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Link Biscuits: 1.6.09

Submitted by Matt Lewis on Thu, 01/07/2010 - 01:46
  • Aaron M. Renn, Will Anyone Stand Up For American Industry?: "There's a positive reinforcement cycle at work. The less we manufacture, the less we can manufacture. We slowly lose the skills, the facilities, the institutions, and the culture that enable a robust manufacturing economy to thrive. Eventually, we won't be able to recover. Maybe we won't even want to. The less we make, the less we want to make. As we become unmoored from our agro-industrial roots, we fail to see them as central to our national identity and frequently treat them with hostility. As Douglas and Wildavsky put it in Risk and Culture (1982): A larger proportion of the population of working age was disengaged from the production process than had been before. The economic boom and educational boom together produced a cohort of articulate, critical people with no commitment to commerce and industry. Increasingly, Americans have no personal experience with industry, and even no family experience with it. What was once common is just another niche, much like military service has become. This means most people have little familiarity or affection for industry, agriculture, or energy production. Many, especially urban dwellers, view most productive industry as a negative, as a source of blight where once others saw jobs and a strong tax base.
  • Harold Meyerson, Without a movement, progressives can't aid Obama's agenda: "In America, major liberal reforms require not just liberal governments, but autonomous, vibrant mass movements, usually led by activists who stand at or beyond liberalism's left fringe. No such movements were around during Carter and Clinton's presidencies. For his part, Obama won election with something new under the political sun: a list of 13 million people who had supported his campaign. But he has consistently declined to activate his activists to help him win legislative battles by pressuring, for instance, those Democratic members of Congress who have weakened or blocked his major bills. To be sure, loosing the activists would have brought problems of its own: Unlike Roosevelt or Johnson, who benefited from autonomous movements, Obama would be answerable for every loopy tactic his followers employed. But in the absence of both a free-standing movement and a legion of loyalists, Congress isn't feeling much pressure from the left to move Obama's agenda."
  • John Judis, Barack Obama, You Remind Me of Herbert Hoover: "Most economic commentators have focused on the “financial crisis” and ignored or downplayed the crisis in the productive core. In the broadest terms, this crisis goes back to the 1970s when the U.S. began to lose market share--and in some cases entire industries like consumer electronics--to European and Asian competitors. It abated somewhat in the 1990s with the emergence of new computer/telecommunications/internet industries, but it became acute again in the early 2000s with the dotcom-telecom bust, which underlay the recession of 2001-2. There was a brief uptick in private non-residential investment in 2005-6, but according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, it began to decline in 2007 and has continued to do so. In the third quarter of this year, at the same time that economists were trumpeting the recession’s end, investment in non-residential structures fell 19.8 percent and in industrial equipment 4.8 percent from the previous quarter."
  • NY Times, For Working Families Party in New York, Power Brings Challenges: "Bill de Blasio, New York City’s new public advocate, is a lifelong Democrat and a likely future mayoral contender. But ask him to name the most innovative political force in the state, and he points to the Working Families Party. “On the issues they care about, from minimum wage to tenant issues to development, they are absolutely definitional — they can set the debate at the city and the state level,” Mr. de Blasio said." .... Since its founding in 1998, the Working Families Party has accumulated a handsome pile of scalps, and prodded and sometimes dragged Democrats to the left. This year it successfully championed a so-called millionaire’s tax and a bill to train workers and weatherize houses — and its troops helped push Mr. de Blasio to victory. Its ambitions, too, remain outsize: Leaders have seeded chapters across the nation. “They are the only state party that’s a full-time party with ideas,” said Ed Ott, former political director of the Central Labor Council. “You call the Democratic Party in between an election, and it’s a ghost town.”"