Council 31 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees has been engaged in a campaign to oppose Governor Pat Quinn’s plans to close down the Tamms prison in southern Illinois in addition to seven other state correctional facilities. The campaign has pitted the union against many low-income, mostly Black community members whose loved ones have faced torturous conditions at Tamms, including long-term isolation of inmates.

 June 3, 2012 by Common Dreams

Unionizing the New Jim Crow?

by Brian Tierney

Dozens of people gathered outside of a supermax prison in Illinois in April demanding that the facility be shut down. They held signs that read “I am a mom,” a spin on the iconic “I am a man” signs held by striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968.

But these protesters – many of them mothers of incarcerated men at the prison – were directing the repurposed slogan in part against the very same union that represented those African-American strikers as they marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King more than 40 years ago.

Council 31 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees has been engaged in a campaign to oppose Governor Pat Quinn’s plans to close down the Tamms prison in southern Illinois in addition to seven other state correctional facilities. The campaign has pitted the union against many low-income, mostly Black community members whose loved ones have faced torturous conditions at Tamms, including long-term isolation of inmates.

One the one hand, this is a familiar struggle in the age of austerity. For AFSCME, it’s about jobs. For the governor, it’s about cutting the budget. But for the mothers, it’s a matter of human rights and social justice.

The controversy around the Tamms prison isn’t unique. Like other instances in which unions have and continue to resist prison closures, it raises a larger question for the labor movement and those who care about stopping the injustices that are so central to the nation’s criminal justice system. Is it in the interests of organized labor to advocate for the kind of policies that have helped make the U.S. home to the largest prison population on the planet?

While this is not a new conundrum for the labor movement, the fight around the Tamms prison in Illinois is happening at a time when the issues of union rights and criminal justice have been pushed to the fore of national attention in recent months. The historic battle around collective bargaining in Wisconsin has put the spotlight on the union movement in the same way that the execution of Troy Davis and the killing of Trayvon Martin have been a lightning rod for debate and protest against the racism of the criminal justice system.

Since its inception, the labor movement has long championed social justice issues, if not always consistently. AFSCME’s stance on keeping prisons like Tamms open to save its members’ jobs while prison rights activists protest to shut them down creates an awkward contradiction in working-class principles.

Representing around 85,000 corrections officers and employees throughout the country, AFSCME has been organizing prison employees for decades. But it certainly isn’t alone.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, representing more than 30,000 officers in that state, has been representing correctional officers since the 1950s. The conservative CCPOA has lobbied in favor of draconian tough-on-crime policies. It campaigned heavily to support the notorious Three Strikes law which helped make California a global leader in prison construction.

Nationwide, thousands of poor Blacks and Latinos – including many non-violent offenders – have had their lives turned upside down by these heavy-handed laws, instituting a system of social control which author Michelle Alexander calls the “New Jim Crow.”

To be sure, unionization among prison employees doesn’t always turn the priorities of labor against those of prison reform activists. Recently, newly-organizing correctional officers in Florida successfully defeated a bill that would have privatized nearly a third of the state’s prisons.

In that case, the unionized correctional officers stood shoulder to shoulder with activists fighting against perhaps the most nefarious aspect of the New Jim Crow – the prison industrial complex. But even there, the common ground between the two groups generally begins and ends where cost-cutting corporate interests seek to profit off of mass incarceration.

The injustices that are so bound up with criminal justice policy in the U.S. – from the cops, to the courts, to the carceral system – have been forced into mainstream discussion thanks to decades of activist struggle and official revelations about police brutality, torture, wrongful convictions, and the stark racism that runs through the entire system. Hunger strikes among prisoners like the ones that swept the state of California last year have exposed the inhumane conditions faced by inmates in the country’s sprawling network of penitentiaries.

And the statistics speak for themselves. Of the nearly 2.5 million people behind bars – a 625 percent increase since 1975 – 39 percent are Black. Seven million people are under some form of correctional control in the U.S., a country with five percent of the world’s population and yet 25 percent of world’s incarcerated population. And more than half of the inmates in federal prisons are doing time for drug convictions.

