the turnover rate in Congress is lower than contemporary European monarchies. They believe public service should be a calling, not an entitlement for life. In an era of unprecedented change, voters want leaders who understand the complex challenges of the 21st century economy. They seek leaders who have a vision for shared prosperity in places left behind and for the jobs of the future." And he asked his readers to evaluate DiFi within this context as she seeks "a fifth term in 2018, one that would extend to 2024." Acknowledging her nearly 5 decades of accomplishments, he asked "Why then should California seek a new voice and jettison years of seniority?"

Put simply, we are not living in ordinary times.

At stake are the fundamental values of what defines us as Californians and Americans. On the big questions of this new century, Feinstein has been wrong.

She was wrong to vote for the Iraq war. She was wrong to be the lead sponsor of the Patriot Act and then to push for its extension. She was wrong to support President George W. Bush’s expansion of the National Security Agency in conducting surveillance on U.S. citizens and collecting metadata.

She was wrong to introduce legislation to outlaw encryption, compromising the personal data and privacy of consumers. And she has consistently been wrong about restricting speech online, including supporting The Stop Online Piracy Act, which faced a backlash from netroots activists and millennials.

Apart from her problematic voting record, she has failed to show leadership on issues of income inequality. She has not offered any pathway to Medicare for All, even being dismissive of the goal itself.

She has failed to lead on issues of debt-free college. She has not introduced bold proposals to increase wages for working families. Although she undoubtedly shares core Democratic values, she is not pushing the envelope to offer an alternative to the current economic system, which so many Americans believe is rigged against them.

California can do better. Our state is home to some of the most innovative policy thinking in the nation and the most passionate grassroots activism. We deserve a senator who will help lead on the big issues in the years ahead.

Harold Meyerson's column at the American Prospect was harsher, suggesting DiFi has outlived her moment. The oldest member of the Senate started on the right of the Democratic Party way back when she was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and has moved further right on key issues while "Democrats have moved left... California has moved left; and California Democrats have moved more to the left than Democrats anyplace else... In her 25 years in the Senate, she has always stood well to the right of the Golden State’s other elected Democrats, not to mention its Democratic voters."

Indeed, Feinstein designed her initial appearance on the stage of statewide politics with the specific intent of showing just how far to the right of Democratic activists she actually stood. During her first bid for statewide office (she previously had served as San Francisco’s mayor), she delivered a speech to the delegates at the 1990 convention of the state’s Democratic Party in which she made damn clear that unlike John Van de Kamp—the state’s liberal attorney general, who was her opponent in that year’s Democratic primary for governor—she emphatically supported the death penalty.

Her ringing endorsement of San Quentin’s gas chamber produced an immediate and noisy chorus of boos from the delegates, as her campaign had anticipated and planned for, since her subsequent television commercials featured the footage of her standing at the podium, defying the fuzzy-headed liberal boo-birds and that wuss Van de Kamp while standing up for crime victims. Feinstein went on to lose November’s gubernatorial run-off to Republican Pete Wilson, but two years later she won election to the Senate.

...Over the years, Feinstein has been a reliable Democratic vote on most occasions, but her persistent right turns on a number of landmark votes have marked her as the most conservative Democratic senator from a solidly blue state.

In 1999, Feinstein voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill, which tore down Glass-Steagall’s wall between depositor and investment banking. Most Democrats, to be sure, joined her, but Boxer—along with Russ Feingold, Tom Harkin, Barbara Mikulski, and Paul Wellstone, among others—voted no.

In 2000, Feinstein voted for the bill establishing “permanent normal trade relations”-- free trade-- with China. Almost immediately, American manufacturers began their exodus from the industrial Midwest to the low-wage, union-free Middle Kingdom.

In 2001, Feinstein was one of just 12 Democrats to vote for George W. Bush’s tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, nine of whom came from states Bush had carried the previous November. No senator from a state that had voted as heavily against Bush as California chose to join her in support of the legislation. At the time of the vote, Feinstein was (and still is) among the wealthiest members of the Senate, with an estimated net worth in the hundreds of millions, thanks to the fortune amassed by her husband, Richard Blum.

In 2002, Feinstein voted for the resolution authorizing the United States to go to war in Iraq: 23 of her Democratic Senate colleagues, including Boxer, voted against the resolution, as did 24 of the California Democrats in the House-- a clear majority of the state’s Democratic delegation. Indeed, on a host of issues, not just Boxer but the state’s leading House members, beginning with Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman, stood well to Feinstein’s left.

...The most likely figure to emerge as a Democratic challenger to Feinstein is State Senate President Kevin de León. To his fellow progressives, he should also be the most deserving, and to his fellow Californians, quite probably the candidate with the most compelling story. The son of Guatemalan immigrant parents (his father is also half-Chinese), de León was raised by his housekeeper mother, became a teacher, and in 1994 helped organize the massive Latino immigrant demonstration in opposition to the anti-immigrant Proposition 187. One of a number of young activists who worked under the tutelage of Miguel Contreras, the brilliant Los Angeles labor leader, de Leon was elected to the state Assembly from a racially diverse, heavily immigrant downtown Los Angeles district in 2006, and to the state Senate in 2010.

As Senate president, de León authored and steered to passage the landmark legislation that requires California to generate half its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. He also convinced his Senate colleagues to pass somewhat skeletal and provisional single-payer legislation, and conceived and persuaded the legislature to enact a pioneering bill to provide IRAs to the nearly seven million low-wage California workers who aren’t offered retirement benefits on the job, creating a state-managed fund through paycheck deductions from which workers would have to opt out.

...Feinstein supporters’ main argument against the very idea of a Democratic challenge is that it would require a massive diversion of money and energy that should instead be invested in efforts to unseat Republicans. That’s an argument that cannot be easily dismissed: A challenge to Feinstein would indeed require millions of progressive dollars that could otherwise be spent on Democrat-versus-Republican races, just as efforts to beat back that challenge would also require the re-routing of Democratic dollars.

The counter to that criticism is that a de León candidacy holds promise of activating all wings of the new progressive California and bringing voters to the polls who wouldn’t otherwise turn out. Seven of the state’s 14 Republican members of Congress represent districts that Clinton carried last November; Democrats are contesting all of those districts. A high-profile candidacy by de León-- who’s relatively young (50), progressive, Latino, and Asian-- could bring enough Latino and young voters to the polls to help swing a number of those districts. For all their considerable merits, the same can’t be said of Steyer and Sanberg.

