On Labor Day

Today is Labor Day, when America celebrates its workers by giving them a day off from labor, but we thought we’d sit down and write something about it anyway.

Some say Labor Day is intended to celebrate the labor union movement, but they’ve always struck us as a bunch of pinkos, and here in the proudly right-to-work state of Kansas we’ve never seen it that way. Some of the workers at the local aircraft factories gather down at the Machinists’ Hall on the south side to make a big deal about it, and we hope they enjoy their hot dogs and beer and end-of-the-summer picnic as much as the rest of us, as they’re a good bunch of guys and gals by and large, and they’re even inclined to vote Republican when their gun rights or some other irksome sort of government busybody-ness is seen to be at stake, but we are nonetheless are inclined to justify our day of idleness by thus honoring all those who labor and are heavy-burdened, regardless of whether their employment is bargained collectively or by the choice of a free-born individual. These days only 6.6 percent of the private sector workforce is unionized, far down from from a mid-’50s peak of 35 percent, and gradually moving further downward with each passing Labor Day, and the dwindling crowds down at the Machinists’ Hall reflect that objective fact, and only those hidebound types who still swell up with tears every time they hear Joan Baez singing “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” and of course the people that Obama administration appointed by hook and crook to the National Labor Relations Board and the rest of the federal bureaucracy, seem to care.

The latest jobs report suggests that this overwhelmingly non-unionized sector of the country isn’t faring very well, with the official unemployment rate dropping to an almost respectable 5.1 percent but the real rate that includes those who aren’t even bothering to fill out applications anymore at more alarming 10 or more percents, as even the self-described socialist and sudden Democratic Party presidential front-runner Sen. Bernie Sanders admits, and the growth in wages has barely kept apace a similarly suspiciously low inflation rate, but few think that a lack of union meddling is the culprit. Wichita isn’t so bad off as Detroit, which had a lot more hot dog-eaters and beer-drinkers at the United Auto Workers’ Labor Day picnics than the Machinists’ could ever draw around here, and most of us around here will assume that it not entirely coincidental. Whatever problems the American economy confronts, and there seems to be an endless supply of them at the moment, union goons and work stoppages and regulatory schemes that don’t take into account that increased employment compensation must follow increased productivity are not likely to prove satisfactory solutions.

Meanwhile, over in the more rapidly expanding public sector, union membership is still stuck in that Eisenhower-era Golden Age achievement of 35 percent. They’re plenty powerful enough to warm the soul of the late Joe Hill, too, and their members enjoy more compensation and job security and perquisites than their more largely non-unionized compatriots in the private sector. This does provide an argument for private-sector unionism, we suppose, but we can hope that people committed to careers with companies that do enjoy such protections from ruthless competition would be susceptible to the counter-argument that the public sector unions have grown too powerful and become a drag on the overall economy. We’re still hoping that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will get his due credit for taking on the public sector unions in his state, and surviving their brutal reprisals, but for now the latest Donald Trump reality show is getting higher ratings.

Better, then, to hoist a Labor Day beer to the average workingman and the average working woman. We mean that “working woman” in the most respectful way, of course, and to those who are offended we offer our most sincere apologies and our most heartfelt assurances that we only meant to be inclusive. It is altogether fitting and proper, as Abraham Lincoln might have said, that as a nation we take a day off to honor the labor that would otherwise be done. In the third chapter of Genesis we learn that work is a curse that God placed on Adam and his descendants, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground,” in the third chapter of Colossians it is described as a blessing, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not human masters,” and our long experience of work suggests that both of these seemingly contradictory notions are true. Those who endure work’s burdens and exhilarate in its joys therefore deserve that moment of reflection and swig of beer.

We’ve got some seafood and steak that we’ll put on a tiny little charcoal grill in the backyard, and we’ll do our annual playing of Merle Haggard and the Strangers wailing those “Workin’ Man Blues.” It’s a big job just gettin’ by with nine kids and a wife, as the song explains, “but I’ve been a workin’ man dang near all my life, and I’ll keep on workin’, as long as my two hands are fit to use. I’ll drink a little beer in a tavern, and cry a little bit of these workin’ man blues.” There’s a heroic guitar solo by James Burton that seems to celebrate the satisfactions of a workin’ man’s life, and Merle’s whisky-smooth vocals sum up its miseries, and there’s some politically incorrect posturing about welfare, and no mention of unions. That song and Labor Day always make us happy to be Americans, so today we can only say, “Hey, hey, the workin’ man, a workin’ man like me.”