With this record, the U.S. has earned its title as the “incarceration nation,” which is also the title of a Time magazine article last month examining the fallout of the failed “war on drugs.” As the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik recently wrote, “There are more Black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system – in prison, on probation, or on parole – than were in slavery [in 1850]. Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America…than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”

Michelle Alexander’s best-selling book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, has pushed a damning analysis of the criminal justice system even deeper into popular discourse. Her book examines the history of mass incarceration in the U.S., explaining how the war on drugs has produced a modern system of social control akin to the racist, segregationist laws that dominated the post-Civil War South. Today, legalized discrimination and political disenfranchisement of people of color continue as a result of criminal status rather than the overt racism of Jim Crow.

Alexander writes:

In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer permissible to use race explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion and social contempt…Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination – employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other benefits, and exclusion from jury service – are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a Black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow.

The question of whether unionism among police and correctional officers puts a segment of the union movement at odds with the movement to dismantle the New Jim Crow is too often ignored or given short shrift within the labor movement. Unions representing prison guards and workers typically frame their public advocacy using the rhetoric of public safety, playing into the conservative trope about protecting communities from dangerous criminals. This undermines any positive role these unions might play in challenging the policies of mass incarceration.

Correctional officer unions and organized labor as a whole need to more forcefully take part in the conversation about prison reform before opportunistic union-busters succeed in steering public outrage at mass incarceration toward anti-union sentiment.

In fact, the policy interests of prison guard unions have already given way to pro-reform arguments from the right-wing that blame mass incarceration on the unions. A recent article in the Philadelphia CityPaper looks at the how one conservative foundation is “criticizing a labor union for being too tough on crime.”

As Daniel Denvir writes in the article, “After decades of bipartisan support for tough-on-crime politics, it is oddly refreshing to hear conservatives attack an ostensibly left-leaning group for stoking crime paranoia.”

But Denvir also notes that the right-wing is using increased public awareness and interest in prison reform “as yet another bludgeon with which to beat up on the labor movement.” Also important is the fact that conservative ideas about “prison reform” rely heavily on turning penal institutions over to for-profit operations.

In an article published last year in Criminology & Public Policy, Temple University professor Heather Ann Thompson counters the idea that prison guard unions wield any real influence in preserving the status quo of mass incarceration.

“There is little correlation between the presence of guard unions, even the presence of large guard unions who have had a militantly conservative history like the CCPOA and NYSCOPBA [New York state correctional officers union], and the fate of a given state’s carceral apparatus,” Thompson writes.

“As it happens, only three of the six states that experienced the most substantial increase in prison populations in 2008 (Pennsylvania, Florida, Alabama, Indiana, Arizona, and Tennessee) had a serious guard union presence.”

Unions like CCPOA and NYSCOPBA have taken some abhorrent positions when it comes to the policies of the New Jim Crow. But Thompson argues that most prison officer unions rarely play much of a political role. And when they do, their general opposition to prison privatization and the risks that overcrowding places on workplace safety has at times led prison guard unions to stand against the expansion of the carceral state.

In any case, right-wing political forces like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are far more powerful in their agenda to widen the oppressive reach of the prison system than any union could ever be.

Still, when the preservation of jobs is the main focus of union activism, prison guard unions are more likely to oppose efforts to reduce the prison population and shut down prisons. Like other unions, they advocate for their members at the workplace level, bargaining for better wages, benefits and working conditions. Their political activism beyond the workplace puts them in the public fray over economic and social priorities as they lobby for policies that would seem to benefit their membership.

But if there has been any impact from this advocacy, it has been the New Jim Crow that has impacted organized labor, not the other way around.

