For Labor Day today, David Sirota wrote:

if we hope to ever rebuild an economy that works for everyone, we’re going to need many more workers in unions and a much stronger labor movement.

and posted this graph:

Sirota continued:

This graph comes from the Economic Policy Institute — it shows the relationship between union density and the percentage of national income going to the richest 10 percent of Americans. As you can see, the larger the share of the American workforce that’s unionized, the lower the share of national income goes to the super-rich — and vice versa.

I…

PEQ = Plain and Easy Quote

Reading books — who has the time? Every once in a while, I read something that provides insight into our current condition. So I thought I would share….

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 585).

A few notes pertinent to this PEQ:

1. The Democratic Party of Adams’ times was the party of white supremacy, an ironic fact of history which leaders of today’s party of white supremacy, the Republican Party, like to (mis)use in an attempt to smear Democrats today as racists.
2. In…

In an article entitled “Young Black Americans not sold on Biden, the Democrats or voting,” two professors at American University have released the results of a survey of 1,215 African Americans in battleground states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia.

The results are a blaring warning that the Democrats have lots of work to do in the next two months if they actually intend to evict Donald Trump from the White House. …

Adam J. Tooze teaches at Columbia University and is director of Columbia’s European Institute. He is the author of the 2018 book, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, and is writing Shutdown: How the Coronavirus Made a Financial Revolution for Penguin / Random House. He was recently interviewed by Eric Levitz of The Intelligencer.

The COVID crisis has forced an acceleration of the collapse of the “idea that there are hard-and-fast limits to debt sustainability and that governments that spent too much and ran large deficits would face the wrath of the all-powerful bond market.” …

The next big rescue / stimulus package is now being worked on in Congress, and Senate Republicans are their usual obstructionist selves. The best way to ensure there is immediate, flexible and direct funding of state and local governments is to mobilize state and local elected officials to contact their Representatives and especially Senators immediately.

Little of the $3 trillion in emergency spending has authorized by Congress in the past month, and the $6 trillion in money creation and lending powers given to the Federal Reserve, has gone to help the people and businesses who need it most. The political…

I do not remember the New Deal, even though it’s central to my political memory. I’m 63 now, so I wasn’t even alive during the First Great Depression and the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. For me, memory of the New Deal was transmitted by those who had lived it and embodied it: my foremost formative experience of government was John Kennedy beckoning the nation to put men on the moon.

I grew up in Chicago, at a time the Democratic Party took pride in getting things done. John Kennedy said, “The American, by nature, is optimistic. He is experimental, an…