Hollywood and the Working Class

Last week one of the strangest stories to go viral in the first hours after riot police cleared Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park was the fact that dozens of celebrities were tweeting about the raid. Tweets from Alec Baldwin, John Cusack, Chuck D, Russell Simmons and Michael Moore were re-circulated in at least 8,000 news stories, blogs and other tweets. Journalists reported that the celebrity tweets were full of concern and outrage, as in this tweet from Mark Ruffalo “People in Liberty Park were pepper sprayed. Police beat women. Press pushed out so they could not witness the crackdown. Dehumanizing 99%#Ows.”

At virtually the same moment Time magazine mounted a slide show on its website of the five most “colorful” celebrity critics of Occupy Wall Street. At the top of the list was Frank Miller, author/illustrator of 300, Sin City and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns who called the protestors “a bunch of iPhone, iPad wielding spoiled brats who should stop getting in the way of working people and find jobs for themselves.” Also in the top five were Ben Stein, long time Republican-identified star of the game show Win Ben Stein’s Money and All Clear eye solution commercials, The View talk show host Elizabeth Hasselbeck, hyperbolic pundit Glenn Beck, and Frasier star Kelsey Grammer.

Though this recent news coverage of celebrity involvement in politics is almost parodically superficial, political celebrity is hardly the latest fad. Activism by actors is as old as Hollywood itself . As Steven J. Ross argues in his new book, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (2011), the power of Hollywood celebrities to effect real political change dates back to the first red scare in US history, when J. Edgar Hoover ordered FBI agents in to investigate left-leaning stars. In 1922 FBI agents reported back to Hoover that “numerous movie stars” were taking “an active part in the Red movement in this country.” These actors, the agents reported, were “hatching a plan to circulate ‘Communist propaganda…via the movies.’”

If The New York Times is right (and I hope it is) and Occupy Wall Street represents the legitimate beginnings of the third progressive movement in modern American politics, then Ross’s book is a timely reminder that we should treat celebrities’ involvement in politics seriously. With Hollywood Left and Right, Ross has produced a thoroughly researched, extremely readable, and fascinating account of Hollywood stars, on the left as well as the right, who have used their money, influence, and star power, as well as their considerable organizing and leadership talents to create, sustain, and shape American political movements.

Ross has spent much of his career finding the connections between popular films, film stars, and working class and left politics. His seminal Working Class Hollywood offered the counter-intuitive thesis that working class politics could be found in early silent films, and in this book Ross argued that unions were among the most enthusiastic early adopters of film technology for their cause.

With Hollywood Left and Right, Ross gives us ten engaging biographies of some of the most prominent and political Hollywood stars and moguls, from studio head Louis B. Mayer to Charlie Chaplin, Edward G. Robinson, Harry Belafonte, George Murphy, Warren Beatty, Charlton Heston, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For readers like myself who did not grow up in the 1950s and 1960s, the biographies of Ronald Reagan and Jane Fonda are especially surprising. In the Jane Fonda chapter Ross explains how Fonda’s momentary lapse in judgment during a trip to Vietnam labeled her forever as Hanoi Jane, but Ross also shows why her long, committed political career should be seen in greater detail and complexity. Fonda was an important foot soldier as well as a leader and strategist for the New Left—an activist more committed to stuffing envelopes and knocking on doors than to becoming a high profile emblem of the cause. Likewise the stereotype of Reagan as an “actor turned politician” does little justice to Reagan’s long, sometimes contradictory, but surprisingly intellectual and well-thought-out transition from the silver screen to the presidency.

But what about Hollwood and the working class? What can Ross’s history of political celebrities tell us about this fragile and fascinating relationship? Ross shows at least three ways that political celebrities have connected to the working class over the last century:1) many political celebrities came from working-class backgrounds and/or had working class sympathies from a young age; 2) many political celebrities have played working-class characters; 3) many political celebrities, both left and right, have understood that their audiences were mostly working-class and have used the populist rhetoric of “ordinary Americans” to explain their political actions.

Of the Hollywood luminaries that Ross profiles, Louis B. Mayer, Charlie Chaplin, and Edward G. Robinson had the most hard-scrabble childhoods. Mayer, born Lazar Meir in the Ukraine, migrated to Canada in the early 1900s,where his father became a junk dealer. For London-born Chaplin, after his parents divorced he was “plunged into the harsh underbelly of Victorian London.” It was there, according to Ross, that the humiliation Chaplin suffered at the hands of condescending reformers and do-gooders was even worse than being cold and hungry. Edward G. Robinson was a Romanian immigrant whose parents sent their sons to America one by one, as they could afford to, after Robinson’s brother Jack was killed in Romania by an anti-Semitic mob. Robinson later attended PS 20 in New York City, living with his family in a “cramped Broome Street tenement flat.” And even stars like Reagan and Warren Beatty, who grew up in relatively middle-class homes, both suffered from having alcoholic fathers. Low down suffering, it seems, lurks in the biography of many a political Hollywood star.

Ross also writes about the way these political stars played working-class characters on the big screen. Ross explains how Chaplin created working-class characters, like The Tramp, who was not content with his station in life, and who even engaged in political struggle, however hilariously. Robinson played lowbrow gangsters throughout the 1930s, and he knew that the gangster motif appealed to working-class viewers who envied the gangster’s material success but who also judged the route the gangster used to achieve it. Belafonte, who also had a difficult immigrant childhood, played a labor leader in the film Island in the Sun (1957). Warren Beatty, who resisted many calls to enter politics as a candidate in his own right, played the radical John Reed, in the epic film Reds. Jane Fonda memorably played Gertie Nevels, the luckless working-class Appalachian mother in The Dollmakers (1984).

Finally, Ross writes about the way that Hollywood’s more political stars understood the classed nature of the film industry’s mass audience, and how some used populist rhetoric to describe their own political choices. Mayer, despite his conservative politics, or, perhaps because of them, understood that the movie industry was built on the “nickels of the working class.” Reagan and George Murphy, from the years they spent appealing to viewers at the box office as “B” movie stars, understood how to craft a message that would appeal to working-class Americans, even if the policies they campaigned for ultimately hurt those same people. “Americans really are conservatives,” Reagan argued on the campaign trail in the 1960s. “They pay their bills, they don’t run big debts.” Echoing this populist note, Arnold Schwarzenegger “warned Democratic and Republican politicians tos ‘do your job for the people and do it well, otherwise you’re hasta la vista, baby.’” Likewise Jane Fonda’s China Syndrome is about the way ordinary people rise up against a large corporation, demanding answers as well as change.

