Democrats and progressives have reason to be cautiously optimistic about the 2020 election. Polls have consistently indicated that former Vice President Joe Biden has a commanding lead. Yet, frankly, I’m scared about this particular election—and future ones as well.

What frightens me is that while Democrats try to reach out to various voter groups, many of whom are combating systemic inequality that must be addressed, they are forgetting one with legitimate grievances of its own. I’m talking about the Trump base: white, blue-collar workers (or non-workers) who are struggling to make a living. These Americans are largely overlooked by the Democratic establishment or even viewed with disdain.

The odd thing is that blue-collar white people used to be the core of the Democratic constituency. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, after all, was designed to help them find new ways of securing livable wages and job security.

Now, they are forgotten Americans. Forgotten, at least, until Donald Trump saw them, their anger and how to exploit it. Yet although Trump won in 2016, he is not their true leader, nor are the Republican politicians and pundits who support him. They are pseudo-leaders, purveyors of hate, conspiracy, fear and policies that only hurt the working people who vote for them and their ability to provide for their families.

In recent years, the Trump administration and Republicans have passed a massive tax plan that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, opposed raising the federal minimum wage, tried to give employers workers’ tips, proposed cutting their food stamps, rolled back regulations that protected their physical safety and, of course, attempted to take away their affordable health care. The Democrats, meanwhile, have tried to help blue-collar workers through federal anti-poverty initiatives, which studies show primarily benefit working-age white people without a college degree.

What too many Democrats still do not understand is that many white, blue-collar Americans think they are better than “other people” who receive government aid. They would rather have higher status on some artificial scale than higher income. As Barack Obama said in 2008:

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. So it’s not surprising, then, that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.

Those are tight grasps.

It is very difficult to help people who do not want to help themselves or accept other people’s help, and the Democratic establishment’s assumption that financial aid will be enough to persuade blue-collar voters has so far not panned out.

But that does not mean the Democratic Party should ignore them. As long as their anger and self-pity are allowed to fester, other groups, including Black people, Latinos and immigrants, will be held hostage. While poor white people often cannot successfully advocate for themselves, they can be major obstacles to the advancement of other deserving groups. Look no further than opposition to Medicaid expansion to see how they vote against their own economic interests and concurrently hurt others.

Identity politics becomes negative when one of two things happens: (a) fighting among the individual groups about whose agenda gets top priority becomes so intense that no one gets what they want, and (b) a group with its own identity issues becomes excluded.

As Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas, points out, the new dominant core of the Democratic Party is professional workers. Most of these people are white, well-educated and upwardly mobile. They are teachers, doctors, engineers, attorneys, architects, top-level administrators, investors and more. In essence, these professionals have stolen the core of the Democratic Party from FDR’s working-class base.

This professional class wants to have its interests protected like any other group in our society. Professionals want their achievements honored and preserved. They are a class of credentials, and their certificates separate them from others. All the education and training they received must be honored. If a group’s identity can be defined by who is not a part of the group, then professionals are those among us who are certified to be employed in a small assortment of occupations. These people find their interests protected in part by the Democratic Party.

The bottom line is that simply offering economic stimuli will not bring blue-collar white people back into the Democratic camp. The question is, then, how can Democrats appeal to them?

A partial answer can come from winding the clock back nearly 90 years to the New Deal. FDR and the Democratic Congress developed successful ways for many white people who were suffering economically to accept government assistance. Many of the New Deal programs were not direct handouts; they were employment programs. Among the first programs to be passed was the Civilian Conservation Corps, which immediately hired unemployed people to work on public land projects, including upgrading national parks and building infrastructure.

Too many poor white people see their farm subsidies or school lunches as welfare. They consider that to be for “other people.” What they need—in fact, what we all need—is well-paying secure jobs.

Democrats, if you set your sights on the forgotten people and help them through programs that don’t offend them, then they will begin to vote with you.

This opinion piece is cross-posted from Newsweek Magazine.

