Back in the 1990s, “Not Your Father’s Labor Movement” was meant to signal organized labor’s break with the past—its bid for a new generation of workers, men and women, and for a new identity as a movement of multicultural, feisty vitality. In 2012, it feels like an epitaph: at least our fathers’ labor movement had some power.
This past Sunday, I appeared on Up With Chris Hayes, where I spoke briefly about the rise of austerity politics in the Democratic Party (begin video at 2:13). My comments were sparked by Bruce Bartlett’s terrific piece “‘Starve the Beast’: Origins and Development of a Budgetary Metaphor” in the Summer 2007 issue of The Independent Review. Barlett is a longtime observer of the Republican Party, from without and within. He was a staffer for Ron Paul and Jack Kemp, as well as a policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official under George HW Bush. Now he’s a critic of the GOP, writing sharp commentary at the New York Times and the Financial Times. He and I have argued about […]
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Categories
Economies, The Right
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Tags Alan Greenspan, balanced budget, Bruce Bartlett, debt ceiling, George HW Bush, George W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Grover Norquist, Herbert Hoover, John Kenneth Galbraith, Jude Wanniski, Milton Friedman, Obama, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, starve the beast, tax cuts, Up With Chris Hayes
Yale University President—and union buster extraordinaire—Richard Levin is stepping down after 20 years in power, er, office. His reign—sorry, “administration”—was longer than that of Deng Xiaoping, Slobodan Milošević, and Ríos Montt. Though not as long as Mayor Daley’s.
From Ryan Cooper at the Washington Monthly comes this especially pointed tale of workplace coercion (h/t Douglas Edwards). So the Romney campaign visited a coal mine on August 14th, for a speech with a bunch of suitably dirty miners standing behind him, with his podium bearing a placard that read “Coal Country Stands with Mitt.” But apparently it should have said “or else” at the end: The Pepper Pike company that owns the Century Mine told workers that attending the Aug. 14 Romney event would be both mandatory and unpaid, a top company official said Monday morning in a West Virginia radio interview. A group of employees who feared they’d be fired if they didn’t attend the campaign rally in […]
I was on Up With Chris Hayes this morning talking about conservatism and the GOP. For various reasons, I can’t yet embed the video here. All I can do for now is provide the links to the three segments in which I appeared. I hope to post an embedded version later. For now, though… Part 1: Racial backlash is in the DNA of the modern conservative movement. Part 2: The waning power of law and order as a conservative idea. Part 3: How the Democrats became the party of austerity. Update (11 pm) I fixed the link to Part 1.
I’m going to be on Up With Chris Hayes this Sunday morning, sometime between 8 and 10. Not sure yet on the specifics, so check back in. Update (5 pm) Looks like I’ll be on between 8:40 and 9:05. But these things can change, so…
So this map of discrimination against gays and lesbians in the workplace is making the rounds. Which prompts the following questions. In how many states can you be fired for being gay? 29 In how many states can you be fired for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all? 49 Which state is the exception? This one. Update (10:30 pm) Shawn Gude directs me to this study of Montana’s just cause employment law. I haven’t read it but it looks good.