The most important lesson of Ross’s book is that when Hollywood stars become political, their rhetoric, and their activism, should be taken seriously. Though Ross certainly leans to the left himself, he admires the sincerity and the skill with which even right-leaning Hollywood politicos have operated. “They worked as hard at their politics as they did at their screen careers,” Ross argues. The “United States would be a far better place,” Ross, concludes, if each of us was willing to work as hard as these emblematic Hollywood luminaries.

But another, more subtle lesson of Hollywood Left and Right is that political movie stars have often understood that the working class—the 60+% of Americans who do most of the difficult and underappreciated work in our country—must be recognized for the productivity and consumer power they possess. From the ranks of the working class, and, especially, from the ranks of working-class immigrants, we have been given some of our biggest entertainers and stars. Their understanding of poverty, suffering, and solidarity can serve as inspiration to the rest of us, whatever our backgrounds.

Kathy M. Newman

How Obama Can Win Ohio

Note: This week’s blog is a repost of John Russo’s column from Friday’s Opinionator blog at the New York Times.

The decisive referendum vote to repeal the bill that would limit collective bargaining by public sector unions has changed the political landscape in Ohio. Tuesday’s vote on Senate Bill 5 could and should be a harbinger for the 2012 presidential election. By mounting a direct assault on public sector workers and the unions who represent them, Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio may have done more to help Barack Obama win re-election than anything Obama’s political team is likely to do over the next 12 months.

With Ohio’s continuing high unemployment rate (9.1%!, just like the rest of the U.S), it had seemed unlikely that President Obama could win Ohio, and without Ohio, he’d have difficulty getting re-elected. The same factors make re-election a challenge for Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democratic and one of the most pro-labor members of the Senate. But Kasich, the Republicans in the Ohio legislature and outside conservative financers and think tanks like the Buckeye Institute, may have done Obama and Brown a big favor.

Karl Rove described Senate Bill 5 as a much “more extensive reform” to public sector unions than was enacted in Wisconsin, in part because the Ohio version included firefighters and police officers. While the protests in Columbus were smaller and received less national attention than those in Madison, unions and community groups in Ohio organized a ballot initiative with 10,000 volunteers circulating petitions in all 88 counties. Over 1.3 million Ohioans — more than five times the number required to put the initiative on the ballot — signed the petitions.

Despite a large influx of money from conservative organizations like Citizens United, Freedom Works, and Restoring America, Ohio voters repealed Senate Bill 5 by an overwhelming 22 point margin — 39% yes, 61% no (a no vote was pro-union). Democrats and independents voted overwhelmingly against the measure, and, if pre-election polls are correct, 30% of Ohio Republicans also voted to reject Senate Bill 5.

This should be good news for Obama. While Ohio is notorious for swinging back and forth between supporting Republicans and Democrats, its 18 electoral votes are especially important for Republican candidates. It’s almost impossible for a Republican to win the presidential election without Ohio, and that means winning significant support among union household voters.

According to CNN exit polls from the last few elections, union household voters remain a strong presence in Ohio, even after more than three decades of de-industrialization. Twenty-eight percent of Ohio voters come from union households, compared with 23 percent nationally. In 2008, they underperformed for Obama, who won 56 percent of their votes in Ohio versus 59 percent from union households across the country. No similar data exists for the 2010 midterm election, but many labor leaders admit that Kasich beat the Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, in part because voters from community groups and union households either voted Republican or stayed home (essentially giving half a vote to Kasich).

If union households in Ohio lost their enthusiasm for Democratic candidates in recent years, Kasich’s actions, together with the national Republicans’ just-say-no politics and kill-Medicare initiatives (like the Paul Ryan budget), have made the Democrats look a lot better than they did in 2010.

It all comes down to math. In 2008, 2,933,388 Ohioans voted (or 51.5%) for Obama, 258,897 more than McCain won. If union households maintain their proportion of the electorate, and if just 1 percent more of them vote for Democrats, they can add 15,700 votes to the Democratic vote and subtract the same number from the Republicans – a swing of more than 31,000 votes. If Ohio’s union household voters increase their support for Democrats by 3 percent – that is, if they match the national average for union household voters – they would generate 47,100 additional votes for Obama, a swing of 94,200 votes. That alone could give the president Ohio’s electoral votes.

But because of Senate Bill 5, we might reasonably expect an even larger shift. A recent Quinnipiac poll suggests that the anger generated by the anti-union bill and the organizing fostered by the effort to overturn it has 70 percent of union household voters planning to support Obama and the Democrats in 2012. That translates into an increase of 219,829 votes for Obama, a swing of almost 440,000 votes. Put differently, a mobilized Ohio labor movement with 742,000 members, including many teachers, police officers, and firefighters who have often voted Republican, will be more likely to vote for Democrats in 2012.

This gives Obama the opportunity to score a big victory in Ohio, but that won’t happen solely on the basis of Senate Bill 5. The president must offer a positive economic vision and a program for economic change. The American Jobs Act – even if it must be pushed through piecemeal — is a good start, as are the president’s recent actions on mortgages and student loans.

Such positions will also help Senator Brown’s chances of re-election, but in 2012, in Ohio at least, the usual pattern of members of Congress benefiting from presidential coattails could be reversed. Brown’s solid support for organized labor, community groups and those who have been most hurt by the continuing economic crisis — positions that resonate with the millions of Ohio voters who overturned Senate Bill 5 — may help Obama more than anything Obama has done will help Brown.

None of this is guaranteed, of course. In order for the battle over Senate Bill 5 to influence the 2012 election, those who have organized so effectively to defend unions must continue to work together. Unions will have to keep educating members and reach out to those outside of the labor movement. They will also have to work closely with community and neighborhood groups like the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which played a pivotal role in community organizing around Senate Bill 5.

None of that will be easy. Competing interests within and between organized labor and community organizations make the coalition very fragile. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. is relatively weak in Ohio, and some tensions exist between public and private sector unions. Meanwhile, Ohio Republicans are threatening to put parts of Senate Bill 5 through in a series of smaller bills next year. Without solidarity across labor organizations, the coalition that fought so well against one big bill could fracture. It may be that other issues won’t have the unifying effect of Senate Bill 5. After all, the same voters who overturned that bill approved a constitutional amendment barring the implementation of the individual insurance mandate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act.

But if the organizers of the campaign against Senate Bill 5 can hold together and if the Obama campaign can tap into the anger and solidarity of that fight, Tuesday’s vote could turn out to be the turning point in the 2012 election.

 

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

Memo to the Occupiers

Occupy Wall Street has many on the left cheering.  That includes me, albeit with reservations.

