Dan Little: Social change and leadership [feedly]

   

Moderator:

This is a very provocative post from Dan Little. Only one quibble. Even a very enlightened sociologist like Dan Little -- and student of Marx too -- can engage in a confusion  of things Karl Marx said and meant vs things later "Marxists" said and meant. Marx was not a Utopian. Many later "Marxists" were. Indeed. Marx was not a "Marxist."



Social change and leadership

Dan Little Understanding Society
 

http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2017/06/social-change-and-leadership.html

Historians pay a lot of attention to important periods of social change -- the emergence of new political movements, the development of a great city, the end of Jim Crow segregation. There is an inclination to give a lot of weight to the importance of leaders, visionaries, and change-makers in driving these processes to successful outcomes. And, indeed, history correctly records the impact of charismatic and visionary leaders. But consider the larger question: are large social changes amenable to design by a small number of actors?

My inclination is to think that the capacity of calculated design for large, complex social changes is very much more limited than we often imagine. Instead, change more often emerges from the independent strategies and actions of numerous actors, only loosely coordinated with others, and proceeding from their own interests and framing assumptions. The large outcome -- the emergence of Chicago as the major metropolis of the Midwest, the forging of the EU and the monetary union, the coalescence of nationalist movements in France and Germany -- are the resultant of multiple actors and causes. Big outcomes are contingent outcomes of multiple streams of action, mobilization, business decisions, political parties, etc.

There are exceptions, of course. Italy's political history would have been radically different without Mussolini, and the American Civil War would probably have had a different course if Douglas had won the 1860 presidential election. 

But these are exceptions, I believe. More common is the history of Chicago, the surge of right-wing nationalism, or the collapse of the USSR. These are all multi-causal and multi-actor outcomes, and there is no single, unified process of development. And there is no author, no architect, of the outcome. 

So what does this imply about individual leaders and organizations who want to change the social and political environment facing them? Are their aspirations for creating change simply illusions? I don't think so. To deny that single visionaries cannot write the future does not imply they cannot nudge it in a desirable direction. And these effects can indeed alter the future, sometimes in the desired direction. An anti-racist politician can influence voters and institutions in ways that inflect the arc of his or her society in a less racist way. This doesn't permanently solve the problem, but it helps. And with good fortune, other actors will have made similar efforts, and gradually the situation of racism changes. 

This framework for thinking about large social change raises large questions about how we should think about improving the world around us. It seems to imply the importance of local and decentralized social change. We should perhaps adjust our aspirations for social progress around the idea of slow, incremental change through many actors, organizations, and coalitions. As Marx once wrote, "men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing." And we can add a qualification Marx would not have appreciated: change makers are best advised to construct their plans around long, slow, and incremental change instead of blueprints for unified, utopian change. 

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Absent a More Progressive Economics, the Democrats Will Lose [feedly]

Absent a More Progressive Economics, the Democrats Will Lose
http://prospect.org/article/absent-more-progressive-economics-democrats-will-lose

The challenge Democrats face today—uniting a broad coalition of working class Americans that spans racial, regional, gender, and generational lines—is far from new, but it has not always been this daunting. 

The staggering results of last November's election should be a reminder to Democrats that the racially diverse, young, educated, unmarried (women), and urban voters who comprised a significant portion of the Obama coalition do not constitute an inexorable path to Electoral College victory for Democrats. In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama consolidated the Rising American Electorate (RAE), but also captured critical majorities in places like Sawyer County, Wisconsin; Luzerne County, Pennsylvania; and Macomb County, Michigan—all home to significant numbers of white working class voters. These were just three of the 219 counties that flipped from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016.

White working class voters in these parts of the country, once hubs of manufacturing and production, feel economically abandoned by both parties in the nation's capital. Many are still reeling from the effects of an increasingly globalized economy that has traded American jobs for corporate profits made on the backs of cheap overseas labor, and they are disillusioned with a political establishment in Washington that they see as more interested in rewarding wealthy campaign benefactors, and the industries and interests they represent, than they are in helping ordinary Americans.

Where working people of all races once helped deliver Democratic victories under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, winning a majority of white working class voters has proven elusive to Democrats in the modern era of political campaigns.

Since 1980, Democrats have failed to carry this key constituency in presidential contests—with two exceptions. In the 1992 presidential race and again in 1996, Bill Clinton bested his Republican rivals among white non-college educated voters, in each instance with a plurality and by one point. Since Clinton's re-election, however, non-college educated white voters have consistently evaded the Democrats' grasp.

While Donald Trump's sweeping victory this past November revealed a widening gulf between the voting patterns of college educated and non-college educated whites (Trump won the former group by 4 points, and the latter by 39), the Democratic Party's problems with the white working class, therefore, are decidedly not new. Neither are efforts—like this commendable undertaking—to analyze the challenge and devise a solution.

The White House

The Obama administration's embrace of the financial industry early in his first term led to a new low point in the Democratic Party's credibility as a check on Wall Street. Here, President Obama talks with Chief of Staff Jack Lew and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as they walk on the Colonnade of the White House in 2013. 