California has emerged as the capital of anti-Trump America, and, more than that, as the progressive model for America’s future. That shift is due as much to de Leon as to anyone else-- even including Jerry Brown, the governor whom he prods from the left.

  And San Francisco Chronicle columnist Joe Garofoli offered a roadmap for defeating her.

How do you defeat an incumbent senator with near-universal name recognition, a place in history as California’s first female senator, a net worth of $94 million and the party establishment tripping over themselves to say nice things about her? Just this week, one of her erstwhile challengers, Los Angeles Mayor Gil Garcetti, threw a fundraiser for Feinstein and the United Farm Workers union endorsed her.

...To many progressives, DiFi is, in no particular order, a corporatist, Iraq war-mongering, single-payer-health-care-dubious, not-anti-Trump-enough, pro-Patriot Act, anti-Edward Snowden one-percenter. For starters. And she has got to go.

“This is a movement moment. It’s not enough to resist,” said Bill Honigman, the California state director for the national Progressive Democrats of America. “You need to offer a replacement for things that generally need to be replaced.”

And it ain’t going to be a Republican.

“I don’t think she can be beaten in a Senate race,” said former South Bay GOP Rep. Tom Campbell, whom Feinstein defeated for Senate in 2000. “Certainly a Republican won’t be able to do it.”

Given the anemia of the California GOP, it will be difficult to beat Feinstein by doing anything but running to her political left-- which de León would be best positioned to do. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, said she is “not running for Senate in 2018.” Billionaire San Francisco environmentalist Tom Steyer is still Hamleting on a run and wealthy Los Angeles [Orange County] entrepreneur Joseph Sanberg has little name recognition.

So, according to progressive leaders, here is the road map for how to beat DiFi:

Keep saying she’s soft on Trump: Anti-Trumpism is the breakfast of champions for progressives and many feel Feinstein hasn’t touched her plate. Moulitsas and others found Feinstein’s comment “offensive” last month that Trump “has the ability to learn and to change. And if he does, he can be a good president. And that’s my hope.”

More offensive to others is that Feinstein voted for 11 of President Trump’s 22 Cabinet and other upper-level nominees, while fellow California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris voted to confirm only four.

“It has to be a referendum on Trump because she has been conciliatory,” said Marcy Winograd, a leader of the California Democratic Party’s 1,100-member progressive caucus. “She says you have to have patience. It’s no time for patience.”

Keep asking, “Where’s DiFi?” There are two things Feinstein rarely does: town halls and debates. That could be a liability in the social media Era of Oversharing, especially among voters under 30, as more Millennials (35 percent) disapprove of Feinstein than approve (34 percent), according to a September Berkeley IGS poll.

Unless things change, history may remember Campbell as the last person to debate Feinstein-- and that was almost in the last millennium (2000). Feinstein hasn’t deigned to debate her last two Republican Senate opponents. In 2012, her campaign manager, Bill Carrick, shrugged off a debate challenge from Republican Elizabeth Emken, saying, “This is the sort of typical cliche move from someone (who) is 19 points down and has $25,000 in the bank and 35 percent name recognition,” Carrick said.

“We feel that her job is to represent California and not be a personality where it is about her and not us,” said Aram Fischer, a leader of Indivisible San Francisco, which at 4,500 members is one of the largest local resistance groups in the nation. “We don’t think that Dianne Feinstein is meeting that standard.”

Keep talking about single-payer Medicare-for-all: This weekend, the National Nurses United-- the Oakland-based union with 100,000 members in California-- will hold 100 grassroots actions in all 80 state Assembly districts to talk about an issue on the top of progressive wish lists. Any Feinstein challenger who talks up single payer has a chance to tap into their energy.

“That’s an indication that you have an activist base that’s getting active,” said union spokesman Chuck Idelson.

Keep hoping the revolution will be nationalized: A candidate not named “Tom Steyer” or “Joe Sandberg” can’t keep pace with the bottomless bank of DiFi. But progressives feel money won’t matter as much because the race will draw national attention-- and small dollar donations from progressives around the country. If a Democrat with no political resume, like Jon Ossoff, could raise a record $30 million for a special House race in suburban Atlanta, imagine what someone like de León, with a record of legislative accomplishment, could raise.

“This race will be nationalized-- and I will do everything I can to make it so,” said Moulitsas, whose DailyKos operation has an email list of 3 million and between 10 million and 12 million unique monthly visitors.

Keep focusing on your voters: A progressive candidate-- particularly de León-- could be attractive to a coalition of Latinos, African Americans and Millennials, Moulitsas said. “Of course, those are also the voters who don’t vote (in high numbers) in midterm elections. But long term it is the right bet. That is the future of the party.”

Combine that coalition with white progressives and stir in the energy of new grassroots anti-Trump resistance groups like Indivisible, and a progressive candidate could have enough votes to climb into the top two finishers in a June primary.

Look for at least de León to jump in. Traditionally, it would be career suicide for a fellow Democrat to take on such a well-respected incumbent like Feinstein. But the feeling among de León supporters is that even if he loses, he would be appealing to the progressive future of the party’s voters.

Running would be good for him-- and good for progressives.

“It would be,” Moulitsas said, “a win-win.”

Democratic Senators Who Need to Be Lobbyists in 2017

Each of these Democrats need to be turned into lobbyists at the earliest opportunity. For three of them, that's January 2017 (click to enlarge and share).

The Senate held its final cloture vote on Fast Track, and after a lot of wheeling and dealing over amendments — whose will get a vote and whose won't — the Democrats above voted to help grease the next NAFTA treaty's passage into law.

Pro-TPP writer Alex Rogers, in the National Journal (Ex-Im means "Export-Import"; my emphasis throughout):

Ex-Im Bank Deal Gets Trade Bill Moving

Last-minute floor trading on reauthorizing the bank secured the votes to proceed on fast-track measure.

The Senate advanced a major trade bill Thursday, after a last-minute deal on a vote to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank prompted Sen. Maria Cantwell and others to break away from a powwow on the chamber floor to say, "Aye." ...

The vote, 62 to 38, came over the objections of [anti-TPP] senators, who claimed that the Senate GOP leadership—President Obama's strange bedfellows on free trade—had throttled debate, allowing only two votes so far despite around 200 amendments filed.

"The last time we did fast-track legislation on the Senate floor it was three weeks of debate," said Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. "This is about three days."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had set up the procedural vote Thursday despite other time-sensitive deadlines determining the National Security Agency's bulk-collection authority and highway funding. But he seemed aware of the possibility of failing on Wednesday afternoon. "Well we're going to grind on and finish TPA," he said, "if those who say they're for it end up voting for it."

