Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Following up on economics.enlightenradio.org

Hi there,

I wanted to check in with you one last time regarding my previous email and our guide about helping single women obtain the mortgage they deserve. I think this resource would be a great addition to this page of your site:

http://economics.enlightenradio.org/2016/05/ryan-cooper-why-bernie-sanders-is-most.html

I’ve included our guide here:

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/single-womans-guide-to-mortgage-ready-credit.php

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Gratefully,

Ryan Noonan
Communications Specialist
CreditCards.com
9600 N. Mopac, Stonebridge Plaza II, Suite 500
Austin, TX  78759

On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 9:39 PM, Ryan Noonan <ryan.noonan@creditcards.com> wrote:

Hi there,

I hope you’re enjoying your Thursday.

I wanted to reach out to see if you had a chance to read my previous email.

We created a guide that explains the best strategies for single women to build a strong credit profile and obtain a mortgage. It also describes the best practices for preparing and protecting ones credit throughout the home-buying process.

I thought you might want to include it on your page here:

http://economics.enlightenradio.org/2016/05/ryan-cooper-why-bernie-sanders-is-most.html

Here’s the link:

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/single-womans-guide-to-mortgage-ready-credit.php

Please let me know if you can add our guide to your page.

Best,

Ryan Noonan
Communications Specialist
CreditCards.com
9600 N. Mopac, Stonebridge Plaza II, Suite 500
Austin, TX  78759

On Thu, Apr 4, 2019 at 9:01 PM, Ryan Noonan <ryan.noonan@creditcards.com> wrote:

Hi there,

I hope you’re well!

I noticed you mention cbpp.org’s A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality on this page of your site:

http://economics.enlightenradio.org/2016/05/ryan-cooper-why-bernie-sanders-is-most.html

I thought you might also want to link to our guide that empowers single women to rise above financial inequality and build their credit in order to obtain a mortgage.

Despite making up almost one-fifth of the home buying market, single women are more likely to be denied mortgage loans than any other group. We created a guide that breaks down the best strategies for positively managing credit throughout the home-buying process and how to utilize a strong credit profile to combat gender bias.

I have included a link to our guide here:

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/single-womans-guide-to-mortgage-ready-credit.php

Would you consider adding a link to our guide on your page above?

Gratefully,

Ryan Noonan
Communications Specialist
CreditCards.com
9600 N. Mopac, Stonebridge Plaza II, Suite 500
Austin, TX  78759




Don't want emails from us anymore? Reply to this email with the word "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject line.
CreditCards.com, 9430 Research Blvd Bldg 4, Austin Texas, 78759, United States

Friday, April 19, 2019

Capitalism’s Great Reckoning [feedly]

Capitalism's Great Reckoning
https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/capitalism-s-great-reckoning-by-james-k--galbraith-2019-04

As the maladies of modern capitalism have multiplied, fundamental questions about the future of the world's dominant economic model have become impossible to ignore. But in the absence of viable alternatives, the question is how to reform a system that is increasingly at odds with democracy.

VISIT WEBSITE

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Thursday, April 18, 2019

Question for economics.enlightenradio.org

Hi there,

I hope you’re enjoying your Thursday.

I wanted to reach out to see if you had a chance to read my previous email.

We created a guide that explains the best strategies for single women to build a strong credit profile and obtain a mortgage. It also describes the best practices for preparing and protecting ones credit throughout the home-buying process.

I thought you might want to include it on your page here:

http://economics.enlightenradio.org/2016/05/ryan-cooper-why-bernie-sanders-is-most.html

Here’s the link:

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/single-womans-guide-to-mortgage-ready-credit.php

Please let me know if you can add our guide to your page.

Best,

Ryan Noonan
Communications Specialist
CreditCards.com
9600 N. Mopac, Stonebridge Plaza II, Suite 500
Austin, TX  78759

On Thu, Apr 4, 2019 at 9:01 PM, Ryan Noonan <ryan.noonan@creditcards.com> wrote:

Hi there,

I hope you’re well!

I noticed you mention cbpp.org’s A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality on this page of your site:

http://economics.enlightenradio.org/2016/05/ryan-cooper-why-bernie-sanders-is-most.html

I thought you might also want to link to our guide that empowers single women to rise above financial inequality and build their credit in order to obtain a mortgage.

