July 2004
Today I rode my bike on the Fern Ridge bike path all the way to its end at Greenhill Road. A surprising number of gray-bearded men bombing along on their bikes. Okay, so physical life doesn’t have to end just because you’re in your sixties. Onward.
I found out a lot about wetlands from the interpretive signs, saw herons, geese, ducks.
I go back and forth on aging. Some days I think it’s all bullshit, that I haven’t changed in any major way since I got “old,” and that I shouldn’t get wrapped up in a false concept. What makes the difference is mainly how I feel. When I’m tired I feel old.
I will not get old. I will-not-talk-slow.
Is “old” a style?
Innocence is an appealing quality in a child, or even a young adult. After age 30 it turns into ignorance.
One thing we like about death is that it’s so dramatic.
Everything depends, although on what I can’t say.
Walking is better than coffee.
Older man, long white beard, singing and playing his guitar in the neighborhood park.
Why do older women have two cats? Because one isn’t enough.
We all have an obligation to be each other’s audience.
Here is a blog I like, The Homeless Guy.
An email from my ex-wife. Her sister’s twin boys, in the reserves, have been called up to go to Afghanistan. “Sooner or later,” she says, “the war affects all families.”
Time is the only luxury I have, so I waste a lot of it. Because I can. So important not to be productive. Freedom now. I hate getting up early, but I’ve discovered this gives me more time to waste.
Have I mentioned that I’m much nicer in person?
Just spent almost four hours in an interesting, fast-paced conversation. A special treat, to find someone who likes intelligent talking and with whom I share some common interests. I’m used to telling people about something I’m interested in and getting blank looks, followed by them changing the subject. So I’ve gotten cautious. I don’t want to bore people with all this thinking.
There is always the danger of becoming a character in your own movie.
It’s no wonder people think politics is “boring,” considering the level on which they approach it: “Bush bad. Kerry good, him not Bush. Nader bad, him elect Bush.” That’s the current Democratic platform, in its entirety. The odd thing is that Democrats don’t seem embarrassed by this.
… the average student loan debt of those graduating from four-year institutions is nearly $19,000, and the average credit card debt is more than $3,200.” – Register-Guard
I believe it was Donald Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, who said in one of his crime novels that power in any city swings back and forth between business people and the reformers. In Eugene power has just swung back to the reformers after years of business control. It will be interesting to see if anything significant changes. The mayor-elect spent about $100,000 on her campaign. Reform is expensive.
Dreams
In a dream, I was helping a woman understand her dream. The punch line was, “The canned life is not worth living.”
Cleaning tombstones in an old cemetery, maybe a job. I find Mother’s tombstone. C and C (my nieces) are there. C keeps saying to me, “You are home!”
I told my older sister in a dream that “I can remember things that haven’t happened yet. I don’t understand how that can be.” Specifically, I could remember her death, though not how it actually happened in waking life. I wanted to warn her to take it easy, but didn’t know how to say it.
There are things you can’t tell the living. Or the dead.
When you’re having death dreams, get up. Don’t go back to sleep for more of the same.
Postcards
The land levels as he comes down out of the trees and into miles of vineyards, the crooked branches crucified on wires. – E. Annie Proulx, Postcards, 1992
"I'm at an age where I can be invisible," she said. "Nobody notices older women. It's assumed that they're just there." – Proulx in an interview, 1994
Proulx, I’ve read, rhymes with “true.”
Several years ago I read her novel The Shipping News and got totally absorbed into it, as I seldom do anymore. Not sure about this earlier novel yet. Grim, very realistic, dead serious, literature.
She knows a lot about the past, how things looked. Postcards has incredible detail about how people lived in the past. I’m amazed that anyone can know that. How does Proulx know what an insurance company office would have looked like in 1951?
When I read something like this I realize that the world is just a sketch to me, like a dream. I notice so little, visually. My mind is full of ideas. Or maybe I’ve just never exercised the visual memory part. I told someone recently that for me memory is like snapshots in a photo album.
