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Gin and Vodka

[ 134 ] June 14, 2012 | Erik Loomis

It’s time to restart LGM’s War on Vodka. One of the main generals in this war on inferior spirits is the heroic and delicious gin. A new front has opened:

Ah, gin. Brisk, peppery gin. Once, it epitomized summer elegance. It was the cool-breeze component of martinis and gimlets, rickeys and slings, fizzes and Collinses. It was the soothing tonic that helped the quinine go down. It was yardarms and pastel sunsets.

Then the ground trembled and the sky darkened. Along came the devil, I mean vodka, and gin was forsaken in favor of — What? No flavor? No aroma? No character? Well, that’s vodka for you: a bland, neutral cipher. Gin’s cocktails became vodka’s cocktails, championed by those who ought to have known better, consumed by the masses who had no idea what a martini was, much less a yardarm.

….

These efforts have been modestly successful, though they have done nothing to slow vodka’s ascendancy. According to the Distilled Spirits Council, a trade group, sales of vodka in the United States have risen steadily to around 62 million cases in 2011, from about 39 million in 2002. Sales of gin, however, have been static, hovering around 11 million cases a year. The one area of encouraging growth has been at the highest end, in the super-premium category, which was up 24 percent in 2011 compared with in 2002.

The output of the new, small distilleries amounts to no more than a trickle. Like so many in the cocktail renaissance, many of them have rejected vodka as hopelessly square and dull while embracing gin as complex and distinctive. Perhaps, too, they have a historical appreciation for gin, just as the cocktail connoisseurs embraced the nearly forgotten rye whiskey and, in an earlier generation, craft brewers resurrected moribund styles of beer.

There probably are other theories for the decline of the United States. But the increase in vodka consumption from 39 million cases to 62 million cases a year in less than a decade is as good as any I’ve read.

I look forward to the vodka drinkers among you complaining about this. But note that you are inferior human beings.

Guerrero

[ 13 ] June 14, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Jonah Keri with a very nice piece on the apparent end of Vladimir Guerrero’s career. My own Vlad memory primarily consists of watching him hit not one but two impossibly long home runs off Jamie Moyer. The last great Expo, though Scott might have something to add to that.

Labor Notes

[ 22 ] June 14, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Lot of stuff going today.

1. We know that America’s plutocrats want to return the nation to the Gilded Age. It turns out that Mexican plutocrats feel the same. Such as Carlos Slim. The world’s richest man has some brilliant ideas on how to make people’s lives miserable:

The world’s richest man has urged struggling nations to lift workers’ retirement age to 70 and privatize as many infrastructure assets as possible to help shore up their economies, Mexican press reported on June 12.

Moreover, countries should have people work until they are older to reflect longer life expectancy rates, Slim reportedly said. He noted the ideal work schedule should be 10-11 hours three times per week for people over 60 to allow them to have more days to “innovate, create and cultivate themselves.”

Slim added the current retirement age was established “when jobs were more physical and people died at 60, but now we live until 85 or 90.”

Old people should work an 11 hour day to cultivate themselves! Just like children in coal mines needed to work 14 hour days to learn a work ethic!!!

2. In southern California, a new labor organization has popped up to give warehouse workers some representation. Called Warehouse Workers United, it is organizing at Wal-Mart, the most anti-union corporation in the country. Wal-Mart’s response–hire a young woman to pretend to be a USC journalist wanting information on bad labor conditions and then spy on the workers! Very classy!! From WWU:

For months warehouse workers have been asking to meet with Walmart. There have been many opportunities to sit down with workers: Last year the state issued more than $1 million in fines for labor violations at warehouses where workers move goods for Walmart, UCLA conducted a study about the risky working conditions inside the warehouse, Cal/OSHA issued more than 60 violations totaling more than $250,000 in Walmart-contracted warehouses and workers at a Walmart-contracted warehouse filed a class action lawsuit that documents awful working conditions including working 362 days a years with no break and no overtime. Last week when Walmart had the chance to talk about real issues affecting Latino workers in Southern California it instead sent “Zoe,” a fake reporter. A spy. Our door is open. Walmart can change this industry and create thousands of good jobs and improve the quality of life in Southern California, but first it has to come out of hiding.