As someone who devoted a good portion of his life to fighting  injustice—or as the late liberal icon and state legislator Robert Hagan was fond of saying “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable”—I have a natural affinity for the folks camped out in New York and other cities around the nation and the world.

On the other hand, as someone who has spent the past 24 years striving to affect change by working both inside and outside the “system” I listen to the white noise that’s emanating from the protesters and all I can say is: “Really?”

Really, you have managed to garner the attention of the media around the world and you can’t figure out what the hell it is you want?

Really, leaders of the protests—to the extent there actually are any—are offended that the media is even asking what the hell you want?

Really, the best answer you can give is this kind of mumbo jumbo as reported in the New York Times:

The General Assembly has already adopted a “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” which includes a list of grievances against corporations and a call for others to join the group in peaceful assembly. To many protesters, that general statement is enough, and the open democracy of Zuccotti Park is the point of the movement.

Really, if that’s the point, you guys should all pack up your stuff, grab a low fat, grande latte on your way out, and go home, because you’re wasting everybody’s time.  Worse yet, you’re actually helping the very comfortable miscreants you’re supposedly there to afflict.

Let’s be serious, anyone who thinks the traders and financiers walking around in $5,000 bespoke suits in the offices overlooking the protests gives a damn about marches, chants, signs, or the invective that’s hurled at them as they arrive and leave in their limos and Town Cars each day is, in a word, delusional.  I’ve dealt with people like them, they know they’re evil, they enjoy it, they revel in it, and believe me, they’re laughing at the protesters all day, every day, including on the weekends whether they’re at their Beach House in the Hamptons or flying off to the islands on their Gulfstream Vs.

In fact, when they hear words like these from the occupiers they literally laugh so hard that Dom Perignon flies out of their noses:

In Boston, Meghann Sheridan wrote on the group’s Facebook page, “The process is the message.” In Baltimore, Cullen Nawalkowsky, a protester, said by phone that the point was a “public sphere not moderated by commodities or mainstream political discourse.” An Occupy Cleveland participant, Harrison Kalodimos, is even writing a statement about why demands are not the answer.

Yup, I can see the boys at City Bank reading this stuff in the NYT and then saying: “OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOh we’re so scared of a public sphere not moderated by commodities” Give me a break.

Even someone as smart as Paul Krugman, whom I respect and with whom I usually agree, has been taken in by the “protest is enough” claptrap that, at least for the moment, defines OWS.

You see, until a few weeks ago it seemed as if Wall Street had effectively bribed and bullied our political system into forgetting about that whole drawing lavish paychecks while destroying the world economy thing. Then, all of a sudden, some people insisted on bringing the subject up again.

And their outrage has found resonance with millions of Americans. No wonder Wall Street is whining.

OK, Paul, Wall Street is whining, but guess what, they’re also winning.  That’s because they have bribed and bullied the political system, including the Obama Administration, into doing nothing either to punish them for the damage they’ve done to the economy or to stop them from doing it again.

While I’ll grant that the outrage being expressed does resonate with a vast majority of Americans, that outrage means nothing if it’s not converted into action that brings about real change.  That’s what turns a protest into a movement that fundamentally alters and improves the world we live in.

History provides many examples of how this works: Ghandi’s crusade to dismantle South Africa’s pass laws in the early 1900s; the labor movement’s battle to organize industrial workers in the ‘30s; Dr. King’s drive to secure passage of the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights statutes; the anti-Vietnam war movement that brought down LBJ.  Even this year’s protests in Ohio against SB 5.  All started as protests with clearly defined goals that turned into effective movements.

The same can be said for the Tea Party.  Derided as yahoos and know-nothings when they emerged to protest corporate bailouts and President Obama’s health care reform plan, they coalesced into a movement built on easily understandable demands: smaller government and lower taxes.  Their mantra was adopted by dozens of GOP Congressional candidates in 2010 and played a major role in ousting the Democratic majority.  Since taking power, the Tea Party members have been driving the legislative agenda in Congress—including killing virtually every initiative proposed by the President.

So, here’s some advice for the occupiers wherever you are.  Learn from history.  If you want Wall Street and the new Robber Barons to stop laughing at you, figure out the things they fear and hate the most, then make those things happen.

That’s a principle Tom Friedman of the New York Times grasped in a recent column.  He suggested that OWS demand that four reforms be imposed on the financial services industry.  Nice try, Tom.  Unfortunately, as you point out in the very same column, Wall Street owns Congress, having purchased it with $3.2 billion in campaign contributions over the past 20 years.  As long as that’s the case, it will be a very cold day in Zucotti Park and the other places the OWSers are congregating before the change they’re seeking occurs.

So what should the protesters demand or do?  Here’s two suggestions for starters.  First, fight for real campaign finance reform that reverses the Citizens United decision and takes the “For Sale” sign off the Capitol and the White House.  Renew the push for publicly financed campaigns started a couple of decades ago by folks like Fred Wertheimer.  Look, it’s a proven fact that politicians respond to the people who write the checks that finance their campaigns. So it’s logical to believe that if those checks come from Main Street rather than Wall Street the people with the power to reform the financial system might actually do it.  Now that’s something the fat cats will really hate.

Second, the protestors should head to Massachusetts and do whatever it takes to make Dr. Elizabeth Warren Senator Warren in January of 2013.  There’s no one Wall Street hates more, which should be motivation enough to support her campaign.  There’s also a practical reason: her willingness to fight for working families.  Elect her to the Senate where she can team up with a principled colleague like Bernie Sanders of Vermont and they can use the body’s arcane rules to grind business to halt—either to force passage of reform legislation or block bills that favor Wall Street.

Accomplish these two goals and the OWS will have taken a huge stride in going from “Really?” to really making a difference.

Leo Jennings

Empathizing with Capitalists

Once upon a time, in the 1970s, there probably was, as political conservatives and the business class claimed, a capital shortage.  Union power, rising wages, and a tax-and-spend “liberal consensus” had increased household incomes for three decades at the expense of profit rates, and this left businesses without sufficient capital to invest in all the profit-making opportunities provided by expansive consumer spending power.  This, so the story goes, was the root cause of the virulent 1970s inflation.  In the famous Keynesian formula for macroeconomic demand, there was too much spending power in the hands of consumers and government, and too little in the hands of investors.  Capitalists were short of cash, and the solution was clear: get them more, a lot more.

Short term this was accomplished through President Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich in the early 1980s.  But long term it required “breaking the back of the American standard of living,” as I remember Business Week bluntly arguing at the time.  This required limiting, eroding, and chipping away at a whole set of institutional structures built up since the 1940s around labor unions and government.

