Sunday, April 29, 2018

The Road Back To Unionization Runs Through Public Schools

There are lots of books, articles, blog posts and so forth documenting the decline of labor unions in American life.  This recent article from the New York Times is probably as useful a thumbnail summary of those works as any.  Perhaps one observation from it does as much as any other fact to sum up that loss of power:  the fact that, within my lifetime, a president as Republican as Richard Nixon appointed a union man as his Secretary of Labor.  It's safe to say that Nixon took no pleasure in doing so, but Nixon was nothing if not practical (with the exception of Watergate) when it came to political moves.  He was simply recognizing the power that unions exerted back then on national elections, especially on the Democratic side, and so, as he did in other areas, he moved to co-op a potential political threat.

Today, Donald Trump has no need to worry about such a threat and, for all of his phony rhetoric about turning power back over to "the people," the reality is that his Administration is staffed with quite possibly the most plutocratic as well as kleptocratic personalities in our history.  So, in theory, there's no need to worry about a rising labor movement between now and 2020.

Or is there?

What happened in West Virginia earlier this year, as documented by Slate.com, was remarkable by any standards.  It demonstrated that, despite that state's to destroy union power by outlawing strikes and collective bargaining for public workers, workers cannot be denied their First Amendment rights to assemble and petition for a redress of grievances.  And make no mistake:  whenever there is an assault on union rights, it is in fact constitutional rights as well as economic rights that are very much at stake.

But it did much more than that:  it reaffirmed the reality that in the United States, while unions no longer support a significant number of manufacturing jobs, it is definitely supporting a large and rapidly growing number of service-sector jobs--in the process, redefining what it means (as pointed out by Slate) to be a "working-class" American.  And, at the same time, it identified a significant and widely supported object of government spending--education--that is also a large part of that sector.

The West Virginia strike by teachers led no less a business media outlet than Bloomberg to speculate about the possibility of similar uprisings by teachers in other states.  Well, it did not take long for speculation to become fact.  As it did in Oklahoma.  In Kentucky.  In Colorado.  And, most recently, in Arizona.

And make no mistake:  these teachers have the support of the parents whose children they educate, not only within their own states, but outside of them as well.  What happened in Oklahoma when the teachers there went on strike?  People from all around the country ordered pizzas for them as a show of support (and kudos also to the pizza shop that made all of the pizzas and all of the deliveries).  That kind of support doesn't happen to fringe movements.  And this expanding revolt of public-school teachers against red-state budgets and the corporate tools that pass them is clearly anything but a fringe movement.

You can see that in the unbelievably pathetic response to the Oklahoma strike by one Sooner lawmaker that the ranks of the strikers were filled in part with paid protesters.  He declined to name his source for this "information."  I don't see why he needed to do so; it really doesn't take that long to say "no one."  But you can see it far more clearly in the response by the Republican governors of the affected states, who are at least beginning to make real, if somewhat tepid, responses to the strikers by putting pay raises on the political and budgetary tables.

There's some suggestion that this teacher revolt might not have much impact on political issues other than education--and, given the fact that many of the affected teachers are themselves Republicans, there is at least some practical reason behind that suggestion.  Then again, it may be so much whistling past the proverbial graveyard; here is another Times piece, in which three Arizona public-school teachers, all Republicans, commit the cardinal Republican sin of--wait for it--asking for a tax increase in order to pay teachers.

For the Trump GOP, the teacher revolt is not a minor course correction.  It is very much an existential threat to the entire way of doing business over the past four decades, going back to the real beginning of the "Reagan Revolution" when Saint Ronnie, the first former union president to occupy the White House, busted the air traffic controllers' union and signaled the beginning of a war by Wall Street on the right of workers to organize in the same way that investors have the right to organize capital in corporations.

We have, as a nation and as a people, come a very long way down a very bad road since then.  I say all of this, as I have said here before, as the son of an educator who promoted public education.  But I also say it as a member of two unions with a very strong appreciation for what union power can do to make the lives of working people better.  And the only way back to where we were, back to when the American Dream was not the American Fantasy, is through organizing not only politically, but also economically.  If teachers can point the way--and I believe that they are now doing exactly that--it just makes me doubly proud.  In any case, it's time for all of us to express our American pride in the same way, to borrow a phrase, that we always have.  Together.

Saturday, April 21, 2018

And, Speaking Of Paying For Civilization ...

