I know it may seem like I (and many others in the lefty blogosphere) spend a lot of time slamming David Brooks -- after all, he's just a guy paid (a whole lot of money) to sling bullshit a couple of days a week at the nation's paper of record and on various public television and radio outlets. But it is for precisely that reason -- he's the thinking man's conservative, the reasonable one, the guy the Obama Administration wants to appeal to -- that makes him far more consequential than he ought to be, and hence, a suitable target for all of the derision heaped upon him.
Today he has a column that demonstrates once again how little substantive knowledge he brings to the table and the degree to which he is simply a sly right wing propagandist. (Contrast Brooks with someone like Ezra Klein, who has actually done the hard work of studying and mastering arcane detail about the day to day workings of our health care delivery system and those of other countries.) Brooks, in his encomium to Chief Justice Roberts' sense of restraint, proclaims that we are now ready to proceed with the real nuts and bolts debate of how to furnish health care coverage to people. He proclaims:
Liberals tend to argue that major structural changes can be made within the framework of Obamacare. Republicans tend to believe that the perverse incentives can only be corrected if we repeal Obamacare and move to a defined-benefit plan — if we get rid of the employer tax credit and give people subsidies to select their own plans within regulated markets.
He then goes on to state in the very next paragraph:
Personally, I think the Republicans’ defined-contribution approach is compelling. It’s a potentially effective way to expand coverage while aligning incentives so that people make cost-conscious, responsible decisions. But the truth is neither I nor anybody else really knows what works. We’re going to have to go through a process of discovery. We’re going to have to ride the period of rapid innovation that is now under way.
The truth is David Brooks doesn't know what the fuck he is talking about as "defined benefit plans" and "defined contribution plans" are opposite approaches to funding something -- and neither are traditionally thought of as approaches to financing health care.
Defined Benefit Plan is a pension term of art describing a traditional retirement program where a participant is assured a guaranteed monthly income for life (and often the life of his/her spouse), with the monthly benefit based on some defined formula attributable to years of service. I have never seen it used in the context of a health plan and I've been doing work for union health plans for 27 years.
Defined Contribution Plan is also a pension term of art describing an individual account retirement arrangement, like a 401(k) plan, where one gets at the end of one's career a payout of the amounts that you or your company contributed, plus any investment earnings thereon. There are no guarantees of what that amount will be and no assurance that the amount saved will be adequate to last until one's death. Again, this is not a term that I have seen associated with health plans as a general rule.
A defined contribution approach to health care would be, I suppose, one in which an individual sets aside a certain amount of money to cover actual health care costs incurred over time. This is a spectacularly bad idea and one at odds with the entire historical concept of insurance, which is all about socializing risk. Anyone who has worked with health plans knows that roughly 20% of the covered population will incur about 80% of the costs. (And you should thank whatever deity you thank if you are not among that 20%.) Catastrophic health occurrences are not evenly distributed and they are very often simply random events that victimize people for no particular reason. (I know any number of people who at young ages have suffered from cancers or other genetic diseases that were immensely expensive to treat and that were in no way related to unhealthy behaviors -- not that I think the latter should matter.) If this is what Brooks and the Republicans are advocating, it is a terrible idea.
Finally, the notion that we don't know what works in this realm or that there is some great mystery about controlling costs is simply nonsense. There are any number of models out there of how to run a health care system more cheaply than we do in the U.S. and with universal care provided. Brooks can choose to ignore this as they are all in some form or fashion examples of national health care, but the notion that this is all shrouded in mystery is just more bullshit from the master. The issue addressed by the ACA is trying to cobble together a system that approaches universality and bends the cost curve down without arousing too much opposition from insurers, hospitals, providers, and the pharmaceutical industry. It is complex out of political necessity, not because health care delivery needs to be complex. Brooks' fellow Republicans have made cost containment more difficult by their demagogic campaigns against "death panels" and the "$500 billion cut from Medicare by Obama," i.e. cuts to Medicare Advantage providers, all the while plotting to impose significantly larger obligations on individuals to pay for health care as necessary "skin in the game."
The bottom line is that this latter approach will only serve to further deny needed care to people, while doing nothing to promote universality or contain costs. In this policy debate, the right (and Brooks) literally have nothing to offer.
Lastly, I note that Brooks has the old "tort reform" canard in his column. This ignores consistent findings that malpractice suits do not add significantly to the cost of medicine as well as the fact that many states, like Texas and Florida, have already enacted tort reform -- seemingly without any boost to getting people insured. My question is how can all of these principled federalist take the position that Congress has the power to legislate on tort law, an area that has traditionally been the province of the states, when it cannot dictate terms to states under Medicaid?
Updating to add this sweet pic I swiped from TPM's front page (hope they don't mind!):
Yeah, that's John Boehner having a sad. If I were the photographer, I'd be patting myself on the back for weeks for catching him with that expression on his face.
Dancing in the Street, because, somehow, the good guys won this one. Take your pick of versions.
Martha Reeves and the Vandellas:
The Mamas and the Papas:
Mick Jagger and David Bowie:
Van Halen:
And even the Grateful Dead:
I spared you the Carpenters version, though. I have some standards, after all.
In an hour or so, we'll know whether the ACA survived intact, is crippled, or got taken out and shot.