That mission has now been accomplished – and accomplished all too well.  We now have exactly the opposite problem: too little spending power in the hands of consumers and too much in the hands of investors.  Capitalists are said to be anxious as they sit on some $2 trillion in cash reserves, while real wages and household incomes decline.  There simply is not enough consumer demand to provide profit-making opportunities for capitalists, just the opposite of the 1970s.  The solution is again clear: get more money in the hands of consumers.  In the long run that means we need higher wages, much higher wages, but tax changes and stimulus programs can do a lot of good in the short term, and they are a good way to get started.

Just as in the 1970s the solution was to redistribute spending power from consumers to investors, we now need  redistribution in the other direction, from investors to consumers – not for the purpose of achieving a more equitable distribution of income (as desirable as that is) but, as in the ‘70s, to get the economy growing strongly again.  Raising taxes on top earners to fund job creation and raising wages for low earners is not just about “fair shares” (though it is very much about that, too).  It is necessary to reinvigorate our fat and weary form of capitalism.

The historical symmetry of these opposing problems and solutions is important because current Republican rhetoric about “job killers” and “job creators” assumes that there is always a capital shortage and, if that were true, throwing money at rich people might be part of the solution.  It’s important to realize that this idea once had a legitimate intellectual provenance, disputed to be sure but with a factual basis. That factual basis is gone and has been for quite a while.  With $2 trillion in corporate cash still sitting on the sidelines, it’s hard to argue that we need to overcome a capital shortage!

President Obama’s American Jobs Act implicitly recognized, at least on a temporary basis, that strong economic growth going forward depends on redistributing spending power from capital to labor, from investors to consumers.  For example, it included payroll tax cuts, extended unemployment compensation, and direct federal spending to reemploy teachers, cops, firefighters and construction workers – all paid for by taxing millionaires.  If it had passed, the Act would have increased economic growth by channeling spending power to workers and consumers who very much need it and would, therefore, spend most of it quickly, thereby stimulating other economic activity, leading to more jobs, more income, more consumer spending, and so on.

This is not an aberration.  Much of Obama’s program from the very beginning – the initial stimulus package, semi-universal health care, the Making Work Pay tax credit – has been redistributive in the right direction.   What is lacking is a clear Presidential explanation of the underlying problem – the long-term structural imbalance between investment capital and consumer spending.  Indeed, the President will not admit, even when badgered by Bill O’Reilly earlier this year, that he favors any redistribution of wealth.

Our President denies being a socialist, and I believe him.  For all I know, he may actually be philosophically opposed to the redistribution of income and wealth, seeing his own various redistributive programs as merely temporary expedients.  But someone in his administration understands that the U.S. economy needs more income in the hands of workers and consumers.  Even Business Week and the National Federation of Independent Businesses are beginning to understand it.  So do thousands of Americans occupying Wall Street and other public spaces around the country.  Explaining that – and pounding away at the need for increasing incomes in any way we can think of, as conservatives did with “the capital shortage” back in the day – might actually be more valuable than passing legislation.  Plus, such arguments increase the chances of passing the necessary legislation.

A stronger and more insistent focus on growing incomes in order to grow the economy, coming from the White House and Congressional Democrats, would draw attention to and bolster movements already underway to combat wage theft, pass living wage legislation, and help workers organize unions and other forms of workplace collective action.  All this not just to help poor unfortunate workers, but also to give our capitalists the boost they need.  Greatly increasing consumer demand is the only thing that can provide the myriad of investment opportunities that will save them from their current malaise.

Thus, far from “punishing” the rich and multinational corporations, reducing their cash hordes by increasing wages and average incomes is really for their own good.  I like this paternalistic empathy – especially in contrast to demonizing a whole class of people that I have almost no direct experience of – but I would not indulge that feel-good feeling if it weren’t also so clearly true and urgent.  The best way to give our capitalists a hand up and not a handout is to increase wages and average households’ incomes.

Jack Metzgar, Chicago Committee for Working-Class Studies

The Creative Class Joins the Working-Class

How is the so-called creative class faring in the ongoing economic crisis?  In three books published in the first decade of this century, Richard Florida argued that America’s future lay in metropolitan regions with a high density of “sexually diverse,” cultural, professional, and high-tech workers whose creativity would attract capital and spur future economic development. Recently, in articles in magazines like Salon.com and The Atlantic, critics have been debating whether the creative class is undergoing the same economic transformations as the working class.

 Undaunted by the economic crisis and the subsequent, continuing jobless recovery, Florida continues to suggest that the answer to post-industrialization lies in the continued migration of the so-called creative class to a few cosmopolitan urban areas. The transformation in economic geography would produce winners and losers both individually and regionally based on the ability of communities to develop and attract human capital. His Martin Prosperity Institute has contributed to a report ranking nations on the basis of their investment in innovation and technology.  Of course, all of this reflects Florida’s neo-liberal view that such changes are part of the “natural economic order,” and he has consistently attempted to normalize the new emerging economic order.

But despite Florida’s claims, the creative class is not necessarily winning in the current economy.  Like industrial workers before them, they are being affected by the past 30 years of neo-liberal economic reforms characterized by deregulation, marketization, and liberal trade policy that yielded significant corporate profits from the subcontracting, outsourcing, and the casualization of work in unskilled and semi-skilled industries. As the past decade has made clear, corporations and governments have used those same strategies to make employment for skilled workers, including those in the “knowledge industries,” increasingly precarious.

This has been aided by a different model and language of work, drawn from the so-called “creative industries” — those areas where employees, often in the arts and more recently higher education, were willing to give up stable employment in hierarchical organizations and embraced – or at least accepted – contingent employment involving self-directed, entrepreneurial, and cognitive labor. Florida provided much of the language and rationale for that shift, and his ideas had an significant impact on public discussions of economic development and urban renewal. Further, his view had great currency with the growing ranks of mobile, privileged, educated workers who were willing to embrace the high-risk/high reward employment/worker model.

But Florida had relatively little to say about the real working lives of members of the creative class and the changing organization of work produced by the changes he predicted. In fact, as Scott Timberg argues in Salon.com, the new creative class now shares the same working conditions as many on the other end of the labor market, especially those in the service sector that makes up the majority of today’s working class.  These conditions include uncertainty, temporary or intermittent employment, working in multiple jobs, and accepting jobs for which they are overqualified.  Creative workers, like many in the working class, are isolated from protective legal employment laws and are less likely to have benefits such health insurance, retirement plans, or paid sick leave. Put differently, young educated people, so popularly identified with the creative class, are suffering the same conditions as working and middle class families and could become what Business Week reporter Peter Coy has called a Lost Generation.