Individual proposals for reform may test well with voters, but these ideas alone are not enough. To meaningfully re-engage the white working class with the Democratic Party's agenda, a compelling narrative about how our platform provides genuine solutions to the growth of an American plutocracy is of critical importance.

Indeed, a CNN/ORC poll conducted in February of 2016 showed that the vast majority of Americans believe that the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy (71 percent) instead of being fair to most people (27 percent). The idea that income and wealth should be more evenly distributed among Americans has won the support of 60 percent or greater since 2012, but Americans are skeptical that government officials will act to protect their best interests. According to a 2015 Gallup report, 75 percent of Americans perceive corruption as widespread in the country's government.

Not only have Democrats presided in Washington for significant stretches while these trends have developed; they have, in visible ways, exacerbated those trends, through, for instance, global trade deals enacted in the 1990s and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. This is certainly not to blame the Democratic Party for all the ills that have been inflicted on the country over the past 40 years, far from it. But too many times, our party has been guilty not just of sins of omission—failing to stand up to the Republicans on critical issues, or even providing the GOP cover in some cases (as when some congressional Democrats supported the Bush tax cuts and the war in Iraq)—but of commission, too. The Obama administration's embrace of the financial industry early in his first term, combined with its decision not to prosecute any of the individuals and institutions responsible for the economic collapse of 2008, led to a new low point in the Democratic Party's credibility as a check on Wall Street. In the 2010 midterm elections, voters who blamed Wall Street for the country's economic problems preferred Republican candidates by a margin of 16 points, despite the Democratic Party's efforts to deliver a message against Wall Street special interests.

Given this reality, it is not particularly surprising that the party has yet to articulate a clearer, more credible, and more commanding vision for the economic revitalization of the country, the middle class, and, more specifically, the hollowed-out communities in which many white working class voters struggle. The white working class's sense of its economic isolation is compounded by a gap in cultural sensibilities: White working class voters, particularly baby boomers and older, tend to be less liberal on social issues than their more educated (and more urban) counterparts, whose support has been nurtured by the Democratic Party for the past several election cycles.

In a political environment where Republicans have shifted the terms of debate to stoke racist biases (nearly half of Trump's supporters describe African Americans as more "violent" than whites) and sexist inclinations (67 percent of Trump supporters deny the role of sexism in America), the need for a forceful, serious, policy, and values-driven Democratic platform has never been greater. To be sure, Democrats have increased their support among college-educated whites: Hillary Clinton trailed Trump by only 4 points among these voters in 2016, whereas Obama lost this group by 14 points to Mitt Romney in 2012. But that gain was overwhelmed by Clinton's abysmal performance within the white working class.

Playing to Populist Strengths

Far from being a call for Democrats to moderate their stance on such issues as a woman's right to choose, gun safety reforms, and equal protection of civil rights for all Americans, our point is that when Democrats fail to offer a compelling economic vision and agenda, the opposition not only benefits from that failure, but is allowed the opportunity to shift the debate to areas where it enjoys greater advantages over Democrats.

Recent face-to-face conversations with working class voters in Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania conducted by Working America in the weeks following the election underscore the intense economic anxiety that pervades their communities and their lives. Working-class Trump and Clinton voters alike reported that they wanted the president-elect to address jobs and the economy first, with Trump voters expressing more urgency (37 percent said that the economy and jobs are the most important issue, compared to 21 percent of Clinton voters).

For some white working class Trump voters, their perception of the candidate's focus on bringing jobs back to their communities took priority over their serious misgivings about him. As one white working class Trump voter from the Pittsburgh area told Working America: "Trump's an asshole. But sometimes you need an asshole to make things better and shake things up." Both Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016 tapped into an intense desire for change and spoke to pervasive economic anxieties; this thematic commonality helps to explain the crossover appeal of two otherwise completely different politicians for some white working class voters.

For the last several election cycles, we have urged Democrats to develop a vision for the American economy that addresses the deep-rooted concerns of the working class and provides solutions to the scope of the challenges we face. Trump's ascent to power on the strength of a white working class supermajority, though he was the most disliked presidential candidate in history, reminds us that this economic message and policy agenda is more important now than ever.

Given the Democratic Party's historic deficits with this demographic group, it is unlikely—and unrealistic—that Democrats will be able to make up all the ground that has been lost with white working class voters by 2018 or even 2020. As such, the Democratic Party's efforts should be structured specifically to engage the white working class voters that Obama won in 2008 and 2012 that Clinton then lost in 2016—the voters living in swing counties like Sawyer, Luzerne, and Macomb. Such efforts must not come at the expense of (re)engaging the sometime voters among minorities and the young—significant swaths of the country who do not regularly turn out to vote, whose patterns of voting are irregular, or who no longer feel a sense of loyalty to the Democrats; we look forward to that discussion as well.

Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons

For some white working class Trump voters, their perception of the candidate's focus on bringing jobs back to their communities took priority over their serious misgivings about him. Here, Trump supporters hold signs at a campaign rally in Las Vegas.

According to estimates by The New York Times and The New Republic, the election was lost for Clinton by between 77,000 and 110,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Making up this difference will be key if the Democrats are to build back from what is a historic nadir of political power at all levels of government.