My wife, who doesn't exactly live and breathe politics the way I do, had a dream last night that it was Thursday evening, she hadn't been near a computer or a TV all day, and she had no idea how the Supreme Court ruled on health care reform. She was trying hard to find out how it came out when she woke up.
Anyhow, here's some Supremes to get you going:
Out my way, the forecast is for high of 102° tomorrow. Raspberrry-picking season is just about done here in southern Maryland; up to a few years ago, we were only seeing the very first ripe berries right about now. In anticipation of tomorrow's heat, here's another oldie from when I was growing up:
I am anxiously awaiting the announcement of the ACA decision. I have multiple blog pages open and am hoping to catch the one that can give us the first glimpse of the Court's decision.
While we are waiting you can feel free to engage in idle speculation or discuss other things.
What I dread most about the possible overturning of the law is not simply that it will undo a year's worth of agonizing work on the most difficult public policy issue of our time, but the thought of hearing those braying jackasses on the right engaging in triumphalism, while trying to paint the President, rather than the Court, as lawless.
Be back in a bit.
Amy Howe at SCOTUS Blog says it survives as a tax. Dianne Riehm just announced that they struck it down. I hate this.
Tom Goldstein just announced that the mandate survives and that Chief Justice Roberts joined the left of the Court in upholding it. Very good news. I will try to read and get a little more info.
Goldstein just wrote the following:
The bottom line: the entire ACA is upheld, with the exception that the federal government's power to terminate states' Medicaid funds is narrowly read.
Nice.
And still more from SCOTUS Blog:
The money quote from the section on the mandate: Our precedent demonstrates that Congress had the power to impose the exaction in Section 5000A under the taxing power, and that Section 5000A need not be read to do more than impose a tax. This is sufficient to sustain it.
I want to see the opinion -- SCOTUS Blog seems to suggest that it is 5-4 with Roberts saving the day. Miraculous really.
There is something about Bruce that makes conservatives desperately crave his approval or to be able to co-opt him in some form or fashion. There were ham-handed attempts by the Reagan people to invoke "the hope" in Bruce's music as an example of morning in America -- Bruce had a wonderful, succinct response, musing
"The President was mentioning my name the other day, and I kinda got to wondering what his favorite album musta been. I don't think it was the Nebraska album. I don't think he's been listening to this one."
before launching into a particularly fierce version of Johnny 99. That bow-tied fuck George Will tried the same treatment, in what is to this day one of the most infuriating columns that I have ever read. (Eric Alterman suggests that Will's column was inspired by a show that I was at in the old Capital Center in Landover, MD in 1984, which also featured a blistering Johnny 99, in which Bruce changed the words "put me in that execution line" to the more blunt (and bluesy sounding) "put me in that killing line.") One reads the Will column with amazement that anyone anywhere could be so wrong about anything.
And today Will's spiritual heir (sadly Will is actually still around, but his relevance died at least a decade ago), prissy fussbudget David Brooks got into the act, describing the experience of following Springsteen around to shows in Spain and France, basking in his peculiarly American glow. No word on whether "Moral Hazard" accompanied him on these outings. (It's the sort of thing that makes me want to grab the baseball bat out of the car and hop the Metro two stops down to Cleveland Park and administer a serious knee-capping. Hey, it is the unofficial state sport of New Jersey.)
But topping all of the nauseating right wing fanboy attempts to claim the Boss as their own, has been the Atlantic's pity party for Springsteen enthusiast Chris Christie, whom Bruce has had the temerity (some might say wisdom) to ignore. It started with a lengthy Jeffrey Goldberg piece that I submit is a masterpiece of some kind -- I just can't figure out what. Then, in a special kind of horrifying synergy, Clive Crook got into the act, giving a hearty amen to Goldberg and Christie and demanding that Springsteen do his duty and buy Christie a beer. (I'd recommend a Miller 64.) It's a short piece, but it packs a remarkable amount of wrong into so few syllables. (I also strongly recommend reading the comments to Crook's piece, which are truly high-sterical.)
All I can say to these right wing clowns is that they need to accept that Springsteen doesn't like or share their politics or world views and he probably wouldn't be all that keen on them as people. Tough shit. Go follow Lee Greenwood or Toby Keith around, assholes.
Update: We seem to be having a problem with comments again. I am trying to notify Typepad. Those of you with the twitter machines seemed to get good results last time, so feel free to weigh in.
Further Update: Never mind -- it seems to have cured itself. Comment away.
I pretty much abandoned the internets for the weekend and did old-fashioned things -- I finished reading Wolf Hall, and saw two movies: Moonrise Empire and Your Sister's Sister. I enjoyed both well enough I guess, although the former is a bit precious and mannered, and the latter perhaps too small for even a small film. You could certainly do worse though than either of them.
Now I am anxiously awaiting news on the Affordable Care Act decision -- I must say my sense of dread over it has been rising the closer we get to its issuance. My faith in this Court to have even a remote sense of the right thing is at a low point. Let's see, what else is happening?
