Values

Adam Cohen in yesterday's NYT on the 75th anniversary of the National Industrial Recovery Act and the minimum wage:

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This week marks the 75th anniversary of the National Industrial Recovery Act — which Roosevelt signed June 16, 1933, at the end of his famous first 100 days — and of the federal minimum wage. It was a grudging, almost accidental win, and the road since then has been rocky. Advocates for low-income workers have had a hard time keeping the minimum wage at a reasonable level and passing other laws necessary to fulfill the original goal: ensuring that people who work hard can achieve a reasonable standard of living.

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The Supreme Court declared the NIRA unconstitutional, but the idea of a federal minimum wage had taken hold. In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act — which a more progressive Supreme Court upheld — creating a mandatory federal minimum wage.

The new law was enormously effective: within a year, it brought millions of low-paid workers up to a wage of 30 cents an hour. It also had major weaknesses, notably that it was not indexed to inflation. Congress has to raise it, which leaves low-income workers at the mercy of politics.

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The minimum wage can play a vital role in lifting hard-working families above the poverty line. But as Roosevelt understood, it is also about something larger: what kind of country America wants to be. “A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy,” he said in the Congressional message that accompanied the Fair Labor Standards Act, can plead “no economic reason for chiseling workers’ wages.”

One way to think about the debate over the Wal-Mart economy is in narrow cost-benefit terms: do the benefits of the low prices provided by America's largest private employer exceed the costs of low wages and benefits? But I think the better way to think about it is in Rooseveltian terms: do we want to be a country of low retail prices, low wages, and Gilded Age inequality?

Late last week, the 27 leaders of the nations that compose the European Union reached agreement on an outline of new rules to govern the European Union. Although they're not calling it a constitution anymore or trying to consolidate the various treaties governing the EU into a single document, the new agreement preseves much of the language from the planned EU constitution.

I was particularly struck by the agreed-upon treaty language that would specify the European Union's values and objectives (you can find the original text at page 24 of the conclusions document from the meeting):

1. The Union's aim is to promote peace, its values and the well-being of its peoples.

2. The Union shall offer its citizens an area of freedom, security and justice without internal frontiers, in which the free movement of persons is ensured in conjunction with appropriate measures with respect to external border controls, asylum, immigration and the prevention and combating of crime.

3. The Union shall establish an internal market. It shall work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment. It shall promote scientific and technological advance.

It shall combat social exclusion and discrimination, and shall promote social justice and protection, equality between women and men, solidarity between generations and protection of the rights of the child.

It shall promote economic, social and territorial cohesion, and solidarity among Member States.

It shall respect its rich cultural and linguistic diversity, and shall ensure that Europe's cultural heritage is safeguarded and enhanced.

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4. In its relations with the wider world, the Union shall uphold and promote its values and interests and contribute to the protection of its citizens. It shall contribute to peace, security, the sustainable development of the Earth, solidarity and mutual respect among peoples, free and fair trade, eradication of poverty and the protection of human rights, in particular the rights of the child, as well as to the strict observance and the development of international law, including respect for the principles of the United Nations Charter.

Of course, these aren't just European values, they're also held by most Americans. But it's still striking to see them set out explicitly and proposed as an amendment to a foundational document like the EU treaty. In U.S. history, FDR's proposed second bill of rights comes closest to this kind of comprehensive statement of positive and foundational values related to economic security. Although it uses the language of rights, the second bill of rights is really a set of goals intended to be accomplished through legislation, rather than preserved through litigation.

For a long time, liberals and progressives have made the mistake of emphasizing issues, often narrowly defined, more than broad values and principles. This has been a mistake, and one that could be rectified in part by a lifting up positive elements of our history and principles. As Cass Sunstein wrote a few years ago in a Prospect piece on the second bill of rights:

... America's principles and self-understandings help to determine our practices. For much too long, the far right has succeeded in defining the nation's principles, leading Americans and the world to see the United States through a distorted mirror—one that disserves our own history. The sooner we eliminate the distortion, the better.

Dean Baker is keepin' it real:

.... there are two very distinct ways in which Democrats see themselves as helping out the middle class and poor. On the one hand, much of the Democratic Party leadership portrays the government as sort of a collective charity. These Democrats draw a picture that has the market determining societies' winners and losers. But, because they are nice people, they think it's appropriate to tax the winners to help out the losers. This distinguishes them from the Republicans, who want to tell the losers to get lost. This philosophy can be thought of as "loser liberalism," since it holds that the government must tax back some of the winners' money to help out those who did not do very well on their own.

