Dear Citizens, Elected Officials, and Democratic Party Leaders:
I was planning to write about Senate Charles Schumer’s Op-Ed in the New York Times from July 24, 2017, “A Better Deal for American Workers,” because it has been long awaited: what exactly he would come up with since he was so unhappy with Sec. Clinton’s campaign. In fact, I’ve been waiting for his response since March 27, 2017, when I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s fine piece about him here http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/can-chuck-schumer-check-donald-trump
Now Kolbert is one of my favorite writers, and she usually is focused on global warming and species extinction, in great depth – and insight. Perhaps she is experiencing a bit of despair herself, understandably under the maniacal Trump circus of a Presidency, and decided to cover Senator Schumer, whose open rumblings of dissatisfaction with the direction of the Democrats has been apparent for some time.
Yet this is quite an act for Schumer to pull off, this tilting back to the working class and stressed out middle-class, since he is also known as the Senator from Wall Street. So here he is in the Op-Ed, sounding as alienated as Senator Sanders and some Trumpians, talking about a “rigged system,” one that “favors short-term gains for shareholders instead of long-term benefits for workers, and calling for “bold changes.” Here at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/opinion/chuck-schumer-employment-democrats.html?_r=0
The strange things about Schumer’s pretty decent policy proposals, seeming to come from the reform wing of the party, are their disjointed nature and the timing of the party press conference held in Berryville, Virginia. We get it, the location, but the timing, neither Fourth of July nor Labor Day, doesn’t make much sense for a savvy politician as Senator Schumer is (and I sincerely hope he is much more than that, for he is a bright and hard-working man. I called his office to get some more background on his thinking but haven’t heard back. )
The policy documents – there are four or five – have the heading for release “Senate Democrats” – not even a reference to the House…so it’s not clear if the Senator has the whole party with him or just a good portion of the leadership. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was there, of course, and it was a party conference, after all, that preceded the press event …but then the documents don’t show much cohesion or synthesis: there needed to be a call to arms speech to pull it together, and Schumer’s in the Times was too short to catch national attention, competing, as all serious policy thinking is, with the daily, lurching crises of the Trump upheavals.
I’m not going to try to cover all the policy areas touched upon, however. The one that caught my attention was also jumped on by Corey Robin, at his blog here http://coreyrobin.com/2017/07/24/the-democrats-a-party-that-wants-to-die-but-cant-pull-the-plug/
Robin, who is an intellectual historian who writes about the rise of the Republican Right, zeroed “right-in” on Schumer’s’ proposal to ramp up job apprenticeships, which Robin goes after with an axe because of its long, unimpressive track record, and was inflamed for him by the “awash in cash” state of American business, which certainly doesn’t need or deserve a tax break for job training programs. The details in the policy paper, however, have performance and directional stipulations for the tax break which mitigate some of Robin’s objections. Still, however, this is a far cry from the needs of Red rural America and the urban de-industrialized ghettos, and the new suburban ones as well, like Ferguson, Missouri. And of young people working for the minimum wage in part time jobs, and the forced retirement older population who need work to supplement meager public and private pensions. That’s why I’ve been promoting a new CCC or WPA. And, to put it succinctly, the apprenticeship idea is a program that doesn’t match the crisis language which Schumer himself used in his Op-Ed piece.
And that’s the nature of the dialogue I entered into with “roxan” from the Ohio Valley at Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism Blog. It started with a piece by Carol Graham, of Brookings and the University of Maryland, entitled “Lack of Hope in America: The High costs of Being Poor in a Rich Land.” Here at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/07/lack-hope-america-high-costs-poor-rich-land.html
“roxan’s” comment was both fact filled and emotionally powerful, a painful family and “regional” biography in brief.
What follows below is the dialogue I copied directly from Naked Capitalism, and I’ve only slightly edited my comments for punctuation and spelling. The comments by others I did not touch.
“William Neil
July 29, 2017 at 12:36 pm
Here is a brief but powerful paper on the correlations between “Deaths of Despair” – the ills of rural Red State America – and voting support for Trump, by counties: http://aese.psu.edu/directory/smm67/Election16.pdf
The very strange thing about the American economy today is that a good portion of the top 20% of the income distribution live in the realm of the two “happy” indicators: the low unemployment rate and low inflation, which is not the reality that 60-70% of the nation is feeling, as expressed both in the Sanders’ campaign and the election of Trump.
In reality, the upper 20% of the nation are living in, still, the “roaring 1990’s” of the Clinton Dreams, while many are experiencing 1929-1932 despair, even if the objective conditions are not as horrific.