- What is it about Apple that makes some liberals lose their minds? There was a large piece in the Sunday New York Times detailing the piss poor wages that Apple pays on average to its retail store employees - on average a little more than $11 per hour. And right on cue, there is an apologia from Matt Yglesias, basically trying to make the case that this is a pretty decent retail wage and that the world would be a better place if other retailers paid as well as Apple. To which I say bollocks. Seriously, Yglesias tries to make $25,000 a year sound like a living wage (well you do get a 401(k) -- the ultimate BFD -- and discounts on Apple products! Where the fuck do I sign up?) I have a pretty good sense of where a lot of the Apple stores are and they are generally in some of the most expensive places in the country. I know that in DC at least $25,000 is not really a living wage. Hell, it was my starting salary back in 1985 and even then it was a wage fit only for a single person on his/her way up in the world -- a wage suited for group houses and studio apartments. Christ, I work in a relatively small law firm where my compensation (and that of my partners) is directly attributable to the profits we generate and we still pay our lowest paid employee in excess of $20 an hour, plus fully paid family medical, plus 8% of salary into an individual account pension plan, plus a 401(k) match. It strikes me that the most profitable company in the world might be able to do a little better than our modest little firm. Apple should be a pace setter in terms of compensation, not applauded because it keeps its employees above the poverty line. Jesus Christ.
There is a good sense conveyed in the article of both just how exploitative Apple is and at how successful they are in selling a peculiar brand of false consciousness for the well-educated set:
This is why Apple can do something unique in the annals of retailing: pay a modest hourly wage, and no commission, to employees who typically have college degrees and who at the highest performing levels can move as much as $3 million in goods a year.
“When you’re working for Apple you feel like you’re working for this greater good,” says a former salesman who asked for anonymity because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. “That’s why they don’t have a revolution on their hands.”
How in God's name did people ever get the idea that working for Apple was working for the greater good? It baffles me.
This is another indicia of how much damage the demise of unions does to people in these kinds of jobs. People who work as clerks and support personnel at unionized supermarkets around here actually made a living wage, one that included an hourly wage that could support a family (very modestly) and a real pension, not this 401(k) bullshit, which requires people to defer from their princely $11 an hour wage. And supermarkets were always a notoriously low margin industry. Apple, by contrast, has huge mark ups on all of its goods and faces little in the way of competition given the name brand appeal of what it sells. Shouldn't we actually expect such a company to do a little more than this? The people who work at the Apple stores are actually pretty decently skilled folks, especially the ones who staff the so-called "Genius Bars." Is it too much to ask that a genius get paid $20 an hour and the company become just a little less profitable?
I must say that I generally prefer my exploitation with a little less smug than Apple manages and their enablers, like Yglesias, let them get away with.
What else is going on with you?
Update: There will be no health care decision from SCOTUS today. Stay tuned for Thursday. Today the Court summarily upheld the Citizen's United case in striking down a Montana statute limiting corporate campaign contributions. The Court largely affirmed a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision enjoining enforcement of Arizona's infamous S.B. 1070, the "papers please" law. I have yet to read the full opinion, but it appears to me that the majority of the Court, with Justice Kennedy writing, found the Arizona law to be pre-empted by the federal government's power over immigration. Scalia dissented in what strikes me as a fairly radical state's rights opinion. Thomas and Alito also filed separate opinions, dissenting in part. I have not had the time to read those. Evidently Scalia issued some sort of statement in conjunction with the opinion noting President Obama's recent decision to suspend deportation efforts against those brought to the U.S. illegally when children. I am guessing that this (I haven't yet seen it) will prove to be another nakedly political statement from the great legal mind of the right.
So Thursday morning should be a big day. I suspect SCOTUS Blog will be crashing at about 9:59 AM that day. SCOTUS Blog seems to believe the health care opinion is being written by Roberts, with Kennedy co-authoring part of the majority. If that is the case, it may be good news -- Kennedy voting in favor of the law and Roberts deciding to control the opinion and its scope by joining in the majority. (Or that may be entirely wishful thinking.)
Just to clarify things up front, this post isn't about whether the filibuster should be abolished entirely, kept in its present form, or whether some reform should be found that keeps the filibuster in some form, but keeps it from being used as a perpetual supermajority requirement for passing legislation in the Senate.
This one's strictly to present one of those in-between reforms and to make the argument for its utility.
First, a brief wave at the larger debate: many of you here are for abolishing the filibuster altogether. I can see the logic in that position. I can also see the value in retaining the filibuster in some form that would enable a determined minority to block a bill, but at sufficient inconvenience to themselves that they wouldn't be inclined to use it very often.
I also deeply doubt that complete abolition of the filibuster is likely to get through the Senate anytime soon (unless the GOP comes out of this election with the Presidency and both houses of Congress in hand, of course). So just as a matter of practicality, I think we need to find a way to preserve the filibuster as a tool that a minority could use to prevent the passage of legislation, while ending its use as a general supermajority requirement.
Here's the properties I'd hope for in a reformed filibuster:
1) Its use would impose sufficient inconvenience on the minority as to prevent its routine use, 2) but not so much inconvenience as to make it impossible for a determined minority to use it to block legislation, and 3) should impose a fairly light burden on the majority in their efforts to maintain a quorum and ultimately invoke cloture successfully.
Before I explain my proposal, we should make sure we understand how things work now, and why the current system doesn't work like that - e.g. why the majority doesn't force the minority to 'actually filibuster,' to talk through the night to block the majority from voting.