... we should be especially concerned about the best area of investment in our future:  education.

I have said it before, in the interest of full disclosure and (for those who came in late, to borrow a phrase from "The Phantom" comic strip) I'll say it again:  my late father was both a university professor and a leader in expanding publicly-financed higher education in Maryland.  If you wish to view my education advocacy through that lens, feel free to do so.  I advertise it with no shame and a considerable amount of pride.

And yes, it is one reason why it offends me that we have let our system of public education fall apart.  Not completely, of course.  Here in Maryland, it is still strong and well-funded, thanks to the involvement of parents who always need to be the backbone of their children's academic life.

But that is not the case in many parts of the country.  There, conditions are at a place that has to be considered below sub-standard.  I can't sum it up any more effectively that the New York Times has in this article, which you should take a look at.  And be appalled.  And resolve to do everything and anything you can to turn this disgraceful state of affairs around.  The point made in the Times article about the age of textbooks currently used in school was somewhat poignantly reinforced for me by this CBS News story.  As great as it is that this first grader is excited about reading a textbook that Blake Shelton used 36 years ago, she deserves a better text book  I'd like to think that Blake Shelton would agree with that thought.

But what can you expect when this country has school districts advocating the use of miniature baseball bats to combat the current epidemic of school shootings?  That's right--miniature baseball bats, the kind that ballparks sell or give away as souvenirs.  I'm not kidding; take a look at this, if you don't believe me.  Lest you think this is entirely about a lack of money, consider the idiotic observation in this article that "I think a bat could disarm a pistol with a nice swing."

Do we think so little of our own children, the future not just of this country but of the human race, that we have no regard for the contents of their brains or the safety of their lives?  Does having a few extra dollars in our pockets (and billions more in the pockets of special interests) mean that much to us?

Perhaps not to all of us.  Perhaps this helps to explain this year's surge of mothers running for public office.  Perhaps they're not content with seeing their children educated under conditions that would make a Third World government blush.

Perhaps this explains the recent surge in labor actions by teachers, about which I'll have more to say in a future post.  (Spoiler alert:  I'm quite sure that it does.)

In any case, it time to realize the truth I talked about in my last post:  a rising economic tide does not produce magic money for governments.  Like it or not, overall, we are not taxed enough.  That must change.  America must change.  Or it will go the way of all nations that do not adapt, and turn into dust on the shelves of history.

We Need An End, Once And For All, To Voodoo Economics

From its beginning, TRH has been, as much as anything, my personal opportunity to scream as loudly as the Internet will let me against the assault by the Republican Party on the means to pay for the civilization we've built.  Or, to use a word they regard as a curse word, on taxes.  Somehow, it seems fitting, on the day that Barbara Bush is being laid to rest, to renew my protest against that assault by recalling one of her husband's best contributions to our political discourse--the phrase "voodoo economics."

If you can recall the 1980 Presidential campaign, and specifically the New Hampshire Republican primary, George H.W. Bush coined that phrase in a debate against, among others, Ronald Reagan, who was building his campaign, as he would later build his Presidency, around advancing supply-side economics as the means to ending the financial woes of Americans.  Supply-side economics--or the concept that steep tax cuts will pay for themselves through the amount of economic activity they can generate--were correctly viewed by more moderate Republicans as being the fiscal equivalent of alchemy, and therefore not to be taken seriously. 

Despite the correctness of that view, the concept has remained popular with the American people, many of whom have never met a "free lunch" they didn't like.  Which goes a very long way toward explaining why, with a few exceptional moments of Democratic ascendancy in our national politics, supply-side economics have not lost its grip on the economic thinking of most Americans.  Indeed, it is reflected in the one and only major piece of legislation signed into law by Donald Trump:  last year's so-called "tax reform" bill.

It's worth stopping for a moment and asking the question:  exactly why don't massive tax cuts generate equally massive amounts of economic activity?  True, the expectation that they will pay for themselves is foolish on its face.  But it does seem slightly logical to assume that, if Washington takes in less money from taxpayers, the taxpayers will then turn around and spend or invest the money in ways that generates tax revenue that, arguably, might not otherwise have been generated.  Shouldn't that at least mitigate the cost of the cuts to the government?

Well, once again, the short answer is no.  And the reasons for that are twofold:  the tax rates that are created though supply-side economics, and the actual fate of the money that flows from the cuts.

