Lost in the Shuffle: Issues that Matter
My problem with political dialogue that focuses on the likes of Bill Ayers is simply this: Such dialogue distracts us from the far more substantive, meaningful dialogue we should be having. Unfortunately, I am now as guilty of said distraction as those who shoved Ayers into the dialogue in the first place.
I decided weeks ago to shine an occasional spotlight on Bill Ayers, not in the interest of defending Ayers, but in the interest of rebutting arguments that attempt to make Ayers into what he is not: A reason to discount Sen. Obama. I believe my objective was honorable. But yesterday, I took the exercise a step too far, posting a video clip of Ayers — in which he offers thoughtful, constructive, sane advice to new teachers — under the headline: “Does This Man Frighten You?”
Once again, my intent with that post was not to defend or vindicate Ayers, but to further drive home the reality that there are things Ayers has advocated with which many people could agree — e.g., promoting the nobility of the teaching profession; taking a grassroots approach to school reform, etc. — just as there are things Ayers has advocated with which many people could never agree — e.g., ending capitalism; bellying up to Hugo Chavez, etc. Accordingly, I believe our only legitimate ask of people who have sat on boards with Ayers — or taken his classes, or otherwise associated with him — is that they separate the good from the legitimately not-good. And the extensive evidence we have on Obama suggests he has done just that. So, let’s drop it.
Unfortunately, with yesterday’s post, I failed in two ways: First, I did not clarify my intent, leaving readers to decode it from a cryptic headline and video. Second, I posted only a video showing the constructive, common-man Ayers, omitting any countervailing clip showing the out-of-bounds, anti-culture Ayers. In these respects, I was as lopsided and biased in my presentation as I believe Stanley Kurtz has been.
Looking beyond yesterday’s post, my decision to counterbalance the Ayers-related hysteria has now culminated in a more general failure. One or two posts on Ayers would have been sufficient. By writing more, I advanced rather than dismantled the distractive quality of these non-material issues.
And that failure really hit home between Friday night and this morning, as I learned more about Obama’s support for — and McCain’s opposition to — a return of the “Employee Free Choice Act.” For those not familiar with this bill, here’s how an article Friday in the Miami Herald explained it:
The act … would update the nation’s labor laws and end a long-standing practice of secret balloting that dates to 1935 and the National Labor Relations Act.
Instead of voting in secret in a federally supervised election to determine whether to unionize, under the new proposal employees could unionize simply by collecting signatures from more than half the workers at a business.
On the surface, that doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. In practice, the repercussions could be significant. Case in point: A friend of mine is an executive for a mid-sized firm that, despite economic pressures, has maintained a manufacturing plant in the U.S. He told me there should be no question in anyone’s mind: If the Employee Free Choice Act becomes law — and the employees at my friend’s company unionize as a result — then the company would immediately shut down its U.S. plant and move operations and jobs to Mexico.
Label it “hard-nosed corporate greed” if you like, but I don’t believe that’s the case, at least not in this situation. My friend’s company is in a very competitive business, where raising prices is effectively a non-option. Thus, dramatically higher labor costs would leave his company’s managers no choice but to take the steps necessary to curtail those costs and keep the company (and its other jobs) protected. If that’s true, and if that pattern were repeated thousands of times over, the impact to U.S. employment and the larger economy would make our current woes seem laughingly non-substantial in contrast.
Now, please understand: I am not anti-union. I believe unions can play — and throughout our history have played — a valuable role. What’s more, my son will likely join a union in the not-too-distant future, in order to maintain access to a group health plan. At the same time, I know unions are as corruptible as any corporation or other large institution, and they have (at times) grossly distorted the balance between hard work and fair pay.
The tragedy here is not this one issue or the Act itself. The tragedy here is that neither Presidential candidate seems eager to talk about such issues (the very point of the aforementioned Miami Herald article) — or how such issues could be managed, and compromises made, to yield the best outcome for everyone concerned.
Worse, journalists and voters (and yes, I’m the most guilty of all) have too eagerly engaged in attack-and-defend dances on subjects like Bill Ayers, self-blinded to the reality that there’s a whole slate of more meaningful topics we probably should have been discussing all along.
Shame on me. Shame on all of us.
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Obama's been all style, next to no substance whatsoever. It's all been about appearances and Feeling Good. (and bashing Bush and the Republicans) Criticizing Obama on serious issues will get nowhere with his fans (especially the fervent personality-cult and naive progressive types who probably make black Americans angry at the former's rush to adopt Obama as their own).
