Actor Kal Penn speaking last night at the 2012 DNC convention in Charlotte, North Carolina:
“Let’s keep fighting for a president who has never stopped fighting for us.”
Unless you’re a public employee in Wisconsin, in which case President Barack Obama never started fighting for us.
I didn’t hear the words “public sector” mentioned once last evening. A few well-deserved jabs at Romney’s stand on reducing the number of firefighters and teachers, but nothing that would indicate to me a paradigm shift in the structure of the economy. I didn’t hear anything about reclaiming unionization as a strategy for recalibrating the economy.
Granted, it was the first night of the convention, and I think its pretty obvious that they’ve set the stage for “nothing new to come.” I’ll spare my analysis of the opening day rhetoric, suffice it to say, I didn’t think it set the stage for any message of substantive change from an Obama second term.
Who knows. Perhaps there will be a moment of earth shattering surprise by the end of day 3, but I’m not counting on it.
PJ, you should ask yourself why you haven’t heard “public sector” mentioned. How is that remotely a winning message for the general public? I wish they HAD talked about the woes of paying for pensions and a minimal health care portion. I’m sure your average joe or out of work person could reallllly relate to that!
And you didn’t hear anything about reclaiming unionization as a strategy for recalibrating the economy because well, that’s just plain silly.
Okay (or granted), Obama betrayed his promise to stand on the Madison “picket” line in support of the union workers. It was deliberate, it hurt, and was unexplained. It has been his only major failure as President in my opinion
I make no apologies for Obama’s inaction in Wisconsin’s recall of Walker. Based upon my limited or small view of the big picture, as President, I would have been on the “front lines” standing with the workers and would have directed all Democratic resources be devoted to the Wisconsin war against takeover of the state by the special interests and outsiders through their agent, Scott Walker.
But perhaps I don’t know what I don’t know. In other words, I do not have all the facts relevant to the decision.
Looking at history, there was a critical decision made by FDR on the conduct of the wars against Germany and Japan which resulted in loss of life and prolonging the conflict with one of our adversaries. FDR came to the secret conclusion that the war with Germany was to be given priority in men, resources, and effort to the detriment of the war with Japan.
Bad call?
I fault the union leadership for allowing Republican and right-to-work wonks to give unions such a bad name. Those attacks should have been answered years ago, instead of being allowed to inflict a wound which may never again be healed. Obama is still in the fight. He avoided a unique battle (recall) that he didn’t quite know how to win. Sometimes generals do that. Did he make a mistake? I think so. But it wasn’t as serious as the one in which he tried to compel religious organizations to buy a certain kind of insurance. Nobody’s perfect. But I’m just thankful a man with his intellect, ability and character decided to risk his life and happiness to lead this country back to viability.
He didn’t just skip the Recall, he skipped the protests months before recall was ever considered. He skipped the fight in Ohio over SB 5. He skipped the picket line at Manitowoc Crane, settling the question if he was abandoning labor in general or just public sector unions. Obama abandoned any attempt to pass the Employee Free Choice Act or any variation of pro-union legislation. Yesterday he let Rahm Emmanuel, an extraordinary union buster in the mold of Scott Walker, stand on stage in the least unionized state in the nation and speak about the priorities of the Democratic Party, none of which seems to be about fighting for working people at all. Obama is flat out bad for labor
For a long time I have held that position that while liberals truly care about “the little guy”, Democrats mostly care about getting “the little guy” to vote for them.
Totally agree. Based on what I have heard from my public sector union (I’m still a member although my local’s gone), unions are trying to evolve as fast as they can, but you can’t make the changes with no support anywhere. It should also be noted that for the short term, unions are about the only left-leaning organizations with the funds to fight, post-Citizens United. That will change though once they’re ‘right-to-work’ed to death.
I wonder what Bill Clinton will have to say when it’s his turn to speak? Hopefully he’ll remember that he’s not in Arkansas and doesn’t need to trash unions quite so energetically as he did when he was campaigning for Blanche Lincoln in that blue-dog state.
Short-sighted and insulting strategy, if you ask me. Yes, we union members know we have nowhere else to go. Except some union members are going elsewhere, and did in both of Walker’s gov victories.
To me, Obama wasn’t merely breaking a campaign pledge by not joining the picket line in Wisconsin. Rather, he and the DNC entirely missed the boat in defining our time by redirecting the lens through which this nation views itself. In other words, not cementing in place a progressive infrastructure rather than allowing a Conservative, Corporate-Elitist infrastructure to be laid. They missed the boat by not taking on Wall Street prior to health care – the reverse would have laid a better foundation for the Affordable Care Act, the Recovery Act, the 2010 mid-term elections, the cause of labor, voter suppression, GOP education “reform,” privatization of the public sphere, the decline of the middle class and the rise in poverty. DNC neglect in Wisconsin is merely symptomatic of the broader struggle of robust, proactive government versus enervated, small government; of the primacy of public versus private sectors, public good versus private profit. Obama and the DNC are on the wrong end of these struggles.
Are labor issues front and center in the national discourse? No. Zach posted an excellent quote by John L. Lewis not too long ago which does what the DNC and Obama will not do: situate the issue of labor within the framework of wealth disparity and societal prosperity. Lewis joined the labor cause in the 1920s, but he articulated principles that had been undertaken by trade societies 100 years prior – in the 1820s (Pre-Marx, by the way, and inspired by 18th century Democratic-Republicanism). The same issues were at the fore then: grotesque accumulation of wealth and capital, economic democracy, the concentration of power, and the exploitation of working people. These are the same struggles Americans face today.
