- America’s public schools are not failing, American communities are failing. Our public schools in well-to-do neighborhoods are doing just fine, thank you. Our problem with children’s education in some area has nothing to do with public schools or teacher’s unions. The kids are failing because the working class communities they live in are failing.
- Jobs and the Economy are related but are two entirely different subjects. Slaves on plantations had jobs. The servants at Downton Abbey had jobs and in both instances, the economy grew but the bounty of the economy went to the .1%. The same applies to today’s new economy.
- The Global Economy is not a law of nature. It is a system designed by humans and can be changed at any time by humans. Telling working class Americans that their poor wages, lack of health care as a right, and amount of hours required of them each week is all because of “the global economy” is a lie. Those in control designed it to be so. If you want to know who is in control, follow the money. These are the SAME people that can afford to pay a politician $225,000 for a “speech”.
- Undocumented immigrants are not doing the jobs that working class Americans will not do. Undocumented immigrants are doing the jobs that working class Americans will not do for the unfairly negotiated wages and working conditions that undocumented immigrants are willing to take from the .1% and their ilk.
- Wages for working class Americans have been stagnant for over four decades while the DOW has grown, GDP has soared, and our national bounty has flourished. In this period, BOTH parties, Republican and Democratic, have been in significant majority control at one time or another to change that. NEITHER party has done so.
Please share widely!
I’ll bite.
1. I agree. We really should do a better job defending public education.
2. Yes, but the slavery example is bad (they did NOT have jobs). The Downton Abbey example works better.
3. Yes and no. Certain organizations are in a better position to take advantage of the global economy (like Apple), and yes, those people manipulate things to their benefit. But the phenomenon of India becoming an IT hub (and now places like Singapore, and soon even more far-flung places) was on no one’s economic model. There are some large forces at work.
4. Yes
5. Yes but we try — a lot of our policies are about economic uplift. I’ll agree that we haven’t done enough.
On point 4 I think it’s important to distinguish between the fact that wages are being depressed by a variety of forces, including undocumented immigration in certain low skilled sectors. Vox and other liberal pundits supporting fully open borders and citing the aggregate benefit of immigration to the economy forget that it hurts specific groups of lower skilled workers and those particular workers ended up having a greater impact on the last election than the surge in Latino turnout that never came to fruition.
I would also caution that undocumented immigrants are themselves victims of this economic injustice and not workers seeking out to undermine native born workers in an intentional or malicious way. So long as we don’t crack down on employers, the conditions that hurt both sides of this cultural and economic divide will persist.
I think we just need to enact and enforce laws relative to wages and working conditions that apply to everyone. We also need to grant immunity to any undocumented person who whistleblows on their employer. However, I’ve never liked the idea that employers should themselves be expected to enforce immigration law.
When a US citizen works 40 hours a week and cannot support a family, save for a rainy day, and live in relative style and comfort – that’s just unAmerican and proof that capitalism is a failed system, at least capitalism as it is practiced in the USA..
Is it, therefore, your contention that any and all instances of a forty hour workweek are for the purposes of ‘support[ing] a family’? And no other purpose…?
Any and all? No. I prefer to not deal in absolutes – very difficult to defend as it makes perfect the enemy of the good.
Many and most, yes.
Would you agree?
That’s a good answer.. It’s not correct. –at least as regards your willingness to deal in absolutes — but it sure sounds good.
You did say ‘a US citizen’ and you did say ‘a week’ and you did say ‘a family’ suggesting, rather forcefully, a bucket in which all those variables, and those variables alone, meet. Which is why I asked….not because I particularly enjoy your mode of argumentation.
So… nigh-on-absolute… just not absolutely absolute. Whatever that means?
How many families are there? How many jobs are there? How many of those jobs are ‘minimum wage’. How many people in this jobs are 18 and 19 years old?
