What’s a Moderate Journalist Worth?

     For too long our mainstream news reporters have followed the journalistic convention that Congressional Democrats who vote with Republicans are “moderates”.  This is a purely Republican rhetorical construct repeatedly used by Mitch McConnell and company, which has been well dissected by Jonathan Bernstein.  

     During the long drawn-out negotiations with such so-called moderates about the Affordable Care Act, the law was weakened to the point that the bill’s primary accomplishment – if  not overturned by the Supreme Court next spring – is that the federal government will subsidize Americans to purchase private health insurance plans. There is nothing moderate about this outcome:  it leaves all the for-profit players in control of the health system and has virtually no cost controls whatsoever. 

     The latest triumph of so-called moderation occurred yesterday when Democratic “moderates” in the Senate supported the Republicans’ filibuster of one piece of President Obama’s Jobs bill.  Tonight, the News Hour duly dubbed the renegades “moderates”.  What is moderate about voting against a proposal to keep police, firemen, and teachers on the job at the cost of a ½ of one percent tax on incomes over $1million?  An individual with an annual income of $1.1 million would pay $500 more in taxes beginning with the 2013 tax year! What is not moderate about that? The tax would keep hundreds of thousands of public employees at work. The president had proposed a tax increase for household incomes over $250,000, but Senate leaders reduced the tax take to a surcharge on millionaires.  Even Karl Rove’s outfit’s polls found that surcharge was supported by two-thirds of the American people.  

     When will the News Hour and other “moderate” news reporters wise up and escape the Republican narrative?  

Repudiation, Not Responsiblity

Just as the President is gearing his rhetoric for combat with the Republican No Deal Party which won’t pass his new jobs plan, the Vice-President is muddying the message:

Vice President Joe Biden acknowledges that it’s time to hold the Obama administration’s feet to the fire for the sorry state of the U.S. economy instead of continuing to blame President George W. Bush.

“Right now, understandably — totally legitimate — this is a referendum on Obama and Biden and the nature of the state of the economy,” Biden said during an interview with South Florida public radio station WLRN this afternoon.

Biden made the startling comment during an interview in which his main goal was to pitch for support of President Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act.

The vice president dismissed polls in which people continue to blame the Bush administration for the economy.

“Even though 50-some percent of the American people think that the economy tanked because of the last administration, that’s not relevant,” Biden said. “What’s relevant is we’re in charge. And right now we are the ones in charge and it’s gotten better, but it hasn’t gotten good enough.”  (September 29, 2011 Newsmax Wire)

Biden has not received the message that turning the other cheek is no longer strategy.  To the contrary, what the White House needs to do is to repudiate the past regime.  The economy is not progressing because of the enormous failures of neo-liberal ideology as a philosophy for governing the country.  The failures are well-known – the gross irresponsibility of the financial CEOs, the regulatory failures to prevent dangerous food in the food supply, the failure of the tax code to get the extremely rich and powerful to pay their fair share, the scape-goating of the unionized middle-class, the BP blow-out in the Gulf, the enormous unfunded expense of the war in Iraq, and on and on. These are Republican problems caused by Republican policies and the President is not responsible for them.  Without repudiation of the past policies, the Democrats cannot change the subject and take the country in a new direction. 

Now and Then

September 29, 2011

Compare Obama in Colorado this week:

“If asking a millionaire to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher makes me a class warrior, a warrior for the middle class, I will accept that.  I’ll wear that as a badge of honor because the only class warfare I’ve seen is the battle that’s been waged against the middle class in this country for a decade now”.  (New York Times, September 28, 2011) 

and Franklin Roosevelt running for re-election in 1936, speaking at Madison Square Garden:

“For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. … Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent….

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred.”

Many commentators have claimed that President Obama finally has his mojo back.  But there are important differences between 1936 and 2012.  President Roosevelt went on to specify the lies that the Republicans were telling about Social Security pensions and unemployment compensation and to call out the threats of unemployment that came from employers and the crocodile tears shed by Republicans about the poor working man.  He had an expectation that details of his message would be received and heard.  Also, Roosevelt had a mass movement pushing from the populist left:  general strikes in Minneapolis and Seattle and Toledo, militant unionizing in Michigan, a radical movement of the unemployed, and marching veterans and the elderly.  There was a mobilized electorate, funded by the Mineworkers Union and galvanized by the President’s rhetoric. 

