Category: Under the Perfect Sun

After nearly twenty years of ‘reform’, the schools of Chicago remain among the lowest performing in the nation.

A funny thing happened on the way to labor’s extinction: the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) staged one of the most daring and important strikes in recent memory. As Chris Hedges put it during his Democracy Now interview last week “the teachers’ strike in Chicago is arguably one of the most important labor actions in probably decades.” And in the midst of this struggle, most of the corporate media around the country have decried the horrible greedy teachers from their editorial pages and assured readers that they were on the side of the children rather than the teachers.

It’s the week after Labor Day and the Carl DeMaio attack machine is in full force, with SuperPac-funded ads in the works designed to keep pounding away at Bob Filner while DeMaio furiously tries to repackage himself as someone palatable to moderate Democrats and Independents. This will involve things like lying to San Diegans about his environmental record, spending big money to woo Latino voters, and hoping that some local Democrats are terminally stupid enough to buy his “independent” populist reformer act. While I have written extensively about DeMaio’s right wing think tank pedigree, it never hurts to revive the historical record, particularly when we can count on the local news to fail on all counts in this regard.

Recently, I had the great pleasure of visiting a Buddhist monastery to do a walking meditation on a luminous summer morning. It was a beautiful experience but what struck me afterward was how quickly even many of those bent on being here now reached for their cell phones to check their text messages or play Angry Birds. As charmingly ironic as this is, it is also a perfect manifestation of what most ails us. We just can’t stop working/amusing ourselves to death.

Not too long after my encounter with the texting Buddhists, I came upon an illustrative article in the Travel section of the New York Times entitled “Call Waiting: ‘It’s Me, Vacation’: Can’t Let Go? Eight Rules for Getting the Most Out of Your Time Off” by Matt Richtel. Richtel’s article starts with the story of a failed vacation that left him “exhausted, defeated, and irritable” rather than refreshed and at peace. He then turns to the wisdom of neuroscientists, behavior experts, and business executives to learn that “letting go” is something you have to “practice on a daily basis.”

After a flurry of anxiety that Mitt Romney was surging it appears that the Obama campaign has righted the ship, leading handily in a recent Bloomberg poll and by narrower margins in other polls. More importantly, Obama appears to be doing quite well in most of the battleground states as his campaign hits Romney hard as the “outsourcer in chief.” Certainly, it doesn’t hurt Team Obama to be running against a guy who at times seems to be trying to mimic the cartoon capitalist in the board game Monopoly.

The bottom line is that Romney is a laughably terrible candidate, …

Not allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good, progressives should be happy that the Supreme Court dealt the Neanderthal right a huge blow by upholding the constitutionality of health care reform. Now 30 million more Americans will have access to health care, parents will be allowed to keep their adult children on their policies longer, and those with pre-existing conditions can no longer be excluded from coverage among other good results. This is a real, tangible win for scores of Americans, but not all of us.

On the political front, years of insane ranting about death panels, the end of American liberty, and creeping socialism got slam dunked by a conservative judge who joined the liberals in affirming the lion’s share of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act. This will not stop the bullshit machine at Fox News and elsewhere from cranking out more lies, but it will most likely help more than hurt Obama’s campaign for a second term. With no alternative to offer, all the right has, as Paul Krugman wrote last week, is prevarication and cruelty. Not an attractive combination even when being presented by the ever-so-suave Mitt Romney.

I had an old friend in town recently for a visit, a friend who’d lived in San Diego for many years until leaving for South America before the law could catch up with him. Back in the day, my pal was a real wild man, spending much of his free time scouring San Diego for the next dive bar with its mandatory sordid adventure, so his return to our heavily gentrified city was like watching a bewildered Bukowski re-emerge after being cryogenically frozen for 20 years, stumbling through the streets of downtown, Golden Hill, North Park, City Heights, and the beaches bitterly muttering to himself about chic bistros and expensive craft brews. The statute of limitations was up but his city was gone.

Never has a stout middle-aged man seemed so distraught to be in a room full of beautiful young women as my companion was when confronted with the new gang populating the renovated Waterfront Bar and Grill or the cocktail lounge that replaced the bar with no name and the crooked pool tables. “What happened, Miller?” He kept saying to me as he shook his head disapprovingly. “Look at this! What the hell happened?”