Despite making up almost one-fifth of the home buying market, single women are more likely to be denied mortgage loans than any other group. We created a guide that breaks down the best strategies for positively managing credit throughout the home-buying process and how to utilize a strong credit profile to combat gender bias.

I have included a link to our guide here:

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/single-womans-guide-to-mortgage-ready-credit.php

Would you consider adding a link to our guide on your page above?

Gratefully,

Ryan Noonan
Communications Specialist
CreditCards.com
9600 N. Mopac, Stonebridge Plaza II, Suite 500
Austin, TX  78759




Don't want emails from us anymore? Reply to this email with the word "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject line.
CreditCards.com, 9430 Research Blvd Bldg 4, Austin Texas, 78759, United States

Embedded Internationalism: The Only Way to Fight the Global Oligarchy [feedly]

Embedded Internationalism: The Only Way to Fight the Global Oligarchy
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/embedded-internationalism-the-only-way-to-fight-the-global-oligarchy.html

A Very provocative essay on what constitutes internationalism. Also provocative, Dani Rodrik's Peaceful Coexistence 2.0

Embedded Internationalism: The Only Way to Fight the Global Oligarchy

Posted on April 18, 2019 by 

Yves here This post may seen a bit abstract, but it attempts to map out how to increase democratic accountability and counter the influence powerful private sector interests have over major international institutions. While another response has been to try to bolster national sovereignity, that can't go very far in a world where economies smaller than the US and China (or ones that are or have been forced to autarkies, like India, Russia, and Iran) operate through regional trade blocs.

The shortcoming of nationalism as a response to how the global wealthy have succeeded in using their ability to arbitrage markets to foment a race to the bottom in environmental, regulatory, and labor standards is that it often winds up being dominated by right wing interests that play upon xenophobia and by design don't address the problems of mobile capital and long supply chains. So "embedded internationalism" isn't quite a solution, it at least helps clarify the nature of the problem and where some approaches might lie.

By David Adler (@davidrkadler), a political researcher. Originally published at openDemocracy

Progressives must urgently develop a new vision for international institutions, or they will be reshaped in the image of our opponents.

This article is part of a series by openDemocracy and the Bretton Woods Project on the crisis of multilateralism. The views expressed are those of the author's only, and are not necessarily representative of either organisation.

A coup is underway at the World Bank, and no one is watching. On Friday, 5 April, the executive directors of the world's most powerful multilateral bank voted unanimously to appoint David Malpass — a staunch supporter of Donald Trump and fierce critic of "globalism" — as its new president.

The decision honoured the 'gentleman's agreement' that allows the US president to install an ally at the helm of the bank — despite a hard-fought campaign to allow for an open selection. The direction of the bank will now be set by a man who believes that multilateralism has "gone substantially too far" to obstruct the America First agenda.

But beyond the pages of the Financial Times, these proceedings have barely dented public discourse. Malpass will begin his five-year term without a single street protest or a single press statement by a major political party.

The silence is puzzling. The World Bank, like its partner the IMF, has huge costs. The United States alone contributes $155 billion of taxpayer money to the bank — more than double what it spends on food stamps each year. These institutions also have huge consequences. As the Bretton Woods Project has revealed, the World Bank and the IMF continue to demand austerity and drive privatization across the global south. The scale and scope of these institutions suggests that their management should invite serious public scrutiny.

But they do not — and this is not an accident. International institutions are intentionally insulated from democratic demands. A very generous reading would suggest that this is because international institutions must be protected from the vagaries of the electoral cycle. Their democratic deficit is, according to this view, a virtue. International institutions could never withstand grassroots intervention.

But this strategy has now — clearly and dramatically — backfired. By closing themselves off from public view, these institutions made themselves easy targets for political entrepreneurs seeking a scapegoat for their domestic crises. The European Union, the United Nations, NATO — international institutions have become the bogeymen of populist movements around the world. There are important reasons to revile these institutions, but they are rarely those cited by the blustering Brexiteers or MAGA chuds.

In other words, if democracy once appeared as the great danger to the integrity of international institutions, technocracy has revealed itself as their true existential threat.

