Labor Day – Many Things Considered

Airport Security, Andrus, Boise, Conservation, Egan, Idaho Politics, Labor Day, McClure, Refugees, Simpson, The West

A Celebration of Politics Working…

Posted on August 5, 2015by christian

It would be easy – even inevitable – given the dysfunctional state of American politics to just say the heck with it – nothing works any longer and nothing much gets done. I’ve been in that funk and may well slip back soon enough, but today I take heart that politics can still work.

The United States Senate this week completed action on a piece of legislation to protect more than a quarter million acres of some of the most spectacular landscape on the North American continent as Wilderness – with a capital W. The action, eventually coming as the result of a unanimous consent request in the Senate, follows similar approval in the House of Representatives. President Obama’s signature will come next.

The Politics of Effort…

The legislation is largely the result of determined, persistent effort by Idaho Republican Congressman Mike Simpson, a legislator of the old school who actually serves in Congress in order to get things accomplished and not merely to build his resume and court the fringe elements of his own party. Simpson is not the type of lawmaker that many in his party might wish him to be – one of those nameless, faceless members who vote NO, do as little as possible, get re-elected every two years and blame Washington’s shortcomings on “bureaucrats” and “Democrats.”

For the better part of fifteen years Simpson has, often single-handedly, championed greater environmental protections for the high peaks, lush meadows and gin-clear lakes of the Boulder-White Clouds area in his sprawling Congressional district in eastern Idaho. Rather than churn headlines denouncing the environmental movement, Simpson invited them to the table along with ranchers, county commissioners and a host of other interests to find a way to resolve controversies in the Idaho back country that date back decades. None of the parties trusted the others, but Simpson made them reason together with the quiet hard work that is the essence of real politics.

Blessed with a fine staff and the instincts of a patient dealmaker, Simpson worked the problem, understood the perspectives of the various interests and pushed, cajoled, humored, debated, smiled, and worked and waited and never gave up. At any number of points along the way a lesser legislator might well have lost patience, gotten discouraged or just said the hell with it, but Simpson never did, even when blindsided by members of his own party who once unceremoniously knifed his legislation after publicly indicating their support.

I wasn’t alone in concluding that the political process in Washington and the “Hell No Caucus” in Mike Simpson’s own party would never permit passage of another wilderness bill in Idaho. Over time the discouraged and disgruntled placed what little of their faith remained with President Obama. Obama, who has only gotten grief from Idaho Republicans the last seven years and owes the state nothing except maybe a thank you to a handful of Democrats who give him a 2008 caucus victory over Hillary Clinton, hinted that he would use “executive action” to declare the Boulder-White Clouds a National Monument. That potential provided the grease needed to lubricate Simpson’s legislative handiwork and the stalemate was broken.

There is an old maxim that dictates that you can keep your opponents off balance and disadvantaged in politics by displaying just enough unpredictability – even recklessness – that they think you just might be crazy enough to do what they most fear. Idaho Republicans, who had mostly not lifted a finger to help Mike Simpson over the years, came to believe that Obama just might be crazy enough to stick his proclamation pen in their faces and create a monument twice the size of the wilderness Simpson’s proposed.

Make no mistake, whatever they might say now, the determined congressman would not have received the support he ultimately did from other Idaho Republicans had they not feared – really feared – action by the president that would have created an Idaho national monument. It also didn’t hurt that Simpson and conservation-minded Idahoans in both political parties demonstrated broad public support for action on the Boulder-White Clouds.

Victory has a thousand fathers…and mothers…

While it is tempting to gloat about the late comers to the grand cause of environmental protection finally having to cave, it is more important to remember that political victory always has a thousand fathers and mothers. This is a moment to celebrate. Mike Simpson deserves – really deserves – to savor what will be a big part of his political legacy. Idaho conservationists, particularly the Idaho Conservation League and its leadership, deserve to celebrate the role that Idaho’s oldest conservation organization played in creating what some of us thought we would never see again – a wilderness bill in Idaho.