How many minimum wage job holders are ‘US citizens’ (which is your criteria, and one I find suspect…)
You postulate a mythical nirvana that, to the extent it EVER existed, did so primarily for white Americans living in suburbia. Immigrants who lived in tenements in NYC in the 1930s and 1940s worked FAR more than 40 hours per week. They were paid FAR less in inflation-adjusted hours then even today’s sub-standard minimum wage. They lived in slums.
It doesn’t sound as though you are very familiar with the history of immigrants, minorities, Native Americans, agricultural workers, and millions of other situations throughout most of our history.
To the extent that capitalism has failed, it has failed for great many people outside your description. On the other hand, many of those immigrants were the GOP base until very recently. They would tell you that “capitalism as it is practiced in the USA” worked marvelously for them — many of them built lifetimes of relative prosperity out of those years of sweat, blood, long hours, and low pay.
There certainly are enormous problems with our economy today. It is not clear to me that “capitalism as it is practiced in the USA” is the cause of those problems. Some would argue, in fact, that there are two distinct periods when our economy has failed almost all of us:
1. The Gilded Age, when Republican dogma allowed robber barons and people of their ilk to amass enormous wealth with essentially no government regulation at all
2. The current era, when Americans who are ignorant of our history and vulnerable to exploitation by despots and liars have recreated the Gilded Age by reverting to that Republican Dogma. Not surprisingly, the results are similar this time around to what happened the first.
In my view, “capitalism as it is practiced in the USA” is what we did from about 1945 until about 1980. Specifically:
– Very high estate and gift taxes
– Very high marginal income tax rates on our wealthiest taxpayers
– Relatively strict government regulation (in comparison to today)
– Very high government investment in public education (in comparison to today)
– Very high government investment in infrastructure (in comparison to today)
We face profound challenges in today’s economy, especially extreme wealth and income concentration and all the consequences that follow from that. We must be careful about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. History is chock-full of alternative economic models that failed miserably.
I agree with you that the economic system being imposed on us today is failing miserably. I think it is very important that when we change it, we change it to something better.
The burning question is what we propose to do about all this. Raising the minimum wage — even to $22/hour — is not nearly enough to “support a family, save for a rainy day, and live in relative style and comfort.”
Some sort of UBI is crucial, because our economy never did support enough labor demand to meet your criteria, and will continue to shrink as more and more jobs are replaced by technology.
Single-payer government-sponsored health care is crucial, because access to health care should be an entitlement analogous to access to public education.
The bottom line remains that we must craft an America where our citizens are able to “support a family, save for a rainy day, and live in relative style and comfort” WITHOUT working 40 or more hours per week.
The sad reality is, as well, that the profound ignorance and functional illiteracy of today’s America is an enormous factor in our inability to govern ourselves and in our susceptibility to lies, demagoguery, and scapegoating. America today is dangerously similar to Germany of the early 1930s, It took at least one generation to spiral so far down, and at least one generation to climb back.
It seems to me that our immediate risk is to prevent Donald Trump (or some other demagogue who comes after him) from following in Hitler’s footsteps and starting WWIII as he or she plays out their personal pathologies.
Wages for working class Americans have been stagnant for over four decades. Our top three private employers do not pay a majority of their employees a wage that will sustain a family. That was not the case four decades ago.
How? By continuing to run the same candidates, with the same issues, and the same financial obligations to a few wealthy contributors?
As Chris Matthews said in so many words on Hardball last night, “It’s time the Democrats stopped listening to the donors and stated listening to the voters”.
I think that says it best.
…closed the comment too early. Your comment
is one of the directions we need to go.
There are many, many things we can do to right this ship. I recently read Rigged:How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer
By Dean Baker
I would make it required reading for all Democrats in office.
In short, our working class is not suffering the affects of the natural forces of a global economy, technology advancements and other myths perpetrated by both political parties. Our working class is suffering the affects of tax codes, labor policy, and other man made legislation that was created by our government. We created it and we can change it.
Our working class is suffering from both.
I enthusiastically agree that our working class “is suffering the affects of tax codes, labor policy, and other man made legislation that was created by our government”, I’ve been arguing for fundamental changes in those things for most of my life.
