The sad thing about this interview is that neither Moyers nor Stern appear to have looked at the normal, progressive solutions to worker problems in America. Just to take two: economic codetermination and balanced trade policy.

In the early 1990s Ralph Nader proposed to require a federal charter for all corporations that engage in interstate commerce. Then the rules for those corporations would include, in the charter, normal economic codetermination whereby one-half of corporate boards would be comprised of elected employee/union representatives. Germany has been doing that for decades and it is the direction the entire EU is going for making commercial organizations worker-friendly. This policy lets workers represent themselves in the board room. Who better to speak for them? In a company that had half its employees unionized, then half the employee reps on the board would be from the union. Simple and elegant.

Trade policy. Trade needs to be balanced so the US is required to balance trade by a revised international system. That way our workers don't get undermined by low wages with no environmental or human rights standards. This is easy to do by way of the rejected proposal by Keynes at Bretton Woods in 1944. Susan George wrote a great summary article about that recently in LeMonde. In this proposal, any nation that runs a trade deficit or trade surplus gets penalized by the way the system is structured. Had this been in place, we would not have dismantled our manufacturing industries to exploit the advantages of ultra-cheap labor abroad. Here is a link to the article:

http://mondediplo.com/2007/01/03economy

It would be nice to see such leaders as Moyers and Stern grasp such standard, and obvious structural solutions.

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