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David Dayen: Hello and welcome to the Prospect podcast on the post coronavirus world. I’m David Dayen the executive editor of The American Prospect. This is a conversation, based on the cover package in our May-June issue. Looking at how the pandemic will change the social and economic of America in a handful of key areas and with me are the other three co authors of the package: Bob Kuttner, co-founder of the Prospect, Paul Starr co-founder of the Prospect, and Harold Meyerson, currently serving as editor-at-large. So I just thought this was a really interesting project and wanted to bring everybody together to really talk about parts of the series. Paul, you really sort of set this whole thing up. And one thing you talk about is the sort of possibility that this could trigger, you know, if we persuade our fellow citizens that this could be a moment for real progress and it can trigger an outlet for some of the anger and rage about various inequities in our society. Right now, I think we’ve seen the rage unleashed mostly on the protest of the lockdowns, more than anything, despite the capacity of the populist left. What, what do you think about how this has transpired so far.
Paul Starr: So I think there are two general possibilities and the first I described as the pandemic being an intensifying or accelerating event accelerating many of the ugliest tendencies in our society and in the world. And as of now, it’s intensifying inequalities in the suffering directly from the pandemic. It’s accelerating the concentration of industries in the largest firms. It’s destroying a lot of local businesses. There are a whole range of things in progress. Now that looks like the world we have today but in many respects worse and developing more rapidly in that direction than we thought. So that is the grim prospect, and I think the question is whether we can mobilize people on the basis of what they are experiencing; on the basis of what they can see in order to flip things around in the other direction and that is where I think the question of rage really comes in: the outrage about the injustice; about the inequality; about who’s making loss very well in this and others are suffering. So that is, I think, the central challenge and it matters that this has all happened on the watch of Donald Trump. It should be so clear to people that his leadership is directly responsible for the level of suffering in this country today, and we just have to come back to that over and over again. There were opportunities right at the beginning to have addressed this, to have dealt with in a way that other countries are doing much better than we are. So why, why are we doing so much worse. Why is America, not just doing worse but exceptionally worse. And this is, I think, really, you know, this is the central challenge that Democrats and progressives more generally face today.
Harold Meyerson: I want to address just one aspect of your question in which you said, we’ve seen the right-wing rage at the shutdown orders as the most prominent expression of rage so far. Can I just point out that the left-wing rage is from people who are sheltering in place? And so by definition, the most visible kind of rage is that of the right but I think you’ll find a pervasive rage at the inequality among people who people who can’t make the rent and things like that. It just hasn’t you know isn’t taking the form of visible mobilization.
David Dayen: Well, that I mean that brings up a question of how do you mobilize in this moment and I would say, actually. And this has resonance for your piece if you want to call it that. I don’t know if you want to call it left wing rage or not. But one of the more prominent displays of dissent in this crisis has been the over 150 Wildcat strikes that we have seen at various workplaces throughout the nation, whether it’s at Amazon or through workers with some of the gig apps Instacart or just individual workplaces. We have seen workers really responding to the lack of sanitary conditions: Lack of hazard pay, things like that, and that has been fairly prominent. I think it would be more so if we had a stronger labor press. But your article’s really interesting because it really stands in between this question of are we going to see this as a unifying moment for labor action set against the fact that the labor laws in the country all sort of work against the kind of mass movement from happening. So maybe talk about it in the, in the context of that.
Harold Meyerson: Yes, well, the last several years for labor have seen a range of significant, but insufficient victories for which I think the emblematic movement is SEIU’s fight for 15 and the Union. Where they’ve been able to mobilize in a way that it affects state and local government because state and local governments can raise a minimum wage. They’ve been hugely successful minimum wage has been raised to $15 over time in California and New York in large numbers of cities and other numbers of states and cities and haven’t raised it as high as 15 but nonetheless raised it. And a union has not produced a single union member for SEIU because that is preempted by federal law, which is totally dysfunctional. So one of the things I argue is that the kind of mobilization of which we see the green shoots of with more than 150 labor actions related to the people having to work through the coronavirus pandemic requires A: a growth of those kinds of actions, particularly once the shutdown orders are lifted, but B: It really requires a change in federal law justice. The great mobilization of workers into unions that began in the mid 1930s was also a mix of radical labor actions: talk to patients and even general strikes in several cities. And the change in federal law you needed both and you need both of them. I won’t say now, but presumably if the Democrats take the White House, the Senate and hold the House in 2021.