     Today, we have episodic mass action, best expressed by the public sector unions in Wisconsin and other Midwestern states which, while very impressive in inspiring a 50-state demonstration of support, lost the first round of the battle and has dissipated as a national movement since.  More recently we’ve seen the “occupy” movement blossom from Wall Street to spread to every big city.  This is a different, younger and less focused group of folks than we saw in Wisconsin. It has been sparsely reported; the rightwing populism of the Tea Partiers still gains the media’s attention.  The Tea Partiers have turned full-face toward 1936-style Republican tosses of sand in the eyes and their blandishments that the government is picking the pocket of the working man with dastardly programs for health insurance and spending on infrastructure and schools, all the while they are protecting hedge fund managers, bankers, and multinational CEOs.  Who will tell the people, as William Greider put it?  I’m afraid the Obama for America campaign is no match.

Lessons Ten Years After

September 24, 2011

David Cole’s article in The New York Review of Books (September 29, 2011) argues that the rule of law in the United States was protected very well against the broadside assault against civil liberties launched by the George W. Bush administration in the wake of the terrorist attacks in 2001.  He’s right that we should pause at least to note that, to the surprise of pessimists and cynics, popular and organized support for civil liberties forced the administration to retreat time and again. Many Americans and key government officials as well demonstrated their commitment to our historical values by directly opposing the Executive’s far-flung claims for unitary power.  These Americans no less than our soldiers embody the slogan “freedom isn’t free”.  The American Civil Liberties Union, among other organizations, became a highly effective vehicle for hundreds of thousands of new members to push back the incipient police state.  

Now there is every reason to continue to press the Obama administration to repudiate rather than continue some of the ugly legacies of 9-11, including extra-judicial murders and the suppression of speech and press.  The Justice Department should conduct criminal investigations of the previous administration’s leading figures, who have bragged about their torture policy, up to and including Vice-President Cheney.  The Senate should approve the President’s nominees for the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which was one of the key recommendations of the official 9-11 Commission. 

Summer Blues

September 17, 2011

     I haven’t been posting recently because of demands at work.  Here are comments from August and July sent to news media, two of which were published.

August 15, 2011

     Sometimes it's better to have a little more information about stories that seem familiar to us because key words are invoked that are inherently vague, such as "Congressional dysfunction" and partisan gridlock.  The partial shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration was caused by House Republicans, who wanted to close small airports and reverse a rule for airline unionization.  We're told that the National Mediation Board "relaxed union election rules" after President Obama appointed two new members to the panel, which suggests a partisan tilt to the decision.  How reasonable is the Republicans' objection?  The new rule for union representation elections says that whoever receives the most votes in an election is the winner. The old rule counted non-voters as votes against union representation. With that standard for election, most of the Republican House members would not be in office today.  The turnout in the 2010 elections was 40%, slightly higher than the long-term average for off-year Congressional elections.  As usual, the party of non-voters swept to victory.  Goodbye Republicans.

July 28, 2011

     As we close in on the federal default date, the media is treating the debate as it does presidential elections as a horse race between candidates. But focusing on whether the Republicans or Democrats promise the greatest reductions in government spending is no more useful than which presidential candidate is leading in the polls when citizens have to make up their minds. When the parties promise huge cuts in spending, it is not merely the total we need to know, but the specific programs that will be cut.  The Republican House already passed a budget resolution to turn Medicare into a voucher program for everyone under 55 years of age. Now, if you're a voter who thinks that's fine, that is OK, but the citizen who wants to keep Medicare will understand that this huge budget cut is unacceptable. The Republican plan also includes even greater proposed cuts -- which are reported in the aggregate -- which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates will lead not only to massive cuts in Medicare but also to cuts in Social Security Pensions.  Now, again, if you're a voter who supports cutting the income of seniors, then fine, but if you want to keep Social Security for yourself and the two-thirds of seniors who rely on Social Security as their primary source of income, then the fact that the Republicans can win the budget cutting race is irrelevant because the cuts are unacceptable.

July 26, 2011

     It couldn’t be about rightwing extremism, could it?  Ross Douthat, in his July 26 column about the murderous attack on Norway’s leading political party, the Labor Party, by a Norwegian Christian man steeped in the virulent xenophobia that flourishes on both sides of the Atlantic, wants us to believe that the real culprit is the Labor Party, which would not listen to the fact that “Europe’s cultural conservatives are right”.  

