The Progressive Mind

Marinaleda - The Spanish Town With Equal Wage Full Employment and $19 Housing

LIBertea — Sun, 07 Jun 2015 01:12:15 GMT

With virtually no police, crime or unemployment, meet the Spanish town described as a democratic, socialist utopia. Unemployment is non-existent in Marinaleda, an Andalusian village in southern Spain that is prosperous thanks to its farming cooperative.

On the face of it, the Spanish town of Marinaleda is indistinguishable from any other in its region. Nestled in the picturesque Campiña valley, the surrounding countryside is made up of rolling green hills, miles of olive plantations and golden fields of wheat stretching as far as the eye can see. The town is pretty, tranquil and typical of those found in Andalusia, Spain’s poorest and most southerly province.
It’s also a democratic, anti-capitalist village whose mayor actively encourages shoplifting.

Since the financial crisis began in 2008, Marinaleda has shot to fame — and so has its maverick mayor Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, who earned the nickname,”The Spanish Robin Hood,” after organizing and carrying out a series of supermarket raids in a direct action protest last August. Basic groceries such as oil, rice and beans were loaded into carts, wheeled from the store and taken to a local food bank to help the poor, as helpless cashiers looked on, some crying.

In an interview after the event, Gordillo, the democratically elected mayor since 1979, said it was not theft, but a non-violent act of disobedience.

“There are many families who can’t afford to eat,” he argued. “In the 21st century this is an absolute disgrace. Food is a right, not something with which you speculate.”

In this province alone there are 690,000 empty properties due to bank foreclosures. But not in Marinaleda, because Gordillo has a solution: anyone who wants to build their own house can do so for free. Materials and qualified workmen are provided by the town hall, and the generous allowance of 192 square meters means the homes are spacious. Families then pay just 15 euros ($19) per month for the rest of their lives, with the agreement that the house cannot be sold for private gain.

In Andalusia, unemployment now stands at 37 percent (a staggering 55 percent for young people). But Marinaleda, population 2700, has virtually full employment through the town’s farming cooperative, where laborers earn equal wages of 1200 euros ($1600) per month. Here, in a region where 1 in 3 people are unemployed, this achievement cannot be understated.

“We need to rethink our values, the consumer society, the value we place on money, selfishness and individualism,” Gordillo remarks. “Marinaleda is a small example, and we want this experience to extend throughout the world.”

The American people are clueless: Why income inequality is so much worse than we realize

LIBertea — Sun, 05 Apr 2015 04:29:26 GMT

The American people are clueless: Why income inequality is so much worse than we realize

A wealth of new research confirms the rich and the poor have no idea how good and how bad the other have it

Nicholas Fitz, Scientific American

(Credit: Shutterstock/zstock)

This article was originally published by Scientific American.

In a candid conversation with Frank Rich last fall, Chris Rock said, “Oh, people don’t even know. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” The findings of three studies, published over the last several years inPerspectives on Psychological Science, suggest that Rock is right. We have no idea how unequal our society has become.

In their 2011 paper, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely analyzed beliefs about wealth inequality. They asked more than 5,000 Americans to guess the percentage of wealth (i.e., savings, property, stocks, etc., minus debts) owned by each fifth of the population. Next, they asked people to construct their ideal distributions. Imagine a pizza of all the wealth in the United States. What percentage of that pizza belongs to the top 20% of Americans? How big of a slice does the bottom 40% have? In an ideal world, how much should they have?

The average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. The reality is strikingly different. The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.

We don’t want to live like this. In our ideal distribution, the top quintile owns 32% and the bottom two quintiles own 25%. As the journalist Chrystia Freeland put it, “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.” Norton and Ariely found a surprising level of consensus: everyone — even Republicans and the wealthy—wants a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.

This all might ring a bell. An infographic video of the study went viral and has been watched more than 16 million times.

In a study published last year, Norton and Sorapop Kiatpongsan used a similar approach to assess perceptions of income inequality. They asked about 55,000 people from 40 countries to estimate how much corporate CEOs and unskilled workers earned. Then they asked people how much CEOs and workers should earn. The median American estimated that the CEO-to-worker pay-ratio was 30-to-1, and that ideally, it’d be 7-to-1. The reality? 354-to-1. Fifty years ago, it was 20-to-1. Again, the patterns were the same for all subgroups, regardless of age, education, political affiliation, or opinion on inequality and pay. “In sum,” the researchers concluded, “respondents underestimate actual pay gaps, and their ideal pay gaps are even further from reality than those underestimates.”

These two studies imply that our apathy about inequality is due to rose-colored misperceptions. To be fair, though, we do know that something is up. After all, President Obama called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time.” But while Americans acknowledge that the gap between the rich and poor has widened over the last decade, very few see it as a serious issue. Just five percent of Americans think that inequality is a major problem in need of attention. While the occupy movement may have a tangible legacy, Americans aren’t rioting in the streets.

One likely reason for this is identified by a third study, published earlier this year by Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich that suggests that our indifference lies in a distinctly American cultural optimism. At the core of the American Dream is the belief that anyone who works hard can move up economically regardless of his or her social circumstances. Davidai and Gilovich wanted to know whether people had a realistic sense of economic mobility.

The researchers found Americans overestimate the amount of upward social mobility that exists in society. They asked some 3,000 people to guess the chance that someone born to a family in the poorest 20% ends up as an adult in the richer quintiles. Sure enough, people think that moving up is significantly more likely than it is in reality. Interestingly, poorer and politically conservative participants thought that there is more mobility than richer and liberal participants.

According to Pew Research, most Americans believe the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, but 60% believe that most people can make it if they’re willing to work hard. Senator Marco Rubio says that America has “never been a nation of haves and have-nots. We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves, of people who have made it and people who will make it.” Sure, we love a good rags-to-riches story, but perhaps we tolerate such inequality because we think these stories happen more than they actually do.

We may not want to believe it, but the United States is now the most unequal of all Western nations. To make matters worse, America has considerably less social mobility than Canada and Europe.

