Diane Ravitch Bob Herbert's new book Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America is one of the most important, most compelling books that I have read in many years. For those of us who have felt that something has gone seriously wrong in our country, Herbert connects the dots. He provides a carefully documented, well-written account of what went wrong and why. As he pulls together a sweeping narrative, he weaves it through the personal accounts of individuals whose stories are emblematic and heartbreaking. Herbert reminds us of a time when America's policymakers had great visions for the future and acted to make them real, whether it was the building of the Erie Canal or the transcontinental rail system, Franklin D. Roosevelt's TVA, or Dwight D. Eisenhower's national highway system. He reminds us that the American dream was to create a nation where there were good jobs for those who wanted to work, where there was increasing equality, and a growing middle class. What we have today is a nation dominated by plutocrats and corporations, which are allowed by the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision to dump unlimited amounts of money into elections and to write legislation that favors plutocrats and corporations; what we have is historic levels of wealth inequality and income inequality, where corporations outsource good jobs and many people are slipping from the middle class into minimum wage jobs or even poverty. Herbert explains that our failure to invest in rebuilding the nation's infrastructure has left us with crumbling bridges, tunnels, water mains, sewers, and gas lines, which are dangerous and sometimes fatal to citizens who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, as bridges collapse, levees fall, and gas lines explode. He goes into detail about the corporate assault on public education, fueled by the plutocrats' desire to turn education into a free market. He points out that the plutocrats' favorite reform -- charter schools -- enroll a tiny percentage of students and have on average an unimpressive record. Their relentless attacks on the teaching profession will damage that profession for many years into the future. Herbert spent time in Pittsburgh, meeting the activists and parent leaders there. He saw at ground-level the harm inflicted by massive cuts in the state budget and the determination of parents to fight back. He describes the emptiness of the reformers' boast that they can close the achievement gap by privatization and by union-busting. Having talked to teachers, parents, and principals, he knows the harm that poverty inflicts on children, the pain caused by living without adequate food, shelter, and medical care. Herbert writes movingly about the endless wars in the Middle East of the past decade. Did the policymakers know what they were doing when they launched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did they have a strategy for victory? No, they did not. They launched wars with a goal (victory) but not a plan. He quotes Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who assured the American public that our invasion of Iraq would not last longer than five months. Herbert writes about a remote sector in Afghanistan called "the valley of death," where American troops struggled to establish a base. It was portrayed in an award-winning documentary called Restrepo. Many young Americans died there, but no one could explain why our troops were sent there; eventually, the disaster ended, and we abandoned that forlorn valley. Herbert cites economists who calculate that the wars of the past decade will cost trillions of dollars, as well as thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of lives of people in the countries we went to "save." There is no end in sight. Does anyone still believe that Iraq or Afghanistan are on their way to become stable democracies or even a country that will no longer harbor terrorists? Herbert pulls all these events and issues into a coherent whole. We have lost our way. Our elected officials dream no big dreams. They have little or no concept of major public works programs to rebuild our nation's infrastructure, which would put millions of people to work and invigorate our economy. They willingly waste blood and treasure on wars in distant lands, yet they cannot bring themselves to invest in our nation and create jobs by rebuilding the vital roads, tunnels, bridges, sewers, and other public assets that are now in disrepair, rusting, crumbling, threatening lives. We have money aplenty for war, but no money to put people to work fixing our infrastructure. Plutocrats buy politicians to protect their fortunes and reduce their taxes. Corporations buy politicians who will deregulate their activities and cut their taxes. The stock market rewards corporations that cut their payroll, firing experienced employees who had served those corporations loyally for decades. Men like Jack Welch of GE and "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap became famous as business leaders who coolly and heartlessly fired tens of thousands of workers to increase shareholder value in their corporations. Herbert writes: "How did things go so wrong? How is it that so many millions were finding it so difficult to get ahead, to emerge from the terrible, demoralizing rut of joblessness and underemployment? In a country as rich as the United States, why were so many being left behind? "The biggest factor by far was the toxic alliance forged by government and America's megacorporations and giant banks. That alliance of elites, fueled by endless greed and a near-pathological quest for power, reshaped the rules and regulations of the economy and the society at large to heavily favor the interest of those who were already well-to-do. In the process they trampled the best interests of ordinary Americans." Herbert's book comes alive through his account of the experiences of two individuals: one, a woman in Minnesota who was driving across a bridge that spanned the Mississippi River when it collapsed in 2007; the other, a young man who was grievously wounded in Afghanistan and struggled to regain the ability to walk. In these and many other accounts of individuals and families, Herbert uses his superb journalistic skills to bring major issues to life. Along with the data and the documentation to make his arguments, Herbert vividly portrays what matters most: the human impact of political decisions. If you read only one book this year, make it Bob Herbert's Losing Our Way. It will change you. It will make you want to get involved, take action, make a difference. As he says at the end of the book, it doesn't have to be this way. Changing it depends on us.