The current rules require that, in order to invoke cloture (that is, to bring debate on a bill to an end so that an up-or-down vote can take place), the majority needs the votes of 3/5 of all Senators, present or not. Barring mid-term deaths and retirements, that means the majority needs 60 votes, period.
All the minority needs to do is maintain one Senator on the floor at all times in order to ensure that debate doesn't simply stop. (I presume that such an event would mean the majority woudn't need to invoke cloture to bring debate to an end, since debate would have come to an end by itself. But I'm not sure of this. Either way, the minority needs at most one Senator on the floor at any given time.)
And that one Senator can periodically demand a quorum call. In the Senate, a quorum is 50 Senators. If there is no quorum, then the Senate is adjourned, and neither votes nor debate can take place until it comes back into session.
The upshot is that in order to force the minority to keep talking, the majority needs to keep 50 Senators on the Senate floor, or at least close enough by to respond to a quorum call. But the minority only need to ensure that they have one Senator present.
The burden of inconvenience, then, falls overwhelmingly - excessively so - on the majority. And that is why a filibuster is automatic, rather than involving talking: once a cloture vote fails, it just isn't worth the while of 50 Senators to hang around to force one minority Senator to keep talking, since it would be futile and pointless to do so. So the majority tables the bill and moves on to other business.
So how do we fix this? Through proxies. But not just any old proxies. The key thing is in how the rules allow and circumscribe use of the proxies.
So here's how I'd have them work:
0) The regular Senate rules apply until a cloture vote garners majority support (counting 50 as a majority if the veep is on your side), but fails to get 60 votes. Then the following set of rules takes over:
1) From that point on, the majority only needs 3/5 of those voting to invoke cloture.
2) Proxies can be used in voting, and for quorum calls.
3) Five to one, baby, five to one: each present Senator voting for cloture can carry the proxies of up to five absent Senators, but each present Senator voting against cloture can only carry the proxy of at most one absent Senator. In either case, a Senator and all the proxies s/he carried would have to vote the same way.
This would mean the majority would need only nine Senators present to maintain a quorum, and either nine or ten, depending, to maintain their full voting strength.
The minority, on the other hand, would need 17-20 Senators (depending on the number of votes held by the majority) present at all times, in order to maintain their filibuster.
A couple of examples to flesh this out:
First example (best case): Ted Kennedy's just died, his replacement hasn't been appointed, the Dems have 59 votes and the GOP has only 40. The initial cloture vote fails 59-40, and (a) 49 of the Dem Senators sign proxies, handing them to the remaining 10, and leave, and (b) 20 of the GOP Senators sign proxies, handing them to the remaining 20, and leave. Over time, the composition of Senators on each side changes, but (a) if the number of GOP Senators drops below 20, the Dems can win a cloture vote and move on to the up-or-down vote on the bill itself, or (b) if the number of Dem Senators drops below 9, one GOP Senator can demand a quorum call while his GOP colleagues hide in the cloakroom, forcing adjournment.
While the number of Senators each side needs to keep in the room aren't that different, the GOP would have to keep 1/2 of its caucus in there at all times (so each GOP Senator would have to spend 12 hours out of every 24 on the Senate floor until the filibuster ended), while the Dems would only have to keep 1/6 of their Senators on the floor, which means spending only 4 hours of every 24 on the floor.
This would strain the endurance of the minority to its limit after awhile, but the majority could sustain the burden fairly easily.
Not only is this the sort of thing the minority would only put in the time to do over something pretty major, but they'd look damned silly doing it just to filibuster the Motion to Proceed on some judicial nomination they didn't give a shit about to begin with.
Second example (worst case): the Dems lose 3 Senate seats, net, this November, but keep the Presidency. So we've got a 50-50 Senate, with Biden being able to break a tie. Just to spice it up, let's say the Dems retake the House, and a new American Jobs Act squeaks through the House, and goes to the Senate, where a cloture vote fails 50-50.
This time, 9 Dem Senators preserve both the quorum and the caucus' full voting strength. Since the Dems can only muster 50 votes, the GOP needs only 34 votes to maintain their denial of cloture. But that still means 17 Senators out of 50 on the floor. So due to the reduced Dem majority, the Dems need essentially 1/5 rather than 1/6 of their caucus to remain present (still not too bad), while the GOP needs only 1/3 rather than 1/2 of their caucus, which makes things a bit easier on them.
It's still going to be easier for the Dems to force the GOP to maintain their filibuster than it will be for the GOP to maintain its filibuster, but not by as much; who wants it how badly is a factor, but the Dems don't have to want the win quite as badly as the GOP does in order to prevail.
But even in this worst-case scenario, the minority couldn't filibuster every little thing that came along; they'd have to pick and choose, so they could get back to their fundraising calls. :D
- Maureen Dowd had a column the other day suggesting that the Jerry Sandusky scandal is indicative of an era in which we no longer recognize right and wrong with any clarity. In this case, she focused on Penn State assistant coach Mike McQueary who stood by passively while Sandusky molested a small boy in the shower. I am not going to excuse McQueary's passivity, but would simply note in defense of our times that Sandusky is actually being brought to justice and held to account now for activities in which he has been apparently engaging for decades. The notion that we are living in "dystopian" times in terms of our collective moral sense is absurd -- especially when one considers the degree to which these kinds of crimes against children (not to mention things like domestic violence) were routinely covered up or ignored by those who knew or should have known. And someone should tell Dowd that Thomas More, whom she invokes as the anti-McQueary, was so certain of right and wrong that he was comfortable having people burned to death for reading the gospels in English. I'll take passivity any day over that particular example of moral rectitude.
