White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett would like to make one thing exceedingly clear: The Obama administration is not bad for business. No way. No how. Not one little bit. “We are not anti-business,” the president’s chief liaison to the business community stresses to me over the phone one afternoon in late July, an edge of frustration ruffling her usually calm-as-cream voice.
Journalists often annoyingly inflate events in their own backyards, fallaciously treating the local and provincial as mega-trends and national harbingers. Those of us who practice political journalism in Washington, D.C., have been somewhat immune from this tendency. Our city government, with the still-looming figure of a former crackhead mayor and the not-very-distant memory of a federally imposed control board, is way too sui generis for that. But for once, Washington has emerged as an urban vanguard—a home to bold and laudable reform.
Early last week, Alvin Greene paid a visit to the studios of WBT Radio in Charlotte. Ostensibly, he was there to drum up support for his campaign to unseat South Carolina Senator Jim Demint. But, as is always the case with Greene, politics quickly gave way to farce. For two hours, he offered up his daffy policy proposals (like selling action figures of himself to end the recession) and fumblingly dodged embarrassing questions about his involuntary discharge from the military and his recent indictment for allegedly showing pornography to a University of South Carolina coed. The most surreal moment came when the show’s host, Keith Larson, played a viral rap hit about the candidate (sample lyrics: “Greene’s a new face in politics / And he don’t show porno to college chicks”), spurring Greene, to the delight of Larson and the six cameramen filming the radio interview, to get up from his chair and dance. It was only a matter of hours before the clip of Greene shimmying went viral itself. Which, of course, is why, according to the Charlotte Observer, WBT shelled out $575 dollars for a limo to chauffeur Greene the 230 miles from his home in Manning, South Carolina, to Charlotte to do the interview in the first place. The radio station knew that, one way or another, Greene would make news.
It seems unfair to begrudge any candidate the right to what political consultants call “earned media”—newspaper articles, TV news stories, radio interviews, etc.—especially at a time when, thanks to the decrepit state of American journalism, earned media coverage is so hard to come by. But, in the case of Alvin Greene, it’s well past time that reporters stop covering him—for his good, and their own.
In the beginning, the media’s fascination with Greene was understandable. When the “unemployed 32-year-old black Army veteran with no campaign funds, no signs, and no website,” as Mother Jones’s Suzy Khimm described Greene in one of the first national articles about him, came out of nowhere to win the South Carolina Democratic primary in June, it was appropriate for journalists to try to figure out more about the candidate and his improbable victory. And as their reporting raised more questions—including accusations from prominent South Carolina Democrats, such as James Clyburn, that Greene’s victory was the result of a Republican dirty trick—the media swarm that engulfed Greene, who conducted almost all of his interviews from the rundown home he shared with his 81-year-old father in the tiny town of Manning, was painful to watch, but, at the same time, seemingly necessary.
In the end, however, the sinister suspicions about Greene proved unfounded, as an investigation by South Carolina officials concluded that Greene had paid the $10,400 filing fee himself. And, while no one has ever come up with a completely convincing explanation for how Greene was able to win over 100,000 votes after not having even conducted a campaign, the truth is that the question is moot, since the race against Demint, no matter who was running against him, was never going to be close.
And yet, rather than move on, the media have continued to cover Greene—despite the fact that polls have him trailing Demint by more than 40 points. This, not surprisingly, drives the South Carolina Democratic Party nuts, since it hardly helps other Democratic candidates in the state—Democratic candidates who are actually in competitive races—to have a man currently under indictment on obscenity charges serving as the public face of their party.
But it’s not just Fox News and conservative talk radio paying so much attention to Greene; it’s liberal media outlets like The Huffington Post and MSNBC, too. And, while it would be nice to believe that the continuing fascination with Greene is a right-wing conspiracy to hurt Democrats, I think it’s something worse. At this point, any journalist covering Greene is basically mocking him. In one respect, that makes him no different from the handful of other fringe candidates who, for whatever reason, capture the fancy of the mainstream media, whether it’s Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton on the left or Rick Barber and Dale Peterson on the right. But when reporters mock these fringe politicians, they are, to a large extent, mocking their ideologies—and the cultural baggage that comes with those ideologies.