The bear, like many bears, had led a brief and vivid life. Born in the late winter of 1918 in a stump den, he was the oldest of two cubs. In personality he was quarrelsome and insensitive to the subtle implications of new things.
Every time I go to hear a writer read, one of the questions is always some variant of “How do you do it?” We’re readers, and we’re mystified as to how our books are created. We will never understand. We wish we could do it ourselves.
The moon slipped up, showing a scorched edge like a dime in fireplace ashes. Its light coated Larry’s hand, his glasses, the dog’s enamel eye.
Hard-edged images close to truth, always original, never predictable.
What I see in her writing is that reality, and how we feel about it, is seldom what it is “supposed” to be. That layer of sentimentality we put on top of everything, to make it nicer.
This world where I forget almost everything as soon as it happens, can’t remember if I took the calcium pill.
The unsecured scaffolding of his life rested on forgetting.
It’s very difficult to turn life into literature without lying. I find myself telling stories to new acquaintances, making them better. It’s simply part of the process: everything gets changed. Someone asked me if something I had written in Drift were true. “It’s a performance,” I said.
That boiling smile.
Social epidemics
Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, 2002, reminds me of some of the ideas from the complexity class I took recently. Societies behave like complex systems. Little changes in social systems can have large effects.
Social change can happen quickly. The system suddenly snaps to a different stable state. The speed of change is counter-intuitive: we expect social change to be slow and steady, but it actually often proceeds in sudden jumps. The dissolution of the Soviet Union would be an example.
Gladwell calls a sudden social change the “tipping point,” a term he borrowed from epidemiology. It’s the point at which an epidemic takes off, moves from an arithmetical progression to a geometrical one, because the number of carriers has reached critical mass. The graph line suddenly shoots upward. Only Gladwell is writing about social epidemics. Ideas, he says, are contagious.
Main principles:
1. “The Law of the Few” – A few people do most of the idea spreading, because they are much better at it than others. These are the people you want to recruit to spread your message. The 80/20 principle says that 20 percent of the people cause 80 percent of the effects. But with epidemics it’s even more extreme – fewer carriers. “Social epidemics…are driven by…a handful of exceptional people…. It’s things like how sociable they are, or how energetic or knowledgeable or influential among their peers.” (Also see the novel Bellwether by Connie Willis.)
· “Mavens” are curious and detail-oriented, to the point, compared to the rest of us, of obsession. They love to gather and pass on information. Lots of them on the Internet.
· “Connecters” link us to other people.
· “Salesmen” are the persuaders.
2. The “Stickiness Factor” – A message has to be memorable, contagious, move us to action. “There are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.”
3. The “Power of Context” – “Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.” Small changes in context can cause large changes in behavior, so we should focus on little things in the community, like graffiti, that we can easily change.
Gladwell writes that the way we “function and communicate and process information is messy and opaque…. Social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.” So you have to test to see if your attempt to start a social epidemic is working, measure results.
Timing is important: “Tipping Points are moments of great sensitivity. Changes made right at the Tipping Point can have enormous consequences.”
The American left has often been accused of “preaching to the choir,” but maybe that makes sense if the “choir” is made up of active transmitters and not just passive receivers, like most Americans.
Where do you find these people? I would look for people who are already activists, reporters, teachers, ministers, politicians, etc. Tell them you don’t expect them to join your group or spend a lot of time on it, just pass the message on when they can. Give them simple materials they can use, a stack of brochures with website address. Speakers they can invite to meetings or neighborhood coffees. The message should include some simple, easy action people can take – go to the website and use a form to send a message to a politician. Build up an email list, and use it sparingly.
Working Stiff
I’m reading and enjoying A Working Stiff’s Manifesto by Iain Levison, 2002. A humorous account of all his bad jobs. I like his “bad attitude.” It’s all a pile of crap, we’re treated like slaves, so don’t take it more seriously than you absolutely have to.
