Game-Changers?

1. Matthew Rothschild enjoys a low-key "told you so" moment - didn't we all? - over Randian Alan Greenspan's recent admission that, shucks, his belief in a financial system unfettered by regulation might've had a few flaws.
   

   “I have found a flaw,” Greenspan testified.

   That’s kind of like the astronomer Ptolemy saying, “Something’s wrong here, maybe the sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth.”

   Or like the biologist Lamarck saying, “Maybe the giraffe doesn’t get a longer neck by stretching for high leaves.”

   Or like the Pope saying, “Maybe the earth wasn’t created in seven days.”

   Except that the consequences of Greenspan’s blunder are much more severe than the fallacies of the past.

   He and his faulty free market philosophy have precipitated a global recession.

   Millions are losing their homes. Millions more will lose their jobs. And tens of millions have already lost their retirement funds.

   All casualties of Greenspan’s belief in a fable.

2. Harold Meyerson on Working America's inroads with working-class whites in Ohio, and labor's mixed record in the 20th century to protect its better angels (i.e., the social-democratic ones) at the expense of the lingering racial insecurities and, shucks, hatred:
   

In a sense, overcoming the nation's racial rifts has always been the distinctive challenge facing American labor. Unlike its European counterparts, its own working class has always been multiracial -- a fact that explains a great deal about the failure of the United States to ever have a powerful socialist movement or a more solidaristic consciousness.

At their best, unions have been an indispensable force in combating American racism -- but even the best unions have not always been able to enlist their white members in that cause. Under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the United Auto Workers (UAW) funded and provided most of the resources (e.g., buses) for the 1963 March on Washington. For decades, it had championed the rights of black autoworkers, and African Americans generally, in Detroit and other industrial cities. Such policies did not win universal approval within the union, however, which was chiefly made up of Appalachian whites and Southern blacks, who both had traveled north for the work. During World War II, the union worked constantly to keep its members in the newly integrated defense factories from attacking each other. From the 1930s through the 1960s, the UAW did persuade its white members in and around Detroit to vote for progressive Democratic candidates for federal and state office. It failed continually, however, to persuade them to vote for liberals at the level of Detroit city government. From their city council, their white members wanted housing laws that would keep their black union brothers out of their neighborhoods, and a police force that would keep them more generally in their place.