Cece Andrus in the shadow of the White Clouds – Idaho PTV photo

There must be praise for visionaries who came before, particularly including former Governor Cecil D. Andrus who campaigned against an open pit mine in the area in 1970 and later attempted to do what has now been done. The late Idaho Senators Frank Church and Jim McClure deserve a big acknowledgement. Both knew the value of protecting the area and never flagged in their determination to see it accomplished. Countless other Idaho hikers, hunters, fishermen and outdoor recreationists played their indispensable roles as well.

Best of all, unborn generations of Americans will now have a chance to experience one the most remarkable, pristine, and beautiful areas in the entire country, if not the world. American wilderness is landscape and habitat and majesty and solitude, but it is also a state of mind. Knowing we have conserved something so special and so valuable not just for ourselves, but also for the future is truly a priceless gift.

On this one occasion and after decades of work, the good that politics can do reigns supreme. A piece of heaven right here on earth has been saved and we are all the richer for it.

2014 Election, American Presidents, Baucus, Borah, Britain, Churchill, Congress, Coolidge, Foreign Policy, Iran, John Kennedy, Labor Day, McClure, Nixon, Obama, Reagan, Thatcher, U.S. Senate

Just Say No…

Posted on April 6, 2015by christian

By all accounts Barack Obama has his work cut out for him convincing Congressional Republicans – and some Democrats – that his proposed nuclear weapons control agreement with Iran is better than having no deal at all.

Republican skepticism about an Obama initiative certainly isn’t surprising, since the president has seen something approaching universal disdain for virtually anything he has proposed since 2009. That Republicans are inclined to oppose a deal with Iran shouldn’t be much of a surprise either. In the post-World War II era, conservative Republicans in Congress have rarely embraced any major deal- particularly including nuclear agreements – which any president has negotiated with a foreign government.

Republicans Have Long Said “No” to Foreign Deals…

Before they were the party of NO on all things Obama, the GOP was the party of NO on international agreements – everything from the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I to the Panama Canal Treaties during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Even when Ronald Reagan attempted a truly unprecedented deal in 1986 with Mikhail Gorbachev to actually eliminate vast numbers of nuclear weapons – the famous Reykjavik Summit – most conservative Republicans gave the idea thumbs down and were happy when it fell apart.

And, near the end of his presidency when Reagan pushed for a treaty limiting intermediate nuclear weapons, conservatives like North Carolina’s Jesse Helms, Wyoming’s Malcolm Wallop and Idaho’s Jim McClure thought that Reagan, then and now the great hero of the conservative right, was plum crazy.

Much of the criticism of Reagan from the hard right in the late 1980’s sounds eerily like the current critique of Obama, which basically boils down to a belief that the administration is so eager for a deal with Iran it is willing to imperil U.S. and Israeli security. As Idaho’s McClure, among the most conservative GOP senators of his day, warned about the Reagan’s deal with Gorbachev in 1988, ”We’ve had leaders who got into a personal relationship and have gotten soft – I’m thinking of Roosevelt and Stalin,” but McClure was really thinking about Reagan and Gorbachev.

Howard Phillips, the hard right blowhard who chaired the Conservative Caucus at the time, charged that Reagan was ”fronting as a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.” Helms actually said Reagan’s negotiations with Gorbachev put U.S. allies in harms way, just as Mario Rubio, Ted Cruz and Scott Walker say today Obama is putting Israel at risk. ”We’re talking about, perhaps, the survival of Europe,” Helms declared in 1988.

Walker, who was 20 years old when Helms’ was preaching apocalypse, told a radio interviewer last week that the Iranian deal “leaves not only problems for Israel, because they want to annihilate Israel, it leaves the problems in the sense that the Saudis, the Jordanians and others are gonna want to have access to their own nuclear weapons…” Never mind that the whole point of the Iranian effort is to prevent a nuclear arms race across the Middle East.

