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Remember the Folks Who Brought You the 8-Hour Day?

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By Jim Miller

Last week, May Day came and went and, while there was a small march downtown, most people barely noticed. Indeed most Americans don’t know much about May Day and if they do, they associate it with the state sponsored holiday in the former Soviet Union.

The truth of the matter is, however, that May Day has deep American roots. It started in 1866 as part of the movement pushing for the 8-hour day.

In the course of this effort, the nationwide American labor movement was born. Workers joined together in the service of the principle that, in the emerging industrial age, they should have a say in their economic lives and a voice in our politics—neither of which would come without a struggle.   [Read more…]

Raise Up San Diego – Do the Right Thing About the Minimum Wage

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By Jim Miller

These are still tough times for most working people in the United States. We are in the midst of a new Gilded Age of historic economic inequality. The rich are carving out a bigger slice of the pie at the expense of nearly everyone else in America. As I noted in my column last week, corporate profits are at their highest level in 85 years and employee compensation is at the lowest level it has been in 65 years.

And this is happening despite the fact that the average American worker is more educated and more productive than ever before. The result of all this is a declining middle class, economic instability, and the hijacking of our democracy by moneyed interests.

Here in San Diego, we have one of the highest costs of living in the United States, and the picture for workers at the bottom end of the economic spectrum is grim. More than 300,000 households in our city have incomes too low to meet basic expenses, and our tourism industry has the largest number of employees with incomes below the Self-Sufficiency Standard with more than half of those workers failing to make ends meet.
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Who Owns America? Not You

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“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” –Louis Brandeis

By Jim Miller

In the wake of the McCutcheon decision, there was a brief flurry of outrage about the growing power of moneyed interests in our politics, but it predictably ebbed. One might reasonably argue that this is because the American public has become immune to such bad news.

Indeed, a cursory survey of the media over the last couple of weeks alone is enough to give any concerned citizen a depressing snapshot of where we are now with regard to wealth versus commonwealth.

The New York Times reports that “Corporate Profits Grow and Wages Slide” noting that, “Corporate profits are at their highest level in at least 85 years. Employee compensation is at the lowest level in 65 years.”   [Read more…]

“Taxifornia” Dreaming: Who Really Pays in California?

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By Jim Miller

Tomorrow is tax day, and we are likely to hear the usual histrionics from the pity the millionaire crowd about how the draconian taxes on the affluent and businesses in “Taxifornia” are killing growth and jobs and driving folks out of the state. There is only one problem with this—it’s not true. Indeed, far from the socialist hamlet that the anti-tax zealots like to portray us as, California’s tax system is still more regressive than progressive.

This is documented in the California Budget Project’s (CBP) Annual report “Who Pays Taxes in California?” that shows that, “Contrary to the oft-repeated claim that high-income Californians pay an unfair amount of taxes, it is actually California’s low-income households who pay the largest share of their incomes in state and local taxes.”

Consequently, the CBP argues that “Given widening income inequality over the last generation, and the ongoing economic challenges facing Californians in the aftermath of the Great Recession, policymakers could take specific steps to reduce the regressive nature of California’s system of state and local taxes and to promote economic security for low-income families.”
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Supreme Insanity: How the High Court is Killing Your Democracy

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By Jim Miller

Last week was a very bad week for American democracy. With the McCutcheon v. FEC decision, the Supreme Court of the United States dealt a sweeping blow to existing campaign finance laws that seek to limit the influx of money in American politics.

In the wake of the Citizens United case that opened the door for big spending by Super PACS and dark money, this ruling takes another step towards plutocracy by striking down overall limits on campaign contributions. By doing so McCutcheon rudely thrusts us further into a new Gilded Age where our economy and our politics are thoroughly dominated by a small minority of the opulent.

Senator Bernie Sanders put it best when he observed that, “The Supreme Court is paving the way toward an oligarchic form of society in which a handful of billionaires like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson will control our political process.” And that’s why it’s increasingly hard to get anything good for everyday people done in Washington D.C., even when a healthy majority of Americans approve of a given policy.   [Read more…]

Zen and the Art of Baseball

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It’s spring and opening week is here and that makes me very happy. Baseball helps me live. It’s perhaps the best American manifestation of the kind of daily ritual that enables us to achieve a small portion of the balance and harmony we need to provide ballast against the chaos of the world. Whether it’s playing the game or simply contemplating it, baseball provides one with precisely the kind of focused yet purposeless activity that can take you out to the ballgame and into the heart of the moment.   [Read more…]

Notes from the Class War: Killing “The Year of the Populist” in the Crib?

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By Jim Miller

Recently, in “Neoliberalism and Its Discontents: What’s Left Beyond More Impoverished Choices?”, I continued my analysis of the national debate that followed the publication of Adolph Reed’s sharp criticism of what qualifies as the “left” in the contemporary American political landscape.

After that column was posted, Reed wrote yet another piece in American Prospect, this time responding to Harold Meyerson’s dismissal of his call for a left less tethered to a Democratic Party increasingly colonized by Wall Street and other corporate interests.

In it Reed makes a key point about both the current political landscape and the recent history that has produced it   [Read more…]

Rebel Green and Bacchanalia: Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

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By Jim Miller

Today lots of people will try to skip out of work early to grab a pint of Guinness at a bar or perhaps find something green to wear whether they are Irish or not. St. Patrick’s Day, for most of us, is just a fun day to party, watch a parade, or listen to some Irish music. For better or worse, even if we aren’t getting drunk, we don’t think that much about it. Nonetheless, there are still some interesting bits of history behind the holiday.

The actual origins of the “Wearing of the Green” are political, dating back to 1798 when Irish soldiers wore green uniforms on March 17th to signal solidarity with the Society of United Irishmen whose aim it was to end British rule in Ireland. That’s when the song and the color green became synonymous with both rebellion and St. Patrick’s Day.

Before that in the United States, the first official St. Patrick’s Day came to be when George Washington proclaimed the holiday as a way to thank Irish soldiers fighting for the cause of American Independence in 1780. But there were celebrations before that in the United States dating back to as early as 1756 when the first St. Patty’s bash was held at the Crown and Thistle tavern in New York City.   [Read more…]

Neoliberalism and Its Discontents: What’s Left Beyond More Impoverished Choices?

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By Jim Miller

The debate rages on. Last week after I spent the final part of my column addressing Adolph Reed’s provocative Harper’s piece on the dismaying state of American politics, “Nothing Left: The Long, Slow Surrender of American Liberals, the argument just kept going across the national progressive media landscape.

In a sharp rebuttal to Reed in The Nation, Michelle Goldberg attacked what she characterized as “Electoral Nihilism” by essentially dismissing what she called his “left wing disappointment” and reasserting the very strategy that Reed so adeptly critiqued in his article:

So yes, for liberals, there is only one option in an election year, and that is to elect, at whatever cost, whichever Democrat is running. The rest of the time, those who find the current choices intolerable should join in the long, slow groundwork that would allow for better ones.

Goldberg points out some current signs of hope for progressives nationwide, particularly a wave of progressive new mayors in places like New York and concludes that this makes it a “bizarre moment” for Reed to put forth his argument.   [Read more…]

What’s Left: Surrender or Resurgence?

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By Jim Miller

Just when you thought the Obama administration’s education policy couldn’t get any worse, it did.

Last week Obama nominated founder and CEO of New Schools, Ted Mitchell, to the second highest post at the Department of Education. Mitchell and his organization have been at the forefront of the education privatization movement and this confirms the bad news that rather than rethinking some of its unsuccessful, wrong-headed education policies, the administration has doubled down and is now completely in the tank with the corporate education reformers.

As Capitol and Main reported, this signals continued “corporate influence at the Department of Education”:

“He represents the quintessence of the privatization movement,” Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H.W. Bush, tells Capital & Main. “This is a signal the Obama administration is committed to moving forward aggressively with transferring public funds to private hands.”

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Ghosts of City Heights Past: Chaos, Wonder, and Love

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By Jim Miller

In my first novel, Drift, there is a passage where the main character, Joe, is driving through City Heights pondering the poetry of the streets.

He notes the “funky majesty” of a store front church sandwiched between a pharmacy and a liquor store and revels in the cacophony of signs in Vietnamese, Spanish, English, and more while he loses himself in the street life passing by as “everything bled together seamlessly in the twilight and became part of the mystic fabric of impending night.”

Joe’s musings mix with music on the radio as he contemplates the “blue feeling” of minimarts to jazz and rolls by massage parlors, 99-cent stores, and the Tower Bar. When I read this passage back in 2007, I had the pleasure of being accompanied by Gilbert Castellanos on trumpet and his melancholy solo lent the perfect air of blues dignity to the piece. It was, of course, a love song to my old neighborhood and the present hard-edged marvel that is City Heights.   [Read more…]

The “Alvarez Effect” and the Future of San Diego

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By Jim Miller

Nobody thought this was going to be easy.

Back in July, at the height of the Filner debacle, I predicted a dire outcome, noting that “in a recall or special election in an off year, the electorate is guaranteed to be more conservative and definitely not favorable” for a progressive replacing Bob Filner because, “Faulconer would have a huge fundraising advantage garnering support from all the usual suspects downtown and benefit from an energized base geared up to hand it to the liberals, unions, minorities, and other foul ‘special interest groups’ that they’ll blame for bringing us the evil that was Bob Filner. With the Democrats dispirited, humiliated and divided, it might not even be much of a fight.”

As it turned out, David Alvarez stepped up and offered progressives hope, and the labor movement surprised everyone by actually being able to raise more money than the Faulconer forces.   [Read more…]

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