A New York Times editorial (6/24/20) notes, “The annual economic output of the United States has almost tripled, but, with the help of policymakers from both political parties, the wealthy hoarded the fruits.”
Online readers of the New York Times might have been forgiven if, when they got to the editorial section on June 24, they thought they had accidentally jumped to the website of Socialist Action, or at least The Nation. In a 2,600-word editorial headlined: “Opinion: The Jobs We Need,” the editorial board laid out a powerful case that “over the past four decades, American workers have suffered a devastating loss of economic power, manifested in their wages, benefits and working conditions.”
The board members noted that over that same timeframe, the annual economic output of the United States had tripled, but, “with the help of policymakers from both political parties, the wealthy hoarded the fruits.”
“The Jobs We Need” is the third “chapter” in a series titled “The America We Need,” which, together with accompanying op-ed pieces, looks at the way confronting the Covid pandemic crisis could offer an opportunity to move the US away from its neoliberal/neoconservative experiment to a more collectivist and humane kind of society.
It moves well beyond opinion, though. In excruciating detail, it lays out the facts (many of them reported over the years in the Times by its own journalists, like now-retired labor reporter Steven Greenhouse, whose work is, curiously, not acknowledged or linked in the article). It shows that workers who used to earn union wages high enough to make them members of the middle-class were now earning half as much in constant dollars — barely sufficient to keep a family above the poverty line.
“Picture the nation as a pirate crew,” the editors write:
In recent decades, the owners of the ship have gradually claimed a larger share of booty at the expense of the crew. The annual sum that has shifted from workers to owners now tops $1 trillion.
Franklin Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt noted in 1936 that “economic royalists” were complaining that his New Deal was attempting to “overthrow the institutions of America,” when “what they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.” Citing FDR, the editorial board wrote:
Now as then, the nation’s economic problems are rooted in political problems. And now as then, the revival of broad prosperity—and the stability of American democracy—require the imposition of limits on the political influence of the wealthy. It requires the government to serve the interests of the governed.
The editorial went on to recount the impact of the infamous (but, at least in corporate media, rarely mentioned) 1971 Powell Memo, sent by then–corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to the US Chamber of Commerce. That memo darkly warned that the US “free enterprise system” was “under threat,” and that it was urgent for business to “fight.” This call to arms by Powell, who was named to the Supreme Court a year later by President Richard Nixon, led to the creation of the Heritage Foundation by Joseph Coors, the Times editors wrote, and inspired the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) to begin a controversial campaign of “educating” federal jurists on the wonders of deregulation and unfettered capitalism.
Calling Powell and the leaders of America’s largest corporations working through NAM “counterrevolutionaries,” the editorialists write that they “embraced a radical view of the role of corporations,” adhering to the philosophy of free-market advocate Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate economist who argued that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”
The Times editorial recounted the weakening and destruction of the labor movement, as corporations spent huge sums lobbying Congress, pushing the message that the decline in the fortunes of US workers was the tough-but-fair result of market forces: “People will get paid on how valuable they are to the enterprise.”
New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet published an op-ed (6/3/20) calling for the military to be used against protesters–without reading it.
The critique of neoliberal economics here was blunt, and not what Times readers have been used to seeing on its editorial pages. Certainly not during the tenure of editorial page editor James Bennet, who served in that role from 2016 through June 7, when he was unceremoniously dumped by the publisher. His sacking followed the publication of a “needlessly harsh” op-ed by right-wing Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, headlined “Send in the Troops” (6/3/20), which called for military action against anti-police protests going on in cities across the nation (FAIR.org, 6/19/20).
Could the collectively written “The Jobs We Need” editorial, published just over two weeks after Bennet’s departure, be an indication of a sea change in the paper’s editorial slant? The Times wouldn’t grant FAIR an interview to inquire about that. But it’s worth noting that Bennet hadn’t hidden his ideological bias against progressive, much less socialist, ideas. In a discussion with Times staffers upset with a perceived rightward tilt to the paper’s opinion pieces under Bennet—an off-the-record discussion that was secretly taped, leaked to and published in Huffington Post (2/27/18) a few months later—Bennett said:
I think we are pro-capitalism. The New York Times is in favor of capitalism because it has been the greatest engine of, it’s been the greatest anti-poverty program and engine of progress that we’ve seen.