David Dayen: Right and the timing is interesting because in in 2020 in 2028 Democratic nomination campaign. You saw this sort of one upmanship with all these labor proposals and even Joe Biden, who did not really play that game in other aspects, did come out the labor proposal that has been praised by some segments of the left so they’re the framework for what needs to be done is there. Whether it can be done remains to be seen. I want to bring Bob in here. The series did not get a whole lot into geopolitics, but you touched on it with respect to China and how this crisis might shake out regarding the two global superpowers, if you will, at least economically within, within the world and where that hierarchy might end up depending on our policy response. So could you talk about China in this context?
Robert Kuttner: Yeah. And let me just make a brief comment to pick up where Paul left off. I think this is a teachable moment about the importance of competent government in a crisis and also in general government as a counterweight to an incompetent and corrupt and greedy private sector. If there were every teachable moment that really makes clear the necessary role of government is now and that segues into the role of government in rebuilding the economy in rebuilding American industry in rebuilding American infrastructure in shifting to a green economy. And that brings us to China because the orthodox trade view has been to treat any form of regulation has an interference with the right of capital to go wherever it wants to. But with a completely bizarre exemption carved out for China. To be as mercantilist as it wants to. As long as American corporations and American finance are cut in on the action. So American corporations get to be cut out in the action because they get to outsource jobs to very low wage workers and American finance gets to underwrite a lot of these deals. So now we’ve reached a kind of a tipping point where China through its various plans made in China 2025 and its efforts to bring Chinese sponsored infrastructure projects to the third world is on the verge of overtaking United States both to economically NGO politically and technologically and what’s really interesting here if you measure Biden against Trump I’ve written about the fact that Trump’s most competent employee appointees is probably Robert Lightheiser, the, the U.S. Trade Representative and whereas the Steve Bannons of the world have embraced to kind of jingoistic native mystic racist view of China. Lightheiser has embraced a very real as to of China. How do we treat China as a geo economic adversary? What kind of policies do we pursue so that the United States gets back into the game? Technologically in terms of made in America infrastructure and industry otherwise China just keeps eating our lunch because China has a planned economy with a lot of subsidy and a lot of protectionism and the punch line here is that if Biden doesn’t define a kind of benign version of economic nationalism as Franklin Roosevelt did, Trump wins on this issue by defining a more ugly nativist jingoist form of nationalism with China has the scapegoat in a way that doesn’t even take seriously the need of competing with China on a broad range of technology, for instance. So, the Washington Post had a piece on this the other day about how China could end up as one of the defining issues of the election, and as I’ve recently written, there’s kind of trench warfare within the Biden camp between the traditional corporate globalists and then the people who believe more in a kind of industrial policy and infrastructure policy. The use of the moment for green transition. So this is very, very consequential on a number of dimensions.
David Dayen: I want to push on that just a little bit. You know, China had its first reduction in GDP in in its recorded memory in the first quarter. There’s also indications that the Belden Road initiative, this infrastructure initiative and at developing countries, is collapsing and all these countries are seeking debt relief from China on these projects. So there’s an extent to which China has its own problems that they may not be able to easily emerge from and one of them sort of relates to the problem we’re seeing right here. The lifting of their lockdown has not occasioned a rise in consumer spending. Consumers are still extremely wary until this pandemic is done from going out and doing the kind of normal day to day activities that they were going to do. We’re seeing that here in the United States as certain states to side to reopen their economies. What they find is that nobody wants to come in through the door. There was a story about a bar in the Atlanta area in Georgia, which reopened over the weekend, that had two customers all weekend, so I’m curious about how that’s going to create much more lingering economic effects, both for us and the world until we get some treatment or vaccination. As Paul talked about in this piece that’s really the only way this this this really end. And so it seems to me like, there needs to be a bigger assessment. Of the whole that we’re going to be. And because a lot of it is based on a sort of unipolar like we’re going to go up and then we’re going to come back down as this subsides a U-shaped recovery or B or whatever. It seems like this is going to be much more of a Nike swoosh where the recovery is going to be very long very slow and very uncertain.