It is time, then, to bring the politics back in — not only as a strategy for building a new internationalism, but also as a necessary defence against the alt-globalist agenda that is climbing its way to the very top of our international institutions, one quiet coup at a time.

II.

But what, exactly, does this mean? How should we make sense of the struggle to reclaim international institutions? And what are the strategies to get there?

To answer these questions, it is helpful to set out the terrain.

I map the political economy of this struggle across two axes. The first is embeddedness: the extent to which markets are anchored in society. At one end is laissez faire capitalism, a free market unconstrained by moral considerations and economic regulations. Everything here is a commodity, including human life and the earth itself. The axis therefore moves upward toward decommodification, enshrining protections that limit the exploitation of resources like labour and land.

The first axis could also be described by its more modern inverse, financialisation: the extent to which elements of society present themselves as opportunities for financial speculation. To disembed is to financialise. To re-embed is to definancialise.

The second axis is scale: the level at which political activity is organized, from the nationalto the global.

Figure 1: The Axes of Internationalism

The map tells the story of a century of political conflict.

In its first half, the primary conflict occurred along the axis of embeddedness at the national level. A Gilded Age of capitalism witnessed the emergence of a consolidated national bourgeoisie, which built new institutions — peak associations, political machines — to disembed the economy. New workers' movements then organized their own institutions at the national level — trade unions, political parties — in order to demand that governments combat inequality, provide decent jobs, and enshrine new rights to services like healthcare and goods like housing. Social democracy was born.

The latter half of the century activated the second axis. Having been tamed at the national level, capital went global, chasing opportunities in countries where the economy was far less constrained by embedding regulations. Of course, they did not encounter those countries in a natural state of disembeddedness. Rather, this process required the construction and mobilization of institutions that would clear the way for international investors.

The World Bank and the IMF, dangling the carrot of development resources, were refashioned to play this role. Promoting their 'Washington Consensus,' these institutions acted as vehicles for a global disembedding of the economy — both directly, in the cases of countries that agreed to the terms of structural adjustment; and indirectly, in the cases of countries who were forced to compete with them, applying pressure to undo the progress of the social democratic arrangement.

In other words, capital and labour have been caught in a game of cat and mouse across the quadrants of this map. Capital first scurried to enshrine its interests at the national level, then labour caught up and contested. Capital scurried to reconstruct the global economy in its image — but no social movement has emerged to contest it at that scale.

Indeed, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, new political movements tended to point toward more familiar quadrants of the map. Right-wing populists from Nigel Farage to Donald Trump heralded a new model of national neoliberalism: shifting back on the axis of scale while demanding a deeply disembedded economy — Singapore-on-Thames, or the Trump tax cuts. Their left-wing opponents similarly called to reassert the primacy of the nation, but with much stronger social protections. Globalization, both agreed, had gone too far.

But in calling to return to the nation, the new social democrats failed to learn the lessons of the past. Capital, now globalized, has the upper hand against individual nations that hope to contest it. It can slither between borders, and hide out in havens. The mouse is out of the bag — now we must train the cat to find it.

In other words, our task is to push into the missing quadrant — to re-embed the institutions that govern the global economy: an embedded internationalism.

Figure 2: Strategies for Embedded Internationalism

But how, exactly, do we get there?

The map provides some ideas. In particular, it suggests two lines of strategic attack that we must pursue simultaneously.

The first is contestation: igniting a transnational debate that links social movements around the world in a single conversation about our international institutions — scaling up along the x-axis. The last half-century of globalization has made our national debates increasingly alike in content, focused on transnational issues like trade and finance in a global economy. But they remain fragmented in form: few social movements or political parties coordinate their platforms across borders. Scaling up means integrating these national debates to match the scale of their issues.

In a word, we need to get international institutions back on the ballot, calling on progressive politicians to outline their own vision for institutions like the World Bank, IMF, ILO, and the UN.

The second is democratization: demanding reforms that shift power away from the technocrats and toward regular people — re-embedding along the y-axis. We might start by killing the 'gentleman's agreement' that allows the US and the EU to install their allies at the head of the World Bank and IMF, respectively. But we should also call to introduce democratic representation at the heart of these institutions, allowing countries to elect members of their governing council.