Date the GOP No Response to FDR and Yalta…

Historically, you can date the conservative Republican opposition to almost all presidential deal making to Franklin Roosevelt’s meeting with Stalin at Yalta in 1945 where FDR’s critics, mostly Republicans, contended he sold out eastern Europe to the Reds. “The Yalta agreement may not have been the Roosevelt administration’s strongest possible bargain,” Jonathan Chait wrote recently in New York Magazine, “but the only real alternative would have entailed continuing the war against the Soviets after defeating Germany.”

By the time of the Yalta summit, Red Army troops had “liberated” or were in place to occupy Poland and much of central Europe, which Roosevelt knew the United States and Great Britain could do little to stop. The alternative to accommodation with Stalin at Yalta, as Chait says, was making war on Stalin’s army. Roosevelt’s true objective at Yalta was to keep Stalin in the fold to ensure Soviet cooperation with the establishment of the United Nations, but the “facts on the ground” in Europe provided a great storyline for generations of conservatives to lament the “sellout” to Uncle Joe.

That conservative narrative served to propel Joe McCarthy’s hunt for Communists in the U.S. State Department and cemented the GOP as the party always skeptical of any effort to negotiate with the Soviet Union (or anyone else). Many conservatives contended that “negotiations” equaled “appeasement” and would inevitably lead American presidents to mimic Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938. Illinois Senator Mark Kirk dusted off that old chestnut last week when he said, “Neville Chamberlain got a better deal from Adolf Hitler,” than Obama did from the Iranians. The Iranian deal is certainly not perfect, but worse than a pact with Hitler?

Conservatives became so concerned about “executive action” on foreign policy in the early 1950’s that Ohio Republican Senator John Bricker proposed a constitutional amendment – the Bricker Amendment – that said in part: “Congress shall have power to regulate all executive and other agreements with any foreign power or international organization.” Dwight Eisenhower opposed Bricker’s effort certain that his control over foreign policy, and that of subsequent presidents, would be fatally compromised. When Bricker, who had been the Republican candidate for vice president in 1948 and was a pillar of Midwestern Republicanism, first proposed his amendment forty-five of forty-eight Senate Republicans supported the idea. Eisenhower had to use every trick in the presidential playbook, including working closely with Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, to eventually defeat Bricker and other conservatives in his own party.

A logical extension of McCarthy’s position in the early 1950’s was Barry Goldwater’s opposition in the early 1960’s to President John Kennedy’s ultimately successful efforts to put in place a nuclear test ban treaty outlawing atmospheric or underwater nuclear tests.

A test ban treaty was, Goldwater said, “the opening wedge to disastrous negotiations with the enemy, which could result in our losing the war or becoming part of their [the Soviets] system.” In Senate debate Goldwater demanded proof of the Soviet’s “good faith” and argued, directly counter to Kennedy’s assertions, that a treaty would make the world more rather than less dangerous. The treaty was approved overwhelmingly and has remained a cornerstone of the entire idea of arms control.

Later in the 1960’s, and over the profound objections of conservatives, the U.S. approved the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) designed to prevent the expansion of nuclear weapons. Ironically, as Jonathan Chait notes, the NPT today provides “the legal basis for the international effort to prevent Iran from obtaining nukes.” But the idea was denounced at the time with William Buckley’s National Review saying it was “immoral, foolish…and impractical,” a “nuclear Yalta” that threatened our friends and helped our enemies.

When Richard Nixon negotiated the SALT I agreement, interestingly an “executive agreement” and not a treaty, conservatives worried that the United States was being out foxed by the Kremlin and that Nixon’s focus on “détente” with the Soviet Union was simply playing into naïve Communist propaganda. Congressional neo-cons in both parties, including influential Washington state Democrat Henry Jackson, insisted that any future arms control deal with the Soviets be presented to the Senate for ratification.

Republican opposition to international agreements is deeply embedded in the party’s DNA, going back at least to the successful Republican efforts to derail Senate ratification of the agreement Woodrow Wilson negotiated in Paris in 1919 to involve the United States in the League of Nations, end the Great War and make the world “safe for democracy.”