Robert Kuttner: I think David, we would all say in different ways that we’ve done in these articles that this is all the more reason why you need a World War Two scale government mobilization to create jobs, to use public investment that we need to be having anyway. To create macroeconomic lift and there is no for us, other than the government that can possibly do that. The private sector is not capable of engineering this recovery by itself private purchasing power private jobs are not going to come back. And China as a state directed economy may have a slight leg up on the United States or it may prove that this is a whole that it has trouble climbing out of China is also more of an export. Driven economies in the U.S., which is both a plus and a minus I mean it means, on the one hand, it doesn’t have to rely so much on domestic demand. But on the other hand, if the rest of the world is in a hole there code China’s export markets, but I think the one thing that’s incontrovertible is that the government has to play a much bigger role across the board in the recovery, if there’s going to be recovery at all.
Paul Starr: So I think one big question is whether there will be a second wave of agreements about government action when we get a second wave of the pandemic, we will certainly, certainly going to kind of get that. That’s been typical in earlier pandemics and right now it’s hard to see why these areas that have had less impact so far are going to be immune from it. It looks much more likely that we just haven’t seen the full spread of this into all regions of the country.
David Dayen: Yeah, and then, and then
Paul Starr: I think that are hit harder.
David Dayen: Yeah, I mean I think it’s not even a second wave. It’s the second first wave. I mean if you if you separate out New York and the New York Tri- State Area which has actually because the lockdown is stronger. Because the fear is greater, it has suppressed the number of new cases and number new deaths. If you separate that out from the rest of the country, the rest of the country is still on an upward swing, despite a lot of these places deciding to relax the social distancing measures. Because we have such a large country, we’ve aggregated. Look at these charts around where we’re at on the curve in such a way to make them sort of indecipherable and the drop is really coming from New York. And now the rest of the country is responding to that by reopening. It’s really dangerous.
Harold Meyerson: Yeah. David, can I just elaborate for a minute on what Bob was saying about the need for us, you know, massive federal spending? I just want to make two points. The first is that besides you know what we think of as a neo WPA and infrastructure PW, a building, you know. The green using this to build a green new deal, given that the workforce and the needs of the country have changed radically since the 1930s. I think a lot of the federal investment also has to go into caring occupy occupations into federally paid for childcare, elder care, and public health, that was my first point, my second is, again, when we talk about massive federal investment, you know, we cannot let that be offset by massive governmental budget cuts at the state and local level, which is exactly what happened with the so called recovery after 2008 where you know what we invested at the federal level came to about two and a half percent of GDP. But when you subtract it all the budget cuts from states and localities, it was less than 1 percent of GDP that made a hell of a lot of different friends and that made for a largely ineffectual and very prolonged and Nike swoosh recovery and we know that, you know, we know that. So this is a key, a key issue with which Congress will have to be grappling shortly.
Robert Kuttner: Yes, may I ask a question? So in this package of articles. We’ve got three pieces. Paul really talking about the big picture socially. And Harold talking about what this pretense for labor, you talking about what this portends for regulation of corporations, from finance, and all the abuses that crept into the bailout, me writing about this as a possible moment for a pivot to massive public investment, you guys are a little more pessimistic than I am. I’m sort of the polyadic in the group your three pieces say that the odds are that this is not going to break right but if we get lucky if we if we do interest. Right? It could lead to the kind of transformative change that we need. What do you think would have to happen politically for this to break right and for this to be a moment for the resurrection of labor, for the creation of a decent public health system, and for the deregulation of financial antitrust in that whole agenda?
David Dayen: Who wants to answer that first?
Harold Meyerson: And well, just to begin, quite unknown is Democratic victories in November, that that’s a given. That at the White House. The Senate and the House that that’s your baseline. Otherwise, we are in even worse trouble than we can possibly imagine.