- Strangely, I actually agree with Ross Douthat and his Euroskepticism. Calls for the presevation of the Euro and for greater continental cooperation in matters of fiscal and currency policy are essentially calls for rule by "expert." Such ideas are at their heart anti-democratic, depriving elected national leaders of control over the most fundamental aspect of economic policy. (Additionally, the experts have shown themselves to be not particularly skilled.) I think those of us who believe in a meaningful electoral politics should find the calls for greater European integration along these lines to be troubling.
- A number of really good pieces have been written about the recent coup against the president of the University of Virgnia -- I particularly liked this one by Jamelle Bouie. What is going on at U VA is really quite astonishing. One of the country's most prestigious state universities is being turned upside down by a few business types who sit on its Board of Visitors (regents to most of us) and somehow fancy themselves as experts in these matters. Kieran Healey brilliantly captures the cretinous quality of these business titans and their pretense to have a vision for the university of the future. Evidently it will not have a classics or a German department. Thomas Jefferson would be so proud.
- And yesterday was the 65th anniversary of the Taft-Hartley Act, one of the most insidious and effective pieces of right wing legislating in the nation's history.
Must run off to a meeting while you have your say.
Stanley says "Try not falling under my spell, try not to love me -- look into my eyes -- reistance is futile -- you are mine." "Now get me the ham."
- They call it the "Dream On Act" - Marco Rubio has a sad because he wasn't consulted by the White House before the President announced the suspension of deportation actions against young undocumented immigrants. The words "fuck you you arrogant, lying sack of shit" leap to mind as an appropriate retort. Because, of course, we all know that Rubio would have bucked his party and delivered a major legislative victory to Obama prior to the election.
- In their defense, they first divided the carcass evenly among the pack and then gave half to the government. (Yes, it's in terrible taste, but I couldn't resist.)
- Speaking of wolves, I want to thank whoever among you raved about the book Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I am about two-thirds of the way through and just blown away by both its artistry and its compelling take on a story that most of us know well. And I am delighted that there is a recently published sequel.
- I thought this article in the Washington Post yesterday about the merits of teaching your son to fight was both good and amusing. I really struggled with this issue. My father taught me how to handle myself -- how to throw a punch, how to break a hold, where to hit someone to cause maximum pain (the solar plexus is a good one), and handy shorthand tips like " go for the eyes, the throat, and then the nuts." Sadly, when I was growing up in the sixties, schools largely turned their backs on bullying and left kids to a kind of Lord of the Flies existence once they left the building. In the end, I decided against giving my son a similar education. Not because I am a pacifist, but because it seemed to me to require teaching as well a kind of judgment and discretion that really couldn't be reasonably expected from a kid. My son went to private schools that basically had no tolerance at all for fisticuffs -- a stance with which I mostly agree. It seemed inherently contradictory to send him to such a school while giving him little tips on fighting. (He still ended up getting suspended for a shoving match with a smart-assed peer. I bit my tongue in the meetings and did not once utter the words "you want to see a fight -- I'll show that little fucker what a fight is.") I think in the long run that a world in which boys are not brought up needing to fight is a far better place.
It's Fathers' Day, and the little rascal is, amazingly, still asleep at 10:10am. We were over at his cousins' last night, and they and their friends wore him out, apparently.
I'm wearing this t-shirt. How can a self-respecting geek dad wear anything else on Fathers' Day?
Instead, the true "lessons" of Watergate were how we could abandon our responsibilities as citizens, and twist the obligations of self-government, so that "the country" would never have to "go through" anything like that again. What was a triumph of self-government in 1974 was reckoned to be such a national trauma by 1986 that our elite institutions formed an iron circle to keep it from happening to Ronald Reagan and his people because the country "couldn't take another failed presidency."
And that's how we've arrived at a place where Obama was warned in advance by the Villagers to barely mention Bush's failures, let alone his likely crimes, and where it seems to have become impossible to prosecute anyone in a position of wealth or power for crimes involving the abuse of their power.
Read the whole thing. As always with Pierce, it's worth it.
I think I've made that sad joke before, but my life has been largely a three decade front row seat at a phenomenon that seemed to be all of the talk recently due to the results of the Wisconsin recall. To be honest, I don't think it was quite the momentous event that many have painted it, from Ezra Klein to Kevin Drum. Rather, it was just one more story in what has been a long, brutal, and often ignored war. Wisconsin was actually to me a bit heartening -- not the results obviously, but the fight it showed, the grass roots energy, the unwillingness to take no for an answer. I do not believe in glorious defeat or other attractions of beautiful loserdom, but I damn sure would rather go down with a fight than endure what Rich Yeselson at the New Republic described as the "slow motion death spiral" -- something for which I have had a ring side seat.