As the sociologists Stephen McNamee and Robert Miller Jr. point out in their book, “The Meritocracy Myth,” Americans widely believe that success is due to individual talent and effort. Ironically, when the term “meritocracy” was first used by Michael Young (in his 1958 book “The Rise of the Meritocracy”) it was meant to criticize a society ruled by the talent elite. “It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit,” wrote Young in a 2001 essay for the Guardian. “It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.” The creator of the phrase wishes we would stop using it because it underwrites the myth that those who have money and power must deserve it (and the more sinister belief that the less fortunate don’t deserve better).

By overemphasizing individual mobility, we ignore important social determinants of success like family inheritance, social connections, and structural discrimination. The three papers in Perspectives on Psychological Science indicate not only that economic inequality is much worse than we think, but also that social mobility is less than you’d imagine. Our unique brand of optimism prevents us from making any real changes.

George Carlin joked that, “the reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.” How do we wake up?

David Sirota: A Deepening Democratic Party Divide

LIBertea — Sun, 05 Apr 2015 04:29:24 GMT

A Deepening Democratic Party Divide

Posted on Apr 4, 2015

By David Sirota

Hillary Clinton. (Shutterstock)

For those pining for a Democratic Party that tries to represent more than the whims of the rich and powerful, these are, to say the least, confusing times.

On the presidential campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has been promoting standard pro-middle class rhetoric, yet also has been raking in speaking fees from financial firms. One of her potential primary challengers, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, has been sounding anti-Wall Street themes, but only after finishing up two terms in office that saw his state plow more public pension money into Wall Street firms, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in financial fees.

Similarly, in Washington, the anti-Wall Street fervor of those such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren sometimes seems as if it is on the ascent—that is, until big money comes calling.

Indeed, on the very same day Reuters reported on big banks threatening to withhold campaign contributions from Democratic coffers, Democratic lawmakers abruptly coalesced around Charles Schumer as their next U.S. Senate leader. CNN captured in a blaring headline how unflinching an ally the New York senator has been to the financial elite: “Wall Street welcomes expected Chuck Schumer promotion.” Notably, Democrats appeared ready to promote Schumer over Assistant Democratic Leader Dick Durbin, who once dared to publicly complain that “banks frankly own” Capitol Hill.

It would be easy to conclude that the status quo is winning Democratic politics—but a series of high-profile elections shows the trends are markedly different outside the national political arena.

Two years ago, the era of billionaire Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Wall Street-worshiping city politics ended when populist Democrat Bill de Blasio and a slate of progressive city councilors backed by New York’s Working Families Party were swept into office promising to increase taxes on millionaires and fund universal pre-kindergarten. A year later, New York’s conservative Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his $40 million campaign war chest couldn’t muster two-thirds of the Democratic primary vote against an unknown progressive opponent named Zephyr Teachout. Though Cuomo was ultimately reelected, he was humiliated, and his future prospects have been significantly diminished.

Now comes Chicago, where Mayor Rahm Emanuel has shuttered schools, handed out big corporate subsidies, blocked a financial transaction tax and pushed for cuts to city workers’ retirement benefits. He made the old corporate Democratic assumption, betting that he could easily win reelection by simply spending opponents into the ground.

No doubt, Emanuel succeeded in the latter part of that equation. With six-figure checks from financial executives, he amassed $15 million and outspent his top challenger, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, by a 12-to-1 margin. But because of a massive grassroots organizing campaign, Garcia got enough votes to force the first mayoral runoff in the city’s history. At the same time, voters added more progressive voices to the city council.

Lambasted as “Mayor 1 Percent,” Emanuel has been forced to champion more progressive policies to try to appease the Democratic base—he suddenly backed a $13 minimum wage and signed an ordinance compelling developers to pony up more cash for affordable housing. His underfinanced opponent Garcia still may lose the April 7th election, but in a city that has for decades been under the thumb of corporate Democrats’ political machine, a deeper victory for progressives has already happened.

“We’ve put every Democrat in America on notice that there’s a political price to pay for putting the demands of hedge-fund billionaires ahead of the needs of working families,” said Kristen Crowell, executive director of the grassroots Chicago group United Working Families, a sister organization of New York’s progressive Working Families Party.

As perplexing as the Democratic Party’s divide is, Crowell’s straightforward statement rings true. National Democratic politicians may not yet be hearing the message, but if they hope to hang onto power, they probably should start listening.

David Sirota is a senior writer at the International Business Times and the best-selling author of the books “Hostile Takeover,” “The Uprising” and “Back to Our Future.” Email him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

How the 1 percent always wins: “We live in a faux democracy, which is why everyone’s so cynical and nobody votes

LIBertea — Sun, 05 Apr 2015 04:29:13 GMT

How the 1 percent always wins: “We live in a faux democracy, which is why everyone’s so cynical and nobody votes”

The rich get richer, the middle class gets hollowed out. We all stay quiet. Steve Fraser explains why we allow it

Scott Timberg

Jamie Dimon, Donald Trump, David Koch (Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas/AP/Dan Hallman/Evan Agostini)

Why aren’t we getting angry about the steady shifting of treasure from the middle class to the very richest? Why haven’t the few who are vocal and visibly frustrated coalesced into a real movement? Has there ever been a time when Americans made noise about this kind of thing? These questions are at the heart of “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power” (Little, Brown), a new book by labor historian Steve Fraser.

Alternately hilarious, lucid and disturbing in its documenting of contemporary complacency, the book looks at the intense opposition to capital in the original Gilded Age and contrasts it with the silence today. It concludes discussing the 21st century versions of the Horatio Alger myth — the heroic billionaire, “the fable of the free agent” and “the folklore of limousine liberalism.” Fraser, a regular contributor to Tomdispatch.com and co-founder of The American Empire Project, spoke to us from New York.

In the historical section of your book — most of which takes place in the decades after the Civil War, as industrial capitalism and the Wall Street financiers were really getting going — I was amazed how much organized resistance, anti-plutocrat rhetoric and even violence there was from workers back then. Do most of us assume that other countries have a history of resistance, but that the U.S. has generally been more pliant?

Yes, I do think that most people have that impression. I think one reason they do is rooted in both myth and reality. The myth is of course the myth of the American Dream, that America has always provided vast opportunities for people to start over, start anew, and to move, you know, upward mobility. There’s a lot of truth to that myth. A lot of people came from impoverished circumstances from around the world and they did improve their lives or at least those of their children. So I think that encourages the idea that there probably was very little conflict in America, class against class, haves against have-nots, as compared to other places in the Western world or Western Europe.

