Bill, maybe the shorter way if not better to answer Hedges and Leopold is by just citing Brinkley's "The End of Reform" - the eulogy for a whole range of federal interventions on behalf of labor, full employment, regional suffering and the whole slew of troubles from the collapse of capitalism, let me be blunt, between 1929-1932. Brinkley died in 2019. The New Deal died with Bill Clinton's 1996 pronouncement on "Big Government."
The West democracies have had a long and varied list of interventions to get at what Heges and Leopold are talking about. The more ambitious interventions all got fierce resistance even after the collapse of capitalism and we've had nothing like that since then, not 2008-2009 nor 2020 with Covid coming close in the sense that the Federal Reserve stepped in to save the financial system and the top 10%... There are ideological tides Bill, despite what Lenin demanded, and they limit what can be done if the advocates have the burden of winning a majority of voters for policy changes. Sanders movement never gained the full voice needed in mass culture to create the tide he was hoping for. And key members of the Democratic constituency in SC under James Clyburn - the older church going black ladies who are very conservative vis a vis Sanders talking points - helped do him in. As did the young protestesters who stormed his campaign platform that one day where i think he was too accomodating. I see no wave of concentrated left ideology built around labor reform and the environment capable of overcoming all the other fracture lines in the society. And the very division of labor which grows every decades under modern capitalism mean more and more people have no idea what others experience at work or in their neighborhoods. If rallying around the environment's destruction couldn't do it, nothing else in the short run can short of another economic collapse and even there as in Germany it may be the Right this time which can take advantage of it.
Right now among dems the most unifying force is the fear of Trump. That doesn't take them much beyond the election.
Well, I'm 21 minutes through the Hedges-Leopold discussion, and what strikes me is not that either are wrong so far in anything that they've said but I think they are out step on what the public says is there most pressing problem: inflation, which just bumped up again. Don't forget Bill the unemployment rate is 3.8% the lowest it's been since the great days of the glorious last decades and the autumn of those years, the late 1960's. The public shock with mass lay-offs in my understanding peaked in the 1980's and early 1990's when IBM, Kodak, and remember in NJ AT&T were dismissing many thousands - and the stocks would go up. It was a middle level manager slaugher, and earlier it was in the 1980's blue collar job slaughter: Caterpillar, the steel industry (the Mahoning Valley in the late 1970's) the infamous rein of Jack Welch at Gen. Electric...My point is that all the economic talk around people like the two candidates I'm writing about is about the gushing numbers of Biden (but of course, they were even better under Trump because inflation did not begin to spike until late 2021-2022).
The federal "interventions" they're talking about - which are difficult ideologically for all mainstream dems who bought "free markets, free trade and no federal regs") not just for mass layoffs but also for doing what the Dem Senator from Pa - Casey has picked up and I have been urging: the serious vetting, case book style of indiv. companies and their cost and price structures....proposed at the SEC I think....
All the trauma the two dissenters are talking about here is real (Deaths of Despair won a nobel prize in economics) and a good part is economic, but it is also gender, marriage and secularization changes since the 1960's...lefties have been doing what Leopold trots out in his poll results to show see blue collar folks aren't moving as far right as is alleged but so far it hasn't translated into a new labor movement beyond the UAW, the flight attendants...we'll see how the Southern campaign goes, the UAW having won the vote in Tenn at VW by 73% of the 84% who actually voted. I do suggest that Shawn Fain ditch the "Eat the Rich" t-shirts though...short of Sanders, AOC though there is no powerful left voice in "mass culture" where the average media consumer can latch on to anything easy to remember in economic struggle. Nothing close to Ralph Nader back in the 1960's... and Nader never fit very wellthe traditional labor left.