Alvin Greene doesn’t represent any ideology, at least not a recognizable one. But he does represent a culture—namely the culture of the working-class (and often rural) black South. Granted, I make that claim with some trepidation; I don’t want to suggest that obscenity indictments and involuntary military discharges are representative of any particular culture. But if you’ve spent any time in the Pee Dee in South Carolina or the Black Belt in Alabama, then Greene probably reminds you of some of the people you’ve met there. His slow, occasionally halting pattern of speech—which once led a CNN interviewer to ask him if he was mentally impaired or drunk. His tumbledown home—which, as every profile of him almost invariably marvels, does not have a computer. His “family reunion” t-shirt. These aren’t unusual things in parts of this country, but these are the things that people mock when they mock Greene. For reasons that have more to do with class than race, being poor and black and demonstrating a remarkable unfamiliarity with the ironic sensibility that holds sway among denizens of coastal cities is still considered acceptable to laugh at. Because, let’s face it, laughing at white rednecks has become passé. (Laughing with them is another matter: see Larry the Cable Guy.) Laughing at black backwoods types, however, still seems relatively fresh. As The Awl recently pointed out, a lot of the popular Internet memes these days are “mostly just people laughing at working-class African-Americans”; what’s more, if you look at the five videos the Awl highlights, four have Southern datelines.
And that’s why reporters really need to stop covering Greene—not only because it does him no favors at this point (“Nobody should have to be a laughingstock,” as one South Carolina voter recently put it to the Charlotte Observer), but also because their coverage of Greene reveals their own prejudices. This was most apparent during that WBT interview. After Greene got up to dance, Larson, the show’s host who’d uproariously introduced his guest as “the unemployed, enigmatic, true American hero,” expressed his displeasure with Greene’s moves. “You’re biting your lower lip there, Alvin! You’re looking like a white guy in a wedding, biting your lower lip there,” Larson admonished the candidate. “Knock that off! You can’t do that!” To which I really wish Greene had replied, “Why the hell not?”
Jason Zengerle is a senior editor of The New Republic.
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WASHINGTON—President Obama decided this week to raise the stakes in this fall's election by making the choice about something instead of nothing but anger.
In the process, he will confront a deeply embedded media narrative that sees a Republican triumph as all but inevitable. Paradoxically, such extravagant expectations may be the GOP's biggest problem—by raising the bar for what will constitute success, and by discouraging necessary strategic adjustments should our newly combative president begin to alter the political battlefield.
Until Obama's Labor Day speech in Milwaukee and his Cleveland-area statement of principles on Wednesday, it was not clear how much heart he had in the fight, or whether he'd ever offer a comprehensive argument for the advantage of his party's approach over the other's.
In the absence of a coherent case, Republicans were winning by default on a wave of protest votes. Without this new effort at self-definition, Obama was a blur: a socialist to conservatives, a sellout to some progressives, and a disappointment to younger Americans who wondered what happened to the ebullient, hopeful guy they voted for.
That's why the Milwaukee-Cleveland one-two punch mattered. The first speech showed Obama could fight and enjoy himself in the process. The second speech spelled out why he's chosen to do battle.
The news headline was Obama's decision to draw the line on George W. Bush's tax cuts. He would continue the most economically stimulative cuts for families earning under $250,000 a year but say no to extending the rest of the tax cuts which, as Obama noted, "would have us borrow $700 billion over the next 10 years to give a tax cut of about $100,000 to folks who are already millionaires." What do Democrats stand for if they are not willing to take on this cause?
But even more, Wednesday's speech in Parma, Ohio, saw Obama speaking openly about the philosophical underpinnings of his presidency by way of explaining where he would lead the country.
"I've never believed that government has all the answers to our problems ... ," Obama said. "But in the words of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, I also believe that government should do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves." And then he offered examples of what that meant, highlighting programs Americans actually believe in, as an antidote to empty and abstract anti-government rhetoric.
Suddenly, there's a point to this election. Obama is late to this game, but at least he's finally playing it.
The New Obama (or, rather, the resurrected Old Obama) will be up against a media story line whose self-sustaining quality was brought home by the treatment of Gallup poll findings over the last two months.
The media largely ignored a mid-July survey giving Democrats a six-point lead, then devoted huge blocks of print and airtime to last week's Gallup survey dramatizing conventional wisdom by showing Republicans ahead by a whopping 10 points—only to have Gallup come out this week with a poll showing Republicans and Democrats tied. All this raises the question of whether the only polls that matter are the ones that reinforce preconceptions.
Even Democrats concede a Republican sweep may be in the cards. But there is another possibility: that we are now at the Republican peak, and that Democrats are in a position to claw back enough support to hang on to both houses of Congress.
Republican voters simply can't get more enthusiastic without violating the law by casting multiple ballots. Democrats, on the other hand, have a large swath of yet-to-be motivated sympathizers. For Republicans, the costs of Tea Party extremism are beginning to balance the benefits of the movement's energy.
Republican pollster David Winston thinks the economy has given his party "an enormous opening," but he cautions against seeing the contest as over and done with. As a technical matter, he argues that likely voter screens applied by pollsters too early exclude a disproportionate number of voters in key Democratic constituencies.