It’s no coincidence that the prison boom has coincided over the last three decades with the decline in industrial manufacturing jobs. As Alexander points out in The New Jim Crow, “In the early 1980s, just as the drug war was kicking off, inner-city communities were suffering economic collapse. The blue-collar factory jobs that had been plentiful in the 1950s and 1960s had suddenly disappeared.”

Since the 1970s, neoliberal outsourcing and deindustrialization has contributed to unemployment among people of color, leading to the tripling of urban poverty rates over a period of ten years. Economic deprivation has continued and worsened for the poor since the 1980s, providing the conditions for drug use and trafficking in the midst of the law-and-order hysteria of the drug war. Harsh sentencing, including mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenses and the crack-cocaine disparity, has been a key weapon in a war on drugs that has in effect been a war on the poor and people of color.

Not surprisingly, the decline in union representation in manufacturing has happened alongside the growth of correctional workers represented by unions. While the shift is a reflection of the larger economic trends in those two sectors, it presents challenges for the labor movement from a social justice perspective.

Like the prisoners behind bars, prison guards are a part of the working class. But when their unions support prison growth, they set the interests of the working-class prison guards against the rights and dignity of the working-class prisoners. Rather than leveraging their influence to push for both better working conditions for their members and progressive reforms to beat back the New Jim Crow, prison employee unions counterpose union rights and social justice when they campaign to keep facilities like Tamms open.

By opposing the racist policies of mass incarceration and fighting to expand industrial employment, labor can win good union jobs for those who are otherwise railroaded by the criminal justice system. From the shop floor to the cell block, workers have so much more to gain from that struggle.

In fact, the very integrity of the working class depends on it.

Brian Tierney is a freelance labor journalist in Washington, DC. Read more of his work at Subterranean Dispatches, where this article first appeared.

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If one were to honestly assess Occupy's current strengths and weaknesses as a movement, confusion must be the inevitable result. This is because Occupy is not one movement, but an umbrella term that encompasses several different groups that have varied aims, organizational structures, and gaping theoretical differences. Photo: (Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images) Occupy may not be dead, but its power as a powerful social movement has surely been splintered into a dozen or so mini-movements. For example, a good, broad definition of a social movement is a large group of people who collectively try to achieve certain agreed on goals. (Three cheers for the splinteers!)

June 2, 2012 by Common Dreams

Imagining the Post-Occupy Social Movement

by Shamus Cooke

If one were to honestly assess Occupy's current strengths and weaknesses as a movement, confusion must be the inevitable result. This is because Occupy is not one movement, but an umbrella term that encompasses several different groups that have varied aims, organizational structures, and gaping theoretical differences.

Photo: (Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

Occupy may not be dead, but its power as a powerful social movement has surely been splintered into a dozen or so mini-movements.  For example, a good, broad definition of a social movement is a large group of people who collectively try to achieve certain agreed on goals.

A social movement without common goals does not move in one direction, but many; an organization without a common set of principles or agreed upon demands is not a “group,” but "groups.”  

Consequently, Occupy's various mini-movements move in different directions, towards different ends, using different means, while rarely coordinating with the other groups that are focused on their respective organization, growth, habits, and campaigns. 

The result is that collective mass action large enough to change social policy - another key definition of a social movement - is rendered impossible.

Sadly, this was the state of the left prior to Occupy: different groups organized on an "issue based activism" basis, focusing on their own projects, disconnected from any common vision or collective action. Occupy was different precisely because it was massive, and that these various groups found connection under a single banner. But the banner has since been pulled in hundreds of directions until it tore.

Occupy came close to becoming a real social movement but didn't cross the threshold. Although Occupy failed to evolve into a social movement, it has laid a foundation for one, through its successful mass education around highlighting the 1% vs. the 99% and experiments with organizing and its creation of a new layer of revolutionary activists. Occupy's inability to grow into a mass social movement may have been inevitable, since the left's disunity runs especially deep in the United States. 

Occupy did, however, create additional barriers for itself to become a social power. Occupy was organizationally wedded to a lack of organization, preventing the enormous energy from being funneled into a social force, and thus spilling in every possible direction.