— Bud Norman

The Fun of the Free Trade Fiasco

As much as we favor free trade, and would like to see more of it with most of the advanced Asian economies, we must admit it’s been fun watching President Barack Obama’s proposed Trans Pacific Partnership go down in flames. Even on one of the rare occasions when he seems to have the right idea, the president’s tendency to insult rather than argue with opponents, his secretiveness and opacity, his long record of being untrustworthy, his lack of legislative experience and personal relationships, and the rest of his usual leadership flaws are on such conspicuous display that even the Democrats are grousing about it.

This time around it’s the Democrats who are the targets of the president’s insults, so they’re mostly grousing about that. Longtime Democratic operative Brent Budowsky writes in The Observer that he has “never seen any president of either party insult so many members of his own party’s base and members of the House and Senate as Mr. Obama has in his weeks of tirades against liberals on trade,” and adds that “Mr. Obama’s tirades on trade have included accusations that these liberal Democrats are ignorant about trade policy, insincere when offering their opinions, motivated by politics and not the national interest, and backward looking toward the past.” We can’t recall Budowsky objecting when the president was saying Republicans want dirty air and dirty water, and telling them to “sit in the back,” or making countless similar accusations and slurs, but we’re pleased that he has belatedly come to the conclusion that  such invective is not presidential.

Nor is it very persuasive, judging by the president’s apparent inability to insult members of either party into line over the past four years or so, and even in the case of the Democrats it’s not at all accurate. Loathe as we are to defend Democrats, we’ll concede that most of the ones in the House and Senate have some familiarity with the arguments about free trade, even if they’ve reached what we consider the wrong conclusions, and we don’t doubt they’re all too sincere about the wrong things they say, and to whatever extent they have political motivations for opposing Obama we can only assume it is because they’ve wrongly concluded that a majority of their constituents and unionized donors will not benefit from free trade, and we actually would prefer that Democrats occasionally look backward to the past to see what has and hasn’t worked. Such well-intentioned stupidity should be met with reasoned and respectful argument rather than gratuitous ad hominem insults, but well-intentioned Republicans with better ideas have already learned that this is not the president’s style.

Irksome as the chore might be, we must also say in the Democrats’ defense that they’re right to complain about the president’s unwillingness to publicly divulge any of the details of the deal that he’s asking for fast-track approval to negotiate. The Democrats were willing to vote for Obamacare in order to find out what’s in it, a decision that many current and especially former members of Congress have come to regret, but this is about free trade rather than expensively and inefficiently bureaucratized health care so they’re not keen about the general idea in the first place, and thus we can hardly blame them for wanting a look at the fine print. We’re disappointed that even the most zealously pro-free trade Republicans aren’t just as skeptical, given the administration’s negotiations with Iran, and the very real possibility that Obama is motivated by western colonial guilt and has some sort of lopsided reparations deal in mind, and the noteworthy development that even Democrats no longer trust the guy, and so we find ourselves with most strange bedfellows on this issue.

A smoother presidential operator, armed with the unaccountable support of most of the opposition party, could probably prevail by taking a solid case to the American and pulling some parliamentary tricks and calling in some hard-earned favors from reluctant congressional allies, but both parties and even the press have by now figured out that’s not the president’s style. The president’s preferred style of insults and secrecy and demands that he be trusted invariably hardens the opposition, whether Republican or Democratic, and it seems likely to doom any chance of a good free trade agreement with most of the advanced economies of Asia, which would be great boon to the American economy, but we do admit it’s been great fun watching it nonetheless.