The Democratic Party will require a robust economic vision that appeals to the appetite for populist reform; a forceful push-back against Trump policies that hurt working Americans; and a commitment to campaign-finance reform and removing the influence of big money in elections, which voters believe is the first step to implementing economic—and other types of needed—change.

Economic proposals will not be enough. The Democratic Party's historic strength, dating back to the New Deal, has been to offer a vision of government that actively works to protect working people and makes their lives better. A central appeal of the current economic populist agenda focuses on the importance of limiting the power of big money in politics.

Especially in the aftermath of the Citizens United ruling, Americans of both parties wish to restrict the political influence of the hyper wealthy. A February 2016 poll conducted by Rasmussen Research found that 76 percent of Americans believe that the wealthiest individuals and companies have too much power and influence over elections—a majority that holds across gender, age, race, and party lines.

Our own research in 2011 found that, above all other regulations, voters are interested in government oversight of the relationship between special interests and politicians (77 percent). A populist economic message is especially powerful when it hinges on a greater push for reform; by utilizing this frame, the Democratic Party should be able to draw contrasts that blunt the appeal of populism on the right.

Now that Trump is president, with policies favoring the plutocrats, the Democrats should be able to turn his populist message against him. Part of that pushback should be grounded in clear, broadly disseminated articulations of how his administration's actions are hurting all working-class Americans. It will be especially important for the party to gain an edge from his administration's inability to deliver on promises for a better economy with good-paying jobs.

Additionally, the Democrats face the real challenge of embodying the values of working Americans through their candidates, their professed values, the scope of their policy agenda, and their commitment to action. A crucial step in this process must be purposefully cultivating and supporting candidates who resonate with working class Americans, even if they lack the financial heft that has characterized the prototypical Democratic candidate in recent years. 

A Party Building Economic Vision

In our post-election work, we've found that even Clinton voters have struggled to identify the Democratic Party's vision for the country's future. Formulating such a vision shouldn't be all that difficult. A national survey conducted in 2015 for the Progressive Change Institute explored the public's appetite for a number of far-reaching economic reforms and bold policy ideas, and found strong enthusiasm from the majority of voters. A proposal to institute fair trade that protects workers, the environment, and jobs enjoyed the support of 75 percent of voters. Similarly, more than seven-in-ten voters (71 percent) supported a Medicare buy-in for all Americans; a Full Employment Act (70 percent support); a Green New Deal and major infrastructure jobs programs (70 percent support each); taxing the rich at the same higher rate that President Reagan did (59 percent support); and breaking up the big banks (59 percent support). Our own research has shown that support for strengthening—and expanding—Social Security and Medicare will also be particularly important, especially giving the relatively advanced age of the 2018 midterm electorate.

The support for such economic reforms (the aforementioned are but a handful of examples) is buttressed by similarly widespread public backing for policies aimed at giving ordinary Americans a voice in their government again: a proposal to end gerrymandering receives support from 73 percent of voters; public matching for small dollar donations receives support from 57 percent of voters, and full disclosure of corporate spending on politics and lobbying receives support from 71 percent of voters. A laundry list of popular policy prescriptions do not a winning economic message make, yet these results suggest that the time has come to structure the Democratic Party's agenda around robust reforms—on dimensions of significant economic and political change. 

 

Nick Solari/Creative Commons

In many ways, the path forward for rebuilding the Democratic Party's relationship with the white working class was articulated best by Senator Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign. Here, Sanders speaks at a campaign rally in New Orleans. 

 

BUILDING POLITICAL SUPPORT is partly the work of effective messaging. Our polling has shown that when we describe economic conditions through the lens of lived experience—"can't make ends meet" or "can't pull ahead no matter how hard they try"—instead of through abstractions, voters listen and often move to our side. Being explicit about causes of economic harm by referring to CEOs and other leaders provides clarity and generates support for our message, as well. 

In many ways, the path forward for rebuilding the Democratic Party's relationship with the white working class was articulated best by Senator Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign. Sanders's message centered on unabashed economic populism and a commitment to remove the influence of corporate money from our politics—and hence, our government. This message has also been championed by Elizabeth Warren, Elijah Cummings, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus as well. Indeed, the latest GWU Battleground Poll suggests that Senator Sanders remains well positioned to serve as a source of strength and leadership. A solid majority (56 percent) of voters hold a positive opinion of him—a higher favorability rating than those of the other national leaders tested in the poll. Sanders and Hillary Clinton are virtually tied in terms of favorability among Democratic women, and African American and Latino voters are warmer to Sanders than they are to Clinton. While non-college educated white voters are split in their view of Sanders (40 percent favorable, 39 percent unfavorable), he far outperforms the Democrats' 2016 presidential nominee as well as the image of the party as a whole among those voters. Again, we must remind ourselves that the (near-term) objective is not to win over majorities of these voters; it is to improve—and measurably so—on their declining support for Democrats in recent elections.

Sanders's primary election successes in the states and counties that flipped from Obama victories in 2012 to Trump victories in 2016 further underscore the appeal of his progressive message, especially as we look toward targeting these swing votes in upcoming elections. In Wisconsin, for example, 21 counties that Barack Obama won in 2012 voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Every single one of those 21 counties were won by Bernie Sanders in the April 2016 Wisconsin Democratic Primary, which Sanders won handily.