Levison says that people with English degrees are a “great demographic” for get rich quick sales scams where you have to “invest” a lot of money up front. “The trillion-dollar-industry-that-produces-nothing called ‘the educational system’ got us, so we can be got again.”
My BA is in sociology. Same difference. I’ve bit on a few of those ads. A couple of times I’ve paid for “business plans” that were vague crap. Anything to escape going to a dreary office job for low pay, suffocating in boredom.
I once answered an ad that said for fifty dollars I could get a list of companies in MY AREA who would hire me to work at home with a computer. They sent me a copy of the local yellow pages on a disk.
He’s good. Tells this awful story with enough humor to make it go down. Of course if you don’t want to know anything about reality – say you’re a college student working on a liberal arts BA – you won’t like it.
I hope he made some money off this book.
This is the kind of book I would like everyone to read, and probably no one I know would read it. Too true.
Someone took all the money, that’s for sure. It’s got to be around somewhere, there was so much of it. Maybe it was the trickle-down theory of economics in reverse, the trickle-up theory. It just slowly bled away from the American people, as one careless decision after another allowed the millionaires to carve off a bigger piece every day.
I disagree with Levison about the “careless” decisions. From everything I’ve read it has been a very deliberate decision by the haves to take more from the have-nots.
There is no happy ending to his book. Unless he makes it as a writer he is permanently stuck in low-wage work. What seems real about the book is that behind the humor and interesting writing is a solid sense of futility.
Today I went to a leftist political meeting. They are sharp, good-hearted people, but I still had that familiar feeling that I was an ambassador from the poor people’s planet. I’m not sure that middle-class people can ever fully get it.
Defining “left”
It should be trivial to describe in a way that people will agree with. – comment on the Portland Indymedia website.
It is difficult to get agreement on much of anything, especially among the left! However, there are commonly accepted definitions, and these are core concepts for understanding politics. It's about income and asset distribution in society, who gets the money. This is, and always has been, the main political issue in any society, at least since mass agriculture and "civilization" replaced tribes.
Those who believe that an elite should get most of the money are on the political right. They believe that a large amount of inequality in a society is the natural state of affairs, that they are entitled to keep every penny they can lay their hands on, and that they have no responsibility to help anyone else. Social Darwinism, survival of the fittest, with the assumption that the fittest are those who make the most money. They want a minimal government which will provide a military defense and protect property. They hate social programs and want to privatize everything. They use government to channel tax money to big business – corporate welfare.
Those who believe that there should be little or no – certainly less – inequality in society are on the left. They want a fairer distribution of the goodies. Everyone should at least get what is required for survival, preferably enough to lead a decent life, as defined in a particular society. They want government to redistribute income, through taxation, so that there is less inequality. Government should also write rules that favor labor organizing, so that working people have more power over their income. Government safety net programs should catch those who fall through the economic cracks.
Societies organize themselves into economic classes. Lower classes are associated with the left and higher classes with the right.
In the U.S., political groups arrange themselves from left to right roughly as follows:
communists – socialists – Naderites (controlled capitalism) – progressives – Greens – liberal Democrats (Kucinich) – organized labor – “new” Democrats (Clinton, Gore, Kerry) – traditional fiscal conservatives (Reform party, Ross Perot) – Republicans – Libertarians (Republicans who smoke dope)
It is possible that some people are not on this scale, because they don't care about income distribution, but I would argue that they are also outside of politics. Fundamentalist Christians seem to care more about having society reflect their values than they do about their often low incomes, so they've allied themselves with the Republicans.
I don't know enough about anarchism to say where they would be on the left-right scale, or if they would even be on it. From what little I've read I get the impression that they're against civilization – mass organization – and want to return to the tribal level.
I read somewhere that the terms "left" and "right" originally came from the seating arrangements of the two factions in the English parliament.