Let's start with the rates themselves.  As illustrated here, the United States, over the past 60 years or so, has gone from having a systems with a series of graduated tax rates, designed to tax incomes more deeply as they increased along the scale (i.e., "progressively"), to one that has a much smaller number of rates.  The effect of this has been to tax the middle class far more heavily than wealthier taxpayers, forcing the former to pay for an increasing share of government services, while rendering it less able to generate economic activity on its own through either consumption or investment.  It also means that the folks at the top of our economic pyramid get an increasingly larger share of benefits from those cuts, especially in the case of the Trump tax cuts.

But so what?  Who cares about whether the very well-off get a lot of money from tax cuts?  Surely they would be motivated to spend and/or invest that money in ways that make up for what the middle class is no longer able to do, right?

Again, no.  Generating economic activity is not, contrary to conservative belief, what naturally motivates these people.  Rather, fear of losing their riches is what motivates them the most.  This is reflected in decades of Republican propaganda directed at working-class voters, to the effect of "Watch out, the Dems are going to find ways to take your money and give it to undeserving people!"  (And, of course, by "undeserving people," they mean people of color.)

So, what do they do?

First of all, they buy out the government and the major political parties.  This goes a long way toward explaining why political campaigns, and election spending generally, has increased in cost (but definitely not value) over the past several decades.  It also goes a long way toward explaining the presence of corporate cash in Democratic coffers, and its subsequent "centrist" effect on traditional Democratic politics.

Second, they engage in bidding wars for various trophy items in our consumer culture, especially real estate, the last refuge of people looking to squirrel away money.  Once upon a time, no one could find a decent place to live in New York City because of rent control, or so it was said by people who had an interest in destroying rent control.  Now, no one can find a decent place to live in New York because the wealthy have bid up the price of real estate to a level at which only they can afford it.  In the case of New York, this has the unfortunate ripple effect of pricing a lot of up-and-coming artists and arts organizations out of the supposed cultural capital of the nation.  And the ripple effect of prices in New York eventually affects the price of real estate elsewhere, as people move out and bid up the values of other locations.

Third and, in some ways perhaps worst of all, they simply send the money out of the country altogether, into overseas business or into pure (actually, impure, given their purpose) tax shelters.  I have said for many, many years that the Reagan tax cuts, and all similar tax cuts that followed, were little more than a foreign-aid program.  The Trump tax cuts, however, illustrate this point to a spectacular degree.

So, unfortunately, we don't get massive benefits from the massive cuts.  What most of us get, frankly, is the laughter behind closed doors of wealthy Republican donors and their economic fellow-travellers, as they gleefully celebrate pulling a fast one over on the rest of us.  Once upon a time, the rich mocked the poor with so-called "poverty parties."   No doubt nowadays, they're coming up with even more creative ways to mock the rest of us.

But wait a moment.  Is it possible that the rest of us are finally catching on, that we're finally ready to stop being played for suckers?

Maybe.  Consider, for example, this, especially coming, as it does, from a media source deeply invested (pardon the pun) in flattering the business community.

Or, speaking of business-oriented media, consider this, straight from the old Capitalist Tool itself.

Or, speaking specifically of Forbes, consider this.  We are staring down the face of an annual federal deficit that has increased almost threefold in just a year.  And we can't count on other countries to help us; they have their own problems.  That's probably in no small part because they have followed our own bad example.

Is it too late to do anything about this?

Of course not.

We have an election coming up this fall.  We absolutely must use it to tell Washington to stop comforting the comfortable at the expense of the afflicted.  We must tell them that we are willing to pay for the civilization we have all worked together to built, in a manner that is fair in the paying and not spendthrift in the result.  We must ensure that they take the steps needed to undo the harm that Trump and his Congressional cronies have done.

In short, we must put an end to voodoo economics.  Once and for all.  And remember that everything worth having has a price tag that has to be faced.  And paid.

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Why It's Time To Stop Being So %$#*@! Nice

Like water to a wilted flower in the desert, so was this Slate article to me.  And yet, almost as quickly, this New York Times article almost stomped the flower deep into the sand.

The Slate article first.

In "It's Time to Fight Dirty," David Faris makes the case that Democrats should, at long last, play hardball not only in fighting the Republicans on issues and policy, but also do so in order to make structural changes in the system that would undo much of what the GOP has done over the past decade to give themselves a perpetual advantage in national elections.  He goes so far as to advocate expanding the number of Supreme Court seats, and adding additional states in various ways, such as breaking up California,  and admitting Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.