And the economic debate Obama tried to reframe this week, Winston said, "is going to have an impact. It's not enough for Obama to be wrong. If Republicans want to get to a majority, they have to lay out where they want to go."
Yes, Republicans had better start defining themselves. If they don't, Obama, who labeled them the party of "stagnant growth, eroding competitiveness and a shrinking middle class," is now happy to do it for them. And that's what changed in Milwaukee and Cleveland.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. is is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of, most recently, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right.
(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group
In the next few days—perhaps Thursday—the Korean Workers’ Party will begin its national conference, the first since 1966. The meeting, according to state media, will “mark a meaningful chapter in the history of our party.” Some reports indicate that the gathering already started on Monday, with the registration of participants.
The event, the third in the history of North Korea, is the result of a national mass mobilization. South Korean sources say military units have been converging on Pyongyang, presumably to take part in a show of might. China’s Xinhua News Agency has issued dispatches about rehearsals in the North Korean capital for a grand celebration, with participants waving red and pink plastic flowers.
In all probability, the party conference will coincide with Thursday’s celebration of the sixty-second anniversary of the founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as North Korea formally calls itself. As such, the event looks like it has been scheduled to boost the legitimacy of Kim-family rule.
Kim Il-Sung founded the North Korean state, and power passed to his son, Kim Jong-Il, upon his sudden death in 1994. Kim Jong-Il is at this moment readying the succession to his youngest acknowledged son, Kim Jong-Un. We don’t know much about the dictator-in-waiting except that he is in his late twenties, went to private school in Switzerland, loves Eric Clapton’s music, and is as chubby and ruthless as his dad.
This week’s conference looks like the product of a well-prepared succession process, but that is only partly true. Until recently, discussing succession in North Korea was essentially a crime, a one-way ticket to years of hard labor. Kim Jong-Il’s August 2008 stroke, however, changed that. Since then, Pyongyang has been abuzz with talk about the power transition.
Kim Il-Sung took about two decades to arrange succession to his son, the first heredity transfer in a communist state. Now, Kim Jong-Il has been rushing to put succession planning into place, along the way discarding his first two sons as unsuitable. His idea of passing the throne to Jong-Un has not been greeted with universal acceptance. There are signs of power struggle and rumors of palace intrigue. Since this spring, for instance, there has been a series of hard-to-explain deaths of senior officials.
Almost anything can occur at the party conference. Everyone will be watching what happens to the youngest Kim. More interesting, however, will be events surrounding Jang Sung-Taek, widely seen as the regent for young Jong-Un. Jang, Kim Jong-Il’s brother-in-law, has already accumulated substantial authority in the last two years, especially over the security services. In all probability, Kim Jong-Il is uneasy about handing over so much responsibility to a non-Kim, but he has no choice if he wants his not-too-well-prepared son to eventually take over.
So far, Kim has given his son a post inside the National Defense Commission, the most powerful body in North Korea. The army, the regime’s backstop, is generally on board with Jong-Un because most flag officers realize their favored position in society is dependent on the Kim family.
But Jong-Un’s future is by no means assured. China probably wants him out of the way so that there can be a collective leadership. Moreover, ambitious generals and even-more-dangerous colonels could be scheming. Finally, Jang Sung-Taek may not want to relinquish power when Kim Jong-Il has passed from the scene, either naturally or otherwise.
What should we be looking for this week? If Jong-Un is proclaimed successor at the party conference, we know his dad, Kim Jong-Il, is close to death. It’s not his father’s style to cede power quickly. It’s more likely the young son will be given one or more party posts. It’s even possible that the party machinery will be merely reorganized to allow the young Kim to build his power base. The last outcome would indicate continued resistance to Kim’s succession planning.
When Kim Il-Sung died of a heart attack—his son may have hastened death by preventing medical treatment—succession plans had been in place for a long time. Despite the North’s troubles then, the Great Leader was revered throughout the nation. Now, Kim Jong-Il is not nearly as well respected, and his succession planning has been haphazard. That means a smooth transition in this militant nuclear state is the least likely outcome in the years—possibly months—ahead.
Gordon G. Chang is a Forbes.com columnist and the author of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World.
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An article in The New York Times Magazine doesn’t becomes the big political story in London every week, but the Times piece “Tabloid Hack Attack on Royals, and Beyond” has been a front-pager and led on the TV news here. The tabloid in question is the News of the World, one of whose reporters was imprisoned a few years ago for “phone-hacking,” or intercepting cell phone calls, most notably from the two young princes, William and Harry. Although Andy Coulson, the editor of the paper at the time, was forced to leave his job, he denied any knowledge of malfeasance. But the Times story cast lengthy and well-sourced doubt on his denials, and his credibility in general.