Here is another take on the question, a diagram copied from the Portland Indymedia website, where they’ve added a vertical authoritarian scale to the left-right economic scale. The people on the scale are all presidential candidates.
Walt Brown – Socialist
David Cobb – Green
Michael Badnarik – Libertarian
Michael Peroutka – Constitution
Poor white trash
White Trash, ed. Matt Wray & Annolee Newitz, 1997
The whole country looks more like a trailer park every day. As our lived economy gets worse, more jobs are becoming temporary, homes less permanent or more crowded, neighborhoods unstable. We’re transients just passing through this place, wherever and whatever it is, on our way somewhere else, mostly down. – Allon Berube, “Sunset Trailer Park”
Poor, rural whites (the original white trash) have lived by dreams…. – Roxanne A. Dunbar, “Bloody Footprints”
So it is particularly unseemly when [white trash] appear to shamelessly flaunt their trashiness, which, after all, is nothing but an aggressively in-your-face reminder of stark class differences, a fierce fuck-you to anyone trying to maintain a belief in America whose only class demarcations are the seemingly obvious ones of race. – Constance Penley, “Crackers and Whackers”
I get the impression that white liberals would rather deal with race than class. Somehow class is a touchier issue, because it puts middle-class white liberals in conflict with people of their own race, people who look like them. It’s not something they can deal with by being more tolerant, by promoting “diversity.” Class differences imply that the middle class needs to give up some of its privileges.
I also feel the need to get in their faces. You have to be very confrontational before they’ll get it.
Above all, we must not vote with them.
Penley, who grew up as a southern poor white, says there was only one real distinction between poor whites and blacks: blacks ate “gopher,” a burrowing tortoise, and whites didn’t. Well my white family, when we were poor in Florida, did eat gopher. I remember my father cracking the shell, extracting the turtle and making stew out of it. I also remember eating squirrel. My father never made much money – carpenter, salesman, reporter – but he was resourceful.
I don’t remember feeling poor or being looked down on for it. Perhaps those around us in the rural Florida of the late 40s and early 50s were not much better off.
I think the poor, of whatever race, have to learn defiance. If you don’t you will be “put in your place” and spend your life sucking up to your “betters.” In my fantasies I picture large crowds of poor people marching in the streets, right arm raised, middle finger extended in the fuck you salute.
One response of those who have been oppressed is to embrace the insulting label pinned on them – “nigger,” “poor white trash” – and make it their own.
There is no reason to assume the superiority of the middle class over the poor. Just because you don’t have a junked car in your front yard…. Someone in Colorado told me those cars are “yuppie repellant,” but I think more likely they’re for spare parts.
Penley says pornography is a form of resistance against the middle class, a way of rubbing their tidy fastidious little noses in it. We want to annoy. And also, “You think we’re animals? Well here’s what it looks like.”
Penley argues that pornography is a way for working-class people to show their disrespect for middle-class values, to get back at them. Of course you could also argue the reverse, that pornography is just another way of exploiting poor people. Let us entertain you. We got that natural rhythm.
Middle-class people probably have just as much sex as the working class, they just call it “making love” and are more private about it. The whole middle-class idea is to keep everything under control. They are the self-smothering class.
The idea of in-your-faceness is further spelled out in White Trash in an interview between Laura Kipnis and performance artist White Trash Girl:
LK: And Clit-o-matic is…?
WTG: It’s like this big pussy with big teeth on top of a V-8 engine. It’s like power and femaleness, and explicitness. Everything that clit power and the explicit body means when it goes into autopilot and destroys everything in its wake.
I told someone offhandedly that if I were a superhero I’d be White Trash Girl. Her main super power would be like screaming at people. Like when somebody was giving her a hard time, she would just have this piercing [screams] “Fuck you, you fucking fucker!” And they would die of agony from hearing this piercing, screaming noise.