Enough Occupiers were against goal setting that no goals could be collectively pursued. The well meaning attempts to create direct democracy and inclusion - through general assemblies, consensus, spokescouncil structures, etc. - resulted in gridlock, inefficiency, and exclusion instead, since most working people found it impossible to attend the initial lengthy, daily meetings that seemed unable to push the movement forward.

Some will argue that Occupy is doing fine, and that working towards a multitude of goals will inevitably bring victory, since all paths lead toward the same end, though few Occupiers agree on what this end should be. Working class people, however, are only powerful when they are united in mass numbers and acting collectively on an ongoing basis - no social movement has achieved social change without this preliminary factor. Whereas Egypt and Tunisia steadily gained momentum, Occupy eventually lost it.

It is still possible that a faction within Occupy - and there are several - could regenerate Occupy as a whole by working towards goals with a mass appeal that unite Occupy in a campaign capable of re-inspiring and mobilizing the broader population. But lessons must be learned from Occupy's experience. The key lesson - in this writer's opinion - is that social movements are created when they base themselves on concrete issues/goals that the majority of the population is concerned with. 

For example, in the Arab Spring the movement's goal was specifically anti-dictator/pro-democracy; in Europe it is anti-austerity/pro social services; South America's ongoing social movements were born fighting foreign economic domination, in the form of the austerity policies implemented by the IMF and World Bank.

In all these cases the majority of working people in these countries could relate or sympathize with the goals of the movement, which helped multiply the initial protests into what later became powerful social movements. 

In the United States, the number one concern of most people today - says numerous polls - is jobs. Occupy could demand that the federal government create millions of jobs, as was done in the 1930s, and pay for the program by taxing Wall Street as many in the Labor Movement have advocated.

Accessible, affordable quality public education and government social services are other major concerns. Occupy could focus its energies on demanding that the rich and corporations are taxed so that teachers could be rehired and tuition at colleges and universities could be reduced.

In other words, Occupy could aim at increasing taxes on the 1 percent in order to meet the needs of the 99 percent. This would also reduce the growing inequality in wealth. But these issues were lost in a whole laundry list of other goals that, although important, only concerned a periphery of the population.

The movement that Occupy gives birth to will be born at a higher level, with unity of purpose and collective action. It will not simply protest corporate power but directly challenge this power and the political system tied to it by the combined power of working people.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org).  He can be reached atshamuscook@gmail.com

In 2008, voter registration drives in the state of Florida brought thousands of young, black, Hispanic or low-income voters to the polls, many of whom helped President Obama win the state. To prevent that from happening again, the Republican-dominated legislature passed a law last year that could have imposed heavy fines or criminal penalties on volunteers if they accidentally registered an ineligible voter. That put a quick end to the drives. On Thursday, Federal Judge Robert Hinkle said the limits on voter drives were unworkable, served no legitimate purpose, and appear to violate the National Voter Registration Act. He blocked them until there can be a trial on the issues. The League of Women Voters, which by current Florida standards is a radical band of outlaws, cheered the ruling and vowed to return to the dangerous business of helping people participate in democracy.

June 1, 2012, 6:18 PM

The Law Comes to Florida

By DAVID FIRESTONE

Florida Republicans have gone so far in trying to (keep the voter registration numbers posted in their favor despite the majority of Floridians being Democratic Leaning voters, that the Obama Administration, FINALLY using the powers of its bully pulpit to ENFORCE THE VOTING LAWS OF THE LAND, decide to do something to FINALLY STOP the voter fraud in Florida which enabled the Republicans to bring Dick Cheney to power, and then subsequently load the Supreme Court with died in the wool "original constructionists" who will keep things in line in this country long past the time the American people have voted the Republican Party as it presently presents itself (as the party of no) out of office for two generations) tilt the voter rolls to their advantage that two higher powers were forced to step in yesterday to right the balance.