I’m currently reading Why Labor Organizing Should be a Civil Right by Richard Kahlenberg and Moshe Marvit. I’m not sure yet what I think about the book but it has some interesting factoids I didn’t know about and would like to share. 1. Many, though not enough, people know that when Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, he had been traveling there in order to support a strike of local sanitation workers. But what’s not widely known—and certainly came as news to me—is that one of the grievances of the workers was that they were not given shower facilities to wash up after their shifts. As a result, bus drivers and passengers would keep them off the […]
From my inbox: AT&T technicians in Indiana have filed a lawsuit alleging that the company has put “heavy restrictions” on how they can spend their unpaid lunch breaks. The complaint says that while employees can spend unpaid lunch breaks eating in company vehicles, they aren’t allowed to read newspapers, nap, use personal computers, or listen to portable music players, such as iPods. The company also restricts how far workers can go from a job site during their unpaid lunch breaks to less than one-half mile. No reading newspapers, no listening to music, no writing on computers: your First Amendment at work! H/t Gordon Lafer
Last fall, you might recall, there was a big debate on the left about whether or not the Obama administration and the Department of Homeland Security had ordered the crackdowns on the Occupy protests throughout the country. Naomi Wolf was perhaps the most prominent exponent of the claim that the crackdowns were organized/coordinated/ordered/directed—the specific allegation was always a mosh pit of roving verbs and changing charges—by the feds. I took the opposite position, pointing out that political repression in the US tends to be decentralized and local. I’ll admit I haven’t been following this particular issue much since then, but this latest report suggests I was right. Focusing mainly on the crackdown in Portland, it provides evidence that if anything […]
Sylvia Nasar—author of A Beautiful Mind and, more recently, Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius—was interviewed this past weekend by the New York Times Book Review. This particular exchange made my jaw drop. What’s the best book about economics you’ve ever read? The worst? There are so many great ones, but these are exquisite: “John Maynard Keynes,” by Robert Skidelsky. “Bankers and Pashas,” by David Landes. “The House of Rothschild,” by Niall Ferguson. “Economic Sentiments,” by Emma Rothschild. “Poverty and Compassion,” by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Worst? To be worst it would have to have had a wide following, because otherwise who cares? I suppose “Das Kapital,” by Marx; “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” by Engels; and “Mein […]
From the FB page of my graduate student Dan McCool… Paul Ryan: “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” Ludwig von Mises to Ayn Rand: “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you.” Update (9:15 pm) Another FB friend, Kevin Fathi, points me to this letter from Cornell political scientist Ted Lowi to the New York Times, reminiscing about what Hayek said about Rand: Back in 1961, Friedrich A. […]
From today’s New York Times: The waitress’s lips were moving but nothing seemed to be coming out. Hundreds of voices swallowed her words as a D.J. pumped out a ticka ticka of dance beats. The happy hour-fueled din rose with it, amplified by tin ceilings and tiled walls. “I’ve been getting migraines,” the waitress shouted on a recent Thursday night, leaning in to be heard. She said that she woke up with her ears buzzing, and that her doctor had recently prescribed seizure medicine: “It decreases the amount of headaches you get.” The restaurant, Lavo in Midtown Manhattan, is not just loud but often dangerously so. On that night, the noise averaged 96 decibels over the course of an hour, […]
Somehow I missed this post from BuzzFeed, but my friend Kathy Newman brought it to my attention. It’s a list of “9 really weird reasons for getting fired.” Here are three of my favorites: sending emails in all caps shaving your head for charity wearing a Green Bay Packers tie in a Chicago office filled with Bears fans With my hatred of all things sports, the last is kind of a twofer for me.
Every month the jobs numbers come out, and every month we have the same conversation: Why is unemployment so high? How can we get it down? While the entire political establishment continues to suck its thumb, this post from the Atlantic (h/t Bryce Covert) tells you all you need to know. We have the lowest number of public-sector employees per population since 1968. If we merely restored government employment to its 2007 levels, there’d be 1.7 million more jobs. Remember last summer when the Atlantic asked a group of worthies, including Matt Yglesias, “What is the single best thing Washington can do to jumpstart job creation?” I think we know the answer: First, stop firing people. Second, start hiring people.
Whatever you think of Chicago’s and Boston’s attempts to prevent Chick-fil-A from setting up shop in those cities because of its president’s anti-gay views—there’s been a great discussion about this issue among progressive, led by Glenn Greenwald, who’s got the better of the argument, it seems to me—one thing is clear. No matter how much of a threat to Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy’s freedom of speech Chicago and Boston’s actions pose—and for the record, I don’t think it’s much (there’s little evidence to suggest Cathy’s fortunes would be so altered by these two individual actions as to compel him to change his positions; that’s not to say, however, that these actions don’t set bad precedents, which is why they must […]
Michele Bachmann claims that Gore Vidal’s novel Burr made her into a Republican. “It’s very interesting because I had been a Democrats — and I’d actually worked on Jimmy Carter’s campaign. And I was reading a novel by Gore Vidal, and when I was reading it he was mocking the Founding Fathers. And all of a sudden it just occurred to me: I set the book down on my lap, I looked out the window of a train I was riding in, and I thought to myself, ‘I don’t think I’m a Democrat. I think I really am a Republican.’ Because the Founding Fathers were not the characters that I saw Gore Vidal portraying in his novel. “And that snotty, mocking […]