As work has eroded and become more episodic, not only does the creative class share the economic conditions of the working class, that group also now shares the working-class’s sense of alienation from American politics and antagonism toward the economic elite who have gained so much ground over the last decade. You need to look no further than the growth of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement.  On the streets of New York and in cities around the country, you see highly educated  young adults joining with displaced working- and middle-class people who believe the American Dream has become nightmare. They have been joined by public and private union members including 300 airline pilots marching in full dress uniform. All are rallying around their shared position as part of the 99% of Americans – a loose coalition much larger and more diverse than any single class.

What brings them together is a politics of resentment that is fueled by growing understanding and anger over the increasing economic inequality in the U.S.  While OWS has focused on Wall Street and government plutocrats, it is expanding and multiplying like an amoeba, in different directions politically and geographically. The issues driving people to occupy not only Wall Street but Public Square in Cleveland and a public park in Kansas City and a dozen other locations are not identical.  Each local group works independently, and they are focusing on issues ranging from the economy and war to agricultural and environmental policy,

As Kathy Newman said in Working-Class Perspectives last week, one of the great things about the OWS movement is its inclusivity. This should not be unexpected. Like the many middle class Americans, the creative class now shares the employment and economic conditions of working people and has shed their sense of difference and superiority over the working class. They now understand that despite the façade of self-direction and creativity, their economic position is every bit as uncertain and unfair as that of many retail, food service, and health care workers.  Just where this new amoeboid politics of resentment goes is anybody’s guess. But we can hope that it will become even more directed at those who are responsible for shaping the current national and global economic conditions that has now engaged and enraged so many people.

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

Upsetting the Apple Cart

Last week, a few days before Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer, a friend posted a critique of the Occupy Wall Street protesters on her facebook page, in which she basically slammed the protesters for preaching the gospel of anti-corporatism all the while plunking out tweets and status updates from their Apple computers.  My friend was irritated by the irony:  “If you want to change the system,” she wrote, “analyze first the way you live within it.”

I could see her point, but I found myself defending the protesters because they were making me happy.  I loved seeing the creative signs (You Know Things Are Messed Up When Librarians Start Marching), reading about the Human Microphone, and watching as the mainstream media seemed forced against its will to cover the movement.

Then, last Wednesday, October 5^th, two startling things happened.  First, New York unions joined the protesters and swelled their numbers into the many thousands.  Hundreds of new organizations around the world covered the actions and thousands of news articles about the protests appeared on radio, television, newspapers, and online.  On the same day it was announced that legendary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had died, and Apple devotees around the country mourned his passing on facebook and Twitter and by leaving flowers at the door of Apple stores.  Tweets from Occupy Wall Streeters supporters around the globe were mix of “RIP Steve Jobs” and “Occupy Together.”

How can we make sense of these outpourings of spontaneous action, in protesting and in mourning, that have gripped Americans over the last week?

Occupy Wall Street seems to have the most obvious political significance of the two, though the media are struggling to explain it.  The media messages about the protests can be boiled down into three basic narratives:

1)  The movement has no message.  This is a fascinating claim because in the age of instant communication I am not sure that any movement has been able to get its message out more quickly or more clearly.  The message is that 99% of Americans have far too little of the nation’s wealth.  (see Annie Lowrey, here, from Slate, examining the truth behind this claim).  The message is Make Jobs, Not War on Middle, Working Class and Poor.  The message is If I Had a Job I Would Not Be Here.  The message is A Better World is Possible.  True, the movement does not have a list of answerable demands.  But then again, while many have criticized the movement for not having any clear objectives, others have praised it for staying open and flexible.

2)  The movement is the left wing answer to the Tea Party.  I find this narrative somewhat more plausible.  There is something spontaneous, angry, funny, and absurd about the protests that bears some similarities to Tea Party protests (there are even some misspellings in the hand made signs—though not as many).  On the other hand, there is little evidence (so far) that big money is bankrolling the occupiers, as the Koch brothers and other have bankrolled the Tea Party.  In addition, the Occupy Wall Street movement is targeted at the financial system and not the government.  The message, in fact, is that the financial system has largely taken control of the government.

3)  The movement is the beginning of a new, legitimate movement on the left.  This is the narrative by which I am the most persuaded.  While I liked the movement immediately, I liked it even more when union activists started supporting the New York protesters with blankets and food.  My admiration increased again when union activists and members started marching with the protestors last Wednesday.

One of the best things about the movement so far is its inclusivity.  While political scientists, economists, and Marxist theorists debate who is or who is not working class (I am partial to Michael Zweig’s definition which finds about 66% of us to be working class), I feel included in the OWS protests even though I am an English professor at a prestigious university married to another white collar professional.  Because even though my husband and I make a better living than most, we are still solidly in the 99%.

As a result, Occupy Wall Street taps into the rage and frustration that I feel because the Pittsburgh school budget was cut and my son’s bus stop was moved to one of the most dangerous intersections in my neighborhood.  It taps into the rage and frustration that I feel when the students that I teach at Carnegie Mellon University can’t find jobs after they graduate while they are tens of thousand of dollars in debt.  It taps into the rage and frustration I feel when my friends in the labor movement cannot (yet) post information about basic workers rights on bulletin boards in the workplace.  It taps into the rage and frustration I feel when wages, rights, and benefits of union members in Wisconsin, Ohio, and dozens of other states are attacked. It taps into the rage and frustration that I feel knowing how many immigrant families in Alabama are struggling to stay together since the repressive anti-immigrant laws recently passed are now being enforced.

So what does all of this have to do with Steve Jobs?  Whose side would he be on?  Since his death many have written about his company’s dreadful labor practices, his relative lack of philanthropy, and his autocratic personality.  Nonetheless, when I heard the news last week that he had died I felt like I had lost someone who had meant something to me.  I even wondered if Apple products and advertising keywords, like “Think Different” and “Magical” and “Revolutionary” had inspired my activism and critical analyses over the years.  I used an Apple computer to make flyers for rallies and strikes when I was a graduate student/union activist.  I used an Apple computer to write my dissertation.  I used an Apple computer to store and share pictures of my children.  I am using an Apple computer to write this post.

If nothing else, we can acknowledge that Jobs helped provide powerful new tools, and for many a new sense of empowerment, for activism.  Thanks to Steve Jobs and thousands of ordinary people—all 99% of us across the country and around the globe—maybe the revolution won’t be televised.  But it will be tweeted.