But as a matter of fact, in terms of sheer violence — and that’s hardly the measure of resistance, but it’s one measure — the American social landscape in the late nineteenth century was far more violent, filled with violent confrontations between not only workers and their industrial employers, but also between farmers and their relationship with the major banking and agricultural machinery interests and so on. America has, I think we can all agree, always been a kind of violent culture, but class violence was typical of America to a degree in the nineteenth century that it wasn’t true, say, of Western Europe at the time.

The U.S. was founded the same year Adam Smith published “The Wealth of Nations.” It was just about the time the first factories in and around Manchester, England started billowing smoke. We assume that the U.S. is the offspring of industry and capitalism, but that’s not entirely true. There are other impulses and other kinds of lineages in the American identity and American history.

Yes. First of all, America begins as an underdeveloped country when Adam Smith writes his book. The country revolts and a few years later wins its revolution and begins its life as an independent nation. It’s an underdeveloped, agrarian, non-industrial nation. There’s a handful of factories that begin around the turn of the nineteenth century like in Lowell, Massachusetts. But America is mainly an agrarian place, and a very egalitarian place. I don’t mean merely in credo and belief, which it was, but also in the condition of its population.

What Jefferson, for example, feared was that America might, if it weren’t careful, become like Europe already was, that is to say a society of haves and have-nots, of urban squalor, of great inequalities and so on. So his hope for America is premised on the notion that there’s this vast territorial landscape out there which can provide independent homesteads for Americans so that they won’t become slavish proletarians, they won’t become dependent. So the vision of America in the early years, even up to the Civil War, is one that does not necessarily entail urbanism, industrialism, or the kinds of social class inequalities that were already becoming apparent in Europe. But that prospect was feared by people like Jefferson and others.

The main argument of your book is that during the long nineteenth century and especially the first Gilded Age, there was significant resistance to capitalism, to industry, to inequality, and that somehow that faded away when the second Gilded Age kicked in more recently. I wonder if it seems important that in the nineteenth century, Americans still had a memory of an agrarian or artisan kind of world that had been washed away by capitalism, but the psychology of those earlier forms weren’t completely gone. By contrast, by the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, we simply don’t have any kind of memory of what a pre-capitalist world was like. Is that significant?

Yes, to me it’s vitally significant to the argument of my book. It’s more than memory. What we need to realize is that because America was for many decades a pre-industrial society, even while it was beginning the process of industrialization, people weren’t really remembering there were in fact independent farmers, there were in fact handy craftsmen and artisans, there were in fact small businessmen serving local economies, there were in fact immigrant peasants from Southern, Eastern Europe who knew a kind of village life that was quite different from the world that they were about to enter in America.

The argument in my book is that one of the reasons, perhaps the principal reason, why there is such concerted resistance to capitalism tout court, this new way of life — we need to remember than that it was a new way of life — was because on the one hand it threatened to destroy their older forms of existence, or as you put it their traditions and memories they had of those older ways of life, moral economies, one not entirely subject to the marketplace, one that lent them a certain independence which proletarianization deprived them of; they were threatened with a kind of existential extinction.

And on the other hand, they knew that capitalism was not a fate, was not an inevitability, was not the way the world was necessarily meant to be because they had either lived or had memories or had parents or grandparents who had kin networks abroad who were living very differently. That doesn’t mean that they were enjoying their former lives. I don’t mean that those lives were a kind of paradise, but it gave them a measuring rod to say, wait a second now, this world of the market, of sweatshop labor, of 12-hour days in a steel mill, or down in a coal mine, of child labor, of all those kinds of things, this is not necessarily the way the world needs to be. So it gave them a kind of implicit indictment of that capitalism.

And as you put it the vanishing of those memories and those actual ways of life meant that the horizon about what was possible and not possible in the late twentieth century began to close in on us, where we began to feel, well, the market is the only real way to organize.

Those rebels and agitators in the first Gilded Age that you write about, were they opposed to capitalism itself and able to articulate some kind of alternative, or were they upset about some set of local abuses that they hoped to reform or overturn?

I think the answer is both. They were enormously aroused by all kinds of very specific grievances. For instance, the eight-hour day movement which comes to life in 1886 and sweeps across the country is on the one hand a movement which wants to reduce the hours of industrial labor — and that’s a very practical measure. But the eight-hour day movement was simultaneously an indictment of the whole industrial order, which didn’t seem able to grant that kind of civilized reform, that instead insisted that labor had to earn its keep in whatever the employer demanded. So that you had people who were aroused and radical both because of very specific grievances, whether it was child labor, or being evicted from their family farm out on the Great Plains, or working down in a coal mine and having their leg amputated — the rate of industrial accidents in America was enormous — but at the same time, they saw all these things in a more general framework.

And it isn’t just radicals and agitators, it’s novelists and poets, preachers. The Protestant church was split down the middle. It envisioned what they used to call the Social Gospel, which was a Christian Commonwealth. The Knights of Labor, which was a mass labor movement talked about the cooperative commonwealth, was a new kind of society that would replace “dog-eat-dog” capitalism. There were a lot of visions. There was socialism, of course. There were a lot of different competing visions; the point is they all were all striving for something other than the market/laissez-faire/Darwinian order that they were being subjected to.

The historian Jon Wiener wrote, in his review of your book, that after the working class stopped talking about class struggle, the financial class doubled down on class struggle and began winning big. So he sees part of the issue, I think, as a failure of nerve on the part of the left and the labor movement. Do you think that’s fair to say?

Well, I think that’s a complicated question. One must always recognize, even in our own age, and certainly back during the First Gilded Age, that the element of fear, and real legitimate fear, plays a role. If you want to talk about today, the One Percent, corporate America has become powerful in part because as the country has industrialized, the wherewithal for resisting the power of organized wealth has diminished.

The unions that were formed in the nineteenth century, and of course culminating during the New Deal during the 1930s, are a pale shadow of what they once were. They used to provide a defense mechanism. Without them, it’s harder, it’s dangerous, it’s very risky. Let’s say you’re an undocumented immigrant worker, which makes up 12 million people in the American economy, at super exploitative wages. They’re working for employers who they know are violating every wage and hour law on the books. But if you’re one of those people, are you going to have the courage to stand up and report your employer? Maybe not; you’re risking deportation. So fear plays a real role in this. The National Labor Relations Act, which presumably gave people the right to organize, has steadily been whittled away by Congress over the years, and especially Republican presidents over the last 25 years. So in a variety of ways, fear is part of the picture.