The GOP’s DNA Dates to Woodrow Wilson…

The most effective and eloquent opponent of that agreement was Idaho Republican Senator William E. Borah who, it was said, brought tears to the eyes of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge when he spoke against Wilson’s ideas on the floor of the United States Senate on November 19, 1919.

Addressing treaty supporters, but really talking to Wilson, Borah said, “Your treaty does not mean peace – far, very far, from it. If we are to judge the future by the past it means war.” About that much the Idahoan was correct.

Without U.S. participation and moral leadership the League of Nations was little more than a toothless tiger in the two decades before the world was again at war, the League unable to prevent the aggression that ultimately lead to World War II. It is one of history’s great “what ifs” to ponder what American leadership in a League of Nations in the 1920’s and 1930’s might have meant to the prevention of the war that William Borah correctly predicted, but arguably for the wrong reason.

Jaw, Jaw Better Than War, War…

Many Congressional Republicans have spent months – or even years – chastising Obama for failing to provide American leadership on the world stage, and for sure the president deserves a good deal of criticism for what at times has been a timid and uncertain foreign policy. But now that Obama has brought the United States, Britain, France, Germany, the European Union and Russia to the brink of a potentially historic deal with Iran, the conservative critique has turned back to a well-worn line: a naïve president is so eager to get a deal he’ll sell out the country’s and the world’s best interests to get it. Ted Cruz and other Republican critics may not know it, but they are dusting off their party’s very old attack lines. Barry Goldwater seems to be more the father of this kind of contemporary GOP thinking than the sainted Ronald Reagan.

No deal is perfect, and doubtless some down through the ages have been less than they might have been, but the history of the last 75 years shows that presidents of both parties have, an overwhelming percentage of the time, made careful, prudent deals with foreign adversaries that have stood the test of time. In that sweep of recent American history it has not been presidents – Republicans or Democrats – who have been wrong to pursue international agreements, but rather it is the political far right that has regularly ignored the wisdom of Winston Churchill’s famous admonition that “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

Borah, Cenarrusa, Idaho, Labor Day

Women Who Work

Posted on September 2, 2013by christian

The Labor Day news has been dominated by strikes at fast food restaurants, essays on growing income inequality in the United States and even reports about how increasingly unaffordable higher education is going to make the current generation less likely than their parents to climb into a comfortable middle class life.

All these challenges, and more, are worth the attention of policy makers and lawmakers was we mark another Labor Day, a holiday created in 1896, by the way, as an olive branch to workers by the anti-labor union President Grover Cleveland. We should also add to our list of policy and societal concerns the continuing challenges and inequality that confront women in the work place.

Those fast food strikes aimed at a higher minimum wage are, as Slate points out, mostly about women. “This is a labor movement that is structured largely around the needs articulated by the working mothers in it, women who, with or without a partner, are often trying to raise families on minimum wage jobs. Women make up two-thirds of the fast food work force, and a quarter of workers are raising children.”

At the other end of the economic spectrum – the high end – Fortune reckons that only 21 of the companies in the Fortune 500 are run by women. A 2011 report by Catalyst, an outfit that tracks “critical statistics to gauge women’s advancement into leadership and highlights the gender diversity gap,” found that only 16% of all Fortune 500 board positions where held by women. Fewer than 3% of companies had a woman chair the board of directors, only 1% – a decline from a previous study – had as many as 40% female board members and 11% of the Fortune 500 had absolutely no women in governance roles. Predictably the numbers are even worse for women of color; 3% of board seats of the biggest companies in the United States are held by women of color and 70% of the Fortune 500 have no women of color at all in governance roles.

Some Idaho specific numbers to contemplate when next your order that Whopper from the woman behind the counter: the median income of a working woman in Idaho in 2012 was $18,772 – dead last in the nation with Utah and Montana ahead. (All these numbers are from the website USA.com.) And just to put that $18,722 in context, the poverty level – as officially calculated by the government – is $23,550 for a family of four. A working mom in Idaho who is bringing home the state’s median income and supporting a couple of children is, to say the least, struggling.

