James Galbraith on Countervailing Powers

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My magazine piece on the decline of labor was all about labor’s role as a countervailing power against the corporate community. The concept of countervailing powers is, of course, the brainchild of John Kenneth Galbraith, and today Ezra Klein talks to his son, James Galbraith, about how this applies to the world today:

What if labor never gets off the mat, and initiatives like the one in Wisconsin succeed? Are there any other actors in the economy who can play the countervailing role that labor has traditionally played?

There are certainly other organizations in the system. Voluntary associations and churches and so forth. But there’s nothing able to play the role as effectively on economic issues as an organization based on economic roles. Everything else is divided up into particular concerns — many of which are very important, like civil rights and environmental issues. But what has faded out is an organization with a clear and coherent focus on the economic position on the working population. And not the working population composed of manufacturing workers, but the mass of service sector jobs and others who are not organized.

This is a very good way of putting it, and it’s similar to a few paragraphs I wrote for an early draft of my article. The left still has plenty of interest groups, and they play important roles. But most of the best funded groups don’t really focus strongly on economic issues, and most of the groups that focus on economic issues aren’t well funded. As I put it in the article, we lack a countervailing power “as big, crude, and uncompromising as organized labor used to be.” Somehow we need to figure out how to get that back.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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