To what extent is the ‘60s notion of personal freedom or liberation part of the acquiescence problem, or at least part of the fragmenting of resistance? It sort of turned into consumerism, didn’t it?

I think it did. I think there was, pardon the expression, a dialectic at work. What began as a kind of liberatory impulse, and, for instance in the case of feminism, identified the family and the patriarchal family in particular as the site of a very intimate, personal oppression, and that one had to open up this private zone to private scrutiny in order to liberate women. And the whole counter-culture, which began to talk about personal liberation, some of which defied the kind of repressiveness and inhibition that had characterized life up until then, came into the hands of corporate America as a way of mining that psyche through the avenues of consumer culture.

So private rather than social emancipation becomes the goal, and you can achieve that emancipation in a thousand ways in the marketplace. You can achieve it in your fantasy life. You can achieve it in a variety of ways; corporate America became so sensitive to it that it was even prepared to make fun of itself if it could find a niche market that would buy into that ironic advertising. All corporate America cares about — they’re amoral, I don’t mean anti-moral, just amoral — all that matters is the bottom line.

What role did the Reagan revolution play in all this, the social-cultural changes like money worship, celebrity worship, that sort of thing?

Well, I think the Reagan era is obviously crucial. It’s a turning point in the history of resistance turning into acquiescence. Part of that is what you allude to, just to be very practical-minded about it; the administration practically begins with the breaking of the air-traffic controller strike, which was the signal to all of industrial and corporate America that it was open warfare on unions, kind of the green light to do that.

And of course there was this transvaluation of values. You had a free market during the era of the New Deal that had been constrained by various social and state inhibitions. Under Reagan, we begin to buy into the notion that freedom and the free market are the same thing, and that the way to unleash that freedom is to deregulate the whole economic arena, which gave license to… we began to worship the big financiers, the titans of finance, the Michael Milkens, the Carl Icahns, the Ivan Boeskys, the “greed is good” world, because they became the paragons. They became the pioneers of a new kind of market freedom. And we began to treat them, and the media began to treat them, as kind of savants, as gurus, as heroes, which was very different from the way the culture had treated them a hundred years earlier.

How significant or consequential, at least in the medium run, was the Occupy movement? It seems the Tea Party is the more powerful of the populist (or faux populist) movements that popped up.

There’s no question the Tea Party, whatever else one might say about it, must be credited with being durable, having sustained itself over an extended period of time, engaged in national organization. I don’t think it’s entirely a creature of a handful of dynastic businessmen. I think it’s more deeply rooted than that.

Occupy Wall Street was more ephemeral. On the other hand, it was enormously important. My book opens with a reference to OWS because although organizationally it vanished rather quickly, it did, as people said at the time, change the conversation, at least for awhile. Suddenly, what had been apparent for decades, that is to say the dominance of the “1 percent,” the gross distribution of wealth and income and political power in the country suddenly became, thanks to Occupy (it’s not entirely to Occupy) a topic of national, and for that matter international, conversation and debate. It was a rather ephemeral movement without deep roots among working people, which I argue is the only way, not that it’s easy to have done that. I don’t blame Occupy for not having done that. It’s not easy. But I think the only way Occupy could have grown was to find avenues into work-a-day America where that message also resonated.

We live in a kind of faux democracy right now, which is why everyone’s so cynical and nobody votes. We’re only interested in politics as a form of personal gossip, because the system seems to be immune to popular sentiment about a variety of things. I think the feeling of widespread hostility to the business and financial community is clear after the crash of 2008. But it never registered inside these political parties because they’re so beholden to those same corporate financial interests.

One form of acquiescence is a kind of abdication: Why bother? Nothing’s going to change. Even though polls will again and again show that people have various sentiments in favor of extending social welfare, universal health care and so on and so forth, none of this ever makes its way into the halls of Congress.

But anyway, to get back to your point, I think Occupy may have been a straw in the wind. Even if it didn’t itself persevere, there are other signs of restiveness in the country which I briefly allude to in my book, which may in the years ahead give rebirth to the kind of anti-capitalism that I talk about in the nineteenth century.

These are small signs. But I think one of the bigger ones is the environmental movement. After all, the environmental movement is certainly an exception to the rule that I’m laying down, that we live in an Age of Acquiescence. The environmental movement has lasted for decades. It’s grown; it’s grown in the teeth of having won very little. That might be a measure of its failure. But normally when movements fail they collapse. The environmental movement has, on the contrary, grown. I think, increasingly, people may see that capitalism, at least as presently constituted, and a sustainable environment are incompatible.

I think because there also is a kind of growing cynicism about democracy being kind of a faux democracy that people may conclude that what Mark Twain talked about in the nineteenth century of what we call today “crony capitalism” is so profoundly subverting democracy that they may have had enough. I think also this immigrant population is a volcano ready to explode. Not only do these people often have to live furtively and under the radar, but increasingly they work in an economy in which the sweatshop has become the norm, not an aberration, but the norm. Their combined need both to be recognized as citizens, as fully participating members of American society, and their super-exploitation at work may erupt sooner than people anticipate.

A counter-force to everything you’re talking about is American tradition that runs from the Horatio Alger stories to “Joe the Plumber” to Silicon Valley dreams, that I may not be wealthy now, but riches are just around the corner for me, so I need to protect their interests. How does that function in American society and does it seem to be lacking or waning these days?

I think that’s critical. I think it’s indigenous in the American make-up. It’s been here since the beginning, since the founding of the country. As I indicated earlier, it’s a promise that has been in part fulfilled over the course of the country’s history and it has enormously alluring power and it keeps reemerging in American culture and American life. For instance, in the last 20 years, before the great crash, when everybody was in love with Wall Street, it was Wall Street R Us. It wasn’t just a place where those big guys were going to get rich, but us day traders were going get rich too. We were all going to make it. And I think this notion of self-invention, self-creation, of self-reliance is a very powerful inducement to people, and contributes to this, it keeps the dream alive.