But Idaho must be doing better for women in the management and professional ranks, right? Not so much. Nearly 47% of the Idaho work force is made up of women, which is slightly below the national average and just over 35% of those women are employed in “management or professional” positions. That number puts Idaho well below the national average as the 49th state in the nation for women in more traditional “white collar” jobs. Idaho is just ahead of Nevada and Hawaii, states with a particularly high level of service oriented jobs due to their tourism based economies. Idaho’s regional neighbors do substantially as measured by a percentage of women working in white collar jobs: Utah is at 41 in the nation, Montana 28, Oregon 25 and Washington at 15.

So what’s going on here? From the highest reaches of corporate America to the neighborhood coffee shop women seem not to be sharing anything like parity in the work place with men and the gaps haven’t been closing much at all.

Hanna Rosin, a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of The End of Men, says we’ve focused too much on the “wage gap,” the well-worn statistic that women only make 77 cents on the dollar compared to men. Rosin says there are many reasons for the wage gap, and many are not comforting, including the fact that women often work few hours a week than men, men more often belong to unions (and generally get paid more as a result) and, perhaps the big one, women, despite overtaking men in educational achievement, still gravitate (or perhaps are forced to gravitate) to generally lower paying jobs.

The bigger issues, Rosin says, are “the deeper, more systemic discrimination of inadequate family-leave policies and childcare options, of women defaulting to being the caretakers. Or of women deciding that are suited to be nurses and teachers but not doctors. And in that more complicated discussion, you have to leave room at least for the option of choice—that women just don’t want to work the same way men do.”

Author and educator Stephanie Koontz, who incidentally will speak at a major and sold-out Andrus Center conference on women and leadership this week at Boise State University, made essentially the same point in a New York Times essay earlier this year.

“Astonishingly,” Koontz wrote, “despite the increased workload of families, and even though 70 percent of American children now live in households where every adult in the home is employed, in the past 20 years the United States has not passed any major federal initiative to help workers accommodate their family and work demands. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 guaranteed covered workers up to 12 weeks unpaid leave after a child’s birth or adoption or in case of a family illness. Although only about half the total work force was eligible, it seemed a promising start. But aside from the belated requirement of the new Affordable Care Act that nursing mothers be given a private space at work to pump breast milk, the F.M.L.A. turned out to be the inadequate end.

“Meanwhile, since 1990 other nations with comparable resources have implemented a comprehensive agenda of ‘work-family reconciliation’ acts. As a result, when the United States’ work-family policies are compared with those of countries at similar levels of economic and political development, the United States comes in dead last.”

As an old friend use to remind me – “all things are political.” Whether its the paltry percentage of women in corporate governance in America, the unlivable minimum wage or work place friendly policies that impact working women and their kids, the public policy response to women who work has, as Stephanie Koontz says, not just stalled, but “hit a wall.” Even Barack Obama, who most thought would take major steps to correct the gender balance in major presidential appointments, has a record leaving much to be desired.

A couple of weeks ago the Nixon Library was in the news as it released the last of Richard Nixon’s White House tape recordings. Less notice was given to some 30,000 pages of documents from the Nixon years that were released at the same time. Two of the pages where a typewritten 1971 memo from Nixon staff assistant Barbara Franklin to White House political advisers Fred Malek and Jeb Magruder. Franklin had just been to a Washington, D.C. conference on the “status of women” – the delegates she wrote were not “radical feminists” but “establishment women” appointed by the nation’s governors – and she wrote excitedly about the standing ovation that had been given at the conclusion of remarks by a woman named Betty Friedan who had issued a stirring call for woman to seek greater political power. [Friedan’s pace setting book The Feminine Mystique had been published in 1963.]

Franklin told Nixon’s political guys in the concluding lines of her memo, “I’m absolutely convinced the ‘women’s issue’ is gathering momentum. We should be listening and thinking!!” Unfortunately that is still appropriate advice to politicians 42 years later.

As Dr. Kootnz has written we need to “stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. To do that, we must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders.”