The post How the Democratic Party Can Win Back the Trump Base appeared first on Occasional Planet.

As our national debate on gun control continues, we can learn a great deal from FDR and his Fourth Freedom.  This was part of his declaration of American principles as World War II loomed.  He wrote:

 The fourth is freedom from fear – which, translated into international terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation anywhere will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.

Obviously, FDR’s focus was on the international aggression of the time, and how the Allies would respond.  His goal of a world without fear also applies to his view of the presence of guns in the United States.

As Adam Winkler writes in the New Republic:

Like health care, social security, and so many other issues central to the Democratic agenda, the party’s support for gun control stems from Franklin D. Roosevelt.  For most of American history, regulation of guns was a matter of state law. State-level regulation, however, came under tremendous pressure during the 1920s and 30s, when Prohibition-era gangsters like Al Capone overwhelmed local police resources and traveling desperadoes like Bonnie and Clyde easily escaped capture by racing across state lines. FDR promoted a “New Deal for Crime,” which, like his other New Deal policies, involved expanding the role of the federal government in serving the people.

Roosevelt’s original proposal for what would become the National Firearms Act of 1934, the first federal gun control law, sought to tax all firearms and establish a national registry of guns. When gun owners objected, Congress scaled down FDR’s proposal to allow only for a restrictive tax on machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, which were thought to be gangster weapons with no usefulness for self-defense.

Clearly, FDR’s initial proposal is one that would be the dream of every current progressive Democrat and anathema to the NRA and its compatriots in the Tea Party.  It’s hard to compare the “paring down” the Congress did with regard to machine guns and sawed-off shotguns to current calls for restrictions on semi-automatic, or at least automatic, weapons.

The outgrowth was:

Congress watered down FDR’s bill because of concerns about maintaining the right of people in rural communities, where there was little police presence, to have handguns for protection—not because of the Second Amendment.

As we previously reported, the wording of the Second Amendment is confusing at best.  It has only been in recent years that the libertarian view of gun ownership has adopted the Second Amendment as its primary principle.  In FDR’s era, even those who wanted few restrictions on gun ownership used more reasonable arguments such as the need for people in rural communities to protect themselves, particularly in areas where few law enforcement officials were available.

FDR’s work was carried on by Lyndon Johnson, in the wake of the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. But by Johnson’s time, the NRA had become a powerful political force, and Congress refused to pass his modest proposals.

Many people feel that because of the recent spate of mindless massacres, the timing is auspicious for meaningful reform.  However, the time was even more auspicious following the assassinations of the 1960s,  yet Congress did not act.  If we are able to achieve meaningful reform, we should be thankful to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who preached and practiced consistent international and domestic policies that worked to minimize the presence of any and all kinds of lethal weapons.

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President Barack Obama’s speech before Congress on September 8 regarding jobs may have been his most effective remarks since his speech on race in Philadelphia in April 2008, when he was still running for the Democratic nomination for president.

One word that he did not use in this speech was “stimulus,” but Republicans were quick and accurate to point out that his American Jobs Act has the look and feel of a stimulus. If that were true, and if the proposal were to pass intact (doubtful), then after a year’s lag, Stimulus I would be followed by a smaller Stimulus II.

What’s a shame is that may never have been a need for a Stimulus II, if the first stimulus had been the real thing. Granted, the $700 billion cost of Stimulus I was significant, but hardly excessive. Opponents stated that additional spending and debt would set off a spiral of inflation. An inflation rate of less than 2%, which is what we have had, hardly qualifies as out of control, or even significant.

The state of the American economy was dire in 2009 when President Obama asked for the stimulus, and a Democratic Congress passed it. The “fierce urgency of now” was very much in play as money needed to be pumped into the economy, and pumped in quickly. When President Obama indicated that the program would focus on shovel-ready jobs, many indicated that few projects would be shovel-ready upon passage of the bill. Big projects need planning and assessment, including important criteria such as environmental impact studies. So, the president was forced to go with relatively small tasks that were already in the works.