The Tea Party is a very funny movement. If you remember, they denounced the bank bailouts. I think one of the reasons they do that is they aren’t exactly fond of big business, but they are fond of business — that is to say, they want the opportunities themselves to become small and medium-sized businessmen; they value that as a way of life. But they resent the wealthy corporations and big banks that sometimes are their enemies. I think that dream of “I can make it on my own” thrives in the Tea Party, and gives it real roots. That’s what I said before; I think it’s a kind of family capitalism that gives it life in America.

The populist left from the nineteenth century was united largely by economic concerns. What passes for a North American left these days is heavily anchored in academia, and is largely oriented around race, ethnicity and gender. How does that change the picture?

In a way it’s the inverse of the subtitle of my book. What has happened since the New Deal and what I would I call the New Deal Extended in the civil rights movement and the feminist movement and so on, is that the rights revolution has spread widely and with great benefit obviously to African-Americans and to women and others. But what happened in the course of that is that the attention, the focus on organized wealth and the power of that organized wealth, has largely dropped out of the picture.

Also what happened, thanks to that rights revolution, partly in response to it, partly inherent in it, was a kind of identity politics which was understandable, but also shifted the focus away from the kinds of power blocs I’m talking about, and produced a certain kind of fragmentation. After all, the notion of identity politics is to say the primary reference group is not some broad economic class or social class, be it cultural, or racial, or gender-defined sub-groups. It’s very easy to understand where that identity politics came from. It’s also (easy) to take the measure of what it cost in terms of unifying people against the power blocs of our kind of neo-liberal, financially-driven economic world.

I wonder if you’re getting “swift-boated” yet as the book’s argument gets out there. You know, “he hates our freedom” “Fraser’s a communist,” that kind of thing?

I’ll tell you a funny story; the only one I know about is a well-known radio show that gets no call-ins, but it has a Web page. After the show the producer told me this story that the first guy to write in described me as a “another neo-Bolshevik scribbler.” I kind of like that. I did take offense at the word “another,” that he thought I was so common. But in a perverse kind of way it amused me because it was a return to a language that has gone out of existence, that language of plutocrats and class struggle and so on.

Scott Timberg, a longtime arts reporter in Los Angeles who has contributed to the New York Times, runs the blog Culture Crash. He's the author of the new book, "Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class."

Nearly At "Full Employment"? 10 Reasons Why The Unemployment Numbers Are A Massive Lie

LIBertea — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 02:29:09 GMT

On Friday, we learned that the official “unemployment rate” has fallen to 5.5 percent. Since an unemployment rate of 5 percent is considered to be “full employment” by many economists, many in the mainstream media took this as a sign that the U.S. economy has almost fully “recovered” since the last recession. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, some Federal Reserve officials believe that “the U.S. economy is already at full employment“. But how can this possibly be? It certainly does not square with reality. Personally, I know people that have been struggling with unemployment for years and that still cannot find a decent job. And I get emails from readers all the time that are heartbroken because they are suffering through extended periods of unemployment.

So what in the world is going on? How can the government be telling us that we are nearly at “full employment” when so many people can’t find work? Could it be possible that the government numbers are misleading?

It is my contention that the official “unemployment rate” has become so politicized and so manipulated that it is essentially meaningless at this point. The following are 10 reasons why…

#1 Since February 2008, the size of the U.S. population has grown by 16.8 million people, but the number of full-time jobs has actually decreased by 140,000.

#2 The percentage of working age Americans that have a job right now is still about the same as it was during the depths of the last recession. Posted below is a chart that shows how the employment-population ratio has changed since the beginning of the decade. Does this look like a full-blown “employment recovery” to you?…

#3 The primary reason for the decline in the official “unemployment rate” is the fact that the government now considers millions upon millions of long-term unemployed workers to “no longer be in the labor force”. Just check out the following numbers…

The number of Americans participating in the labor force has been on a decline for the past few years. Nearly 33 percent of the Americans above age 16 are not part of the workforce, the highest number since 1978. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report issued recently has found 92,898,000 Americans above age 16 not a part of the labor force of the country as on February 2015.

When President Obama took over the office in January 2009, nearly 80,529,000 Americans were not a part of the labor force. The number has increase by nearly 12 million over the last few years.

#4 Over the past couple of years, the labor force participation rate in this country has been hovering near mutli-decade lows…

The labor force participation rate hovered between 62.9 percent and 62.7 percent in the eleven months from April 2014 through February, and has been 62.9 percent or lower in 13 of the 17 months since October 2013.

Prior to that, the last time the rate was below 63 percent was 37 years ago, in March 1978 when it was 62.8 percent, the same rate it was in February.

#5 When you add the number of “officially unemployed” Americans (8.7 million) to the number of Americans “not in the labor force” (92.9 million), you get a grand total of 101.6 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now. Does that sound like “full employment” to you?

#6 The quality of our jobs continues to decline. Right now, only 44 percent of U.S. adults are employed for 30 or more hours each week.

#7 Millions upon millions of Americans have been forced to take part-time jobs because that is all they can find, and wages for American workers are at depressingly low levels. The following numbers come directly from the Social Security Administration…

-39 percent of American workers make less than $20,000 a year.

-52 percent of American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

-63 percent of American workers make less than $40,000 a year.

-72 percent of American workers make less than $50,000 a year.

#8 The average duration of unemployment for an unemployed worker is still about twice as long as it was just prior to the last recession.

#9 Most Americans feel as though the Obama administration has done little to nothing to help the middle class. Just consider the following poll numbers…

According to a new poll by the Pew Research Center, Americans see government policies under the Obama administration as having mostly benefited wealthy people, large corporations and financial institutions.

Seventy-two percent of respondents said government policies have done little or nothing to help the middle class, and 65 percent said they have done nothing to help the poor. Sixty-eight percent said the policies have done nothing to help small businesses.

Meanwhile, 45 percent said the policies have done a “great deal” to help large banks and financial institutions, 38 percent say they have helped large corporations, and 36 percent say they have helped the wealthy.

#10 If the unemployment rate was calculated honestly, we would all be talking about the horrific “unemployment crisis” that we were currently enduring. According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, the real unemployment rate in the United States right now is above 23 percent.

Our politicians and the mainstream media are attempting to convince us that everything is just fine.