Certainly the current Times editorial board authors of this particular editorial make it clear that they aren’t on board with that rather controversial and Friedmanesque assertion of Bennet’s.
By way of solutions, the editorial board calls for a $15/hour minimum wage “with regular adjustments for inflation.” They say workers should be able to join unions “without fear of reprisals.” They call, too, for the government “to restrain the power of corporations,” including banning the use of corporate profits for share buy-backs. They also call for an end to employer-based health insurance (presumably to be replaced by a government-run insurance program), so that workers are no longer deterred from changing jobs for better pay (or from going on strike to win union recognition or a better union contract).
What is striking here is that everything being argued in this editorial was in the platform espoused during the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns of 2016 and 2020. Yet there is no mention of Vermont’s junior senator or his campaign platform in this surprisingly radical proposal on the Times editorial page. Nor is there any mea culpa for the many times that the paper sought to ignore, dismiss or trash Sanders in covering both of those primary races.
The New York Times (2/15/16) used to call the idea that government could guarantee healthcare to all citizens a “fairy tale”–citing economists connected to the corporate wing of the Democratic Party.
Back in the 2016 campaign, for example, Sanders was the target of a hit piece in the New York Times by Jackie Calmes, headlined “Left-Leaning Economists Question Cost of Bernie Sanders’s Plans” (2/15/16). Calmes quoted four economists trashing Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal, claiming its costs would be too great, while ignoring the fact that the costs of the current system based upon private health insurance are vastly greater. None of the article’s economists, two of whom worked for Barack Obama and two for Bill Clinton, were actually leftists. (See FAIR’s piece by Doug Henwood criticizing this article—2/17/16.) During the current year’s Democratic primary, the Times continued its one-sided criticism of single-payer healthcare (FAIR.org, 4/15/20), even while conceding it might be a good idea during a pandemic.
Joe Biden, who has throughout this campaign year argued against Medicare for All, while assuring workers that he knows the value of their “hard-won” employer-sponsored health insurance plans (even as 16 million of them were being laid off and losing them), was also not mentioned in the Times’ “Jobs We Need” piece.
A Times media relations person, Ari Isaacman Bevacqua, denied FAIR’s request for an interview with senior opinion editor Kevin Delaney, editor of the three-part “The America We Need” package, but provided a statement: “‘The America We Need’ purposely avoids focusing on politicians and instead focuses on zooming out and examining solutions.” This, however, begs the question of how corporate media like the Times have for years, including this year, both through their news coverage and opinion pieces, limited and skewed the options available to US voters for addressing the very real problems raised in this unusually candid series of editorials.
A long-time Times journalist observed that the paper has “moved considerably to the left over the past five years,” beginning in 2015 (9/4/15), when the paper first editorialized in favor of a phased move toward a $15/hour minimum wage. But, he added:
I was surprised at how muscular the editorial you cite was! Everyone sees how ridiculous income inequality is, and how corporations are far too powerful, and how Republicans are in the pocket of corporate America, and how government too often overlooks the concerns of typical Americans and workers — and the editorial reflected that.
John Hess: “News is what the public doesn’t know.”
My old friend and neighbor, the late, great John Hess, spent his whole journalistic career at the Times, until retiring at the end of a long and bitter strike at the paper, and moving into freelance work. John, I’m sure, would have been pleased with his old employer’s belated editorial support for higher pay, better labor laws that encourage and protect union organizing and membership, some kind of government insurance program that doesn’t chain workers to their jobs, as well as for ending corporate money in the political system.
But always a cynic, he would probably reserve judgment about how that will affect the paper’s news coverage of these issues going forward. “Remember,” he used to say with a twinkle in his eye, “news is what the public does not know.”
Full of metered sound and measured fury
Signifying completely nothing
Dave Lindorff is a serviceable pundit, but the only line that makes any sense here is the one about the NYT editorial board sounding like “Socialist Action.”