This view can be contrasted with "power populism," which doesn't accept the basic government/market distinction that loser liberalism treats as its starting point. The power populists see government policy as determining who wins and loses in the market place.

This is a fair—and also fun and polemical—description of one of the major fault lines that divides the left. There are some more interesting variants of the liberalism that Baker describes, including some that are more robust. For example, in the The Stakeholder Society, Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott, offer up a less lightweight version of liberalism, and echo Baker's critique of charity as a model for government:

We are trying to break the hold of a familiar vision of the welfare state in America. In this view, modern government has succeeded to the traditional tasks of the church—tending to the old, the sick, the disabled. Like the church, the welfare state is concerned with providing the weak with a decent minimum.

Given this statement of the problem, debate centers on how minimum the minimum should be. Even libertarians grudgingly concede that some vulnerable Americans must be provided some care some of the time; welfarists push the minimum higher.

We reject the organizing premise of this unending argument. Our primary focus is on the young and energetic, not the old and vulnerable. Our primary values are freedom and equal opportunity, not decency and minimum provision. ... Our first concern is not with safety nets but with starting points; ... not with welfare, but with economic citizenship.

If you combine that variety of liberalism with power populism, you have a very powerful political philosophy, one that gave us many pieces of landmark progressive legislation in the 20th century, including the National Labor Relations Act and the GI Bill.

An extract from an essay by the UK's Ed Miliband—although he's talking about progressivism in the UK, most of what he says is directly applicable to progressivism in the US:

Progressive politics has shown a capacity for economic stewardship in a way it never has before in [the United Kingdom]. Public investment has helped to regenerate our public services and create new institutions of the public realm, like Sure Start. Working people have seen gains in income and rights, from tax credits to paid holidays. The ethos of the country has shifted to the left on gay rights, the environment, development, and even taxation and spending.

What matters is whether these gains are the start, or the end. This period of progressive rule was never going to be 1945 to 1951: the big bang. The model for us is surely closer to Scandinavian social democracy: sustained incremental change which knits progressive values deep into the fabric of the country. Why does this matter? Because it shifts the centre ground of politics irreversibly onto progressive terrain. By that standard, there is all to play for.

As many have pointed out, renewal in office is one of the hardest things to achieve. But it is not impossible. It requires some key ingredients. First of all, ethos: shining through from every action and proposal should be a sense of what progressive politics is about. Second, clear priorities: how does progressive politics specifically answer the challenges of building a society with the ethos we want to see? Third, political practice: can we live our ethos through the way we conduct our politics?

The first building block for an ethos of progressive politics must be equality – including a belief that all should have a fair chance to achieve their potential. Part of being in progressive politics is a faith that people can achieve extraordinary things, but they need the right opportunities to do so.

In our pursuit of equality, three particular challenges face us far more starkly than they did in 1997: the challenges of the environment, of globalisation, and of asset-based inequality. In different ways, they make the traditional pursuit of equality more difficult, but they also make the case for progressive politics clearer than ever.

Achieving environmental sustainability requires that markets be embedded within the laws and norms of society, which reflect a set of social and political values. Globalisation shows that government must play its necessary role to ensure that people are not left isolated, and the benefits and burdens are fairly shared. Issues in the housing market call for looking at the potential for giving more of a priority to providing greater housing, in all its forms, and looking at ways of enabling individuals to build up assets.

But, with these greater pressures facing the egalitarian project, the most important area of policy remains education. And though school reform and investment need to continue, creating a more equal society cannot be done in the classroom alone. We know from the past decade that we also need a focus on what happens before children get to school, what happens out of school, and their career pathways after school. That means childcare, youth services and vocational skills must all be greater priorities in the years ahead.

Equality is one part of the progressive ethos. But there is more to the good society than the aggregation of the ‘I’: my health, my education, my job, my house, my pension – important as these things are. The challenge is also to address the wider question of not just what each achieves for themselves, but how we relate to each other and what kind of society we are.