David Dayen: Yeah, absolutely. It’s the baseline, but in many ways it’s not enough. Right. I mean, what I talk about is the fact that you’re going to see, given the disproportionate initial response in this pandemic response bill, small businesses dry up by the millions while you’re going to see big businesses protected by a Federal Reserve guarantee of entire credit markets, and that has already been lifting these companies without even having to get to the stage of the bailout, so you’re going to see just de facto concentration, the number of sectors. So yes, a Democratic victory is needed, but what you’re going to need beyond that is the political will to move that the victors into a direction, where they will use the existing tools that are available to fight the corporate concentration and over financialization that we’ve seen for the last 40 years, and I guess one reason why I’m pessimistic is we’ve seen it for the last 40 years. Now we obviously didn’t have a forcing event, a hinge point event, the way that the coronavirus pandemic has created. But there’s a lot of sort of centrifugal force or inertia, or whatever you want to call it. There’s a lot of energy towards bringing back a sort of status quo neoliberal policy framework that doesn’t view antitrust enforcement, doesn’t view serious steps to challenge short termism financialization Wall Street dominance, doesn’t see those as big, major priorities and unless they are, I don’t think you’re going to get the same kind of equity that you’re going to need throughout the population. I don’t think you’re going to get. I think is going be very hard to get a kind of massive public investment without restricting the power of these outside actors. And so I think that starts with at the at the ground level. It starts with a mass movement that says the way that we’ve been doing business doesn’t work anymore. And right now I have not seen that level of mobilization on the left. However, it is large, it is usually very organic, and I have another piece in this issue about the Biden campaign. And whether we can expect the progressive presidency if he should win. And one of the things I talk about is the towns and clubs. In the 1930s, so Francis Townsend was this retired physician who wrote a letter to the editor to the Long Beach press telegram in 1933 saying we should have old agents. And from one newspaper editorial in one section of the country within two years there were thousands of towns and clubs, calling for this all over the nation. And a petition to agree this is before the Internet of 20 million signatures to President Roosevelt saying we need old age, insurance and this created a lot of the energy that led to the Social Security Act of 1935 so to the extent that that might happen organically, there is a potential to really use that mobilization to move people to move politicians from where they were traditionally and that could be true of Biden. That could be true of the democratic house, but it’s going to take a sustained effort.
Paul Starr: So I think one reason for the very sober if not pessimistic tone of these articles is that there were high expectations in 2008-2009 for the revival of the labor movement and for many other changes didn’t It didn’t get real. And so I think, I think there’s some caution now a about repeating, repeating that mistake.
David Dayen: Absolutely true.
Paul Starr: You know, we know what the odds are. We know where the power has become concentrated. Now that doesn’t mean there will at some point be a turning point where this kind of rage explodes. And I do think this could be that kind of moment. It’s impossible in advance to anticipate when that kind of thing happens.
David Dayen: Paul, you talk about in your piece, how the pandemics themselves often create these kind of historical pinch points; that this has been a moment throughout the centuries, where there’s been a spurt of change.
Paul Starr: Yes and the great example of where a pandemic led to greater equality is the Bubonic Plague in the 14th century which killed a third of the population in Europe and shifted the power in labor relations basically to workers and so you had the end. And that’s, that’s a great example. But I’m afraid. That very happy results.
Harold Meyerson: The current pandemic is happening in a domestic political climate where there already have been significant shifts to the left over the last couple years is evidenced in polling about the favorability rating of unions and rising support in the Democratic primaries for Medicare for all. None of that is decisive in itself, but I think had the pandemic not happened, we still would be you know, talking about things like the political shifts within the Democratic Party and such. Those are distinct from the shifts in power relationships. But if power relationships are to shift it will be because of changes like that and I’m of the belief that the pandemic will work on the side of those policy shifts. Whether that’s sufficient, I don’t know.
David Dayen: But at the same time, this pandemic comes to us at the height of one of the most partisan polarized at times in in in that I can think of in the last hundred years. And who does this pandemic move, who, who does this shit in the electorate? You know, what we’re seeing is the sort of same cultural war. I mean masks are now a culture war object that there are conservative areas that are rebelling against the wearing of masks in grocery stores and pharmacies. The real question is, what does this change about politics or does it does it you know channel into the exact same polarized tribalist kind of debates that we’ve been having for decades now?
Harold Meyerson: Well, here I’m inclined to think that yes, we’re still polarized but that doesn’t mean we’re always polarized at a 49 percent to 49 percent division.
The fact that the states that have long been thought of as Republican bastions like Arizona are in play this November suggest that demographic shifts and other shifts are out there. The fact that in political polling right now, senior citizens traditionally a base of the Republican Party, are now favoring Biden over Trump largely because of Trump’s incompetence in handling a crisis which is more severe for seniors, should they contract the disease than it is for anyone else does show I think a shift in that kind of sentiment as well. And there’s some early indications that from one poll, at least that I’ve seen, that support for Medicare For All at a time when people are losing their job-related health insurance is rising as well. So let’s see. I don’t know where all this will come out, but I think you’re right that there has been increased far right mobilization, which can take a very visible form. But I think they’re also changing some changes that are coming out in polling that would suggest that the polarization is still there but you know they’re shifting more towards the left. We’ll see.