The Obama Administration hoped that a one-shot stimulus would jump-start the economy and generate massive hiring in the private sector. It helped, but not enough. Conservatives may have been correct in arguing that businesses would be reluctant to hire if uncertainty was what lay beyond this quick-fix stimulus.

As economists such as PBS’s Paul Salmon pointed out, the stimulus was not to be confused with a New Deal program. 1930s programs such as the CCC, WPA, CWA, NRA and TVA were designed to last as long as they were needed. That meant that a project could go through all the necessary steps of development with the agency in place. First there would be planning, then review, then construction, and finally evaluation.

The TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) was a huge program that brought electric power to impacted areas of Appalachia. The TVA was primarily a series of dams that produced hydroelectric power. It now serves over 9 million customers. The Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River and the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River were two other massive water projects in the New Deal. Hundreds of courthouses, post offices, schools, hospitals and parks were built during the New Deal.

Even though America did not come out of the Great Depression until it entered World War II, Roosevelt was able to cut unemployment in half and instill renewed spirit in the American people. Perhaps most relevant to President Obama is that FDR satisfied the needs of his political base and was re-elected in 1936, 1940, and 1944.

As inspiring as President Obama’s September 8 speech was, it can be argued that it would have been unnecessary had he successfully promoted an initial stimulus that was similar in magnitude to the beginning of FDR’s New Deal. Such a program would have initially put hundreds of thousands or millions of unemployed people to work. It would have initiated the planning for a series of projects that would have been phased in for as long a period as was necessary to regenerate private hiring and also meet basic social needs of the country.

It is true that, when President Obama entered office, he had far less of a majority in Congress than FDR did. The House was solidly Democratic, but many of the “Blue” were “blue dogs” – Democrats who were leery of excessive federal spending. However, many of the “blue dogs” represented economically depressed areas, such as West Virginia and southern regions of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. Additional spending would have had a direct and positive impact on the constituents of these representatives. Additionally, Nancy Pelosi was a very savvy Speaker of the House who was eager to advance progressive policies.

With independents Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman, the Democrats theoretically held fifty-nine of the one hundred seats in the Senate. One more would have been needed to make their majority veto-proof. However, some of the Democrats were either DINOs (Democrats in Name Only) or more interested in pork for their states than good policy. The shenanigans of Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana in the debate on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act were both cynical and deplorable.

However, had President Obama taken a page from Lyndon Johnson’s playbook, he may well have brought Nelson, Landrieu and others along without paying a heavy penalty. Johnson had been a master at getting both southern Democrat and Republican votes for the series of civil rights acts that were passed in the 1960s. President Obama needed one or two Republican votes as well, but one state, Maine, with Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, might have given him a veto-proof majority. Had the president traveled to Maine to explain to the voters how a state with aging industry would have benefited from full-scale stimulus, he may well have gained their votes.

Even had President Obama not been able to persuade Congress in 2009 to pass a comprehensive stimulus bill, he would have put the arguments on the table, and it would have been much easier now to explain now how much more was needed.

All of that is history. What is important now is the future. President Obama’s proposed $450 billion stimulus (of which half is tax reductions) is short-range. If he is fortunate enough to get Congress to pass his current proposals (somewhat of a longshot), the stimulus will end in short order. The private sector knows that, and it will be reluctant to assume the risks of large-scale hiring if they are staring an uncertain future in the face.

It is not enough for us to take President Obama’s advice and urge our representatives to pass what he has proposed. We need them to pass the real thing – a stimulus that is of such a critical mass that it is powerful enough to overcome the horrible damage inflicted upon our economy by eight years of George W. Bush.

President Obama is now acting like a Democrat. It is incumbent upon us as citizens to let us know that that is not enough; we need a strong Democrat. He can be that person. It will be good for both his political and presidential legacy.

