One-dimensional chess

Using a word like “Repugs” just cheapens your post and makes it look like you have nothing substantive to say. Why do you want that?

Pr Q said:

The big issue to be decided by the lame-duck Congress is whether to extend Bush’s tax cuts for the very rich[1]. This is a one-dimensional chess game, with the obvious zero-sum property that if the tax go through, the Republicans win and (at least in standard political terms) the Democrats lose by an equal amount.

I don’t mean to carp (still less snark) but didn’t Pr Q suggest not so long ago that the Big Issue for the next congress would be the REP’s threat to shut down the government unless health care was repealed?

Obama and his aides plan a series of pre-emptive capitulations, after which the Republicans will demand the repeal of the healthcare act (or maybe abolition of Social Security). When/if that is refused, the Repugs will shut down the government, and this time they will hold their nerve until Obama folds.

On this reading the normally gloomy Pr Q seems to have lightened up substantially, given that a government shut-down is now presumably no longer on the REP agenda. Hence the exhilaration of moving from a negative-sum zero-dimensional chess point to a zero-sum one-dimensional chess line. Or is it too early to count that chicken?

My prediction at that time, FWIW, was that the victorious REPs would demand contractionary budget cuts in return for co-operation on appropriations, which would probably trigger a double-dip recession. On a brighter note I predicted that the REPS would not “go ballistic” and bluff a shut down of the federal government because their key constituents (Red-state voters and Blue-state donors) depend on federal money.

One things for sure, the REPs are more interested in political failure of Obama rather than policy success for themselves. That is, according to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, they aim to “make Obama a one-term President”, with the implied threat of sabotaging all efforts at successful governance. Although he seemed to step back from this threat a few days later.

My prediction is that Obama will hold fast on health care and the REPs will step back from the brink on government shut-down. But that the DEMs will probably roll over on extending Bush tax-cuts and slashing discretionary spending, tossing the Tea Party some red meat. The US economy will limp along for another couple of years and Obama’s chances of re-election will probably slide.

Not exactly Armageddon but not “hope and change” either.

@1, the press will treat this as the Dems supporting tax increases

I believe a better line of attack would be to treat this as the Dems ruining the economy (“no poor man ever gave me a job”, etc.).

Also, I don’t think it’s clear that this is one-dimensional. They could compromise this time, in exchange for raising the retirement age, for example. Then a few years later pass the tax cut on $250K+ income anyway.

And the way this is set upthe Dems have lost already (so it’s zero-dimensional for them) as in the end they will be blamed for Bush’s tax cuts, on top of everything else.

In fact they’ll be blamed for every piece of legislation ever passed in the past and every piece of it that should be passed in the near future but doesn’t make it.

Damned if you didn’t and damned if you don’t.

I’m also interested to see whether New START ratification will be another Obama administration profile in courage. Will they point out that opposition to a series of Reagan-like cuts in the nuclear arsenal due to objections over the content of the preamble is prima facie evidence that John Kyl and his supporters lack the most basic qualifications for even being a Senator? Or will Axelrod pre-emptively fold? I’m on tenterhooks I tell ya.

I am trying to think what we could have instead of a 3d party

We need to get out of the electoral box. When I said people rioting in the streets, I wasn’t joking.

More pacifically, I would like to see a National Debtor’s Union that would organize collective mortgage strikes, destigmatize bankruptcy, block evictions from foreclosed houses, etc. There is no reason for the banksters to agree to any meaningful financial reform, or any more stimulus, until there is a plausible alternative that looks much worse for them.

The New Deal didn’t happen because people voted Democratic. Nor did it happen because people didn’t vote Democratic. It happened because people did things like this.

The problem with a non-electoral strategy for the left is that without majority support among the white working class, the left will lose the battles in the streets. (In this respect, though hardly in general, America resembles Germany in the 1930s more than Russia in the teens.)

The current preoccupations of the left aren’t likely to mobilize the white working class, either. Although rates of divorce, illegitimacy etc. have risen in this group, they won’t go to the barricades for sexual liberty. And they actively oppose most of what is advocated under the rubrics of multiculturalism and affirmative action.

A more leftist economics, e.g., a National Debtors Union, might have more success, but that would fracture the Democratic coalition. The executives at JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs support the Democrats precisely because they support gay marriage, abortion on demand, etc. They won’t be interested in bankrupting and nationalizing the banks. For that matter, is the Ivy League professoriate about to relinquish its endowment income and agree that student loans don’t need to be repaid?

How about extra-electoral?

Perhaps a “Progressive Committee” to which we donate, and which then conditions release of monetary increments to the DNC etc. on how much liberal legislation they advance?

