The great labor bard and martyr Joe Hill was executed on a dubious murder charge by a Utah firing squad on November 19, 1915. He instantly became a worldwide icon who 'never died'. Tonight on the radio we feature a recent musical work: Joe Hill: 16 Actions for Orchestra, Voices and Soloist. It's a kind of cantata that dramatizes the Joe Hill story interwoven with some of his songs.
Are you as tired as I am with never-ending critiques of Barack Obama coming from the left as well as the right? Mainstream punditry has decided that he is largely a failed president (never forget that the MSM thought he was a failed candidate before he wasn't). Everyone on the left thinks, as one friend (a committed feminist) said the other night, ‘he has no balls.' The current rage is focused on apparent White House support for some sort of compromise on extending those Bush tax cuts. And there's plenty of other betrayals over which to wring hands and gnash teeth.
Handwringing and teeth gnashing don't bring the needed change, however. Why do we keep playing this blame game?
Let's stipulate, the administration needs to be criticized and pressed to correct course. There's no doubt that the president needs to figure out how to explain his key policies to those whose disapproval seems based on misunderstanding. This seems especially true for health care reform, the complexity of which has been key to its apparent unpopularity (I say this in light of the fact that large majorities approve of most of the specific provisions of the act when these are described). But the demand that Obama become more confrontational in order to challenge the fatuous and foolish GOP in congress isn't good strategic advice for him. The country sees him as trying to solve problems and govern, and sees the GOP already as obstructionist. A significant number of people who once identified as Republican now declare as independents. Here's some recent polling evidence. For us on the left, Obama's reasonableness is frustrating. But it could be his best chance to prevail in terms of policy as well as politics.
But...
As I keep saying in this space, if progressives want to promote real change we can't be waiting for Barry, it's up to us. We should be asking each other, not what should he be doing, but what should we do. Of course it's fine to mobilize for a progressive/populist tax measure in the lame duck congress and to defend social security in the face of the Bowles-Simpson initiative. These very focused issues lend themselves well to on-line actions that will give counter-weight to the rightwing onslaught.
But there are more far-reaching measures we should be figuring out how to mobilize for-measures that might really help the people:
A new WPA?
In a recent web posting, Jeanne Mirer and Marjorie Cohen, argued that Obama could do what FDR did-create a lot of jobs by executive order:
"Can the President directly create jobs by executive order? The answer is a resounding yes. Remember when the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which created the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) was passed, one of the purposes was to preserve homeownership, and promote jobs and economic growth.
Much of the TARP money has been repaid and the administration refers to the profit on the payments. If one assumes an average cost of one job is $50,000, 6 million jobs could be immediately created for $300 billion. 12 million jobs could be created for $600 billion. Because this is already appropriated money, Congressional Republicans could not blockit""
Such funding could also be used to support state budgets to protect education and public safety, and to promote weatherization and other green economy job creation.
This past Labor Day the President proposed establishment of an infrastructure bank that would leverage federal seed money to get private and public capital investments to begin dealing with the $2 trillion in infrastructure development the country needs. It's an idea that has been supported by labor movement economists as well as libertarians. LA Mayor Villaragoisa's 30/10 plan to develop massive public transit in LA is in the same spirit. It's likely to attract avid support from all kinds of business interests. It strikes me as the sort of proposal that would substantially outflank TOP obstructionism-and that potentially could result in millions of jobs.
One of the administration's largest failures is the effort find relief for homeowners who are being foreclosed or are below water. The crisis is intensifying because of the tremendous bank fraud. Moratorium on foreclosures, and/or real pressure on banks to modify loans are at least two possible pathways.
Toward a progressive anti-deficit agenda
Socialist senator Bernie Sanders has convened a progressive gathering of major organizations to formulate an alternative deficit reduction program focusing on corporate tax benefits and the Pentagon budget. Congressperson Jan Schakowsky, a member of the deficit commission, has outlined a five year deficit reduction program with a similar thrust.
I list these in order to show that there are very promising major initiatives that could really help the hurting ‘middle class' (i.e. working class). I don't think they will be led from the White House-but I do think they could be next steps for the coalitions that pushed for healthcare and financial reform and that brought about the One Nation march in October. I don't think these formations will do anyone a favor by simply lining up to support whatever the White House considers politically feasible, nor just by waging defensive battles to ‘save' social security and the like.