Those members included Washington state Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray as well as Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who formed a tight circle with McConnell on the floor to hash out an agreement for a future vote on authorizing the Export Import bank, whose charter expires at the end of next month.

What's the Export-Import bank? A slush fund for companies like Boeing and the CEOs who draw their pay from them:

The bank, which helps finances U.S. businesses' exports, is synonymous with "crony capitalism" by conservatives and many House Republicans who wish to kill it. But the bank is also popular with many Senate Republicans, including Graham, who—like the Washington state senators—represents a state with a significant stake in the success of Boeing.

Fast Track is as good as done in the Senate. On to the House.

The Democrats' Trade — Your Rich People for Mine

So here's the trade Maria Cantwell, Patty Murray and the other pro-TPP Democrats made. They will vote to give money to rich people who will benefit from TPP. In exchange other senators will vote to give money to rich people who run companies like Boeing. There were a bunch of trades like this in the Yes-on-TPP camp. Who said there's gridlock in DC?

What did we get? If Fast Track passes the House, we get TPP, the next NAFTA, and the one after that, TPIP, the same bad deal on the Atlantic side. These senators, of course, will do quite well in any case.

A Tale of the Rich and the Rest

The TPP story isn't about the U.S. and the world. It's about the rich and the rest, also known as "capital and labor," as this excellent piece by Harold Meyerson explains:

A trade deal at what cost?

So what gives with the American people? Don’t they realize, as my colleague Charles Krauthammer argued last week, “that free trade is advantageous to both sides”?

The sides to which Krauthammer referred, of course, are nations. But perhaps those who’ve experienced such free-trade consequences as factory closings and lower-paying jobs are thinking about two entirely different sides — capital and labor. ...

When advocates make the case for Congress expanding free trade with Pacific Rim nations by passing the “fast-track bill” currently before it, they cite the U.S. industries that the deal will benefit. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial, for instance, acknowledges that, while U.S. exports to South Korea have hardly increased since we signed a trade accord with that nation in 2011, our service-sector growth there has been substantial. Our international law firms can now practice there, the Journal proclaims, and “American investors can now own telecom operations in that country.”

A great deal for international lawyers and investors — two groups of embattled U.S. proletarians who clearly needed our government’s help.

For other American workers, not so great. The treaty was promoted as benefiting the U.S. auto industry, but since its enactment Korean auto imports to the United States have boomed while sales of U.S.-made cars to South Korea remain all but nonexistent.

Is it any wonder, then, that virtually the entire base of the Democratic Party opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the fast-track bill that would ease its enactment? From coast to coast, Democrats are doing their damnedest to raise the very wages that globalized capital has depressed.

But what about restraining the power of China? Meyerson delivers the knockout blow:

Of all the developments that led to the increase in China’s power and the diminution of ours, the one that definitively did both was Congress’s enactment of permanent normal trade relations with China in 2000. That led to a flood of U.S. companies shuttering their domestic plants and shifting production to China. When Beijing insisted that the price of doing business there was the transfer of proprietary high-technology techniques to China, many of those companies complied.

So a trade deal benefiting U.S. investors at the expense of U.S. workers created the rise in Chinese power, and now, we’re told, a trade deal benefiting U.S. investors at the expense of U.S. workers will help us keep Chinese power in check.

"A trade deal benefiting U.S. investors at the expense of U.S. workers" — an apt description in both cases. A tale of the rich and the rest (meaning us).

If Democrats Want to Lobby for Rich People, They Should Register

And you can help by moving them out of their current job and putting them on the labor market. These TPP Democrats are up for reelection in 2016:

▪ Patty Murray — 202-224-2621 — Now deep in Senate "leadership" and apparently hungry for more of that Schumer-Murray magic.

 

▪ Michael Bennet — 202-224-5852 — Mr. Bipartisan. As chair of the DSCC, he oversaw the 2014 election losses, then afterward said he worried that Republicans would be mad at him.

 

▪ Ron Wyden — 202-224-5244 — The worst. As Ranking Member of the Finance Committee, he was lead perp in the Senate, patient zero for the fatal infection. He deserves an expensive lobbyist office filled with very uncomfortable chairs — soon.

Their phone numbers are above. Do you vote in Washington, Colorado or Oregon ? Are you a donor to senatorial campaigns? Feel free to pick up the phone and speak your mind. They've certainly spoken theirs, or the minds of their "investors," to borrow Meyerson's phrase.

But What About the Senate?

But what about "the Senate," you ask? First, is this a Senate worth fighting for? Second, with votes like these, do you think candidates like these are more likely or less likely to continue the party debranding that led to the 2014 results?

U.S. trade deficit since 1960. That "steep NAFTA slide" starts in 1994, one of Bill Clinton's signature accomplishments.

Frankly, if you really want a better Senate (I do), abandon all twelve names on the graphic above — let their "investors" take care of them — and elect Blue America candidates like Alan Grayson, Donna Edwards, Russ Feingold and P.G. Sittenfeld. You can help by contributing here.

GP

Pay no attention to the Lying Liars of the Right -- inequality of economic opportunity was NOT always the law of the land

The sainted Ronald Reagan bequeathed Americans the right to revel in their ignorance, bigotry, and savagery even as they were being so carefully lined up in the bent-over position.


"What [William Lazonick] has uncovered is a shift in corporate conduct that transformed the U.S. economy -- for the worse. From the end of World War II through the late 1970s, he writes, major U.S. corporations retained most of their earnings and reinvested them in business expansions, new or improved technologies, worker training and pay increases. Beginning in the early '80s, however, they have devoted a steadily higher share of their profits to shareholders."

-- Harold Meyerson, in his Washington Post column
"In corporations, it’s owner-take-all"

by Ken

Last night I shared Jen Sorensen's lovely Daily Kos comic strip that neatly and crucially made the connection between the institutionalized social inequality on display in Ferguson and the institutionalized economic and legal inequality on display in Bankster America. And as I said, while I was focusing yesterday on the social-inequality side of this coin, tonight I planned to flip the coin over to the economic-inequality side, noting that they are the twin legacies of the sainted Ronald Reagan.

When it comes to Saint Ronnie, I write a lot (to whoever said "incessantly," was that really helpful?) about his disastrous sociopolitical legacy, the benediction he bestowed that whatever you believe to be, or even wish to be, reality is the real thing -- assuming, of course, that it's compatible with an ultra-right-wing way of looking at, or not looking at, the world. I guess that's the side of the Reagan Legacy that usually makes me crazy, since the consequences are incalculable.