But what they are telling us simply does not match the cold, hard reality on the streets.

And since the talking heads on television are proclaiming that we are nearly at “full employment”, that just makes millions upon millions of Americans that can’t seem to find work no matter how hard they try feel even worse than they already do.

If jobs are “easy to get”, then those that are chronically unemployment must have “something wrong” with them. That is the message that we are being given. If the mainstream media says that unemployment has gone way down, then anyone that is still unemployed must be really “lazy”, right?

When you are unemployed for an extended period of time, it can really suck the life right out of you. It can be really tempting to believe that you are viewed as a failure by your family and friends. And for the government to lie to us like this just makes things even harder.

If you are unemployed and can’t find a job right now, I want you to understand that you are caught in the midst of a long-term downward economic spiral which is going to get a lot worse.

When the government tells you that we are in a “recovery”, they are lying to you.

And when the government tells you that things are about to get a lot better, they are lying to you.

Everyone has times in their lives when they get knocked down.

The key is to always get back up and to never, ever stop fighting.

Yes, we are facing some really hard economic times. But that does not mean that your life is over. Never give up, and never give in to fear. Just do what you can with what you have today, and tomorrow get up and fight with everything that you have got.

Sheldon Adelson – The Dangerous American Oligarch Behind Benjamin Netanyahu

LIBertea — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 02:13:58 GMT

“What are we going to negotiate about? What I would say is, ‘Listen, you see that desert out there? I want to show you something,'” Adelson said at Yeshiva University. “You pick up your cellphone, and you call somewhere in Nebraska, and you say, ‘okay, let it go.’ So there’s an atomic weapon goes over — ballistic missiles — in the middle of the desert that doesn’t hurt a soul.”

Adelson continued: “Then you say, ‘See? The next one is in the middle of Tehran.’ So, we mean business. You want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position and continue with your nuclear development.

– From the Washington Post article: Adelson: Obama Should Fire Nuke to Send Message to Iran

That a handful of extraordinarily rich and powerful oligarchs as well as mega-corporations have completely hijacked the American political process is hardy news. It’s been the key topic of discussion here at Liberty Blitzkrieg and elsewhere for many years (see: New Report from Princeton and Northwestern Proves It: The U.S. is an Oligarchy).

What makes their control so effective is the use of an army of lobbyists, lawyers, Super PACs and bought and paid for politicians to do their dirty work, thus employing an opaque network of well-heeled minions created to conceal who is really pulling the strings.

Of all the commentary written about Netanyahu’s embarrassing political stunt in front of the U.S. Congress last week, the most important angle was largely overlooked. That is, it sort of represented a coming out party for the American oligarch from behind the curtain.

Sheldon Adelson, by all accounts a vile and violent sort of the worst kind, has made entirely controlling the Republican party his lifelong achievement. Additionally, and quite significantly to U.S. and Israeli citizens, Mr. Adelson has transformed himself into the puppet-master behind Benjamin Netanyahu. Just so there’s no misunderstanding about who Sheldon Adelson is, let’s revisit a post from last year titled, Inside the Mind of an Oligarch – Sheldon Adelson Proclaims “I Don’t Like Journalism”. Here’s an excerpt:

Billionaire casino mogul and conservative donor Sheldon Adelson said Sunday that the Palestinians are a made-up nation which exists solely to attempt to destroy Israel.

At the conference, which also featured top Democratic funder Haim Saban, Adelson also said Israel would not be able to survive as a democracy: “So Israel won’t be a democratic state, so what?” he asked Saban, adding that democracy, after all, is not mentioned in the Torah,and recommended that the country build a “big wall” to protect itself, saying, “I would put up a big wall around my property.”

Saban and Adelson should buy The New York Times together in an effort to bring more “balance” to the newspaper’s coverage of Israel and the Middle East, Adelson suggested to wild applause.

“I don’t like journalism,” Adelson said, highlighting what he said was the media’s insistence on focusing on the empty half of the glass.

Bill Moyers recently hit the nail on the head when it comes to Sheldon Adelson and his war catalyzing puppet, Benjamin Netanyahu. He writes:

Everything you need to know about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress Tuesday was the presence in the visitor’s gallery of one man – Sheldon Adelson.

The gambling tycoon is the Godfather of the Republican Right. The party’s presidential hopefuls line up to kiss his assets, scraping and bowing for his blessing, which when granted is bestowed with his signed checks. Data from both the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics and the Center for Public Integrity show that in the 2012 election cycle, Adelson and his wife Miriam (whose purse achieved metaphoric glory Tuesday when it fell from the gallery and hit a Democratic congressman) contributed $150 million to the GOP and its friends, including $93 million to such plutocracy-friendly super PACs as Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, the Congressional Leadership Fund, the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund, Winning Our Future (the pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC) and Restore Our Future (the pro-Mitt Romney super PAC).

Yet there’s no knowing for sure about all of the “dark money” contributed by the Adelsons – so called because it doesn’t have to be reported. Like those high-rise, multi-million dollar apartments in New York City purchased by oligarchs whose identity is hidden within perfectly legal shell organizations, dark money lets our politicians conveniently erase fingerprints left by their ink-stained (from signing all those checks) billionaire benefactors.

Adelson owns the daily Israel Hayom, a leading newspaper, as well as Makor Roshon, the daily newspaper of Israel’s Zionist religious right and NRG, a news website. He gives Israel Hayom away for free in order to promote his hardline views – the headline in the paper the day after Obama’s re-election was “The US Voted [for] Socialism.”

More important, he uses the paper to bang the drum incessantly for Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud Party, under the reign of which Israel has edged closer and closer to theocracy. As Hebrew University economist Momi Dahan put it: “De facto, the existence of a newspaper like Israel Hayom egregiously violates the law, because [Adelson] actually is providing a candidate with nearly unlimited resources.”

In fact, as Israel’s March 17 election approaches, Adelson has increased the press run of Israel Hayom’s weekend edition by 70 percent. The paper says it’s to increase circulation and advertising, but rival newspaper Ha’aretz reports, “Political sources are convinced the extra copies are less part of a business plan and more one to help Netanyahu’s re-election bid.” Just like the timing of Netanyahu’s “State of the Union” address to Congress this week was merely a coincidence, right? “I deeply regret that some perceive my being here as political,” Netanyahu told Congress. “That was never my intention.” Of course.