I have thought about this stuff so much for so long that it is difficult to fully organize my thoughts, but here goes: First, Ezra's suggestion that there is some other type of coalition that can stand in labor's stead strikes me as questionable, even though I share his fear that the labor movement lacks the heft now to really push its agenda and that it is more likely to decline than grow in the existing political and economic environment. The labor movement is unique in that it is not just a "special interest" -- it is virtually the only political player that I can think of that pushes a broad variety of legislation, even where it does not directly or exclusively benefit its membership -- everything from the minimum wage (not too many union members are affected) to mandated paid time off (again not typically a problem for union members) to civil rights legislation to job safety regulation (which is far more important for non-union workers). Ezra's notion that the liberal community can coalesce against all special interests as a strategy struck me as unusually weak thinking for him. It's a kind of parody of good government abstraction which will have zero attraction or effectiveness in the world of power.
Second, the decline of organized labor has been ongoing steadily for quite a long time. Private sector union density has gone from roughly a third of the workforce in the 1950s to today's scant 7%. This has not been an accident. It has been part of a concerted effort between business interests and right wing politicians that never really went away (remember Taft-Hartley was passed in 1947) but that garnered significant momentum in the late 1970s -- when economic stagnation destroyed the short-lived modus vivendi that had existed in segments of the industrialized economy -- and has accelerated in ferocity since then. .The American labor law regime offers incredibly weak protection to workers and business interests and their reprehensible lackeys in the management labor bar have spent decades now cynically violating the rights of workers, secure in the knowledge that any penalties would be minimal, assessed long after the offense occurred, and cost-effective. All attempts to reform the law over the past fifty years have died under concerted Republican opposition and, of course, the filibuster (where conservative Democrats have often dealt the fatal blow.) I see no real reason for optimism while the law remains as it is.
To some extent the decline of private sector unionism was offset to a degree by the rise of public sector collective bargaining. Bargaining in the public sector flourished largely because most jurisdictions did not emulate their private sector counterparts -- most public sector workers who wanted to join unions faced no intimidation or concerted campaigns to stop unionization. (This era would seem to be drawing to an end with the rise of Walker-like tactics.)
I think that public sector unionism is not a fully satisfactory substitute for private sector unionism -- and resonates less in our capitalist culture. In my mind the NEA or AFSCME will never be the equivalent of the UAW or United Steelworkers of another era -- in part because the latter actually had the ability to shut down significant parts of the economy back in their heyday. These industrial unions represented millions of workers at a time when the working population was considerably smaller, they fought brutal battles against employer violence to win recognition, they negotiated landmark contracts that helped created the American middle class, and they were on the cutting edge of social change -- especially the UAW, which was a force for civil rights and broader social justice as well as the economic advancement of its members. Who will stand in the shoes of the UAW when it comes to fighting the good fight for an array of peoples and interests down the road? I have no good answer to that question, but sadly, I think it is a crucial one to ask.
Finally, I need to express a little bit of bitterness to my fellow lefties who are my contemporaries or a bit older. I have enjoyed the renewed vogue for organized labor that has characterized much of the liberal community over the last few years. I was especially heartened by young bloggers showing interest in a movement that had largely gotten the back of the hand from a lot of liberals over the previous couple of decades. And it's nice to see Joe Nocera put in a plug for them while praising Tim Noah's The Great Divergence." But I have to admit that there's a pretty big part of me that wonders where the hell Nocera and all of the others who are now bemoaning labor's passing were back three decades ago, when the assault began in earnest. I chose my side way back then -- I remember trying to hustle my resume at the UAW's Washington office in 1982 before I got admitted to law school. They smiled in good natured amusement as I tried to cold call them and sell my services cheaply in the midst of the horrific Reagan recession. As Eric Alterman points out in this excellent piece, back in those days it was pretty damn hard to sell most liberals on unions. They were deemed old-fashioned, irrelevant, the province of uncool, fat old white men -- when I expressed my desire to work for the labor movement, all manner of liberal people I met wondered why.
I really don't know what kind of a future unions have in this country. I am out there pushing for them every day and will continue to do so, but I cannot say I am overly sanguine about their prospects. What I am sure of is that liberalism without unions will not be the same and that the quest for broader economic justice will be immeasurably hampered if we cannot preserve them and then reverse to at least some degree their decline. The Republicans, strangely enough, understand their significance and thus, will stop at nothing to try to kill them. It is too bad that more liberals didn't recognize their value back when it would have been a lot easier to protect them.
[Feel free to treat this as an open thread as well if you wish.]
Here is the Green Monster picture I couldn't manage to post on Saturday. I am slowly gaining competency with my iphone, but the process is far from complete.
So I got back from my reunion, which was a good time, although no thanks to the alma mater. There was a nice turnout of some of my favorite people, many of whom I had not seen in decades. And someone managed to get a big screen feed of the Celtics-Heat game in the room, giving us an additional bit of local color for the festivities. Inexplicably, however, the alumni relations folks decided that at 10:00 PM it was time for us oldsters to hit the road despite the fact that fourth quarter had just begun and most of us were far from being done talking and sharing a glass with dear old friends. The last straw was when some twenty-something alumni relations guy sidled up to me and asked me to give him my beer. No, I said, I'm still working on it.
"Sir, I need to take that from you now."
"I don't think so."
"You have to give me the beer."
"You have to take it from me -- and I wouldn't bet on that happening."