Our working class IS ALSO suffering “the affects of the natural forces of a global economy, technology advancements. ” These are not “myths”, these are hard facts. The clothes you wear are not made in the USA. The device you use to interact with this blog was not made in the USA.
The very first people who are even now feeling the impact of withdrawing from NAFTA are working-class Americans. The globalization of our economy is real, has been driven by insatiable market demand for lower prices, and is not going to go away because we wish it so.
Working-class people in America shop at Walmart because they can’t afford to shop anywhere else. When they do, they buy goods that are made abroad. Many of those goods are currently manufactured in places that make today’s America look like Nirvana in comparison. Americans buy those products because they are less expensive. So long as they are less expensive than their US-made counterparts, Americans will choose them.
The same is true of technology advancements. Those are not “mythical” — just ask former textile workers out of work because a robot produces a hundred times a many shirts in a day as they do, doesn’t need breaks, safety precautions, or overtime, works around the clock, and costs a tiny fraction (over the course of a year) as them.
The forces you cite as “myths” are, in fact, the very REASON why we need to change our “tax codes, labor policy, and other man-made legislation”. When you characterize them as “myth”, you undercut the strongest argument in favor of the changes we so desperately need.
Our “tax codes, labor policy, and other man-made legislation” are not going to change because we wish it so or because of nostalgic appeals to a past that never existed. They will change because the forces of today REQUIRE them to change, just as the forces of the 1930s and 1940s required them the first time around.
We must stay reality-based.
Many of the undocumented were displaced from their former work when NAFTA killed off their jobs in their native land.
1. Agreed.
2. Okay, so no pay is better than less than fair pay…….but that’s a distinction without a difference in my book. Many working class Americans are virtual wage slaves in a Hobson’s choice that if before them.
3. Certain organizations are in a better position because the rules allow them to be so….and who makes the rules?
4. Thanks.
5. We give the appearance of trying with stump speeches and campaign promises but we must see that after four decades of no measurable results, no one in Washington is really trying.
We also can’t bury our heads in the sand when it comes to the reality of a global economy. We must make it work for everyone and resist any temptation to become protectionist.
There is a WORLD of difference between actual slavery and anything that happens today.
Even wage slaves today are able to say “no” when their employer wants to have sex with them, and the law supports them in bringing rape charges if they are ignored. That was absolutely NOT true of actual slaves.
There is no counterpart in today’s economy to the common practice of slave owners selling men, women and children away from their family. Slaves who were fertile were more valuable, because their children could be sold for hard cash just like any other livestock.
In many slave-owning states, it was a crime to teach slaves to read and write. It is ironic that you so frequently attack the Democratic Party for striving to make college available to working class families while comparing “virtual wage slavery” to actual slavery. Education has ALWAYS been at the center of bipartisan efforts to improve life for working class Americans,
Life is more than a job and a paycheck. Families matter. Choice matters. Education matters Every worker has a choice today, even if those choices are difficult. That was absolutely NOT the case for actual slaves.
You greatly understate the evils of actual slavery.
Well yes and no. America’s version of slavery was particularly harsh and violent, much like its version of capitalism. Slavery in Africa was quite different, . Even several pope owned slaves as slavery was bad, but not as bad as the colonies and the slave states of the USA.
But yeah, slavery in the USA was about as bad as it gets, much like our capitalism that treats working class blokes like animals but butters up the wealthy class because Republicans and far too many Democrats will tell you that the money HAS to come from somewhere….
“Families matter. Education matters. Choice matters” sounds awfully libertarian to me. That’s basically where conservatives J. D. Vance and Kevin Williamson are coming from. It was wrong to blame the victim when it comes to black poverty and it’s wrong to blame the victim when it comes to white poverty.
I think our candidates in 2016 across the board were in denial about the perverse pervasiveness of systematic racism. They were also in denial that the Obama and Clinton administrations focused on national net growth that’s left a lot of isolated pockets of the country behind. Just as Deval left gateways behind.