Democracy on the critical list: How do we escape this toxic political cycle? Will American politics ever break free from its "Groundhog Day" nightmare? Someday -- but it might not be pretty ANDREW O'HEHIR . . . Is there any plausible way out of this obsessive, recursive cycle, in which we can expect to see President Clinton 2.0 take office in January of 2017 with a feeble and ineffective Democratic majority, only to be punished for her feminist acts of treason by the resurgent angry white men in 2018, and so on, ad nauseam? Yeah, there must be. We just don’t see what that might be yet, and anybody who says they do is full of it. Nothing endures forever, especially not in politics. The United States has already gone through at least five or six distinct systems of factional or partisan electoral politics. Back in February, I put forward the hypothesis that we have entered a new one: The current era of stagnation, gridlock and symbolic cultural warfare could be considered the Seventh Party System, supplanting the Sixth, which began with Pat Buchanan’s “Southern strategy” of 1968 and the ensuing conservative counterrevolution. How we might possibly get out of this mess has been the subject of considerable magical thinking on all sides. I’ll take these propositions one at a time, but here are the four big ones I see. First, there’s the idea that we’ll elect some president so charismatic and large-spirited and post-partisan that he or she will heal our wounds, reach from one fortified bunker to another and forge a new way of consensus or compromise. Yes, it’s the “transformational figure” fantasy, and you can stop laughing now. Or is that crying? Then there’s the alluring notion, extensively indulged in online comments forums, that one party will conclusively win the ideological debate and banish the other to near-permanent secondary status. (This sounds comical now, but remember that when Republicans won the House in 1994 they ended 40 uninterrupted years of Democratic majorities.) Next comes the allied but distinct notion that demographic change will doom one party to irrelevance, or force it to change into something unrecognizably different. (You get only one guess.) Finally, if we conclude that none of those things is likely to happen any time soon, we introduce a fourth possibility, the big unforeseen event that leads to implosion, collapse, transformation or revolution. That one sounds the most far-fetched, but it’s a little like Nietzsche’s proverb about the abyss: The longer you look at it, the more irresistible it becomes. 1. The Transformational President . . . 2. Total Victory at Last! . . . 3. The Demographic Long March . . . 4. The Big Lebowski Here’s where we get to the possibility of some world-historical event that scrambles the entire political equation, and causes the system to reinvent itself or come crashing down. No such calamity sounds especially likely on its own: Ted Cruz loses the presidential election but incites a right-wing coup in the red states; a stolen election — one more egregious than the one we’ve already had — sparks widespread civil disobedience in the cities; a calamitous drought or series of hurricanes leads to panic, financial collapse and martial law. You can make up your own scenario, not necessarily less plausible than those. But as I just said, the 2014 midterms demonstrated that the political system is dangerously shallow and precarious, and that voters are motivated far more by unthinking hatred and fear than by any form of hope or reason. Such an unstable context, where a large majority of the population mistrusts both parties and their leaders, all branches of government and most other supposed pillars of civil society, is not far from what Lenin called a “revolutionary situation,” primed for civil war or conquest, for exploitation by vanguard movements and cults of personality. Almost everyone in our society professes loyalty to the vague symbolic idea of “America,” but the contradictions embedded within that idea have become ever more prominent, and it no longer functions as a unifying concept. Anyone who believes that a nation-state as big, as well entrenched and as strongly fortified as ours could never suffer a sudden collapse under its own atrophied weight and internal divisions should go talk to Mikhail Gorbachev, who has spent much of the last 23 years running a nonprofit in San Francisco. All those far-fetched possibilities, taken together, add up to a not-impossible medium-term future in which the United States either ceases to exist – an event, sad to say, that would be widely celebrated around the world – or becomes something very different from what it is now. If such a thing happened, it could go in all sorts of dreadful directions. But I’m honestly not sure it would be worse than the more plausible disaster scenario, the world-historical transformation that is already well underway. That’s the one in which the United States is slowly bankrupted into permanent dependency by endless, secret foreign wars while tiny cadres of the ultra-rich squabble over control of the economy. Electoral politics is angrily contested over a narrow but contentious range of lifestyle issues, and drives away all but the most committed culture warriors on either side. Nothing is done about the warming climate, the poisoning of the air, water and soil, the elimination of biodiversity or the mass extinction of other species. Lost in our 14-hour workdays and our consumer bubbles of pretend affluence, we don’t really pay attention, although we’re sad about the pandas and the polar bears and we hope somebody will do something about it eventually. In due course the political stalemate between Republicans and Democrats stops mattering, stops existing and is gone with the wind.