The post How Stimulus One could be working for us now appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In 1934, President Roosevelt traveled to Green Bay, Wisconsin to support working families who were struggling against the equivalent of today’s Koch brothers. By doing so, he demonstrated to the people of the Midwest that he was on their side in the struggle against corporations and Wall Street. His direct support of working people, through his policies and actions, and his willingness to stand up to moneyed interests, won him spectacular political success—something President Obama could have if he did the same.

Today teachers and other public sector union workers of Wisconsin are battling against the extreme right wing agenda of Republican Governor Scott Walker. Although he did not campaign on these issues, Walker has declared war on public sector unions, given tax breaks to the wealthy, cut services to working families, and has plans to privatize state assets.

The hundreds of thousands who braved the bitter cold last January to protest Governor Walker’s extreme measures, and who are still battling to recall Walker next year, could use the same kind of support from President Obama that FDR gave workers in Wisconsin in 1934. But, since the demonstrations in Madison began, President Obama—who vowed during his campaign to walk the picket line whenever union workers were threatened—has been missing in action. And, in his recent Mid Western tour, he chose to steer clear of the political hot bed of Wisconsin.

Many of us are longing for candidate Obama to reappear and take a strong stand for working families against the greed of Wall Street and billionaires such as the Koch Brothers. Endless compromise in favor of their representatives—the Republican Party—is not helping us recover as a nation. In these difficult times, we, the people, need a strong advocate.

Like Obama today, FDR faced a harping demand from the Right for deregulation and small government as a solution to the country’s economic woes. But, unlike Obama who has not been clear where he stands, FDR scoffed at their self-serving ideas. His speech is as relevant and inspiring today as it was when he delivered it in Green Bay 77 years ago.  The following is an excerpt. For the full speech, click here.

People know also that the average man in Wisconsin waged a long and bitter fight for his rights. Here, and in the Nation as a whole, in the Nation at large . . . man has been fighting . . . against those forces which disregard human cooperation and human rights, in seeking that kind of individual profit which is gained at the expense of his fellows . . .

In the great national movement that culminated over a year ago [1933], people joined with enthusiasm. They lent hand and voice to the common cause, irrespective of many older political traditions. They saw the dawn of a new day. They were on the march; they were coming back into the possession of their own home land.

As the humble instruments of their vision and their power, those of us who were chosen to serve them in 1932 turned to the great task. In one year and five months, the people of the United States have received at least a partial answer to their demands for action; and neither the demand nor the action has reached the end of the road. . . .

Before I left on my trip . . . I received two letters from important men, both of them pleading that I say something to restore confidence. To both of them I wrote identical answers: “What would you like to have me say?” From one of them I have received no reply at all in six weeks. I take it that he is still wondering how to answer. The other man wrote me frankly that in his judgment the way to restore confidence was for me to tell the people of the United States that all supervision by all forms of Government, Federal and State, over all forms of human activity called business should be forthwith abolished.

Now, my friends, in other words, that man was frank enough to imply that he would repeal all laws, State or national, which regulate business—that a utility could henceforth charge any rate, unreasonable or otherwise; that the railroads could go back to rebates and other secret agreements; that the processors of food stuffs could disregard all rules of health and of good faith; that the unregulated wild-cat banking of a century ago could be restored; that fraudulent securities and watered stock could be palmed off on the public; that stock manipulation which caused panics and enriched insiders could go unchecked. In fact, my friends, if we were to listen to him and his type, the old law of the tooth and the claw would reign in our Nation once more.

The people of the United States will not restore that ancient order. There is no lack of confidence on the part of those business men, farmers and workers who clearly read the signs of the times. Sound economic improvement comes from the improved conditions of the whole population and not a small fraction thereof.

Those who would measure confidence in this country in the future must look first to the average citizen . . .