McCain simply seems as dysfunctional as the more with-the-dysfunctional-”program” Republicans.
Part of the blame can be attributed not only to the nature of Washington (object of ridiculous, not merely extra-constitutional expectations) but of society nowadays (as exemplified by the nature and content of commercial as well as much public programming on the airwaves).
Credit where due, Pete- this is an honorable admission of the bias of your previous posts and I apreciate it. I feel that I too, have come across as though Ayers is more important in my calculus than he really is. Several times in comments I've been asked if this association is really that important, and I've tried to explain that it's just one of many, many issues that cause me to vote against Obama, but when there are multiple posts downplaying the Ayers relationship I have found it important to provide an alternative viewpoint.
And of course I agree with you on the problem with the EFCA (and the broader problem of how these issues haven't been adequately discussed.) On EFCA though, it ought to give moderate Obama supporters pause to realize that George McGovern is running ads against Obama's position on this. If you're to the left of McGovern on labor issues, you're probably not a moderate.
Thanks for this Pete. It's much more entertaining to NOT talk about the substantive issues and debate comparable “fluff”. Just look at this the issue you brought up Pete; the Employee Free Choice Act. The act is worthy of several debates in itself. But all sides like to get involved in the much more “easier” character and associations issues. Not saying they aren't important but when we don't talk about things such as the EFCA, it leaves a tremendously large portion of the electorate ignorant.
Note also that while specifics are lacking in our superficial era, people can still get a general sense of order or disorder and if there are trends that they like or dislike. It has nothing to do with robotically, brain-stem-level-only reptilian dislike of Republicans as well as conservatives that we see by many (those who aren't simply the many fad-followers among the young, who will largely outgrow this and hating Republicans and conservatives stupidly once they're older and wiser, even if they remain liberal). 2006 showed a no-confidence vote (vote of displeasure) with the status quo and perceived trends, and the general sense I get on “the street” is that if anything, this is more true this year than in 2006.
Note to T-Steel: Here in Detroit, on lefty talk radio (whose revival and that of the Left may be a trend in and of itself), when Hoffa is on any of the shows, he makes a big point about getting the Employee Free Choice Act passed. (I also hear on local-Detroit-righty as well as on lefty talk radio a strong insistence on tariffs and other interventions related to imports as opposed to free trade trends.)
Thank you for bringing this issue up. Obviously though, it should have been done months ago. But anyway, I have far more questions than answers. On the one hand, I can see where non-secret balloting could favor the unions, arguably in an unfair way. I think history has demonstrated that unions don't always work in the workers' best interests. Your executive friend's comment represents one potential example: it doesn't benefit the workers if the company moved their workforce overseas. Why wouldn't the workers realize that? And realizing it, why wouldn't they put pressure on the union to avoid it? On the flip side of the coin, I think it goes without saying that management doesn't always have the workers' best interests in mind either. The underlying assumption your friend's comment seems to be that unions will always predate on management. Or is just the possibility that they might sufficient reason to pull up stakes and head out to sea? Might there be other issues involved?
Another thing that comes to mind is the fact that there is a growing income inequality in this country. We have one of the highest GINI indexes (a measure of income inequality) of any developed nation. Wealth inequality is growing even faster. As a general rule, countries with high income inequality and wealth inequality tend to be unstable. They are usually totalitarian regimes that flip back and forth over time between nominally left wing and right wing regimes. The only unstable nations with a low GINI index are those whose economies have failed pretty much completely — Somalia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, etc. That suggests, at least to me, that we have to do something to get the problem under control. The question isn't whether we need to do something, but what that something — or, more correctly, those somethings) is/are.
Getting back to your friend's comment, if moving offshore is more profitable than paying their workers more, then obviously that's what they'll do. So one could ask… what can be done to prevent it from being more profitable? I don't know the answer to that. In fact, I doubt there is any one answer. But I do think we have to start addressing the problem, seriously and meaningfully.
I'm not sure whether I'd characterize the position on the “left” of McGovern since it's sounds like McGovern supports the general gist except for the voting part, and I'm not sure how the voting part is a “left” vs “right” issue. To be honest the voting part seems like a complete non-sequitur anyway because all the pro-rhetoric talks about addressing things that are in no way related to the voting and then that's just thrown in there. I'd have to assume the only reason for it is to make it easier to start a union and regardless of your views on unions I'm not sure why that would be a noble goal in and of itself.