Last week I commented on the larger economic significance of the Wisconsin recall for the average American, but it is also worth noting what it may very well mean for American politics and the soul of the Democratic Party. One thing is quite clear: Obama threw labor under the bus in Wisconsin. As a candidate in 2007, the President famously said, “If American workers are being denied their right to organize, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I’ll walk that picket line with you as President of the United States.”

But when the rubber hit the road in Wisconsin, he sent a twitter message, had Bill Clinton sub for him, and walked the other way. Indeed, back at the height of the drama in the Badger state, all the President could muster was a feeble statement about how union workers were “friends and neighbors.”

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s overwhelming recall victory could signal the demise of the middle class nationwide.

As Doug Porter aptly observed in his election post-mortem last week, big money spoke loudly in the big races on June 5^th. This is nothing new but what happened in Wisconsin was truly historic. It was a soul-crushing defeat—not unexpected, but a gut punch nonetheless. Labor’s loss in the recall battle against Governor Scott Walker will surely go down as a key sequel to the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike for unionized public sector workers in America. Indeed, Governor Walker clearly said that he wanted to emulate that model, and he just won a very big battle in the war against collective bargaining in the United States.

Why is the PATCO strike so significant? After Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers and crushed their union in 1981, it sent a signal to corporate America that it was open season on labor.

In my column last week, I pointed out what Scott Peters’ accepting the endorsement by the New Democrat Coalition meant. Specifically, I outlined the history of the Democratic Leadership Council and its transformation into the New Democrat Coalition and noted that these organizations have been the chief engines behind the Democratic Party’s shift toward a far more business-friendly orientation. I also observed something that even Bill Clinton’s former advisor Robert Reich has recently written about—that the Clinton administration’s loosening of economic regulations as a result of this ideological shift helped grease the wheels for the great financial train wreck from which we are yet to recover.

This ideological shift in a large chunk of the Democratic Party was made possible by a web of corporate interests funding the DLC and its NDC offspring in order to influence policy on both sides of the aisle. It is, I argued, just as important to note these ideological and economic networks inside the Democratic Party as it is to look at the well-funded think tanks behind folks like Carl DeMaio.

If you really want to understand what’s at stake in the race for the 52nd Congressional District between Scott Peters and Lori Saldaña, the most important thing to consider is not personality conflicts or whether the candidates get along with the media but which wing of the Democratic Party they would represent. Both want to unseat incumbent Republican Brian Bilbray, but whose interests would each candidate serve? What kind of Democratic Party would they help shape?

As has been noted elsewhere in the OB Rag, Saldaña has the backing of many local and national progressives and would certainly head straight into the Progressive Caucus. This is the most liberal caucus in the House and describes itself thusly:

Our Caucus members promote a strong, progressive agenda, what we call “The Progressive Promise–Fairness for All”. The Progressive Promise is rooted in four core principles that embody national priorities and are consistent with the values, needs and aspirations of all the American people, not just the powerful and the privileged. They reflect a fundamental belief in government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The four, core principles of the Progressive Promise:

1. Fighting for economic justice and security for all;

2. Protecting and preserving our civil rights and civil liberties;

Editor: Just to ensure that our readers and the world know where the OB Rag stands on Carl DeMaio, we’re running two posts today, one by Doug Porter, and this one by Jim Miller.

“We have a conservative movement that has learned, over the decades, to mimic
many of the characteristics of its enemies.” – Thomas Frank

As Frank Gormlie noted in an OB Rag piece last Saturday, Carl DeMaio used a pull quote from one of my OB Rag columns describing Nathan Fletcher as a “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.” More specifically, DeMaio’s mailer cites this passage:

Nathan Fletcher is not a man of great political courage. He isn’t even a particularly independent thinker. But he is politically clever, and he knows that San Diego’s Democratic base has a long history of being bamboozled by wolves in sheep’s clothing from the days of Pete Wilson to the present.

Scott Lewis had an interesting article in the Voice of San Diego last week on the tense relationship between Nathan Fletcher and the U-T San Diego editorial board. What was not particularly shocking was the clear evidence of the fact that the U-T sees itself as an extension of the local GOP and was disturbed that Fletcher may have harmed the Republican brand. More illustrative, however, was Fletcher’s defense of his move (note the part in bold):

Well I think you’ve got to go and look at what I actually said. And what I said is that I’m rejecting the partisan environment of today. People say “well did you ever consider becoming a Democrat.” I didn’t. Because I think there’s unwillingness on that side as well to step out and solve problems, whether we’re talking about pensions or managed competition or some of these other types of issues.