In 2008, registration drives brought thousands of young, black, Hispanic or low-income voters to the polls, many of whom helped President Obama win the state. To prevent that from happening again, the Republican-dominated legislature passed a law last year that could have imposed heavy fines or criminal penalties on volunteers if they accidentally registered an ineligible voter. That put a quick end to the drives.

On Thursday, Federal Judge Robert Hinkle said the limits on voter drives were unworkable, served no legitimate purpose, and appear to violate the National Voter Registration Act. He blocked them until there can be a trial on the issues. The League of Women Voters, which by current Florida standards is a radical band of outlaws, cheered the ruling and vowed to return to the dangerous business of helping people participate in democracy.

State officials, meanwhile, had found another way to reduce the participation of minorities and the poor, who tend to vote Democratic. A few months ago, Gov. Rick Scott expressed deep concern that non-citizens might be poisoning the political system by daring to vote, though there wasn’t the slightest indication that was a widespread problem. To prevent that from happening, he ordered that the voter rolls be checked against driver’s license records to ferret out renegade voters.

That process produced hundreds of errors and drew widespread criticism, but none as effective as the letter that arrived from the Justice Department late yesterday. It said the purge violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which requires the department to pass judgment on all voting changes in certain areas with a history of discrimination against minorities, including parts of Florida. As a result, the department said, the purge was legally unenforceable.

Immediately, county election supervisors across the state (many of whom always hated the idea of a purge) said they would stop trying to scrub the rolls. That left Mr. Scott sounding rather alone, denying any discriminatory intent and saying the state would review the letter from Washington. “We want fair elections,” he said. As long as the right people do the electing.

[L]awmakers give a strikingly warm embrace to certain types of immigrants. Those are the “legal” ones who enter with special visas under the pretext of having special skills or filling certain labor shortages--like Silicon Valley tech jobs or seasonal blueberry harvesting. So what makes one kind of immigrant valuable and another kind criminal?

June 2, 2012 by In These Times

Unwelcome Guests: Work Visa Programs Cheat 

Global Labor, Build Global Capital

by Michelle Chen

When immigration comes up in Washington, politicians either politely ignore the issue or engage in lively debate on how best to punish and get rid of undocumented workers. Yet lawmakers give a strikingly warm embrace to certain types of immigrants. Those are the “legal” ones who enter with special visas under the pretext of having special skills or filling certain labor shortages--like Silicon Valley tech jobs or seasonal blueberry harvesting. So what makes one kind of immigrant valuable and another kind criminal?

So-called guestworker programs attest to the arbitrary politics of immigration that has generated a perfectly legal, global traffic in migrant labor. A new report by the advocacy group Global Workers Justice Alliance reveals how various federal visa programs funnel workers into special high-demand sectors, like amusement park staff or computer programmers. Like their “illegal” counterparts, these workers are inherently disempowered: they may be dependent on employers for legal status in the U.S., have their wages regularly stolen, or suffer sexual or physical abuse. Many lack the access to the health care and overtime pay that citizen workers often take for granted. As products of globalization, they’re sometimes compelled to endure virtual indentured servitude to provide critical wage remittances to their families back home.

The economic logic is simple, according to the report: externalize the costs to those who can’t afford to challenge authority.

Under these visas, workers who enter are structurally cheaper than U.S. workers, because employers are legally exempted from certain payroll taxes, legally able to pay wages lower than fair market wages, and/or legally empowered to pass on many basic costs associated with employment – such as transportation, visa fees, housing and more – to the workers.

Companies can also outsource unscrupulous labor practices to third-party manpower agencies, which are known to recruit workers with deceptive job advertising or discriminate against female job applicants.

Kanthi Salgadu, a human trafficking survivor whose story was documented by the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, migrated from Sri Lanka to work as a housekeeper in Singapore, and later entered the U.S. on a visa, under pressure from her employers and employment agency. She then endured virtual captivity as a domestic servant for a Los Angeles household, where she was physically abused by her boss, “was not paid, and was not allowed to contact her family, aside from occasional letters to her mother.”