In our time, when labor has been under sustained attack the best Democrats seem to utter is that they will keep labor at the table to negotiate their benefits down. Not good enough. That’s not forward. That’s backward. They never seem to discuss legislation that creates a framework for dramatic union expansion in both private and public sectors. If Democrats do that, I will believe they are serious about reducing poverty and wealth disparity. If President Obama wants my vote he’ll need to take a much more proactive stance on the ability of working people to determine economic independence and economic prosperity instead of passively acquiescing to the mercy of “job creators.” I doubt such a vision will be announced in North Carolina.
PJ, thanks for this comment. You summed up exactly my thoughts on the labor movement and Democratic politics.
Zach, you can’t take this guy’s comment too seriously. After all, he was Harold. Or Kumar. Not sure which. What, were Cheech and Chong not available?
FMSN – you speak of a “winning” message derived from division, disunity, demonization and envy. Your vilification of the public sector belies a great evil – that of blaming public employees for our nation’s economic woes. Pensions did not cause the economic crisis we are facing. Public employees did not cause the economic crisis we are facing.
I don’t need to ask myself why “public sector” wasn’t mentioned, but perhaps rather than jumping on the propagandist bandwagon of division and envy as you have done, you might try to consider these matters with a clear, thoughtful mind. The GOP and DNC are beholden to a corrupt and dysfunctional private sector seeking to eliminate altogether both the public sector and unions. Concerted union busting has been in the works a good fifty years – efforts coordinated between corporations, federal, and state governments. The “winning” anti-union message you speak of is one that has been oiled with the grease of corruption for half a century. It is a message of distortion and disinformation and it is a canker on this nation’s economic well being. Broad prosperity in this country occurs when unions are strong and individuals have a voice in the workplace. In our Democratic Republic the public sector is the first sector, the primary sector from which the private sector necessarily follows. It is the public sector and unions that have historically set the bar for the private sector. They are checks and balances on a sector that cannot be trusted to reasonably balance itself. Try as you may to degrade and minimize the public sector – it is and remains a core structural element in every Democracy from Attica and Athens to America in the present day. Contrary to what you’ve been led to believe it is the public sector that is the great innovation of Democratic society.
What YOU should be asking yourself is how much do you value liberty? How much do you value high wages and economic independence? Who is in control of your life? Your working life? You? You with your jaundiced eye gleaming with malignant spite towards those who seek a voice and a decision-making role in their working lives? What you display is grudging resentment for what unions possess that others don’t – liberty. You are among the malleable convinced to turn on your neighbor with rancor for possessing something you do not possess. You have been trained to covet then betray whom you covet. You have been dishonestly impelled to serve as foot soldier for tyranny and to believe that taking away the liberty of someone else enhances your own.
Without a union, FMSN, you are on your own to “fairly” negotiate wages, working conditions, retirement… Who knows? You may do well judging by the typical girth of your comments. And your comments do reveal how your brilliance gleams like a gilded chamber pot. Most Americans, however, are more lackluster – less brilliant than you are. Most Americans face negotiating with big business entities, multinational corporate behemoths, and administrative personnel trained in the art of employee imposition. Average Americans need something more than your jutting talents of persuasion in their economic lives to “compete” in today’s globalized economy.
There’s a word for the process that I just described, which refers to entering into economic relationships on a more equal footing, maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s called laissez-faire. Now, it’s possible you may regard laissez-faire in terms of regulatory measures or tariffs because that’s how it has been delimited by contemporary capitalism. But, in its 18th Century inception, it was a concept embraced by anti-capitalists who viewed the individual as the proprietor of liberty and the domain of the economy. The proponents of this philosophy had many names here and abroad. Here, many were known as Democratic-Republicans or simply, Republicans.
The populist movement of Democratic-Republicanism centers around notions of hierarchy, manifested in established religion, incorporated entities, and the “financial aristocracy,” the latter group being a special concern in matters pertaining to concentration of wealth leading to concentration of power and vice versa. As it happens Democratic-Republicanism’s immediate successors in the early decades of the 19th century also adopted laissez-faire. Who were their immediate successors? The early union movements (farmers and laborers) who sought a counterbalance to the rise of exploitive capitalists and industrialists. Laissez-faire provided the framework for their struggle against exploitation. They advocated for democracy in their lives. Because laissez-faire was an idea intended to apply to individuals, not to chartered monopolies or corporations nor was its intent to guide economic relations between individuals and incorporated bodies.
Then, but even more so now, individuals had lost control of the economy. It had been usurped by those that used concentration of wealth abusively and tyrannically. Then, as now, those early unions were keenly aware that broad prosperity in this country is possible only when individuals are not deprived of their liberties whether those liberties be threatened in the political or economic sphere. Laissez-faire posits the idea that parties entering into economic relations must not be at disadvantage to one another. Collective bargaining by unions – balancing the power for individuals – is what brought broad prosperity to this country. Right Wing Extremists don’t want to acknowledge that basic fact, but the data is there. The evidence is there in the historical correlation between the strength of unions and the strength of the economy as a whole. Just because Radical Right Wing Extremists had their heads in the sand during the recall doesn’t mean that the empirical evidence doesn’t still speak to truth and reality. It does. Walker didn’t win on truth. He won on exceptionally well-funded lies and obfuscation. He was funded by the very forces that would profit at the expense of average Americans. But when your average joe can’t distinguish his own individual interest and individual liberty from that of those entities financing Walker’s propaganda machine – well then – no the message won’t resonate. Not rocket science.
The “winning” message is the message of liberty, economic democracy, economic independence, and broad prosperity that comes with unionization. You see “winning” from the perspective of the GOP’s political warfare frame. Your view is electoral politics of the ugliest variety. The “winning” message is the one where America wins. America wins when it is fully unionized and liberated from economic despotism.