We who support this New Deal do so because it is a square deal and because it is essential to the preservation of security and happiness in a free society such as ours. I like its definition by a member of the Congress. He said:

“The new deal is an old deal—as old as the earliest aspirations of humanity for liberty and justice and the good life. It is as old as Christian ethics, for basically its ethics are the same. It is new as the Declaration of Independence was new, and the Constitution of the United States; its motives are the same. It voices the deathless cry of good men and good women for the opportunity to live and work in freedom, the right to be secure in their homes and in the fruits of their labor, the power to protect themselves against the ruthless and the cunning. It recognizes that man is indeed his brother’s keeper, insists that the laborer is worthy of his hire, demands that justice shall rule the mighty as well as the weak.

“It seeks to cement our society, rich and poor, manual worker and brain worker, into a voluntary brotherhood of freemen, standing together, striving together, for the common good of all.”

Keep that vision before your eyes and in your hearts; it can, it will be attained.

 

The post What Obama can learn from FDR appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Franklin Roosevelt gave us the New Deal; Lyndon Johnson gave us the Great Society, and Barack Obama gave us a stimulus package of more than $700 billion.  So which president brought us the largest public works program, and how is it doing?

The answers to these questions are: 1. Dwight Eisenhower, and 2. It depends on your perspective.  In 1956, Eisenhower steered the Interstate Highway System through Congress.  In an era of true bi-partisanship, a Republican president worked with a Democratically controlled Congress to initiate a program that eventually cost $425 billion in 2006 dollars.

Eisenhower was open to the idea of a massive new highway system because he had crossed the country in 1919 as part of an army convoy, and found that U.S.  highways compared poorly to the German Autobahn that he saw following World War II.

The plan that Congress passed was an outgrowth of a system that President Franklin Roosevelt had asked the Bureau of Public Roads to research.  The final plan authorized by Congress (and only modestly altered after 1956) calls for 65,000 miles of interstate with routes in all 50 states.

How did such a large-scale program gain bi-partisan support and actually proceed continuously for thirty-five years?  The reasons include:

1. Eisenhower and leaders of Congress overcame the opposition, because road-building and maintenance had previously been the province of states and localities.  They referred to the “commerce clause” of the constitution, specifically Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 that states that the United States shall “have power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States.” The highway system was clearly designed to know no state boundaries; it met the definition of the commerce clause as interstate in nature.
2. In an era when the Cold War was “hot” (the Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949. and by 1956 there were some who thought that the Soviets had both more powerful bombs and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.  Bomb shelters (of little use) were being built throughout the U.S., amd children in schools were going through the charade of practicing hiding under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack.  Clearly, new ideas were needed  to give the American people either a more practical or psychologically relieving sense of security from a nuclear attack. A big selling point of the interstate highway system was that it would provide metropolitan residents with ways to leave their cities and head for parts unknown, where missile strikes were less likely.
3. Lest we be naïve, there were some rather large industries that stood to gain by the proposed interstate highway system, including automobile and truck manufacturers, and producers of petroleum, concrete, steel, and heavy machinery.  In addition, organized labor was thrilled to have so many new jobs become available.

In the fifty-four years since construction on the interstate highway system began, we have not had the scene (except in a few movies) of cars jamming highways to avoid a nuclear attack.  However, we have found that the system provides a much improved capacity for people to leave areas of natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods and forest fires.

Most of the system’s use comes on a daily basis as people and goods move back and forth across the country. During holidays, people enjoy the system so much that they are willing to spend hours in gridlock, as they inch to and from their destinations.

If we assess the project, there are clear pros and cons:

Pros and Cons

So, as you lament the presence of the interstate system and how the ribbons of concrete have torn cities apart and polluted our environment, remember that it provided a much needed stimulus for the economy.  It’s also a big part of why you can order almost anything in the United States today and receive it tomorrow.

There is an inescapable irony:  As the “Party of No” opposes stimulus packages, unemployment benefits, etc., many of its politicians crow to their constituents about the jobs that they have brought to their communities.  When is the last time that you heard a Republican praise Dwight Eisenhower for bringing us the interstate highway system?  Don’t hold your breath waiting.

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Recently I was in Seattle and took in a tourist attraction, the Seattle Underground.  I was a little skeptical at first, because I thought it might be like the Atlanta Underground, which gained its initial fame from segregationist Lester Maddox, who sold ax handles at his subterranean novelty shop.  He was none too subtle about the meaning of the ax handles.

