Looking back in history
Racial anger often seems to prevail after Republican victories. In 1896, Robber Barons bought the election of Republicans, and Jim Crow laws proliferated throughout the South. In 2016, Dark Money, Fox News, and Russians brought us the election of Donald Trump, with Southern attitudes applied to the country as a whole. It is a long, sad story, but we need to progress beyond it if we hope to regain our influence in the world of the 21st century.
From Eric Garner to George Floyd: How History Repeats Itself
By: Peter Temin – MIT
The need for full-employment
Post COVID, argues Bradford DeLong, the U.S. needs to have a federal commitment to full employment: every American who wants a job should be able to find one that pays enough to keep the worker’s family above the poverty line. This implies an increase in the federal minimum wage which is currently $0.75 higher than it was in 1950, after adjusting for inflation. The US GDP has increased by several multiples during this 70 year period.
[R]estoring and maintaining full employment may require that we divert demand from elite consumption to labor-intensive sectors like public health. It also may require a large-scale labor-intensive public-works program. So be it. It’s time to make full employment our highest priority. Once we have done that, everything else will fall into place.
What the Democrats Must Do
By: J. Bradford DeLong – University of California, Berkeley
The political angle
For starters, many Americans have accepted that they live in a winner-takes-all society of deepening inequality. While the wealth and incomes of those at the very top continue to grow, tens of millions of Americans struggle to afford health care, childcare, and other basic goods. This story has been told many times over. But what often goes unremarked is that the responsibility for managing the social costs of this system has been offloaded onto the police.
America’s Mis-Police State
By: Jeffrey Sommers – University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