Paul Starr: Well, I agree, Harold. I think there is, there is some movement amongst seniors toward the Democrats. It’s hard to say whether that’s because Biden is more acceptable as a candidate to seniors, or whether it’s the pandemic rationally. I think seniors should be very worried about the policies that Republicans are promoting. The premature reopening is going to increase spread of the coronavirus and that puts them at risk. I just wish that the rational responses governed our politics.
David Dayen: Bob, I want to ask you this. So, you know, one thing we’re probably going to see snapback I don’t know when it’s going to happen, probably on January 21 2021 if a Democrat takes the oath of office, but you’re going to see the old deficit hawk argument, come back and you’re going to see because of the extraordinary amounts of support that have already been released that we can do no more precise and certainly around state local governments who are already going to be in the Hall. Precisely at the moment when we’re going to need that support because all we have done is allow people to survive in a basic level. We have done nothing in terms of stimulating the economy. We built the Hoover Dam. We built the Golden Gate Bridge during the Depression. It seems like that sort of motivation is not necessarily expressed to a great degree within the Democratic Party, though, it needs to be. And, it’s certainly expressed here at the Prospect. What are your hopes for beating back that argument when it inevitably comes back?
Robert Kuttner: Yeah, I’m actually a little bit of a polyadic on that front as well and I think because the inflation environment has been so incredibly low and because interest rates are today so incredibly long despite these large deficits and expanding debts. You’ve had fairly mainstream people move in the direction of
less deficit phobia and less obsession for reducing the debt. And it’s certainly the case that there are very few people, particularly among Democratic oriented economists, who would say that as soon as the worst of this is over. We need to shift to a debt pay down mode, which was the catastrophic mistake that Obama’s people made when they embraced Bowles Simpson and the ideology deficit reduction in early 2010. I mean, Larry Summers has sort of disowned that and it’s really interesting. I mean, I do think that certainly if Biden is elected and takes the House and the Senate, you’re going to have a very substantial number of mainstream Democratic economists saying no, we need a big recovery first and history has disproven the idea that there’s crowding out that you’re going to get a spike in interest rates if you if you don’t pay down debt. Interestingly and in the little Symposium, we did on the Prospect website somebody who’s a very left wing economist, Cherry Epstein from UMass Amherst, was the one who pointed out that one of the reasons why the inflation environment has been so well behaved is because of the crushing of labor power that if you ever got enough labor power so that you’d actually get wage increases, you might get the beginning of some kind of a wage price spiral. Again, we’re so far away from that would be nice to have to worry about that. I think the other new element that was not part of the traditional catechism about deficits and debts and trade offs and crowding out is the fact that in in the 2008 collapse, they discovered the power of the Fed balance sheet and you’ve written about this, David. I mean, in that collapse, the Fed balance sheet went to, I don’t know, four or 5 trillion. Now it’s going to go to 9 trillion and the Fed seems to be able to take stuff onto its own balance sheet. A lot of absolute junk and feel that it can just hold it and not sell it into a weak market anytime soon. Maybe hold it indefinitely. I did a long interview which we ran with Sarah Raskin, former very progressive member of the Fed, who basically felt that the Fed can hold on to this as long as it needs to, and that the real challenge is for the Fed to start using its power to create liquidity. To create liquidity for social purposes and not just for bailouts. I mean, if the Fed can bail out junk bond purveyors, you know, the Fed could take a trillion or $2 and buy up all the student debt. So the question is going to be not just should we be obsessive about the need to move to austerity. I don’t think that’s going to have a lot of support, but what else can we do with the power to create liquidity that would have social benefits.