You have to go around the DNC. Blue America, for example.

I see the left as hopelessly split between the private sector working class (subject to competition from imports, cycles in the economy) and the public sector employees lobby. The latter is highly motivated electorally and relatively immune to economic cycles.

In my near urban center, how do you motivate $25,000 working class people to rally and support a democratic/union machine dedicated to +$60,000 a year public sector jobs with full benefits? Who is more important – the sons and daughters of working class voters or the unionized teachers that teach them? The democrats in my state can’t answer that question …

#17 – “Map maker, that post could be the dictionary example for ‘concern troll’”

It could, or it could also be a short exposition on a quite notable part of what is ailing the left; the D’s.

On the other hand, I think it is important to remember that the New Deal happened both because of the mass movement and because of electoral success. The mass movement did not extract a New Deal from Hoover.

And without the unprecedented Republican use of the filibuster, the last legislative session would have passed a ton of real and powerful progressive legislation. The progressive caucus grew this last election, and now represents 1/5 of the House. So rejecting an electoral strategy at this point seems like an equal mistake to not working towards a mass movement.

And the power of the media to distort the visibility and effectiveness of mass movements should not to be ignored. There were three fairly large marches on Washington this Fall, two sponsored by media companies. Most people have never heard of the third march, and if you are interested in comparing the sizes of the three marches, you can’t, because none of the networks ever bothered to estimate the size of the third march. If we organized an unemployed people’s march on Washington, would anyone know it had happened?

Certainly, that can and probably should be taken as a strong argument for direct action rather than visible protests.

Alternate universe hypothesis: The Senate Dems could pass the identical House HR that will provide for permanent cuts below the $250,000 (like they did with health care), without needing a cloture vote, and using a simple majority.

Even more alternate universe hypothesis :
the Senate could simply block renewal of all the Bush 43 tax cuts by simply doing nothing, thereby actually reducing the deficit .

JQ, why not give inserted comments a 1.1 or 1A number?

(ii) The Dems opening move will be to resign

Yup, that my Dems…:-(

Do they have the same for tax code changes this year? I am not aware of that being the case.
Not yet, but that’s how the Bush tax cuts passed in the first place. Here’s a partial list (see Think Progress for full list) of the tactic:

Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001
Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003
The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005
Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005

@31: If you mean nested comments, like on Megan McArdle’s site, please don’t do that. It produces a set of fragmented discourses in place of a unified conversation.

Regarding non-electoral strategies for change: part of the challenge facing left movements in post-industrial societies is that it is possible for the elites to pacify the majority of the population while claiming all the excess in production for themselves. There is just no comparison between economic conditions today and during the GD. You can’t afford health care? In the 1930s, health care as we know it didn’t exist. How about food? It’s a lot easier to feed your family today than it was in 1933. So why should people get up and riot? It’s a lot like going to war. Probably a negative sum game. And things just aren’t bad enough that it’s worth it yet. Maybe the system will collapse sufficiently that it will be, but it hasn’t happened yet.

You can’t pass the tax cuts with a simple majority in the Senate because they don’t pay for themselves.

Correction: you can’t pass permanent tax cuts with a simple majority in the Senate because they don’t pay for themselves. As Tom M observes @ 36, it is entirely possible to pass “temporary” tax cuts with a simple majority. This is why the Bush Deficit Increase and Social Security Theft Act is up for renewal: the expiration date allowed it to be revenue-neutral over the required ten-year span.

Now, this does suggest that instead of trying and failing to get permanent tax cuts for all Americans on the first $250,000 of their income by agreeing to another “temporary” tax cut exclusively for those making more than $250,000, an alternative would be to do things in the same fashion as the Bush Borrow from Our Children’s Future to Give More Money to the Rich Act. To wit: simply offer a tax cut extension on the first $250,000 of income that expires in ten years. That would presumably allow for reconciliation to be used. Meanwhile, don’t even deign to vote on extended tax cuts for $250,000+, because THE DEFICIT. Return some of the spittle Democrats have been sprayed with by those shrieking about the deficit while demanding $700 billion over ten years in additional tax cuts for the rich .

Just don’t display numbers on comments at all: replace the number with a “#” for permalinking.

This seems like the way to go. Sticking freed-from-moderation comments at the end would also work (and would make those comments more likely to be read), provided you did not renumber when deleting comments.

I’m with Charles S. and K. Williams here – people are making claims about extra-political activism in relation to the New Deal that are way out of synch with the historical reality.

