Just dropped off my smiling daughter for the first day of seventh grade. Took wonderful photographs we will treasure forever as we left the house and as she got out of the car. Turning the corner from the school, the parent’s misty eyes manifested. It all goes by so fast.
On the way to school we had talked about why some kids’ parents might be tempted to steal, that it's sometimes for buying drugs but sometimes because they need money for basic things. We talked about how tough it is for many parents after their kids go to school, and they go look for work or try to figure out how to pay their bills on minimum wage, part-time work, and temp jobs, if they can even find work.
Before we left for the drive to school I had read Thomas Franks’ great piece in this morning’s Guardian, www.theguardian.com/.... Please read it.
Here's the point that most hits home as a new school year begins:
Modern-day Democrats are constitutionally incapable of sharp and bold; Nancy Pelosi’s op-ed announcing the Better Deal in the Washington Post, for example, is swimming in the same sort of ambiguous futurific formulas that Americans are wary of but that Democrats seem to love.
“It is time,” she writes, “to ignite a new era of investment in America’s workers, empowering all Americans with the skills they need to compete in the modern economy.”
Empowering Americans with skills for modernity? If the Democrats mean, workers will be paid more, why not just say it? Even the noncontroversial promise (noncontroversial among liberals, I mean) to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour is clouded on the Better Deal homepage with enough wishy-wash to make one doubt the sincerity of the party’s Solons.
We Democrats must become the party of working people once again. The recent proposal for a Better Deal is too much warmed over myth of the professional Democrats who control the party focused on the false premise that workers are out of work and struggle because of lack of training.
A Better Deal is not even particularly liberal. Consider the vague promise that I mocked about giving people skills for the “modern economy”. Read Schumer’s op-ed and you discover that what this actually means is giving employers tax cuts to encourage them to “train workers for unfilled jobs.”
That’s right: it’s a reference to the so-called skills gap, one of the most backward but fact-resistant articles of faith in the Washington credo. Accepted by leaders of both parties, it essentially blames unemployment on workers themselves: the reason people don’t have jobs is because they aren’t skilled enough to get those jobs, presumably because they didn’t study the right thing in school.
Everything comes back to education, which makes a lot of sense to an elite that rationalizes its rule by educational credentials. But in truth, what American business leaders need in order to fill those vacant positions is not a tax cut – they need to offer more pay.
The Democratic Party has become a top down professional myth-clinging party. We are supposed to celebrate its management of us. The professional limiting assumptions cannot be challenged, and when we get too demanding, we must be crushed, which is the opposite of how Labour is waging a strong comeback in the UK.
Now, let us compare the Democrats’ manifesto with one that actually succeeded. For the Many, Not the Few was the title of the Labour party’s proposal to voters as the UK headed for its general election in June, and as you might surmise from the manifesto’s title, it was made of considerably sterner populist stuff than its American counterpart.
Both documents bang away at a “rigged” system; both acknowledge the alienation of ordinary people in these post-recessionary times, but the British iteration is strong where Better Deal is weak; its demands are clear where ours are vague; it is remarkably free from New Economy cant and quite specific about its aims. For example: a national investment bank. Public ownership of public utilities like water and the mail (!).
I realize that in individual House and Senate races the candidates might deem they have to run to the center to win. But the party messaging should be a uniting message of deep democracy that promises liberty and justice for all, not maybe this, maybe that, maybe sometimes, some justice will arise from the tweaking of the neoliberal society we must have. You too may get lucky and get a high tech job if you get your act together and take the right classes.