If the nation could only cross the Rubicon of intervention into Neoliberal Labor Markets, via a WPA and CCC (which happened when the whole economy collapsed), it would help meet those needing work half-way…but it won’t/can’t. The Neoliberal rigidity on what government can and can’t do in labor markets is the obstacle, intellectual and practical. That helps explain why we can’t get to FDR’s Second Bill of Rights from 1944 and “the Right to a Job” or MMT’s (Modern Monetary Theory) job guarantee program (as advocated by L. Randall Wray)…despite so much of the nation’s needed work not being addressed: social, structural and environmental.
These tensions have played out inside the Democratic Party. The Clinton’s think tank, the Center for American Progress, has played two notes. In December of 2015 they put out a long policy paper touting Apprenticeship Programs to fill the business cry for the “jobs-skills gap,” and it was followed by a number of shorter follow-up policy pieces pushing this direction. Then came the “Ideas” Conference of May 16th, 2017, where they proposed a Marshall Plan-WPA inspired targeted jobs guarantee program for a portion of those needed work, those without a college degree. It didn’t take, as the conference speeches and panels on that day clearly showed, and this is how I interpret Senator Schumer’s “Better Deal” Op-Ed in the New York Times on July 24th. Apprenticeship programs have won out, and industry is happy to have the public pick up as much of the cost as they can manage to shift.
I don’t think this meets the need I see presented in today’s posting by Carol Graham, or the one I linked to by Professor Shannon Monnat from Penn State. Hardly.
Reply ↓
roxan
July 29, 2017 at 1:31 pm
I come from one of those desolate towns people talk about so much these days. My mother always said the steel mill was a good company because they didn’t pay in scrip, and they built decent houses, paved streets, provided the utilities and so on. Eventually, they even built a community center and library. At Christmas, they put on a parade.
That is all gone. The steel mills and mine are not only closed, the mill has mostly been torn down. When I had to go back to care for my mother in 2004 I was shocked–downtown had always been crowded with traffic. Now, I could have slept in Main Street with no danger of being run over. All the stores were empty, or had turned into ‘coffee shops’ i.e. gambling dens. Even our dignified old bank building was now a coffee shop! At first I thought the coffee fad had reached us, and remarked on that to a neighbor I saw coming out of one. She laughed and said, “I work in there. We just pour whiskey, that’s all. It’s one-armed bandits, no fit place for women.”
I could not buy the most basic things, such as getting a lock installed and a key made, glass for the windows, lumber, or even cement. The house was falling down but I couldn’t buy what I needed. We lived in a nice suburban area, but most of the street was abandoned. Next door, I saw a guy who looked like Cletus (in the Simpsons) building an actual camp fire in the front yard! I was going to ask him to clean up the rat infested garbage pile in the driveway, but decided it was best to avoid him.
No one had work. One relative’s teenage boy was loading trucks at night for sub-minimum wage and happy to have that. His mother, Linda, was subsisting on her mother’s social security. The old lady had a stroke in middle-age, could not move and screamed constantly. She had to be lifted from bed to chair and diapered. Linda had done that since the 1980s, and now had heart trouble herself. She had no earning skills and was trying to hang onto the house. If she put her mother in a home, they would all have been out in the gutter.
Even as an RN, I could only find a few $10 hr jobs, not enough to live on considering the long commute. I had to go back to the East Coast, and send money home to hire aides. I met a lot of absolutely desperate people. One lady, who offered to help with Mom, was taking care of her uncle and father, who both had dementia. My mother was violent, listened to nothing and was difficult to manage. Aides quit as fast as I hired them but I was trying to hang onto our family home which would be lost if I put her in a nursing home.
I did not see anyone sitting around drunk or stoned, and never saw that when I grew up either. I think all those tales about violent, drunken hillbillies are just that–tall tales. Most of the young people I met were going into the service. I found them to be good steady people who did what I asked and felt bad I couldn’t pay them more. They were having a very hard time, as there were no jobs one could drive to whatsoever. It is the same throughout the entire Ohio Valley. A wasteland.
The military seems to provide a decent solution but young people shouldn’t have to risk dying in order to get an education. My suggestion would be something like the old CCC. Learning skills is not enough. People need to get away from the whole area and learn how to live in ‘the world’ as Appalachians refer to the larger society. I had more than one young person come up to me and exclaim, “I heard you was out in the WORLD. What’s it like?”
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Yves Smith
July 29, 2017 at 1:35 pm
This is so sad and it must be terribly stressful for you too.
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William Neil
July 29, 2017 at 2:13 pm
Thanks Roxan. I live in a county in Western Maryland which is formally part of the legal jurisdiction of the Appalachian Regional Commission, set up by Congress to bring the 13 state area up to “modern” standards of infrastructure, education and I suppose, “the way the rest of us live.” I think the funding averages about $13 million per year per state, hardly making a dent; it does offer loans for creative types with business ideas, including some green ones. And I think the Trump Administration zeroed out the funding, or outright reached for the organization’s abolition, in their current budget proposals.