And, if truth be told, I don't have a lot of hope that the national organizations I've mentioned will easily decide to promote the grassroots action that such initiatives will require. Somehow a national grassroots jobs movement needs to stir-just as it did in the early Thirties. Socialist and communist activists in 1930-32 organized unemployed councils, marches on city hall and the white house, disruptions of relief centers, storming of state capitol buildings, and massive rent strikes. The evidence is pretty clear that these uprisings propelled the reforms now attributed to the New Deal. I've no idea what the contemporary equivalent of such action might look like. But here's the thing-the little inventory of job creating measures I listed earlier shows that something real could be done but for the political stalemate that now rules. History suggests that such stalemates can be dissolved when people with grievances take matters into their own hands. That's what democracy looks like.
Some resources:
Dan Froomkin has been running a series at Huffington Post on ideas to create jobs of which the above are some but there are a number of others.
Please go see the new documentary Inside Job which depressingly dramatizes how we are controlled by a kleptocracy. Some exceedingly rich people, one feels, need to be in jail. And some very prominent academic economists are exceptional embarrassments to the academic profession.
Incidentally, if you take a look at this interesting web article on the unemployed movement of the thirties you will see significant reference to the tenants battles in the Bronx in 1932 in buildings on the same block as where Mickey Flacks grew up a decade later. These events were news to us!
Please comment below-you just need to know that State St. is the great street in Santa Barbara to access the comment box.
This week's Culture of Protest happens on Veteran's day. And the annual pledge drive at KCSB continues. As a Veteran's day special, we'll be featuring excerpts from our recent program that used songs from the Vietnam war to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the war's end--songs that express the experience of those who fought the war...and we're offering a cd of that broadcast as one of our thank you gifts if you pledge.
I've been doing my weekly show, Culture of Protest, at KCSB for more than 28 years. If you've never tuned in, I hope you will (and you can get it streaming on line at www.kcsb.org at 6 PM PST Thursdays). As usual, I'm hoping you'll make a contribution and I'm offering Cd's of several of the most requested recent culture of protest programs as thanks.
You can make a pledge by sending me an email at rflacks@igc.org providing your name, address, phone and donation amount. The basic membership levels are $25 for UCSB students and $50 for non-students. For a basic pledge, you can request one of the following:
Vietnam war soundtrack--a brand new Bear Family compilation of 13 Cd's embodying an exhaustive collection of songs of the Vietnam war provided the basis for a recent show. A perfect way to observe Veteran's Day!
Tribute to Abbey Lincoln--one of the great jazz singers, she died a few months ago and this program interwove her story and her songs
Tribute to the Fugs: Tuli Kupferberg, a Fugs leader, died recently; we presented a montage of Fugs songs that pioneered in bold satire of militarism, Mammon and much else.
Tribute to the 33 Chilean Miners: when they were finally liberated we presented a sampling of the rich musical tradition of miners over the last 150 years. A truly educational experience for me--and I think for
You can have 2 of the above for a $75 donation, 3 for $100. Please include your name, address, phone, pledge request. Or call me when Culture of Protest is on the air: 6-7 pm PST Thursday 11/11 805-893-2424
Essentially what happened on Tuesday was that a large part of the progressive grassroots didn't go to the polls, especially in the Midwest. Young people, who favor Obama and progressive reform, sat it out (as they usually do in non-presidential elections). California may well have been a big exception. There is no sign in our results of any sort of conservative turn (I'll get back to this below). What may have helped was the pot legalization initiative: I haven't seen data on this yet, but that issue may have boosted youth turnout here (not enough of course to pass it, but close). Black voting participation was down from 2008 as well. An important demographic statistic: nearly a quarter of the voters in this election were 65+--the one age group that went for McCain in 2008 (when they were but15% of the electorate). The ‘enthusiasm gap' was real, and it wasn't overcome by the sanity rally, the Daily show appearance by Obama and other GOTV stuff aimed at the young.
Ponder this: the president's most committed base encompasses those groups most vulnerable in the economic slump. Yet all the brilliant voter mobilization efforts seemed not to have enabled many of those folks to see how voting might be a means to better times. Some of this mobilization clearly worked-e.g. Harry Reid's results, perhaps, were enabled by a reputedly superb ground level machine (combined, of course, with the fact that his opponent was recruited from a traveling circus).