Seattle’s underground was born out of geological necessity and later become a family tourist attraction.   A fire in 1889 ravaged Seattle’s downtown, destroying twenty-five buildings.  Two lessons were learned: (a) brick and stone are more fire resistant than wood, and (b) necessity required elevating the buildings on the shore of Elliott Bay to minimize the risks of downtown flooding and the stench of toilets backing up at high tide.

Our tour guide posed the question, “How was Seattle rebuilt when it became clear that the first floors of downtown buildings were no longer usable?”  He said that it was simple; the work was to begin in 1893, and fortuitously the country had just fallen into an economic panic.  That was bad news to some, but good news to the planners of a new downtown Seattle.  The panic meant that there were lots of out-of-work people who would love nothing more than to be employed in rebuilding their city’s downtown.

This explanation came from a tour guide, not a progressive economist.  The words woke me out of my trance, the kind of malaise that comes from the slow-walking tours that I normally manage to avoid.  Clearly, with no political agenda to advance, our tour-guide simply stated the obvious: One way out of hard economic times is to find something that has to be done and then put people to work doing the job.

This “priming the pump,” or stimulus package, is an idea that is rather new to the inexact science of economics.  The “presumed father” of the idea was the British economist, John Maynard Keynes, who in 1936 published his treatise, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.  It was written for academics, and during the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had neither the time nor the inclination to read it cover to cover.  However, he invited Professor Keynes to the White House, and in distilled terms, Keynes described a theory that basically reflected the policies that Roosevelt had been pursuing in the New Deal.  In times of high unemployment (25% when Roosevelt took office in 1933), the Keynesian philosophy was:

1. Since the private sector is not hiring, the government should become the “employer of last resort.”
2. When the people who are hired by the government have money in their pockets, they spend it.  This consumer demand provides the impetus to put factories back to work.
3. The owners of the factories then hire more workers to rebuild inventory and to meet the demand from the spending of the workers hired by the government.
4. The newly hired workers in the factories and elsewhere in the private sector now have money to spend, and they further stimulate consumer spending, the engine that Keynes asserts drives capitalism.
5. With renewed spending and more people at work in the private sector, the government can reduce its role as “employer of last resort.”

It worked for Seattle in 1893, and it worked for the United States following the Great Depression (albeit with the employment stimulus of World War II).  John Kennedy swore by Keynesian economics (something he had learned at Harvard) and stimulated the economy in the early 1960s while balancing the federal budget.  Lyndon Johnson saw the wisdom of Keynesian economics, but when he chose to fight the Vietnam War without raising taxes to pay for it, the economy sputtered.

TIME Magazine recently published a cover story called “The Broken States of America.” Our 50 states are now running a combined deficit of $55 billion.  President Obama is suggesting a special stimulus of $50 billion to help states and municipalities through tough times so that more teachers, fire fighters, police officers, etc. are not laid off.  Most Republicans, the ones who so frequently advocate states’ rights, oppose President Obama’s additional mini-stimulus – perhaps because it is President Obama’s idea.

John Maynard Keynes wrote the long treatise outlining the benefits of deficit spending when people are out of work.  The people of Seattle unwittingly solved the problem before Keynes developed his prescribed theory.  So here’s the good news:

1. Unlike states and localities, the federal government can run a deficit when needed.
2. Both theoretical and empirical evidence gives us good reason to believe that deficit spending works in times of economic distress.

I’m thankful that I started (but didn’t finish) the walking tour of Underground Seattle.  Whether written or not, basic laws of economics were working in 1893, and clearly well before then.  It’s another lesson from history worth learning.

The post What we can learn from Seattle’s 1893 stimulus appeared first on Occasional Planet.