That might not have caused so much comment here if it hadn’t been for the truly astonishing fact that, shortly after his departure from the paper, Coulson was hired as “communications director” (what we called a press officer in less grandiose times) by David Cameron, then the Conservative opposition leader, now prime minister. A storm in the media teacup thus became very big political news—and for the Cameron government, a potential disaster, entirely self-inflicted.
If not the most illustrious of the London Sunday papers, the News of the World is one of the oldest. For most of the past century, a diet of sex-and-scandal has made it the best-selling British paper, and, since 1969, it has belonged to Rupert Murdoch. It was his first London paper, after he acquired it in fierce competition with the late Robert Maxwell (what a pair!). Its story has never been more lurid than in early 2007, when Clive Goodman, the paper’s “royal correspondent” (what a job title!), was sent to prison for the phone hacking. Months later, Cameron airily waved aside any misgivings about the wisdom of hiring Coulson, saying that he believed in giving people a second chance, as though the purpose of Tory headquarters was to rehabilitate offenders. But if he hoped that Coulson’s record would be quickly forgotten, he could not have been more wrong. Last year, The Guardian returned to the story, showing how extensive hacking had been at the News of the World, which, in the meantime, has paid out huge sums to placate its other hacking victims, such as Gordon Taylor, a sometimes soccer supremo, who received £700,000. (The paper also paid a very large kiss-off to Clive Goodman to buy his silence)
In July 2009, Coulson appeared in front of a House of Commons committee and denied any knowledge of the scandal, saying "my instructions to the staff were clear—we did not use subterfuge of any kind." That didn’t look very convincing then, and it seems far less so after the Times story, in which several former employees of News of the World said that the culture of illicit bugging and hacking was widespread at the paper and that Coulson was in it up to his neck. Sean Hoare, who worked for Coulson, said that what his former editor told the parliamentary committee was “a lie.”
Hardened media-watchers will notice scores being settled. While it might seem puzzling that the haughty Old Gray Lady of Eighth Avenue would bother with a few tabloid sleazebags by the Thames, the Times is locked in bitter competition with the Wall Street Journal, a recent Murdoch acquisition. And there is no love lost between The Guardian and Murdoch papers, either.
And yet, all of that palls beside the political ramifications of the Times story. Some of what happened is still a matter of dispute. What is not is this: In July 2007, the leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party chose to employ Andy Coulson. David Cameron is a clever man and a plausible politician. We all make mistakes, which may be forgivable or remediable, and I’ve described one or two of his (“Tory Story,” August 12). But some mistakes are neither easily remedied nor properly forgiven, and this one was so grotesque as to defy belief. Writing with as much restraint and understatement as I can, let me say that Cameron was tonto, meshuggah, crazy, bonkers, or off his chump to have hired Coulson. The man had just been sacked as editor of a salacious tabloid after a sordid scandal that had seen a reporter jailed, and that plainly cast a huge shadow over Coulson’s own integrity. What more did Cameron need, a neon sign on top of Coulson’s head reading “I am trouble”?
Thanks to the Times exposé, the story has become far moreembarrassing for Downing Street—and made it a fresh target. Parliament has just returned from its summer vacation, a break that, a very long time ago, coincided with the season for hay-making and harvesting, and Labour is determined to make as much hay of another kind as possible out of the Coulson affair. In the Commons on Monday, opposition MPs pummeled Theresa May, the home secretary, who had to say limply that the police could re-open inquiries if they liked.
What Labour most enjoys at present is stirring up trouble between the Tories and their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats. So the sharpest Labour barb of all came from Alan Johnson, the shadow home secretary. He quoted Chris Huhne, a leading Lib Dem who is now in the Cabinet but who last year called for Coulson to be sacked: "I agree with those sentiments, forcefully expressed by her cabinet colleague,” Johnson said meanly to May, “Does she?" Another minister (a Tory) has asininely complained that Labour is acting for political advantage. Well, of course it is. Why wouldn’t it, and why shouldn’t it?
It will also be worth watching the reaction of News International, Murdoch’s media group, and the old guy himself. Murdoch is gloriously amoral about such matters as factual veracity, and thick-skinned when it comes to tabloid excesses. But he understands the bottom line. The News of the World and The Sun are highly profitable (unlike the London Times, which loses money every year but lives off the immoral earnings of its wicked sisters). If Coulson’s old paper finds itself forced to make many more really big pay-outs, as seems more than likely, it will hurt Murdoch where he minds. It’s also worth keeping an eye on the Metropolitan Police, which has a chummy relationship with the Murdoch papers. Bill Keller, editor of The New York Times, says that “Scotland Yard has declined our repeated requests for interviews and refused to release information we requested months ago under the British freedom of information law. ... Our story speaks for itself and makes clear that the police already have evidence that they have chosen not to pursue.” Our own Financial Times has added that there should be an independent review of the accusation that “the police may have dropped a valid investigation.”