In the Michigan Primary, which Sanders won narrowly, nine of the 12 counties that flipped from Obama to Trump were won by Sanders as well. Obviously, there are numerous problems in comparing white working class Democratic primary voters to white working class general election voters. Yet, this is far from the only evidence pointing to Sanders' appeal among white working class independents, many of whom he successfully encouraged to join the ranks of the Democratic Party by participating in the 2016 primaries. In a head-to-head matchup between Sanders and Trump in our own April 2016 Battleground survey, Sanders bested Trump 51 percent to 40 percent. Among white non-college graduates, Trump beat Sanders 49 percent to 41 percent, but that margin is far smaller than the 39-point margin that Trump racked up over Clinton in November.

While Sanders's personal popularity and influence is an important takeaway from these data, the more salient point is that the Democratic Party stands to gain politically when it returns its focus to issues of class, including the substantial and ongoing challenges of income inequality and the negative influence of corporate special interests on the lives of working-class Americans of all kinds.

Effectively engaging the white working class is an essential task for the Democratic Party, but we must also acknowledge that this work will go to waste if we ignore our base. The approaches outlined here can serve to energize the base as well as engage the white working class. By moving forward with an agenda that explicitly continues our commitment to racial and gender justice and opportunities for all, including immigrants, we will work to ensure that our base ratifies our message in future elections. 

The path forward will not be easy, but neither is it as mystifying as some may imagine. A sweeping platform of economic and political change resonates powerfully with white working class voters and the young, diverse, educated, and urban voters whom Democrats must nurture and energize if it hopes to be successful in the 2018 midterms. Embracing this change will require not just political smarts, however, but political will. Democratic activists will need either to convince the party's establishment of the necessity of this approach—or failing that, actively work to replace it. For the Democratic Party, the stakes have never been higher and the challenges have never been clearer.

Click here to read the rest of our series on the White Working Class and the Democrats.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Trump Doctrine Emerges, and It's as Bad as We Thought [feedly]

The Trump Doctrine Emerges, and It's as Bad as We Thought
http://prospect.org/article/trump-doctrine-emerges-and-its-bad-we-thought

Environmental activists protest Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, outside Trump Tower in Chicago on June 2, 2017.

Donald Trump possesses a remarkable ability to appall us by doing exactly what he said he would when he ran for president. True, he has abandoned some promises and flip-flopped here and there, but mostly on the stuff that everyone knew was bogus from the start, unless you were possessed of an epic naïveté. (Oh dear, he's not really going to "drain the swamp" and stick it to Wall Street? I'm shocked.) Nevertheless, with each new decision, initiative, and reaction, the Trump presidency turns out to be as bad as we thought—or worse. The most alarming thing is that he is exactly who he seemed to be.

This week's reality-TV-style announcement that he will pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement showed Trump at his most Trumpian, commandeering the media's attention for a lurid and self-congratulatory display of ignorance, dishonesty, and primitive tribalism. It also showed that the Trump Doctrine in foreign affairs is taking shape. A man who knows nothing about the world has a firm and unshakeable principle on which he will construct his foreign policy. It says that there is only one question that needs to be asked: What's in it for me?

That Trump would bring his transactional mindset to foreign affairs is no surprise. He has made it plain that he thinks about every interaction with friend or foe as a "deal," something to be negotiated to get the best possible terms. Alliances from which everyone benefits or actions that have a short-term cost but long-term, widely shared gains just make no sense to him.

Which is why he was bound to walk away from the Paris Agreement. After all, it involved the entire world joining together to make progress on a common problem, while Trump has been quite explicit that his goal is to gain advantage on other countries. When he says "America First," he doesn't just mean that he cares more about our own welfare than that of other countries and people, but that he wants to win, which means others have to lose. As his national security adviser H.R. McMaster and his chief economic adviser Gary Cohn wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week (clearly channeling their boss, though in more articulate terms), "the world is not a 'global community' but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors, and businesses engage and compete for advantage." If that's what you believe, then of course you have no patience for an international agreement to reduce greenhouse emissions.

The idea of gaining advantage ran through the speech Trump gave on Thursday announcing the pullout from the agreement. Consider his assertion that this was only one phase in a negotiation to come:

Therefore, in order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, but begin negotiations to reenter either the Paris Accord or a really entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers. So we're getting out. But we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that's fair. And if we can, that's great. And if we can't, that's fine.

This is ridiculous on multiple levels. First, there will be no renegotiation. The Paris Agreement was worked out with every country on earth except for Nicaragua and Syria. They aren't going to redo that entire process in the hopes that Trump might find some other hypothetical agreement more satisfying. Second, there will be no "new transaction," because it isn't a transaction at all. It's a pledge by all those countries to reduce their emissions. Third, the emission targets are voluntary. It can't be terribly unfair to the United States if there is zero consequence for the United States not meeting its targets. And those targets weren't forced on us by some cruel foreign government; each country came up with its own.