There's a lot of blame for this being leveled at President Obama. Marshall Ganz, the guru of community organizers who helped with the Obama presidential mobilization, has been stressing that Obama in office has lost the voice that elected him, turning from what Marshall calls ‘transformational' to ‘transactional' leadership mode. Ganz, John Judis and others see the failure of the youth and minority vote as the result of the President's inability to deliver a populist perspective. It may well be that a more populist and impassioned president would have done something more to energize the young and the disadvantaged. And both Judis and Ganz emphasize the deliberate dismantling of the Obama for America grassroots operation (and folding it into the Democratic Party) as a major strategic mistake Obama and co. made at the start.
I share the critique emotionally (and I've just sketched its more detailed elements; see the articles these guys have written to get more depth). I think, however, that it underestimates the strategic dilemmas Obama has been trying to cope with. For example, I assume that he has been betting on the chance to win GOP moderates in the face of the extremist takeover of the Republican Party. Election returns don't make that sort of move seem promising, yet there is a logic to trying. How to reconcile progressive populism and rational centrism to forge a majority? And, by the way, if you watched any of Obama's stump speaking at huge rallies shown on line and on C-SPAN you might feel that there was a good deal of populist fire coming from him (but certainly late in the game).
There's surely a grassroots populist mood which all of us share. It's not historically unusual (it's really common) for populist energy to be channeled by the far right. "Illegal immigration" was rated as the most important issue by 8% of voters (who voted heavily GOP); but everyone knows that the economy was the number one issue for most-and the majority of those saying so voted Republican. Wall Street bankers got more blame than George Bush or Obama for the state of the economy-and fully 1/3 of those who blamed the bankers voted GOP (and interestingly, for those who gave health care as the lead issue, the majority were Democratic voters.)
But the central populist frame has to do with the debt, taxes, government spending. I think for most of us deficit rage is a mystery. After all, it seems plain enough that the real deficit is in private investment and consumer spending, and the first law of Keynesian policy is that government deficits help overcome that private spending failure. The need for pump priming has been understood for a few generations, we thought. Less well grasped is that public investments are crucial for the economy as a whole and that such investment (like private investment) gets repaid in many direct and indirect ways.
I think Obama's biggest failure has been his inability to explain these things. Instead, his main message tends to accept the anti-deficit line and talk regretfully about the emergency that forced him to do unpleasant spending. The administration claims, but fails to persuade, that the health care reform will in fact reduce the debt substantially in the long run. The President talks about the need to invest in infrastructure, but doesn't seem to have spent real thought in how to make us understand the difference between public investment and unproductive spending (since our retrograde budgeting process itself fails to make such distinctions clear). In his press conference yesterday, we could hear some pretty good efforts to say these things-but surely much more could be done to try to clarify the public mind.
The Tea party, the GOP and the deficit hawks are peddling what most economists consider poppycock about these matters. And their seriousness can be questioned given that it was W's administration that created a vast deficit without evident outcry. A serious anti- big government crusade would certainly focus on defense spending and expose gigantically wasteful weapons projects. It would deeply question whether we can afford the discretionary wars. And it would be willing to engage the possibility that ‘tax relief' for the wealthy and is a major cause of the long-term deficit. According to some leftwing writers who are soft on libertarianism, maybe such thoughts will emerge from the mouth of Rand Paul (whose pop has gotten fans because of his anti war and anti -empire stance).
But I don't think the anti-spending mania (which has infected the regimes of Europe as well) can simply be a matter of ignorance or ideology. What might be fueling it at the grassroots includes feelings on the part of aging well-off white people that the benefits of such spending go to the colored and/or undeserving poor (and to government workers as well). Given the demographics underlying the voting, we may want to ponder the persistence of what my colleague Howie Winant calls' racial formations'-i.e. the various ways that structures and polices that sustain racial disparity are rationalized and displaced in political consciousness.
Anyway-here's the main point I want to make right now and hopefully engage with as we struggle forward:
We progressives have spent the last number of years working hard to advance some semblance of equality and justice through the electoral process and national legislation. We've helped achieve at least the health care reform. Now we need to see that by focusing energy in those ways we have failed to do some crucial things that must be done if this country can hope to break out of the corporate dictatorship that now controls regular politics. We, like the President, have largely failed to provide the vision and the rationale that makes people understand and desire a social and economic democracy. So we need to spend more time on that rather than just the wonkery. We need to invest in creating grassroots public debate and help communities get the materials that can fuel that. We need to really engage the college campuses in such debate and not just see students as fodder at election time to fuel the campaigns. In future writings I'll try to call attention to the ideas and perspectives that we ought to be discussing (perspectives going beyond defense of government spending and campaign finance reform, as defining issues for our side).