But this renewed scandal must hurt the government most of all. The FT is one London paper with no axe to grind. It has called on Cameron to investigate the matter, and asked meiotically, “Was he not reckless to have employed Mr Coulson, given the murkiness of the allegations surrounding the News of the World?” Even Cameron must be ruefully asking himself the same question. One of many English colloquialisms for being fed up is to say, “I’m hacked off.” Quite soon, that phrase may have painful new meaning for the prime minister.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include The Strange Death of Tory England and Yo, Blair!
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The terms “recession” and “depression” were once used to suggest that a downturn was not as bad as a “panic” or “crisis.” In fact, for the first years of his presidency, Herbert Hoover chose to refer to the downturn as a “depression” in an effort to convey that what the country was experiencing was just a temporary indentation. Only in 1931 did Hoover begin to speak of a “Great Depression.”
Our current downturn has also been plagued by word games. Faced with the fear that the U.S. was about to suffer another “great depression,” commentators and economists revived the term “great recession” that had been used to describe the recession of 1982. The intent was to distinguish the current downturn from the graver one of the 1930s. At an economists’ forum in February 2009, Nariman Behravesh, chief economist and executive vice president for IHS Global Insight, said, “This is the Great Recession, not the Great Depression 2.0, and not Japan in the last decade.”
There are, indeed, obvious differences between the current downturn and the Great Depression. The unemployment rate, for one thing, was much higher in the Great Depression. But for the purpose of deciding what to do next, the term “Great Recession” is deeply misleading, and has led to a continued underestimation of the challenges facing the United States and the world. In its basic contours, the current downturn is much more similar to the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s than to the post-World War II recessions. Until our policymakers in the White House and on Capitol Hill acknowledge this, and convey the depth of the crisis to the public, it is going to be very difficult to get out of the economic hole in which we find ourselves.
The current downturn resembles the great depressions rather than the post-World War II recessions in three significant ways:
1) The Financial Crisis: The downturns of 1893, 1929, and 2007-8 were precipitated, and deepened, by a financial crisis. In 1893, gold outflows resulting from a downturn in Europe (in the 1890s, London was the center of world finance) caused deflation and a spate of bank runs. In 1929, it was the stock market crash, and in 2007-8, the subprime mortgage crisis.
2) Overcapacity in a Leading Industry: After the Civil War, railway construction had driven the development of capital goods industries. In the years before 1893, it started to slack off, leading to a slowdown in private investment. Before 1929, the production of automobiles and streetcars tapered off, and before 2007, the growth of computer/telecommunications/Internet industries began to slow, along with construction, housing, and auto sales.
3) The Global Dimension: During recessions, a downturn in one country has been eased by prosperity in another, but in depressions, the downturns have been global. During the early 1890s, the downturn spread from Europe to the United States; in the 1930s and late 2000s, it spread from the United States to Europe and Asia.
Each of these features contributes to the most salient feature of depressions: their sheer length and intractability. Overcapacity in leading industries and the growth of indebtedness discourage consumption and investment; global instability holds back trade. The recovery of the private sector is slow and tortuous, and an increase in employment must be achieved primarily through public investment. During the Great Depression, new private investment in factories and offices did not rise to the level of the 1920s until 1946. Until then, whatever growth in employment occurred was largely the result of public investment.
Since World War II, policymakers have used the automatic stabilizers built into the federal budget (for instance, unemployment insurance) and the Federal Reserve’s power over interest rates and the money supply to ease the country out of recessions. The success of these efforts even led Fed and Treasury officials during the late 1990s to believe that the United States had finally conquered the business cycle. But depressions have proven much more difficult to counter with federal policies.
To get out of a depression, a country’s consumers and businesses must pay down the debts they have accrued. Only then can demand for consumer and capital goods pick up. Government can, however, accelerate this process through public subsidies to individuals, businesses, and banks, and through jobs programs. If government decides not to stimulate spending and demand, as occurred in the United States in 1938 or in Japan in 1998, it can cause a regression in the recovery and prolong the process over a decade.
Countries also get out of depressions by developing new leading industries and outlets for investment. After the Depression of the 1890s, the U.S. enjoyed a boom in the production of cars, streetcars, and telephones and in the development of electrical power. The U.S. got out of the Great Depression because of World War II and the subsequent growth of an automobile/suburban/interstate highway industrial complex.
And as some countries have recovered earlier than others, they have given the impetus for a global recovery. The United States did this after World War II. In addition, reforms to national and international financial systems have prevented the re-emergence of instability and uncertainty. The Federal Reserve System came out of the Depression of the 1890s and Bretton Woods out of the Great Depression.