As Daniel Larison of The American Conservative pointed out, this has been a regular part of Trump's deal-making strategy throughout his career: renege on the deal, and assume that the other party will come crawling back with terms that are more favorable to you. That's the point of not paying his bills, something for which Trump was so often sued. He figured that at best he could get something for nothing, and at worst he could get it for a fraction of what he agreed to pay, because the stiffed vendor would rather accept pennies on the dollar than get nothing at all. Sometimes it even worked.

For Trump, every bit of foreign relations is a transaction and every transaction is a hostile one, so the very idea of countries coming together to achieve a common goal simply makes no sense. A "deal" is where you negotiate terms that you hope enable you to take advantage of the person across the table. A "bad deal" is one where they screwed you over, and a "good deal" is one where you screwed them over. That's all Trump understands. So if we didn't screw everyone else over, we must have been the victims. "This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States," he said.

This is the heart of the Trump Doctrine, a belief that the only way to approach the world is by trying to do it to them before they do it to us. If there's some short-term benefit to be gained for us, we can do a deal. If not, forget it.

So what happens to American leadership when that is the guiding philosophy of the American administration? What happens is that people and governments begin to realize that they can't rely on the United States as an ally or a partner unless the angry toddler in the White House is convinced that he's getting one over on them. International agreements become somewhere between difficult and impossible to negotiate. Allies assume they'll be left on their own. It becomes harder to persuade other countries to join with us when we need them. And eventually, the very idea of "American leadership" begins to disappear. 

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

President Trump, climate change and the coalfields [feedly]

President Trump, climate change and the coalfields
http://blogs.wvgazettemail.com/coaltattoo/2017/06/01/president-trump-climate-change-and-the-coalfields/

 

Well, Rep. David McKinley, R-W.Va., was the first into my email inbox with a statement praising President Donald Trump for abandoning any global leadership by the United States in fighting the climate crisis. Here's what the congressman had to say:

President Trump's decision to withdraw is a bold statement that he will put America first even in the face of intense international pressure. The Paris Climate Agreement is a flawed deal that puts America's energy needs and economic growth on the back burner, while transferring money and power to unelected international bureaucrats.

Moving forward, the best way to lead on this issue is to prioritize energy research and promote new technologies that will allow countries around the world to use all their resources – including fossil fuels – in the cleanest and most efficient manner.

I urge President Trump to seize this opportunity and champion technology to provide affordable, efficient and reliable energy. This alternative approach will not only benefit America, but will help the billions around the globe who remain in energy poverty.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., wasn't far behind with this statement:

While I believe that the United States and the world should continue to pursue a cleaner energy future, I do not believe that the Paris Agreement ensures a balance between our environment and the economy.  To find that balance, we should seek agreements that prioritize the protection of the American consumer as well as energy-producing states like West Virginia, while also incentivizing the development of advanced fossil energy technologies.

To be fair, though, I think Attorney General Patrick Morrisey's statement hit Twitter before I saw either of those emails:

Today's announcement is a major victory for working West Virginia families. My mission is to continue to fight against unlawful regulations that pose a threat to jobs and the success of the Mountain State.

I'm sure other West Virginia political leaders will follow with similar political pandering about the president's decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. And they can talk all they want about how this is going to help the coal industry, and throw around phrases like "prioritize energy research" and "incentivize the development of advanced fossil energy technologies." But the fact is that the Trump administration wants to gut government spending needed to make "clean coal" — whatever that is, exactly — any sort of reality.

Tons of journalists and scientists — and business people — who are way smarter than me have provided lots of discussion about the very real dangers that this move by President Trump poses to our society (see here, here and here for example).  There are also indications from some that the clean energy revolution is far from over, and that all hope for dealing with climate change isn't yet totally lost.

But if you're here in West Virginia and were watching the president's Rose Garden speech, you no doubt noticed repeated reference to coal miners, and coal communities, and how much we are apparently loved by this administration. That seems as hard to believe as it ever has been, if you can remember back a little more than a week ago, when we reported how the administration is looking to settle with the coal industry in a lawsuit brought to block one of the key federal mine safety protections put in place after the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster.  The final wording of that eventual settlement might be educational in how much President Trump really loves coal miners.

And what about the rest of President Trump's budget? What about plans to help struggling coal communities get back on their feet economically? Anyone who is really paying attention knows that the key programs coalfield residents rely on both just to get by — and more importantly to try to grow and lift themselves up — are being targeted for major cuts by the administration.

While coal markets have seen some improvements, there's no indication that those are long-term changes or that the industry's structural decline will be reversed. Most analysts tell us not to buy into the notion that the president's action this afternoon will help generate jobs in other industries either.

It's difficult for many political leaders, let alone average West Virginians, to really stomach all of this. It's hard to be honest about it. But here's how Paul Krugman of the New York Times explained the other day the place that West Virginians find themselves in right now:

So many of the people who voted for Donald Trump were the victims of an epic scam by a man who has built his life around scamming. In the case of West Virginians, this scam could end up pretty much destroying their state.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Return of Workplace Immigration Raids [feedly]

The Return of Workplace Immigration Raids
https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2017/06/04/the-return-of-workplace-immigration-raids/

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – David Huerta, President of United Service Workers West, SEIU, speaks at a meeting of San Francisco janitors and other workers supporting AB 450, a bill protecting workers during immigration raids and enforcement actions. 