I admit this is really juvenile work. It’s Mad Magazine and Beavis and Butthead. People say, I hate to tell you this, but it’s kind of stupid and I say, yeah, and….? What are you trying to say?
The trick is to find some arty humorous way to express our rage. Like Michael Moore. Only nastier.
… bell hooks describes the way blacks associate whites with “the mysterious, the strange, and the terrible.” – Annolee Newitz
Whites, she says, view themselves as “racially invisible.” Yeah, we think we blend into the all-white background. “I’m invisible now, I’ve got nothing, to conceal, tell me how does it feel….” – Bob Dylan
Whites, Newitz suggests, project their undesirable traits on both blacks and “white trash.” As a way of denying that they’re at all like that. Human. Newitz says middle-class whites regard poor whites as primitive and uncivilized, people they can look down on. We assume that those with little money must be stupid.
One of the ideas I got out of White Trash is that there are conflicts within classes, not just between them. The middle class, for example, is, I think, often bored to death with itself. The only time anything interesting happens is when they break the rules. It seems to be mainly disaster that interrupts the deadly routine: getting fired or laid off, adultery, divorce, illness and death.
I’m split between the two classes, because I have a liberal arts BA, read a lot and have mostly middle-class friends. But I feel more loyalty to the class I came from, and economically never got out of. My economic self-interest is on the side of poor white trash.
Robert Reich
With rare exceptions, senators are always tall and big-shouldered. Heightism is rampant in American politics. – Robert Reich, Locked in the Cabinet, 1998
Important to Reich because he is a very short man. Reich was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor in his first term. Apparently also Clinton’s resident liberal, Reich got frustrated and didn’t stick around for the second term.
Every time a new president is elected, America assembles a new government of 3000 or so amateurs who only sometimes know the policies they’re about to administer, rarely have experience managing large government bureaucracies, and almost never know the particular piece of it they’re going to run.
Before he ran Clinton’s “vast” Dept. of Labor, Reich says he had managed only one employee, a secretary. To do what he has no idea how to do, manage the department, Reich must interview and hire a bunch of assistants. If he moves quickly they might be in place in five months, and it would be another six months before they know what they’re doing. He wants them to share Clinton’s values, be knowledgeable about policy and be good managers. He realizes he has no reliable way of telling if candidates meet any of these criteria. “I’m flying blind.”
On campaign finance, Reich quotes Rep. Marty Sobo, chairman of the House Budget Committee:
We’re owned by them. Business. That’s where the campaign money comes from now. In the 1980s we gave up on the little guys. We started drinking from the same trough as the Republicans. We figured business would have to pay up because we had the power on the Hill…. We were right. But we didn’t realize we were giving them power over us. And now we have both branches of government [1993], and they have even more power. It’s too late now.
And then in 1994 the Republicans took over Congress. Democrats have been unable or unwilling to mount an effective defense, and things have gone steadily downhill from there. Clinton helped it along by giving in on key issues like welfare and pushing globalization., a policy wonk’s wet dream.
On an issue of interest to the Northwest, Reich says that “Environmentalism isn’t to blame for the shrinking number of jobs [in the logging industry]. As in much of the rest of American industry, technology is taking over routine work.”
Reich wanted “investments” in the workforce, such as free job training. It was part of Clinton’s 1992 campaign, and probably the main reason I voted for him. (Somehow I missed the welfare bashing.) But the “investments” got crowded out by deficit reduction:
Historians will note that Bill Clinton’s investment plan was killed when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. Marty Sabo had it partly right: Democrats have sold their souls to big money, and big money isn’t buying the plan.
Perhaps because, unlike Reich, they didn’t see a need for it. Reich thought the future of America, as he said in a previous book from the late 1980s, was in specialty, high-value manufacturing. As opposed to the mass, high-volume manufacturing that had made America prosperous, and was now declining. He thought specialty manufacturing would require high worker skills, so it would be a good “investment” to retrain them.