David Dayen: Yeah, that’s a great point on the Fed and I write about this in my story about how they have bailed out half the economy without firing a shot. They did basically a larger version of what Mary and Monte at the European Central Bank did when he said we will do whatever it takes. They have announced that they will support all of these credit markets, whether it’s junk bonds or just regular corporate debt or asset backed securities, and this has turned on these dormant markets to such a degree that now companies like Boeing are declining direct support from the Fed because they know they can get it indirectly, and then avoid any conditions that the Fed might place on it. They got a $25 billion bond issue almost entirely because the Fed is propping up that bond market. So you’re absolutely right to pinpoint that and what needs to be asked, which is if the Fed is basically nursing to help the investor class. What about the people who don’t have stocks? So, yeah, that’s a great point. I wanted to bring in something that is touched on sort of at the margins of a lot of the things that we’ve been talking about, and then a lot of things in the pieces. But maybe we should address it more directly. And that’s the question of race and how this crisis will exacerbate racial inequalities that have been endemic to America since the founding and even before the founding and what needs to be done in terms of race conscious policies after the pandemic. Anyone have anything on that?
Paul Starr: Well, it’s because COVID is most devastating to people with other conditions, particularly things like diabetes that it has so much more severe consequences for African Americans. So this is where the whole issue of racial disparities in health, which has been a long standing subject of research, in public health, medical sociology and so forth. This is where all of this comes to a hand becomes a major factor in in the consequences of the of the pandemic. One of the points I was just reading this morning about why the spread of coronavirus has not had as severe consequences in Sweden as it would have in the United States if we just let the natural course take itself towards herd immunity is that we have so much higher a rate of all of these chronic conditions: conditions that make COVID a matter of life and death. And so yeah, so race is directly a part of this, you know, on both the epidemiological side and the economic side as well.
Robert Kuttner: Well, it’s all the intersection of race and class in that, you know, in addition to diabetes and asthma and all the conditions that you’re more likely to have if you live in a polluted neighborhood. The occupations that African Americans are concentrated in are the occupations, where people are putting themselves at greater risk and you’re less likely to have health insurance. So it’s a whole panoply of things. That just shines a beam on the grotesque inequality in this society and you hope as we come out the other side of this where the complete failure of the health system becomes the predicate for fundamental reform that the need for greater equity in the distribution of health insurance and other health resources comes to the fore.
David Dayen: Right. I think the labor point is a great one. And look, the organization that the Trump administration sort of has its target on in terms of a large employer that would be the U.S. Postal Service which traditionally has been seen as a ladder for African Americans and other people of color to raise into the middle class?
Paul Starr: Yeah, and public employment generally. The Republican party is trying to obviously undermine public employment through privatization, unionization and so forth.
David Dayen: Disproportionality and state local people have a bigger impact on African Americans as well.
Harold Meyerson: And in general, because you know McConnell’s opposition to getting money to state and federal governments, I think, is also directed at weakening major public sector unions before the November election because they’re the ones that play the most active role in mobilizing potential Democratic votes.
Robert Kuttner: Now that the flip side of this putting on my optimist hat is that Biden, in order to get elected and take the House and Senate with him, is really going to have to energize the African American vote and not just by putting a an African American running made on the ticket, but by making some commitments that he’s going to need to deliver on. So again, if you want to focus on the part of the glass that’s half full, the political logic of the situation is going to require by demonstration to be progressive on race.
David Dayen: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, we’ll start to wrap this up. But was there anything in someone else’s coverage of this this that’s in this issue that you read that you found surprising or maybe disagree with, or one of the just sort of discuss in this open forum?
Robert Kuttner: Well, I wanted to push Harold harder on where, Harold, you see that attraction coming. If you can be a little optimistic. Where are the breakout possibilities if we can imagine a friendly Biden administration and some changes in labor law. Where could you see unions making real gains. Of the kind that the SEIU campaign for 15 and a union didn’t make that could really lead to either increase membership in traditional unions or increase membership in non-traditional labor organizations.
Harold Meyerson: Well the first is the unfinished business of 2009. They need to change Union election procedures to get the card check. That’s sort of the low hanging fruit. Beyond that, there’s a host of things they could do in terms of this would be conceptually difficult but in terms of going to sectoral bargaining for instance. Or picking up Nelson Lichtenstein’s proposal to create worker health and safety committees in any workplace that has more than 25 people or any enterprise that has been 25 employees. A reworking of the National Labor Relations Act through both NRLA regulations and law would bring eligibility to union membership for part time workers, for temp workers, for gig workers, for independent contractors who are not really independent contractors but being mislabeled. There’s a host of actions that either legislatively or more honestly through regulations at the National Labor Relations Board, but the legislature is better because the NLRA has enacted rules and then repealed rules when another party comes to power so better to go the legislative route if you can. There have always been recalcitrant Democrats in the Senate from the South, who opposed what most of the Democrats favored. There are fewer Democrats from the South. That may be a factor and getting some of this legislation passed, we shall see.