David Bacon

At the end of February immigration agents descended on a handful of Japanese and Chinese restaurants in the suburbs of Jackson, Mississippi, and in nearby Meridian. Fifty-five immigrant cooks, dishwashers, servers and bussers were loaded into vans and taken to a detention center about 160 miles away in Jena, Louisiana.

Their arrests and subsequent treatment did more than provoke outrage among Jackson's immigrant rights activists. Labor advocates in California also took note of the incident, fearing that it marked the beginning of a new wave of immigrant raids and enforcement actions in workplaces. In response, California legislators have written a bill providing legal protections for workers, to keep the Mississippi experience from being duplicated in the Golden State.

Once the Mississippi restaurant workers had been arrested, they essentially fell off the radar screen for several days. Jackson lawyer Jeremy Litton, who represented three Guatemalan workers picked up in the raid, could not get the government to schedule hearing dates for them.  He was unable to verify that the other detained immigrants were being held in the same center, or even who they were. 

The Geo Corporation, formerly known as the Wackenhut Corporation, operates the LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena. Geo's roots go back to the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which became notorious in the nineteenth and first half of the 20th century for violent assaults on unions and strikers.

Today Geo operates 16 immigrant detention centers around the country, according to its 2015 annual report. It runs privatized prisons as well, some of which have been investigated by the federal government after allegations of bad conditions and understaffing. The LaSalle facility has 1,160 beds. Litton says it is normally full, so taking in an additional 55 detainees would result in severe overcrowding.

The use of Jena's immigrant jail to hold workers detained in workplace raids has a bitter history in Mississippi. In 2008 481 workers were arrested at a Howard Industries electrical equipment factory, in Laurel, Mississippi, in the middle of union negotiations. They, too, were taken to the LaSalle detention center. There they were fed peanut butter sandwiches at mealtimes, and according to Patricia Ice, attorney for the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), "There weren't even enough beds and people were sleeping on the floor." Eight workers detained in that raid were charged with aggravated identity theft in federal court, for having given a false Social Security number to the employer when they were hired.

"This latest raid is causing a lot of fear in our community," says MIRA director Bill Chandler.  "There's fear everywhere now because of the threats from Trump, but here in Mississippi our history of racism makes fear even stronger."

Agustin Ramirez, an organizer for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in California, told me that the Mississippi raids have heightened fear among West Coast immigrants, too. "What we have seen in the past, and the threats from Trump, tell us this is coming. We may not have had a raid like this here yet, but we can see the sky is dark, and we know it's going to rain. We just don't know when."

In California, with many times the immigrant population of Mississippi, the potential impact of workplace raids is enormous. Of the nation's estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, over 2.6 million live in this state—almost one in every 10 California workers is undocumented. They make up almost half of its farm workers, and over 20 percent of its construction workers. The National Restaurant Association says that of the country's 12 million restaurant workers, 9 percent are undocumented, while the Restaurant Opportunities Center estimates that in large cities they make up almost half of that industry's workforce.

The legislative response in California came from United Service Workers West (USWW), the union for janitors, security guards and airport workers affiliated with the Service Employees International Union. "We want to lead the nation with the strongest resistance efforts to protect workers, not just in the community, but in the workplace," explained David Huerta, USWW's president.

In cooperation with labor attorney Monica Guizar, USWW worked with San Francisco Assemblymember David Chiu to craft Assembly Bill 450. The bill, called the Immigrant Worker Protection Act and introduced March 24, addresses workplace immigration raids in four ways:

·AB 450 requires employers to ask for a judicial warrant before granting access to a workplace by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

·The bill prohibits employers from sharing confidential information, like Social Security numbers, without a court order.

·If there is an immigration raid, or if an employer is told by ICE to hand over information that employees provide on I-9 immigration-status forms, the bill requires the employer to notify the state labor commissioner, the workers themselves and their union representatives.

·AB 450 authorizes the labor commissioner to certify workers who report claims against their employers, prohibiting employers from retaliating against them, and helping them to gain visa status as witnesses in legal proceedings.

Assembly Bill 450 was co-authored by Bay Area Assemblymembers Phil Ting and Rob Bonta, and State Senator Scott Weiner. "Trump's threats of massive deportations are spreading fear among California workers, families and employers," Chiu told a news conference, adding that the bill "goes beyond California's existing defense of immigrants to offer new legal protections for individuals in our workplaces."

In a highly publicized April 11 event on the Arizona-Mexico border, Attorney General Jeff Sessions emphasized the Trump administration's hard line on enforcement.

In a highly publicized April 11 event on the Arizona-Mexico border, Attorney General Jeff Sessions emphasized the Trump administration's hard line on enforcement. Chiu cited Sessions's previous statements and orders as a reason for the bill's new measures of protection. Sessions told the press in Arizona that enforcement would now prioritize identity theft among other factors. "And it is here that criminal aliens, and the coyotes, and the document-forgers seek to overthrow our system of lawful immigration," he announced.

By using phrases like "identity theft" and "document-forgers," Sessions is treating as a criminal offense the means used by every undocumented worker to get a job. Like all other workers, undocumented immigrants must supply Social Security numbers to employers to get hired. But since the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, they have been prevented from applying for them. Workers therefore invent Social Security numbers or use numbers belonging to others.

