Since when did being a lefty become about cultural stuff?

It seems to me at times that the political fights in this country are between rich people: economic libertarians on the right and social libertarians on the "left" duking it out over the legal status of fetuses and gay people, and gee, there's no time left after discussing those issues to talk about how working people are getting screwed over more and more and more.

The democrats have been all but useless on economic issues for 30 years; the "kitchen table issues" that Truman focused on are long forgotten. NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagal, EFCA, the abandonment of Progressive taxation and a million other cuts have bled the working class into economic ruin, and the Democratic Party has stood by (Yes, Clinton made some pious noise about sending all those former assembly line workers to college so they could be knowledge workers or something, which sounds nice but is actually kind of ridiculous.)

Here's the thing, Lefties: people are flocking to militias and birtherism and tea parties because the left stopped talking to them - or rather, the problem is the left offers words (but even those, rarely) but precious little else.

American Plutocracy

What we have now is a plutocracy, and plutocracies tend to be either reformed (see 1930s New Deal) or end in considerably more grief (see various armed revolutions in Latin America, Africa and Asia.) I much prefer the "reform" route of the two choices.

One thing that bugs me about people who call themselves "liberals" is that there are enough upper income ("creative class") people calling themselves that that any mention of the typical means of reform (steeply progressive tax rates and income redistribution) is greeted like the rantings of Marxists, rather than the thoroughly sensible, historically proven ideas they actually are.

A Decent Start

The Obama Administration is going to release detailed descriptions of torture used against prisoners held by the United States.

This, however, is not encouraging:

Saying that it is a “time for reflection, not retribution,” Mr Obama reiterated his opposition to a extensive investigation of controversial counter-terrorism programs.

It is not "retribution" to obey the demands of justice. As I said before, the precedent of torture needs to be strongly and unequivocally condemned; the perpetrators need to suffer significant penalties, including prison terms, so that the next president who is tempted to authorize torture will blanch at the price.

Torture is so dangerous to democracy that it needs to be excised root and branch. Half-measures are like cutting out only half of a malignant tumor.

An Inspired Rant at DKos

We're wasting our time here. Just nationalize the damn banks already. Almost all of the top economists are now in agreement that we should take this step. The people who put the money in are the people who own the company - that's how capitalism works. I'm a die-hard capitalist. I don't want the federal government owning banks for an extended period of time. But what's worse is to continue letting these bankers rob us of our money day in and day out while we sit around like fools.


At the very least, it is unconscionable to get rid of these pay caps. On what grounds do these people think they deserve millions of dollars for bankrupting their companies? How is that capitalism? That's not capitalism, that's cronyism. They pay the politicians, the politicians pay them. They have perverted the whole system.

Want A Thriving Middle Class?

Robert Reich has a post over at TPM Cafe where he advocates strong unions as a means of reviving the long-term prosperity of the American economy.

Why is this recession so deep, and what can be done to reverse it?

Hint: Go back about 50 years, when America's middle class was expanding and the economy was soaring. Paychecks were big enough to allow us to buy all the goods and services we produced. It was a virtuous circle. Good pay meant more purchases, and more purchases meant more jobs.

At the center of this virtuous circle were unions. In 1955, more than a third of working Americans belonged to one. Unions gave them the bargaining leverage they needed to get the paychecks that kept the economy going. So many Americans were unionized that wage agreements spilled over to nonunionized workplaces as well. Employers knew they had to match union wages to compete for workers and to recruit the best ones.

Fast forward to a new century. Now, fewer than 8% of private-sector workers are unionized. Corporate opponents argue that Americans no longer want unions. But public opinion surveys, such as a comprehensive poll that Peter D. Hart Research Associates conducted in 2006, suggest that a majority of workers would like to have a union to bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions. So there must be some other reason for this dramatic decline. But put that question aside for a moment. One point is clear: Smaller numbers of unionized workers mean less bargaining power, and less bargaining power results in lower wages.

It's no wonder middle-class incomes were dropping even before the recession. As our economy grew between 2001 and the start of 2007, most Americans didn't share in the prosperity. By the time the recession began last year, according to an Economic Policy Institute study, the median income of households headed by those under age 65 was below what it was in 2000.Typical families kept buying only by going into debt. This was possible as long as the housing bubble expanded. Home-equity loans and refinancing made up for declining paychecks.