These may sound like pipedreams. But the perverse power structure of our international institutions means that a progressive president in the White House or prime minister at Number 10 could radically shift the momentum in favour of these proposals. After all, countries like the US and the UK hold key purse strings. If contestation can push their governments to table serious democratization reforms — to raise the voices of small countries around the world — these proposals will get a hearing.

Of course, not every institution can be salvaged in the process of re-embedding the global economy. Consider the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a wing of the World Bank Group that oversees private sector investment in developing countries. The IFC today acts as little more than an engine for financialisation, turning public wealth into financial products that can be traded across the financial sector. A bold agenda for global re-embedding would simply abolish the IFC full stop.

But new institutions can be proposed in its place. Progressives around the world are crying out to coordinate their demands and fight together to constrain the global oligarchy. All it takes is one progressive government with the courage — and the imagination — to propose new institutions to do so: worker ownership funds, green transition institutions, tax justice authorities. Even proposals that are introduced unilaterally will soon attract international participation. If the US builds it, in particular, they will certainly come.

Critics like Adam Tooze suggest that efforts to reclaim and transform the international institutional order are "quixotic," because the global economy is too fluid, too volatile to be ordered in this way.

But laissez faire was planned, and globalization was, too — and now David Malpass is preparing to remould them. Progressives should take a page from the playbook of their opponents and develop a plan to roll out new institutions for the re-embedding of the economy, rather than simply relying on ad-hoc interventions to roll back the mistakes of the past.

III.

On the eve of Trump's inauguration, the United States was poised to retreat from its role as the driver of global disembedding. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was dead. America First was alive. And virtually every international institution had earned the ire of the incoming president. "If the word 'isolationist' has any meaning, [Trump] qualifies as one," the FT reported.

But now we can see that the right-wing populist project is more dangerous than it first appeared. Far from rejecting international institutions — scaling back from the global level to the national one — Trump and his allies are mounting their take-over. The objection to the Washington Consensus, it turns out, was not that it did not serve their interests. It was that it did not serve them well enough. This is what David Malpass means when he says that multilateralism has gone "too far."

It is all too easy for progressives to dismiss international institutions as the machinery of global capital, and to focus where power appears closer at hand.

But we cannot afford to play peek-a-boo politics: just because we don't talk about the World Bank and the IMF doesn't mean that they are not still there. As the mess of Brexit has definitively demonstrated, power at the international level is a prerequisite for sovereignty much lower down, particularly in countries that lack the geopolitical weight to set the international agenda. We must therefore develop our own vision of international institutional change, or else they will be reshaped by our opponents.

The first steps of this strategy are now clear. We must contest globally, reminding people and parties around the world that international institutions are theirs for the taking. And we must demand democracy, reigniting our imagination about how to transform them.

But the prospects for such a transformation are far better than they may appear. The unanimous appointment of an anti-globalist like David Malpass at the helm of a hyper-globalizing institution like the World Bank should be an inspiration to all of us — that radical change may be around the corner.

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This entry was posted in Banana republicEconomic fundamentalsFree markets and their discontentsGlobalizationGuest PostIncome disparityPoliticsRegulations and regulatorsThe destruction of the middle class on April 18, 2019 by .

13 COMMENTS

  1. Sound of the SuburbsApril 18, 2019 at 4:07 am

    Let's work out what's wrong with their half-baked neoliberal ideology and its underlying economics, neoclassical economics.

    "Everything is getting better and better look at the stock market" the 1920's sucker that believed in free markets

    "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." Irving Fisher 1929.

    The 1920's neoclassical economist that believed in free markets knew this was a stable equilibrium.

    Better shelve this for a few decades until everyone has forgotten.

    Now everyone has forgotten we can use it for globalisation.

    I don't know who the architects of globalisation were, but I do know they weren't very bright.

    Just because people have forgotten what's wrong with neoclassical economics, it's still got all its old problems.

    Running an economy on neoclassical economics.

    The 1920s roared with debt based consumption and speculation until it all tipped over into the debt deflation of the Great Depression.

    No one realised the problems that were building up in the economy as they used an economics that doesn't look at private debt, neoclassical economics.