In the past, the federal government has occasionally interpreted this as not only as a reason for deportation, but as a federal crime. Sessions is threatening to make these occasional charges mandatory in every case. The irony is that undocumented workers, using those bad numbers, contribute about $13 billion annually to the Social Security Trust Fund, and are disqualified from receiving any benefits that those contributions are supposed to pay for.

Heavy immigration enforcement against workers is hardly new. Under President George W. Bush, large-scale raids led to the detention and deportation of thousands of workers, especially in meatpacking plants. At Smithfield Foods in North Carolina and Agriprocessors in Iowa, 389 immigrants were jailed, charged with felonies for using bad Social Security numbers. Under President Obama, ICE agents audited the information provided by workers on I-9 forms, comparing it with the Social Security database. ICE then told employers to fire those immigrants whose information didn't pass muster. The government developed an enormous database, called E-Verify, for rooting out undocumented workers. Thousands were fired, and in 2010 alone ICE audited about 2,000 employers.

Anger over these enforcement actions has a long history in California. Los Angeles janitors, members of USWW, sat down in city intersections to protest firings by Able Building Maintenance in 2011. The union fought similar firings in Stanford University cafeterias, and among custodians in the buildings of Apple and Hewlett-Packard. Two thousand seamstresses protested their firings at Los Angeles's American Apparel. Members of UNITE HERE, the union for hotel workers, mounted a hunger strike outside the Hyatt in San Diego over the same issue. In the Bay Area, 214 workers at the Pacific Steel foundry fought firings for almost a year, while at the Alameda County Industries recycling plant in San Leandro, they even went on strike to try to stop them.

Over the years, unions have charged that employers use the firings when workers try to organize, or when they are negotiating contracts. Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, says, "raids drive down wages because they intimidate workers—even citizens and legal residents. The employer brings in another batch of employees and continues business as usual, while people who protest get targeted and workers get deported. Raids really demonstrate the employer's power."

To help workers protect themselves in the workplace, the ILWU, Filipino Advocates for Justice and several other groups organized a training session about actions workers can take on the job, in the face of a raid or I-9 firings. Workers from Alameda County Industries acted out a teatro-based sketch on their own strike to stop the company from terminating them for not having papers. In another skit, they dramatized the way workers might demand that their boss bar ICE agents from the workplace if the latter have no court order. Other unions described their experiences over the past decade in organizing workers to fight off raids and firings.

"Our experience tells us that workers can resist raids at work, and the more they do that the better off they are," Agustin Ramirez says. "We are getting prepared, trying to give people as much information as possible. We're trying to spread this idea that in addition to AB 450, workers can take action on the job to protect themselves."

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Profiting from the Working Class: How the Opioid Epidemic Echoes the Mortgage Crisis [feedly]

Profiting from the Working Class: How the Opioid Epidemic Echoes the Mortgage Crisis
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/profiting-from-the-working-class-how-the-opioid-epidemic-echoes-the-mortgage-crisis/

For the second time in a decade, a group of Fortune 500 companies are engaged in a con game that is devastating working-class families and the communities in which they live. The first scam, which involved predatory lending and the sale of worthless mortgage-backed securities, led to the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the near-meltdown of global financial markets in 2008. In its wake, nearly ten million American families lost their homes, millions more lost billions in equity and were left broke and hopeless. Many of the victims are still struggling to rebuild their lives today.

NBC News photo

As with predatory mortgage lending, the ongoing opioid and heroin abuse epidemic began quietly and went undetected by regulators and law enforcement officials until evidence of the carnage it was causing began piling up at their feet. One of the most widely-discussed reports came from economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who identified rising death rates among middle-aged whites, especially those from the working class, tied in part to overdoses. And while the housing crisis and the opioid/heroin epidemic were both spawned by corporate greed, there's one significant difference: the victims of the drug epidemic aren't attempting to rebuild their lives. They're dead.

The similarities between the two scams are striking and disturbing. Like the bankers who created the mortgage crisis by marketing unsustainable investment tools that exploited homebuyers, the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture opioids engaged in a concerted and highly successful effort to convince physicians and pharmacists to hand out dangerous and highly addictive drugs, including OxyContin and Vicodin, as if they were jelly beans.

How successful was that marketing campaign? Very. As the Charleston Gazette-Mail noted in an explosive report on the epidemic, between 2007 and 2012 pharmaceutical companies sold 780,000,000 hydrocodone and oxycodone pills in West Virginia. That's 433 pills for every man, woman, and child living there. Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Florida, and New York have also been flooded with these drugs.

The drive to convince doctors that opioids could be safely prescribed for the long-term treatment of chronic pain without substantial risk of addiction was led by Purdue Pharmaceutical, the manufacturer of OxyContin. As reported in the American Journal of Public Health,  Purdue funded self-serving studies that produced fudged data, distributed that data to thousands of physicians, pharmacists, and nurses during conferences held at luxury resorts, more than doubled its sales force, and paid reps who produced increased OxyContin sales $40 million in bonuses. As a result, Purdue's owners, the Sackler family, jumped to Forbes Magazine's list of America's wealthiest families with a net worth of over $14 Billion at the end of 2015.