Despite the repeated praise of that low unemployment rate, there is no structure for federal intervention for actuall laid off workers beyond the usual unemployment system, which is a wreck and couldn't cope with the Covid disaster numbers: no job guarantee as in the 2nd Bill of Rights, no scaled up CCC to give it heft and actual meaning, and no national regional planning for rural red state America in the way FDR produced the this document: https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellows-book/confronting-southern-poverty-in-the-great-depression-the-report-on-economic-conditions-of-the-south-with-related-documents/ in 1938 about the poverty of the American South; I'm not sure that we have moved in this area of federal remedies for the turbulence (and worse) of capitalism much further than those portrayed in the late Alan Brinkley's 1995 work, almost a requiem for the New Deal's planning and economic efforts called "The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War - and the date is not accident of history...you know why...we have no equivalent to the many name changes imposed on the National Resources Planning Board, always minimally staffed and under attack by the Right of the day, shifted from agency to agency to keep it out of the line of fire...still did vg work.
this book is worth reading just to delineated where we were in the 1930's and WWIII resource planning, and in terms of ambitious planning, its all gone...even when "electrification" cries out for it because the private sector no can do. So far.
Bill - I think Leopold was focused more on the political, community and cultural impacts of those early deindustrialization mass layoffs in driving the shift away from the Dems and explaining the Trump politics that are typically ascribed to cultural/identity issues ('deplorable" "right wing populism"). Seems like his objective was to press the Democrats to shift back to the New Deal ideology and program as a strategy to regain their support by targeting Wall Street and corporate power instead of government (and identity politics or "wokism").
The layoffs haven't ended - they're now hitting the tech sector, check this out:
I don't trust the unemployment rate statistics - they don't measure those who dropped out of the labor force and long term unemployed, et al. Plus, that metric sends misleading signals: even full employment at shitty low wage no benefit no future jobs is not a good thing. Same thing with the job creation metric.
I'm apparently a little more optimistic than you are about the shift in politics to the "left" - I sense that the Columbia protests are this generation's Berkeley Free speech movement moment, and anti-war sentiment is growing, and climate activists seem to be getting more militant. In the likelihood - if Dems stick with Biden - that Trump gets reelected will greatly magnify these political movements and the shit will really hit the fan in spring '25.
In this context, the politics of inflation are marginalized.
Biden and dems are committing political suicide with the Israel support and war spending - Biden is rehashing the LBJ collapse. Many parallels to '68 (including the location of the Dem. convention!)
Bill - after I wrote this comment, I just came across this book review at CounterPunch - check it out for current relevance:
“The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation.” (One-Dimensional Man, pg. 7)
Charles Reitz’s comprehensive study of Marcuse: “These works challenged corporate capitalism’s illusions of democracy characterized by consumerism, cultural anaesthetization, intellectual compliance, environmental degradation, and war as untenable forms of wasted abundance and pollical (sic) freedom.
Accordingly, “If the New Left emphasizes the struggle for the restoration of nature, for public parks and beaches, for spaces of tranquility and beauty; if it demands a new sexual morality, the liberation of women, then it fights against material conditions imposed by the capitalist system and reproducing this system. (Marcuse 1972, 17)
[...]
“Today the 1% is armed with its own theory; the 99% is not. A fundamentally different outlook is necessary. The main problem, as I see it, is to develop an incisive vision for humanity as sensuous living labor. I have developed in this volume a labor theory of ethics, an ethical realism grounded on the mutual respect, cooperation, and reciprocity of commonwealth labor… EarthCommonWealth envisions the displacement and transcendence of capitalist oligarchy as such, not simply its most ugly and destructive components. This is a green economic alternative because its ecological vision sees all living things and their non-living earthly surroundings as a global community capable of a dignified, deliberate coexistence,” pg. 257.”
That's a good, alternative response to what I wrote Bill. Certainly more optimistic. Yes, the "gut" reaction in the protest is correct: Israel's overreaction is a horror story. But the Hamas and Palestinian alternatives have hardly been models that thinking people in the West can or ought to rally behind. The US is never going to allow Israel to be "overrun" and no one should want that. The best analyses I've read shred both the "one state plans" (either the Palestinian or Israeli leff versions) and the two state plans. If no decent opposition emerges within Gaza or its better exiles I don't know where things are going to go because the Israeli Right sure knows what it wants and we are watching the horror unfold inside Gaza.
