Dana Goldstein on Colorado's strange labor-business coalition:
In an unprecedented deal between labor and business, those initiatives, and two others backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers, were pulled from the ballot last Thursday, just hours before the Colorado secretary of state's deadline for Election Day changes. Seventy-five executives at local companies, including powerhouses Excel Energy and Qwest Communications, agreed that in exchange for labor pulling the measures, business would raise $3 million to fight Amendment 47, a "right-to-work" ballot initiative that would make it more difficult for unions to collect dues from their members, effectively ending the growth of organized labor in Colorado.
Tom Schaller asks five questions about the new electorate:
For a decade, Democrats have heard promises that a durable electoral majority was just around the corner. It's easy to construct such a majority on paper: Racial minorities and young voters (those born after 1978) turn out at record levels, working-class whites suppress their socially conservative leanings to vote their pocketbooks, and suburban professionals and their spouses vote together as unified blue households. Such a coalition could obliterate the aging, white, male, socially conservative Republican base that has dominated American politics for most of the past three decades.This majority, however, is like the carrot tied in front of the donkey's nose--always just a few inches away.
And Robert Kuttner considers what needs to come next in addressing the credit crisis:
The crisis also destroys the basic business models that have proliferated in the past decade -- of having financial intermediaries invent ever more obscure securities that allow ever greater levels of pyramiding. It is the unwinding of this larger model that is causing the deeper collapse, and not merely a lack on confidence in certain exotic bonds backed by mortgages of depressed value. Hedge funds will be next, causing wider losses. The Paulson plan will take weeks to implement, and markets are already declaring a resounding vote of no-confidence.
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--The Editors