America is supposed to be the land of opportunity, where people who work hard can create wealth and security for themselves and their families. Yet, the startling rise of families living in poverty challenges this treasured American myth. Leo Hindery, Jr., Chairman of the US Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative of the New America Foundation, feels the Obama administration is not paying enough attention to what he calls a “pandemic of poverty” sweeping the nation.  His article describing this disaster, “America’s Dirty Little Secret:  Who’s Really Poor in America” can be found here.

The statistics Hindery offers are shocking:

• At least 50 million people are ill-fed — up from 37 million just a year ago — including 17 million children. Hunger in America is now at an all-time high, and there are currently entire national geographic regions — the very large 15-state ‘South’ being one of them — where more than half of all public school students are poor and ill-fed.
• 30% of the nation’s 50 million homeowners own a home whose value is below its mortgage balance, and this number could rise to an almost unbelievable 50% by year-end 2011.
• Despite the truly dismal ‘real unemployment’ figures with which most everyone now agrees — a staggering 30 million workers and 19% of the labor force — very little attention is being paid to the particularly adverse effects the recession is having on people of color, recent immigrants, and out-of-school youth. And almost no one is acknowledging the sad reality that even the nation’s 130 million full-time workers have had an average economic loss of 15% just since December 2007 — an average effective work week of 34 hours rather than 40 — which means that the number of unemployed workers, measured economically, is actually as high as 50 million.
• And 100 million people, fully one-third of the entire U.S. population, are at or below “200% of the federal poverty line of $21,834 for a family of four,” which is a needs-measure made lame by the fact that no family of four can actually comfortably live on such a low annual income.

Hindery feels the best response to this sobering reality is to adopt FDR’s “Economic Bill of Rights” that would guarantee every person, in addition to education and health care:

• “a job with a living wage. . . .that would earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing  and recreation;
• “protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment;”
• “and a decent home.”

FDR wanted to create a socialist democracy, a regulated market economy, which would provide a basic standard of living for every citizen. He sought equality in the pursuit of happiness and believed individual freedom requires economic security. But a socialist democracy that spreads the wealth and insures the basic well being of all its citizens, flies in the face of the individualist American fantasy of becoming wealthy and powerful. For the many who still live in this fantasy world, a socialist democracy would curtail personal economic freedom and that chance to “make it big.” But in reality, although a small percentage of Americans have amassed large sums of money, the vast majority never will. In our current fantasy-based “free market” economy, a shocking number of us cannot even afford basic needs. And a country without a stable middle class effectively kills opportunity for all, except for the financial and corporate elite.

Until we Americans collectively shed our economic myths and fantasies, we will not be able to grow and mature as a nation.  A mature citizenry, in my opinion, would embrace the wisdom of FDR’s economic bill of rights. It was a great idea when he introduced it in January 1944, and it remains a great idea today.

The post Letting go of our economic myths and fantasies appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The current lack of bi-partisan cooperation in part reflects a polarity of ideas, but also a distressing amount of “boys and girls behaving badly.”

The current gap between the parties is reflected in part by the recalcitrance of Republicans to accept ideas of President Barack Obama, even when they agree with them coupled with President Obama’s “enabling behavior.”  Continually he goes back to the well, reaching across the aisle for cooperation, and repeatedly being rejected, even humiliated.  Common wisdom is if you’re being “gamed,” the wise thing to do is quit the game or find another one to play.  Republicans clearly do not want to give President Obama credit for anything, even if it’s consistent with their agenda and the president continues to be “community organizer in chief,” trying to answer Rodney King’s question, “People, can’t we all get together?”

It may be that the best way for us to break the decades-long grid in which we’re locked is to try new strategies to address the idea gap between the parties and the childish behavior reflective in both.

Children in kindergarten learn and practice basic elements of fairness and sharing.  Andre and Rebecca each get an opportunity to get their water color supplies first.  George and Serena each have days when they are responsible for sponging down the lunch table.  Small children learn that fairness means the same rules apply to everyone, and anyone who misbehaves can expect some sort of a consequence.

