By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 15th, 2012 
Chad Goldberg’s “Lessons of the Wisconsin Uprising” ignited a great deal of discussion here and on my Facebook page. There was a lot of heat. I am posting some excerpts of the high points of the debate today centered on the question of labor unions, with some additional commentary. In upcoming posts the question of electoral politics, the Democratic Party and Barack Obama will be considered. The exchanges were sharp. I hope to illuminate some key issues in hopes of moving the debate forward, inviting deliberate discussion.
On Facebook, the most heat was generated over appraisals of the union movement. Chad wrote his piece with a post Doug Henwood published in his Left Business Observer in mind, quite critical of his attack on labor.
Henwood replied:
“I have never come across such a bunch of thin-skinned, paranoid, defensive people as those in & around the labor movement, except maybe the hedge funders who were offended when Obama slipped and called them fat cats. If you criticize, you’re embracing the right. Not all are like this – I’ve gotten a lot of support for what I’ve written from rank & file teachers, laborers, Teamsters, and even one SEIU VP. They at least know that telling comforting tales would be suicidal at this point.
Also, how is the fact that 38% of union HHs voted for Walker not an indicator of union failure to educate and mobilize the membership?”
Goldberg in turn replied:
“I do not object to all criticism of labor but criticism that (1) adopts and starts from the assumptions of the right and (2) is too sweeping. To conclude that unions are an ineffective means to mobilize popular support for social justice because Walker survived a recall election is to set the bar absurdly high. He was only the third governor in U.S. history to even face a recall election. Yes, thirty-eight percent of voters in union households (not 38% of union households) voted for Walker. I’m open to constructive suggestions . . .
Read more: Heat and Light over the Wisconsin Uprising: On Unions
By Tim Rosenkranz, June 14th, 2012 
The playoffs are almost over, the road to the finals was long, there were upsets and defining moments, but in the end the two favorites came through. They just had the most resources and the best game-plans. The two finalists will now battle it out. Many experts expect a tight series, which will probably go down to the wire. There will be a winner and a loser, there will be euphoria and disappointment. In the end the winner will take home the trophy, the loser will regroup, switch players, adjust tactics and get ready for the next season – there is always another season.
Unfortunately, I am here neither talking about the NBA nor the NFL, neither basketball glory nor football fortunes – I am describing the US-Presidential elections that will be decided in November between President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney, between the Democrats and Republicans, the Red and Blue teams. Whatever form of media we choose today, the inflationary use of sport rhetoric in the coverage of politics has become hard to ignore. It is quite fascinating how similar politics and sports have become in the 24-hour news-cycle: Analysts speak of the “endgame” or “gameplan,” compare debate schedules to seasons or playoff-series, or they announce “win-or-go-home” states in Republican primaries. Exemplifying this overlap: In Martin Bashir’s show on MSNBC, analysts were discussing the ‘bracketology’ of March Madness in the Republican Primary.
One might argue that this stylistic closeness in coverage is only logical, since both, sports and electoral politics, are competitions. So what is the problem in mixing rhetoric? The problem is that we might lose the essential function of politics if we talk about it like sports, because sports are a specific form of competitive activity. In sports the competition is the end in itself, while in politics it should just be the means. The cultural critiques of the early Frankfurt School, especially Theodor Adorno in his analysis of the “Culture Industry,” already singled out sports as stylized forms . . .
Read more: Sports in Politics?
By Daniyal Khan, June 12th, 2012 
“Do you think it matters, Daniyal? Do you think anybody cares about your senior project? All that matters is the people around you, and your senior project doesn’t make a difference to anyone.”
All I could do was to look at my friend with a blank expression, completely stunned and humbled. These words weren’t spoken with the least bit of aggression, as one might think. Rather, they were delivered with a straight, honest face and in a soft-spoken manner, and still managed to convey all the seriousness in the world. The words struck me more so for two reasons. Firstly, I consider my undergraduate senior thesis to be the culmination and high-point of a grueling intellectual journey undertaken over five years. Secondly, my project is dedicated to my friends because they have often been my most ardent supporters as well as my harshest critics during this journey. Yet, there she was, a friend mind you, effortlessly reducing my best academic work to a heap of worthless trash!
In retrospect, her attitude towards a piece of academic writing and a person who aspires to be an academic was not surprising at all. Current opinion on the value and worth of the institutional home of the academic — the university — is far from being conclusively positive. My friend had recently experienced and witnessed some of the worst tendencies of academia at a conference at which she presented a paper. Rather than asking a question about the presentation, a philosophy instructor in the audience had chosen to speak to my friend in a patronizing manner, suggesting that her interest in her chosen subject of inquiry was worrisome, thinking that it was unhealthy for a girl of her age.