What has happened instead is that manufacturing in general has been automated, and some of it exported to cheaper wage countries, so we simply don’t need very many manufacturing workers. Manufacturing has gone the way of agriculture.
That, along with the U.S. baby boom, women flooding into the labor force and unlimited immigration, much of it illegal, has made workers expendable.
The good jobs are not there to train people for. Most new jobs are routine, low-skilled, badly paid service jobs. Well there are skills, like taking care of children in day care centers, but these are skills our culture doesn’t value and won’t pay much for. What we need to do is to force employers to pay service workers more, but that means the sacred middle class would have to pay more for services. They’ve come to depend on a low-paid servant class.
Reich also points out that Clinton screwed up by publicly focusing on reducing the deficit instead of public investments. “What’ll I be able to tell the average working person I did for him?” Clinton fumed, as his program went down the drain in Congress. Not much, as it turned out. Not enough to keep a lot of us in his party. There was a failure of leadership.
We haven’t even begun to adapt to an economy with a chronic surplus of people. Either we need to reduce the surplus, probably by cutting off illegal immigration, or find some other way than jobs to pay people. Give everyone a piece of the pie. Make us all part owners of business – not a particular business, which may disappear at any moment, but business in general – with required monthly payments from our “investments.” Some economist proposed that in the 1970s. He said we should all be capitalists. Yeah, that would still leave the plutocrats in charge, but they would have to cut us in on the deal.
Would free job training, in the early 90s, actually have helped me? I don’t know. With the help of some money I made growing pot, I bought computers and taught myself how to use them from books. I was a secretary, word processor, administrative assistant. At my highest level, I learned Photoshop, on the job, scanned and adjusted images. But I still only made $10 per hour, part-time. Where were the good jobs using a computer that I could have gotten into?
I know someone who works as a “graphics designer,” using a computer to help create a print publication, but I don’t have the artistic ability – I’ve tried – to do that. I tried programming but my mind doesn’t work that way and after a few classes I lost interest. Not real technical. I took a class in technical writing, which I do have some talent for, good at explaining things, but couldn’t find a job at it.
I just could not find the door in the wall. For me, and I suspect most people, the door isn’t there. In so many fields, the career ladder has been pulled up, and we labor eternally in the mines.
In Jeremy Rifkin’s book, The End of Work, 1995, he suggests that we deal with the gradual disappearance of jobs by paying people to do volunteer work. That might have worked for me, if I had a lot of freedom to choose the work and change it whenever I wanted to. Rifkin wrote that there is plenty of work in this country that needs to be done, it’s just that we don’t want to pay people to do it.
Somehow we need to break the rigid grip of “the market,” which locks us into fixed roles that don’t suit us, and will not let go.
Unionized or nonunionized, America’s front-line workers feel bruised and beaten by years of promises unkept, real wages and benefits cut, and jobs eliminated.
In 1993, during the first year of Clinton’s reign, he got a bill through Congress to raise taxes on the rich. It barely passed by two votes in the House and one vote – Gore’s – in the Senate. The Clinton team celebrated. (Bob Woodward, The Agenda)
But Reich wrote at the time that they had walked into a trap. The whole plan had been sold as a way of reducing the deficit. (Which it eventually did, later producing a surplus. Or maybe it was just the usual business cycle upswing, producing more tax revenue.) This would also mean no money for Reich’s beloved public “investments,” and budget cuts for programs that helped people. The deficit had taken over the Clinton administration.
Because no one will want to make big cuts in defense, and no one will have the political courage to stop the explosion of Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlements for the better-off, the only categories of spending to be sacrificed will be those that go to working people and the poor – spending on public schools in poorer areas, on job skills, on public employment for the jobless, on child care, mass transit, food stamps and welfare.
Defense can’t be cut because even liberal Democrats see it as a jobs program – the only one they’re going to get – although spending on civilian projects such as construction of low-income housing would create more jobs per tax dollar spent. Conservatives see defense spending as a way to make the corporations richer.