3. Speaking of Wal-Mart, workers at one of the company’s seafood suppliers went on strike June 4 to protest working conditions they describe as “slave labor.” These are temporary workers on H-2B guest visas who live in rat-infested housing and work 24 hour shifts with no overtime. The seafood supplier’s general manager is also the head of the Crawfish Processors Alliances, an industry group lobbying to fight against increasing pay for H-2B guestworkers. No doubt Carlos Slim would call these 24 hour shifts an opportunity for these workers to cultivate themselves.

4. I have tut-tutted Mark Bittman for looking down at the poor when it comes to food. But he did some very good work yesterday giving publicity to ROC-United’s new National Diners’ Guide to help consumers patronize restaurants that don’t treat their workers terribly. Of course, virtually every major fast-food chain pays their workers very little. A few however, such as Five Guys, actually provide sick days. More here.

5. President Obama continues to pay off labor for its support of his political career by negotiating secret NAFTA-style free trade agreements with Asia. A leaked document shows how nasty this is. As UE’s Chris Townsend states, “This is what happens when you get an administration that is pretty much in the lap of corporate America.” I’m glad we’ve reached the point where labor doesn’t even get a say in helping modify trade agreements to make them slightly less bad for American workers.

6. Thousands of AT&T technicians under CWA representation walked off the job for a 1-day action in Nevada and California because the company is trying to crush their union. The best represented members of the American working class the increasingly fewer unionized workers at AT&T and Verizon and they are target #1 among private sector unions for American corporations.

That’s a lot of labor news. There’s more but I’ll stop here for now.

The Meaningless of the Term “Latino”

[ 95 ] June 14, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Jamelle Bouie has an excellent article arguing that progressives’ dreams of a demographic majority with the rise of the Latino population is a chimera. Progressives have a vision that endless Republican racism will combine with the growth of people from Latin America to propel a rejuvenated Democratic Party into a period of dominance. That’s pretty problematic, as Jamelle shows. There’s no question that the majority of peoples from Latin America will remain Democrats for the time being, but the future is murky. First, there are plenty of Latinos who are already Republican or who might be if the current iteration of the Republican Party wasn’t dominated by mouth-breathing white supremacists. Second, there’s no guarantee that Republicans will continue to be the white man’s party three and four decades down the line, although this is possible. The most likely possibility is that certain sections of the Latino population will simply become white and accepted into the a modified Republican narrative about race, class, and America.

This has profound implications. If whites are the “mainstream” of American life, with overwhelming representation in politics, business, and culture, then intermarriage with Latinos and Asians has the potential to bring those groups into the mainstream as well. Put another way, the wildly popular comedian Louis C.K. is understood to be white, even though his father and grandfather are Mexican and his first language is Spanish. More important, his children will be perceived as white, despite their Latino heritage. In effect, C.K. and others like him are expanding the definition of “white.”

To Pantoja, this bears a strong resemblance to the pattern of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the U.S. saw massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. “Latinos seem to be on a similar trajectory as Italians,” he says. “At the turn of the century, the Italians were seen as a stigmatized minority group that could not be assimilated into the American mainstream.” It was common to describe Italians as “dark,” “swarthy,” and—in language that also has characterized African Americans—prone to crime and poverty. But as Italians rose out of working-class professions and joined a burgeoning middle class, they and other “nonwhite” immigrants assimilated. Eventually, the New Deal, along with unions, service in World War II, and the G.I. Bill, brought Italians fully into American life.

The politics of Italian Americans changed with their shifting status. As the party most identified with immigrants, Democrats gained an early lead with Italian Americans; they formed a key part in Franklin Roosevelt’s victorious coalition and proved crucial to Democratic successes through the 1960s. But as Italians became fully assimilated, and Democrats championed the rights of racial minorities and women’s rights, the balance shifted. By the 1980s, Italians would join most white Americans in voting Republican.

