Overturning the New Deal

Long game strategies, when employed with simplicity, specificity and devout dedication, are the most effective way to cause change lasting for decades.  When the Labor Movement and others seeking to safeguard the rank-and-file worker and common citizen from economic calamity gained a friend in the White House, many of their ideas and demands found their way into the policies and agencies forming President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.  Many of those institutions that started in the mid-1930’s are still with us today and still as popular as they were at their founding like Social Security, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, the 40 hour work week, overtime pay, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.  Before the backdrop at the time of the fledgling global competition between free market capitalism and the spreading ideology of communism, the wealthy industrialists and moneyed interests in the United States coldly accepted these New Deal programs and tolerated them at an arm’s length for several decades.

There are several remnants and reminders of New Deal era government agencies that have long since ceased to exist along this, the Mother Road’s most conservative stretch.  Two Tulsa high schools were made possible with a grant from the Public Works Administration.  One of these is the Alma Mater of Yours Truly, Will Rogers High School.  Myself and all who attended any public school built in the 1930s with government funding are direct beneficiaries of the New Deal, like it or not.  I always felt privileged to be one of those that benefitted from that PWA grant as a student some four decades removed from it and ever since as a member of the alumni community.  For the record, the conservative-majority of my graduating class and my own rightwing radio fan brother has never uttered a peep of complaint about attending a school built with money from a New Deal program then or now, at least within my earshot.  Nor have I ever heard any of them complain about any of the other above listed New Deal era institutions, especially since so many of them are now or have been the direct recipients of their benefits and safeguards.

Much of the groundwork for rolling back New Deal-era policies was laid in the early 1980s when President Reagan refused to negotiate with striking air traffic controllers in August 1981.  This set an ominous tone for the future of  worker and employee rights going forward.  With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism as viable global economic system was ostensibly defeated, save a few isolated backwater pockets.  Slowly but surely, those aforementioned moneyed interests have sought to expand their reach and maximize their profits.  One way they have done this is to erode collective bargaining rights of workers via Right to Work laws such as the one we have in Oklahoma.  Since 2002, the only right an employee has in the Sooner State is to QUIT!

The current occupant of the Oval Office and those duly noted moneyed interests that helped put him there are a great deal more shrewd at implementing their long game strategy than most of us liberal and progressive types give them credit, corruption notwithstanding.  There is a method to the madness of  government by chaos, sensationalism and distractions.  Ah, yes, distractions.  Over the past couple months while the mainstream media outlets and radio talking heads and all have been covering things like the Special Counsel’s Russia investigation, the North Korea on again-off again summit and the ICE crackdown on illegal immigrants to the nth degree amongst other things, an obscure case came before the Supreme Court in early April.  The Liberal wing’s mouthpiece on the court spoke out after a 5-4 decision along the usual ideological lines was handed down reversing a lower court ruling.  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made it clear regarding this case that the New Deal may be under attack.  The focus of the case was a provision in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Ginsburg Sounds Alarm on New Deal Rollback

Excerpt:

<<“Monday’s decision aligns the court majority with the Trump administration’s interest in rolling back federal regulation of business.
“By stretching the [overtime] exemption … ,” wrote Ginsburg, the 85-year-old leader of the liberal wing, the majority strips away “protection for … vulnerable workers.”
Monday’s dispute centered on the Fair Labor Standards Act, passed in 1938 during the Great Depression. Its overtime pay requirements, as Ginsburg noted, were intended to induce employers to hire more people who worked 40-hour weeks rather than to keep a workforce of fewer employees with longer hours.
At issue in the case of Encino Motorcars v. Navarro was a provision exempting certain workers from overtime protection, specifically “any salesman, partsman, or mechanic primarily engaged in selling or servicing automobiles, trucks, or farm implements.”
The question in the appeal by a Mercedes-Benz dealership in California was whether service advisers who consult with customers about their servicing needs fell under that exemption. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that service advisers qualify for overtime pay.”>>

I realize that this case was little more than a blip on the national radar but its decision does reflect the consequences of liberal and progressive electoral defeats.  Even though critics may dismiss Justice Ginsburg as being overly alarmist, her warning should be duly noted by all.  This may be one small item but it plays into that long game strategy of reversing all gains of the Labor Movement of a hundred years ago and disenfranchising its coalition.  It is all part of the goal of modern Conservatism to eliminate unionization and to privatize Social Security, Medicare, the Veterans Administration  and as many other government administered agencies as possible.  The vision of those moneyed interests whom the current *President truly represents is to return America to the Gilded Age where labor is cheap, plentiful and submissive, where there is no social safety net, where it is every man, woman, child, veteran, elderly and disabled person for themselves, where those top 1% taxpayers can demand and receive the benefit of everything and have no liability after the fact.  Does that sound a little extreme or perhaps dystopian?  Do you think it isn’t possible?  The question is where are we willing to draw the line?  Please think long and hard about that one because it is a battle that is looming on the horizon.  As liberals and progressives our long game strategy must be reasonable, functional and marketable and our dedication to it must be ironclad.  Plan on seeing and learn to recognize the common threads of this discussion in every political campaign in 2018.  The future of our state and nation is hanging in the balance.