Women and minorities have provided the electoral power in the last two presidential elections, finally breaking one glass ceiling and putting an African-American in the White House. A woman may well be next and perhaps that will be, at long last, the catalyst for a policy agenda that really addresses women who work.

Egan, Idaho Politics, Labor Day, McClure

More McClure

Posted on March 1, 2011by christian

Man Bites Dog

Lots of reaction and remembering, very appropriately, to the weekend passing of one of Idaho’s political icons Sen. Jim McClure. Most of the reaction, again appropriately, has described McClure’s time in the U.S. House and Senate as distinguished, thoughtful and productive. Others have noted that he was a work horse, not a show horse; a decent guy in a business that has become more and more characterized by nastiness and blind partisanship.

One of the best and most thoughtful reactions to McClure’s death and his career comes in a great piece by long-time Idaho Conservation League Executive Director Rick Johnson. Johnson has taken the point in the Idaho environmental community in stressing a new approach to engagement and even collaboration with some of the traditional “enemies” of the conservation community. He writes of not initially thinking much of McClure, but over time coming to realize that the conservative Republican was a fellow you could talk with and maybe even make a deal with.

“I now see,” Johnson writes, “how much wilderness we didn’t get back then working with him and later in the under-appreciated collaboration he had with then-Gov. Cecil Andrus. Those bills were far from perfect. But bills today are also far from perfect, and today’s are more limited in scale. Nothing’s perfect you say? I didn’t know that then. Incidentally, my older mentors didn’t know that, either.”

It is almost a “man bites dog” moment and strong kudos to Johnson for recognizing and admitting that a guy who is a card carrying environmentalist – I say that with affection – could learn a thing or two from a senator who was often caricatured as an apologist for extractive industries. That is the beauty of politics – things are rarely as black and white, cut and dried as some try to make them. Progress is in the gray area of compromise and consensus.

One aspect of McClure’s career deserves special recognition as Idahoans reflect on his importance to the state’s politics. The guy was a legislator. He didn’t see his job as making bombastic speeches, although like any good and effective politician he could do that, he went to Washington, D.C. to get things done. Over a career that included strong advocacy for timber, mining and the Department of Energy, he also offered up conservation oriented legislation that, as my friend Rick Johnson argues, many of us would be glad to have on the books today.

That alone is why Jim McClure and others of his ilk will be long remembered. They used public office to try and do things. His approach is always going to be a good model – at any time in any state.

Baucus, Egan, Idaho Politics, Labor Day, McClure, U.S. Senate

One of the Greats

Posted on February 28, 2011by christian

James Albertus McClure, 1924-2011

History will record that Sen. Jim McClure, who died Saturday at the age of 86, was one of the most significant politicians in Idaho’s history. A staunch Republican conservative, McClure nonetheless was liked and respected by those across the political spectrum, but beyond that he accumulated a record of accomplishment that has lasting impact.

A strong advocate for the natural resources industries so important to Idaho, McClure also saw the need to resolve long-standing debates over wilderness designation in his native state.

He worked out the boundary lines of the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area by spreading maps on the floor of the governor’s office and getting on his hands and knees with Democrat Cecil D. Andrus.

He helped champion creation of the Sawtooth NRA and in the last days of Frank Church’s life he got the iconic River of No Return Wilderness renamed for the Democrat.

He fought tooth and nail to grow the Idaho National Laboratory and distinguished himself as a member of the Iran-Contra Committee investigating that scandal.

As a reporter and in other capacities, I have had the chance to interview Jim McClure probably more than 20 times over the years. I never sat down with any person who was better prepared or who provided a better interview. He was candid, opinionated and always impeccable well informed. I also never saw the guy use a note card or a script. He was a marvelous extemporaneous speaker. He was also a complete gentleman.

Once in Sun Valley years ago, while McClure was chairing the Senate Energy Committee, he sat for a taped interview for well more than half an hour. At the end of the session, while we were making small talk, the technical crew whispered in my ear that none of the half hour of Q and A had been recorded on tape. Gulp.