So Netanyahu gets the best of both of Adelson’s worlds – his powerful propaganda machine in Israel and his campaign cash here in the United States. Combined, they allow Netanyahu to usurp American foreign policy as he manipulates an obliging US Congress enamored of Adelson’s millions, pushing it further to the right on Israel and the Middle East.

There you have it: Not only is this casino mogul the unofficial head of the Republican Party in America (“he with the gold rules”), he is the uncrowned King of Israel — David with a printing press and checkbook instead of a slingshot and a stone. All of this came to the fore in Netanyahu’s speech on Tuesday: the US cannot determine its own policy in the Middle East and the majority in Congress are under the thumb of a foreign power.

Everything you need to know about Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress Tuesday was the presence in the visitor’s gallery of that man. We are hostage to his fortune.

Don’t forget the quote at the top where he suggested scaring Iran into submission by threatening to drop a nuke on Tehran. Who’s the aggressor again?

This whole thing takes on a much greater level of significance given Adelson’s near total control of the U.S. Republican party, as well as his control over Israel’s Prime Minister. The man is not only the 8th richest man in the world, he’s also a menace to civilized society, and people need to start paying a lot more attention to him.

I think the following illustration from Haaretz sums it up best:

Must Read: What Richest Americans Are After

PapaSmurf — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 22:54:44 GMT

Koch-Supporting Texas Billionaires Explain What Richest Americans Are After
They complain and complain, but can't recognize themselves in the mirror.
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet

This is rich. Some of the wealthiest Texans who attended the Koch brothers’ political donor conference last month—where participants set a goal of raising $889 million for the 2016 elections—are saying that all the Kochs really want is to end “special interests” influence in Washington.

“We attended that meeting — and we have an answer,” wrote Doug and Holly Deason of Dallas, in a Dallas Morning News column co-signed by eight other wealthy Texans. “We want Washington to do what it hasn’t done for years: work for, not against, the American people.”

Um, nice try. But if you are as wealthy and powerful as some of these Koch attendees, you are not exactly representative of the American people, whose median income was $51,939 in 2013, according to the U.S. Census.

Read More at http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/koch-supporting-texas-billionaires-explain-what-richest-americans-are-after

Does anyone need more evidence that the 1% is living in a bubble?

Looking Closer at Obama Budget Plan

PapaSmurf — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 19:47:43 GMT

Obama Budget Plan Would 'Benefit the Worst Corporate Tax Dodgers'
'This is how the rules get rigged.'
by
Nadia Prupis, staff writer

President Barack Obama's corporate tax plan does not go far enough to close wide loopholes for corporations, critics say. (Photo: Barack Obama/flickr/cc)

President Barack Obama on Monday announced a new proposal as part of his 2016 budget to tax the trillions in offshore profits made by U.S.-based multinational corporations, but critics say the plan leaves in place a system that "encourages companies to game the system to avoid U.S. taxes."

The proposal would impose a 19 percent tax on the future overseas earnings of U.S.-based companies, as well as a one-time 14 percent tax on the trillions in offshore profits that those companies hold right now. The Obama administration said revenues from the one-time tax will go toward fixing the country's crumbling infrastructure and filling in a projected gap in the Highway Trust Fund—which has suffered chronic shortfalls as revenues from fuel taxes remain unchanged since 1993 while construction costs continue to rise.

"Obama's decision to challenge international tax avoidance is laudable, but his execution leaves a lot to be desired." —Robert McIntyre, Citizens for Tax Justice

"President Barack Obama's decision to challenge international tax avoidance is laudable, but his execution leaves a lot to be desired," said Robert McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. "If companies were required to pay the same tax rate on their foreign profits as their domestic income, then they should owe 35 percent on their accumulated foreign profits, rather than the 14 percent that President Obama is proposing under his new transition tax."

"Such a low tax rate would disproportionately benefit the worst corporate tax dodgers and leave billions in tax revenue on the table that could be used to make critical public investments," McIntyre said.

MSNBC explains:

Currently, U.S. corporations only have to pay taxes on earnings when they bring the money back home, at which point they’re taxed at the full 35% corporate rate. That has led many corporations to stockpile cash overseas to avoid being taxed, sometimes delaying repatriation indefinitely.

Under Obama’s plan, future corporate earnings overseas would face a minimum tax of 19%, which corporations could then bring back to the U.S. without being taxed further.

In addition, the New York Times reports, "The president will reiterate his call for a business income tax overhaul that lowers the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent, and 25 percent for manufacturers."

James Henry, senior adviser with the Tax Justice Network, stated on Monday, "The proposal is not as bad as what Bush did in 2004," referring to a previous tax repatriation holiday, "but if you keep doing this, you in effect repeal the corporate income tax."

In 2004, a number of U.S.-based corporations repatriated their overseas profits under an amnesty provision of the American Jobs Creation Act. However, as Citizens for Tax Justice pointed out (pdf) in 2009, Congress "utterly failed" to ensure that those profits were actually used for job creation or any economic stimulus.

"A recent study found that there was no positive correlation between a company’s repatriated earnings and an increase in the permitted uses, but did find a positive correlation between the repatriation and increased repurchases of stock (effectively putting the money in the hands of the shareholders) which was NOT a permitted use under the bill," CTJ found.

According to Robert Borosage, president of the Campaign for America's Future, the 2016 plan will allow more of the same results.

"The last time [corporations] pulled this scam," Borosage wrote on Monday, "they got a huge tax break and the money was largely used for mergers and stock buybacks, hiking the bonuses of the executive suite and doing virtually nothing for jobs. Worse, more corporations decided they could benefit from the scam, and started reporting more of their profits abroad. Only small business and patriotic corporations face the nominal corporate tax rate of 35 percent."

The administration defends the one-time tax by saying it would avoid the complications of the repatriation tax. "Unlike a voluntary repatriation holiday, which the president opposes and which would lose revenue, the president’s proposed transition tax is a one-time, mandatory tax on previously untaxed foreign earnings, regardless of whether the earnings are repatriated," a White House official said Monday.