Some of these latter ideas seem, at the moment, to be beyond the boundaries of political possibility, and may not even be necessary, in the short run.  After all,  if there is a Democratic wave this fall big enough, the party may have sufficient clout to deal with a President hobbled with crises and scandals of his own making.  But Faris' larger point is well worth making over and over again.  I know, because I've made it many times myself, here and elsewhere.

And that larger point is this:  over the past thirty years, the Republicans have shown an expanding willingness, sometimes brazenly, to destroy many of the political norms that ensure a level playing field in both elections and in the process of governing.  During the Obama administration, this willingness reached epic proportions, as the Supreme Court's destruction of campaign finance reform combined with Mitch McCONnell's abuse of the filibuster rule, and state governments' unprecedented use of gerrymandering, to shred any sense of fairness in our political process.  As noted by Faris himself in the Slate interview, this culminated in the abuse of the advise-and-consent process with respect to Merrick Garland's nomination to replace Antonin Scalia on the High Court, as well as the penetration of the 2016 presidential election process by Russian political/business interests.

On this, I agree with Faris 100%.  The Republicans have shown beyond any doubt a complete willingness to shred any and all political norms for the sake of maintaining and expanding its power.  In such an environment, there is no justification or requirement for their opponents to play according to Hoyle.  When one's opponents have shredded the rule book, they forfeit the right to object to any violations.  If there is one principle that is absolutely fundamental to a truly free society, it has to be this:  either the rules apply to everyone, or they apply to no one.  And, since the Republicans have decided that the rules do not apply to everyone, the Democrats need not worry about violating them.

This does not mean, however, that Democrats should behave as badly as Republicans.  Far from it.  It simply means, as Faris suggests both in his book and in the Slate interview, that they should stop approaching the GOP on their knees ready to make major political and policy suggestions for the practical equivalent of crumbs.  They should act, in the first instance, with confidence in what they believe, in part because history has time and time again shown that confidence to be justified.  Then they should set goals that go beyond what they think they can practically achieve, in order to bend the public perception of what is possible.  Finally, they should not be afraid to not give in.  The people who voted them into power, including me, did not give them a mandate to unilaterally surrender.  We gave them a mandate to win.  They should act like it, and stop being afraid of their own ideas as well as their opponents.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean that the Democrats should be afraid to be edgy.  Let's take the Garland case for example.  You know what I would have done if I had been in President Obama's shoes?  I would have, as the leader of a common-law nation, invoked an ancient common-law maxim:  qui tacet consentire videtur, ubi loqui debuit ac potuit.  Put simply, silence equals consent and, since the Senate never took an official position on Garland--in fact, they refused to do so--they were deemed to have consented to his nomination, and I would have wasted no time in having Garland sworn in.  Would the Court object?  Unlikely; the Court's jurisprudence in disputes of this nature is to allow the executive and legislative branches to sort out their differences.

So, in the end, it's not a question of who has the angriest voice, but who has the sharper mind.  The Democrats should not be afraid to use their advantage in this regard.  They should not be, above all, afraid to win, for the sake of their supporters and, ultimately, the sake of the nation.

Now, sadly, to the Times piece.

Being mindful of another Latin maxim, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, I grieve with the family, colleagues, and friends of David Buckel in morning his death.  His legacy of fighting on behalf of LGBT rights is a noble one, and deserves to be honored and remembered.

But that is what make his choice of political suicide all the more puzzling and, ultimately, upsetting in light of my view of the need to fight.

Our opponents are not inspired by noble examples of good behavior, no matter how honorable and sincere those examples are.  I certainly do not question Mr. Buckel's honor or sincerity.  But I am forced to question his judgment, and question whether or not it was clouded by the despair that our current political situation naturally inspires.

Simply put, we cannot afford to lose people like him.  We don't need them to sacrifice themselves; we need them alive, well, and able and willing to fight the fight that must be fought against opponents who sacrifice nothing and demand everything.

If you out there are reading this, and feel the level of despair that Mr. Buckel obviously felt then, by all means, get whatever help you can.  And stay with us.  And band with us together.  And fight like hell for the sake of a nation built on the sacrifices of far better people than our opponents.

It's time to leave sorrow and politeness in the past.  There's a future to be won for the sake of the greatest nation in the history of the human race.  Let's go win it.