A similar path might emerge for Latinos. Initially outsiders, they form a bond with the political party that most identifies with their concerns. As they move into the mainstream, those concerns become less salient, and their political preferences become identical to those of whites’—less dependent on their racial or ethnic traits than on factors like education, wealth, and geography.

Yes indeed. Many ethnic groups have become “white” over the centuries–Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, etc. Each of these groups was seen as suspicious upon their arrival to the U.S. and found shelter within a more welcoming Democratic Party. Eventually, each became broadly seen as white and at that point, various other factors helped drive them to a greater or lesser extent into the two political parties. There is no reason this won’t happen for broad sections of the Latino population.

And that gets to another issue: that the term “Latino” has almost no value. What do Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Guatemalans, and Mexicans have in common? For that matter, one can ask what Spanish-speaking Mexicans from Durango have in common with Mixtec or Zapotec-speaking Mexicans from Oaxacans, a group that makes a up a major chunk of Mexican migration in some areas of the United States? Not a whole lot, sometimes not even language. It’s really rather insulting; it’s like saying that all the immigrants from eastern and southern Europe in the 1910s were the same thing. And maybe a lot of Americans saw them that way, but we know now that was pretty racist.

Terminology around race is tricky. My understanding of Latino is that it came out of immigrant political activism in the 80s and 90s as a way to get around the more offensive “Hispanic,” although I could be wrong about some of the details. But as the Latin American population has grown, the term has served as an easy way for “whites” to talk about this growing group of immigrants without paying much attention to the particulars. It has covered up the incredible diversity of peoples entering the United States from the south and blocked understanding of how immigration is changing the United States. We’d be better off getting rid of it and instead start talking about Mexican voters and Guatemalan voters and Colombian voters. They aren’t the same now and they certainly won’t be the same when some of them start becoming white and others don’t.

I Think Jamie Dimon Should Become Secretary of Education

[ 117 ] June 13, 2012 | Erik Loomis

My good friend Michelle Rhee is at it again:

Rhee, the former Chancellor of D.C. Public Schools and Founder and CEO of StudentsFirst, told the capacity crowd that businesses evaluate their employees based on rigorous standards and public schools should too. Rhee was the keynote speaker at the Team Pennsylvania Foundation and Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce co-sponsored Education Summit.

“I guarantee you don’t run your businesses anything like the way our public schools run their organizations,” Rhee said. “So the question is, ‘do we have the wherewithal to make the incredibly difficult decisions on behalf of our children, and the answer is, ‘no, we have not been willing to make those decisions’.”

Rhee said changing the education system is not easy, adding a teachers union in another state recently called their new evaluation program “suspicious” and “punitive to all teachers.”

I think it’s an excellent idea to run our schools like we run our businesses. I very much support the people who created a half-decade and counting economic decline while nearly creating a second Great Depression being in charge of American education. I mean, when someone completely fails in business, they are always punished. Just ask Jamie Dimon!

And when business has gotten involved in higher education, nothing bad has ever happened. Not only is the for-profit college industry strictly honest but they graduate students at rates unheard of by traditional schools!

If only our teacher unions would get out of the way, we could let Bernie Madoff invest our education funding from prison. Stupid organized labor….

Wrap Yourself in the Flag, Because the GOP Always Puts the Soldiers First!

[ 9 ] June 13, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Republicans truly do care about our troops…..

Republican Senators John McCain, Scott Brown, and Susan Collins all support an effort by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, to expand abortion access for military women who are raped. But despite bipartisan support in the Senate, Shaheen’s proposal may not make it into the final version of the 2013 defense authorization bill—because House Republicans oppose it.

