Sunday Slacker: On The Wing
Plus Behold! a really really pale rider
Yes, Sunday’s newsletter is out today. Don’t be a slave to time.
Links are at the end.
The anticipated flood of suggestions for getting the smoke smell out of Bad Crow Review world headquarters in the wake of the flaming manapua incident has yet to materialize.
Just sayin’.
Today’s photo shows a crow departing Harajuku Station in Tokyo. We’re booked for Japan early next year; Tokyo isn’t on the agenda other than a layover at one of the airports, but crows, trains, and snow are.
“Which Side Are You On, DC?”
In an obvious and obviously hypocritical attempt to cast themselves as pro-labor, several GOP presidential hopefuls, including Josh Hawley, voted in favor of the sick leave provision in Bernie Sanders’ failed amendment to the contract settlement forced upon rail workers. The week following the vote, Hawley outlined the religio-populist line he plans to take in his pursuit of the presidency in a new right-libertarian magazine, Compact.1
The Book of Deuteronomy instructs, “You shall not oppress a hired worker.” Apparently, no one told President Biden or the rest of the political-industrial complex. Last week, they united to stifle a potential strike by railway workers, the first one in years. It’s too costly for the economy, the DC types moaned, the workers are being unreasonable.
Hardly. The rail workers were merely asking for a handful of sick days, something the professional class regards as a matter of divine right. Half the House of Representatives still won’t show up for work for fear of even potentially falling ill. But railroad workers must be forced to work and take sick days on their own dime. The hypocrisy is rank—but also revealing. The country’s political class has very little regard for blue-collar work or the people who perform it. That needs to change.
If not for references to “woke capital” and Biblical imperatives, parts of his polemic might be found in a socialist tract, or at least a Democratic Socialist one. Hawley aligns Democrats with Wall Street and portrays both as out-of-touch, anti-labor elitists.
No member of Congress or White House bureaucrat would ever have accepted this bad bargain, to say nothing of the Fortune 500, where white-collar employees just spent the last two years working “remote.” Many of them are still at it. And yet somehow, Biden and lawmakers decided even a few sick days for railway workers was a bridge too far.
Which raises the question: Do we want blue-collar work in this country or not?
Wall Street, Democrats, Capital—all aligned against the working family. Hawley then calls for wages and benefits sufficient for workers to support their families on a single income, bringing the thesis back around to religion and conservatism and framing it as essential to supporting and cementing ‘traditional values’ moving forward.
Hawley’s campaign and PAC donations come, as with many members of Congress from both parties in both chambers, in bulk from FIRE sources—finance, investments/securities, and real estate, institutions which are most often bitterly opposed to all things labor other than pension fund investments.
The money is one obvious reason Congress passes more laws benefiting those and other industries than ones benefiting labor; the money is why then-Newark mayor Cory Booker assailed Obama for going after pirate equity in the 2012 presidential campaign against Romney; the money is why Hawley can indict Democrats for not just failing workers but acting directly against their interests; and it’s why he poses a problem for Democrats: he’s right about them. As a class, they suck on labor issues.
Of course Republicans suck worse, but Hawley is workshopping an approach that could force individual Democrats to spend a lot of time defending the party’s support for labor.
Hawley is himself as elite as they come, in the same pejorative sense that he uses to attack Democrats and the “political-industrial complex:” born to a banker, private prep school, coastal universities in Stanford and Yale Law, teacher at one of the top boarding schools in England, clerk to chief justice John Roberts, university professor, state attorney general, recipient of massive campaign donations from inimical sources during his young senatorial career, chronic voter against worker interests, and world-class Capitol Hill hall runner.
That may not matter for him, or for other Republicans who might take his tack. Trump is obviously not to the labor manor born, and neither were Bush fils or père or Reagan before them; it was Nixon who may well have been the last plausible Republican champion of the common man to win the office, but his successors got there anyway with no small assist from the working class.
Nixon was also the last Republican president who was as smart as Hawley is. Smart is no guarantee of political success, just as stupid is no guarantee of failure, but one of the things leftish Democrats have been fretting about since Trump’s successful run is encountering a Republican contender with the same general instincts as Trump but smarter, more focused and less uncouth — not a high bar — with the ability to attack Democrats on an issue that they should, and perhaps think they do, own.
The 2020 Democratic party platform, Biden’s platform, takes note of the decades-long stagnation of wages and wealth for the working class and the related acceleration of income inequality.
