The reactionary elements of our society are salivating at the prospect of crushing labor unions. The oligarchs, the corporations, and ALEC tremble with excitement as they anticipate the Supreme Court decision on the Janus case. They don’t care that labor unions offer a path to the middle class. They don’t care that labor unions reduce income inequality. They want to grind workingpeople into the dust. They are thrilled that Trump’s pick for the Court, Neil Gorsuch, will supply the deciding vote.
I don’t usually post hate mail, but read it for yourself.
Read the pdf here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer” – Michael Corleone, in “The Godfather”.
(the previous post is incorrect)
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Thank you for posting. A quick search turned up that they are linked to the Bradley Foundation, a right-wing vehicle you’ve made us aware of in the past because of their attacks on Wisconsin unions and support for school choice. There’s obviously a lot of dark money behind the Freedom Foundation, as one can easily figure out by looking at their staff list. You need big bucks from oligarchs to support that many people. Here’s a nice graphic that is worth a thousand words on the big money figure behind the Bradley Foundation: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/File:Michael_Grebe_graphic.png.
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“They don’t care that labor unions offer a path to the middle class. They don’t care that labor unions reduce income inequality.”
Actually, they do care. That’s why they want to get rid of them.
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It isn’t just the working people of America that are being ground into dust. The wealthy in the US are destroying people the world over. And of course, these people need more tax breaks. What a wonderful plan the GOP is pushing on America. [sarcasm]
………..
Incentive for Terrorism: America Has Taken Nearly 70% of the World’s Wealth Gains Since 2012 @alternet
The super-rich are pillaging the world and making everyone less safe in the process.
By Paul Buchheit / AlterNetDecember 11, 2017, 8:24 AM GMT
…From 2012 to 2017, global wealth increased by $37.7 trillion, and U.S. wealth increased by $26 trillion. Largely because of a surging stock market, our nation took nearly 70 percent of the entire global wealth gain over the past five years. Based on their dominant share of U.S. wealth, America’s richest 10 percent—much less than 1 percent of the world’s adult population—took over half the world’s wealth gain in the past five years…
One would think that a nation monopolizing the world’s new wealth would avoid alienating the victims of inequality. But it’s just the opposite. The U.S. dropped thousands of bombs on seven Middle Eastern and African countries in 2016. Estimates of civilian deaths by airwar monitoring groups surpass official Pentagon numbers by a wide margin…
Big money interests have turned America into a financial machine, accumulating more and more tax-deferred wealth through the stock market, and using the media to frighten us with overblown terrorist threats. At the same time, Americans are brainwashed into believing that we’re forever fighting a war for freedom. But freedom has become a distorted concept in our increasingly unequal nation. Young lives are put at risk to ensure that a few thousand American households are free to take most of the wealth.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/incentive-terrorism-america-has-taken-nearly-70-worlds-wealth-gains-2012#.WjACVa7-fIw.gmail
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In the past teacher unions were forbidden to bargain and strike on State and National scalles by the pretext that their bargaining units were the local school districts. But State and Federal government long ago took over the role of Management and that excuse no longer holds. Whether any teacher unions have the sense to recognize that fact remains to be seen. If they continue much longer letting themselves be drained of strength, they will go the way of PATCO. It should be obvious by now that the workforces in corporate charter schools are nothing less than cadres of scabs being readied for that day.
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Unless the law has changed, I read that teachers in Indiana are not allowed to strike. They cannot bargain for better working conditions but can bargain for salaries. Red states like Indiana do not want to pay more for salaries because there is a lack of proper funding. Once a teacher retires that is the set amount of a pension for life. There are no increases in pension dispersement amounts.
In Illinois, we get a 3% increase at the beginning of February each year. Of course Illinois has the worst funded pension system in the nation. The state borrowed money for years to pay state bills and then underfunded it. Politicians are constantly working out ways to decrease the pensions and are working hard on teachers still in the system. Part of the problem has been political corruption..lots of it.
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New Jersey, under a succession of governors, Democratic and Republican alike, did the same. They used the pension fund honey pots to cover general fund shortfalls, because they wouldn’t tax capital gains and high income earners sufficiently to provide the services that people need and demand.