If Shaheen’s measure passes, military families will finally have the same access to abortion that other federal employees already receive. Unlike the rest of the federal government, the Department of Defense currently only provides abortion coverage if the life of the mother is at stake. Under current law, if a State Department employee is raped, her government health insurance plan will pay for an abortion if she wants one. But if an Army medic serving in Afghanistan is raped and becomes pregnant, she can’t use her military health plan to pay for an abortion. If she does decide to get an abortion, she will have to pay for it with her own money. And if she can’t prove she was raped—which is difficult before an investigation is completed—she may have to look for services off base, which can be dangerous or impossible in many parts of the world.

Of course, if we stop our male soldiers from raping the women they work with, how will they learn how to subdue foreign peoples!

Mr. Friedman, my olive tree grove was destroyed by settlers. How do I start a Lexus dealership?

[ 16 ] June 13, 2012 | Erik Loomis

This is obviously the greatest Tumblr ever.

In the Suburbs

[ 9 ] June 12, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Pick up a copy of Redbook. It’s the only magazine dedicated to young adults.

This is what I believe is known as a rich text.

Zombie Sonics

[ 18 ] June 12, 2012 | Erik Loomis

The people of the Evergreen State are really, really bitter about the Thunder advancing to the finals.

Make sure you read below the lead headline as well.

If Dumping Jamie Dimon is the Answer, We’re Probably Asking a Shallow Question

[ 98 ] June 12, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Easily the worst panel I saw at Netroots Nation was titled, “Beyond Occupy: What Does a New Economic System Look Like?” Now, doesn’t that seem like a really interesting panel? I was hoping for some serious discussions integrating the Occupy critique into hard thinking about how we create a more equitable system. Put a neo-liberal type up there, a socialist, an intellectual who had been part of Occupy, a union person–this could be really good.

Uh, no.

Instead, we got the most misleading title at the entire conference. This panel was nothing more than a cheerleading session for Clinton-era capitalism. Quite literally–Jennifer Ancona, the panel chair, quite literally cheered when someone else said capitalism was a great thing. There were smart people on the panel–Ancona as chair, the former chief economist at the IMF Simon Johnson, Erica Payne, Sarita Gupta from Jobs with Justice, and Colin Mutchler, a Silicon Valley CEO who frankly offered nothing useful. Five people who, in various ways, thought that capitalism, with just a few tiny tweaks to make it a bit more fair and less corrupt, was the perfect system. That’s certainly typical of a big section of the Netroots and that’s fine, but of course the panel’s labeling was a lie–no one on that panel had probably ever talked to anyone from Occupy, not to mention that it wasn’t about a new economic system.

But really it was worse than that. Ancona literally said “When I think of labor, I think of the past” while Payne (and I paraphrase here) exclaimed that the truly free market was the ideal economic system. Even Gupta offered no real challenge to this free-market love fest; her most notable contribution was to blame unions for looking out for their own members.

This all drove me crazy not because it’s not a legitimate perspective–certainly someone with these ideas could be very useful on such a panel. By sheer chance, I walked outside my office just after starting this post. On the table outside my office someone placed an old issue of The Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations that featured an interview with Johnson (was it you higher power of my choice?). And he’s a real smart guy. He’s genuinely angry that a system that he not only believed in but participated in has proven so utterly worthless. He’s always worth hearing speak.

Rather, the panel was infuriating because it showed a complete lack of understanding about how the economic system has declined and what we can do to make it better. Virtually no discussion or understanding about labor underpinned a panel whose participants clearly saw the halcyon days of 20 years ago as ideal–the go-go Clinton capitalism of the 90s. But the system was already corrupt and dying during those years and no one on the panel had an answer for this. Johnson himself kept focusing on replacing Jamie Dimon. Dimon might be evil. But Dimon is not the problem. Get rid of Dimon and his replacement is a clone. The problem is with the system that spawns such ideas and actions. And I guess this sums up my differences with this kind of thinking–Johnson believes in the system enough to think replacing Dimon could be really effective. I’m certainly fine with kicking Dimon to the curb, but I see the entire system of global capitalism as destructive to the world’s people and ecology. Dumping Dimon does nothing to solve that problem.