    What's the problem?
    1) The belief in the markets gets everyone thinking you are creating real wealth by inflating asset prices.
    2) Bank credit pours into inflating asset prices rather than creating real wealth (as measured by GDP) as no one is looking at the debt building up.

    Let's have another go.

    https://cdn.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2017/04/Screen-Shot-2017-04-21-at-13.52.41.png

    Whoops!

    1929 and 2008 look so similar because they are; it's the same economics and thinking.

    The global economy never stood a chance.


 -- via my feedly newsfeed

DeLong: How Big a Problem Is the Malapportionment of the Senate? [feedly]

DeLong has not entirely defected from the "Clintonite/Rubinite" club, but he is seeing that the time of some new Utopianism {his term] of the Left may be arriving. The center, in his view, is not holding because there are no Republican partners anymore.

How Big a Problem Is the Malapportionment of the Senate?
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/04/council-on-foreign-relations-_the-future-of-democracy-symposiumhttpswwwcfrorgeventfuture-democracy-symposium_.html

It's a big problem. But it could be turned into small problem, even an advantage, if we had normal politics. Here's what I said about it at the CFR Future of Democracy Symposium:


Council on Foreign RelationsThe Future of Democracy Symposium: Session Two: Economics, Identity, and the Democratic Recession: You might well sayz—take a look at the thirty-five states that will elect seventy senators and yet have a decreasing share of the population. These are overwhelming communities and states that are being left behind by the economic engine of American world-globalizing-value-chain-whatsit. That for a political logic to overrepresent those people to offset the fact that the economic logic is grossly underrepresenting them—that might be something that is not totally unfair. It could well not be a big problem. If we had normal politics—normal interest-group Theodore Lowi-polyarchy politics—it could be fine.

But this requires normal politics. This requires that the senator from Nebraska, say, actually be interested in policies that tend to bring money and wealth into the state of Nebraska rather than the senator from Nebraska cheering the nominations of Herman Caen and Steve Moore to the Federal Reserve Board on the grounds that it "owns the establishment". In our identity-politics world in which Ben Sasse wins reelection by "owning the establishment", then it will be a serious problem.


Let me expand on the current senators from Nebraska. Deb Fischer, calling for the "possible elimination" of the Environmental Protection Agency. There is Ben Sasse, who strongly supports the nomination of Republican political hack Stephen Moore to the Federal Reserve Board because https://www.wsj.com/articles/stephen-moore-says-feds-pivot-validates-criticism-of-interest-rate-increases-11553544172:

Steve's nomination has thrown the card-carrying members of the Beltway Establishment into a tizzy, and that says little about Steve and his belief in American ingenuity, but a lot about central planners' devotion to groupthink!...

The Establishment opponents of Moore's nomination—James Pethokoukis of AEI "disruptive—and not in a good way" https://theweek.com/articles/833016/dont-let-trump-blow-fed, Ross Douthat of the New York Times "consensus... that Moore is an enormous hack" https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/1110546479343681537, and Greg Mankiw of Harvard "shockingly unsuitable... a propagandist... flimsy arguments" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/business/mankiw-moore-cain-federal-reserve.html—are not groupthinking central planners, but rather people who (rightly) believes the Federal Reserve does an OK job at a necessary and impossibly difficult task and needs to be staffed by competent people. But, for Ben Sasse, their fear that Steve Moore on the Fed would harm America is the primary reason to nominate him.

One is tempted to quote Alfred from Batman: "some people just want to see the world burn".

Argument and education need to change the hearts and minds of the citizens of Nebraska so that they elect better senators, or at least so that the senators they have believe they have to show voters that they can enact policies that are good and so moderate their tongues and their votes.

That is one reason the baton needs to be passed for the next lap to those to the left of my Neoliberal Clintonite Rubinite faction. Let them run with the baton. They may not be able to change hearts and minds in Nebraska by highlighting their vision of utopia. But they may.

Certainly there is nothing we Neoliberal Clintonite Rubinites seeking common cause with nonexistent "moderate Republicans" could ever do to flip the vote of either of these senators from Nebraska.