On the mass layoffs: you're right, they're back but labor has to prove that not only can it overcome the ghost of failed "Southern Strategies" from the past, and in a dying industry by the way - American cars competing against Japanese, German, Taiwanese, Korean and not yet Chinese... - but whether the massive service sector of retail food and fast food and chain restaurants can be organized...and what are the alternative institutions the left is building...the Wall Street Journal is attacking Biden's feeble CCC efforts on "ideological grounds" already...don't we wish it was something closer to the even temporary and military tinged CCC of the New Deal where young men from very different backgrounds had to work together often in rural areas that had never seen "urban toughs" before (and the locals girls ended up marrying some of them after they l earned urban america was human too).....the failures of national health insurance, affordable housing, our educational system and "the right to a job" all point to the failures of our very "successful" capitalism if you get the contradiction here. Getting our society to recognize those failures of hyper-individualism is a huge and almost not even begun task...so that's still the social democrat in me talking and thinking which ought to ease fears of reading "the Frankfurt School." No one is going to overthrow the whole American business establishment...the best we can hope for is the tempering institutions coming out of these unmet needs and the great failure on the environmental front. Neither of the MD senate candidates on the Dem side meet anything like that hope...and of course, Larry Hogan is conventional business "wisdom" personified.
Bill - check out this superb interview of Norm Finkelstein - the first 20 minutes or so are largely biographical, but after that he does a superb job of analyzing the current split in the Democratic Party on Palestine, finding its roots in an ironic backfiring of identity politics. The last few minutes I think you will really appreciate, as they go to questions that I have faced personally, and I'm pretty sure you have as well:
Give me a chance to get the post out to my own mailing list Bill, then I'll get to Scheer Hedges take - but I think the answer is no; Trone's proud of his hiring of former prisoners he says 1,400 to work in his stores selling wines et al....but you know this all rides on the fact, or is it the hope that "unemployment" has been solved by Larry Summers and the quants...and indeed, the number is good in historical perspective but does not quite account for all the factors which mean even if you have a job the "ends" don't quite meet...nor for me in retirement.
Bill, maybe the shorter way if not better to answer Hedges and Leopold is by just citing Brinkley's "The End of Reform" - the eulogy for a whole range of federal interventions on behalf of labor, full employment, regional suffering and the whole slew of troubles from the collapse of capitalism, let me be blunt, between 1929-1932. Brinkley died in 2019. The New Deal died with Bill Clinton's 1996 pronouncement on "Big Government."
The West democracies have had a long and varied list of interventions to get at what Heges and Leopold are talking about. The more ambitious interventions all got fierce resistance even after the collapse of capitalism and we've had nothing like that since then, not 2008-2009 nor 2020 with Covid coming close in the sense that the Federal Reserve stepped in to save the financial system and the top 10%... There are ideological tides Bill, despite what Lenin demanded, and they limit what can be done if the advocates have the burden of winning a majority of voters for policy changes. Sanders movement never gained the full voice needed in mass culture to create the tide he was hoping for. And key members of the Democratic constituency in SC under James Clyburn - the older church going black ladies who are very conservative vis a vis Sanders talking points - helped do him in. As did the young protestesters who stormed his campaign platform that one day where i think he was too accomodating. I see no wave of concentrated left ideology built around labor reform and the environment capable of overcoming all the other fracture lines in the society. And the very division of labor which grows every decades under modern capitalism mean more and more people have no idea what others experience at work or in their neighborhoods. If rallying around the environment's destruction couldn't do it, nothing else in the short run can short of another economic collapse and even there as in Germany it may be the Right this time which can take advantage of it.
Right now among dems the most unifying force is the fear of Trump. That doesn't take them much beyond the election.
Bill - did we hear anything along the lines of this analysis by Les Leopold?
Wall Street's War On Workers
https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/08/the-chris-hedges-report-billionaires-are-striking-back-against-workers/
Well, I'm 21 minutes through the Hedges-Leopold discussion, and what strikes me is not that either are wrong so far in anything that they've said but I think they are out step on what the public says is there most pressing problem: inflation, which just bumped up again. Don't forget Bill the unemployment rate is 3.8% the lowest it's been since the great days of the glorious last decades and the autumn of those years, the late 1960's. The public shock with mass lay-offs in my understanding peaked in the 1980's and early 1990's when IBM, Kodak, and remember in NJ AT&T were dismissing many thousands - and the stocks would go up. It was a middle level manager slaugher, and earlier it was in the 1980's blue collar job slaughter: Caterpillar, the steel industry (the Mahoning Valley in the late 1970's) the infamous rein of Jack Welch at Gen. Electric...My point is that all the economic talk around people like the two candidates I'm writing about is about the gushing numbers of Biden (but of course, they were even better under Trump because inflation did not begin to spike until late 2021-2022).