This then got maliciously turned into a story about “greedy” public servants bankrupting the state, conveniently ignoring the fact that, by law and definition, pensions are a form of deferred wages.
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Teachers strikes are illegal in :Utah, too.
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WOW … no kidding this is HATE mail. How sick.
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Diane OMG, what a twist. These dorfuses (A) keep wages and salaries down to a minimum where workers have to scrap for a living for themselves and their families, then (B) they want to take away health care and other supports for those same families; and THEN (C) they claim that the UNIONS, whose only legitimate purpose is to protect and advocate for workers, are TAKING AWAY WORKERS’ RIGHTS BY NEEDING TO FUND THE UNION’S EXISTENCE. WHAT AN ORWELLIAN TWIST!
But if “the government” were actually working Of, For, and By The People, that funding would be covered by trickling it down FROM those whose prosperity, in good part, flows directly from those workers TO those workers and to labor and other organizations whose voice is ONLY FOR THE PEOPLE. Individual workers cannot do it alone, because they are already faced with a Foustian Bargain. . . .
. . . as it’s set up, individual workers are required to pay “union dues.” But that’s **a set-up for a no-win financial trap for those individuals. That is the choices are all bad:
CHOICE 1: Pay my union dues, OR
CHOICE 2: Keep my hard-earned and “brief” money to help pay for what is essential to me and my family–which is rarely if ever enough, as long as the power is on the side of those whose “essentials” are hardly their problem.
When are “WE” going to recognize that many (not all) corporations are ALLOWED to act like BIG BULLIES–residual of a Plantation Mentality. They throw the “bone” of choice to workers whose cultural history is rooted in slavery. And now, CONGRESS is with them on that allowance.
We don’t need Putin. We have the Supreme Court. (Thank you Mitch McConnell.)
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The irony of these people talking about the mean and big bad unions taking away individual rights is too rich to pass up. I heard a discussion of wages the other day in which a person was blaming immigrants for depressing wages. It was seemingly agreed that a 25,000 dollar income in 1973 had the same buying power as a 48,000 dollar income today. The researched suggested that the immigration effect was less important than the stagnation of wages brought about by other forces. One of those forces cited was the erosion of unions. I feel freer every time my salary increase goes to the insurance company without asking me.
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Because they have contempt for working people.
Amazon is paying delivery drivers below minimum wage.
None of these people value “work”. If they did they would pay people for it.
It’s all rhetoric- the only work they respect is their own.
Something like 65% of working people in the US don’t have a college degree. The majority of workers are utterly and completely ignored and it’s not a mystery why- the people in charge think they’re stupid and lazy.
Amazon doesn’t care how those drivers manage to live on less than minimum wage. They don’t value them or the work they do at all.
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And what would solve that problem real quick would be a nation-wide across-the-board strike. But that’s “pie in the sky” rhetoric that is quickly suppressed by both sides of the establishment. Let’s be Serious, folks. The best we can do is tinker around the edges and otherwise just accept our lot in life. There Is No Alternative.
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TINA !!!
Credit, if you want to call it that, must go to Margaret Thatcher, who gave us both “TINA” and the Glibertarian nonsense, “There is no such thing as society. There are men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people (duh!), and people must look after themselves first.”
Don’t you just love those “Natural Laws” that Glibertarians use to justify their infinite greed and will to power?
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Yep. I was nine years old when she came to power (and ten by the time her boyfriend Raygun was elected here). Never have quite forgiven those who bought into the “supply sided” crap, including my own parents. Even as a kid I could see it was full of ____. I remember asking my parents what was the point of sending me to Sunday School to learn the Golden Rule and to love my neighbor if they were going to vote for “Greed is Good”?
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If states keep cutting the wages and benefits of teachers, they may have to live in a van in the parking lot the same way many service providers do in Silicon Valley. The people that work in the cafeteria, the janitors and service workers live in RVs outside because they cannot afford to rent in the area. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/12/working-poor-finding-homes-on-four-wheels-in-mountain-view/
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I hate to say it but the foundation for the defeat of the labor movement occurred even before the writing on NLRA was dry. . When Unions stopped being broad based advocates for social change . Threatening the centers of power daily, the outcome was a forgone conclusion . Class warfare is a losing proposition when the working class is united in opposition . The union movement has pitted its member unions against each other competing for table scraps . Public against private sector worker and union against union and union against non union worker .