There’s always the possibility that the deal might be be a bad one, after all, so the missed opportunity of a good one is well worth the spectacle of the Democratic infighting. We note that the aforementioned Budowsky is especially insulted by the president’s especially pointed insults to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, “the most nationally respected liberal leader in American politics,” and that the apparently still-existing National Organization for Women is grousing that the president’s criticisms are due to “sexism,” and that a smart fellow over at the right-wing Federalist has looked at the Democrats and concluded that “This Is Elizabeth Warren’s Party Now,” so it is comforting to contemplate that Obama remains anathema to the right and is no longer the most nationally respected figure of his party on the left and is therefor the lamest of ducks. It is not comforting to think that the Democratic party has lurched even further to the left during the Obama administration, but the defeat of the Trans Pacific Partnership will leave Obama and all the Democrats without any significant legislative achievement on the economy since Dodd-Frank and the Stimulus Package and Obamacare, none of which are well-remembered, and those Iran negotiations and that Israeli-Palestine “peace process” and the “re-set” with Russia aren’t likely to yield anything worth bragging about on the foreign policy front, so one can only hope that the next administration will be more likely to come up with the best deal.

In the meantime we’ll cope with the sluggish economy, and hope for the best, and enjoy the spectacle of Democrats enduring those presidential insults.

— Bud Norman

The Cities Farther to West and Further to the Right

The Wichita Wingnuts baseball team has a wide lead in its Double-A American Association division, the Wichita State University Wheatshockers basketball squad will likely be ranked among the top 10 or so teams in the National Collegiate Athletic Association when the pre-season polls come out, and despite everything the Wichita unemployment rate is a bit below the national average, so our civic pride is holding up pretty well these days. Still, we were a bit embarrassed to learn that we are only the 17th most conservative city in the country.

This alarmingly low ranking comes from no less an authority than The Economist, a very high-brow and oh-so-Tory publication from England that we have come trust. We have no idea how they compiled these rankings, conservatism being a rather hard-to-define and even harder-to-quantify concept, but the list does seem plausible. Coming in at the coveted number one spot is Mesa, Arizona, and our limited experience of the city suggests that it’s pretty darned conservative. There seem to be a lot of military veterans there, which does wonders for a community’s conservatism, and it seems fairly affluent, which is another good sign. Arizona is also the home of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, peace be upon him, and they clearly have an enviable number of wised-up old folks and a paucity of tattooed hippie freaks, so we won’t begrudge them the distinction.

Coming in at number two is Oklahoma City, a city we know well, as it is our ancestral hometown, and we think that if anything it is underrated. As recently as our grandfathers’ Dust Bowl days it was a yellow dog Democrat city in a yellow dog Democrat state, but as the party has moved away from the ferociously church-going and defiantly individualistic Okies the city and state have become even more Republican than even Wichita and Kansas, which have been solidly Republican since the Bleeding Kansas days when those slave-owning Democrats were slaughtering the local abolitionists. We still have plenty of beloved kinfolk in the Oklahoma City area, even if most of them have fled north to the Mesa-like suburbs, and will humbly acknowledge the more conservative nature of their communities.

Virginia Beach, which of course is in Virginia, and Colorado Springs, which of course is in Colorado, took the next two spots. Both are also rife with military veterans, sailors in the former case and airmen in the latter, and we are glad to see them ranked so high even at the expense of Wichita. Virginia and Colorado are both “purple,” prone to vote for either Republicans or Democrats in presidential elections, and it’s good to see some solid outposts of resistance in these crucial states. Jacksonville, Florida, is next up, and we don’t know what to make of that. Our only experience of the city was on an extended hitch-hike, which involves a hard-luck fellow we encountered under a bridge during a rainstorm outside Lakeland, and is too involved to allow re-telling here, but suffice to say we were more struck by the cacophony of different languages and the cosmopolitan feel of the dock areas than the city’s conservatism. Arlington, Texas, was next, and although there’s a distinctly George W. Bush aura to the city our most vivid memory of it was a bachelor party at the most elaborate and upscale strip bar we’d ever encountered. Anaheim, California, ranked seventh, making it an essential outpost of Republicanism in a Democratic state, and we are therefore proud to report that a brother of ours stranded in southern California is rooting for the Angels of Anaheim rather than the Dodgers of very liberal Los Angeles.