The federal "interventions" they're talking about - which are difficult ideologically for all mainstream dems who bought "free markets, free trade and no federal regs") not just for mass layoffs but also for doing what the Dem Senator from Pa - Casey has picked up and I have been urging: the serious vetting, case book style of indiv. companies and their cost and price structures....proposed at the SEC I think....
All the trauma the two dissenters are talking about here is real (Deaths of Despair won a nobel prize in economics) and a good part is economic, but it is also gender, marriage and secularization changes since the 1960's...lefties have been doing what Leopold trots out in his poll results to show see blue collar folks aren't moving as far right as is alleged but so far it hasn't translated into a new labor movement beyond the UAW, the flight attendants...we'll see how the Southern campaign goes, the UAW having won the vote in Tenn at VW by 73% of the 84% who actually voted. I do suggest that Shawn Fain ditch the "Eat the Rich" t-shirts though...short of Sanders, AOC though there is no powerful left voice in "mass culture" where the average media consumer can latch on to anything easy to remember in economic struggle. Nothing close to Ralph Nader back in the 1960's... and Nader never fit very wellthe traditional labor left.
Despite the repeated praise of that low unemployment rate, there is no structure for federal intervention for actuall laid off workers beyond the usual unemployment system, which is a wreck and couldn't cope with the Covid disaster numbers: no job guarantee as in the 2nd Bill of Rights, no scaled up CCC to give it heft and actual meaning, and no national regional planning for rural red state America in the way FDR produced the this document: https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellows-book/confronting-southern-poverty-in-the-great-depression-the-report-on-economic-conditions-of-the-south-with-related-documents/ in 1938 about the poverty of the American South; I'm not sure that we have moved in this area of federal remedies for the turbulence (and worse) of capitalism much further than those portrayed in the late Alan Brinkley's 1995 work, almost a requiem for the New Deal's planning and economic efforts called "The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War - and the date is not accident of history...you know why...we have no equivalent to the many name changes imposed on the National Resources Planning Board, always minimally staffed and under attack by the Right of the day, shifted from agency to agency to keep it out of the line of fire...still did vg work.
this book is worth reading just to delineated where we were in the 1930's and WWIII resource planning, and in terms of ambitious planning, its all gone...even when "electrification" cries out for it because the private sector no can do. So far.
Bill - I think Leopold was focused more on the political, community and cultural impacts of those early deindustrialization mass layoffs in driving the shift away from the Dems and explaining the Trump politics that are typically ascribed to cultural/identity issues ('deplorable" "right wing populism"). Seems like his objective was to press the Democrats to shift back to the New Deal ideology and program as a strategy to regain their support by targeting Wall Street and corporate power instead of government (and identity politics or "wokism").
The layoffs haven't ended - they're now hitting the tech sector, check this out:
https://www.trueup.io/layoffs
and Tesla, Google, Amazon and Nike just announced big layoffs, see:
https://www.wsj.com/business/layoffs-2024-companies-tracker-list-6acb4e95
I don't trust the unemployment rate statistics - they don't measure those who dropped out of the labor force and long term unemployed, et al. Plus, that metric sends misleading signals: even full employment at shitty low wage no benefit no future jobs is not a good thing. Same thing with the job creation metric.
I'm apparently a little more optimistic than you are about the shift in politics to the "left" - I sense that the Columbia protests are this generation's Berkeley Free speech movement moment, and anti-war sentiment is growing, and climate activists seem to be getting more militant. In the likelihood - if Dems stick with Biden - that Trump gets reelected will greatly magnify these political movements and the shit will really hit the fan in spring '25.
In this context, the politics of inflation are marginalized.
Biden and dems are committing political suicide with the Israel support and war spending - Biden is rehashing the LBJ collapse. Many parallels to '68 (including the location of the Dem. convention!)