That benediction, after all, comes with an official Seal of Good Americanism for every crackpot chemical impulse flits through a person's brainm such that if it feels right, or just feels good, to you, then it's for real -- again assuming it's compatible with ultra-right-wing doctrine. Not to put too fine a point on it, the "it" here includes every species of ultra-right-wing hatred, savagery, bigory, and urge to violence. If you feel it, preached Saint Ronnie, and if it's real American (translation: compatible with ultra-right-wing doctrine), it's real.

It's called, you know, "Morning in America."

But I tend not to dwell on the other branch of the Reagan legacy, the more nuts-and-bolts kind. For while Saint Ronnie was bestowing upon Americans without access to the levers of power this blessing of unlimited ideological insanity, to those Americans manning the levers of power he was bestowing the country itself, tied in a bow -- again, assuming that those lever-manners subscribed to the ultra-right-wing vision of "free-market capitalism" wherein the mission of government is to force Americans without power to their knees, bent over, ready to receive what ever might be shoved up their posteriors.

It's possible to construct a working model whereby either branch of Reaganism can be seen as providing "cover" for the other. But the power of money being what it is -- which is to say the power of money -- if you were a betting person, you would probably want get behind the view that the crackpot, emotionally exhilarating savagery of Ronnie the empowerer of the masses was providing cover for the rape of those masses by followers of Ronnie the phony free-market capitalist.

One of the crucial elements of the permanent institutionalizing of crackpot ultra-right-wing reality, of course, was Saint Ronnie's open war on labor unions. And doggone if his folksy, largely reality-free or even reality-defying schmoozing skills weren't perfectly suited to turning large numbers of Americans against the only institution our economy has (or rather had) to resist the pulverizing will of the Economically Empowered. He pulled the trick of making the Great American Masses feel empowered while joyfully positioning themselves in the Great Bend-Over.

Now, it has probably always been true that if you tried to talk about equality of economic equality, the right-wing powers who depend so heavily on inequality of opportunity cried, "Class warfare!" And who would know better than the people who had made class warfare a way of life, except on their terms, which are roughly the class-war equivalent of the military-war C-in-C Reagan waged on Grenada. Make sure they're bent over for optimal insertion.

However, over the last decade or two, as the War on Equality of Opportunity has become the American Way, a wrinkle has been added: pretending that the way things are now is the way things have always been, so shut your pieholes, you whining "takers." Don't you know it's Morning in America?

With Labor Day approaching, Harold Meyerson -- bless his soul -- is here to tell us that uh-uh, this is not how it has always been, and what's more, there was a time in the not-so-distant past when this was understood by almost as many Republicans as Democrats. I provided a link last night to Meyerson's Washington Post Labor Day-themed column. For those who haven't already read it, and perhaps even those who have, it begins: "Labor Day -- that mocking reminder that this nation once honored workers -- is upon us again, posing the nagging question of why the economy ceased to reward work."

He ticks off a couple of frequently proposed culprits, globalization and technological change, but then directs "anyone seeking a more fundamental answer" to the article "Profits Without Prosperity" by William Lazonick in the September Harvard Business Review, which he later says "does nothing less than decode the Rosetta Stone of America’s economic decline."

Like Thomas Piketty, Lazonick, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, is that rare economist who actually performs empirical research. What he has uncovered is a shift in corporate conduct that transformed the U.S. economy — for the worse. From the end of World War II through the late 1970s, he writes, major U.S. corporations retained most of their earnings and reinvested them in business expansions, new or improved technologies, worker training and pay increases. Beginning in the early ’80s, however, they have devoted a steadily higher share of their profits to shareholders.

How high? Lazonick looked at the 449 companies listed every year on the S-and-P 500 from 2003 to 2012. He found that they devoted 54 percent of their net earnings to buying back their stock on the open market — thereby reducing the number of outstanding shares, whose values rose accordingly. They devoted another 37 percent of those earnings to dividends. That’s a total of 91 percent of their profits that America’s leading corporations targeted to their shareholders, leaving a scant 9 percent for investments, research and development, expansions, cash reserves or, God forbid, raises. [Emphasis added.]

"As late as 1981," Meyerson writes, "corporations directed a little less than half their profits to shareholders." But then came Morning in America.

[T]he shareholders’ share began rising in 1982, when Ronald Reagan’s Securities and Exchange Commission removed any limit on corporations’ ability to repurchase their own stock and when employers — emboldened by Reagan’s destruction of the federal air traffic controllers’ union — began large-scale union-busting. Buybacks really came into their own during the 1990s, when the pay of corporations’ chief executives became linked to the rise in the value of their company’s shares. From 2003 through 2012, the chief executives of the 10 companies that repurchased the most stock (totaling $859 billion in aggregate) received 58 percent of their pay in stock options or stock awards. For a CEO, getting your company to use its earnings to buy back its shares might reduce its capacity to research or expand, but it’s a sure-fire way to boost your own pay.

And it gets better, Meyerson notes. "With companies lavishing virtually all their net income on shareholders and executives, the way many of them cover their actual business expenses -- their R-and-D, their expansion -- is by taking on debt through the sale of corporate bonds." And better still:

A number of companies, however — most prominently, IBM — borrow specifically to increase their payout to shareholders. And IBM is not alone. Friday's Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. companies are currently incurring record levels of debt, much of which, the Journal noted, “is being used to refinance existing debt, being sent back to shareholders as dividend payments and share buybacks, or banked in the corporate treasury as executives consider how to potentially deploy funds as the economy expands.” Many of the companies that have spent the most on buybacks, Lazonick demonstrates, have also received taxpayer money to fund research they could otherwise afford to perform themselves.

"What Lazonick has uncovered," Meyerson writes, "is the present-day American validation of Piketty’s central thesis that the rate of return on investment generally exceeds the rate of economic growth."

Indeed, Lazonick has documented that wealth in the United States today comes chiefly from retarding businesses’ ability to invest in growth-engendering activity. The purpose of the modern U.S. corporation is to reward large investors and top executives with income that once was spent on expansion, research, training and employees. To restore a more socially beneficial purpose, Lazonick proposes scrapping the SEC rule that permitted rampant stock repurchases and requiring corporations to have employee and public representatives on their boards. [Emphasis added.]

"The lesson for Labor Day 2014 couldn't be plainer," Meyerson says. "Unless we compel changes such as those Lazonick suggests to our model of capitalism, ours will remain a country for investors only, where work is a sucker’s game."