Cutting entitlements for the well-off through means testing (benefits inversely related to income) would turn programs like Social Security and Medicare into poverty programs, probably costing them their middle-class political support.
I can see that one reason Reich didn’t get his money for job retraining is that no one believed the jobs were there to be retrained for. I don’t believe it. I hear that laid off computer programmers are having a hard time finding jobs.
I also think that retraining older people is a nonstarter. By the time we’re in our 50s we want to coast on what we already know. To some extent it could be done. I started learning computers at 42 and continued into my late 50s, but I was learning the kind of low-level skills that make you $10 an hour, just enough to stay in the game. And I give myself credit for doing that. I’m still learning, but only if I feel interested, and rarely for money. I was never very patient with technical details. Beyond a certain level I get bored.
A woman I worked with as a data entry temp, in the late 80s, said computers sure had created a lot of lousy jobs.
By the end of the 90s a lot of those jobs had gone away. Business executives were typing their own letters, or emails, on their laptops. Businesses saved money by getting rid of their office staffs.
Reich, writing in 1993, claims that “the fastest-growing occupations are technician-type jobs paying above-average wages….” He doesn’t say what he means by “fastest-growing” – percentage-wise or total number of jobs? If a small field doubles its number of jobs that’s still not many jobs. I read now that the fastest-growing job categories are low-wage service jobs: janitor, retail sales clerk, nursing home attendants, cooks, etc.
I know an electronics technician in his 50s who was laid off from his $40,000 a year job and ended up working for a car rental business at half the salary. Technology jobs turned out to be boom-and-bust, and many are being outsourced to cheaper labor in other countries. Turns out India and China can train techs too.
One reason Reich couldn’t get money for job training out of Congress is that he supported NAFTA, pissing off labor and their congressional supporters. Reich thought it didn’t matter if NAFTA wiped out some U.S. manufacturing jobs because shucks, we’ll create better jobs which workers can get by … retraining. No one bought it.
Twenty percent of American citizens remain functionally illiterate.
Reich says the unions weren’t interested in job training, they wanted job security, to hang on to the jobs they had. Specifically, they wanted a law barring permanent replacement of strikers. They believed that Clinton could have passed such a law if he had put the same energy into it as he did to pass NAFTA – which the unions hated. Reich agrees. It was a classic case of pleasing the rich instead of the workers.
Blue-collar men are losing good jobs or fear they will. Their wages are dropping, and they have to take women’s jobs in fast food, retail sales, hospitals, and hotels. Their wives have to work harder. They are angry and humiliated and scared. They thought Clinton would change all that. But nothing happened. It only got worse.
Clinton’s health plan, Reich wrote in 1994:
… plays into its opponents’ hands. It’s unwieldy. I still don’t understand it. I’ve been to meetings on it, defended it on countless radio and TV programs, debated its merits publicly and privately, but I still don’t comprehend the whole. In the public arena, nothing is more vulnerable to organized opposition than a huge and complex idea.
Reich says that the two main political parties in the U.S. (in 1994) are actually “Keep the Jobs” and “Let Them Drown.” He doesn’t agree with either one. He wants to help people, but doesn’t believe keeping industrial jobs is possible. He wants to retrain people for “better” jobs, technical, high pay.
So here we are ten years later. Most of the industrial jobs have gone bye-bye, replaced with low-paid service jobs. Two members of my working-class family are retirement home cooks, at $8.50-$9.50 per hour. They are not going to be retrained, at their ages, for nonexistent tech jobs. What they need is higher pay for the jobs they’ve got.
Earth to Reich: job training doesn’t do any good if the jobs aren’t there, and the jobs that are available pay shit wages.
Flint [Michigan] is bleak and boarded up, most of its manufacturing jobs having disappeared. Campaigning here [fall of 1994] is like staging a pep rally in a graveyard. Unemployment is in double digits.