The American psychologist Abraham Maslow is noted for presenting his theory on the “hierarchy of human needs.”  He studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass.  Why is this important to the ways in which Democrats and Republicans act?  Let’s start with something that Eleanor Roosevelt authored:  Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  She wrote, “All humans are born free and equal in dignity and rights.  They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”  I have discussed this article dozens of times with students, and the two key words are “reason” and “conscience” because the degree to which humans possess them is what separates us from other forms of life.

Bi-partisanship survives the first four stages of Maslow’s hierarchy.  The disconnect occurs trying to integrate stage five into the behavior of most political persona.  They often reach Stage 4 and feel good about themselves, but when it comes to exercising the reason about which Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, they fall apart.

The logical and unfortunate conclusion is that most politicians feel better about themselves when they do not exercise reason, empathy, and conscience.  Much more appealing than seeking solutions is playing the “blame game,” engaging in name-calling, acting with bravado, and turning a blind eye to the problems that face constituents.  The one exception to this pattern is when they can agree on ways to distribute pork among themselves to ingratiate themselves with voters and to deepen their campaign coffers.

Can this dysfunctional behavior stop?  Yes, but it requires an understanding of a basic concept: what goes around comes around.  While ideological gaps will (and perhaps should) be difficult to bridge, here are some procedural changes that are fundamental to breaking gridlock.  Each party has an equal interest in supporting these changes because the reforms loosen the grip that the ruling majority has over the minority, and each party spends about half its time in the minority.

1. Bag the filibuster.  It is a tool that blatantly suppresses the will of the majority.  The idea of an “up or down” vote on an issue does not favor one party over the other; it gives each group an opportunity to exercise the mandate that voters presumably gave to them.
2. Remove all special powers of committee chairpersons.  Currently the chairs of committees control what issues will be brought before their committee, what bills will be considered, what witnesses will be called to testify, and what votes will be taken.   This is the antithesis of democracy; the “lowest ranking” member of a committee represents as many people as the chairperson.  Committee decisions should be made by consensus, and when that can’t be reached then there should be a vote in which the chair has no special privileges.
3. Eliminate the practice of “senatorial holds” on nominations.  Right now a single senator can block anywhere from one to all presidential nominations before the chamber.  Recently we have seen Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama put a hold on 70 nominations from President Obama; his asking price to “release” the nominations was a slew of projects for his home state of Alabama.  The practice of senatorial holds not only obstructs the working of the body; it presents our legislators individually and collectively as selfish buffoons and undermines efforts to have the public look at Congress in a serious manner.  As an example, President Obama just reported, “My nominee for one important job, the head of General Services Administration, which helps run the government, was denied a vote for nine months. When she finally got a vote on her nomination, she was confirmed, 96 to nothing. … That’s not advise and consent. That’s delay and obstruct.”  But this is a game that both parties play.
4. Bring electronic voting into the Senate.  Each roll call vote takes at least fifteen minutes; electronic voting can be almost instantaneous.  Expediting the system is party-neutral.
5. Ensure that any proposal that has the support of at least 20% of the members of either house can have an “up or down” vote.  One reason why reforms in areas such as civil rights and health care is measured in centuries rather than decades or years is because many of the most creative and well-conceived ideas are not on our national radar because they never see the light of day when it comes to voting.  Why is it that the Senate has never voted on a “Medicare for all” proposal, or even a public option mixed with private insurance?  We know the answer to this question, but the bottom line is that each party has repeatedly stifled the ideas of the other party by not forcing on-the-record voting on the issues that are most important to the American people.

It becomes trite to say that “everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten,” but trite is often true.  Perhaps the question should not be “what did you learn in kindergarten,” but “what did you forget since kindergarten?”  When it comes to fair play and the best interests of the group, our politicians act as if they were absent when kindergarten happened.  Maturity should not have a party affiliation.  Things will change, and only change, when the party in the majority thinks about what its own best interests will be when it inevitably is again is in the minority.  If politicians are blind to this reality, then we need more citizens to stand up and remind them.

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