Tag Archives: economic justice

Posted on by

Picture this scenario:

Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry takes a break from his whirlwind campaign tour to fly back to Washington DC to cast the crucial sixtieth vote to extend unemployment benefits for millions of Americans left jobless in the Bush economy. He emerges from the Senate Chambers to a triumphant rally with unemployed workers in which he blasts the White House’s callous indifference to the plight of ordinary Americans and pledges to keep fighting to send him looking for a new line of work.

Of coure, that’s not what happened today. Instead, John Kerry spent the day campaigning in Kentucky, a state which, by his party’s count, has lost over 36,000 manufacturing jobs since Bush took office. And, with 59 votes, the ammendment failed.

Kerry’s spokespeople are claiming that the Republicans staged the timing and the closeness of the vote to embarrass him, and I’m sure their right that the Republicans were out to trap John Kerry. But it’s a trap that he walked directly into. More importantly, it’s a vital opportunity to use the power of his office by addressing, in however insufficient a manner, the needs of his constituents, and his hundreds of millions of potential constituents-to-be.

The people of Kentucky didn’t need John Kerry in their state today to talk the talk and shake hands and take photos and raise money telling George Bush to bring it on. They needed him in DC doing his job by defending those who’ve lost theirs.

As November approaches, John Kerry makes it that much more difficult for himself to get working-class voters to take the time out of their day to cast a vote for him every time he has better things to do with his time than cast a vote for them.

(Cross-posted, for the first time, over at the Undernews Blog.)

Posted on by

Tonight’s episode of the West Wing, from what I caught (admittedly, since the writing’s tanked I find it too painful to really concentrate on the show for a full hour), was about the conflict between two positions:

Well-meaning, bleeding-heart “anti-traders” want to protect the jobs of Americans who have them now because they believe Americans are more important than poor people in the third world, and that having jobs today is more important than having jobs in a generation, and because they want unions to vote for them.

Rational, thoughtful free-traders care about everyone’s jobs everywhere and recognize that millions of Americans may need to lose their jobs to outsourcing in the short term, and it hurts them more than it hurts the unemployed, but they have the moral leadership to do the hard thing by pursuing the policies which will rain down wealth on everyone around the world in the long-term.

Needless to say, no discussion of the benefits to workers around the world from “raising the floor” of wage standards and working conditions, or the threat to workers in this country and every other from a corporate race to the bottom spurred on by neoliberal trade policy designed to maximize short-term profits for transnational elites. Instead, the free-traders learned that they should respect the “anti-trade” folks because they mean well even though they’re wrong, and the “anti-trade” folks learned that they’re wrong.

Do people really still see The West Wing as part of that ubiquitious, malignant liberal media we’ve all heard so much about?

Posted on by

The New York Post has Kerry announcing a running mate by the end of May and offers its “sources'” top picks:

Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsak and Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.)

Memo to John Kerry:

Do not tap Bob Kerrey, who besides creating an awkward “Kerry-Kerrey” ticket just made it into the news flouting democracy, the right to organize, and the values of The New School of which he’s President by refusing to recognize the results of its graduate student election.

Do not tap Evan Bayh, who voted for the Bush tax-cut, one of a select group of awful Bush ideas which you actually voted against, and whose presence on the ticket would critically undercut your message on the issue.

Do not tap Ed Rendell, who gave the god-forsaken Democratic Leadership Council an inspiration to hold their conference back home in Philly this summer to celebrate his not being much of a leftist, about a month before he backed down in the face of resistance from a plan to equalize school funding in the state.

You can do better.

Posted on by

The AP reports that Alan Greenspan today urged Congress to cut Social Security benefits in order to keep Social Security solvent. This is only the latest volley from those agitating to burn the village in order to save it. Real social security reform would mean taxing wealth and raising the five-digit maximum income taxed under the payroll tax. But we don’t hear much from either policy about those sorts of plans to “save Social Security.” Mark Weisbrot provides useful perspective in the columns archived here.

Posted on by

Turns out that, as I posted my thoughts, (scroll down) in the early hours of this morning, on why Nader would be wrong to run and why the Democrats would be wrong to respond to a Nader run by Sister-Souljah-ing the left, my classmate Dan Munz had, a mere forty minutes earlier, posted his (brilliantly titled) thoughts on why Nader would be wrong to run, and why the Democrats would be right to respond by Sister-Souljah-ing (his reference) the left. It’s a small shtetl after all, eh?