Paul Starr: The point that I found most persuasive, and what you said in your piece, was that some of this could be done at the state level. Yes, but those safety councils.
Harold Meyerson: Exactly, yes.
Paul Starr: Because I guess I’m not too optimistic about the Senate, even if Democrats retake the Senate, the margin is likely to be small enough, and they’re going to be centrist Democrats joe Manchin and others who I wouldn’t count on for this legislation. That’s just more margin that that’s going to be tough.
David Dayen: I agree with Paul.
Harold Meyerson: Oh, let me unpack the Senate issue. For me, to get anything serious through, I think the Democrats will have to scrap the filibuster, which would reduce the requirement to 51 votes. That said, you’re absolutely right, Paul, that you can’t count on Joe Manchin or should he survive miraculously his reelection campaign, Doug Jones, or some other centrist Democrats to be there. And so, as you know, what happened in 2009 with the Obama stimulus, you have to negotiate from, you know, the point of whatever you however you get to may require scrapping some of what I’m talking about. Some stuff can be done in the state. The problem is that you specify the specific regulation of unions as such as preempted by federal law. The Lichtenstein proposal for a worker account and around that and we may just have to do the steps. So, we shall see.
David Dayen: I think one thing that I would add to that is the potential for unionization in the professional sector and, you know, we ran this great piece about digital media unions, which Aaron Friedman wrote for us. It was a May day piece and talked about how these professional journalists now are envisioning themselves more as workers and showing sort of a path for that sort of unionization drive in
white collar organizations to spread. And the real untapped resource here is Silicon Valley. So we saw Kickstarter actually organize the first probably tech sector union of this type. You can envision these companies which have sort of a social orientation on the liberal side. They reside in liberal areas. They have had sort of class all their class solidarity, but they have a sentiment towards a liberal thinking you could see and there is some reputational risk for these companies, although not all of them really try to suppress this. Among their workers, you could see that have a sort of snowball effect and I think that is the sort of great place where unionization is poised to grow.
Harold Meyerson: That’s how, although I think I heard the barking dogs and Silicon Valley management objecting to that.
Robert Kuttner: They were the running dogs.
Harold Meyerson: Running dogs, yes.
David Dayen: Alright, anything else, just thoughts that people might have had about other people’s articles that they want to address?
Paul Starr: Well, I’m very glad that Bob turned this around to a more optimistic side. Yeah, but there is a possibility here that we might consider, and that is, you know, we’re kind of imagining post pandemic America two years from now. It might be a lot longer. I mean, we may be in the beginning of a very difficult long crisis and that’s where I think the analogy for the 1930s may become relevant. If this is not turned around very quickly, we’re going to see, I think round after round of different measures being adopted of different you know increase. And I think that could open up more radical possibilities. I’m worried. Also, because if Trump is in power, it could open up more radical things on the right. So, you know, this is going to be one of those elections with really historic consequences.
David Dayen: I think that’s right, Paul and the timing of this is such that it’s different than the depression. So stock market crashes in October of 1929 there’s an entire term where Hoover is an office with flailing attempts at trying to put a lid on this and we don’t see like radical labor change for six years. From that stock market crash. You know, it wasn’t until ‘35. Here we are in an election year, when this hits. And while you know that that makes things much more I think uncertain. In the event of the re-election of Trump, you might have even more time where little is done to ameliorate certain conditions around inequality and really basic, basic health measures. If Biden gets elected, then there’s a short space there of sort of nothing being done. And although our politics is very accelerated now relative probably to the 1930s might not be enough time to set in those conditions. So, and what Biden does in an immediate response will become ever more important.
Robert Kuttner: He’s got to do it by 2022.
David Dayen: By the midterms, yeah.
Robert Kuttner: Clinton and Obama both got wiped out in the first midterm and that was the end of that. So the time is very short.
David Dayen: Well, I think we can wrap this up, then. Thank you to Paul Starr, Bob Kuttner, Harold Myerson for joining us. And, you know, stay safe.
Harold Meyerson: You too. Thank you to David.
Robert Kuttner: Cheers everybody
Harold Meyerson: Bye.