Omaha, Nebraska, comes in next, and despite our affection for The Economist we must object. The University of Nebraska Cornhuskers have abandoned the Big 12, the Creighton University Bluejays have split the Missouri Valley Conference, Omaha is the hometown of the notorious crony capitalist Warren Buffet, and we will never concede they are more conservative than Wichita. Tulsa, Oklahoma, is right behind, and we have mixed feelings about that. It’s one of those sui generis towns you have to experience first-hand, a strange and always enjoyable mix of Christianity and capitalism and criminality, but we’re not quite sure that the home of Cain’s Ballroom and Hot Lips Page and the Gap Band can ever be quite so conservative as our town. Then there’s Aurora, Colorado, another important bloc of votes in that purple state, and a nice a place to visit, and Anchorage, Alaska, which we suspect is ranked so high because the population is 95 percent single white males and only 5 percent exhausted women. Fresno, California, adds a few more votes against that state’s lopsided Democratic majority at number 13, Corpus Christi and San Antonio add to Texas’ lopsided Republican majority at numbers 14 and 15, and Nashville, Tennessee, also edges out Wichita, probably on the strength of its reputation as the capital of country music.

All of these are fine cities, but a certain chauvinism still resents seeing them considered more conservative than Wichita. Strange, too, to come in just head of Las Vegas, Nevada, also known as “Sin City.” If we could just trade a few of our hometown hipsters and dues-paying machinists for a couple of those grizzled old veterans in the military towns we’re sure we’d move up on the chart, and we also blame the trade unionism of the local aircraft plants and the subversive effect of a state university. Even so, we’re plum prairie proud to be so far ahead of the likes of Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Los Angeles and San Franscico, California, and Washington, D.C. We’ve spent enough time in each of these places to know what Wichita is far more livable, and that so are all of the cities ranked ahead of them in The Economist’s rankings of most conservative cities, and we don’t doubt that our relative conservatism is the reason why.

— Bud Norman

A Bankrupt Way of Doing Things in Detroit

The rise and fall of formerly great civilizations is a favorite subject of historians, but Detroit is going to prove especially hard for them to explain.

Once a great American metropolis and an international icon of capitalist dynamism, the Motor City declared bankruptcy on Thursday and is thus officially bankrupt in every sense of the word, a third world hell-hole that cannot provide its largely illiterate population with basic services or protection from its unusually murderous criminal class and has wound up too far in debt to pay the obligations it has racked up in the futile attempt. The current crop of historians are respectable members of the academic community and will therefore immediately seek to pin the blame on those dastardly conservative Republicans who are behind every other historical catastrophe dating back to the fall of the Roman Empire, but this will be a hard argument to make even academic journals as Detroit’s last Republican mayor left office in back in the heyday of 1962 and the last remotely conservative citizen split town some time shortly after the race riots of ’67. Since then the city has allowed its core industries to be dominated by private sector labor unions that extorted ruinous contracts, its civic institutions to be dominated by public sector unions that left the city more than $16 billion in debt, its political culture to be dominated by racial animosities that drove its non-black citizens away and reduced the population by 61 percent from its peak, and has been rewarded for these decisions with a taxpayer-funded bailout of two of its largest employers that effectively handed total control to the unions.

Detroit has done everything right, in other words, and the consensus of contemporary academic opinion has no explanation for how it all turned out so disastrously. This is embarrassing for the consensus of contemporary academic opinion, as far as more uneducated folks will naturally conclude, but it’s also problematic for an Obama administration that was boasting as recently as the past presidential election that “We refused to let Detroit go bankrupt.” The administration is now reduced to telling the press that it is “monitoring the developments in Detroit closely,” and has yet to announce a position on the public service unions’ attempt to block the bankruptcy filing, but a more robust defense of the city’s policies is surely under consideration.

The most plausible explanation they’ll come up with is that the city failed because all those right-to-work states put the city an unfair economic disadvantage, and if only the rest of the country had agreed to protectionist trade policies that forced American motorists to live with whatever claptrap jalopies Detroit deigned to produce the city could have sustained its pork-laden efficiencies in perpetuity. The argument will no doubt find many sympathizers in the academic and political communities, as well as the more impoverished and illiterate neighborhoods of Detroit, but it’s going to be a hard sell elsewhere. Here in Wichita, where the crucial corporate jet industry is getting rhetorical trashing instead of bail-outs, it won’t even work down at the union halls.

