David's answer to my question made a lot of sense. I want to pick up on one part of it: expanding the labor movement, and to put in a plug for a law that could make an important difference in realizing the goal.

David stresses the critical role labor has played in progressive politics. There are good local examples with pretty high visibility, like living wage laws, that typically have labor activists somewhere in the mix. Wal-Mart Watch, a project started by the Service Employees International Union, has had great success in forcing better compensation and labor practices at that retail behemoth. And on the economic front, the union advantage in terms of wages, benefits, vacations, etc., are well known and thoroughly documented (though what with globalization and the long-term slide in union membership, even unions' bargaining power ain't what it used to be).

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I think it was the British comedian Alexei Sayle who used to do this routine riffing off of Tracy Chapman's song about revolution. He'd play it for awhile, and then stop it suddenly right when Tracy was singing "there's a revolution coming." And he'd shout, in a very uppercrust accent, "No, there's not!"

I thought about that when I read David's post, but he's the guy that's been going around with his ears close to the ground, and he's got very acute hearing for this kind of thing. So if says something is percolating, I believe him.

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