Getting The Message On The Majority

While fools like David Ignatius are already lamenting that Nancy Pelosi hasn't gotten anything done BEFORE SHE'S EVEN SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE, and while hours and hours of attention are paid to the Democratic leadership races while Republican leadership fights go unreported, at least one outlet is getting the message on who's in charge and how it ought to be covered. After Meet the Press started its first postelection show, in an election decided on opposition to the Iraq war, by featuring war supporters John McCain and Joe Lieberman, this week they're turning to Jim Webb and Jon Tester.

It's a great thing for these two guys to get this kind of national exposure so quickly. Webb and Tester are going to be absolute rock stars in the Senate (and it goes without saying, both were promoted by bloggers since their contested primaries). Webb has already written one of the most audacious editorials in the history of the Wall Street Journal, a fiery, populist essay that laid out the little-noticed problems of wage imbalance and income stratification with piercing clarity.

The most important--and unfortunately the least debated--issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.

Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic's range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade. When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much.

In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future. Trickle-down economics didn't happen. Despite the vaunted all-time highs of the stock market, wages and salaries are at all-time lows as a percentage of the national wealth. At the same time, medical costs have risen 73% in the last six years alone. Half of that increase comes from wage-earners' pockets rather than from insurance, and 47 million Americans have no medical insurance at all.

Manufacturing jobs are disappearing. Many earned pension programs have collapsed in the wake of corporate "reorganization." And workers' ability to negotiate their futures has been eviscerated by the twin threats of modern corporate America: If they complain too loudly, their jobs might either be outsourced overseas or given to illegal immigrants.

This is literally an unheard-of position among the Washington elite, one that suggests that this Washington Post piece about the coming change in trade policy may be prescient. To have a national figure in the well of the Senate talking about the poor and the downtrodden, talking about the greed of corporate boardrooms, will be a sea change in American politics. And I presume Senator-elect Tester will be right behind Senator-elect Webb to back him up.

Billmon is similarly stunned:

That's beautiful stuff. Paul Wellstone could have written it. So could Bernie Sanders, although Bernie actually might find it a little too radical for his tastes. But the last person -- well, almost the last person -- on earth I would expect to emerge as a tribune of good old-fashioned New Deal populism (or, dare I say it, democratic socialism) is fightin' Jim Webb, Ronald Reagan's favorite Marine.

Not only that, but Webb's now against the war -- just like us unreconstructed '60s (or, in my case, '70s) radicals. I just hope he doesn't mind being tarred as a stabber of backs or a spitter on the troops by the modern-day equivalents of the old Jim Webb. It kind of goes with the territory [...]

...if Jim Webb and I are now on the roughly same side on the big issues of the day -- the war, globalization, corporate power, economic fairness, social justice -- it tells you something has fundamentally changed in American politics. It may not be a realignment (a political system this polluted and decrepit may not be capable of such a thing) but when Senators from Virginia start talking like Walter Reuther, it sure the hell isn't business as usual.

This is a voice, very similar to my voice, I have literally never heard in the corridors of power where it counts. Republicans want to point to Webb as an example of how the election proved that the country is conservative; Webb (and Jon Tester) might show the country that it's more liberal than they ever imagined.