 -- via my feedly newsfeed

When US Market Access is No Longer a Trump Card [feedly]

When US Market Access is No Longer a Trump Card
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/04/when-us-market-access-is-no-longer.html

When the US economy was a larger share of the world economy, then access to the US market meant more. For example, World Bank statistics say that the US economy was 40% of the entire world economy in 1960, but is now about 24%. The main source of growth in the world economy for the foreseeable future will be in emerging markets.

For a sense of the shift, consider this figure from chapter 4 of the most recentWorld Economic Outlook report, published by the IMF (April 2019). The lines in the figure show the trade flows between countries that are at least 1% of total world GDP. The size of the dots for each country is proportionate to the country's GDP.

In 1995, you can see international trade revolving around the United States, with another hub of trade happening in Europe and a third hub focused around Japan.  Trade between the US and China shows up on the figure, but China did not have trade flows greater than 1% of world GDP with any country other than the US.

The picture is rather different in 2015. The US remains an international hub for trade. Germany remains a hub as well, although fewer of its trade flows now exceed 1% of world GDP. And China has clearly become a hub of central importance in Asia.

The patterns of trade have also shifted toward greater use of global value chains--that is, intermediate products that are shipped across national borders at least once, and often multiple times, before they become final products. Here's the overall pattern since 1995 of falling tariffs and rising participation in global value chains for the world economy as a whole.

Several decades ago, emerging markets around the world worried about having access to selling in US and European markets, and this market access could be used by the US and European nations as a bargaining chip in economic treaties and more broadly in international relations. Looking ahead, US production is now more tied into global value chains, and the long-term growth of US manufacturing is going to rely more heavily on sales to markets outside the United States.

For example, if one is concerned about the future of the US car industry, the US now produces about 7% of the world's cars in 2015, and about 22% of the world's trucks. The future growth of car consumption is going to be primarily outside the US economy. For the health and long-term growth of the US car business, the possibility of unfair imports into the US economy matters a lot less than the access of US car producers to selling in the rest of the world economy.

The interconnectedness of global value chains means that General Motors already produces more cars in China than it does in the United States. In fact, sales of US multinationals now producing in China are already twice as high as exports from the US to China. Again, the long-term health of many US manufacturers is going to be based on their ability to participate in international value chains and in overseas production.

Although what caught my eye in this chapter of the World Economic Outlookreport was the shifting patterns of world trade, the main emphases of the chapter are on other themes that will come as no surprise to faithful readers of this blog.  One main theme is that shifts in bilateral and overall trade deficits are the result of macroeconomic factors, not the outcome of trade negotiations, a theme I've harped on here (for example, herehere, and here).

The IMF report also offers calculations that higher tariffs between the US and China will cause economic losses for both sides. From the IMF report:
US–China trade, which falls by 25–30 percent in the short term (GIMF) and somewhere between 30 percent and 70 percent over the long term, depending on the
model and the direction of trade. The decrease in external demand leads to a decline in total exports and in GDP in both countries. Annual real GDP losses range from –0.3 percent to –0.6 percent for the United States and from –0.5 percent to –1.5 percent for China ... Finally, although the US–China bilateral trade deficit is reduced, there is no economically significant change in each country's multilateral trade balance.
Some advocates of higher tariffs take comfort in noting that the estimated losses to China's economy are bigger than the losses to the US economy.  Yes, but it's losses all around! As the 21st century economy evolves, the most important issues for US producers are going to involve their ability to
compete in unfettered ways in the increasingly important markets outside the US.  

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Unions urge Democrats to focus on kitchen table economics

Unions urge Democrats to focus on kitchen table economics  

By Michelle L. Price and Nicholas Riccardi | AP April 15

LAS VEGAS — Ardently liberal, pro-labor and anti-corporate cash, the field of Democrats running for president may look like a union activist's dream. But some key labor leaders are starting to worry about the topics dominating the 2020 conversation.

The candidates are spending too much time talking about esoteric issues like the Senate filibuster and the composition of the Supreme Court and not enough time speaking the language of workers, several union officials said. Those ideas may excite progressive activists, they said, but they risk alienating working-class voters.

"They've got to pay attention to kitchen table economics," said Ted Pappageorge, president of the Las Vegas Culinary Union that represents 60,000 hotel and casino workers. "We don't quite see that."