The result being that as long as my members were being taken care of, it was to hell with everyone else becoming the standard operating procedure . Instead of educating and mobilizing membership constantly , so that an attack on any worker was seen as an attack on all workers . We have had the Union movement pushing a value model to employers be it in education or construction….. . Our workers are better trained than the others and we are willing to work with you to insure that ” the quality of our product remains long after the cost is forgotten ” So we have the AFT participate in teacher evaluation schemes and Ed reform. We have private sector unions agreeing to random drug testing. A random test being different than one warranted for cause or suspicion……..
Thomas Frank correctly traces the dynamic that created the schism between Labor and the Democratic party to labors support for Nixon during the Vietnam war. When NY construction workers took to the streets to beat on anti war activists . It resulted in a position as secretary of Labor going to a construction Union leader as a reward . At the same time as his Commerce secretary was sowing the seeds for the Business Round Table and a massive assault on those construction Unions . That today that assault reaches into NYC.
Back in 2011 Trumka realizing that something had to change called for voting membership in the AFL CIO to be extended to other groups . From the NAACP to the Sierra Club ….. The object being to turn it the umbrella group for a broad based social movement again .
That push was rejected by the member unions of the AFL-CIO , “Content to go down with the ship as long as those leaders had a first class cabins ”
I wish I drank or did drugs what is coming would be easier to deal with.
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Quibble with his ultimate assessment of Justice Alito if you like, but I think Brooks summed it up here pretty succinctly.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802E0D9163FF931A25752C0A9609C8B63
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But by the late 1960’s, cultural politics replaced New Deal politics, and liberal Democrats did their best to repel Northern white ethnic voters. Big-city liberals launched crusades against police brutality, portraying working-class cops as thuggish storm troopers for the establishment. In the media, educated liberals portrayed urban ethnics as uncultured, uneducated Archie Bunkers.
The liberals were doves; the ethnics were hawks. The liberals had ”Question Authority” bumper stickers; the ethnics had been taught in school to respect authority. The liberals thought an unjust society caused poverty; the ethnics believed in working their way out of poverty.
Sam Alito emerged from his middle-class neighborhood about that time, made it to Princeton and found ”very privileged people behaving irresponsibly.”
Alito wanted to learn; the richer liberals wanted to strike. He wanted to join R.O.T.C.; the liberal Princetonians expelled it from campus. He was orderly and respectful; they were disorderly and disrespectful. The experience was so searing that he mentioned it in the opening of his confirmation hearing 37 years later.
In 1971, Fred Dutton, an important Democratic strategist, acknowledged the rift between educated liberals and the white working class. In a short book, ”Changing Sources of Power,” Dutton argued that white workers had ”tended, in fact, to become a major redoubt of traditional Americanism and of the antinegro, antiyouth vote.”
The New Deal coalition, including Catholics and white ethnics, was dying, he argued, and should be replaced by a ”loose peace coalition” of young people, educated suburbanites, feminists and blacks.
That plan wasn’t stupid, but it didn’t work. The party has been in a downward spiral ever since. John Kerry lost the white working class by 23 percentage points. He lost among his fellow Catholics. He lost the election.
After every defeat, Democrats vow to reconnect with middle-class whites. But if there is one lesson of the Alito hearings, it is that the Democratic Party continues to repel those voters just as vigorously as ever. The Democrats have amply shown why they remain the party of gown, but not town.
First, there was the old subject of police brutality. If you listened to the questions of Jeff Sessions, a Republican, you heard a man exercised by the terror drug dealers can inflict on a neighborhood. If you listened to Ted Kennedy, you heard a man exercised by the terror law enforcement officials can inflict on a neighborhood. Kennedy railed against ”Gestapo-like” tactics. Patrick Leahy accused Alito of rendering decisions in a ”light most favorable to law enforcement.”