Thus, understanding the source of her disdain towards my project was not difficult. Academics and university professors aren’t always worthy role-models, to say the least. Many people I’ve spoken to insist that academics don’t really do anything, just talk; and you can bet there’s going to be a lot of self-serving conversation (at academic conferences, for example, not to say that there aren’t constructive conferences). No wonder academics are often . . .
Read more: Academia: Reflections of an Undergraduate Student in Pakistan
By Vince Carducci, June 11th, 2012 
The Cass Corridor art movement is Detroit’s aesthetic undead. Like a zombie rising up from the earth, it keeps coming back no matter how many times you try to kill it. And not unlike a George Romero B-grade movie, in some respects it’s understandable why it continues to hold our fascination. It reflects a place and time of creative foment — the slum area just south of the Wayne State University campus in the mid-1960s to late 1970s — when art in Detroit appeared to be serious business indeed.
The Detroit art world was in fact pretty robust then. Artists were in their studios hard at work (and in the off-hours even harder at play), a small but intrepid band of collectors were supporting the artists’ production, and both of the daily newspapers’ full-time art critics (imagine that!) were conceptually connecting the dots and documenting it all. (Side note: My first encounter with the Cass Corridor came as a teenager in the suburbs reading Joy Hakanson Colby’s multipage full-color spread on the scene in the now-defunct Detroit News Sunday Magazine.) The whole thing was capped off with a blockbuster exhibition mounted by the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1980 titled: “Kick Out the Jams: Detroit’s Cass Corridor, 1963-1977.” Legends grew up around the major players that echo to this day.
One of the caretakers of the Cass Corridor legacy is Dennis Alan Nawrocki, an art historian and curator who was there for a good piece of the action and who from time to time has come forward to draw attention to Detroit’s aesthetic heyday. The most recent iteration is currently on view at N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art in the area now known as the Sugar Hill Historic District in Midtown. The show raises some timely and important questions, and Nawrocki and gallery director George N’Namdi deserve credit for mounting it.
The show is titled “Menage a Detroit: Three Generations of Detroit Expressionistic Art, 1970-2012.” As the title suggests, . . .
Read more: Specters of the Cass Corridor @ N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art in Detroit
By Chad Alan Goldberg, June 8th, 2012 
I want to take this opportunity to respond to two recent blog posts which reflect upon the usefulness of electoral politics in the wake of the Wisconsin recall election: one by Jeffrey Goldfarb (“On Wisconsin,” June 6, 2012) and the other by Doug Henwood (“Walker’s Victory, Un-Sugar-Coated”). I am in basic agreement with Jeff Goldfarb’s main points, though I have a few of my own to add. With Doug Henwood, I am in strong disagreement.
Elections matter, as Jeff Goldfarb argues, and not just presidential elections. Elections are what enabled Republicans to gain power in state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010. Their electoral success in Wisconsin is what empowered them to legislate a radical assault on labor and public services there. Unless they are dislodged from power through elections, they will continue to use their power in familiar ways. But ironically, even as the right demonstrates the effectiveness of electoral politics, some radicals are now arguing that the left should abandon elections.
Following Walker’s victory on Tuesday, a longtime friend of mine wrote that Wisconsin’s unions should have organized a general strike instead of fighting Walkerism by means of elections. This is almost surely an erroneous conclusion. Exit polls showed that 38 percent of voters from union households voted for Walker in the recall election, suggesting that solidarity was neither broad nor deep enough to pull off a general strike. Moreover, rather than forcing a repeal of Walker’s anti-union legislation, a strike in Wisconsin would more likely have ended like the 1981 PATCO strike, another iconic instance of government union-busting that reportedly inspired Walker. I do not oppose strikes and other forms of disruptive protest under all circumstances; I only insist that anyone who cares about the consequences of their actions must use these methods intelligently. Their effectiveness depends on the ability of protesters to surmount a host of practical obstacles, well documented in sociological studies of social movements, including the likelihood of severe . . .
Read more: Lessons of the Wisconsin Uprising
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 6th, 2012 
The people have spoken, and they have decided that “fat cat teachers,” and not greed gone wild on Wall Street and beyond, are the source of their problems. A deep disappointment. A defeat. This was my initial response to the results of the special recall election in Wisconsin.