In Maryland’s crab industry, visa-based women workers from Mexico reported taking out loans to pay recruiters' fees and then working for poverty wages under harsh, abusive conditions, picking crab meat by the pound, with “paycheck deductions for knives, gloves, and other basic tools and safety equipment.”

Recently, a group of youth who came to the U.S. for an "educational experience" under the J-1 visa summer work program ended up getting worked to exhaustion at a Hershey facility in Pennsylvania. The students' protests prompted the State Department to initiate moderate reforms to the program, though labor advocates say the entire visa system must be overhauled.

Advocates say threats of retaliation enforce the collective silence of workers:

“An employer can blacklist with impunity,” stated Silas Shawver of the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante. “All they have to say to the recruiter is, ‘I don’t want that worker again,’ and it’s done.” The majority of workers who report blacklisting to the organization have not been involved in concerted or sustained action, or union organizing – often, the employer may be reacting to a one-time, individual act of protest, such as worker raising a concern about workplace safety, speaking up in support of another worker who was fired, or questioning wage deductions on a paycheck.

The pool of marginalized workers feeds into an escalating climate of hostility toward labor in general. While the report focuses on abuses of migrants, it also reveals how corrupt visa policies erode standards for all workers. In some cases, U.S. workers faced displacement and systemic discrimination. For example, farm contractors may sidestep local workers to hire “cheaper,” more vulnerable migrants--and stoke racial resentment in the process.

The report concludes grimly:

The system is designed to pit U.S. workers and temporary foreign workers against each other.... Under the circumstances, it is difficult to forge solidarity among U.S. and foreign workers on the many workplace issues they may hold in common – wage theft, occupational safety, retaliation against those who try to organize.

But a few advocacy groups have managed to rally immigrant and non-immigrant workers in solidarity around common causes, advocating for equitable and decent working conditions for all. California Rural Legal Assistance, for example, works to prevent discrimination and exploitation by monitoring farm employers and informing locals about job opportunities that should be open to all.

Still, nativist groups have capitalized on U.S. workers’ fears of economic displacement with jingoistic hate campaigns. Pro-migrant activists warn that stoking xenophobic tensions--which encourage terroristic immigration-enforcement crackdowns and mass deportations--actually weakens labor. Not only are immigrants at the heart of an inevitable demographic shift in the workforce; they’re rooted in American communities as family members, students, taxpayers and neighbors. And they could wield enormous clout as part of the labor movement, if fully included in it.

Cathleen Caron, founder of Global Workers Justice Alliance, told In These Times:

Really the only way forward is to strengthen protections for U.S. and foreign workers alike. If the system shuts out U.S. workers then of course, U.S. workers will rightly be resentful.  But if the system has safeguards for U.S. workers and foreign workers only come in when there is a legitimate and measurable need, then U.S workers should welcome, and organize the new comers.

Labor can only challenge the dominance of capital by building strength in numbers. Arbitrary immigration policies have produced a dehumanized underclass and forced more workers to fight for corporate America’s crumbs. The real division isn't between “legal” and “illegal” labor, but between all workers on one side, and a criminally exploitative system on the other.

© 2012 In These Times

Michelle Chen is a contributing editor at In These Times. She is a regular contributor to the labor rights blog Working In These Times,Colorlines.com, and Pacifica's WBAI. Her work has also appeared in Common Dreams, Alternet, Ms. Magazine, Newsday, and her old zine, cain.

more Michelle Chen

The stock market’s down. GDP is on life-support. Jobs numbers are cratering. The economy is tanking. And you can bet Republicans will jump on this disaster to push their starve the beast strategy of making government even more ineffective so they can justify gutting it even more. Why? So they can give million dollar tax cuts to millionaires, cut regulations on industry and the financial sector, and eliminate Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, student loans, unemployment and virtually anything else that benefits low and middle income Americans.