Kathy M. Newman

On Violence and Class Warfare

“Class warfare.”  Lately, it is breaking out everywhere.  The phrase, that is.  Over the last 10 days commentators, pundits, comedians, and, finally, Democratic politicians have gotten into the game.  Elizabeth Warren, the new wonder woman Democratic Senatorial candidate in Massachusetts went viral with her plain-spoken rebuke of the Republicans’ use of the term “class warfare.”  In an amateur video made by one of her volunteers she explained how factory owners benefit from the roads and the schools that the rest of us pay for:  “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.”

And just last Wednesday, in a move that seemed inspired by the popularity of Warren’s Youtube video, Obama gave an inspiring speech in front of a bridge to somewhere — the home districts of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell:  “There’s a lot of people saying, ‘this is class warfare.’ Well, if saying that billionaires should pay the same share in taxes as a plumber or a teacher is class warfare, then you know what? I’m a warrior for the middle class.”  Obama has been urged by dozens of columnists, including Sally Kohn of the Washington Post and Chris Weigant of Huffington Post to take the language of class warfare seriously, and to fight hard on the side of the not-rich.

Why? Because there is a war going on, and the working- and middle-classes are losing.  Last week America’s most widely read economist, Paul Krugman, gave us four reasons why “class warfare” is top down, rather than bottom up.  You can see a great visual distillation of Krugman’s point with this cartoon from Clay Bennet.

It turns out that this kind of class warfare—the kind that comes from the top down — is pretty bad for the economy. You can read from the IMF report that shows the negative economic effects of the wealth gap, or take a gander at new September CIA rankings for income inequality.  The survey is based on the “Lorenz curve,” in which “cumulative family income is plotted against the number of families arranged from the poorest to the richest.”  It ranks the US as 39^th worst out of 136 counties surveyed.  The people of Yemen, Pakistan, Poland, Egypt, and Vietnam, just to name a few, suffer less disparity between the rich and the poor than we do.

In the Wealth of Nations, the economist Adam Smith weighed in on the problem of the rich accumulating too much profit.  He railed against the “merchants and masters” who complained about high wages, but not their own high profits:  “Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”

In the meantime I find the invocation of the term “class warfare” completely fascinating, in part, because, as columnist Robert Mentzer argues, the term “class warfare” actually gets us talking about class.  On the other hand, when the term is used, it is usually referencing some change in wealth distribution, and not actual warfare—nothing akin to real battles, pitch-forks, or heads on a pike.  When was the last time that the working class was organized enough to do any real bodily harm to the capitalist class?

The last time the term “class warfare” was used often and sincerely to refer to a violent revolution by workers was during the Gilded Age in the US and Britain.  The best example comes from the the son-in-law of Karl Marx, Edward Aveling, in a published lectured titled “The Curse of Capital”:

You will ask:  ‘Will you not have a frightful struggle and will it not end in bloodshed?’  Possibly.  I do not know.  ‘Is it not setting class against class?’  Yes;  and Socialists mean to devote their lives to setting class against class.  We preach class warfare.  We hope it may not be a warfare of bullets and steel, but if it is class warfare even this, alas! is possible.  It is a warfare of the labour class against the capitalist class.

 That was some real class warfare being proposed by an English radical at the height of the trade union movement in Britian, in 1884.  But good luck finding similar moments in American history.

Here, most working-class radicals have stayed away from violence.  One of America’s most violent working-class incidents, the Haymarket Affair, took place in the midst of a massive (and, we should remember, successful) national movement for the eight-hour work-day.  After two workers were killed at a protest outside the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in May of 1886, Chicago anarchists called for a rally to protest the deaths of the slain workers in Chicago’s Haymarket square.  During the rally, which had been calm and peaceful up to that point, someone threw a pipe bomb at a police line.  Police and some of the protesters opened fire, killing crowd members as well as other officers.  Eight anarchists were tried, found guilty, and hung.

Just before he was hung, the anarchist August Spies shouted, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.” The Haymarket Affair was one of those moments in which class warfare became truly violent, and from the top-down as well.  Reading the last words of the Chicago anarchists, who were likely falsely accused, poorly tried, and tragically executed, I am led to reflect upon the execution of Troy Davis last week.  After he was killed, my friend Robert Perkinson, who is a prison scholar and the author of Texas Tough, posted a photograph in his facebook feed from the 1930s of a banner hanging out of a window in New York City that read:  A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY.

While he was not actively engaged in class warfare, Troy Davis is a casualty in the war on the working class.  His execution is just one more terrible reminder that when class warfare becomes violent, that violence tends to flow from the top down.  As Cynthia Tucker wrote in Grio last week,  “If Troy Davis had been a high school principal or a funeral home director or the proprietor of a soul food restaurant, he probably wouldn’t have landed in the middle of an investigation into a police officer’s murder. Had he been a member of Savannah’s black middle-class, he likely would have been treated with a bit more deference by the criminal justice system.”

For many of us who believe that the death penalty is wrong, and that Davis’s execution was particularly wrong, it has been a sobering week.  We can take some comfort from the fact that the national discourse has turned powerfully and seriously towards class.

As for class warfare, most of us who are fighting with, for, and in the working class are not about to issue—or answer—a call to arms.  But if it is a war of words that is in the offing we have a lot to say.  We will not be silent.

Kathy M. Newman

Fighting for More than A Contract

While Wisconsin drew most of the national media attention as the home front of the battle over collective bargaining for public sector workers, what’s happening in Ohio is every bit as significant and interesting.  Ignoring weeks of protests in the state capitol and around the state, and despite divisions within the Ohio Republican delegations, the Ohio legislature passed Senate Bill 5 in March.  The bill would place tight limits on collective bargaining for most public employees, and it would ban it entirely for college professors (using the language from the Yeshiva Decision that defines us as managers). By June, almost a million people had signed petitions to put the measure on the ballot in November, giving voters the opportunity to overturn the bill – something we can do in Ohio that isn’t an option in Wisconsin.

The petition drive involved unions across the state, as well as community and religious organizations, while local chambers of commerce, businesses, and even the state’s university presidents either overtly advocated for SB5 or insisted on “remaining neutral” and thus passively embraced it .  Those same divisions are playing out as the campaign heats up heading toward November.

For public sector unions, this has been a tough time.  No one wants to make organized labor or collective bargaining look bad right now.  The Ohio Education Association, for example, has encouraged its locals to settle on contracts, no matter how bad, early in the game, and many have complied.