In each of these instances, government has played a major role in creating the conditions for reviving the economy. It has reformed the financial sector, eased the burden of debt, fuelled private demand, subsidized new industries, and negotiated needed changes in the global economic system. Without a huge and active governmental role from the United States, much of the world economy could never have enjoyed the kind of prosperity it did after the Great Depression and World War II.
The White House and Treasury have tried to address the causes of the current downturn, but their efforts seem to be falling short. The administration’s stimulus bill and recent aid to states has created jobs, but not enough to stem the rise in unemployment. Congress passed financial reforms that could eliminate the worst excesses of the recent housing bust, but many of the critical details in their reforms have been left up to the Secretary of Treasury and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who, if hostile to regulation, could subvert the reforms.
And as Fred Block and Matthew Keller document in a new book, State of Innovation: the U.S. Government’s Role in Technology Development, the Obama administration has spent billions of dollars trying to inspire a high-tech green economy. But as Jonathan Alter recounts in his book, The Promise, Obama couldn’t entirely follow-through: He wanted to include sizeable funding for a national electronic smart grid in his stimulus plan, but was discouraged from doing so by the web of different state regulations that would have delayed its construction.
The administration has also attempted periodically to address the imbalances in the international economic system. They have jawboned China, whose growth could pull the global economy out of its doldrums, to revalue its currency to encourage imports. But the Obama administration has stopped short of declaring China a currency manipulator, and the Chinese have largely ignored Washington’s tepid complaints. The Obama administration has also continued to pursue an aggressive overseas military policy, which—whatever its geopolitical merits—has widened the country’s balance of payments’ deficit.
The administration’s hesitancy to move forward in spurring domestic demand, subsidizing new industries, and reforming the international financial system has had much to do with politics. The depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s spawned left-wing movements that demanded stronger government action. This depression has fuelled a right-wing populist movement that opposes government spending. The Democrats and the Obama administration have not been able to counter this movement. As a result, the country has been caught in a dangerous political-economic spiral, as the failure of spending to halt the rise in unemployment has fueled right-wing arguments against any spending, which, if heeded, will result in even sharper increases in unemployment.
To be sure, the United States will eventually extricate itself from this depression. But the question is on what terms. If the Republicans are taken at their word, they will block further spending programs, which will delay the recovery and hamper or altogether impede the transition to new industries. If they gain power—through winning one or both houses of Congress and the presidency—they could be expected to gut financial reform and favor older extractive (and environmentally disastrous) industries over new green ones. Unemployment would linger at seven or eight percent, and the U.S. would find itself increasingly at the mercy of its Asian creditors. Yes, the United States would eventually enjoy modest growth, but not the kind of buoyant and progressive prosperity its citizens once enjoyed.
John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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It's Labor Day, a time to commemorate and reexamine the role of organized labor in American life. The best way to do so, of course, is to browse this collection of classic TNR pieces on labor, written by senior editors John B. Judis and Jonathan Cohn:
"Can Labor Come Back?" by John B. Judis. May 23, 1994.
By the mid-1990s, it became conventional wisdom to think of organized labor in America as a fading political force. In this prescient essay, Judis examines why "the question for the '90s will be whether labor and business can meet each other halfway—exchanging, in effect, union recognition of business's need to compete with business's recognition of unions' right to represent workers. If labor and business do come together, we'll all benefit, whether we belong to a union or not."
"Hard Labor" by Jonathan Cohn. October 6, 1997.
A profile of John Sweeney, the longtime president of the AFL-CIO. Written less than two years into Sweeney's tenure, the piece argues that Sweeney had the right blend of political militancy and personal charm to become one of the most powerful men in America.
"Open Door" by John B. Judis. December 20, 1999.
Once China's entry to the WTO was assured, Judis argues, unions needed to accept reality and deal with the consequences. Rather than fight the inevitable, American union leaders should have used the trade agreements as a bargaining chip to negotiate for better health care and retirement benefits for their employees.
"Dirty Deal" by John B. Judis. April 1, 2002.
How James P. Hoffa of the Teamsters tried to reach an agreement with Republicans, hoping they would give him cover by neutering government oversight and blocking investigations into union corruption.
"Drill Sergeant" by John B. Judis. December 16, 2002.
An article on the bizarre relationship between President George W. Bush and Douglas McCarron, president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. Bush liked McCarron because he was a "doer," and McCarron needed the president's help in an internal union war.
"Auto Destruct" by Jonathan Cohn. December 31, 2008.
Why was the auto bailout necessary? A look at how the automakers brought down their own industry by delivering middle-class lifestyles and economic security for their workers. If the government provided its citizens with health care and a better social safety net, Cohn argues, then the auto companies wouldn't have had to—and probably wouldn't have been in so much trouble.