I’d just wasted the time of a busy, important U.S. Senator and had absolutely nothing to show for it. Not missing a beat, McClure smiled and said, “Let’s do it again.” And we did. He didn’t have to do that. Most would have said, sorry, but I’ve got to run. Obviously, I have never forgotten the kindness.

One thing I’ll never forget about McClure was his principled pragmatism. Never anything less than a loyal and conservative Republican, he also knew that progress often requires compromise and finding a middle ground. Such was the case when McClure again hooked up with Andrus in 1987 and spent weeks working out a comprehensive approach to the decades-long battles over Idaho wilderness. They flew around the state, spread out the maps and offended everyone – particularly their respective “base” voters. There was something in the grand compromise that everyone could hate and the McClure-Andrus approach ultimately failed.

I’ve thought many times since that the two old pols knew they were far out in front of their constituents, but were nevertheless willing to risk political capital to try to resolve a controversy. It’s easy in politics to say “no.” It is much more difficult – and risky – to try to lead. McClure was a leader.

I was pleased to have a hand in creating a University of Idaho video tribute to Jim McClure in 2007. You can check it out at the University’s McClure Center website.

In the Idaho political pantheon, McClure stands with Borah and Church as a among the greatest and most important federal officials Idaho has ever produced. He was a genuinely nice guy, too.

Borah, Labor Day

Putting the Labor in Labor Day

Posted on September 6, 2010by christian

Unions Decline, China Rises…the Great Shrinking of American Manufacturing

David Letterman quips that Americans celebrate Labor Day by going out and buying stuff made in China. That would be funny if it weren’t so obviously true. A little weekend shopping – a new ice bucket (still can’t fathom what happened to the old one), a salad bowl and some tea candles – resulted in a handful of purchases all made in China or somewhere else. Not even one American-made product in the shopping bag.

Can America remain a global power without a manufacturing economy? I guess we’ll find out.

As the president rolls out a new plan to create jobs and address American infrastructure needs, the icy facts about the decline of the nation’s ability to plan, design and build things is hard to ignore, even as most in policy positions do just that.

Once upon a time Labor Day was about celebrating the American Labor movement. From Boston to Butte, from the IWW to the IBEW, unions fought, scrapped, lost and won battles that shaped the American economy. Not so much in the 21st Century. The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne connects the lack of American prosperity today to the great shrinking labor movement. A third of American workers belonged to a union in the prosperous 1950’s. The number is just over 12 percent today. I’ll leave it to the labor economists to connect the dots, if they can be connected – organized labor’s demise = decline in American manufacturing = a struggling U.S. economy = increasing separation among the very wealthy and the rest of our society.

As the American Prospect noted late last year, the U.S. lost 5.5 million – 32 percent – of all its manufacturing jobs from October 2000 to October 2009. More people are unemployed in the United States today than are employed in manufacturing. Since 2001, more than 42,000 American factories have gone the way of the dodo bird. Not resting, but dead. Meanwhile, China’s manufacturing economy is cited as a reason for a bump last week in the Asia stock markets.

Twenty-five years ago, Idahoans – in the legislature and at the ballot box – pulled the teeth of organized labor in Idaho. It was the nastiest, toughest, most consequential political fight in my time in the state. Conservatives won and the number of Idahoans who are members of labor unions declined by 50 percent. With those declines went the once not inconsiderable clout of organized labor to field political foot soldiers and contribute campaign cash. You can mark the steady decline of Idaho’s Democratic Party over the last 25 years to the passage of Right to Work in 1986, even as Cecil Andrus, an opponent of Right to Work and a favorite in the union halls, was returned to the governorship that year.

You can still get a debate going by asking whether Right to Work has been good – or not – for Idaho. Conservatives argue that job growth over those years proves that Idaho is a great place to do business. Others suggest that Idaho’s declining standing in wages, as compared to the rest of the country, proves that the law has been bad for workers. That debate will never be settled.