Here at Youngstown State University, we’re living with the political ramifications of this bill right now.  The faculty union, an OEA affiliate, first accepted the recommendations of an external fact finder,   which included small pay raises, a large  increase in our health care costs, and a small cut in pay for teaching summer courses.  We said yes, agreeing to accept what amounted to major concessions, but the Board of Trustees rejected the fact-finder’s report, demanding even greater “shared sacrifice” from the faculty.  Their counterproposal asked for cuts of up to $7500 in a single year for some, though their public statements insisted that most faculty would lose less than $1000.  Much of that loss comes in summer pay, which affects only faculty, not administrators or other staff.  So much for “shared sacrifice.”

Clearly, the upcoming referendum on SB5 has created an especially difficult context for unions.  Some have speculated that the Board of Trustees (most of whom were appointed by Republican governors) is playing hard ball at the request, advice, or encouragement of the Governor or other Republican leaders who hope that a strike by YSU faculty will illustrate the need for this bill. Others are encouraging the faculty to give in to avoid generating public resentment that could lead to a bad outcome in November.  No doubt, every public sector worker in Ohio, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and other states with similar laws must be feeling the pressure to make organized labor look good.  But should  we make every concession we’re asked for, in order to show that unions are reasonable and willing to do our part to balance state and local budgets?  If we do that, aren’t we also willingly contributing to the loss of power for workers and for unions?

Some organizers of the campaign to overturn SB5 have encouraged us to avoid making trouble, but I would argue that the situation at YSU offers a great illustration of why collective bargaining is so important.  What’s happening here illustrates just how bad SB5 and similar bills will be for public sector workers.  If we were not allowed to bargain, the administration would have imposed much bigger cuts.  YSU faculty are already the second-lowest paid in Ohio, and under SB5 we’d be solidly at the bottom, with no recourse whatsoever.

At the same time, we illustrate that collective bargaining works, not only for workers but for employers.  After all, our negotiations have already been built around concessions, not demands for increased salaries.  Further, in exercising our labor rights – by going to fact finding, by holding democratic votes on the proposals, by authorizing a strike and ultimately deciding not to strike, by filing unfair labor practices – we are working through a process that protects us even as it limits some of what we can do.  To my mind, we make a great poster child for public sector bargaining.

For an academic activist who is also deeply engaged in teaching, this has been an especially difficult time.  On the one hand, I’m ready to push this fight as hard as I can, because what happens here matters not only for us but for public workers across the state.  On the other hand, the threat of a strike – and that remains a possibility – creates real difficulties for students.  The University administration has already shown that it is willing to put our students at risk in its effort to force even greater concessions from the faculty.  A week before classes were due to start, YSU announced that it was putting a hold on financial aid, claiming that they could not say with confidence when school would start because the faculty had filed a strike notice.  They had never done this before, despite strike authorizations in previous rounds of negotiations or during an actual strike in 2005.  While assuring students of the administration’s concern, YSU had prepared alternative schedules and a website full of information, and they had sent threatening messages to members of other campus unions insisting that they were required to cross the picket lines.  The faculty union refused to play along, and after voting down the administration’s “last best offer,” we decided not to strike.  Instead, we are back in the classroom, working under the provisions of the old contract and trying to continue negotiations.

Some students responded exactly as the administration must have hoped: blaming the faculty and creating a facebook page that included many statements by students vowing to vote in support of SB5 because of this.  But others were not reeled in.  Instead, they organized.  They created a facebook page, YSU Students for Faculty (which now has almost 900 members), but they also held protests, conducted a letter-writing campaign, and challenged the University administration to treat its workers fairly.  They analyzed the administration’s actions and communications, and they have used a wide range of tools, from social media to filing public records requests to showing up and trying to ask questions at a Board of Trustees press conference last week.  They are also working with the campaign against SB5.

As the students have made clear, this is a case where politics are not entirely local.  What happens here may well affect the statewide vote in November, and of course, I hope it will make clear to anyone who’s unsure about the issue that unions are our best, maybe even our only, tool to protect the rights of workers.  But while the dispute at YSU and the debate over SB5 are inherently political, they also serve as learning opportunities.  The discussion among the students — and even on local talk radio — has encompassed why people should vote to overturn SB5, what’s happening to workers and universities across the country, the sad state of the American dream, and the real purpose of a college degree.  Those conversations remind us that the fate of public sector workers – educators, clerical workers, safety officers, health care workers – is not just about our income or benefits.  It’s about the public good.

Sherry Linkon, Center for Working-Class Studies

Class and the English Riots

A few weeks ago, England erupted with protests that many saw as tied to the global economic crisis.  What began as a peaceful protest against the police, who had shot dead a suspect in Tottenham North London on August 6, rapidly spread across London and then to other parts of the country. Over the space of the next five days, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester all experienced a wave of rioting and looting.

Politicians and commentators proceeded down a well-worn path of analysis and political point scoring. Most politicians were quick to blame “mindless thugs,” “gangs,” and “feral youth.”  They pointed to the lack of moral values in contemporary society, and the Conservatives, who are the senior partners in our coalition government, saw the riots as yet more evidence of their narrative of “Broken Britain” (conveniently ignoring the fact that other parts of Britain, such as Wales and Scotland, suffered no problems).

What was lacking, initially at least, was any mention of class. It appeared only in references to an underclass. Rhetorically this is a really useful piece of shorthand for the political classes in Britain, as I guess it is in the US. Talk of the underclass allows critics to blame society’s troubles on an ill-defined amorphous band of cultural stereotypes and folk demons.  It also allows for a wider sidestepping of questions of class and inequality that has been rising for the last three decades or more and is sure to increase further in the age of austerity. In this narrative, the riots are defined as the work of the work shy, the amoral, and the feckless; looting represents a mindless opportunism of those lacking a basic ethic of responsibility.

Any other mention of class takes the form of a kind of nostalgic lament for the working class of old. You remember, when the working class knew their place, worked hard, and got on with their lot without complaint. They, the old respectable working class, never complained about deprivation or went out and rioted.

When he was the leader of the opposition, David Cameron — now British Prime Minister — developed his party’s social policy around the concept or sound bite of “Broken Britain.” This was an interesting strategy and not without risk.  It allowed him to reclaim social policy for the Tory party and create a British version of compassionate conservatism. In this way, Cameron could blame the Labour government, which by that time had held power for over a decade, for all of Britain’s social problems. Rather than the solution, state intervention was identified as the cause of the problem. Labour was strangely quiescent in the face of these charges for a number of reasons. It had itself been largely silent on the question of class; it had also been, as one senior New Labour figure put it “relaxed” about the super rich.  But above all, the Party’s acceptance of Thatcherism and the wider neo-liberalism of the 1980s and 1990s meant that they were unable to develop a more critical analysis of deepening inequality.