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Harold Meyerson on "The 40-Year Slump" -- did it (does it?) have to be this way?

by Ken

The American Prospect, as part of a special feature called "The State of Work in the Age of Anxiety," has an important piece by Harold Meyerson called "The 40-Year Slump," of which I can only hit some of the highlights here.

The economic landscape of the quarter-century following World War II has become not just unfamiliar but almost unimaginable today. It constitutes what historian Vaclav Smil has termed “a remarkable singularity”: The United States came out of World War II dominating the world’s production and markets, and its unprecedented wealth was shared broadly among its citizens.

The defining practice of the day was Fordism (named after Henry Ford), under which employers paid their workers enough that they could afford to buy the goods they mass--produced. The course of Fordism never ran as smoothly as it may seem in retrospect. Winning pay increases in halcyon postwar America required a continual succession of strikes. . . .

In the three decades following World War II, the United States experienced both high levels of growth and rising levels of equality, a combination that confounded historical precedent and the theories of conservative economists. By 1973, the share of Americans living in poverty bottomed out at 11.1 percent. It has never been that low since.

By the early 1980s, the Treaty of Detroit had been unilaterally repealed. Three signal events—Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker’s deliberately induced recession, President Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air-traffic controllers, and General Electric CEO Jack Welch’s declaration that his company would reward its shareholders at the expense of its workers—made clear that the age of broadly shared prosperity was over.

There's a lot to explain, both domestically and internationally, with the rest of the world catching up to us following our postwar head start, but for Meyerson it ultimately all comes back to the evaporation of workers share of the pie, their loss of the expected share in their still steadily expanding productivity. No, the postwar economic miracle can't be re-created, but Meyerson points out that "the iconic German manufacturers"

have factories scattered across the globe. Unlike the American multinationals, however, they have kept their most remunerative and highest-value-added production jobs at home. Nineteen percent of the German workforce is employed in manufacturing, well above the 8 percent of the American workforce. German industrial workers’ wages and benefits are about one-third higher than Americans’. While the U.S. runs the world’s largest trade deficit, Germany runs a surplus second only to China’s and occasionally surpasses it.

And Meyerson rejects the notion that our situation was ordained by eonomic forces or is beyond correction.

What has vanished over the past 40 years isn’t just Americans’ rising incomes. It’s their sense of control over their lives. The young college graduates working in jobs requiring no more than a high-school degree, the middle-aged unemployed who have permanently opted out of a labor market that has no place for them, the 45- to 60-year-olds who say they will have to delay their retirement because they have insufficient savings—all these and more are leading lives that have diverged from the aspirations that Americans until recently believed they could fulfill. This May, a Pew poll asked respondents if they thought that today’s children would be better or worse off than their parents. Sixty-two percent said worse off, while 33 percent said better. Studies that document the decline of intergenerational mobility suggest that this newfound pessimism is well grounded.

The extinction of a large and vibrant American middle class isn’t ordained by the laws of either economics or physics. Many of the impediments to creating anew a broadly prosperous America are ultimately political creations that are susceptible to political remedy. Amassing the power to secure those remedies will require an extraordinary, sustained, and heroic political mobilization. Americans will have to transform their anxiety into indignation and direct that indignation to the task of reclaiming their stake in the nation’s future.

4th of July special: "Jefferson’s vision of equality is clearly in peril" (Harold Meyerson)

In a 4th of July column, "Thomas Jefferson’s view of equality under siege," Harold Meyerson harks back to the Jeffersonian vision of not just legal but social equality, and the challenge his agrarian vision faced from the urban development favored by his rival Alexander Hamilton, and the reforms devised in the first half of the 20th century by the two President Roosevelts --

to restore some of Jefferson's egalitarianism in what was, by then, Hamilton's America. Progressive taxation, the establishment of wage and labor standards and the legalization of unions reduced economic inequality, while the prohibition of corporation donations to political campaigns diminished, somewhat, the wealthy’s sway over government.

"But that, as they say," he continues, "was then," explaining how "the war that the American Right and corporate elites have waged against the Roosevelts’ Jefferson-Hamilton synthesis for the past 40 years has largely prevailed."

I'll leave you to read his setting forth of the case, and jump to his conclusion:

So how is our foundational assertion of equality faring on this July Fourth? As to social parity, it has seldom looked more robust. As to economic equality and the political equality with which it is inextricably intertwined, the picture is bleak. The mega-banks that plunged us into deep recession have had the political power to forestall their breakup. A handful of billionaires continues to donate unprecedented sums to election campaigns. The share of national income and wealth that goes to the vast majority of Americans continues to decline. The Republican Party — and the five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court — are committed to doctrines that will make these disparities more glaring. The recent exception to this trend is the health-care-reform act, which partially extends the Declaration’s assertion of equal rights to the realm of medical access. That’s no small achievement, but, with that single exception, on this July Fourth, Jefferson’s vision of equality is clearly in peril.

A healthy and happy 4th to all!

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Will the infotainment noozers ever ask serious questions of Paul "Why the F*&k Aren't You Dead Yet, Granny?" Ryan?

DOONESBURY: A Banker's Progress

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

"Ryan’s pieties notwithstanding, his budget is a prescription for diminishing prosperity and security, a road map, in fact, for national decline."

-- Harold Meyerson, in his Washington Post column,

"Who's hurt by Paul Ryan's budget proposal?"

by Ken

I don't want to talk about it. You name it, I don't want to talk about it. I don't even want to talk more about Charlie Sheen's "show."


But let me just say a couple of things about the Bold New Economic "Vision" of Paul Ryan. (I reckon that this slug's "vision" is to actual vision very much what Charlie Sheen's "show" (see link above) to actual shows.)

* How come when the chorus of lying hooligans of the New Right were spreading their fabrications about "death panels" contained in the health care legislative package, every infotainment nooze outlet picked it up and treated the lies seriously, but now when Paul "Drop Dead, Grandma" Ryan unveils a plan to turn the health care of the elderly over to the tender mercies of the predatory health care industry, hoping to sign -- not figuratively but literally -- a suffering-and-death warrant for the non-rich elderly, there's nary a peep?

* Speaking of Paul "You've Lived Long Enough, Grandma" Ryan and the predatory health care industry, while I realize it would be asking too much to hope that infotainment noozers, who are predominantly economic illiterates themselves (their interest in economics tending to extend only to the point where their inflated paychecks clear the bank), to raise any questions about the supposed economics credentials of a man who is a total and unequivocal economic ignoramus. Still, how come none of the noozers ever ask the hideous troll about any of those nauseating numbers Howie passed on the other day from Public Campaign Action Fund:

1. Over his career, Paul Ryan received more than $2.1 million in campaign contributions to his campaign account and his leadership committee, Prosperity PAC, from health and insurance interests.