Dan and I disagree, like many registered Democrats who fall into this debate, on both a tactical level and an ideological one, and given that we apparently both lost sleep last night setting forth our visions for the party, I won’t rehash that debate except to say again that I believe the Clinton years and the Gingrich revolution are only the most recent demonstrations of the danger in seizing the center and the power of offering a choice rather than an echo. It’s not surprising, of course, that Dan and I are each largely convinced that a party more in line with our respective ideology would also be more effective at building a governing majority (that, of course, is part of the weakness of the “electability” discourse).

Dan is right, of course, that to argue that there’s no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is a weak straw-man argument, and one that hurt Nader’s case. I would add on the one hand that it’s an argument that’s particularly easy to make from a position of relative privilege, in which the comparatively progressive reforms that Clinton accomplish – the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Earned Income Tax Credit, more progressive NLRB nominees, and others – make relatively little impact on one’s life. I would add on the one hand, however, that relatively few of those who condemn the two-party consensus in America would argue that there is, in fact, no difference between the parties (some of course do for rhetorical effect).

Dan goes on, however, to make an equally unfounded claim: that there’s no difference between the Greens and the Democrats. While Dan’s right that Nader’s agenda is “certainly more in alignment with Democratic than Republican values,” that isn’t saying much. It’s hard for me to imagine many of the sixteen issues Nader lists as the core of his campaign as the centerpieces of a Kerry Presidential run. “Full public financing of public elections with the necessary, broad changes for a more fair and representative election process, replacing present charades?” “Universal health insurance — single payer embracing prevention, quality and cost controls”? “A redirected federal budget for the crucial priorities of our country and away from the massive waste, fraud and redundancy of what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex,” as well as the massive costs of corporate welfare”? Dan may not share these as priorities – or even as goals – but I think it’s disingenuous to argue that Nader doesn’t stand for anything the leadership of the Democratic party doesn’t.

Dan argues that “when I see an organization I don’t like, I try to join and persuade it to change. I don’t bail and get all distructive.” I’d argue that social change depends on having folks on the inside and the outside of institutions – be they the Democratic party or, say, the State Department. The system needs to be both kicked and dragged (I’ve tried to act this out with my arms and legs a few times, and I’m told it’s been amusing, if perhaps not enlightening). Dan argues that

These days, a lot of the major battles have been settled, and largely in Democrats’ favor. Both parties now admit we need civil rights, we need social security and other entitlement programs, we need better health care, we can’t be completely isolationist, &c.

To which I’d respond, along the lines I alluded to in my earlier post, that today neither party is proposing the kind of ambitious, radicial, structural change – in areas from public school funding to healthcare to the crippling effects of the drug war – demanded before we could really talk with a straight face about “starting gate equality” for Americans of color, and those who do find themselves labelled “race-baiting demagogues” and are candidates for the Sister Souljah treatment; that neither party is articulating reforms like raising the income ceiling on the payroll tax to make social security a more secure entitlement and a less regressive tax; that neither party is offering the kind of healthcare reform that has saved costs, saved lives, and saved millions from healthcare insecurity in most industrialized nations; and neither party has offered an comprehensive alternative to the use of unilateral military and economic power as American leadership in the global community. As Dan said, “One man’s homogeneity is another man’s consensus…”

Dan and I agree that Nader would be wrong to mount a 2004 Independent Campaign. And we agree that the way for the Democrats to respond to a Nader challenge would be to illustrate the real differences between them and the Republicans. The difference, maybe, is that I think to so compellingly would require more than just a shift in rhetoric.

Posted on by

So much for fiscal conservatism. Then again, historically speaking, it’s easier to pitch dismantling the social welfare safety net for the poor and middle class as a way of saving it when you’ve run the government into deficit through tax cuts for the rich.

Posted on by

CNN has coverage of the March on Yale this morning, as well as other real Labor Day events, here.

“This is the site of national Labor Day outrage,” Jackson said. “This is going to be for economic justice what Selma was for the right to vote.”

The march began shortly after 9 a.m. and ended in a rally at Yale’s Beinecke Plaza and Woodbridge Hall, which houses university President Richard Levin’s office. Police said between 1,000 to 1,500 people marched with Jackson, including Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz, who graduated from Yale, and state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a Yale Law School graduate.

Jackson and about 30 others then blocked traffic. To the cheers of protesters, Jackson was the first to be handcuffed at about 11:30 a.m. and led onto a bus to be processed at police headquarters.