I think it's too bad that unions have gotten associated with a political side because I think objectively speaking they are kind of like abortions. There is nothing “good” about them, but there is a strong argument that they are a necessary evil. However, it'd be a lot better if both sides worked towards reducing the need for them. Unfortunately, the root drivers for unions are extremely gigantic social and economic policies that are very complex and cut across the whole political sphere…so it's easier just to argue about the symptoms instead of the disease.
Ricorun: I believe the Gini coeffiecient is abused, but there is no question that inequality is rising in this country and that many are facing a reduction in their standard of living.
There will always be some inequality and it must be left to happen naturally if we are a free society, but if we're in a rigged system, as many believe we are, then that's something else. I've also noted from several years ago that one thing that a contrarian investor (not the current “Doctor Doom” in the news but the original person who was given that nickname) looked for in seeing or predicting failures was gross inequality of wealth or income.
Life is and will remain log-normal but ideally we can develop economically so that the log-normal curve is closer to the normal curve.
[See figure 2a and 2b here]
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/gut/lognormal/b…
Rico — I believe the Gini coefficient is abused. Some inequality will always be there, but I won't cheerlead for this as some would do, and acknowledge that gross inequality at some point obviously is a sign of failure. While we cannot return to the 1950s and 1960s as some on the far Left would want (including powerful unions, like the UAW in its glory days), we cannot continue to see many people experience a reduction in their absolute as well as relative standard of living and expect the nation to prosper or improve, at the same time.
Life is long-normal, as the following site correctly explains (many things affecting nature are synergistic — they are not merely additive but are multiplicative) — and I've thought of income distribution as well as home prices in metro areas with this in mind — but what ideally we would probably like to see is a shift of the log-normal curve closer to the normal curve. (See figure 2a and 2b below for illustrations.)
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/gut/lognormal/b…
Sorry — my first reply to Rico was not displayed when I revisited this site and thread from scratch a minute ago after making reply #1.
DLS, with all due respect, whether one chooses to apply a lognormal, log(10), linear, or any other scale, the issue affected is the urgency for change, not the necessity. Moreover, I am inclined to agree that there are probably other factors that have to be considered, if for no other reason than I am generally disinclined to believe a catastrophic failure in any complex system can be attributed to a single cause. As with any failure analysis in any sort of complex system, one has to consider many variables, and consider them over time. Thus, it would be nice to be able to perform a factor analysis and/or a part/partial correlation to see how the different variables contributed over time.
The Heritage Foundation came up with the “Freedom Index” to help blunt the implications of the GINI index considered alone. They added variables like press freedom, class mobility, and a variety of other things. And that's a useful and mindful exercise. But then again, one could fairly ask two questions: (1) on what basis can it be fairly evaluated that the variables included in their scale are indicators of freedom? After all, according to their index, Hong Kong rates the highest. Considering Hong Kong is now part of China, and China is itself rated #126, what's that about? It makes you wonder whether they picked and weighted at least some of the variables they used by arguing backwards from the preferred results. I'm not saying they did, just color me skeptical.
And that brings me to the far more important question is… what does the index (or any index, for that matter) predict? No measure, no matter how good it makes you feel, or even how internally consistent it might be, counts for much if it has no predictive value, right? As far as I know, the Freedom Index doesn't have enough of a history to answer that question. But on the basis of my own incomplete, and somewhat subjective historical analysis, I'd say it's fairly apparent that some variables included in the Freedom index are probably leading indicators, others are following indicators, and some are totally useless in terms of their predictive capacity. A factorial analysis could help in that regard, but not enough data has so far been provided.
On the other hand, go here, click on the “CIA Gini” column, and look at where the US stands in relation to all others. Then contemplate what the histories of the countries that have a higher Gini index than us have been like, and what the histories of the countries that have a lower Gini index than us have been like — at least over the last 100 years or so. Considering that, I would very much like to have enough data to correlate that one single variable with the fate of the associated country over the last century. My guess is that it would be very telling — maybe very ominous vis-a-vis the USA.
mikkel, I thought about that in terms of whether or not its accurate for me to say that McGovern is attacking Obama and other Dems for being too far left on this- but whether you agree it should be so or not, I'd say that it is pretty well established that being pro-union is a fit with left sided political philosophies, and this bill is clearly one that puts the union's interests first at the expense of management's interests because it will put pressure on all the union workers to conform to the will of the union leadership.
So, it's a pro-union bill that doesn't even preserve the rights of the individual workers (assumes the group's interests will be better served by conformity than to allow individual dissent) and McGovern is pushing back against other Dems who support it because he sees that it goes too far. For Obama to have any credibility as a centrist on labor issues, he would have had to have taken the position that McGovern takes.