Bob Herbert is a joke. He lists all these great public works projects like the Erie Canal, the TVA, the interstate highway system. None could be built now because of exaggerated environmentalist hysteria. Don't believe me? Then how to explain the six years of foot dragging on a relatively minor pipeline, the XL, that would have provided tens of thousands of high paying jobs, jobs that the democrats' union paymasters desperately wanted. Environmentalist hysteria prevailed however. Citizens United is this great bogeyman for the left. Herbert apparently believes that it ushered in income inequality and a host of other problems. Actually the destruction of decent middle class jobs can more accurately be blamed on both parties' obsession with free trade. You won't hear that from Herbert because big money liberals, eg in Silicon Valley and Wall Streeet, have benefitted enormously from it. And who pushed it the hardest? Good ole Bill Clinton, Mr. Populist himself.
Julie Sokolow The Dark Side of Black Friday As a recovering suburbanite, strip malls make me anxious. They remind me of my childhood, a time when a McDonald's hamburger was a tasty, uncomplicated object. A time before Chris Ellis - a McDonald's employee who makes only $7.60 an hour - showed me the fryer burns running up and down his arm in the backseat of a labor organizer's car. It's the day before Halloween and Chris, myself, and thirty others are headed to the suburb of Greensburg, PA. Cruising around Greengate Centre Circle, the McDonald's, Chick-fil-A, and Verizon stores are mere foreplay leading up to the Walmart Supercenter. This monolithic box represents our nation's largest employer, but Chris doesn't seem daunted. "We want all workers to grow strong together," Chris says. "Their fight is our fight." Tristean Weaver paces the parking lot of a nearby Panera Bread. She's a 21-year-old employee of Walmart's automotive department who has worked at the Greensburg store for two years. Her hands shake as she thumbs through a manila folder. "She's brave. What she's doing, most people have not been able to do," says Elaine Kuhar, an organizer with the OurWalmart organization. "She wants to personally deliver the petition to her own manager." Tristean is one of thousands of OurWalmart members across the nation risking retaliation by fighting for $15 an hour, full-time hours, and respect for workers. Despite working full time, it's a struggle for Tristean to afford the basics such as rent, electric, and groceries. While past Walmart CEOs have made the equivalent of$16,826.92 an hour, Tristean only makes $8.60. "In my opinion, customers think that we're stupid, that we're not educated, that we're just doing this because we're lazy," Tristean says. "I mean, they don't understand that I'm a human just like you." Tristean, Chris, and fellow protesters march around the side of the building. A customer shouts with venom "Get a job" as he walks towards the store. I hear an organizer inform the customer that the rally is, in fact, to support the people working at Walmart. The man pauses, then apologizes. Looking at the disgruntled customer, I'm reminded of my own childhood naiveté. I'm sitting in front of the TV with my family on Thanksgiving. A jingle heralds the arrival of "Smiley" the lovable mascot. "Smiley" turns into a buzz saw, slashing prices and delighting customers and employees alike, but the real mascot of Walmart commercials stretching back to 1998 is the obsequious employee. Walmart has so often promoted the image of the happy associate that, to many suburbanites, the sight of an associate speaking out seems against nature. "We're not asking people to boycott Walmart on Black Friday," says Elaine Kuhar, the OurWalmart organizer. "We just want people to respect the workers and recognize that income inequality in this country is affecting everyone." Tristean, Chris, and Elaine sound upbeat about the impending Black Friday actions. They want the actions to be inclusive, a celebration of workers nationwide. On one side of Walmart's sliding doors, suburbanites will line up to buy discounted Xboxes, HDTVs, and Keurig Coffeemakers. On the other side, our country's hardworking associates will rally for your respect and the ability to survive.
Just as much blame rests on government (the Fed) for devaluing the dollar enough that costs have risen to the point where average citizens can no longer afford them. The bullshit belief that we have to have 1-2% inflation every year is stupid, outdated and incorrect thinking.
I say get some unions in there to tell Walmart what the right wage is. Look how well it's worked out in other industries. Or even better, just get politicians to raise the minimum wage to whatever they think is a good decent living wage. Certainly they know the market and economy better than Walmart. Seriously, it doesn't help Walmart for their CEO to be taking home an obscene comp package when a good number of their employees are being subsidized by taxpayers with foodstamps, medicaide, etc. Not every job is worth $15/hour, most people making those low rates are young or retired, etc and many of them will advacne up the ladder in due time, but it's poor motivation for the CEO to be making hundreds of times what the actual workers do.