One thing that gets ignored in these dicussions is that the American left did a huge amount of internal political work that we’re not seeing efforts to replicate today. The union movement and its allies staged something very similar to the “march into the institutions” – not only did they start to vote Democratic, and build field machines to get out the vote, but they also got themselves on local and state Democratic Party committees, and built themselves political machines (including but not limited to the CIO-PAC model), and built new party institutions like the American Labor Party (taking advantage of ballot fusion) and the Democratic Farm-Labor Party.

What this meant was that, while you could be a “Tammany Hall” style Northern Democrat in 1928 or 1932, by 1934 and 1936 you had to be down with the unions and down with the New Deal. Of course, had this process been successfully carried out in the South and nationally (which FDR to his credit tried to do repeatedly with his attempted purge and his attempted realignment), things would have been different.

So, if you’re looking for useful work to do – how ’bout working to spread ballot fusion to as many states as possible, then grow the Working Families Party into a national presence? How ’bout taking over your local Democratic Party Central Committee?
There is more to political work than electoral/lobbying.

One final point: the Flint sit-down strikes are perhaps the worst possible example of mass extra-political activism imaginable. The UAW chose the sit-down strike precisely because they didn’t have anything close to a majority in the Flint plants – workers were too damn scared of losing their jobs in the midst of the Depression, and many of them remembered how union drives had been broken in the 1920s and 1910s. But while you need a majority to come out in order for a walk-out strike to work, the sit-downs only needed a few workers to throw the lever that shut down the production line, to lock the boss in his office or kick him out, then barricade the doors. It was only after the sit-down strikes worked that you got a mass movement in the auto plants because workers saw that they could go on strike and not lose their jobs – prior to the Flint Strike, there were only 30,000 UAW members; the year after the strike, there were 500,000.

And it required a lot of political work. It required electing Democrats like Governor Frank Murphy who would call out the National Guard for the first time in American history to protect striking workers rather than break the strike, and it required electing FDR to back him up. Without those things, Flint would be another Pullman Strike, where a pro-labor governor was overruled by the national establishment and the National Guard used to break a winning strike.

19 – Map maker, this is a sociologically inaccurate statement. Many blue collar workers have either spouses or sons and daughters who have those public jobs. The idea that the teachers marry teachers and produce teachers in some teachers hive is simply a bogus right wing meme. Public jobs simply are the high end jobs for the blue collar sector – and many of them are actually blue collar jobs, from bus driver to secretary. Of course, private sphere management types like to imagine that all the blue collar workers are sweating in a factory somewhere. It is the upper management types, the white collar workers, who are less likely to have spouses or children working in the public sphere – hence their hatred of it, and automatic assumption that these unionized teachers are equally hated by unionized janitors. This is a laughable assumption. Cuts in public sector employment and salaries will disproportionately effect families below or at the median income range.

Roger,

My point is a public sector blue collar worker is facing a far different economic environment than a private sector blue collar worker. The latter is working in a competitive industry, with wages and benefits being competed away by technology and global competition. Public sector workers, all, including blue collar, have not had paycuts (except in very exceptional circumstances), have excellent benefits, including pensions that just don’t exist in most of the private sector anymore. I haven’t looked at national statistics, but pay and benefits for the blue collar workers in my city are above the average private sector wages for the entire city. Yes, private sector blue collar workers (and remember, there really isn’t much of a private sector unionized workforce in much of the country, including where I live) look up to these public sector unionized jobs – why not – they may have more pay and benefits for the same skill set, with no risk of layoffs or paycuts … that dynamic can’t work when the city can’t afford to hire everyone and those public employees are being paid by taxes on their (lower paid) neighbors.

how ‘bout working to spread ballot fusion to as many states as possible, then grow the Working Families Party into a national presence?

if this were to happen, though, Stephen, it would surely have to be in the face of the fiercest opposition from the Democratic Party, wouldn’t it? Doug Henwood has a bit of background on how the unions/Democrats alliance managed to screw the WFP in the last election cycle; I’d also note that outside the Democratic Party, there used to be until very recently a thing called ACORN that was an extremely effective pro-poor political organisation, and the Democrats had more than half a hand in its destruction.

@29: But the majority of Americans clearly don’t share Prof. Quiggin’s views of the Republican party or the proper way to deal with them. Even most Democratic voters express a desire for bipartisanship, negotiation, compromise, “working together” etc. So the advice to treat the Republicans with contempt and disdain is not good advice for anyone who aspires to rule America or influence the people who do.

Incidentally, responding to your opponents with childish insult rather than civil engagement is a poor strategy in most fields (e.g., academia, law) outside the blogosphere.