If forced to choose, most Americans side with the party that errs on the side of the cops, not the criminals.
Then there was the old hawk-dove divide. If you listened to Lindsey Graham, a Republican, you heard a man alarmed by the threats posed by anti-American terrorists. If you listened to Leahy or Russ Feingold, you heard men alarmed by the threats posed by American counterterrorists. The Democratic questions implied that American counterterrorists are guilty until proved innocent, that a police state is being born.
If forced to choose, most Americans want a party that will fight aggressively against the terrorists, not the N.S.A.
Then there were the old accusations of bigotry. Kennedy misleadingly and maliciously asserted that Alito had never written a decision on behalf of an African-American. But those wild accusations don’t carry weight any more. Rich liberals have been calling white ethnics bigots for 40 years.
Finally, and most important, there is the question of demeanor. Alito is a paragon of the old-fashioned working-class ethic. In a culture of self-aggrandizement, Alito is modest. In a culture of self-exposure, Alito is reticent. In a culture of made-for-TV sentimentalism, Alito refuses to emote. In a culture that celebrates the rebel, or the fashionable pseudorebel, Alito respects tradition, order and authority.
What sort of party doesn’t admire these virtues in a judge?
The big story of American politics, which was underlined by every hour of the Alito hearings, is that sometime between 1932 and 1968, the DNA of the Democratic Party fundamentally changed. In 1932, the Democrats had working-class DNA. Today, the Democrats have different DNA, the DNA of a minority party.
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I’ve got to say that this reminds me why I quite reading Brooks years ago. His self-serving, revisionist tripe provides cover for the most idiotic of analyses. And to use Alito to buttress his case for his political myopia is rich.
What Brooks and Alito miss is a knee-jerk subservience to a white, patriarchal, pseudo-Christian dominance that does not bow to change, reality, or history. Instead they rationalize resentment, self-pity, and envy into an specious argument that yearns for a world that only existed for people who looked and acted like them.
As I look at this personally, I grew up in a military family environment in the 60s and 70s. My friends and acquaintances were mostly poor and middle class, they were diverse ethnically and racially, and I was able to live in differing parts of the country and a progressive foreign nation. When I attended my first school outside of a military environment, at 10th grade in the largest all-boys—1400 boys, of whom 5 were black and all elite athletes—Catholic school in the South, I heard the word “nigger” for the first time in my life and I heard it repeated over and over again from my first day until I graduated. I heard the uproar in the neighborhood I had moved into when a recently drafted professional football player was seen looking at houses in the neighborhood that it was fine if he played for the home team, but they’d be damned if they were going to have a nigger move into the neighborhood. That was also the community where David Duke lived and had his strongest support. That high school also graduated that devout Catholic, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who one boasted in private that the secret to his political success was that he was “David Duke without the baggage.”
There is so much to argue about in the article you cite. But let’s focus on the final three paragraphs. “Alito is the paragon of the old-fashioned working class ethic.” Yes, the ethic that says jobs are for life and that the children of workers get those jobs through a legacy system. An ethic blames others who don’t like you for changes in technology and regulations like those designed to discontinue practices that do long-term damage to the environment and nature because it is economically easier. Define “self-aggrandizement” and how it is the opposite of being “modest.” Is throwing off the shackles of Jim Crow self-aggrandizing? Is a woman who asserts her individuality not modest? Should we be begin to base our reality on false memories “of made-for-TV sentimentalism”? As much as I love and have almost memorized every black-and-white episode of the Andy Griffith Show, is that the world I should yearn for? Even Andy Griffith himself didn’t agree with that. When Public Enemy’s Chuck D rapped “you never see a black man on The Honeymooners” was he being self-aggrandizing, immodest, or denying the superiority and rightness “of made-for-TV sentimentalism”? And is Alito’s “respect [for] tradition, order and authority” as he, Brooks, and, I assume, you interpret it grounded in a “made-for-TV sentimentalism”? In other words, a willful fiction?
I, for one, do not “admire these virtues in a judge” or in anyone, for that matter.
