Jim’s Assignment Desk
Can it really be the case that card-carrying Wobbly Thomas L. Knapp, Mr. Left-Libertarian himself, has not written about the split between the AFL-CIO and the Change To Win Coalition? I sure would like to know what he thinks about the matter. (Kevin Carson, who has an IWW card of his own, has already weighed in.)
For Max Sawicky: Max argues that the proper business of American government is ensuring full employment. Meanwhile Europe’s social democracies accept very high levels of unemployment (by existing American standards) in return for very high levels of social welfare spending (by existing American standards). Why does Max prefer a policy of full employment to European-style welfare statism? Should Europe do it Max’s way? Is it a culture thing (what’s “right” for them isn’t “right” for us because we’re different)? What typical European state benefices, if any, does Max consider worth trading for full employment? Does Max think European levels of defense spending here could move us toward full employment, or away?
Comment by Frank —
July 30, 2005 @ 11:43 pm
I’ll say this, Andy Stern is a fellow at the Aspen Institute run by Kissinger’s human Tucks pad Walter Isaacson. He who purged Barbara “Nickled and Dimed” Ehrenreich from Time’s editorial page. And lest anybody dismiss this guilt by association argument as the rantings of a paranoid distributionist crank- scroll back in recent Billmon or Digby (can’t remember which one and my old computer serves up dead links) for a withering dissection of where Bob Rubin and David Gergen’s summer and what the place is all about. Or just go to Apsen’s website.
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Also, Stern had engaged in public kissyface with Stephen Moore of Club for Growth fame, and has held the son-of-a-bitch up as a model to be emulated. I guess Lenin maybe learned a tactical trick or two from the Fascists. SEIU has already linked up with this DLC offshoot called The Third Way. Third Way my ass. The way Stern was almost smirking behind crocodile eyes at Lil’ Hoffa during the latter’s turn at the podium at the joint press conference oughta (given the family history) have Jr. feeling like “The Third Man.”
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Dust off your Richard Hofstatder, fellow readers, cuz, Stern and his co-conspirators Wilhelm and Burger et al are bunch of Ivy league social workers who wouldn’t know an honest day’s labor if it bit ‘em in the ass. They know better than all the lunkhead steel workers- they went to UPenn. Deep down those bastards got no problem with the deindustrialization of this country-steady blue collar work allowed too many people to go to church and hunt and fish anyhow.
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Comment stolen from General Glut’s Globlog. I wonder how someone like Andy Stern gets to the top of a union in the first place?
Comment by Tim —
July 31, 2005 @ 8:15 am
Dude, if you count the unemployed in the same manner, the U.S. is not all that lower than Europe.
Comment by Jim Henley —
July 31, 2005 @ 11:01 am
Tim, this claim is new to me. Could you please expand on it?
Comment by jamie —
July 31, 2005 @ 1:48 pm
“Max argues that the proper business of American government is ensuring full employment. Meanwhile Europe’s social democracies accept very high levels of unemployment (by existing American standards) in return for very high levels of social welfare spending (by existing American standards.”
I’d question the “in return” formulation. What Europe also has is a more or less continent wide fiscal regime devoted to the suppression of inflation above all else, which tends drastically to restrict the money supply that would otherwise be available for growth, and hence for creating greater employment. Historically, this was the price exacted by European conservatives for a general agreement to high levels of social spending - that it had to be paid for out of “sound money” and this is the deal that got locked into the Euro. Not speaking for Max, but there’s no reason why the US has to accept this combination. It isn’t proved that accepting the social spending component without the economic royalism would lead to high levels of structural unemployment.
Comment by Tim —
August 1, 2005 @ 5:07 pm
Here’s one of the latest things I’ve seen on it.
unemployment rates
Comment by Kevin Carson —
August 3, 2005 @ 2:59 pm
Thanks for the link, Jim.
Frank, you deserve some kind of award for that “human Tuck’s pad” remark. I may steal that one of these days.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 3, 2005 @ 5:20 pm
Kevin: I really said that somewhere? Because it certainly does sound clever. But I don’t remember it.