"Labor And Delivery" by John B. Judis. March 3, 2010.
What drove Republicans to oppose Obama's recent nominee to the National Labor Relations Board? GOP obstructionists could be neatly divided into two camps: Those whose disdain for President Obama drove their every political move, and those who rejected the belief that "workers ought to have some counterweight to the overwhelming power of big business."
Washington—Watching the great civil rights march on television in August 1963, I couldn't help but notice that hundreds carried signs with a strange legend at the top: "UAW Says." UAW was saying "Segregation Disunites the United States," and many other things insisting on equality.
This "UAW" was a very odd word to my 11-year-old self and I asked my dad who or what "U-awe," as I pronounced it, was. The letters, he explained, stood for the United Auto Workers union.
It was some years later when I learned about the heroic battles of the UAW, not only on behalf of those who worked in the great car plants but also for social and racial justice across our society. Walter Reuther, the gallant and resolutely practical egalitarian who led the union for many years, was one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s close allies.
Remembering that moment is bittersweet on a Labor Day when so many Americans are unemployed, when wages are stagnant or dropping, and when the labor movement itself is in stark decline.
Only 12.3 percent of American wage and salary workers belong to unions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, down from a peak of about one-third of the work force in 1955. A movement historically associated with the brawny workers in auto, steel, rubber, construction, rail, and the ports now represents more employees in the public sector (7.9 million) than in the private sector (7.4 million).
Even worse than the falling membership numbers is the extent to which the ethos animating organized labor is increasingly foreign to American culture. The union movement has always been attached to a set of values—solidarity being the most important, the sense that each should look out for the interests of all. This promoted other commitments: to mutual assistance, to a rough-and-ready sense of equality, to a disdain for elitism, to a belief that democracy and individual rights did not stop at the plant gate or the office reception room.
You might accuse me of being a union romantic, and in some ways I am, having grown up in a union town, loved the great union songs, and imbibed such novels about labor's struggles as John Steinbeck's fine and underrated "In Dubious Battle."
So, for the record, I am fully aware of the union movement's failures. I recognize that certain unions became corrupt and others were decidedly undemocratic, that some union contracts proved excessive, and that "solidarity" could turn into intimidation.
Yet these problems get more than ample attention, while labor's achievements go largely unmentioned. The hugely constructive contributions of Reuther (or Sidney Hillman or Eugene V. Debs) are barely noted in standard renditions of U.S. history. Few Americans under 35 have much direct experience with unions. When the word "union" appears in the media these days, it is typically invoked in stories about teachers resisting school reform or the pension costs burdening local governments.
All but forgotten is the fact that our nation's extraordinary prosperity from the end of World War II to the 1970s was in significant part the result of union contracts that, in words the right-wing hated Barack Obama for saying in 2008, "spread the wealth around." A broad middle class with spending power to keep the economy moving created a virtuous cycle of low joblessness and high wages.
Between 1966 and 1970, as Gerald Seib pointed out last week in The Wall Street Journal, the United States enjoyed an astonishing 48 straight months in which the unemployment rate was at or below 4 percent. No, the unions didn't do all this by themselves. But they were important co-authors of a social contract that made our country fairer, richer and more productive.
There are many complicated reasons why these arrangements broke down, but I do not see things getting substantially better unless we find ways of increasing the bargaining power of wage-earners—precisely what Reuther and his fellowship dedicated their lives to doing.
Beth Shulman, a writer, lawyer and union leader who died of cancer earlier this year at the age of 60, called our indifference to those who labor for low wages "The Betrayal of Work," the title of her classic 2003 social portrait of our time. Whatever else they achieve, the unions remind us of the dignity of all who toil, whatever their social position, color or educational attainments. We should miss labor's influence more than we do.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. is is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of, most recently, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right.
(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group
Sometimes, it seems like the United States is more interested in giving aid to Egypt than Egypt is to receive it. This year, for example, Egypt objected to a $250 million civilian aid package if USAID funded unregistered NGOs. Many human rights groups in the country have trouble receiving official sanction from the Egyptian government and thus require outside support to be effective. So, instead of standing firm, the Obama administration agreed to cut their USAID support, departing from U.S. policy elsewhere in the world and breaking its own law as stipulated under the Brownback Amendment.
This perverse exchange is just one of many accumulating signs that U.S. policy toward Egypt desperately needs change, and soon. Currently, America gives Egypt over $1.3 billion every year in military aid alone, fortifying a cruel dictatorship in the hope that this friendship helps the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, contributes to stability in the Middle East, garners more Arab alliances, and fends off religious extremism. And with Egypt’s upcoming elections and indications that Mubarak may be unlikely to live out the next few years, the benefits of incremental reform are increasing, while the costs of sticking with the status quo remain very high.