Who cares what the NYT did 50 years ago – the left gets a major representative in the form of very well researched and written series on economic inequality by the NYT, and all FAIR wants to do is cavil and quibble?
Thank you for the snarky backhanded compliment, Martin. However I think in your less than serviceable criticism you miss the point. The Times didn’t just write an article about inequality. It wrote a prescriptive article about what needs to be done. And that prescription is exactly the one that was being proposed by a Democratic candidate for the current presidential election — a candidate who was repeatedly dismissed, derided and misreported by the Times not “50 years ago” but three months ago. Not only that but the presumptive candidate, in no small part because of mis-reporting by the Times, is Joe Biden, who adamantly opposed one of the key parts of the Times’ editorial board’s prescription for change: an end to the tying of health coverage to one’s job. Joe Biden has vowed to “veto any bill passed calling for Medicare-for-All.” Biden things employer-sponsored health insurance is a great thing even as, now, 21 million American workers have lost their health insurance along with their jobs. The failure of the editors to note how their own newspaper has been, during this campaign (and during the 2016 Democratic primary which was four years ago, not “50”), has been hugely damaging to democracy and civic awareness. The role of this hugely influential newspaper in limiting the terms of acceptable campaign discourse in the national media to “electability” instead of key issues like national health care, labor laws, widening inequality, etc., should have been mentioned in the course of laying out a rather breathtaking editorial change of position.
Nice of you to respond, Dave – are you sure that’s allowed at FAIR? None of the other tyros seem to ever deign to respond to criticism of their criticism.Beneath them? Not fun? Who knows – they don’t talk to commenters, ever.
Punditry is a tough game – all those reaction pieces (which I’ve enjoyed from you over these years, so yes, they have been top-notch and above”serviceable” ), but so little effect.
And that is also true for the Gray Lady – its neoliberal slant on the doomed Bern was but the smallest of reasons why his lecturing from Burlington was never going to overcome the Democratic party establishment. You give the Times a big role in making Joe Biden the nominee – this in a country that is barely literate?
So the Times bought the flavor-of-the-month and has a newly radicalized editorial board – why not savor that fraught accomplishment for a moment? That economic series was way to the left of Joe Biden, way to the left of what it’s been harrumphing about since the Vietnam War (hence the 50 years reference), so why not give it a big progressive “Attagirl!” You want a mea culpa before every meal served?
Well it’s true that the editorial was far better than we’ve come to expect over the decades from the Times, but it’s also true that there is a nomination ahead in the Democratic party, and the guy who’s being crowned including by the Times is far from advocatiing what the editorial is calling for, while the guy who had been being called “unstoppable” until the media ganged up and made “electability” the only criterion in the primary race was for everything that the editorial was saying was needed. That surely deserved a mention, especially as it’s only during the primary before a nomination that any kind of pressure can be brought on the candidates. That said, I’m glad you think my work is better than the “serviceable” grade you rated it earlier. My view of the times is shaped by 50 years of reading it, and over that time the paper has, in my humble estimation, deserved no relaxation from criticism over that entire period.
Not everything can be laid populist-style on “the media.”
Bernie went a long way for a minuscule-state politician with very few people skills and no record of legislative accomplishments. His campaign rode the zeitgeist winds to some early victories and then died in South Carolina, never to bestir again.
He ran not as a party outsider, but as a loyal Democrat player, and if “THE MEDIA” sensed some discontinuity and flaws to his “electability” withing the DNC framework, perhaps, for once, THE MEDIA was right.
The Times’s brilliant 1619 Project and Economic Inequality reportage are a high water mark for the micro-left in what remains of the American public sphere, but don’t expect much from it, either this quixotic demand for strings of peremptory mea culpas or Bezos to starting working on the warehouse line.
Some things are just meant to make you feel good, and what’s wrong with that?
Nice of you to respond, Dave – are you sure that’s allowed at FAIR? None of the other tyros seem to ever deign to respond to criticism of their criticism.Beneath them? Not fun? Who knows – they don’t talk to commenters, ever.