But you are right, something much more powerful in terms of outreach and structure is necessary. A new CCC and WPA, yes, but that is much harder to achieve today, and the mission more complex than the originals, which served mainly all young unemployed men. Today it will be multi-racial, gendered and aged…I don’t know whether it is good to design it to take the citizens out of the region…
I think the structure and cultural imperatives of work, including the psychological benefits, are the way to go rather than the “guaranteed” annual income so fashionable among parts of the left, and even with some Libertarians like Charles Murray.
For most of the work designs I’ve been thinking of, additional training will be necessary. It’s going to take more than a week of orientation, and flexibility will be crucial. I try to keep the idea alive, difficult for the reasons I put forth in first comment above, to be ready with at least some prototype, pioneer examples, to be ready for the next great economic crisis. But, of course, the crisis is already here in this region (and the urban ghettos for how long now…half-a-century or more…)…
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roxan
July 29, 2017 at 7:17 pm
People need self-respect, and that comes from feeling competent. If you feel you can’t do anything worthwhile and never will, pretty soon you don’t see any point in living.
Yes, a modern WPA or CCC of some sort, would certainly be different. I doubt there is any funding, too. Has anyone ever had the idea of holding town halls to find out what people in these areas think would work?
As for the Democrats, I remember when Kerry came to campaign in 2004. He went to the town across the river, and hardly got out of his stretch limo. I had planned to go see him, but they locked down both towns, and closed the bridge across the Ohio. I saw him on TV, making a speech to what appeared to be a cheering crowd. Later, I read in the paper they had paid a few old union guys to wave signs. He clearly had no interest in us. I was disgusted, remembering how JFK came to our town and and discovered–guess what? Appalachian poverty!
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William Neil
July 29, 2017 at 9:39 pm
Yes roxan, I’ve been trying to get some momentum going for a CCC in our region because it has a strong environmental ethic, many working very hard to successfully ban fracking. Been trying for three years now.
I must have written half-dozen postings at the Daily Kos on the topic, but there is just a blank when it comes to alternative thinking about the economy, except for the decentralizing, self-sufficiency, farm to table greens.
The opposition to Trump met to plan with a good turnout in Cumberland, Maryland in early February, and there were three or four major directions apparent. But by early April, only the feminist caucus was still going, and they’re decidedly not interested in the political economy.
Some of the small green businesses who supplied the leadership for the anti-fracking campaign have struck me as being threatened by a program that might pay $15.00 per hour plus benefits – which a CCC/WPA should do…because they are competing for cheap labor as well, and find that threatening. They’ll never say that openly, but the local organic farmers rely on a program called WWOOF, which is like a hostel arrangement without wages; the young nomads come and work on the organic farms, learn something, get room and board, but no wages. Here at http://wwoof.net/
Is this movement a serious hobby or a new economy in the making? It is troubled by all the ancient problems of small scale agriculture: turning a profit and paying wages without turning the workers into a scorned minority, like the migrants.
I think a green CCC with locally designed projects to help farmers with some of their other traditional problems – manure storage and management, fencing to keep livestock out of streams, and so forth, plus all sorts of needed restoration projects (wetlands, contiguous forests, pulling invasives, fencing large areas and culling deer to restore native vegetation…) which also should be designed for what they plant and where, multiple purposes, to combat global warming, could supply a lot of purpose to countless lives.
I’m continually amazed at the resistance: cultural, economic, ideological, and sad to say, in too many cases, traditional business opposition to a “better deal” for labor, green causes or not. Plus the great American tradition of stigmatizing those who have served time or had addictions, who need the most help, and need purpose in their lives.
I don’t know if we’ll get there without a major collapse that forces the issue, forces everyone to face the truth that the private sector can’t meet our human needs as currently constituted.
My Congressman, Rep. John Delaney (MD, D-6), was handed a written outline from me in a small meeting with him and just one staffer: he was stony faced about it and has never shown any interest. If you know about his plans for “infrastructure” – the terms on which he proposes to bring all that idle American “capital” home, you’ll know why.
I’ve also done presentations in front of the city of Cumberland’s Mayor and Council: it’s a city in a county with 5,000 derelict structures: collapsing, abandoned, vacant. Lots of work to handle them and turn some into affordable housing…perfect match…some sympathy at the council, but they also looked like I was proposing a mission to Neptune. Can’t get more basic about the needs in this situation…this is a problem in all the old de-industrialized cities, as well as throughout Red rural America…as you so dramatically showed us.
Until I hear better proposals, I don’t intend to stop pushing it. I also see this as a way to get some more “democracy” into economics: proposing, planning, refining the work that needs to be done…another route that at times seems more logical, and ought to be easier, than democratizing the workplace at Target or Home Depot – or Walmart.
I’m sure that if the national, state and local conservation groups got behind this, they could come up with, easily, enough compelling projects to keep everyone at full employment for decades. I’ve proposed a few myself. Enough for now.”
Best,
Billofrights
Frostburg, MD