I noticed a Facebook post blaming Obama and the Democratic Party. They betrayed the grassroots. He who engages in a crazy militaristic foreign policy killing innocents abroad was denounced. This is irrational, self-defeating and irresponsible. Politics is about alternatives, and the direction the country would go if it follows Wisconsin’s lead last night is profoundly problematic. There is a deep seeded problem in our political culture that must be addressed at the grassroots and in the Democratic Party.
Big money surely played a role, as John Nichols at the Nation quickly declared, reflecting on whether people’s power can overcome money power. But something more fundamental is at issue. How the broad public understands the problems of our times. Somehow in Wisconsin, at least last night, the Tea Party’s diagnosis of our problems made more sense than the view of those engaged in and inspired by Occupy Wall Street. This was my first reaction this morning.
This afternoon I feel a bit less alarmed, though still deeply concerned. There is considerable evidence that the campaign itself made a difference. With the 7 to 1 spending advantage of the Republicans, many Wisconsinites seemed to be critical of the idea of the recall absent major malfeasance in office. They, along with Walker’s most passionate supporters, prevailed. The Democrats were not as united as they needed to be. Their message was muddled. Yet, despite this, in fact, there was a progressive advance. The Democrats took control of the State Senate. Governor Walker won’t be able to count on the rubber-stamp approval of his proposals anymore.
And oddly polls indicate that if the election were held today, Obama would win in Wisconsin . . .
Read more: On Wisconsin
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 4th, 2012 
The jobs report on Friday was bad, as David Howell analyzed here. This immediately was interpreted across the board as good news for Mitt Romney and his party, bad news for President Obama and his. It’s the economy stupid, and bad news about employment means that Obama’s chance for reelection has declined precipitously. And things are worse then that. It’s now or never. It is in the summer that the public’s perception of the economy is locked in for Election Day. Even if things improve in the fall, there won’t be enough lead-time to change the public’s perception.
I know that this is based on solid evidence. Considerable scholarly research has demonstrated the strong correlation between the state of the economy and election results. But the way this research has been directly applied in daily political commentary is troubling, especially because it can become a political factor itself. As the “Thomas Theorem” posits: If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. I add, especially when they are doing the defining on television.
This concerns me as a scholar and as a partisan. As a scholar, I worry about the philosophic anthropology of this. The voting public is being depicted as simpletons, not capable of critical thought, of the most basic examination of the facts. There is a kind of economic determinism involved and the determinism is quite mechanical. People vote their pocketbooks and they don’t think critically about it. They don’t wonder about the causes of their economic woes and just vote the bums out. It amazes me how in the same broadcasts talking heads suggest both that the job numbers are a result of long-term trends beyond the control of the President and that Obama’s chances of victory have greatly diminished because of the state of the economy as indicated by the latest job report. They propose a simple Pavlovian stimulus and response vision of voters, . . .
Read more: It’s More Than the Economy, Stupid
By David Howell, June 1st, 2012 
In this morning’s press release on the employment numbers for May, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ lead was “no change”: non-farm employment “changed little (+69,000)” and “the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 8.2%.” But little change in a severely depressed labor market is very bad news for workers. Even worse news for the Obama Administration is that the labor market so far in 2012 shows no sign of the turnaround he needs.
While it’s true that the increase in employment of 69,000 was not much below April’s increase of 77,000, it was 143,000 in March and higher than that in February. The unemployment rate’s increase from 8.1% to 8.2% can be viewed as essentially unchanged because it’s small, but if these figures hold up, the data still show 220,000 more unemployed than the month before.
Unfortunately, this bad news is likely to hold up because the same trends appear across lots of related indicators: the recently unemployed (less than 5 weeks) increased from 2.54 to 2.58 million; seasonally adjusted initial unemployment insurance claims rose by 10,000 (to 383,000, about where it has been stuck for the last 6 months despite the tightening of eligibility requirements by many States); the long-term unemployment rate (27+ weeks) increased quite substantially, from 5.1 to 5.4 million), as did the median duration of unemployment (from 19.4 to 20.1 weeks). Significantly, the rate of those working part-time but want a full-time job also increased, from 7.8 to 8.1 million. And to top it off, average hourly pay for non-supervisory workers has been flat at $19.70 (up 3 cents from March).
The problem, of course, is that while private sector employers have not been hiring at a pace that offsets the massive job destruction of 2008-10, austerity politics is actually leading to absolute reductions in government employment, and at an accelerating rate. Obama is in a tough spot, since even if employment picks up dramatically, the unemployment rate could continue to increase as millions of discouraged workers re-enter the labor force.
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