Why Won’t You Rubes Get Excited About Cory Booker

By David Shankbone (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

[Update below. 8-28-13]

LEAVE CORY BOOKER ALOOOOOOOONE!!!!

Molly Ball is not impressed with “liberal” critics of Cory Booker. (And Paul Waldman agrees with her.)

“Cory Booker is not yet a senator,” Ball warns,”but many on the left have already made up their minds that the onetime Democratic wunderkind is a sellout.” I don’t think anyone thinks Booker is a sellout, which implies that someone was on the side of right and justice and then lost their way. If you want to boil it down to a phrase, ‘bought and paid for’ would be far closed to the truth than ‘sellout’. The attacks are largely a claim that he’s been motivated by ambition and support for the wealthy from the get go.  Progressive criticism of Booker is nothing new. It’s also odd to suggest that people are supposed to wait to criticize someone who’s been on the national stage for a while now, is running for Senate, and who has received effusive praise from many quarters all along. I do admit that I don’t understand the rules of when it’s appropriate to criticize Democratic politicians–not while we’re passing this policy, not before a presidential election, the midterms are coming. Somehow it’s always the wrong time.

If only there was a time when hippie punching was verboten! Even for a day.

Deep in the Heart of Texas: The AFL-CIO Looks South

Josh Eidelson has a piece about the AFL-CIO “exploring new investments in alternative labor organizing and a multi-union effort to transform Texas.”  And that is good news.  While there has been so much talk about the possibility of a major electoral shift in Texas, there hasn’t been much talk about an opening for labor.  But I agree, based on what I can see from here, and what I’ve heard from those on the ground, that Texas could be an opportunity if the resources were there and an aggressive multi-union strategy.  And that appears to be what we’re talking about here: “Becker also told The Nation that the AFL-CIO plans to support an ambitious multi-union effort to organize in Texas.” That’s AFL-CIO General Counsel Craig Becker, whose leading the “Initiative on the Future of Worker Representation” to come up with ideas to be discussed at the federation’s convention.

There is also talk of increasing support for alt-labor groups, along the lines of OUR Wall Mart or Working America.

The Market Two-Step

It is one of the neoliberal commandments that innovation in markets can always rectify any perceived problems thrown up by markets in the first place. Thus, whenever opponents on the nominal left have sought to ameliorate some perceived political problem through direct regulation or taxation, the Russian doll of the [neoliberal] thought collective quickly roused itself, mobilized to invent and promote some new market device to supposedly achieve the ‘same’ result. But what has often been overlooked is that, once the stipulated market solution becomes established as a live policy option, the very same Russian doll then also rapidly produces a harsh critique of that specific market device, usually along the lines that it insufficiently respects full market efficiency. This seemingly irrational trashing of neoliberal policy device that had earlier been emitted from the bowls of the [neoliberal thought collective] is not evidence of an unfortunate propensity for self-subversion or unfocused rage against government, but instead an amazingly effective tactic for shifting the universe of political possibility further to the right.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste