Open thread for night owls: Sanders's proposal for worker ownership could build labor movement
In December, before he was a presidential candidate, Senator Sanders wrote in “An Economic Agenda for America: 12 Steps Forward,” “here are 12 initiatives that I will be fighting for which can restore America’s middle class.” One was his proposal for worker cooperatives:
Sanders is serious about this and had previously offered legislation to this effect in 2012, 2009 and previously. In June 2014 Sanders’ website described the plan for legislation he was introducing with Vermont’s Senator Patrick Leahy. He proposed to get the government involved in starting and maintaining worker cooperatives and creating a bank to fund worker ownership. From the post:
Conor Lynch explains at Salon in, “The radical Bernie Sanders idea that could reclaim America for the 99 percent,” that short of a badly-needed re-engineering of our system, worker co-ops might be a model for getting past the terrible working situation where companies squeeze everyone and unions are not succeeding in fixing things:
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2011—How Democrats win: Defend the safety net and make government work:
Historian Michael Cohen has what he calls a counterpoint to Rick Perlstein's essay on the political and social importance of Democrats defending the social safety net. But on close reading, it seems that Cohen's argument is more of an extension, or a continuation of Perlstein's essay than a counterpoint.He argues that "relying on class warfare attacks or strident defenses of entitlements might provide a short-term political boost for Democrats. It might even win them the 2012 election. But the larger challenge for liberalism is restoring faith in government and making the case to a skeptical electorate for greater public sector activism." [...]
Defending the safety net is part and parcel of good government, so what Cohen is doing is less refuting anything that Perlstein has said than amplifying it. Perlstein talks about the importance of "saying clearly what you are for and what you are against," and Cohen takes it a step further to the necessity of acting on those beliefs.
Cohen is right to highlight how important it is for Democrats to reclaim the mantle of good, necessary government. That's going to be doubly hard given how much ground was lost in the debt-ceiling deal, which may be past redemption, even if a jobs agenda could somehow be shoe-horned into it.
On today's Kagro in the Morning show, David Waldman invites you to check out Deez Nuts, gives advice on how to manage a large endowment, and even examines some very interesting polls with Greg Dworkin. Greg reminds us that unalienable rights are fragile and could evaporate with the next shuffle of the Supreme Court. Trump ideas are not new, and have been under the surface for a while. "Certain loser" lawsuit against the president strengthened by a SCOTUS decision. Professor, author Ian Reifowitz is David's guest and discusses the philosophical and practical reasons of where and when to invest your votes and political support. How low will Iran Deal opponents go?