Labor Daze

So it's Labor Day, a national holiday since 1894. So what will I be doing? Working, of course.

I'll be working partly because others will be. I can't interview unless somebody agrees to be interviewed--in this case, because she's too busy during the official work week. I have a meeting because others will be there, and the grant proposal is due soon.

Though Labor Day--like a lot of holidays--now has very little to do with its origins (more about them in a sec), this year it's the occasion for opining on the economy. Which in case you haven't heard is pretty bad. President Obama (backed by some recent numbers) says it's improving, though not fast enough, and he will announce several proposals this week. The Republicans will be against them, progressive Democrats will be disappointed they don't go far enough. Paul Krugman's column of a few days ago seems the best summary of where we've been and where we are, and it points out the basic ironies. First, that Obama's Recovery Act is looking to have been too small, although it was the biggest he could get through Congress, and arguably what is needed now is another infusion of job stimulus money, although Congress will never pass it, partly if not wholly because Republican opposition is guaranteed. As Krugman writes," if he[Obama] came out for motherhood, the G.O.P. would declare motherhood un-American."

Krugman thinks President Obama's proposals should be bold anyway, just to force the GOPers to own up to opposing them. That's one political theory of how it might play out, but it's not the only one.

Anyway, everybody's got advice. Robert Reich, for example. President Obama keeps repeating that this is a long term process but people do eat--and vote--in the short term. Nevertheless, as TIME noted, the Recovery Act is going to transform the American economy--just not right away. Its investment in a green future is paying dividends in the present and will pay even more in the next several years, but the report that caught my eye suggests that green jobs of a certain kind can do even more to revive the economy. This Center for American Progress study finds that: retrofitting just 40 percent of the residential and commercial building stock in the United States would create 625,000 sustained full-time jobs over a decade, spark $500 billion in new investments to upgrade 50 million homes and office buildings, and generate as much as $64 billion a year in cost savings for U.S. ratepayers.

Labor Day is also the traditional start of the election season, though that's now 24/7/365. The economy may be the excuse, but this campaign (if not the election itself) is shaping up to be a kind of climax of psychosis--the stoking and organizing of fear, pretty blatantly using the forbidden and hence more powerful undercurrent of fears focused on our first black President--in support of ignorance and lies, otherwise known as the GOP agenda. That's another irony of the Krugman column-- the GOPers who opposed the Recovery Act because it would spark inflation and kill the stock market were proven utterly wrong. So far, polls and those who interpret them claim this doesn't matter. People aren't mad at them just because they were dead wrong.

Will GOPers win back Congress with the same promises that, enacted during the Shrub years, ruined the economy? That's this year's bet, and it has a chance of winning, enhanced if not totally created by the very wealthy who profited the most in the Shrub years and have the most to lose from fairer taxes and a green economy with prosperity for more than just them. Newscorpse and its Fox in the henhouse of supposed news media don't bother hiding their manipulations anymore, and revelations of the billionaires behind the Tea Party movement are merely the most recent.

Which leads us back to the origin of Labor Day. It was a response to the slaughter of American workers by the U.S. military and U.S, marshals during labor union strikes against one of the most powerful economic interests of the day, the railroads. To avert something like a class war, Congress rushed through the Labor Day proclamation by unanimous vote. There were still plenty of bloody battles ahead for labor unions until they achieved better pay and working conditions...for a few decades anyway. Now it's a bloodless class war, in which workers are all but defenseless. The rich are getting immensely richer, and everyone else is getting poorer, with no shots fired except for the ones fired usually by members of the American underclass chiefly at members of foreign underclasses, who fire back. And the rich find ways to get richer still. A lot of people are unemployed, and GOPers want to let them starve. Nearly everyone else is working more hours and more days and more years, for less payment. But hey, there's this extra day off. Sort of.

This is also the traditional end of summer, and once again, it doesn't quite work--at least where I am. We had our warmest day of the year last week--almost 80-- and we look forward to what is often the warmest, sunniest time of the year here, in September. So: no farewell to summer cookout, no day off anyway, in a country apparently no wiser about falling for demagogues and fearmongers, or TV happy faces and push-your-buttons commercials obscuring the continuing rapacity of the ruling class, and their media/political pets. And happy Labor Day to you, too.