There are a host of reasons for the United States to reconsider its policy. Morally, it's clear that Egypt’s three-decade emergency law has engendered a police culture devoid of restraint, as evidenced by the sad case of Khaled Said, a young man who was recently publicly beaten to death by Egyptian police. Such treatment, in varying degrees, is commonplace—and the United States cannot, in good conscience, continue such aid when Egypt refuses to respect fundamental human rights. Washington should make it clear that its sympathies lie with the Egyptian people, especially in this delicate time of transition, when the political environment is being reshaped, and when the public is increasingly demanding a larger voice in policy making. Moreover, American support for Mubarak brands Washington as a fickle and hypocritical champion of democratic principles, and the United States would do well to seize this moment to restore its credibility.
Meanwhile, democratic reform would not be all that harmful to U.S. interests. President Mubarak has successfully sustained the perception that any democratic opening equates to devolution of power to Islamic extremists. But the truth is rather different: The current incarnation of the Muslim Brotherhood is neither fanatical nor self-destructive. It has formally renounced violence, and it sees itself as part of a broader opposition effort in Egypt. The group has formally thrown its weight behind the renowned moderate Mohamed ElBaradei and its electoral platform this year is exclusively concerned with democratic reforms that are supported by a broad coalition of opposition parties, including El Ghad, Wafd, and AlWasat. While freer elections could increase the representation of Muslim Brothers in parliament, they almost certainly would not swamp Egypt's brand of moderate secularism. This year, according to Essam al-Arian, a member of the Brotherhood’s guidance bureau, the Brotherhood plans to field candidates for only 40 percent of the contestable seats—and, highlighting the group's moderation on social issues, 20 to 25 of those nominees will be women.
The belief that reform would bring radical Islamists to power misreads Egyptian society and underestimates the Egyptian people. Unlike the Gazans, who voted for rule by Hamas in 2005, the Egyptian populace has choices between many political parties, and the average Egyptian is not a religious extremist. On the contrary, 70 percent of Egyptians say they are concerned about the global rise of Islamic extremism, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.
From a national security standpoint, too, it turns out that the costs of supporting democracy are fairly low. The Bush administration saw this firsthand in 2005, for example, when it pressured Egypt to hold free and fair elections. To a small extent, the policy worked. The election was far from free and fair, it represented an important step forward. As the first multi-candidate election in Egypt's history, it increased political space for opposition parties from nothing to something, and it opened up the campaign atmosphere more than ever before, while the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was unaffected. As a former administration official explained, “Egypt will continue to make those policy choices based on national interest alone, and not on the United States.” Furthermore, the primary opposition parties and movements in Egypt, in their current statements, demands, and actions, have so far expressed themselves as moderates. Thus, deciding between healthy democratic reform in Egypt and a stable Middle East is a false choice.
Plus, the scope of policy changes required would not actually be that radical. Successful democratic reform is a gradual process. And the Obama administration has already performed some advocacy on behalf of Egypt's democrats, quickly denouncing the government's brutal response to the April 6 protests, its renewal of emergency law, its flawed upper house elections, and the murder of Said. In June, the State Department even released a YouTube video of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Tamara Wittes reaffirming U.S. support for democracy in Egypt—although Wittes’ video has only been viewed 250 times, five of which were by this author.
What is needed instead is an escalation in the profile and priority of our democracy-promotion efforts, and insistence upon modest but important deliverables. Working-level conversations with the Egyptians have been ineffective. The administration should do more and engage the government of Egypt at the highest diplomatic levels to encourage small but real steps toward democratic reform.
In addition, it's clear that United States cannot discontinue aid, but it can leverageit, which would at least align rhetoric with action and improve our image. The White House should ramp up financial assistance to human rights and democracy groups. And, for the upcoming parliamentary elections, it should push for immediately executable changes. Inviting international observers to increase election transparency would be an easy step forward, as would encouraging security forces to keep a distance from polling places, lifting emergency law, and allowing all political parties free campaigning and access to media.
In the longer-run, the United States will have to concern itself with creating a freer environment for political succession. For the presidential election, which is a year away, the scope for reform can expand. In particular, Articles 76, 77, and 88 of the constitution establish high barriers for presidential nomination, remove term limits, ban political rallies, and reduce effective judicial supervision of the election. The United States should support the Egyptian people in their call to amend these.
Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009 gave many Egyptians hope. Obama spoke of supporting human rights “everywhere,” and “power through consent, not coercion.” However, in the months following Obama’s landmark address, these priorities were absent from the agenda. Now is a perfect time to redouble efforts, build on the gains made in 2005, and follow up on Cairo. Otherwise, we risk alienating the world’s largest Arab population.
Aroop Mukharji is a former Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and currently a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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