California had furloughs (extra unpaid vacation)

Not to feed the troll, but — Just a quick reminder that a furlough is a vacation in name only — you’re required to work your normal hours unpaid during furlough time, or expect to be fired immediately. My father’s on furlough, for example, and he has to work during that time; he’s been told to just not come back if he doesn’t show up one of those days. So it basically is a pay cut. No guarantees that this is true universally, since I’m operating off of one-departmental anecdata, but he says it’s true in most departments unofficially if not explicitly officially, and in fact they’re not even accepting early retirement paperwork at this point from normally eligible employees (or rather, they’re “accepting” its submission, and then dragging their feet about acknowledging it or acting on it). Take that for what you will.

dsquared – I have no problem with “in the face of the fiercest opposition from the Democratic Party.” In part because I believe that taking over local and state party committees is the most effective means for reducing that opposition. And while the WFP did squeezed by Cuomo, I wouldn’t count them out by any means.

Mapmaker – furloughs are pay cuts. In the case of California, 14% paycuts. And public school teachers don’t make $100k a year in California – their bosses might, but they’re not workers, they’re management.

if you father has been told that, he has a legal case should action be taken

No, but thanks – I appreciate your acknowledgment that he and many other furloughed workers have been put in an unjust situation, and ought to be entitled to recompense for that. The letter of the law isn’t on their side, though, because it’s possible to pretend that something very different is taking place.

The work needs to get done, it’s his job to do it. If it doesn’t get done each month, they can fire him for failure to perform job duties.

Of course, like most any job, he needs to actually do the work, and the work is already equivalent to n overfull days of work per month, more than any human being could reasonably keep up with. Paying him to work n – 10 days per month doesn’t make the monthly work allotment doable in n – 10 days.

the idea is less pay for less work

Also no. The dirty secret is that, because job duties aren’t rewritten and many are based on monthly data, the amount of work required of the person per month has been held nearly constant for him and many others. The whole point of a furlough is to get [nearly but maybe not quite exactly] the same amount of work out of folks, for [a lot] less pay.

What you do (for salaried employees at least, works less well but kinda sorta works for wage employees depending on the job) is refuse to “realign” their job duties to accommodate the furlough; then if they fail to do their job, well, you fire them for “failure to do their job.” Nevermind that in order to get the work done, they have to come in on their furlough days. It’s literally not possible to do the work by the time it needs to be done otherwise.

What’s particularly interesting is that my dad’s also doing his boss’s job and his boss’s boss’s job [because they’ve left in disgust], and he’s in a bad but fairly average situation in his department — so many people have left in disgust and are not being replaced, that each person’s assigned the work of three people, more or less. So job duties are rewritten upwards even as# of paid days allotted for doing the work is rewritten downwards.

The goal (unspoken and conjectured of course) seems to be to force as many people as possible to resign as quickly as possible, because retirement benefits are on a sliding scale and the sooner they can shovel workers out the door, the less benefits they earn.

I’ve been happy with disqus for comments on my blog. However, in 6 years, no one has even visited, much less commented. I’m not even going to bother to shill it here.

the Flint sit-down strikes are perhaps the worst possible example of mass extra-political activism imaginable.

The stuff following this sentence does not support it at all.

Lemuel – you mean the bit about how the Flint strikes were a minority or vanguard movement, not a mass movement, or the bit about how the success of the strike ultimately depended on having elected union-friendly governors and presidents?

I’m glad to see you’re involved with the WFPs – but that is political work.

you mean the bit about how the Flint strikes were a minority or vanguard movement, not a mass movement, or the bit about how the success of the strike ultimately depended on having elected union-friendly governors and presidents?

The former. I don’t see why the case for extra-electoral work is weakened by the fact that some of the most successful examples were the work of relatively small organized groups — on the contrary, I would think that’s an argument in support. The latter point is well-taken.

I imagine in the US, if you start blocking evictions, they will go swat-team on your ass, and you will end up in a hospital or in jail.

I think this is unfortunately true. The first person to actually try in the present-day US the kind of direct action Lemuel is talking about will be shot by a policeman who will subsequently claim he thought he was reaching for his taser (yes, that’s considered a *defense* here, and the fact that nobody can verify his story is irrelevant — nobody can refute it, either, and the police actually get the benefit of the doubt ordinary people only get on paper). Some talking heads will chatter about the tragedy of his case for a day or two (others of course will say he deserved it) and then he will vanish without a ripple.

Now, the 10,000th person to have the same thing happen to them *might* start getting somewhere. But I wouldn’t count on it. Most people learn about public events through the media, and who owns the media and determines what they cover and how?