     Everything that Douthat claims is “right” is wrong.  He sweepingly claims that immigration has left the Continent "more divided than enriched" – note the instrumental standard he suggests – whereas for decades most western European countries have feasted on cheap immigrant labor. That the economic slowdown, compounded by years of outsourcing by global companies, has created high unemployment certainly cannot be blamed on immigrants. About his claim that Islam and liberal democracy are “not yet proven natural bedfellows”, one wonders if he decided to weasel out – “not yet”, “natural bedfellows” – because he knows that the Christian extreme right does not support liberal democracy. Finally, he claims that “the dream” that the Continent will be ruled by a “benevolent ruling elite” is “folly” whereas it is precisely the insurgent extreme rightwing parties in many countries that have challenged the hope for a democratic (not dictatorial) European Union.  

     Douthat is still smarting from the fallout from Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 attack on the Oklahoma City federal building: “Timothy McVeigh’s connections to Republican politics were several degrees short of tangential, but Clinton successfully linked the heartland terrorist to talk radio…, implying that McVeigh’s crime was part of a broader story of antigovernment conservatism run amok.” He would like us to forget that several Republican members of the House played footsy with the Militia Movement’s armed groups, which engaged in military training precisely to combat the federal government.  McVeigh was deeply involved with the American extreme right.  Just as Jared Loughner is called “the schizophrenic”, now Anders Behring Breivik is “insane”.  He’s not one of our group!  We’re the sane immigrant bashers, xenophobes, elite class warriors, and Christian fundamentalists.

July 15, 2011

     A syndicated editorial cartoon of July 14, 2011 perpetuates a false story that the Democrats and Republicans are equally at fault for the budget crisis.  It shows a Democrat and a Republican collapsed on the floor.  The Democrat is labeled "Spend! Spend! Spend!" and the Republican is labeled "No tax hikes!" and the text reads "What happens when an irresponsible force meets an unreasonable object".  The truth is that Obama has agreed to trillions of dollars of spending cuts while the Republicans have not agreed to any tax increases. The Republicans are both irresponsible and unreasonable.  

     After all, the Republicans ran up the deficit with the Bush tax cuts ($4 trillion, mostly for the super rich), the Bush Medicare drug subsidies for the pharmaceutical industry ($500 billion), two wars paid for with debt (long-term cost $2 trillion and counting), the economic collapse of 2008, and the financial industry bailout. Now they don't want to pay their bills, which is the definition of irresponsibility.  It gets worse: the Republicans unreasonably want the middle class to pay for it all through benefit cuts (e.g. privatize Medicare for those under 55), lay-offs of teachers, police and firefighters, higher tuition at public colleges, banning collective bargaining about health care, and more, all the while protecting the vast privileges of the big banks and hedge fund managers. 

     The American voters have a more reasonable response, as shown repeatedly in opinion polls: two-thirds want to raise taxes on the super rich and big corporations, which have done very well under the Republican regime. 

Symbiotic Relationship

            Are journalists doing their job properly in the budget debate?  The Republicans have talked both parties into a stalemate, partly because few have challenged the Republicans’ premises about how the economy operates. 

                 Today (July 11, 2011) on the News Hour, we heard from two members of Congress, a Republican and a Democrat, about their views on the budget deadlock.  Unfortunately the interviewer, Gwen Ifill, asked weak questions that left the audience – as she not very helpfully surmised – without key information.  Can journalists help move the debate beyond he said/she said? 

When the Republican said that the American people want spending to be cut to balance the budget, Ifill might usefully have pointed out that the public also supports – and has supported by big majorities for two years – increasing taxes on the rich.  When the Republican argued that raising taxes on the “job creators” was a bad idea, Ifill might have noted that the “job creators” are jobs 11 million jobs short and that corporate tax revenue is at a 60 year low as a proportion of the budget.  When the Republican argued that most businesses are so small that their owners do not file tax returns as corporations but rather as individuals, Ifill might have pointed out that most businesses’ revenue is so low that they will not be taxed by any proposal that is coming out of the White House. When Ifill asked if the Republicans were willing to pay a political price as part of a deal with the Democrats, who also would pay a price to get to a compromise on spending, the Republican said it was a big and sufficient sacrifice for Republicans to agree to increase the debt limit.  No doubt the Club for Growth and the Business Roundtable will lambaste any tax increase.  Ifill might helpfully have pointed out that the Republicans seem to be willing to pay a serious political price with voters of modest incomes by their proposal to abolish Medicare for everyone under 55, which is extremely unpopular.  