Christophers plea to let the Republicans become the fair trade party and steal our best issue with blue collar whites is just as frustrating. It’s reactions like this that prove how out of touch we are with the real working families of this country. People like my sister and my students families. People like the folks I met in Fitchburg and Chelsea. If the Resistance passes them by too it’ll be as effective as the 2016 Clinton campaign. Great at winning the popular vote, lousy at attaining real political power.
I was listening to a historian today talk about the rise and fall of Sears and I could not help but draw parallels with the Democratic Party. Most of can recall when Sears has huge, in every mall, and who could forget the “Sears Catalog”. So how did Sears lose out to Walmart and now, Amazon when Sears had deep roots and history in receiving orders from its catalog and shipping them across the USA?
He related a story where someone on a director’s meeting brought up Walmart (before Walmart was huge) and the people at the table dismissed it because Walmart was “just a discounter’ and had no style. That reminded me of how the Democrats look at working class people without college degrees.
And then there was the Sears Tower, built at a time when Sears thought it was too big to fail, and then it failed.
Kind of reminded me of the Clinton and Obama years, where again, we lost focus and thought we were too big to fail. The Clinton’s and the Obama’s vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, expensive wardrobes, getting chummy with Hollywood big shots, being invited to Wall Street insider status…..
Forgetting about our roots and how we got there, leaving easy pickings for Trump just as Sears let Amazon walk away with their customer base.
In my opinion, both parties have a too big to fail mentality. Kodak invented the digital camera but was too involved with chemicals and paper to see what it was missing. Xerox developed first true PC – The Xerox Alto… This sucker had everything, Ethernet networking, graphical user interface, icons, bit mapping, scalable type, a mouse, the world’s first laser printer…but was too tied to copying machines.
I’m not sure what both parties are missing, but it’s painfully clear that Donald Trump is the result of it.
Your summary of Xerox entirely misses the mark. I was there. I know.
Xerox licensed the technologies you mention to companies in their investment portfolio, Apple being one. That decision was entirely conscious, and was made because Xerox knew that they would never succeed at creating the retail channels so vital for the new technologies. Even Apple almost failed.
The Alto was a RESEARCH PROTOTYPE, and a very successful one. Even more influential was the Xerox Dorado.
If the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, then everything is a nail. The real world is not nearly so simple.
Xerox did make money from Apple but it was not from any licensing of technology. Xerox purchased 20% of Apples non-voting stock at the time, and profited by its appreciation.
Xerox missed the boat on this one.
@ lodger. I was there. I worked with Adele Goldberg and the Smalltalk team. The 1979 demo didn’t just happen. The joke inside PARC at the time was “If Xerox had owned Sutter’s Creek, it would have built condos”.
The Xerox team knew that Apple was far more likely to be successful at deploying the technology than Xerox.
What nobody knew at the time was that Apple would so completely mismanage the rollout — driven by the egotism and arrogance of Mr. Jobs — that Microsoft would become the dominant source.
Steve Jobs mistakenly thought that Apple was a hardware company, and refused to license the Macintosh look and feel to run on other platforms (specifically the IBM PC). Microsoft’s response was Microsoft Windows 3.1 — Apple was absolutely crushed in the marketplace.
Here’s what you wrote (that I responded to) (emphasis mine):
You claimed that Xerox had a “too big to fail mentality”, and cited the Alto as your evidence, saying Xerox was “too tied to copying machines”.
My pushback is that the way the Xerox handled the technology developed at PARC was exactly the opposite of a “too big to fail mentality”. The company knew that it wouldn’t succeed, and worked intentionally, diligently, and successfully to move the technology to companies that would NOT fail.
You are probably using a PC with overlapping windows, a mouse, beautiful (by 1970s standards) graphics, and high-speed internet connection to interact with this site.
Xerox succeeded — enormously, beyond the wildest dreams of the people who created these things. You deride that success as a failure, of a company “too tied to copy machines”.
That’s what I argue with.
because…..
It must have been amazing to be there at that time and I envy you that experience I am not arguing that the technology was not a success but that the company did missed opportunities because of an incorrect focus by management on only their business copier target market. It happens all the time, cable TV companies are doing it right now.