The central idea here is that the good society we believe in is underpinned by us holding a set of values in common, around solidarity and concern for others. Public institutions and practices can help bring people together, build solidarity and connect groups that would not otherwise interact. Sometimes this may be about new institutions, such as better youth services or new public spaces offering cultural or community facilities. Also, it is about how we use and build on existing institutions – schools, health centres, libraries and other public places – and about how government supports third-sector institutions to help build stronger communities.

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The attraction of the progressive project before 1997 was its sense of empathy: a notion that we, better than the alternative, understood the struggles and aspirations of ordinary families. After empathy comes analysis. We need a story about Britain and about people’s lives which points to the role of progressive politics. And we need candour, being honest about the challenges and dilemmas facing government and our society.

Miliband's essay is included in full in Politics for a New Generation: The Progressive Moment, a book coming out next week in the UK and this summer in the US; judging by the blurb it sounds worth reading:

To mark ten years since Labour's election, the next generation of British and US political thinkers, including MPs, Ministers and policy specialists have come together to outline what the next phase of the progressive agenda should be and how it can be achieved.

Using evidence-based research and the most promising new theories, this collection of essays will consider the direction of progressive governance, politics and policy in the next decade.

"This is a very timely book, setting out a thoroughly researched agenda for a renewed struggle against social injustice at home and abroad.' - Stuart White, Tutorial Fellow in Politics, Jesus College, Oxford University, UK.

This op-ed, by John Burbank, who heads the Economic Opportunity Institute, a Washington-State-based progressive think tank, has a fair amount in common with the arguments we've been making lately above how the poverty debate needs to be reframed:

This week the Council on Foundations is meeting in Seattle. This gathering will generate a lot of talking and planning about eradicating poverty. For most foundations, the connection is charity.

Charity attempts to address the generation of poverty that is part and parcel of our uniquely American capitalist economy, unbounded by many of the rules that define democracy in many other countries. Government and democracy in our country are often subservient to, instead of partners with, corporate business. This hemming in of our democratic decision-making results in band-aids in the place of progress. Charity provides the money for these band-aids.

Government does as well. Rather than questioning the inequities of our society, public policy makers are apt to default to reinforcing social divides that cordon off government services for the poor, as in child-care subsidies, or the rich, as in government contracts for non-competitive bids for "disaster relief" services.

Contrast charity to the idea of solidarity. Solidarity implies that we all are together in this society, sharing rights, responsibilities and opportunities. Instead of looking down or up the social ladder from our own station in life, solidarity demands shared responsibilities and rights as Americans. What a strange notion - solidarity as Americans. It sounds sort of patriotic.

Social Security is one bedrock for social solidarity in the United States. All workers contribute to Social Security. And all retirees realize the lifeline of Social Security as they age. Our parents get Social Security, so they are economically independent. Our friends who are disabled from work get Social Security. The children and spouses of workers who have died get Social Security to enable them to keep house and home.

Or course, George Bush has been working hard to dismantle Social Security, but just because of the very nature of the program - that everyone pays in and everyone benefits - Bush has failed at rolling the people to destroy this program. Think back two years. Bush was leading a campaign to dismantle Social Security. He sounded like Chicken Little, with claims that Social Security was going broke, while it was running a surplus and the government was borrowing from its trust fund to pay for other programs.

Now Social Security is barely mentioned by the administration, and for good reason. The latest report of the Social Security Administration (with a majority of commissioners appointed by Bush) extends the time period for which the Social Security program is projected to be able to pay full benefits with no changes to 2041. The new projections show that after the trust fund is projected to be depleted, the program will be able to pay an average wage earner a benefit that is 2 percent higher in real terms than an average wage earner who retires this year will receive. These projections are based on negative assumptions about productivity growth and unemployment. So at least we know that one program for solidarity and security is in good shape!

Our Legislature took a big stride for solidarity in passing family leave insurance this month. Here's a policy and program that is available for all workers, those who make $10 an hour, those who make $25 an hour, and those who make $75 an hour. The key is work, not how much you get paid.

Family leave insurance will provide partial compensation for five weeks to workers taking time off to care for a newborn or newly adopted child. It is not a lot of money - $250 a week. But it sure will help pay the bills and enable parents to care for their newborn children, and not jeopardize their jobs in doing so. It enables workers to balance their responsibilities as parents with their role as breadwinners. It creates the first foundation for early learning and simply tender, loving and present care for infants in our state.