Punditry is a tough game – all those reaction pieces (which I’ve enjoyed from you over these years, so yes, they have been top-notch and above”serviceable” ), but so little effect.
And that is also true for the Gray Lady – its neoliberal slant on the doomed Bern was but the smallest of reasons why his lecturing from Burlington was never going to overcome the Democratic party establishment. You give the Times a big role in making Joe Biden the nominee – this in a country that is barely literate?
So the Times bought the flavor-of-the-month and has a newly radicalized editorial board – why not savor that fraught accomplishment for a moment? That economic series was way to the left of Joe Biden, way to the left of what it’s been harrumphing about since the Vietnam War (hence the 50 years reference), so why not give it a big progressive “Attagirl!” You want a string of mea culpas before every meal served? To what end?
Bravos, to TCBH !
Bravos, to FAIR !
The Gray Lady’s long lost her virtues, and like Lady Liberty’s torchlight, each are necessary artifices.
Now that any possibility of achieving “The America We Need” has been eliminated (ie, the Sanders candidacy), the Times can safely opine on “The America We Need.” Got it.
Yes, GB, I share your skepticism. While it definitely IS good that the NYT does an article like this, it remains to-be-seen how they will cover progressive candidates and legislation in the future. It’s all well-and-good to favor progressive/humanitarian goals in the abstract (most people do give those ideas lip-service), but what happens when entrenched financial interests are threatened/negatively impacted by the required legislation, and they start complaining? Then we will be able to see how deep the NYT’s commitment to these principles is…
I agree. There may be a change in the slant on the editorial pages with the sacking of Bennet, but that does not mean that the gatekeeper function on the news side won’t continue apace. The outrageous scam the paper just attempted to peddle about a purported Russian “bounty” on US troops is a clear indication that not much has changed regarding the larger issue of being a propaganda organ for the Washington establishment. Not only was the story bogus and presented using the flimsiest of “evidence” — anonymous sourcing from a source (“the intelligence community”) which has an almost unrivaled record of prevarication — a standard which the Times editors would never permit for an investigative piece on, say, corruption in the awarding of MTA contracts or a pattern of bribery in the restaurant inspection service, but no historical context was given. For example, nowhere was it mentioned that the Carter administration, at the urging of uber-anti-Russian Zbigniew Brzezninski, Carter’s National Security Advisor, had funded, trained and armed the Mujahadeen to attack and kill Russians over a period of 10 years, the goal (besides simply killing Russians), “giving the Russians their own Vietnam,” as Zbiggy cooly put it. The US spent billions of dollars on that murderous project, which was kind of a mass bounty for killing Russians. That should have been at least mentioned.
You are right on spot as usual, Dave. Both about how one of the Establishment’s mouthpieces for fake news, NYT, feels pressed by a real uprising to state some truths and real facts, and how it still lies for imperialism’s plan to dominate the world and thus demean Russia, and the former Soviet Union, in order to make us feel the need for Pentagon protection against evil Putin.
The fake news of Russia paying Taliban to kill US murdering mercenaries is not a fairly tale they will stop spreading. Even in Denmark, the mass media bought this yellow journalism hook, line and sinker. I, however, find no fault with a people invaded by a foreign force against all laws and morality when they kill the invaders. I’m sure 99% of US Americans would think and do the same if some nation invaded its Military Empire.
Americans who have their well deserved jobs, positions and all dressed health care and retirement packages simply do not want to see the problem of low wage workers not partaking in the American Dream. Erich Fromm (The art of loving) wrote : “Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his “personality package” with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume”. The journalist, Upton Sinclair, said “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary (career, privileges, etc. ) depends upon his not understanding it.” COVID-19 is exactly how Naomi Klein describes it as CORONAVIRUS CAPITALISM where TIME IS MONEY and where people’s needs and health are not important. Actually “South Park” better describes the USA and values.
I can’t help but wonder what the true underlying reason is for this possible seeming support of a more just America.
The article’s headline implies that it would reveal “who would bring” the “economic change”, but it still leaves it with politicians. No mention of worker action. Does FAIR have any proletarians on staff? Anyone who ever read any Marxism?