"Am I going to have to call security?" [Seriously.]
"Call whoever you want motherfucker, they're not going to get my beer either." (It's like getting between a mother bear and her cub you know.)
Guy goes to campus cop to complain. Cop looks at him with contempt, looks over at me, continues to watch game with the rest of us.
The game finally ends (badly of course) and all of the booze is taken away ("they took the whole fucking bar" as someone inevitably observed) and booted us out at 10:45. All of us were left a bit astonished after having traveled from all over the country to attend the event. It did not strike me as the best way to some day separate us from our money on the university's behalf.
- Reading Krugman yesterday, I was struck by the thought that it seems like it has been a really long time since the world's elites have collectively lost their senses in such an impressive fashion. Really, think about it -- the west is plagued with unemployment and the dominant response is to cut government payrolls and diminish various government benefits. In turn, economies continue to contract, thereby further diminishing government revenues, exacerbating the very problem that is allegedly being targeted. Spain has achieved Depression levels of unemployment, while half of its young adults are without jobs. Meanwhile the European Central Bank continues to fight phantom inflation while economies contract across the continent; in England austerity continues to shrink the British economy, and the U.S. flounders with sluggish growth. (Amazingly enough, the U.S. has probably responded better to the bad times than most of the other western countries despite our own semi-hidden brand of austerity.) Why the western ruling class cannot understand the devastating impact of widespread and long lasting unemployment is beyond me.
- I now know who the Secretary of Commerce is.
- I still have an over long, half-written piece about unions that (as God is my witness) I will finish and post, but I thought Roy pretty much nailed the zeitgeist the other day regarding a world in which one-third of union household voters can support Scott Walker:
The one significant and ominous thing about the Wisconsin recall election is that most of the voters in a state that is not in the deep South think the problem with our economy is that garbagemen and schoolteachers make too much money.
If this is really the way things are going, then our future will be neo-feudalism, distinguished from earlier variants only by the populist buy-in with which the lords will occasionally refresh their mandate by pointing out to their serfs that someone covered in shit like themselves -- not a celebrity, banker, or manager -- was nonetheless able to build an addition on his house or buy a new car a few years early.
Nothing is certain, but the Almighty has pulled the U.S. out of a lot of jams in the past 236 years and no lucky streak lasts forever. Buy Gold, and by that I mean Cuervo.
Other than omitting granite countertops, I think this is pretty much perfection.
Alright, I've got an arbitration tomorrow and need to contemplate my strategy for tomorrow. Join in the fray.
I am trying this from an iPhone for the first time. Sitting in Fenway Park for the first time in twelve years on an absolutely beautiful day here. Will be heading off to reunion festivities after, so should be a festive day all in all.
I am going to try to post a picture if I can figure out how.
"Helpless and Knockin' on Heaven's Door" - Neil Young and Bob Dylan and the Band
Acftually "Knockin' on a Dragon's Door" or so it seems.
So sorry about comments being knocked out. I am trying to get some assistance from Typepad, but that may take a bit.
I am also heading off to Boston for my 30th college reunion and a family visit. I am traveling sans laptop -- I will feel positively naked I fear -- so posting may be a bit spotty. I am going to try to see a bunch of people I haven't seen for a while in old fashioned face to face contact, so I may not be able to get things fully up and running for a bit. Hang in there with me.
I am working on a post about the many post-mortems going on for the labor movement, which I hope to post this evening, but right now I am obliged to work for the actually existing labor movement.
Just a quick note on the latest Romney revelations -- it's a special kind of asshole who impersonates a police officer.
Alright -- please do your usual fine job and do the heavy lifting for me for a bit. Hopefully I will have something worth saying tonight.
Sorry about comments shutting off. This makes me nuts. I am trying to get Typepad to fix. I appreciate your patience.,
Not since the Salahis has a more embarrassing guest been permitted on the White House grounds. Due to this egregious lapse of security I was able to fist bump with the president tonight.
I am anxiously awaiting more results from Wisconsin. In the early going, Scott Walker has a sizeable lead, but the exit polls and the heavy turnout suggest a close race and a long night. Still it makes me nervous to see Walker with a 20% lead with 17% of the vote counted. I am assuming that all of this is from very heavily Republican areas.
I am going to try to hang in there until the bitter end. And hoping for good news.
Let's see what the night has in store.
Update: Wow, how quickly that bubble was burst. I guess my fears about the 20% lead were warranted. MSNBC has already called it for Walker and with 22% of the vote in Walker is ahead by a margin of 61-38%. This is incredibly disappointing.
I guess we need to see if we will pick up one state senate seat to see if we can gain a majority and thwart further damage being done by Walker and co.
Further Update: Jesus Christ, what an absolutely unmitigated disaster from the looks of things. I wish I had a better feel for where the vote was coming from, but it seems safe to say that with 50% of the vote counted that this does not appear likely to be remotely close. I am curious how the polling could have been so off.
Well the gap has closed a bit -- I am just hoping for a modicum of respectability here -- with the spread down to 11% with 79% of the vote counted. This is just a brutal, brutal loss.
On the plus side, the Celtics have taken a 3-2 lead over the Heat and will be heading back to Boston for a potentially deciding game. Yes, I'm grasping at straws here.