Of course, not all of us will have children in future years. But we know someone who will - it may be our daughters and their spouses, our nieces and nephews, our grandchildren. So paid family leave is an act of solidarity, not charity. It is a lot harder to take away, because in taking it away, we all get hurt.

As the fight over Social Security showed, in a democracy, once a right is given, it is hard to take away. After all, we do vote!

In one of my favorite op-eds of all time, E.J. Dionne argued that progressives "... must create a realistic narrative about a more just and prosperous society. Policies on jobs, health insurance, child care, education and taxes should be more than a list. They ought to form a coherent picture of how things could be better, for everyone."

E.J. wrote these lines about two years ago, but we're still a long way off from having "a realistic narrative about a more just and prosperous society." If one is looking for ideas about how to construct such a narrative, an article by Timothy Garton Ash laying out a "new story" for Europe provides a useful starting point.

Ash argues that:

... our new story should be woven from six strands, each of which represents a shared European goal. The strands are freedom, peace, law, prosperity, diversity and solidarity. None of these goals is unique to Europe, but most Europeans would agree that it is characteristic of contemporary Europe to aspire to them. Our performance, however, often falls a long way short of the aspiration. That falling short is itself part of our new story and must be spelled out. For today's Europe should also have a capacity for constant self-criticism.

Here's what he has to say about solidarity:

Compare this line—delivered by our "exuberant and determined" President—in tonight's SOTU:

A future of hope and opportunity begins with a growing economy – and that is what we have…Unemployment is low, inflation is low, and wages are rising. This economy is on the move – and our job is to keep it that way, not with more government but with more enterprise.

With this rather more accurate assessment of the state of the union from Sen. Webb's response:

When one looks at the health of our economy, it's almost as if we are living in two different countries. Some say that things have never been better. The stock market is at an all-time high, and so are corporate profits. But these benefits are not being fairly shared. When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it's nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day.

As if having Max Baucus head a committee in the Senate wasn't bad enough, check out this new report from Newsweek:

Sen. Joe Lieberman, the only Democrat to endorse President Bush’s new plan for Iraq, has quietly backed away from his pre-election demands that the White House turn over potentially embarrassing documents relating to its handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.

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But the decision by Lieberman, the new chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, to back away from the committee's Katrina probe is already dismaying public-interest groups and others who hoped the Democratic victory in November would lead to more aggressive investigations of one of the White House’s most spectacular foul-ups.

Last year, when he was running for re-election in Connecticut, Lieberman was a vocal critic of the administration’s handling of Katrina. He was especially dismayed by its failure to turn over key records that could have shed light on internal White House deliberations about the hurricane, including those involving President Bush.

A brilliant article by Bill Moyers in the Nation. Here's an excerpt:

... whatever one might say about the election, the real story is one that our political and media elites are loath to acknowledge or address. I am not speaking of the lengthy list of priorities that progressives and liberals of every stripe are eager to put on the table now that Democrats hold the cards in Congress. Just the other day a message popped up on my computer from a progressive advocate whose work I greatly admire. Committed to movement-building from the ground up, he has results to show for his labors. His request was simple: "With changes in Congress and at our state capitol, we want your input on what top issues our lawmakers should tackle. Click here to submit your top priority."

I clicked. Sure enough, up came a list of thirty-four issues--an impressive list that began with "African-American" and ran alphabetically through "energy" and "higher education" to "guns," "transportation," "women's issues" and "workers' rights." It wasn't a list to be dismissed, by any means, for it came from an unrequited thirst for action after a long season of malignant opposition to every item on the agenda. I understand the mindset. Here's a fellow who values allies and appreciates what it takes to build coalitions; who knows that although our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life through the body politic, and each is important to the health of democracy. This is an activist who knows political success is the sum of many parts.

I'm not sure if I'm more stunned by the fact that George Will wrote this or by the possibilty that this kind of extreme economic fundamentalism is taken seriously by some small share of the population:

The minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices.

Like Soylent Green, "labor" is actually ... people! Commodities are things that those people produce. As my American Heritage dictionary says, a commodity is "a transportable article or trade or commerce, especially an agricultural or mining product."

Or, as Pope Leo XIII put it in 1891, in his encyclical on the rights and duties of capital and labour:

Bill Gates Sr. and Chuck Collins in the Bangor Daily News on the estate tax:

In a November ballot initiative, Washington state voters chose to retain their estate tax by substantial margins. Revenue from the state’s tax is dedicated to an Education Legacy Trust Fund that last year spent $100 million to reduce K-12 class size and provide college scholarships for working-class students. We should consider a similar design for the federal estate tax.