I recall, sitting on a chairlift with a friend of mine who was a senior engineer at Kodak telling me about “pixels” and digital cameras and video cameras the size of a deck of cards that could hold hours of video electronically….all being tested in the labs that he worked in but he saw it more of a curiosity because people would still want to print the photos.
@ chairlift: Indeed, Kodak and Polaroid are examples of companies that utterly failed to see or avoid the demise of their own industry.
I just don’t see Xerox that way. Today’s Market Cap for Xerox is $8.502 B. Today’s Market Cap for Kodak is $0.265 B.
Xerox is a success story, Kodak a failure.
The company knew that it wouldn’t succeed
because…..(please fill in the blank)
You’re quite correct, I should have been more clear. Let me try again.
The company knew that it wouldn’t succeed at bringing these technologies to market because …
… selling hardware through retail channels is a completely different business from selling office equipment, much more so in 1980 than today. At that time, Xerox (and other copier companies) didn’t sell their equipment to end users at all. In those days, offices leased their copiers.
Xerox stands in stark contrast to, for example, our local Digital Equipment Corporation (where I worked during 1970s). Does anybody still remember the Digital stores? How about the “Rainbow”? It was a total frigging disaster. Ken Olsen knew a LOT about selling to OEMS and other entities that bought big-ticket items directly from sales representatives that each customer knew by name. Digital knew absolutely nothing about selling retail hardware.
That’s one reason why Digital’s attempt to buy Apple (yes, that did happen) failed so miserably. KO was infuriated by what he perceived as the arrogance of Steve Jobs, who started with a price that was several orders of magnitude above what KO had in mind (as I recall, Steve Jobs started at $10B). KO asked, sarcastically, something to the effect of “where did THAT number come from?”.
The answer, from Steve Jobs, was “that’s how much money I’m going take away from you over the next 5 years”.
Mr. Jobs was right. Mr. Olsen was wrong. Xerox knew what it was doing. Digital did not.
In other words, it was too well off to see opportunity much like the Dems recently.
Hammer, nail. Again.
Projection…..again.
Where did I say that Republicans should become the fair trade party? That’s not what I believe and certainly not what I expect will happen.
@jconway: Please, let’s not reduce more of our language to bumper-sticker words.
Families matter. I’m not willing to concede that to the libertarians or the GOP. A “great job” that takes one or both parents away from their children for most of the waking hours of those children is not so great — no matter how much it pays. A “great” opportunity that requires forcing the rest of the family to give up all their roots in order to move to some new place (especially if the new employer is the only game in town) is not so great. Life is more than a fat paycheck.
Education matters. Surely that is a core Democratic value, and has been for as long as there’s been a Democratic party. Are you now joining JTM in his crusade against public funding of college educations?
Choice matters. We make choices. Those choices matter. Are you proposing that we try and pretend otherwise? All the government programs in the world aren’t going to help someone who refuses to finish high school, or chooses to have a baby (or two or three) at 19, or chooses to kill themselves with tobacco, or chooses to ignore the changes in the world around them while their job or industry becomes more and more precarious. The end of Polaroid was obvious YEARS before the company actually closed its doors and laid off its last workers. Those workers made that choice to stay until the bitter end. People who are eligible vote choose whether or not to show up. People who show up choose a candidate.
I understand the role that system racism plays on all those choices, and in the awful consequences of so many of them. I hope you understand the vital role that choice plays. Is “12 step” a “libertarian” program? Yet the role of individual choice is the heart and soul of that program. Most successful substance abuse programs the same.
The best government programs in the world can only enable choices. No successful government program in a republic can ever replace individual choice.
If the Republicans “steal our best issue with blue collar whites” by lying to them, how is it any better for us to join in that deceit? Look at what the GOP is actually doing to workers. How on earth are they “stealing our best issue”?
You say multiple times how eager you are to move beyond the 2016 campaign. Why then do you bring it up so often?