We need to focus on the war issue not only for moral reasons but because this really is a way to connect to public anxiety (nearly 60% of the conservatively tilted voters oppose the war). Obama has given up fighting on climate change (except that he will try to reach common ground with the corporate and rightwing in favor of nuclear power). Instead of focusing on incomprehensible and dubious ideas like cap and trade, how can we take hold of what the California vote proved: people are coming to understand the value of the green economy?
The One Nation March is already forgotten by media-an amnesia greatly nurtured by John Stewart's rather infantile project. Maybe in the coalitional networks created for that march, and in the programmatic material it generated, a framework for the independent progressive movement can be developed.
As always---please weigh in. Register on this site. Use State Street as the name for Santa Barbara's main street. Tell us what you're seeing/feeling
KCSB, Santa Barbara's campus/community free radio voice, is now in its annual membership/fundraising mode. It's been at 91.9 on the dial for 40 years, broadcasting 24/7. it's programming is as diverse, free wheeling and non-corporate as anything you'll hear anywhere in the US. And virtually all of the work is done by scores of student and community volunteers. KCSB needs community financial support to supplement the budget it gets from UCSB students.
I've been doing my weekly show, Culture of Protest, at KCSB for more than 27 years. If you've never tuned in, I hope you will (and you can get it streaming on line at www.kcsb.org at 6 PM PST Thursdays). As usual, I'm hoping you'll make a contribution and I'm offering cd's of several of the most requested recent culture of protest programs as thanks.
You can make a pledge by sending me an email at rflacks@igc.org providing your name, address, phone and donation amount. The basic membership levels are $25 for UCSB students and $50 for non-students. For a basic pledge, you can request one of the following:
Tribute to Abbey Lincoln--one of the great jazz singers, she died a few months ago and this program interwove her story and her songs
Tribute to the Fugs: Tuli Kupferberg, a Fugs leader, died recently; we presented a montage of Fugs songs that pioneered in bold satire of militarism, Mammon and much else.
Tribute to the 33 Chilean Miners: when they were finally liberated we presented a sampling of the rich musical tradiion of miners over the last 150 years. A truly educational experience for me--and I think for
You can have 2 of the above for a $75 donation, 3 for $100. Please include your name, address, phone, pledge request. Or call me when Culture of Protest is on the air: 6-7 pm PST Thursday 11/4 and 11/11 (I'll be pitching twice during the fund drive). 805-893-2424
Dick Flacks here...sociology professor emeritus at UCSB. Budget cuts mean that I can't continue my annual course on political sociology. Maybe a blog will be a space for me to continue to ruminate and pontificate. And maybe (as a veteran teacher on these matters) I can offer some ways of thinking about what's happening nationally and locally that will be useful, as we struggle to make sense of the tortured complexities of these times.
I've been a leftwing activist for more than 50 years. What we've been struggling for all these years is full democracy--to increase the opportunities for people to have real voice in the decisions that affect them. Step by step over these years we've made some gain...but it is a long march, and one that never ends. The big barrier to democracy in our society is the concentrated power of corporations. At the same time, democracy is undermined by the felt powerlessness of people in their daily lives--the persistent belief that our problems are only our own personal concern. It's a strong cultural theme--such individualism--constantlly reinforced by mass media and everyday circumstance. But the current big crisis of the economy maybe makes it more possible for more people to understand that we've got to have social reform and economic reform. So my writing here is aimed at helping us figure out what to think and act on that so that we can hope for new democratic possibilities. WE'll be talking about the local and the national.
The blog name comes from an old labor union hymn:
Step by step the longest march can be won. Many stones can form an arch...singly none. And by union what we will can be accomplished still. Drops of water turn a mill, singly none, singly none.
For 27 years I've had a weekly radio show on KCSB (91.9 fm. www.kcsb.org) It's called the Culture of Protest. It's comes from my fascination with music and social movements. I collect 'political' and 'protest' music and that's what we play each week (Thursdays 6-7 pm). So sometimes here we'll share and talk about that.
I'm worried about one thing about the blogosphere. And that's the way that some people use the blog comment space for anonymous nastiness. I'm sick of the kind of political blather that assaults the motives of others, and sees dark conspiracy behind every thing one doesn't like. This kind of stuff is helping to poison the political atmosphere. So I'm going to strive for a civil tone to whatever interaction may happen on this blogsite.