Two other factors also contributed to the exponential growth in opioid sales. First, Purdue concentrated its efforts in regions of the country populated by blue-collar workers and the economically disadvantaged because they assumed that patients in those areas were less educated and more likely to place blind faith in medical providers. The Gazette-Mail series on the epidemic demonstrated the companies were correct. While opioid addiction has increased in all demographic groups, the Centers for Disease Control reports the largest increase among whites who earn between $20,000 and $50,000 a year.

But the epidemic was also made possible by the total failure of regulators to recognize what was happening. Despite rules requiring drug distributors and pharmacists to report unusual orders of controlled substances to regulators, billions of pills continued to flood markets across the U.S. for years. No one said a word until the bodies began to pile up and the evidence began to show growing addiction rates among middle-class whites. When regulators did finally act by cracking down on doctors who were over-prescribing pain meds, many addicted patients turned to heroin dealers.

Anyone who has read The Big Short or seen the movie that chronicled the mortgage lending scam will recognize the tactics used by Purdue and the other pharmaceutical manufacturers: create a market for a faulty product, pay once-responsible people lots of money to foist it off on unsuspecting customers, and sit back and reap billions in profit. But the consequences are quite different: victims of the former lose their homes, victims of the latter lose their lives.

It is possible, however, that the U.S. Justice Department will treat this scam differently. In the aftermath of the 2008 housing meltdown, not a single senior banking executive was indicted, convicted, or jailed for the massive fraud committed on the American public. Instead, the feds spent billions to bail out the finance industry and offered only slight assistance to the millions of Americans who lost their homes, their savings, and their dreams.

State attorneys general filled the vacuum by launching investigations and filing civil lawsuits that the U.S. Department of Justice eventually, albeit reluctantly, joined.  While many of the largest banks paid billions in fines and penalties using bailout money supplied by the very taxpayers who had been defrauded and funds that should have been distributed to shareholders, the Obama Justice Department and Attorney General Eric Holder declined to prosecute anyone.  The cozy relationship between Wall Street fraudsters, regulators, and prosecutors, symbolized by Holder's post-AG work at the white shoe law firm of Covington and Burling, discouraged criminal enforcement efforts that many legal observers say should have been initiated. As a former Senate investigator put it, "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail."

Not surprisingly, homeowners were stunned and outraged when they learned that the billionaires who had stolen their houses were allowed to walk — or Lear Jet or yacht — away scot free.  It's also not surprising that many of these historically Democratic voters were excited by Donald Trump's promise to hold Wall Street accountable for raping Main Street.

The Trump administration and AG Jeff Sessions have the opportunity to do better. As evidence of a major corporate fraud piles up and as overdose rates increase in big cities and rural communities in Ohio and other states, Sessions must decide whether to prosecute the corporations whose actions caused the epidemic. So far, despite a professed desire to reignite the war on drugs, the president and his AG have been silent on the matter.

That is why we were encouraged when Republican Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, at the urging of Democratic elected officials and the plaintiff's bar, recently filed suit against the pharmaceutical companies responsible for Ohio's severe opioid crisis and resultant deaths. The theory of the case is obvious: drug companies, led by Purdue, systematically and intentionally used fraud and deception to convince doctors, third party payers including the state's Medicaid program and Worker's Compensation System, and patients that opioids were safe and effective.  As a result, patients became addicted to opioid medications that contain the same active ingredient as heroin, which put their lives in danger.

While we applaud DeWine's decision, and we're glad he included a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) claim in the suit, the foreclosure crisis taught us that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Department of Justice are the only law enforcement agencies with the resources and power to pursue and prosecute a case that involves a massive fraud that impacts the entire nation.

Unfortunately, Sessions and the DOJ appear to be focused on prosecuting and jailing street-level heroin dealers and users rather than the executives at Purdue and the other opioid manufacturers who knowingly touched off the deadly heroin epidemic. This strategy isn't just doomed to fail, it echoes the Obama administration's decision to lockup low-level mortgage brokers but allow Wall Street executives to cash million-dollar bonus checks and head to the Hamptons for the summer.

We remain hopeful that Sessions will surprise us all by deciding to criminally prosecute the pharmaceutical executives who created the opioid crisis. If he does, a clear and for once positive distinction will be drawn between the Trump and Obama administrations. But if he doesn't, if he instead prosecutes the men and women in blue jeans and plaid shirts who are buying and dealing heroin rather than the bespoke suit-clad executives who set them up to become drug addicts, the Trump administration will be repeating the mistake made by Obama's with one stark distinction: they'll be letting murderers off the hook.

And that's certainly not the way to make America great again.

Marc Dann and Leo Jennings III

Marc Dann served as Attorney General of the State of Ohio and now leads the Dann Law Firm, which specializes in protecting consumers from various forms of predatory financing. Leo Jennings III is a leading Northeast Ohio political consultant and media specialist.

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The big banks may get to keep their risky investments after all [feedly]

The big banks may get to keep their risky investments after all
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-big-banks-may-get-to-keep-their-risky-investments-after-all/2017/06/09/df9d134e-49f8-11e7-a186-60c031eab644_story.html

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