And just what of what happened “sometime between 1932 and 1968” that should we discard? The New Deal? The community that defeated the Axis powers? Integration of the military? The Civil Rights movement? Rock and roll, soul, and folk music? The technological change that moved from The Spirit of St. Louis to the Apollo space program? Vatican II? The revolution of transportation that made the world smaller? The social changes that both got us in and out—however tragic it was—of Vietnam? Was George Wallace the answer? None of these and countless other things I’ve left out, good and bad, virtuous and evil?
If Brooks’ pablum is correct and all these things contributed to making Alito a patron saint of the politics resentment that has defined this nation mostly since 1980, then I’m happy that DNA has put me in the minority. Democrats, however imperfect and maddeningly incompetent as they are wont to be, still, on the whole, represent the general direction that is toward progress for all Americans. But to claim that Brooks’ “analysis” provides any clues about what changes need to be made, count me out.
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I tried to signal that appreciating that article requires you to ignore all the stuff about Alito specifically, which arguably is difficult, since it’s largely about Alito.
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And I think the thing that changed the Democratic Party for the worse happened after 1968, although not too much after.
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This probably gets at the point in a more palatable way that doesn’t involve David Brooks’s platitudes.
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The problem, as Thomas Frank has eloquently shown, is that the Democratic Party as given up on being the party of advancement for everybody. It’s morphed into the party of Meritocrats, the Creative Class (God, how I loathe that term) and “the underpriviliged.”
A case in point is the opioid epidemic, which is killing people in numbers comparable to the AIDS epidemic, and which is wrecking working class communities in “flyover” and de-industrialized regions of the country. The Case-Deaton Study showed that for the first time, life expectancy is declining for whites with a high school diploma or less.
And the response of the Clinton/Obama/Third Way wing of the Democratic Party to this local, regional and national calamity? Crickets.
The timetable for dealing with it? Thus far, every indication is that it will be addressed by the Democratic Party on the First of Never.
But these kinds of demographic catastrophes have political consequences, and Trump was one, whereby people in those Forgotten Places, long ignored if not continually insulted by meritocrats on the coasts, “voted with their middle fingers.”
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Right, that was basically what I was trying to get across. The screenshots I pasted in are from the pages of Frank’s “Listen, Liberal.”
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The Democratic Party will deal with the opioid crisis on the ‘first of never”. Are you saying that Trump and his gang will do any better? Or are we just supposed to totally give up on those people because they aren’t billionaires. People who voted for Trump are expecting better than this. It’s sad that the con man will give nothing to anyone except himself and all wealthy people.
……
Trump declares health emergency over opioids but no new funds to help
Chris McGreal in Washington
Thursday 26 October 2017 16.51 EDTFirst published on Thursday 26 October 2017 09.43 EDT
Donald Trump has ordered the declaration of a public health emergency in response to what he called the “national shame and human tragedy” of the US’s escalating opioid epidemic.
As a first step, the president said his administration is requiring the removal of what he called a “truly evil” prescription opioid from the market. But while he said he intends to “mobilise his entire administration” to combat the crisis, there was swift criticism of the lack of major new funds to deal with an epidemic claiming 100 lives or more a day
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/26/trump-opioids-crisis-health-emergency-funds?CMP=share_btn_link
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Democrats don’t care about addicts dying of opioid addiction for the same reason that Republicans didn’t care about gays dying of AIDS – in both cases, those people just got what they had coming for their sinful lifestyles.
Anyway, I might just have to steal “voting with their middle fingers” sometime. Thanks!
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I agree with the criticisms of the Democratic Party directly—how they have abandoned unions, suck up to Wall St., and the “meritocracy” arguments made above, just to name a few—and we don’t even need to get into the abandonment of education, which is why most of us are here.
But I disagree vehemently with using the opioid “crisis” as one the key exhibits in this argument. Here in Ohio I have a front row seat to how Rob Portman uses this issue as a cloak to hide his hypocrisy on health and social issues. Republicans would not care about this if the disproportionate number of victims of opioid abuse were not white. With every other drug abuse issue, they have never focused on public health, it has been about criminalizing the victims and abusers, in some cases to support the privatization of prisons. The New Jim Crow explains this.
