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.

Screw the Rich

You know, there was a time when Democrats like Harry Truman were not afraid of saying "The Republicans are the Rich Man's Party, while the Democrats are the Party of The Common Man."

Here's the thing: screw the rich. They've been doing just fine for the last 35 years, getting richer and richer and richer, while no one else has gotten a raise.

The top marginal tax rate during the administration of that notorious Leninist, Ike, was 91.5 percent. That is not a typo. It resulted in it not being worthwhile to make 300 times as much as your lower paid workers, because taxes would eat up the portion of your income that could be described as obscene. The fifties were not exactly a time of breadlines and hardship. There was a broad and solid middle class.

Republicans Alienating Their Remaining Working-Class Base

By standing against The UAW in their recent torpedoing of the auto company bailout, Republicans will only continue to alienate their remaining working class voters. Which is fine by me. The Republican Party is, at its core, the rich peoples’ party, and the sooner the working classes wake up to that fact, the sooner the Republican Party will be further marginalized.

Passage of The Employee Free Choice Act is part of the solution; another part is repealing portions of Taft-Hartley, specifically section 14(b) which lets states decide whether or not to allow union-shop agreements, would overturn “right to work” laws, and make it even easier to organize in those states, further eroding Republican support in their southern strongholds.

If southern workers want to work in a union shop, they can’t, due to the provisions of Taft-Hartley I mentioned. The owners in the south are very anti-union and have managed to convince some of their workers that they should oppose unions too…but it is in their workers’ interests to organize, and repealing “right to work” would allow southern workers to discover this. Once they are organized and represented by a union, there will be no going back.

The southern elites know this of course, which is why I expect this will be a battle of monumental proportions. I look forward to it.

From the Great Woody Guthrie

I just sang this with my guitar, and I couldn't sing the final verse without tears interrupting.

As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - "no tress passin'"
But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

A Woman Called Hope

I side, reflexively and all the time, with the little guy. Unions. Blue Collar people generally. The Poor. Minorities. The desperate. The doomed. The outcast. That little old lady you see pushing a shopping cart full of garbage outside Starbucks? She's your sister. What can you do to help her? The fact that she's talking to people who aren't there means she needs help. How can we make America a place where she is overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows her around, ready to catch her if she stumbles?

The soldier returning from war, unable to escape the terrible knowledge that what he has seen has shown him the damnable lies that our country tells itself in order to enable men to do things that will haunt them forever? The one who wakes up downstairs, halfway out the front door, because he heard an explosion in his dream and is now warning buddies who aren't there that they are about to die and his wife doesn't understand but tries to be there for him any way she can, but at the same time she's worried for the children? What can you do to help them? They are your brother and sister. How can we make America a place where they are overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows them around, ready to catch them if they stumble?

The man, now 45, who suffers from nightmares and flashbacks from growing up in a neighborhood where he went to sleep many nights to the sound of gunfire; where he lost precious, priceless, irreplaceable friends to random murders, and is not sure he can handle one more fucking senseless death? How can we make America a place where he is overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows him around, ready to catch him if he stumbles?

The woman whose actual first name is Hope. The one who wakes up every morning and, if she's lucky, has a few moments of peace before she remembers that both of her precious grandchildren were murdered; before she remembers that losing the first one was hard, but staring into another grandson's coffin almost exactly a year later -- that that was the beginning of the desolation and crushing grief that robs her daily of the rightful, well-earned joy of being a grandparent. She spends her free time ministering to the kids in the neighborhood, doing what she can to reach them before the gangs or police do. The ones she loses to murder she prays for; the ones in prison she visits and writes to. She is a saint. She needs your help.

How can we make America a place where she is overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows her around, ready to catch her if she stumbles?

America has become a scary place in the last 30 years. How can we make America a place filled with people who are overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows them around, ready to catch us if we stumble?

Things That Piss Me Off

I question whether the libertarian "left" is really "left" - you don't get to call yourself a liberal just because you're pro-choice and drive a Prius.

The most harm done to workers has been by Democrats (yes, I'm looking at you, Bill Clinton) who pivoted away from the notion that the power of government ought to be a counter-balance to the power of business, and sold out the New Deal to a bunch of greedy, corrupt boodlers.

I'm reading Thomas Frank's new book, and getting angrier by the minute. (I'll post a full review if I can keep from making the entire thing one long blue streak of angry swear-words.)

Revolution may be our only hope.

They have a right to be bitter, I'd say

Robert Reich posts on the controversy over Obama's comments that working class Pennsylvanians are "bitter" about their circumstances:

I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 61 years ago. My father sold $1.98 cotton blouses to blue-collar women and women whose husbands worked in factories. Years later, I was secretary of labor of the United States, and I tried the best I could – which wasn’t nearly good enough – to help reverse one of the most troublesome trends America has faced: The stagnation of middle-class wages and the expansion of povety. Male hourly wages began to drop in the early 1970s, adjusted for inflation. The average man in his 30s is earning less than his father did thirty years ago. Yet America is far richer. Where did the money go? To the top.

Are Americans who have been left behind frustrated? Of course. And their frustrations, their anger and, yes, sometimes their bitterness, have been used since then -- by demagogues, by nationalists and xenophobes, by radical conservatives, by political nuts and fanatical fruitcakes – to blame immigrants and foreign traders, to blame blacks and the poor, to blame "liberal elites," to blame anyone and anything.

Rather than counter all this, the American media have wallowed in it. Some, like Fox News and talk radio, have given the haters and blamers their very own megaphones.

Speaking of speeches...

A speech by FDR that may, sadly, become apropos given the ongoing financial collapse:

Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living - a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Something's Happening Here...

...and what it is, is becoming clear: Obama is nearing 1 million donors to his campaign. Not one million dollars - one million donors.

Barack Obama has a Bona Fide movement working for him - the average donation to his campaign (last I checked a couple months ago) is under $100. His candidacy is already changing the political game: rather than relying on fat-cat donors to finance his campaign, his looking to ordinary Joes to do it.

His campaign is a 21st Century Populist movement.