2. Insurance interests alone accounted for more than $850,000 of that total, with health professionals providing more than half a million dollars and pharmaceutical interests giving more than $250,000.

3. Among Ryan’s biggest backers were:

* Blue Cross/Blue Shield, whose PAC and executives gave him $75,650 in campaign contributions;

* America’s Health Insurance Plans, whose PAC and executives gave him $29,500; and

* Koch Industries, whose PAC and executives gave $100,500, including $2,500 from billionaire David Koch.

Shouldn't the little toad be fighting for his political life against a growing chorus of cries of blatant corruption, rather than getting away with his pretense to being anything but the sleaziest kind of megacorporate whore?


* And speaking of those selfsame predatory insurance companies, would it be possible to nominate them to the role of senior seniors liquidators if the Baucus-Emanuel-Messina-Obama axis hadn't made it an inviolable principle of health care "reform" that not even the slightest whisper be allowed to surface regarding their thieving, murderous performance and its role in the economy-destroying explosion of health care costs? Is there any limit to the price we will pay for that profile in gutlessness? (No, I don't think there is any limit.)

* And on the general subject of the extremely special interests represented by the economic "vision" of Paul "Why the F*&k Aren't You Dead Yet, Granny?" Ryan, Harold Meyerson has another great column in today's Washington Post, the one from which I quoted at the top of this post ("Who's hurt by Paul Ryan's budget proposal?").

Here are the final paragraphs:

The cover under which Ryan and other Republicans operate is their concern for the deficit and national debt. But Ryan blows that cover by proposing to reduce the top income tax rate to just 25 percent. He imposes the burden for reducing our debt not on the bankers who forced our government to spend trillions averting a collapse but on seniors and the poor. The reductions in aid to the poor, says the budget blueprint that Ryan released, will be made “to ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.” That’s a pretty good description of America’s top bankers, but Ryan’s budget showers them with tax cuts.

Republicans can’t take sole credit for creating a vision of a diminished America. Most of the Washington-based commentariat has focused on the debt over the past year, ignoring both the persistence of high unemployment and the absolute stagnation of wages even as profits have soared. Those who applaud the macroeconomics of Ryan’s cuts should at least be compelled to explain how ordinary Americans, whose incomes haven’t risen since the late ’90s, can take up the slack, in their own purchasing and in the nation’s economic activity, created by these cuts. They might even want to think about raising taxes on profits and capital gains, since these forms of income are rising even as wages flatline.

And, finally, there’s talk that we have a president who’s a Democrat — the party that created the American social contract of the 20th century. Initially, he focused on reshaping and extending that contract into the 21st. Now that the Republicans want to repeal it all, he’s nowhere to be found. Has anybody seen him? Does he still exist?

Sure, the banksters and the rest of the megacorporate elite are entitled to buy as much government as they can afford, especially as the thug imbeciles of the Supreme Court Far Right prepare to extend the crackpoint notion-turned-constitutional "principle" that money = free speech. But at the very least, shouldn't their bought whores be encouraged, if not actually required, to label themselves as Wholly Owned Stooges of Your Corporate Masters?

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The event was beyond horrible, but Harold Meyerson asks us to think about "the mind-set that survived the Triangle Shirtwaist fire"

The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire: "On March 25, 1911, in New York City‟s Greenwich Village 146 workers, mostly teenage Jewish and Italian immigrant girls, perished after the fire broke out on Triangle Company‟s sweatshop on the 8th and 9th floors of the building. Factory foremen had locked the exit doors to keep workers from taking breaks and stealing scraps of fabric. Other doors only opened inward and were blocked by the stampede of workers struggling to escape. Workers burned or they jumped to their deaths." (the Cry Wolf Project)

"Businesses reacted as if the revolution had arrived. The changes to the fire code, said a spokesman for the Associated Industries of New York, would lead to 'the wiping out of industry in this state.' 'The regulations,' wrote George Olvany, special counsel to the Real Estate Board of New York City, 'would force expenditures on precautions that were "absolutely needless and useless."' 'The best government is the least possible government,' said Laurence McGuire, president of the Real Estate Board. 'To my mind, this [the post-Triangle regulations] is all wrong.'"

-- from Harold Meyerson's WaPo column yesterday,
"The mind-set that survived the Triangle Shirtwaist fire"

by Ken

In that really splendid column yesterday, Harold Meyerson continued (in fact, concluded):

Such complaints, of course, are with us still. We hear them from mine operators after fatal explosions, from bankers after they've crashed the economy, from energy moguls after their rig explodes or their plant starts leaking radiation. We hear them from politicians who take their money. We hear them from Republican members of Congress and from some Democrats, too. A century after Triangle, greed encased in libertarianism remains a fixture of -- and danger to -- American life.

I've been relieved to find that the Triangle Shirtwaist fire hasn't been forgotten. All month I've been seeing a heap of coverage, of nakedly horrified remembrance, but then my vantage point is the crazed left-wing outposts of the alternate media. I'm hoping the rest of the country remembers too, and in a proper mode of unmitigated revulsion. As commentators I've heard have pointed out, there have been countless workplace disasters that caused more damage and loss of life. This one, though, remains fixed in the imagination, probably for the same reason that it inflamed the public imagination at the time: the utter innocence and helplessness of the victims, and the preventability of the tragedy, which was caused by the greed and callousness of the people who could have prevented but didn't give a damn.

Just to be clear about what happened, let's let Harold Meyerson retell it:

The seamstresses were just getting off work that Saturday, some of them singing a new popular song, "Every Little Movement (Has a Meaning of Its Own)," when they heard shouts from the eighth floor just below. They saw smoke outside the windows, and then fire. As David von Drehle recounts the ensuing catastrophe, in his award-winning book Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, just a couple minutes later the ninth floor was fully ablaze.

The fire engines that rushed to the scene did not have ladders that reached to the ninth floor. The fire escape -- which didn't reach all the way to the street anyway -- was not built to accommodate more than a few people and soon collapsed. The stairwell that led to the roof was already burning, and after a few minutes was consumed by flames. The other stairwell led down to the street, but the door was padlocked from the outside so that the men and women who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company would be compelled to use just the one stairwell or the two elevators to exit, lest any of them elude inspection and make off with leftover scraps of cloth. [A shirtwaist, by the way, was a blouse styled like a man's shirt. Later the term was used to refer to a dress that had such a top. -- Ed.]