Meanwhile, Republicans have profited from the opioid industry, most prominently from Purdue Pharmaceuticals, which Diane has highlighted in the past in her posts on the Sackler family. Their response to the suppliers has also been “crickets.” If we want to go back to the history of AIDS, the Republican response was worse than “crickets.” As they criminalized drug use, the penalties for crack possession, mostly in the black community, paled (if I may use the pun) in comparison to cocaine possession, which was mostly in the white community. And now we have Sessions trying to ignore states rights, which he normally loves, on marijuana laws. So please don’t use the response to opioids to preach how Democrats have neglected a constituency. I don’t see any Democrats openly opposing or moralizing about the issue.
As the best example of this, Portman never misses an opportunity to tout his “leadership” on this issue. And at the same time he tries to kill the Affordable Care Act, lies about the tax bill as one its biggest champions, opposes reform of the prison industry, and touts every other part of the McConnell agenda.
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You’re probably still ignoring me, GregB, but I’m not seeing a defense of Democrats in your defense of Democrats. All I’m seeing is “Republicans are bad”. Granted, Republicans are bad. But in order to defend the Democrats against the charge of ignoring a constituency, you actually have to show what the Democrats are doing for that constituency, not what the Republicans aren’t doing.
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When your choice is between Horrible and Just OK, the latter should win.
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Democratic leadership/accomplishments off the top of my head: The New Deal (bank reform, FDIC, Social Security), Tennessee Valley Authority/rural electrification, minimum wage/8 hour day/40 hour work week/unemployment compensation/overtime, the Marshall Plan, the GI Bill, NATO/nuclear deterrence (the latter was bipartisan), Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Medicare/Medicaid, public housing, FEMA, food safety regulations/food stamps, secured funding for K-12 and college education programs, and Endangered Species Act. There have also been great failures, most notably getting into Vietnam, but on balance since the beginning of the 20th century, Democratic initiatives have improved our lives far, far more than Republican ones.
For the Obama years, I was disillusioned quickly after the 2008 elections, in large part because education is a key issue for me. But many good things happened. Here is a good summation I found in my files: https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/januaryfebruary-2017/obamas-top-50-accomplishments-revisited/. I would not, however, forget the failures of education policy, caving on the repealing the Bush tax cuts, failing to fund medical research adequately, fighting for more stimulus funds, or following through on climate change policy. History will also confirm that as a symbolic head of state, Obama was remarkable; he always represented the nation with integrity, agree with him or not.
As for today, there are some bright lights at the state and local level, but as for the federal level, the Democratic Party can only try to be effective in opposition. Check back with me in 2012 if you’re interested in my views then.
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I remember how stunned I was when Romney said he would just let GM fail. Spoken like a private equity guy.
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Peter Brennan was appointed labor secretary in 1973 . But he as the leader of the NYC, Building and Construction trades council applauded when construction workers came out of , the under construction World Trade Center and attacked protestors . Then he held a large demonstration in support Nixon’s war policy and worked for Nixon in the 72 election. . It is simplistic to say that the entire labor vote supported those actions or that it was also mainly an ethnic labor vote . Many of the CIO faction of that movement had already had large minority memberships like the UAW. . In NY the head of the Cities Central labor Council had not only Marched with Black labor leaders and King in 1963 but had by 1968 taken in a large class of majority minority apprentices to his formally father and son, Lilly white Electrical workers union. And King himself died while supporting a labor protest. .
Brooks being Brooks over plays his hand, disingenuous at best. As recently as this week:
“Today’s radicals do not want to upend the meritocracy, which is creating a caste system of inherited inequality. They don’t want to stop technical innovation, which is displacing millions of workers.”
Who the hell does he consider a radical? . And what role did merit play in the creation of that tremendous wealth. ?. David which Billionaire radicals are you referring to?. As Dean Baker says, being a Columnist is not necessarily based on merit .