All of these people just wanted to convince the capitalists to be good. But there’s no reason for the capitalists to act nice. Why should they?

As I’ve stated before, capitalists and governments only reform when pressured from the left. Fix the problems of the Gilded Age so the anarchists quit shooting our presidents in the stomach and our industrialists in the face is a useful way to think about the Progressive Era. FDR enacted the New Deal to save capitalism from itself and undermine communism and fascism from spreading in the United States. The War on Poverty and other Great Society programs were in large part a response to the horrible inequality of the nation so powerfully articulated by the civil rights movements of the 1960s.

Today, there is no real pressure from the left. With the decline of the USSR, extremist capitalism was in full ascent and the political spectrum swung hard to the right. Any questioning of capitalism meant one was totally irrelevant. The economic left collapsed and the triumphal era of Clinton capitalism ascended.

Obviously, old school state socialism is never coming back; probably it shouldn’t. But until we articulate options to capitalism that scare the capitalists, nothing will stop them from destroying the rest of the social safety net and middle class. We need to be thinking about better systems than supposedly free-market capitalism, organizing around them, and threatening the capitalists’ dominance over the nation and the world. I realize this is long-term, maybe even pie-in-the-sky. And capitalism with a benevolent face might be a pretty good way for a lot of people to live. But we aren’t going to get that benevolent capitalism until people force the capitalists to grant it in order that they don’t reject the system entirely. That’s why we need to think about radical alternatives to capitalism.

In other words, we need to actually think about a post-Occupy economy and not use the OWS name as an excuse to get people into the room and then hold a big party for mildly-regulated capitalism.

Great Labor Slogans

[ 14 ] June 12, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Two great labor slogans here.

First, we have this campaign from UNITE-HERE and the LGBT community to get same-sex couples to not stay in non-union hotels.

We then have this from Palermo’s frozen pizza workers in Milwaukee. The Palermo workers have formed an independent union and have gone on strike over worker safety issues.

If we weigh the money behind each campaign equally (UNITE-HERE resources far outweigh an independent union of immigrants), I’d have to say that both are pretty equally fantastic.

Why Unions Are Necessary

[ 72 ] June 12, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic allowed me to respond to his forum asking whether unions are necessary. And in the leadoff position no less. Here it is:

The question of whether unions are necessary is misguided. There is no other proven method to ensure that working-class people receive decent wages, safe working conditions, or a voice on the job. Unions continue to provide workers high-quality representation, helping them receive a fair share of the income their work generates while protecting them from capricious bosses, hazards on the job, and harassment from superiors. There are no other known systems that provide workers these benefits.

The better question is why unions have declined. There is a clear answer to this question: a half-century of intentional union-busting from corporations with assists from federal and state governments. Historians have shown that the supposed “Grand Bargain,” where companies agreed to unionized workplaces in return for an end to radical workplace action was never accepted by corporate America. Even before World War II, corporations looked to move their unionized factories to non-union states. When unions proved too popular across the United States and when federal labor and environmental protections began affecting profit margins, corporations lobbied the federal government to promote globalization, first through the Border Industrialization Project that allowed American companies to build on the Mexican side of the border and then through a full-scale race to bottom, as companies traveled the globe looking for easily exploited labor. None of this has made unions irrelevant; rather, recent labor defeats are simply the next round in this corporate assault upon the rights of working people.

Simply asking a question like whether unions are necessary gives credence to right-wing talking points about organized labor. We need to focus on how to fight back against the corporate malfeasance and greed that has undermined the American working class and plunged the economy into stagnation that has already reached a half-decade. Organized labor is central to any solution to our current economic problems. It is worth noting that the heyday of organized labor coincided with the longest period of growth in the history of the American economy. Only strong unions can provide a fair piece of the economic pie to the working and middle-classes, creating a robust economy that benefits all Americans.

Considering how completely exhausted I was when I wrote that, I’m surprised it came out relatively coherent, if a little passive voicey.

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