When the Democrat got his chance, he excoriated the Republican’s smug sacrifice.  He agreed that the sticking point in a potential compromise was tax increases on the wealthy, which he argued was a matter of fairness.  The poor and elderly would be hurt by the House Republican budget whereas the rich would get off without paying an extra dime.  Ifill might have asked him how the Democrats’ position would stimulate economic growth and employment.  How does his concern for the poor and elderly help the working- and middle-classes?  As is typical, the Democrat never took on the Republicans’ economic analysis and therefore fell into the old trap of wimpy hand-wringing.  He was correct to reject the abolition of Medicare and any threat to the structure of Social Security pensions.  But that is simply defending the position that the Republicans argue the Democrats should compromise in order to get the economy moving again.  

Could we get past this old discussion? Could the Democrat actually challenge the Republican head on and say that the government creates jobs and should do so just because the private is not?  Could the Democrat point out that the profits of the large corporations have recovered from the Great Recession and the bankers are receiving lavish salaries once again and, therefore, argue that these business leaders are not hiring because the incomes of working class people are too low or insecure to give them confidence to buy things? And that it is a terribly misguided policy to have cut 430,000 government workers from the payrolls in the last 18 months – not only are these the people who teach and provide public safety – but laying off public employees creates unemployment every bit as much as laying off private sector workers.  That it is backwards to attack the ability of unions to negotiate higher pay in a recession when consumer incomes have stagnated.  Of course, the Democrat might say, we should tax very high income individuals and corporations because we need to put that money to work so that Americans can go back to work.

Friends Like These

June 21, 2011

Greg Abbott, the Attorney General for the Texas people, is “outraged” that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has decided a case against the Boeing Corporation, which has a maintenance operation in San Antonio that employs 1,700 people.  He claims this is “a legally baseless attempt to interfere with private sector job creation” in right-to-work states like Texas. He has formed a coalition of Republican leaders to “fight the agency”. (Op-ed, San Antonio Express-News, June 17, 2011) What is he protecting us from and for what?

Outrage is a term that expresses moral condemnation for unjust gains. The NLRB decision that has so upset Abbott comes from a dispute between Boeing and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in Seattle.  The Board has found that Boeing discriminated against airline manufacturing workers for exercising their legal right to strike.  This case has been widely commented on in the professional community of labor specialists:  contrary to the anti-union legal brief that Abbott filed, there is virtually no question at all that Boeing is guilty of violating the law.  Its executives gave a public interview in which they said that the company shifted production from Seattle to a new non-union facility in right-to-work South Carolina because employees went on strike.

Such labor disputes are arcane in contemporary America where the rate of union membership has collapsed to about 6%.  So some explanation of what is at stake is needed. The first is the right to form a union. For 200 years, Americans have had the right to form a union to advance their interests at work, including the right to strike.  75 years ago the U.S. Congress put these rights into federal statute law in the National Labor Relations Act and it created the NLRB to make sure the law was carried out. One of the bedrock principles of the American legal tradition that underlies labor law is that individuals have freedom of association and that they cannot be punished for exercising this right.  Of course, the typical employer does not want his employees to form a union because it challenges his undivided power; he thinks it is in his economic interest to fight the union.  Texas and 20 other states passed so-called right-to-work laws in the 1940’s to help employers block the NLRA.  The core provision of right-to-work is that no employee can be forced to pay dues as a condition of employment.  Sound good to you?  Who wants to pay dues?  The purpose of union dues has been lost to history – it is certainly not explained to young people in Texas high school civics textbooks.   

So here is the civics lesson.  Employees who want to form a union pay dues to the union staff to negotiate and administer contracts that they sign with employers.  The union services are not free.  Thus, a law that says that no employee has to pay dues creates an untenable position for the union.  Union members pay for union services, but non-union employees also get the services – coverage by the contract – but don’t have to pay for it.  The union workers have to pay for the free-riders on the union’s work.  This is an incentive for union workers to stop paying dues, too, and free-ride themselves.  But if everyone free-rides, then there won’t be a union.  Success for the employers!  You may ask What about so-called minority unions:  let the union only negotiate a contract for those who want to pay dues; don’t allow free-riders to get the benefits without paying.  That also is illegal under right-to-work.  Case closed.  Right-to-work is one of the chief causes of the rock-bottom rate of unionization in Texas.