The elevator operators made runs up to the ninth floor several times before their cables stopped working, and before desperate sewers sought to escape by jumping down one of the elevator shafts, hoping to find a softer landing atop the descending elevator than on the sidewalk nine stories down.

But many, facing the choice of death by fire or death by impact on the city streets, chose the latter and leapt. Down they came, some already engulfed in flame -- first a few, then a torrent, before the horrified crowd that had gathered by the building, which was just off Washington Square in the heart of New York's Greenwich Village.

When it was over, 146 people had either died by fire or jumped to their deaths. Most were young women, almost entirely Jewish or Italian immigrants, many still in their teens, one just 14.

The Cry Wolf Project recap backs us up a bit, to the situation before the fire:

* Fire Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo had ordered sprinklers to be installed in a number of warehouses. Three weeks before the Triangle conflagration, the Protective League of Property Owners held an indignation meeting. The League's counsel, Pendleton Dudley, then issued a statement charging that the Fire Department was seeking to force the use of "cumbersome and costly‟ apparatus. . . . And the New York Herald noted that the owners claimed the order amounted to "a confiscation of property. . . .‟ (Stein, p. 25-26)

* In 1909, Mr. H. F. J. Porter, one of the ablest fire prevention experts in the city, was recommended to Triangle, in the wake of a commissioner‟s visit, to set up a number of fire drills for the firm. In June of 1909, he wrote them to offer his services, but he received no reply to his letter. The New York Times later tracked him down, after the fire, and he said: “The neglect of factory owners in the matter of the safety of their employees is absolutely criminal. One man whom I advised to install a fire drill replied to me: "Let 'em burn. They're a lot of cattle anyway." (Stein, p. 29)

Triangle owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, Harold Meyerson writes,

had fiercely opposed the general strike of Lower East Side garment workers two years earlier and had hired thugs to beat up their seamstresses when they picketed the plant. They rebuffed the union's demand for sprinklers and unlocked stairwells -- and when these facts became widely known in the fire's aftermath, outrage swept the city. Blanck and Harris were tried for manslaughter -- but acquitted in the absence of any laws that set workplace safety standards.

(As a footnote, Sam Seder did a lovely extended Majority Report Radio interview with author Kevin Baker, whose work includes a trilogy of NYC-set historical novels, and who in the course of providing all sorts of interesting background and a specially detailed walk-through of the event itself, notes that FDR Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the first-ever female cabinet member, at the time a social worker in the city, who happened to be in the Village that day and became an eyewitness to the fire, insisted that March 25, 1911, was the first day of the New Deal. You can hear Sam and Kevin discuss the fact that Triangle owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, after beating the manslaughter rap, cleaned up on their fire insurance -- Kevin notes that end-of-season fires in the garment factories were a commonplace, in fact were more or less counted on to recouping some of the investment in unsold inventory -- and opened another factory that was found to have all the same safety hazards.)

The horror of the Triangle fire was so overwhelming that it actually caused a turning point in workplace-safety regulation -- and, not incidentally, in the fortunes of the American labor movement. Here's Harold Meyerson again:

In Triangle's wake, and facing the prospect of losing New York's Jewish community to an ascending Socialist Party, Charlie Murphy, who ran Tammany Hall and controlled the state's Democratic Party, told two young protégés -- Assembly Speaker Al Smith and state Senate President Robert Wagner -- to make some changes to New York's industrial order. Aided by Frances Perkins, a young social worker who was in Washington Square looking on in horror as the seamstresses jumped to their deaths, Smith and Wagner visited hundreds of factories and sweatshops. Over time, they authored and enacted legislation that required certain workplaces to have sprinklers, open doors, fireproof stairwells and functioning fire escapes; limited women's workweeks to 54 hours and banned children under 18 from certain hazardous jobs. (Years later, Wagner, by then a U.S. senator, authored -- with help from Perkins, who had become labor secretary -- the legislation establishing Social Security; he also wrote the bill legalizing collective bargaining.)

DO AMERICANS REALLY THINK OF WORKERS
AS "A LOT OF CATTLE ANYWAY"?

We've already sampled the reaction of the Pillars of American Capitalism to even the reforms that were generated by the fire. As Meyerson points out in the quote at the top of this post, that attitude has changed surprisingly little in the last 100 years. The general revulsion the fire can still arouse in sentient Americans suggests that the public has never endorsed that noble Pillar of Capitalism philosophy, "They're a lot of cattle anyway." What has changed in recent decades is the general public awareness of why and how workplaces have changed.

I was struck by the way New America Foundation president Steve Coll framed this change as he considered the role of Internet and non-Internet factors in phenomena like the uprising in Egypt, in an April 7 New York Review of Books piece called "The Internet: For Better or for Worse":

One problem confronting anyone who seeks to explore these questions is the habit of mind referred to by intelligence analysts as mirror imaging. In the West, where digital social media were born, many of us find Facebook and Twitter to be new, exciting, and important. When we examine an event like Egypt’s stunning revolution, it is hardly surprising that we find social media to be new, exciting, and important there, too. Labor unions, on the other hand, enjoy no comparable glamour. Yet some Egyptian youth activist groups, such as the April 6th Movement, owe their origins to labor strikes. If, as is at least conceivable, Egyptian labor syndicates were just as important as social media sites in organizing and providing mass support for street protests during January and February, would we be able to see this accurately?

To begin with, I think large numbers of present-day Americans, afflicted by the successful right-wing campaign to wipe out education, are simply ignorant of the revolution that had to occur to raise social consciousness and government policy above the "lot of cattle anyway" attitude toward working people. (The folks at SEIU, by the way, have produced a swell interactive infographic documenting: "How unions succeeded in making your workplace safer in the 100 years since the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.")

Then, I think that decades of vicious anti-union disinformation has done a lot to elevate that ignorance into full-blown imbecility. Even among people who are duly horrified by bits of ancient history like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire there is often a sense that "well, that was then, but that's all over." Do they have any idea what it took to bring about the changes that took place in the course of the 20th century? That a lot of it involved what was in all but name full-fledged war? And that for a long time the Qadaffis of the Pillars of Capitalism military command were winning?