Such a prudent policy won’t happen unless we change our attitude about taxing inheritances. No one makes a fortune alone, without the help of our society’s investments. The moral justification for an estate tax is that some of us have disproportionately benefited from the fertile economic soil we have cultivated together.

How many billionaires land on the Forbes 400 list courtesy of our technological and scientific commons, including the Internet, airwaves, biotechnology, and mechanical advances? Seeing the invisible role of the commons in individual wealth creation should foster both an attitude of gratitude and recognition of our obligation to pass on similar opportunities. Previous generations did it for us — and it is our turn to pass on the gift.

The word, from Brother Bill Moyers:

This is the season to recall Walt Whitman. He wrote in Democratic Vistas, around 1870:

The true gravitation-hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort—a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth. As the human frame, or, indeed, any object in this manifold universe, is best kept together by the simple miracle of its own cohesion, and the necessity, exercise and profit thereof, so a great and varied nationality, occupying millions of square miles, were firmest held and knit by the principle of the safety and endurance of the aggregate of its middling property owners.

How prophetic to see anything like that in the aftermath of the Civil War, in which Whitman had volunteered as a nurse. But in a time of great upheaval, countered by popular mobilization after mobilization, the great poet’s took hold in the people's imagination. Whitman’s liberalism had neither the cultural elitism of those identified with the term on the left, nor the laissez-faire extremism of the free-market “liberals” on the right. Liberalism meant “the safety and endurance of the aggregate of middling property owners.” Its consummation was the New Deal social compact we inherited from five presidents and from substantial voting majorities for a generation after the Great Depression, and the result was the prospect of a fair and just society—a cohesion—that truly made us a democratic people.

Good piece in the Nation on the collaboration between religious organizations and secular progressives on the minimum wage:

A coalition of more than eighty faith-based, labor and community associations, Let Justice Roll initially grew out of a collaboration between the Center for Community Change and the National Council of Churches. In 2004 the Center for Community Change held an event in Columbia, South Carolina, in which it invited Democratic and Republican candidates to address poverty. According to the Rev. Paul Sherry, national coordinator of Let Justice Roll, the rally was a great success, and as a result the planners threw fifteen similar events across the country to get "poverty on the radar screen."

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"We think we succeeded, along with others, in making the minimum wage issue the values issue of the 2006 campaign by appealing to people's better instincts," says Sherry. "We helped people of faith see that if their faith was to be genuine, the minimum-wage issue was a significant vehicle to translate their convictions into a functioning reality. While other issues might divide people of faith, this one united them."

I think this argument has lots of interesting implications for the future of social policy at the national level, which I'll try to write about at some point down the line:

... the one man whose book predicted the election's actual revelation—that the South and its conservative ways were irrelevant to the Democrats' victory--has been shut out. "I managed to squeeze onto Chris Matthews once," says Thomas F. Schaller, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, "but we didn't even talk about the book."

Schaller's book is Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South. Published this October, it argues, "The South is likely to become more Republican in the decades ahead," that Democrats can make and keep the Republicans a mere regional party, and that the best shot at a Democratic majority "in the immediate term is to consolidate electoral control over the Northeast and Pacific Coast blue states, expand the party's Midwestern margins, and cultivate the new-growth areas of the interior West." That's exactly how it went down November 7. .....

Sandy Levinson, a law prof at U. Texas, uses a forthcoming book on the Memphis Janitor strike to make some good points about the important role that faith has played progressive politics:

I have just finished a truly stunning book, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, King's Last Campaign, by Michael K. Honey. It will be published by Norton in January. Based on remarkable archival work, Honey, a labor historian who has lived in Memphis, tells the story of the 1968 sanitation worker's strike in Memphis. Though long (some 600 pages), the book is illuminating about both the world of the time and, by contrast, the world of our own, when it is, among other things, unthinkable that national attention would be focused on a strike by sanitation workers. Today George W. Bush has the effrontery to take part in the ceremony marking the placement of a statue of King on the Washington Mall without the slightest understanding of what King was actually about, not only with regard to his pacificism but, in this context, to his militant devotion to economic justice and helping those at the bottom of the ladder.