But Franks point was simple those that rose through the ranks of the Democratic party starting in the 70s no longer saw labor as indispensable to that party and as Carter’s “NEO LIBERAL “deregulation policies crushed workers like the Teamsters or his proposed deregulation of the Air Line industry. Labors membership started to abandon Democrats . But the the Reagan Democrat is pretty much of myth because the overwhelming number of leaders and members still supported Democrats . Just not in the out sized numbers they had in the past.
After Clinton/ Obama abandoned workers further pushing Trade agreements while doing nothing on Labor issues ,that situation has worsened . Yet still the majority of organized labor still voted Democratic .
“Nationally, Clinton outperformed Trump among union households by just 8 percent,” Yes just 8 points that would be a landslide in any other group . Yet it is down from 18 percentage points for Obama and probably down 30 percentage points from LBJ. Keep up the good work Chuck . I got to start drinking.
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I wasn’t asking for a hundred year retrospective on Democratic accomplishments. I was asking what Democrats have done for the constituency under discussion (i.e., opioid addicts). When people ask “what have you done for me lately?”, they’re not interested in their grandparents’ lifetime. What have the Democrats done to address the opioid crisis in “flyover” country? Saying that the Republicans haven’t done anything does not answer that question.
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Greg B
A large portion of those 50 Obama accomplishments could have huuuuge qualifiers attached to them . If they didn’t Clinton would be starting to plan a second term shortly.
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Dienne, you have the consistent gift of ignoring what you want to. Here is what you wrote: “but I’m not seeing a defense of Democrats in your defense of Democrats. All I’m seeing is “Republicans are bad”. Granted, Republicans are bad. But in order to defend the Democrats against the charge of ignoring a constituency, you actually have to show what the Democrats are doing for that constituency, not what the Republicans aren’t doing.”
Where in that quote is “I was asking what Democrats have done for the constituency under discussion (i.e., opioid addicts).”?
But if you were to read the last part of my answer, “As for today, there are some bright lights at the state and local level, but as for the federal level, the Democratic Party can only try to be effective in opposition. Check back with me in 2012 if you’re interested in my views then.” To answer your second question, I can tell you what Democrats aren’t doing: They’re not opposing funding for opioid programs, they’re not demonizing people addicted to opioids, they’re not calling for elimination or defunding those problems because they think it’s a moral failing, they’re not proposing to cut medical research funding to address the issue as our Dear Leader is, nor are they calling for programs and then doing nothing about funding, as is described in Carol’s post.
Joel: the fact that the current Congress and administration are falling head over heels to reverse the Obama record does nothing to diminish the fact that they were accomplished, however imperfect they might have been. And even with Hillary’s weak candidacy, no one can deny that a large portion of the committed base of Dear Leader was fueled by racial resentment. They decry “identity politics” only when that identity is not mostly white, male, and aggrieved.
And finally, Dienne, you write: “When people ask “what have you done for me lately?”, they’re not interested in their grandparents’ lifetime.” then that’s a big part of the problem. If it were not for broad-based programs that Democrats created, protected and championed, then many of “their” and probably your grandparents might not have lived into old age, had social programs to support them, or health programs to treat their ills. I take a back seat to no one when it comes to bitching about the failures of Democrats, but when I take the long view, I know that they are much more likely to stand up for the issues I hold dear than Republicans ever have. One of the reasons we look back fondly at some of the things Nixon did, for example, was because he coopted Democratic, not Republican ideas. Rather than ask, what have you done lately, perhaps you should get engaged and try to educate the party about what they need to change. That, thanks to this blog, is what I’ve been doing since the last election day. Signing off for a few days, if not for good.
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People know all about what the Democrats did for their grandparents. They’re not stupid. But Democrats can’t keep relying on what they did 50 or 60 years ago. That’s like the Republicans still trying to pretend to be the party of Lincoln and expecting people to be grateful that they ended slavery. The Republicans are not the same party they were in the 1860s. The Democrats are not the same party they were in the 1960s.
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“Where in that quote is “I was asking what Democrats have done for the constituency under discussion (i.e., opioid addicts).”?”
I dunno, maybe this: “But in order to defend the Democrats against the charge of ignoring a constituency, you actually have to show what the Democrats are doing for that constituency”
What I was asking was, what are Democrats doing for opioid addicts (i.e., “that constituency”). I thought that was obvious. Sorry if it wasn’t.