We are NOT GOING TO WIN the 2018 elections. Our divisions go too deep. The attitudes that do so much harm to your sister, your student’s families, and the folks you met in Fitchburg and Chelsea are not going to be changed between now and November of 2018. They aren’t going to be changed between now and November of 2020.
The change we must make will take generations.
The history of the world is filled with “Resistance” movements based on empty promises and lies that served only to either make matters worse for down-trodden, make matters better for the oppressors, or both. How did the French Revolution turn out? How about the White Revolution in Russa? The Communist Revolution in China?
The American revolution was noteworthy in its success and in the foundations that led to that success. If it is even POSSIBLE for “the Resistance” to pass anybody by in the next 11 months, then it is not a movement that will make any long-term difference at all.
Real change and real movements take time.
Given fundraising numbers I have seen I’m actually pretty optimistic about our 2018 chances. Even in normal times the non-WH party usually makes some gains in the midterms.
Your definitions of family and choice are different enough that I appreciate with greater insight where you’re coming from.
I think you fail to realize how much of a post-policy political environment we are in and how much bumper sticker arguments and emotional appeals matter to voters. There is massive psychology that backs this up.
Our party is a brand like any other, one that thrived in a world where there was one primary competitor who just endured a hostile takeover by a new entity radically making it more nimble and harder to displace. I think establishment Republicans and Democrats alike do themselves a disservice hoping to return to an old normal where both parties broadly thought interventionism, globalization, open borders, and mild social tolerance were values held by a mythical and benevolent elite center ruling over the peripheries.
The peripheries lashed out. The losers lashed out. And they did so as many similar people did so in the past by turning to demagogues and questioning democracy. Democracy requires a vital and engaged middle class in order to be created and in order to flourish, and while the establishments of both parties were content to let growth overcome equity as the central purpose of government policy they hallowed out the base of our civic institutions.
The union, the Rotorary, the lodge, scouting, all of these class leveling institutions have been diminished and replaced by a post modern consumer culture overwhelmed by choice and an economy catering to that endless consumerism.
Our planet, our government, our very way of life is threatened by this economy and until we tame it and reclaim space for family and civic life it will continue to erode the fabric of democracy.
I’m with you on most of the issues, I think if we start with the premise that the policies and politicians of the 90’s are the best progressives can do and the socialists and radicals should either vote for they or stay out of the equation than we are setting ourselves up to contract while the right is jumpstaryed by nationalism.
You can’t beat nationalism with restoring the neoliberal globalization of the last few years-you can beat it with social democracy.
I mean Ryan and McConnell are just as loathed by their base as Hillary is. And it’s because average voters see them as two very different sides of the same shitty coin. I strongly disagree with that sentiment and think Hillary actually had a radically progressive platform she didn’t run on, and there are Democrats who foolishly argue she was too left wing. As if middle Americans displaced by trade want Michael Bloomberg as their leader. Yet I do think outsiders will beat insiders, and new radical approaches to old issues are required for our time and not the same old nimby liberal laundry list of safe incrementalism.
This is a fix we can’t make overnight, but boy do we need Civics now more than ever! In a lot of ways I think Trump is the all too predictable result of neglecting the social studies in our curriculum for a generation. It blows my mind that people don’t value democracy on spec. You would think nobody likes to be told how to live their lives and have their rights impinged and would not need to be taught why it is good. My dream is to restore a robust civics curriculum and if I were writing such, at least for Massachusetts, the class would include units not only on basic constitutional structures and how a bill becomes a law, but also how does one participate. Specifically, I would teach what one must do to get on the ballot; how to raise money and solicit votes; how to run an initiative campaign; and yes, with respect to recent discussions, what the role of party committees are and how one becomes involved with them.
Last week I designed a lesson comparing the American and Iroquois constitutions. It’s a great opportunity to have an inclusive history (their constitution predates the Magna Carta) while also some comparative government and primary source work. I will test it out in two weeks and give everyone here an update!
We also do biweekly town meetings and have an Action Civics project for the spring. I really wish other schools did these things too.