While the president's plan is preferable to existing tax loopholes, Borosage argues Obama is making the same political mistakes that punctuated budget negotiations with Republicans during his first term. "In rolling out his budget, the president said he learned that it was better to tell Americans what he thought should be done, than to compromise pre-emptively. So why not simply end deferral and tax multinational profits at the same rate as those of domestic businesses? Why give companies an incentive to move production or report profits abroad?"

Critics of the plan say large corporations, and their supporters in Congress, will be swift to take advantage of the White House position.

As Borosage notes, the proposal contained in Obama's budget "is just the opening bid. Corporate lobbyists are salivating about the bidding war that is about to take place. The president has accepted the principle of a tax holiday to pay for badly needed infrastructure spending. Now the question is simply a matter of price."

"In principle, President Obama's international corporate minimum tax is a smart move because it would no longer allow corporations to defer paying U.S. taxes until they bring those foreign profits back to the United States," said McIntyre. "In practice however, the proposed 19 percent rate is far too low and would leave in a place a system that favors international over domestic investment and encourages companies to game the system to avoid U.S. taxes."

"Its unfortunate that President Obama continues to insist on revenue-neutral corporate tax reform overall, rather than using this opportunity to call for raising revenue over the long term," McIntyre added.

Obama's budget announcement follows a separate proposal released Friday by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), which would tax corporations at 6.5 percent if they repatriated foreign profits within five years.

"This is how the rules get rigged," Borosage says. "We desperately need to rebuild America. The anti-tax lobby stops sensible tax hikes. The corporate lobby grabs the opportunity... And we wonder how the 1 percent has managed to capture virtually all of the country’s income growth, while the middle class continues to sink."
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PODEMOS' "March for Change" to Voice Discontent Over Corrupt Politics

LIBertea — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 01:30:11 GMT

A sign reads “The time is now” in Spanish as Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias gives a speech. La Veu del País Valencià (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

On the heels of leftist Syriza’s victory in Greece, Spain’s own left party Podemos garnered outstanding support at a Madrid rally attended by tens of thousands Saturday. Podemos, considered a “close ally” of Syriza, is led by former university professor Pablo Iglesias and espouses an “uncompromising message against austerity and corruption.”

The party first gained traction in last May’s European Union elections and has grown increasingly popular in a country that continues to lose faith in the traditional bipartisan system, which has proved incapable of curbing corruption and responding to the legitimate needs and desires of a suffering Spanish population.

BBC:

Podemos has surged into the lead in recent opinion polls, and says it will seek to write off part of Spain’s debt if it wins elections later this year.

Podemos says politicians should “serve the people, not private interests.” ... Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias spelt out the party’s message to the crowd.

“We want change,” he said, quoted by the Associated Press. “I know that governing is difficult but those who have serious dreams can change things.”

Protesters are parading in the same streets that over the past six years have seen many other gatherings against financial crisis cutbacks imposed by successive governments.

Read More.

Here are a few clips from the protests:

A New Progressive Era? Meet The Liberals Fighting For Control Of The Democratic Party

LIBertea — Sat, 10 Jan 2015 04:15:01 GMT

Just like the Grinch was shocked to hear that he hadn’t ruined Christmas by stealing all of the presents, Republicans seem livid that their midterm election victories haven’t given way to the broken spirit of the Democratic Party. Just the opposite, in fact. In a way, the midterms are being hailed by many in the progressive movement as a wake up call. After years of running to the center, the Democrats seem poised to finally turn left.

No serious discussion about a more liberal liberal party can take place without first mentioning the astonishing work Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has done. Her populist, anti-big business message resonates with everyone (I suspect even many conservatives) in the wake of the financial collapse. At a time when big banks and megacorporations were begging to be allowed to start doing the same risky business that led to trillions of dollars in losses before, Warren is the voice of reason. A lighthouse warning those same ships away from the craggy rocks.

Meanwhile, liberal outsiders are pushing at the Democrats to get their acts together. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is showing them what an unapolegetic liberal looks like. Watching interviews with him is like seeing the progressive Id take human form and say all the things that lesser Democrats wouldn’t dream of speaking out loud.

Here he is on CNN absolutely demolishing the kinds of right-wing talking points the show’s hosts try to slip in:

The “proud liberal” seems almost extinct in modern politics, and that’s an absolute embarrassment. After all, considering how incredibly successful President Obama’s first six years in office have been, the notion that the majority of Democrats running for office during the 2014 midterms would shy away from his record is baffling. It’s no surprise that almost all of the ones who tried to hide from the president ended up losing by wide margins. They may have appeased some moderate Republicans by not posing for a photo with the president, but forgot to give liberals any reason to come out to the polls on Election Day.

In a counter example, one Michigan politician bucked the trend and embraced Obama and defended his record. He won by a massive margin.

But if the Democratic ship is adrift, then there is opportunity to let someone else lead it. Somebody different. Progressives are hoping to seize just such an opportunity.

In a recent article by Sahil Kapur for Talking Points Memo, he notes how hard progressives have been fighting for a shot to get their voices heard:

Progressive advocates see the next two years through the prism of the coming 2016 race. They want Democrats to use their minority to lay down a sweeping populist agenda for the country ahead of the election, which could include breaking up the big banks, a major clean energy jobs bill or investments in education to let college students graduate debt free.

“Things like that will inspire people to vote,” [Progressive Change Campaign Committe co-founder Adam] Green said. “So the question is, what do we do in 2015 and 2016 toward that north star vision?”

Of course, despite the optimism, Democrats will have to struggle with an American voter who is at best apathetic towards politics in general and at worse, as we’ve seen in the midterms, bafflingly right-leaning.

But within that frustration there are signs that even the American public is warming up to the idea of a new Progressive Era. The ink is still drying on a new Gallup poll that found that an astonishing 24 percent of Americans say they identify as “liberal.” It’s a record high and one that further supports the notion that liberals are coming out from the shadows and seizing the spotlight. To use the vernacular of the times, liberals might just be “having a moment.” Now is the time for Democratic politicians to recognize it, and like their liberal forebearers, use it to make a lasting, positive change on the nation.

If the 20th century was about liberals making huge strides, only to see them whittled away in the closing decades under names like Reagan and Bush, perhaps the 21st century will watch the pendulum swing back the other way. A climb towards progress after a veritable dark ages. What a time to be alive.