Writing in the Post, Harold Meyerson contends that the Great Recession has harmed American workers far more than their counterparts in Europe where organized labor remains strong and a substantial political force. The clout of American labor will continue to decline unless and until leaders of the movement quit doing the same thing over and over and hoping for different results.

Before I get typecast as nostalgic for the “good ol’ days” of shift changes, suds at the union hall and Labor Day picnics, I’ll offer the thought that union leaders must shoulder a good deal of the responsibility for the decline they so readily lament. They have often been tone deaf, cranky and unreasonable and restoring anything approaching their historic standing will require a new generation with new attitudes and tactics. We’ll see.

Still, on this Labor Day this much is true: for whatever reason(s), the American – and Idaho – economy is a lot different than it was a quarter century ago. Lots of “blue collar” jobs in traditional industries are gone forever. Chinese exports flood the U.S. market. Politicians make Labor Day speeches about rebuilding the nation’s economy, but you have to wonder, as another holiday designed to honor labor comes and goes, whether we can rebuild without building things – all kinds of things – again.

Borah, Labor Day

Happy Labor Day

Posted on September 7, 2009by christian

Not Particularly Important News…

This pint of stout will soon make sense. Trust me.

But before we turn to the Irish drink, a random, regional round-up of some not very important news (including nothing whatsoever on health care reform) on the last weekend of the summer.

From Oregon:
Let us acknowledge that Oregon was the first state in the nation to officially declare the first Monday in September as Labor Day. It happened, according to the Department of Labor, in 1887. Good idea, Oregon.

From Idaho:
A San Diego Examiner travel writer, Gary Robinson, writes this weekend about the tiny southeastern Idaho community of Franklin, Idaho (population 673) where he grew up. Robinson notes that since the beginning of the Idaho Lottery in 1989, Franklin has been a steaming hot bed of ticket sales. The Utah state line is just beyond the southern city limits, making Franklin the “home of the Utah lottery” and the Beehive State a chief supporter of school and public building construction in Idaho. We need the help.

From Washington:
The good news here is that the day after Labor Day will see the re-opening of the fabulous Seattle Public Library. Like most cities, Seattle has been struggling to close a budget gap and one tactic was to shut down the city’s libraries for a week. Budget sense, perhaps, but for bookish Seattle not an altogether popular move. As the Associated Press reported: “‘I think it’s a very sad day — week — for the city of Seattle that they can’t access their local library, which is one of the most heavily used libraries in the country,” said Nancy Pearl, the city’s ex-librarian superstar and the author of ‘Book Lust,’ a best-selling tribute to the joy of reading.'” If you get to Seattle, visit the downtown library. It’s almost always open.

And…From Montana:
Another closing – the M&M Bar in Butte – made headlines all across the Big Sky state. The ancient Butte watering hole once claimed it never closed, but a dispute over a power bill had thirsty patrons looking for another venue, temporarily we can hope, at which to raise a glass. I have a feeling those in need of a pint this weekend in Butte found an acceptable alternative. There are always options in Butte. Which brings me to that pint of Guinness.

The venerable Irish Times (a great website, by the way) had as the top story on Sunday Kilkinny’s fourth consecutive All-Ireland Hurling Championship. (Click here if you feel you need the details of the game or just want to be able to drop “hurling” details into your next cocktail chat.)

Delving a bit further into the Times reveals the “news” that the country’s health service is claiming that Irish adults consume “550 pints per year.” (No statistics readily available to compare those numbers to heavily Irish Butte.)

The Irish “strategic task force on alcohol” is quoted as saying that the 550 number “is a conservative figure given that abstainers are not excluded and represent about 20% of the adult population.”

What can you possibly say after that? The only thing I can think of: Guinness – it’s good for you! True in Dublin, in Butte, Seattle, Portland, Boise…even Salt Lake City.

If you’re looking for something to celebrate on Labor Day, you might celebrate all those you know who work hard, those out of staters who spend a buck on a lottery ticket once in a while, those readers who are concerned when the local library is closed and those who sip (in moderation, of course) an occasional pint. It is a great country, even without hurling.

Happy Labor Day.