Further Update and Post Mortem: Okay, so the final results were not nearly as bad as things looked when I headed off to bed. Obviously there were significant Democratic strongholds still to report, leaving us the with a final margin of 6 - 7 points. Not great, but not a landslide, which really would have shaken me pretty deeply. In the end, the polls of last week proved to be pretty damn accurate and well within their margin of error. I find that strangely reassuring, because a double digit Walker win would have thrown all of that in doubt.
And it looks like we may actually pick up the Senate seat that returns a majority to the Democrats -- it's a small, but possibly significant consolation prize.
So what do we make of this in the end? Here are my initial thoughts:
1. A greatly expanded electorate does not always work for us -- I tend to think that it does, but this is a reminder that there is no great tide of progressive voters sitting on their hands and not voting that we can magically woo to the polls and begin a new day. Yes, certain groups, particularly minorities and young people are often underrepresented in elections to our detriment, but expanding the electorate writ large tends to replicate the results of earlier elections;
2. Getting outspent 7 to 1 is a bitch. The flow of limitless plutocrat money into elections is going to have serious implications in state and local races. I do not think that it will have much impact in the presidential race as I think that once you get past a certain level of spending there is a law of diminishing returns -- at least as long as you can return fire. But in smaller races, I think this kind of massive money on one side is extraordinarily worrisome;
3. Public employee unions are going to have to make a better case as to why their interests are more in line with the public than the interests of these right wing plutocrats. The Republicans have been amazingly effective in painting the preposterous picture that a teacher making $60,000 a year with a pension and decent medical coverage is an aristocrat, while people like the Koch brothers are simply job creators;
4. Recall elections might be different than ordinary elections. One can imagine a certain reticence among portions of the electorate to institutionalize this kind of mid-term disruption to the ordinary course of politics. Especially in a state like Wisconsin that has a kind of conservative personality -- not in an ideological sense, but in a general world view sense; and
5. We cannot afford a minute of complacency regarding this fall's election. The other side is going to go full bore after this thing with all of the resources and ferocity they've got -- we have to do the same.
Couldn't resist the opportunity for that thread title.
A friend set up a telescope at the Claggett Farm outside of Upper Marlboro, and we just got back from getting looks at the transit through her 'scope. Figured the kid would have to live to age 110 to see another transit of Venus across the face of the sun, so we dragged him on out. Once he saw it, he was really quite interested, which didn't surprise me too much: earlier this spring, there had been a stretch when Venus, Jupiter, and Mars were all in the evening sky at once, so I'd taken him outside to see. And the next night (which fortunately wasn't cloudy) he wanted to see it again.
It was pretty cloudy this evening, but we got a few decent-sized breaks in the clouds where my friend could aim her 'scope at the sun, which was a challenge: with the appropriate filter on, you either saw the sun through the telescope, or you saw nothing. She had to sight along the outside of the barrel of the 'scope to get it aimed correctly enough to catch a piece of the sun, then do fine tuning while looking through the eyepiece.
Changing subject, I see the TPM headline says, "Wis. Recall On Track For Massive Turnout." That's a good sign. Consider this an open thread for returns from the recall and other election/primary action tonight, and whatever else is on your minds.
(I generally find Stevens a little precious for my tastes -- and actually this song is a little precious too -- but I like it in spite of myself.)
- Well tomorrow is the big day in Wisconsin. It is horribly cliched, but it seems to be all coming down to turnout. The pollsters have Walker leading, but the question is whether or not they have correctly guessed the makeup of the electorate.
- "Still waiting for our first black president" - Articles like this, slamming Obama for being insufficiently zealous in pursuing the interests of black Americans, make me despair. First, the author seems elusive in terms of what legislative remedy he wants the President to pursue, although he seems to come down on the side of some sort of criminal justice reform. Great. So the first black president takes office in the midst of the worst economic crisis in generations, in a country beset by mammoth problems with its financial industry, its auto industry, and its health care system, and Professor Harris suggests that criminal justice reform -- with an explicitly racial emphasis -- should have been at or near the top of his list. Because let's face it, as we've discussed here over and over, a president has only so many things he can realistically push through any congress, even where he enjoys large majorities. Had Obama done here what Harris suggests, I suspect that people across American would have been scratching their heads wondering at the new President's priorities. Obama's triumph electorally was in not being perceived as a candidate who was explicitly a protest kind of candidate in the way that Shirley Chisolm, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton all were. He was a breakthrough candidate who won in the whitest of white states by speaking to the common interests that bind us. If he followed Harris's advice, we would not be fretting over whether he will wina second term, because he would have been crushed.
- Speaking of second terms, I haven't posted since the jobs numbers came out. These were really discouraging, not simply because they suggest a much more difficult electoral environment than hoped for, but because they seem to show an economy with a real absence of momentum, one which just cannot seem to overcome the continued series of problems left unresolved over the last several years, from bad mortgages to public sector layoffs to the European financial crisis. The question remains if, and at what point, the political leadership of the West is going to decide that putting people to work should be a priority. I confess I remain discouraged.
Alright, work beckons. I will be spending an anxious evening tomorrow night flipping between the Wisconisn results and the Celtics. I don't have a good feeling about either venture, but hope to be pleasantly surprised.
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