Flint is Michael Moore’s hometown, featured in his first movie Roger and Me. Mentioned also in Fahrenheit 911, real unemployment still estimated at 50 percent. Twice as bad as the Depression. They might as well evacuate it.
Reich has more faith in the American economy than I do. I have none. It may keep the middle class afloat, but my people are sinking. Unfortunately, as Reich says, “There’s no National Association of Working Poor,” although there sure ought to be.
Reich alternately gets it and doesn’t get it.
In the 1996 election, Reich writes:
… almost all of the new nonvoters were from households earning less than $50,000 a year. The great mass of nonvoters – which keeps growing – is overwhelmingly poor or of modest income. They didn’t vote in 1996 because they saw nothing in it for them.
Earnings inequality among full-time adult workers was greater by the end of the first Clinton administration than it had been at the start. Workers with only a high-school education or less continued their long-term slide.
The fiscal year 1997 budget started right on schedule. The biggest budget cuts were in programs for the poor.
Some half a billion dollars was spent on presidential elections. Most of it came from corporations and Wall Street, which outspent even organized labor in their support of Democratic candidates.
Reich wrote to Federal Reserve chair Allan Greenspan that in 1996:
Only in metropolitan areas where the official level of unemployment is under three percent are we beginning to see employers recruit from the central city and train employees in basic skills.
Reich says we’re becoming segregated not just by race but by class. “Economic apartheid is becoming the rule.”
In the 1994 election, where Democrats lost big, exit pools gave
Democrats a two-to-one advantage among voters who said their personal standard of living was rising, but a two-to-one disadvantage among those who said it was falling. The largest defections from the Democratic party were men without college degrees – nearly three out of four working men – whose wages have been dropping for a decade and a half.
Yet Democrats still think they can win by appealing to middle-class suburbia.
Nor did Reich have a high regard for labor.
Organized labor is an aging, doddering prizefighter still relishing trophies earned decades ago. But it’s the only fighter in that corner of the ring. There’s no other countervailing political force against the overriding power of business and finance.
In 1966 Reich asked Dick Gephardt, “Which would you prefer, a minimum-wage bill the President signs into law before the election, or the minimum-wage issue to clobber Republicans with during the election?” Gephardt replied, “Let’s just say we need the minimum-wage issue as long as possible.” In other words, the Democrats were using it as a political football.
The bill did pass, boosting the minimum wage from $4 something to $5 something, still greatly inadequate, even in 1996. One of the very few working-class victories in the Clinton administration.
And after that Clinton signed the so-called welfare reform bill. Clinton’s original proposal, Reich says, would have added $2 billion a year to the bill for job training and public-service jobs, to move welfare recipients into paid work. But Clinton didn’t push it. Instead, he ended up signing a Republican bill which would “cut total welfare spending by about $9 billion a year, eliminate entirely the sixty-year-old guarantee to help the poor, turn over administration to the states, and cut off benefits after a certain time [five years] even if there’s no work to be had.”
When Clinton signed the welfare bill, mainly to take the issue away from Republicans before the 1996 election, he was 20 points ahead of Bob Dole in the polls.
Reich on the 1996 Democratic convention: “No suggestion that the wages and benefits of almost half the workforce are still stagnant or dropping while the rest of the economy is flourishing.”
Clinton got 49 percent of the vote, after
co-opting the Republicans on all their issues…. The turnout was the lowest percentage of the voting population since 1924…. And almost all of the nonvoters were from households earning less than $50,000 a year. The great mass of nonvoters – which keeps growing – is overwhelmingly poor or of modest income. They didn’t vote in 1996 because they saw nothing in it for them…. Earnings inequality among full-time adult workers was greater by the end of the first Clinton administration than it had been at the start.
Some half a billion dollars was spent on the presidential elections. Most of it came from corporations and Wall Street, which outspent even organized labor in their support for Democratic candidates.