Fighting the same battle 50 Years later

What bemuses me about this recovery is all the hedging going on in the media. We see unemployment numbers consistently drop from one month to the next, but each time critics say more persons are dropping off the record books, and that not enough jobs are being created to cover those lost during the recession.

This is probably true to some degree, but if there is any sector that is lagging in the recovery it is the public sector, especially at the state and local level where conservative governors and mayors made draconian cuts in payroll. Paul Krugman has long said that if government simply hired back all the employees it cut, this would boost employment considerably. These austerity measures are a big reason the economy has taken so long to recover.

Unfortunately, it seems the GOP simply won't budge. It has been a major battle in the Senate to extend unemployment benefits. The Democrats seemed on the verge of a compromise solution, but the Republicans have stonewalled it once gain. You really have to wonder what is gained by this. Do you want more persons falling through the cracks, permanently unemployed and essentially left destitute?

Yet, the Republicans claim to be revisiting the "war on poverty," with their Young Turks thrust front and center in the new debate. Mike Lee proclaimed "economic freedom zones" offering lower taxes, supposedly designed to encourage industry in depressed areas. Yep, the same old ideas wrapped in a brand new rhetoric, kind of like "freedom fries" for the masses.

All this empty rhetoric would have given LBJ heartburn. The War on Poverty was his signature issue. To read Robert Caro's books, Johnson truly wanted to eradicate poverty in America, having grown up dirt poor himself. But, unlike his conservative Southern brethren, Johnson recognized that people needed a hand up and the only institution that could effectively do this was government.

It seems what the Republicans would like to create is a world not much unlike Panem in The Hunger Games, where worker districts are subordinated to a central Corporate authority. The scary part is that they might eventually succeed given the way the Democrats have caved in time and again on jobs and spending bills in an effort to meet Republicans "half way." By contrast, the Republicans haven't budged an inch.

The Democrats have to commit themselves anew to the War on Poverty and make this the signature issue in the midterm elections. Call it "class warfare" if you like, but that's exactly what he Republicans have been engaged in ever since they launched their "Contract with America" in 1994.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...

Rick DiguetteJanuary 10, 2014 at 9:53 PM
The Young Turks of the Republican party, or it is the Young Turds?
James FergusonJanuary 11, 2014 at 10:24 AM
Rand Paul has been pushing these "economic freedom zones" hard and heavy. It is such a bogus idea. States and local communities have been reducing taxes for decades, but without mortgage relief, micro-loans and other means for families to get by on a day-to-day basis, low taxes don't mean squat.
Rick DiguetteJanuary 11, 2014 at 7:41 PM
It's "trickle down" all over again, and again, and again . . .
James FergusonJanuary 12, 2014 at 3:58 PM
Couldn't resist,

https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn2/1150202_742782579066056_2081899771_n.jpg
Rick DiguetteJanuary 12, 2014 at 6:07 PM
I hadn't seen that before.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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