Terry McGowan, president of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 139, in Wisconsin, said many of the issues driving the 2020 primary so far are distractions.

"The people that are into politics, the people who like sideshows, they're into that," he said, citing the debates over reparations for slavery and immigration as examples. "The masses just want to feed their families."

The unease may be an early warning sign for Democrats, who watched as many white, working-class voters, including many union members in key Rust Belt states, chose Trump three years ago. Democrats are hoping to win back some of those voters next year, a challenge that is made harder, some argue, by labor's struggle to build its membership and influence its rank and file. Democrats' early messages may not help, some said.

"You see where some of the party's being driven. It's no secret," said Rusty McAllister, executive secretary of the Nevada AFL-CIO.

McAllister pointed to "Medicare for all" — the health care proposal of choice for several candidates — as an example of Democrats' not seizing on labor's top priorities. Many unions already organized and fought for private health insurance for their members. "That's not something that I think that labor is as much focused on as some of the progressives are," McAllister said.

Such concerns — which stretched from the progressive-minded organizing halls of Nevada to the Rust Belt precincts — were typically focused on the conversation, not the candidates. The early 2020 primary has included detours into debates over the Senate filibuster, the composition of the Supreme Court and breaking up technology companies.

Ken Broadbent, business manager of the Pittsburgh-based Steamfitters Local 449, worried that Democrats are too focused on environmental plans like the Green New Deal, a blueprint for shifting the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels, and will neglect the importance of swing state Pennsylvania's rich natural gas deposits in creating jobs.

"Jobs is where we've got to keep things focused," Broadbent said.

To be sure, many unionists are excited about the presidential field. Contenders include liberal stalwarts like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose campaign became the first in U.S. history with a unionized workforce, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who joined striking Stop & Shop workers on a picket line in New Hampshire on Friday. California Sen. Kamala Harris hired a top Service Employees International Union executive for her campaign and made her first proposal one to raise teacher's pay.

Former Vice President Joe Biden made clear that he plans to appeal to union workers, if he gets in the race. "You are coming back," he told the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers last week. "We need you back."

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the competition in the crowded field has amplified workers voices and issues.

She noted that prominent presidential candidates quickly supported Los Angeles public school teachers when they struck in January. Warren, Sanders, Harris and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker have all proposed various taxes on higher-earning families, a departure from most past Democratic hopefuls who have treaded carefully on the issue.

"It feels different than at other times," Weingarten said. "There is far more attention and focus on working people's economic needs."

Major endorsements are likely several months away, especially because the labor movement is treading carefully after complaints that its leadership was too quick to back Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary over Sanders.

For labor, much is at stake. Despite Republican gains, particularly with trade union members, labor remains an essential part of the Democrats' coalition. Unions spent $169 million in 2018 on federal elections, largely on Democrats' behalf, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Democrats won union workers by a strong 59%-39% margin in 2018, according to AP VoteCast, a national survey of the electorate.

But other big donors and — small, online ones, too — increasingly compete with labor's organizing muscle as key to Democratic victories. Activists on a broad array of issues, from gay rights to criminal justice, compete with unions for candidates' attention. And the labor movement itself is split on its priorities, with some pushing for a focus on trade while other who represent more diverse workforces want to zoom in on immigration.

All this comes as Republicans have pushed several state laws weakening organized labor. And, last year, the Supreme Court ruled that government workers can't be forced to contribute to the unions that represent them in collective bargaining, dealing a blow to public service union's pocketbooks.

As candidates court unions for endorsements, labor leaders say they are listening for a comeback plan.

Any proposal aimed at workers "must include ensuring the opportunity to join a union, no matter where you work, since that's the best way to raise wages, improve working conditions, create family-sustaining jobs and begin to fix our rigged economy and democracy," said SEIU president Mary Kay Henry.

At a conference of North America's Building Trades Unions in Washington on Wednesday, several Democratic contenders talked about outlawing so-called "right to work" laws that prevent unions from automatically deducting dues from members, said the group's president, Sean McGarvey. But, he added, he heard "very little about the actual structural changes to the National Labor Relations Act, or things they could put in place to give people a real free choice to join a union."

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This story has been corrected to provide the correct name of the group North America's Building Trades Unions.

Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV
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