June 2, 2012 by Common Dreams

Compromise Coming Home to Roost: 

The Real Problem with Obama’s Capitulation

by John Atcheson

The stock market’s down.  GDP is on life-support. Jobs numbers are cratering.  The economy is tanking.

And you can bet Republicans will jump on this disaster to push their starve the beast strategy of making government even more ineffective so they can justify gutting it even more. Why? So they can give million dollar tax cuts to millionaires, cut regulations on industry and the financial sector, and eliminate Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, student loans, unemployment and virtually anything else that benefits low and middle income Americans.

You’ll be hearing the words “job creators” a lot.  And “debt” and “deficits” will be raised like a hoary headed monsters in a 3 year-old’s nightmare. 

Austerity and privatization will be chanted like magical incantations.

The press will dutifully report all this, without any critical analysis.

Mitt Romney’s chances of getting elected will soar.

And inevitably, the United States will drift into a deep recession, if not a depression.  Because the policies Romney, Ryan and Republicans are advocating as solutions, caused the economic crash in 2008. 

And herein lies the problem with Obama’s wishy washy compromising with Republicans and his sell-out to Wall Street and the Big Banks.  

Because he refused to engage in a debate about what caused the problem in 2008, he will have no credibility if he tries to do it now. 

There was a time when Americans would have listened to a reasoned argument about why the economy collapsed and what we needed to do about it. 

In the end, the explanation for the Great Recession was really quite simple: it boiled down to two things.

First, when most of the money goes to the ultra rich, the rest of us don’t have enough money to make a consumer economy go. That’s precisely what brought on the Great Depression and the Depression in the 1890’s. And that’s what brought on the Great Recession of 2008. Thanks to 30 years of Republican policies the US has about the same income disparity as Uganda and Cameroon. As a result, 2008 was an economic time bomb waiting to happen.

Which brings us to the second fact. A barely regulated securities market, coupled with a nearly unregulated mortgage market was the trigger that set off the bomb.

Remember, both are a central part of what Romney et. al. are posing as the solution.

To make matters worse, they are pushing austerity – cutting government spending at a time when industry is sitting on their profits rather than investing them in job creating activity.  To the extent they are investing in new infrastructure, it’s overseas.

So get this – the middle class, which is vital to growing our economy -- doesn’t have enough money to make the economy grow.  They’re either losing their jobs or afraid they might and their wages have been frozen for decades.  Industry is not investing in job creating expansions because of this.  And rightly so, by the way.  Why should they expand, when existing capacity is underutilized and the prospect for increased consumer spending is grim? 

So where is the only place job creation could come from?  Government spending, of course.  And there are lots of worthwhile things to spend on that would have a positive return – that is, they would move more money into the economy than we spend.  Physical infrastructure, green energy, human capital, are a few examples.

But that argument is lost in the cacophony of paid plutocratic economic pornography.  The only thing capable of being heard above the self-serving siren song of the uber-rich and corporate America is the voice from the Bully pulpit.

But after failing to draw this distinction and engage in that debate for more than 3 years, any attempt by Obama to do so now will be dismissed by voters as a lame excuse offered by a lame executive.  “Where was all this rhetoric when things were looking better?” they’ll ask.

In short, selling out to Republicans and Corporatists wasn’t simply bad policy, it was bad politics. 

And immoral as hell.

So now our ship of state seems destined to maneuver through dangerous shoals using the broken compass that is the Republican playbook for a corporate take-over of America. 

Naomi Klein called it – disaster capitalism. It’s not a passive thing.  No waiting around for a disaster to occur spontaneously.  They create the disaster, and then capitalize on it.  They cripple government and then say it can’t work.

But the worst disaster for America is Mitt Romney as President.  And Obama's cowardice or his complicity have just made that a whole lot more likely.

John Atcheson is author of the novel, A Being Darkly Wise, an eco-thriller and Book One of a Trilogy centered on global warming. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News and other major newspapers. Atcheson’s book reviews are featured on Climateprogess.org.