In the wake of the riots, other voices that do want to talk about class and social and economic inequality have begun to be heard. At first this line of explanation was a difficult one for politicians and commentators as it was portrayed as a causal argument – poverty equals riot – and therefore easy to criticise as not all rioters were poor, and not all poor areas went up in flames. Gradually what has been emerging, I think, is a more nuanced account of the riots which begins to look harder at the nature of social inequality in Britain. This more self-confident attempt to talk about these issues emerges from a range of academics through to journalists.

In their wake, Labour politicians and some liberals one have begun to deploy these arguments themselves. The most high profile academic in the UK addressing inequality is the social geographer Danny Dorling (most recently in Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists), whose detailed reading of a range of materials places in long-term perspective the widening gap between rich and poor. Dorling is joined by journalists such as Polly Toynbee, who writes for the left of centre Guardian newspaper and who has been a longstanding voice for those left behind by neo-liberalism. Finally, the riots have thrust centre stage a young social and political commentator Owen Jones, author of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class – whose book charts how the working class has been marginalized within political rhetoric and had its  problems ignored. While none of these commentators seeks to excuse civil unrest, they all, in fairly similar ways, explain the complexity of British society and its longstanding problems. All three recognize that contemporary social problems and community breakdown have their origins in the deindustrialization and subsequent joblessness in Britain since the 1970s and 1980s.

The hopeful development from the tragic events of early August is that class is once again beginning to be rediscovered in the political lexicon.  It is interesting to note that some commentators draw parallels between the unbridled acquisitiveness of the looters and the compensation paid to bankers and the fraud so recently committed by members of Parliament in their expenses claims. This may suggest the potential to shift the discourse about class, so that inequality is no longer seen as evidence of individual moral failing. It also might herald a shift in the vernacular where class can be really talked about and “working class” ceases to be a pejorative label. It might also allow those critical of the current government to pose two questions.  First, if Britain is broken, who broke it? And, secondly, if you didn’t like the organized working class of the 1980s, how do you like the disorganized working class now?

Tim Strangleman

Strangleman is a Sociologist at the University of Kent and co-author of the  textbook, Work and Society: Sociological Approaches, Themes and Methods

The Working Class and the Great Capitulator

When I began writing this piece its focus—and the act that earned Barack Obama the moniker “Great Capitulator”—was his decision to cave into Republican senators and Wall Street fat cats and withdraw his nomination of Elizabeth Warren to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  The CFPB, conceived by Warren in 2007, was a key component of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and has been vilified by big money interests and their toadies in Congress from the moment it was proposed.

Professor Warren, who chaired the TARP Oversight Committee and was fiercely critical of the too-big-to-fail banks and brokerages that raked in billions in bailouts funded by working-class tax dollars, is widely recognized as the nation’s premier consumer advocate and most persuasive voice for reform of the financial and credit markets. Along with being an outspoken fighter for working-class families victimized by predatory lenders, Warren is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard, where she has taught bankruptcy, contract, and commercial law since 1992.  By any measure she was, as Mr. Obama noted in announcing her appointment, the person most qualified to chair the CFPB.

Republicans and Wall Street shared that view, as was made obvious by their vehement opposition to her nomination.  The last thing they wanted was a loud and coherent voice for reform—especially because the only other regulators with enough guts and independence to speak truth to Wall Street’s power, the FDIC’s Sheila Bair and the SEC’s Mary Schapiro, no longer held their positions.  It seems Mr. Obama, who appears to cower in the shadow of Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, didn’t want to hear her voice either.

While his surrender on health care, his abandonment of the Employee Freedom of Choice Act, and his decision to “stimulate” the economy by directing more money to Wall Street than Main Street were all slaps in the face to working-class Americans, I was prepared to argue that allowing the GOP and the financial industry to kill Warren’s nomination was the most egregious of the cowardly acts that have characterized this presidency, because it ended any hope that the institutions who are blithely destroying the American Dream would finally be forced face a worthy adversary with a bully pulpit who knew how to use it.

Man, was I wrong.

I was wrong because the Faustian bargain Mr. Obama struck with John Boehner and the modern day Know Nothings who comprise the Tea Party in order to gain an extension of the nation’s debt ceiling makes his previous betrayals seem piddling.  And don’t be mistaken, the betrayal doesn’t lie in the fact that he caved on the issue of whether deficit reduction should be achieved via spending cuts alone or through a combination of cuts and revenue increases.  It lies in the fact that he engaged in the debate at all.

Rather than lending credence to the specious argument that the deficit is the most pressing economic problem facing the nation today, the president should have said that the best, the only way to deal with our long term fiscal dilemma is to grow our way out of it by doing what it takes to put people back to work.

He should have embraced the philosophy that has guided Democratic presidents for nearly 80 years: that tough economic times call for more spending, not less. Spending on infrastructure projects, the development of alternative energy sources, research and development, job training and education.  He should have demanded that we invest in America’s greatest asset: Americans.

Instead, by embracing the ridiculous notion that cutting trillions in spending is the cure-all for what ails the body politic, the Great Capitulator has all but guaranteed that the investment needed to fuel both recovery and deficit reduction will never be made.

Whether wittingly or unwittingly—and it’s hard to say for sure which because this administration has a penchant for committing tactical errors as well as for turning its back on its core constituency—Mr. Obama has now put himself in a rhetorical box that will make it impossible for him to credibly argue that the government should spend money to stimulate the economy, even as working-class families find themsevles staring into the barrel of double-dip recession.

While some may compare Mr. Obama’s decision to join the Republicans in attacking the deficit to Bill Clinton’s partnering with Newt Gingrich to substantially alter the welfare system, there is one very critical difference between the two: Mr. Clinton never abandoned the core Democratic principle that government had an essential role to play in making life better for the American people.

Mr. Obama, for reasons known only to him, has done exactly that.  He is now in league with idealogues whose real goal has nothing to do with reducing the deficit and everything to do with dismantling what’s left of the social safety net that has been woven by a succession of Democratic presidents and Congressional leaders since 1933.

In so doing, he has abandoned the constituency that played a key role in his 2008 victory and renounced the principles and philosophies that constituency holds dear. Throughout 2010, Working-Class Perspectives warned Democrats for ten months that they could not expect working-class support and that people would stay home. Guess what happened.

 

The Democrat operatives running the Obama reelection campaign calculate that the working class has no place to turn politically, and they are trying to gather narratives to place a positive spin on his capitulation.  No doubt, how the members of the working class, people of color, seniors, women, and union members react to this latest betrayal may well determine who occupies the Oval Office in January of 2013.

 

If it’s not Mr. Obama, the Great Capitulator will have no one to blame but himself.

 

Leo Jennings