But that's over. American families no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going. Lower paychecks, or no paychecks at all, mean fewer purchases, and fewer purchases mean fewer jobs.

I would add: Dr. Reich didn't mention the provisions of Taft-Hartley that allow states to ban closed shops (in so-called "right to work" states), but repealing those parts of Taft-Hartley would go a long way to getting Southern workers into unions.

Bonus: Unionizing the South, where most of the "right to work" states are, would get Southern working-class voters voting for the Democrats, reliably, every single election.

Imagine grateful Alabamans, Georgians, Mississippians all voting gratefully for the party that helped them organize and improve their lot in life.

Minimum Wage a Bad Idea??

My fellow Catholics continue to disappoint me with their regressive economics:

Yesterday the federal minimum wage was raised from $5.85 an hour to $6.55 an hour. Perhaps you didn’t notice. Minimum wage laws are a strange sort of thing. They’re quite popular, yet the arguments used to support them are often of the sort that, in other contexts, hardly anyone would find persuasive.

Suppose I were to argue as follows: Homeless is an injustice and a tragedy, and no one should have to beg on the streets for food or money, or to sleep on the streets. Therefore, we should make begging and vagrancy illegal.

Presumably few people would find such an argument convincing. They would recognize that, bad as it is to have to beg for money in order to be able to eat, simply taking away your ability to beg while doing nothing about the circumstances that led you to beg in the first place isn’t going to make you any better off.

Or suppose that, instead of a ban on begging, I propose a law whereby anyone who wants to give money to a homeless person has to give at least $10. That way the amount of money a homeless person will be able to collect from begging will increase, and he or she will soon have enough money to get off the streets. Again, I doubt that many people would find such an argument convincing. They would immediately see that while some people might give more money to the homeless under the new law most people, if forced to choose between giving at least $10 and giving nothing, would choose to give nothing. Nor, I might add, would I be able to win many people over to my proposals by talking about how rotten it is to be homeless. The worse homelessness is, the worse my ideas are.

Yet when it comes to so-called minimum wage laws, i.e. laws making it illegal to hire someone for less than a set amount, many people do fall for precisely these sorts of arguments. It is assumed that if the minimum wage is set at $10 an hour, everyone who would have made less than this absent the law will now make $10 an hour. What people seem to forget, however, is that the minimum wage is always zero. There is no law that says an employer must hire anyone or continue to employ them. If a worker is worth $7 an hour to an employer, and the law says he must pay him $10 or nothing, then the worker will be paid nothing. The law has not improved his situation. It has only made it worse.

Leaving everything up to the market results in wages falling to “what the market will bear.” If that level is below a living wage, should we as a society address that?

If it could reasonably be demonstrated that a minimum wage improves the lives workers, what would be a reasonable substitute (not “in principle” but in actual, concrete fact - some other means besides a legal minimum wage that will actually, you know, work?)

Take away the minimum wage, and McDonald’s would pay its labor 2 bucks an hour. Maybe less if they could get away with it. We’d be back to “I sold my soul to the company store.” (Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickeled and Dimed” gives a good look at a world where companies have all the power.)

One role of the government, of the law, ought to be to protect the weak. This is Godly and Catholic.

If we lived in a medieval world of craft guilds and peasant farmers, all this libertarian garbage might make some sense. In an industrialized world where large corporations wield immense power, I just can’t see the sense in it.

What dday Said...

A Blogger named dday over at Hullabaloo speaks the unvarnished truth:

We've essentially in the Bush era set up a kind of corporate Marxism, where risk is socialized, but where wealth is privatized. And the middle class, in this case homeowners, are the only ones who ever feel any pain.

Ben Bernanke believes that he can save the economy by managing and financing the ultimate downfall of these financial institutions. Which is fine to a point, because the alternative is a massive meltdown of the entire system. But let's call it exactly what it is. And let's no longer allow the other side to say things like "let the market make its own decisions," because they only believe that when they're not affected. This is a selective bailout, and it's government intervention into the markets to save them. Because they currently are non-functional and unregulated. It doesn't have to be this way, but under a laissez-faire system it's inevitable.

Can't wait for some Wall Street honcho or BushCo official to go on about welfare queens or big government programs...

This is just Depraved

Walmart sued a brain-damaged Gold-Star Mother for almost half a million dollars. Awesome, Walmart.

Note to the Walton Family: Hell is forever, folks. Hell is forever.