Working families’ incomes have been largely stagnant for decades, while the cost of basic needs—from housing to health care, higher education to child care—keep rising at precipitous rates. Meanwhile, the rich have been capturing a larger and larger share of the economic pie, with incomes for the top one percent growing five times faster than those of the bottom 90 percent.
. . .
That is why Democrats commit to forging a new social and economic contract with the American people—a contract that invests in the people and promotes shared prosperity, not one that benefits only big corporations and the wealthiest few. One that affirms housing is a right and not a privilege, and which makes a commitment that no one will be homeless or go hungry in the richest country on earth. A new economic contract that raises wages and restores workers’ rights to organize, join a union, and collectively bargain. One that at last supports working families and the middle class by securing equal pay for women and paid family leave for all.
Democrats held the White House for 18 of the past 30 years, with income inequality accelerating as much or more when they’re in the building as when they aren’t. Those incomes stagnated under both parties going back to the late 1970s. Obama came into office promising big things for labor, at one point giving a simultaneously economically populist and deficit-hawking speech2 in Osawatomie, Kansas, a location chosen, in reaction to the Occupy movement, to echo Theodore Roosevelt’s most famed populist speech,3 and left office congratulating himself on vaulting the U.S. into the top spot among oil and natural gas producers — we’re producing almost double what the Saudis are these days — while the Great Recession lingered on for workers and the poor years into the recovery.
Remember card-check?
Biden fashions himself a labor guy supreme, but there’s the rail settlement, which doesn’t look so good paired with a pledge to bolster the right to collective bargaining, and a commitment “to forging a new social and economic contract,” something Democrats have been reluctant to undertake since Bill Clinton drove the final nail in FDR’s coffin. Democrats like to tout their economic successes, but for a whole lot of people, across generations, success has been and remains a mirage,4 and if they vote at all they’re not guaranteed to vote for Democrats.
So the Democratic relationship with labor rank-and-file is far more adversarial than it should be, and their relationship with anti-labor forces and individuals funding the party and their campaigns is far more chummy than it should be, and this creates a breach into which Republicans don’t hesitate to plunge, however insincerely.
Which Side Are You On is among the best-known labor songs in labor movement history,56 written during the Harlan Country coal wars in the late 1930s, and Hawley didn’t make it the title of his essay by accident. Don’t be surprised to hear him leading a chorus of it should he make union halls part of his presidential campaign, even though Missouri is an anti-union state.
A gospel-flavored version of the tune was popular during civil rights marches and assemblies in the 1960s,7 and it’s in that vein where Hawley departs from his fellow Republicans. Churches, religion, were inseparable from the civil rights movement, and Hawley aims to make religion inseparable from his labor cause; he aims to preach it.
“You shall give [the worker] his wages,” Deuteronomy warns, “lest he cry against you to the Lord, and you be guilty of sin.” Sin. There’s an old-fashioned word. For conservatives, it ought to be a reminder that winning a better deal for America’s workers isn’t just an electoral imperative. It’s a moral one. The question now is whether we will take that duty seriously.
Can Democrats match the real or feigned fervor of a Republican wrapping fair pay for labor in the flags of true conservatism, morality and religion? Whether he can succeed in doing so and if so, whether Democrats can match it remain to be seen, but meanwhile Hawley’s question stands: Which side are you on?
Aasiva, “Niriunniq” is outlandishly good.8 Follows Jamaican Queens, “Wormfood;” Cannonball Jane, “Street Vernacular;” French Vanilla, “How Am I Not Myself;” Imaginary Cities, “Temporary Resident;” sxip shirey, “Sonic New York,” featuring the hit single 15 Punk Rockers Pounding A Piano Into Junk; Chulius and The Filarmónicos, “Shorts & Sandals;” Fokn Bois, “Afrobeats LOL,” which we liked so much we followed it with an earlier, longer album of theirs called “FOKN Ode To Ghana.” Playing us out is Lara Hope and The Ark-Tones, “Here To Tell The Tale.”
That, comrades, is all we got, and it’s a lot; sometimes we’re lazy and sometimes we’re not. We’re told this is a good time of year to solicit paid subscriptions, and we’re motivated to take that as gospel, so if you have a spare $50 for an annual subscription or a spare $5 a month for the installment plan, please consider helping out.
Take care, be well.
Nicely curated. Comments are also engaging on this one. For the record, related to getting your disastrous manapua smell out of the apartment, it's lemons or oranges everywhere, or a certain Angry Citrus spray that may, if requested, be acquired in barter for the recent emergency delivery service.
Yes, and I'm saying if they do, they're suckers!