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Greg B
Can’t argue with you that the overwhelming majority of Trump voters were racist SOBs . That is a given . But something happened in the industrial Midwest. It was a work in progress for over forty years starting with the retooling of the Auto industry in the 70s .
So how did States that were reliably Blue for decades turn red . Was there suddenly an explosion in the growth racist white voters . Perhaps racial tolerance and economic security have a link. Perhaps when those racists had good union jobs their need to preserve their economic interests trumped (LOL) their racial prejudices . Once the jobs were gone the Union was also gone they were no longer union voters .
My experience with union construction workers here in NYC, shows the union takes as much blame for the situation of workers experiencing long periods of unemployment as the non union developers breaking the unions . When it comes time to vote many often dismiss union endorsements .
Republicans know that, it is why the first thing they do when they take state control is attack Unions, They pass right to work and restrictive bargaining rights for public workers and the push is on Nation wide ..The tax plan is as much an effort to punish high tax states which are usually high wage and have high unionization rates. Causing them to restrict collective bargaining to control budgets. .
As to the Clinton \ Obama legacy we both have read the literature that is damning on their policy achievements so there is no need to rehash that . But what about the soft factors that influence voters like optics . What would the optics have been of a few Wall Street criminals being taken into custody .The optics of Obama showing up in Wisconsin to stand with workers . The optics of Federal Marshals raiding Snyder’s office in criminal civil rights case. Those cases are usually the way murders become a Federal crime. What on the other hand were the optics of him drinking that glass of water in Flint …. . . And what were the optics of him promising to ram TPP down the throat of those angry voters in the Mid West .
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Here is more on the Koch’s and their efforts to get their anti-government/Freedom Foundation propaganda into economics classrooms:
ALL QUOTED BELOW with Link My Emphases
Controversial Economics Class Dropped From Tucson High Schools
By Brenda Iasevoli on December 15, 2017 7:45 AM
A controversial economics course has been cut from the high school curriculum in Tucson public schools after board members discovered teachers were using a textbook that hadn’t been properly vetted. . . .
Somehow the course slid under the board’s radar and into four Tucson high schools. The course’s primary textbook, Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship, has raised eyebrows for its supposed connection to the University of Arizona’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, or Freedom Center, which was established in 2008 by one of the text’s authors, Dave Schmidtz, and which was funded to the tune of $1.8 million by conservative billionaire Charles Koch. . . .
University of Arizona professor of history and government David Gibbs isn’t convinced the course has no connection to the Freedom Center, which he described as operating with little transparency. Gibbs said the center has about 24 donors, most of whom are unnamed.
**As for the textbook that Schmidtz co-authored, Gibbs called it a skewed interpretation of economics. “This is a far right-wing version of economics that would be more appropriately classified as indoctrination than teaching,” he told Education Week. “[The authors] leave out or distort systematically topics that do not fit their ideology. To present this to college students would be deeply troubling but, even worse, to high school students who I think lack the context to properly interpret this indoctrination.”
Gibbs said the authors bypass discussion of the problems of inherited wealth concentration, currently a major topic in mainstream economics, as well as historical instances of successful government regulation. He also said the authors offer the career of entrepreneur as a wonderful and exciting opportunity, but “make no mention of the fact that most entrepreneurs lose their shirts.” . . . **
“Now that we have a lot more information about the course and what goes on in the classroom, I’m much more willing to have a more robust conversation about it,” she said.
Board member Adelita Grijalva, however, said she still wanted to know how the books got into so many classrooms and why there was no record of the purchases.
“My concern is if any other textbooks got into our classrooms, who purchased those, and how did they get there? Because that’s a major problem,” she said.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2017/12/controversial_economics_class_.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news3&M=58314097&U=1182129
Controversial Economics Class Dropped From Tucson High Schools
blogs.edweek.org
School board members in Tucson, Ariz., acted after learning that a controversial economics textbook that hadn’t been properly vetted.
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I know my enemies well. Just watched the last bit of the Board meeting. Ref Rodriguez was still there.
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