More to the point, do the reflexive union-bashers really imagine that concessions made by organized management were made voluntarily, out of any sense of fairness or the goodness of their hearts? Because that's exactly what they propose to make the nation's labor policy: Let management decide -- they know what they're doing. Oh yes indeed, they do. And that's why they continue to send miners into mines riddled with ignored safety violations, to be maimed and killed. And why disasters like the Triangle fire, far from being obsolete, occur with some regularity -- only now in the "offshore" locales where the Pillars have shipped their low-wage manufacturing work? And when we hear about those maintenance workers being locked into WalMart stores overnight, do we understand that we're talking about situations that could be a match away from another Triangle disaster? Or does it simply not matter because they're "a lot of cattle anyway"?

I can't think of a better way to close that to quote once again Harold Meyerson's conclusion:

"A century after Triangle, greed encased in libertarianism remains a fixture of -- and danger to -- American life."


POSTSCRIPT: "REMEMBER THE TRIANGLE FIRE"

"In concert with organizations and individuals across the country, we are spearheading commemorative events -– activism, education, arts -– for the Centennial and the establishment of a permanent public art memorial."

-- the Remember the
Triangle Fire Coalition

Thanks to Kevin Baker, in the Sam Seder interview, for this tip. The Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, in addition to tracking (since August 2009!) events all over the country related to the Triangle fire anniversary, at rememberthetrianglefire.org (by no means limited to the actual date; the schedule continues on into the calendar year), invites anyone who'll be in New York tomorrow to join them for "Workers United -- official commemoration," from 11am to 1:30pm, at the site of the building that housed the Triangle factory (yes, it's still there, now part of New York University), at Washington Place and Greene Street in Greenwich Village. ("Can't be here in person?? No worries! We will stream the event live right here!")

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"America's decade of dread": As fewer and fewer Americans share in the boom at the top, more and more of us look at grim prospects ahead

[Click to enlarge.]

"The moral world that we see [in a Council on Foreign Relations poll] is the moral world of Charles Dickens. Of the elite of his day, he wrote in 'Bleak House,' 'there is much good in it. . . .' But, he continued, 'it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air.'

"America, at the end of this dreadful decade."

-- Harold Meyerson, in his Wednesday Washington Post

column, America's decade of dread

by Ken

All through 1999 and 2000, smart people kept reminding us that the 21st century wouldn't begin until Jan. 1, 2001, that 2000 was really the last year of the 20th century. Anyone who swallowed that guff, raise your hand. Just as I thought.

By our standard, then, not just the year but the first decade of the century is drawing to a close. Earlier this week the estimable Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson had some interesting reflections on this decade past, which I've been trying to find an opportunity to share with you.

Through most of the postwar era, which is to say now the second half of the 20th century, America's middle class has tended to assume that its destiny and economic prospects were basically linked with those of the financial ruling class. Now, finally, it appears that these folks have learned what our lower economic classes have always known: that the financial elite, famously committed to the economics of "trickle-down," are willing to share only what's left over after its own insatiable greed is quenched, which of course it never really is.

The form in which we've been hearing about this most in recent years is the stupendously inflated gap between rich and poor incomes. And unfortunately, this looks like a schism that the Obama administration, which seems so clearly committed to protecting above all the economic interests of the financial elites, is singularly ill equipped (I suppose I should say "ill disposed," but it amounts to the same thing) to deal with. In the meantime we're facing, most of us, a protracted period of dashed and diminished hopes and expectations.

America's decade of dread

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, December 16, 2009; A19

This decade began and ended in dread. It began with Wall Street -- the World Trade Center -- targeted for mass murder. It ends with Main Street fearful and reeling from economic reverses that Wall Street helped create.

It was the decade of distraction. While the U.S. economy bubbled and then crumbled, the president for eight of the decade's 10 years embroiled us in a grudge match with Saddam Hussein and then persisted in throwing lives and money into the chaotic conflict that (as many predicted would happen) ensued. The decline of the American middle class was nowhere on his radar screen.

The stocks bubble of the late 1990s was succeeded by a bubble in housing; these were the engines of our economic growth. America's production of goods no longer received the level of investment that had made it the engine of our economic growth from the mid-19th century through the 1970s. The change began at the outset of the Reagan years, when the percentage of corporate profits retained for new investment dropped sharply. A report from the International Labor Organization published last week shows where the money went: to shareholder dividends, disproportionately benefiting the wealthy. In the prosperity years of 1946 to 1979, dividends constituted 23 percent of profits. From 1980 to 2008, they constituted 46 percent.

Finance boomed. The gap in annual wages between workers at financial companies and workers at non-financial companies, the ILO reports, grew from $11,000 in 1989 to $40,000 in 2007. The financial sector defended this shift by arguing that it had created many innovative financial products -- the very financial products that managed to turn downturn into Great Recession. In an interview in Monday's Wall Street Journal, former Fed chief Paul Volcker said that he has "found very little evidence that vast amounts of innovation in financial markets in recent years have had a visible effect on the productivity of the economy." He went on to say: "All I know is that the economy was rising very nicely in the 1950s and 1960s without all of these innovations."

The dread in the land today isn't just a fear of losing your job -- or of your spouse, sister, father or child losing his or hers. It's a fear that America has been hollowed out, that we don't have a sustainable path back to mass prosperity, let alone to economic preeminence. A poll taken last month for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) shows that 44 percent of Americans considered China to be the world's leading economic power, while just 27 percent thought the United States still held that throne. Such fears can only be intensified by public policies that fail to champion America's national interests by fostering the flight of investment abroad.

Overcoming some of our national phobia about having an industrial policy, the Obama administration has rightly targeted the renewable energy sector for investment -- a long overdue shift back to real, rather than financial, production. But we don't yet have policies to ensure that the real production we're fostering is done at home. As Joan Fitzgerald, director of the Law, Policy and Society program at Northeastern University, notes in a recent article, 84 percent of the $1.05 billion in federal clean-energy grants distributed since September has gone to foreign wind turbine manufacturers. Unionized, high-wage Germany and non-unionized, low-wage China both have thriving wind-power industries that profitably export their products to us. We have shunned policies that bolster domestic production, which is why more Americans are betting on China's economy than on our own.

The problem is that America's economic elites have thrived on the financialization and globalization of the economy that have caused the incomes of the vast majority of their fellow Americans to stagnate or decline. The insecurity that haunts their compatriots is alien to them. Fully 85 percent of Americans in that CFR-sponsored poll said that protecting U.S. jobs should be a top foreign policy priority, but when the pollsters asked that question of the council's own members, just 21 percent said that protecting American jobs should be a top concern.

The moral world that we see in that poll is the moral world of Charles Dickens. Of the elite of his day, he wrote in "Bleak House," "there is much good in it. . . ." But, he continued, "it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air."

America, at the end of this dreadful decade.

[All emphasis added.]

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