Flaccid Democrats ignore the biggest issues

Debacle. Bloodbath. Drubbing. Call it what you will. For Democrats, this was an ugly Election Day. But there’s no mandate for right-wing policies in its aftermath.

Arkansas voters chose to raise the minimum wage while electing a senator who opposes doing so. Colorado voters are pro-choice and elected a senator who isn’t. Voters want action on climate change and gave the Senate over to those who are in the pocket of Big Oil. The most rational voters — given what’s coming in Washington — were those in the District of Columbia and Oregon, who chose to make marijuana legal.

The 2014 mid-term elections were fundamentally about frustration with a recovery that most people haven’t enjoyed. The Republicans blamed this on President Obama and claimed Democrats were guilty by association. That aroused the GOP base as candidates played down their conservative stances on reproductive choice and went silent on marriage equality.

Democrats chose not to run nationally against Republican obstruction, under the assumption that their broad opposition to right-wing social positions would mobilize their own base.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, who drove the Republican strategy to obstruct every Obama initiative and then paint Obama a failure, is now warbling the soothing tones of bipartisan cooperation.

Any “cooperation” will, of course, be on Republican terms. GOP leaders will invite Obama to join in on  such “reforms”  as reducing corporate tax burdens, paring Social Security benefits, approving budgets that savage the vulnerable and lard the Pentagon, and cutting ruinous trade deals that undermine American workers.

To pay for infrastructure, the Republican-led Congress will champion the “repatriation” of the dough that corporations have stashed abroad, handing those tax dodgers a massive tax break and an incentive to avoid even more taxes in the future.

This is the Wall Street “bipartisan” agenda and it’s ready to go. Immigration and renewable energy? You can bet they’re off the table.

The White House faces a choice. Will it lay out what the country needs? Will President Obama make his case against those who would take the country backward? Or will he just provide political cover for global deals that stack the deck even more for the powerful and against the rest of us?

He shouldn’t be left to make that choice by himself.

In the circular firing squad already blasting away, Democrats will blame these losses on their own liberalism. Conventional wisdom will urge them to move rightward and cooperate with newborn “moderate” Republicans. They’ll be told that the way back to power is to embrace “centrist” policies on trade, tax reform, and entitlements.

But this election exposed the Democratic establishment’s fallacies. Social issues alone, which increasingly favor Democrats, can’t spur victory. Sophisticated campaign targeting and get-out-the-vote operations can’t substitute for the passion, clarity, and vision that motivate the Democratic base to vote.

Democrats won’t win votes by adopting a corporate agenda. They must drive an agenda that will bring about an economy that works for everyone.

There’s a populist majority waiting to be forged. Millions will rally for full-employment economics, for fairly taxing the rich and corporations, investing in rebuilding the country and educating all children, strengthening retirement security, making college affordable, lifting the minimum wage, taking on the corruption of our politics by big money, and transitioning to the new and more sustainable energy options that will create good-paying jobs.

Sen.  Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, has it right: Voters think the government is corrupted and doesn’t work for them. If our country is to deal with the real challenges it faces — extreme inequality and economic decline for the majority, catastrophic climate change for the whole world, an oppressive war on working people — we the people have to stand up and fight.

Democrats will have to make it clear that they’re ready to join in.

Robert Borosage is the co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future. This originated on OtherWords.org.

Robert L. Borosage: Help unions help middle class

 

Labor Day is supposed to be a celebration of workers, but it’s been a long time since workers have been celebrated — or for that matter, have had a reason to celebrate. That’s because the union movement that gave us this holiday is, at least numerically, a shadow of its former self.

If we really want to give workers something to cheer about, we need to revitalize unions. It’s no coincidence that prosperity was widely shared when unions were at the height of their power in the decades after World War II, and that inequality has soared as unions have been weakened.

That’s what I conclude in Inequality: Rebuilding the Middle Class Requires Reviving Strong Unions, a new Campaign for America’s Future report. My analysis tracks the simultaneous decline in the power of the labor movement and the fortunes of middle-class workers. It makes the case in simple terms.

One chart reinforces the point. It compares union membership with the share of income going to the top 10 percent since the 1920s. When only one in 10 workers belonged to unions in the early 1930s, the richest 10 percent pocketed nearly half of the nation’s income.

Then President Franklin D. Roosevelt began a set of bold New Deal initiatives that dramatically increased the power of workers to join unions and bargain collectively. The share of workers who were unionized rose to about one-third by the late 1940s. At that point, the bottom 90 percent saw a significant increase in their share of national income.

Today, as union membership declines to low levels last seen in the 1920s, the share of national income going to the top 10 percent is rising — to levels not seen since then either.

Combine that with lackluster economic growth and you get the result chronicled in an August report by Sentier Research. As The New York Times reported, Sentier found that median incomes, when adjusted for inflation, had fallen 3.1 percent since 2009. They remain significantly below what they were in 2000.

A corporate-driven propaganda campaign has for decades blamed labor unions for saddling American corporations with burdens that made them uncompetitive in the global economy.

That has proven to be cover for dismantling the forces that kept corporations from rigging the economic rules in their favor. When corporate power was kept in check by union power, workers and corporations at least had a fighting chance to prosper together. Without that check, workers are losing. As wages erode, benefits disappear, work conditions become harsher and jobs themselves become more unstable.

The good news is that a combination of worker-activist movements and bold political leadership is setting the stage for a potential resurgence of the labor movement. In Los Angeles and other cities, newly elected pro-labor officials are making companies that benefit from local zoning or contracts pay a living wage and accept unions when a majority of workers indicate they want one.

Across the United States, fast-food worker strikes are fueling state and municipal minimum-wage increases while injecting new energy and ideas to worker organizing efforts.

President  Obama has used executive orders to raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers and require adherence to basic fair labor standards, including the right to organize. These orders could have effects that ripple through to private sector workers.

Labor Day would live up to its purpose if it not only gave workers a temporary respite from the rigors of their jobs, but also drove a national effort to empower workers once again to rebalance the economic scales so that we can rebuild a growing, stable middle class. It needs to be a day on, not a day off, in the effort to reclaim the American dream for working people.

Robert L. Borosage is the co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a center for ideas and action that works to build an enduring majority for progressive change. Distributed via OtherWords.org