Bill - after I wrote this comment, I just came across this book review at CounterPunch - check it out for current relevance:
“The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation.” (One-Dimensional Man, pg. 7)
Charles Reitz’s comprehensive study of Marcuse: “These works challenged corporate capitalism’s illusions of democracy characterized by consumerism, cultural anaesthetization, intellectual compliance, environmental degradation, and war as untenable forms of wasted abundance and pollical (sic) freedom.
Accordingly, “If the New Left emphasizes the struggle for the restoration of nature, for public parks and beaches, for spaces of tranquility and beauty; if it demands a new sexual morality, the liberation of women, then it fights against material conditions imposed by the capitalist system and reproducing this system. (Marcuse 1972, 17)
[...]
“Today the 1% is armed with its own theory; the 99% is not. A fundamentally different outlook is necessary. The main problem, as I see it, is to develop an incisive vision for humanity as sensuous living labor. I have developed in this volume a labor theory of ethics, an ethical realism grounded on the mutual respect, cooperation, and reciprocity of commonwealth labor… EarthCommonWealth envisions the displacement and transcendence of capitalist oligarchy as such, not simply its most ugly and destructive components. This is a green economic alternative because its ecological vision sees all living things and their non-living earthly surroundings as a global community capable of a dignified, deliberate coexistence,” pg. 257.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/19/herbert-marcuse-new-left-revival/
That's a good, alternative response to what I wrote Bill. Certainly more optimistic. Yes, the "gut" reaction in the protest is correct: Israel's overreaction is a horror story. But the Hamas and Palestinian alternatives have hardly been models that thinking people in the West can or ought to rally behind. The US is never going to allow Israel to be "overrun" and no one should want that. The best analyses I've read shred both the "one state plans" (either the Palestinian or Israeli leff versions) and the two state plans. If no decent opposition emerges within Gaza or its better exiles I don't know where things are going to go because the Israeli Right sure knows what it wants and we are watching the horror unfold inside Gaza.
On the mass layoffs: you're right, they're back but labor has to prove that not only can it overcome the ghost of failed "Southern Strategies" from the past, and in a dying industry by the way - American cars competing against Japanese, German, Taiwanese, Korean and not yet Chinese... - but whether the massive service sector of retail food and fast food and chain restaurants can be organized...and what are the alternative institutions the left is building...the Wall Street Journal is attacking Biden's feeble CCC efforts on "ideological grounds" already...don't we wish it was something closer to the even temporary and military tinged CCC of the New Deal where young men from very different backgrounds had to work together often in rural areas that had never seen "urban toughs" before (and the locals girls ended up marrying some of them after they l earned urban america was human too).....the failures of national health insurance, affordable housing, our educational system and "the right to a job" all point to the failures of our very "successful" capitalism if you get the contradiction here. Getting our society to recognize those failures of hyper-individualism is a huge and almost not even begun task...so that's still the social democrat in me talking and thinking which ought to ease fears of reading "the Frankfurt School." No one is going to overthrow the whole American business establishment...the best we can hope for is the tempering institutions coming out of these unmet needs and the great failure on the environmental front. Neither of the MD senate candidates on the Dem side meet anything like that hope...and of course, Larry Hogan is conventional business "wisdom" personified.
Bill - check out this superb interview of Norm Finkelstein - the first 20 minutes or so are largely biographical, but after that he does a superb job of analyzing the current split in the Democratic Party on Palestine, finding its roots in an ironic backfiring of identity politics. The last few minutes I think you will really appreciate, as they go to questions that I have faced personally, and I'm pretty sure you have as well:
https://twitter.com/normfinkelstein/status/1781728505941635520
Enjoy
Give me a chance to get the post out to my own mailing list Bill, then I'll get to Scheer Hedges take - but I think the answer is no; Trone's proud of his hiring of former prisoners he says 1,400 to work in his stores selling wines et al....but you know this all rides on the fact, or is it the hope that "unemployment" has been solved by Larry Summers and the quants...and indeed, the number is good in historical perspective but does not quite account for all the factors which mean even if you have a job the "ends" don't quite meet...nor for me in retirement.