A corollary principle of the right to form a union is the right to strike to try to convince an employer to negotiate a good contract (not to destroy the company or “thwart its expansion plans”, as Abbott claims).  A right to associate without the right to act is a very weak right.  Similarly, employers have the right to lock-out employees if they won’t negotiate.  But employers do not have the right to threaten workers with permanent loss of their jobs for exercising their rights to form a union and strike in furtherance of a lawful goal.  This has been settled law for eight decades.  The NLRA encourages a union and company to recognize each other’s legitimate rights and to negotiate precisely so they don’t try to destroy each other.  However, at least since Reagan, union rights have been weakened to allow companies to ease out of contractual relations that they already have.  This development is what makes Boeing’s action especially bizarre.

The legal doctrine that the NLRB is enforcing in the Boeing case is a weaker doctrine than what was enforced until the 1981.  Before then, a union with a contract with an employer had a right to bargain over working conditions, including an employer’s plan to remove work from the workplace and shift it to other employees, who may be non-union. But in 1981, in the First National Maintenance Corporation case, the U.S. Supreme Court re-interpreted the statute to tilt the balance between labor and management decisively to management.  The Court held that “an employer’s need for unencumbered decision-making in the conduct of its business” trumped the benefits of “bargaining over management decisions that have a substantial impact on the continued availability of employment”.   A business decision “purely for economic reasons outweighs the incremental benefit that might be gained through the union’s participation in making that decision”.  A company’s decision “to shut down part of its business … is not part of [the] terms and conditions of employment over which Congress has mandated bargaining”.  The Court’s new doctrine that a business decision “purely for economic reasons” justified vacating the obligation to bargain created a gaping hole in the entire structure of fair dealing between unions and corporations.  Employers rushed to move operations to non-union states, cancel defined benefit pensions, operate “double-breasted” union and non-union shops, cancel contracts, and undermine employee rights at work, all justified by purely economic reasons. 

This is where Boeing managers made an egregious mistake.  What the NLRB decided in the Boeing case was based on a much weaker provision of our law, namely the prohibition on acting to discriminate against lawful activities, such as striking. If Boeing executives had refrained from bullying in public and had simply made a business case for opening a new facility in South Carolina, there probably would not be a judgment against them.

What is still to be decided in this case is how to resolve the dispute.  Our labor law prefers negotiated settlements and, in fact, for months before issuing his formal complaint against the company, the NLRB general counsel sought to get the parties to make a deal. But Boeing executives drank the Republicans’ anti-labor cool-aid and they apparently believe that their political party will bully the federal government to back down.  Abbott has rushed to champion its tawdry cause.

What of Abbott’s other claim that the decision is a threat to job creation?  Boeing is one of the two leaders in the world in the commercial and military aviation markets and it has been in close competition with the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), which makes the Airbus and other products.  EADS is not a low-cost non-union competitor in a developing country.  Texas’ and South Carolina’s right-to-work laws did not create aerospace jobs.  These laws have been an incentive to move jobs from one part of the country to another.  Right-to-work encourages employers to take the low road to competition by squeezing the compensation of their employees rather than the high road of producing a superior product or service.  Texas is a rich state with a lot of poor people in part because Texas workers do not share in the value they create.  This is the true outrage. With their rights to organize a union dis-incentivized -- as the policy jargon would have it -- Texas workers' economic interests also are politically unrepresented in elections and the legislative process. 

Needless to say, one can oppose this or that union position; no one claims that unions and corporations always act wisely.  But that is the point of a pragmatic approach based on mutual recognition and negotiations.  Trying to destroy the right to have a union is ideological.  And the practical consequences of doing so for our country are already known.  Republican Party ideologues claim that unions interfere with business plans, which if left unfettered would lead to the best of all possible worlds.  This claim is demonstrably false:  for thirty years, as unions have been beaten back, blue-collar pay has stagnated.  Inequality between median pay and corporate executive pay is near its historic high.  Without strong unions to prevent run-away employers, jobs have been re-shuffled to non-union regions like Texas and abroad. Just during the G. W. Bush years, over 2 million manufacturing jobs were lost. Today, American employers have failed to create some 13 million jobs that we need for full employment, despite massive tax cuts for corporations and investors.

Abbott is beating his chest about the NLRB in defense of Texas workers.  He is outraged that a union could file a complaint against a company for breaking the law and foiling the right-to-work strategy. Workers hold their employer accountable?  Shocking!  Please, don't do us any more favors.