— Bud Norman

State of the States

Michigan’s decision to join the growing ranks of “right to work” states was doubly satisfying for conservatives. It was a heavy blow to the labor movement in a state where unions had ruled for decades, and even more importantly it was a rare win at a time when conservatism seems to be routed.

The victory thus gives some hope for a conservative comeback, and it also shows how more such victories might be won at the state level. The Republican party has complete control of the state houses and governors’ mansions in 24 states and at least a share of the power in 11 others, even after an election that handed the party a bitter loss in the presidential race and rendered its majority in the House of Representatives largely irrelevant, and Michigan demonstrates how that can still make a difference. Twenty-one states of a Republican propensity are resisting the implementation of the hated Obamacare law by refusing to participate in its subsidized insurance exchanges, others are defying the federal government’s preferences regarding illegal immigration and voting laws, and further helpful mischief is possible.

Some of the action is taking place in states that Obama carried, such as the anti-union measures in Michigan and Wisconsin, suggesting that good ideas can be implemented in even the most benighted jurisdictions. Should the Republicans be able to figure out why Wisconsin will vote for a Governor Scott Walker and Michigan opts for a Governor Rick Snyder but neither will support a President Mitt Romney, the party might be back in business. Alas, we suspect that too many voters in these curious locales expect their state governments to provide only roads, schools, prisons, and other such basic services, and thus prefer the budget-balancing efficiency of the Republicans, but they expect the almighty federal government and its endless money-printing capability for an unattainable utopia, and notice that the Democrats are the only party promising to achieve it.

The states’ resistance to the federal government will only succeed to the extent that the courts allow it, and recent Supreme Court decisions regarding Obamacare and Arizona’s border enforcement efforts to do bode well. Four years hence the courts will probably be even less amenable to states’ rights, and the federal government even more eager to impose its will. All the more reason, though, for the states to put up as much of a fight as possible while they still have some power.

— Bud Norman

Labor Pains

Back in our newspaper days the corporation we worked for once asked us to temporarily fill in for some striking reporters at their subsidiary in Detroit. We declined the rather lucrative offer, not because of any moral objection to “scabbing” but rather because Michigan seemed a dangerous place to be running afoul of a labor union.

The incident was brought to mind by Tuesday’s big news out of the Wolverine State, where the legislature and governor have decreed that citizens will no longer be forced to pay union dues as a condition of earning a living. The measure at long last restores to the state a fundamental right to work, which is why such measures are known as “Right to Work” laws, and those responsible should be lauded not only for their good sense but also their courage. Not just political courage, which merely means a willingness to lose office for a good cause, but also a physical courage rarely required of America’s public servants.

“There will be blood,” said Doug Geiss during a speech on the floor of the Michigan House of Representatives, “there will be repercussions.” Whether this was meant as a threat or a warning is open to interpretation, but in either case the Democratic legislator was not exaggerating the inevitable results of the law. Demonstrations outside the state capitol during the vote involved the usual union thuggery, from the destruction of a conservative activist group’s tent to a reporter being punched to tear-gassed efforts to block access to the building, and worse behavior seems likely. “We’re going to have a civil war,” James Hoffa told CNN, and as the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters he should know.

During the protracted effort against the public sector unions in Wisconsin there were physical assaults of lawmakers, and that battle involved mostly teachers and bureaucrats backed up by bongo-beating neo-hippies, and it was in the relatively placid state of Wisconsin. The combined efforts of the teamster, automotive, and machinist unions in Michigan, a state with a long history of labor violence, could easily prove much harsher. Workers eager to stop paying dues and any businesses considering relocating to the state with non-unionized workforces should also be concerned, and hope that the state’s unionized law enforcement officers will continue to be vigilant in their duties.

Whatever mayhem the unions have in mind, Michigan will soon find that the right to work is well worth the trouble. The state’s disastrous economy, government-dependent industries, and decimated cities are a direct consequence of union rule run amok, and reining in their influence should help to reverse decades of decline. At the very least, the unions will be required to extort their dues by their own thuggish efforts and the state’s conscience will finally be clean.

— Bud Norman