On this Labor Day, a lot of folks are thinking about what ever happened to labor.

Where did those unions go?

And more immediately, where did those jobs go?

The two might be more connected than you might think.

E.J. Dionne Jr. writes that “When unions mattered, prosperity was shared.” We had less of what one notorious Citibank memo referred to as “plutonomy,” a concentration of wealth among the few at the top. Working families got to share in the material bounty they’d created.

This wasn’t just given. It was fought for, in decades of organizing and struggle.

But it created the consumer power that drove the US economy to new heights.

As retail trade remains contracted around the nation, Capitol Hill’s Pike-Pine Corridor has bloomed. With the Elliott Bay Book Co. as its new anchor, and a growing array of restaurants and bars covering a wide range of styles and price points, Pike-Pine is the Hill’s, and the city’s, most happening spot.

So how’s that affecting the Hill’s traditional main drag, Broadway?

It’s hanging on. From a cursory glance, it might be doing better than a lot of American neighborhood business strips.

Yes, several Broadway merchants failed to eke out this economic storm. A moment of silence now for Bailey/Coy Books, Harem, Broadway News, Blooms on Broadway, Bella Pizza, and their fellow victims of tough times. (Hollywood Video is a separate case, a whole chain that went away pretty much at once.)

Then there’s the little matter of the big hole in the ground at Broadway and John. Toward the end of this decade it’ll be a spiffy light rail station. But for now it’s two long blocks of dirt and noise behind artist-embellished wooden fences.

But Broadway is refusing to close down for the duration, either of the recession or of the rail construction.

I’m writing this on an extremely busy Sunday afternoon at Espresso Vivace, one of the outfits forced out by the rail project. It’s relocated to the Brix, one of Broadway’s six new mixed-use developments. All were launched during the peak of the now long-burst real estate bubble. The last two, Joule and the Broadway Building, are in the process of opening.

Yeah, that means a bunch of new storefronts are coming on the rental market, adding to what was already an oversupply.

But from the looks of things on this Sunday, they stand a healthy chance of making it work.

Vivace’s big new flagship store at the Brix is packed at this writing. The line for service stretches almost to the door.

Nearby, the Dilettante, Byzantion, Deluxe, and Roy St. Coffee (one of those thinly disguised Starbucks) have their own milling crowds. So do the Broadway Grill and Pho Cyclo.

Three blocks south of Vivace, the Broadway Sunday Farmers Market is closing up shop for the day. The dozens of indie merchants there seemed to have had a good day, even if the weather was unseasonally uninviting.

Still further south, Cal Anderson Park is all busy with dozens of young men and women. They’re posing for one another’s digital cameras and prancing about. They’re dressed in elaborate costumes. Some wear wigs of green, blue, or silver.

It’s the monthly meetup of Gasukan, a local “costume role play” group. Its members come dressed as specific characters from anime, manga, and video games. It’s a shining example of the “everyday cosplay” idea I wrote about in this space back in April.

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All this indoor/outdoor activity on an August weekend afternoon certainly doesn’t prove all is fine n’ dandy on Broadway. If it was, perhaps the old Bailey/Coy and Dilettante spaces would be refilled by now.

But at least some of the Joule complex’s storefronts have occupants announced, including an Umpqua Bank branch and a Qdoba Mexican Grill.

The latter is opening approximately where Taco Bell used to be. I can’t say whether or not this is a step up. But at least it’s a step forward, a sign of confidence in the neighborhood by a growing national franchise.

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Meanwhile, one venerable Broadway business is about to change.

Ken and Christine Bauer are retiring from Charlie’s on Broadway. They started the venerable diner and bar, with the late Charles Quinn, in 1976. Its art nouveau nostalgia decor, trendy at the time, now seems like a friendly beloved relic.

The Bauers have put Charlie’s up for sale as a going concern. Let’s hope whoever takes it over knows how to pump up its business, without meddling too much with its essential nature.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

A ramble today about the miserable economy and potential alternatives thereto.

I begin with recent remarks by Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang. He has a book out in the UK, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.

Plugging the book in the Brit daily The Independent, Chang’s alleged that the current global corporate system has turned us all into Matrix drones, sleepwalking through a fantasy world and incapable of imagining any other.

This is the ol’ Plato’s cave allegory, refitted to modern pop-culture references.

And I believe it’s only half true, at most.

Eleven years ago, thousands swarmed Seattle’s streets protesting just that system.

Today, you sure don’t have to be a political radical to see a lot of dysfunction in the way things currently are.

But what to do about it?

In this country, the Republicans only offer a return to the lobbyist-whoring ways of the Bush years. The corporate Democrats offer watered down Clintonian half measures, then dilute them further.

I’ve talked and corresponded with a lot of people who desperately want something better.

But what?

Third-world style dictatorship works at keeping a small elite in power, but it’s lousy for most everybody else. Central-state Communism sometimes worked a little better in regard to social services; but it could be brutally inefficient, where dictatorships were simply brutally efficient.

Besides, excessive centralization of capital and wealth is a lot of what’s wrong with the present system. We need more economic diversity and democracy, not less.

So I hereby introduce my own formula for a better, more prosperous tomorrow:

Economic MISCosity.

The elevator-pitch description: Try whatever works.

To hell with pure socialism, pure capitalism, pure anything.

Decentralize businesses and business units. More authority to those in the field. More co-op and worker-controlled enterprises.

Use public financing and/or administration for those social goods that often aren’t best serviced by the profit motive. I’d nominate health care as just such a sector.

Promote more and different metrics of economic success, other than just the Almighty Stock Price.

To my alt-culture pals: Can the square-bashing, the rural-bashing, and the working-class-bashing. We’re all in this thing together.

To my baby-boomer pals: This ain’t gonna be pretty, or laid back, or mellow. Be prepared for some heavy lifting.

To my NPR-fan pals: This ain’t gonna be easy to understand, let alone simple to accomplish. Beware of easy answers, no matter what they are. Our future is a messy, complex, complicated place, full of twists and seeming contradictions. Live with it.

You know that Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota, the anti-gay demagogue mysteriously loved monetarily by Target Stores? We now know who’s going to be his Democratic rival. It’s an ex-US Senator who happens to be a descendent of Target’s founding family.

There are many threads of influence beneath today’s extreme right wing faux-populism. Here’s one: the religious, political, and sales cult that is Amway.

The retail space at the bottom of the Newmark condo on Second and Pike?

The space that used to have a Pay n’ Save/Rite Aid and a Quiznos?

On the lot that used to hold JCPenney’s biggest store before it closed in 1982?

Where The Bon Marché had been before 1929?

The space thatat most recently had been overflow office space for Washington Mutual Bank (remember them?)

It’s now going to be a Target.

Don’t know if it’ll open in time for Xmas.

(Update: It won’t. The space needs at least a year’s worth of remodeling.)

Now if we can only persuade the company’s CEO to stop backing extreme antigay politicians back in its Minnesota homeland.

Costco’s Washington liquor privatization initiative: Good for chain stores, bad for microbrewers? That’s what the Washington Brewers Guild claims.

Needless Tragedy of the Day: Fremont’s Buckaroo Tavern will close in September. The venerable, beloved dive lost its lease after 72 years.

The building’s owners (a pair of brothers) want to put up their own restaurant and pub in the space. What little we know about these two brothers isn’t promising. One of them is apparently part of a Seattle artists’ collective that ONLY shows its work at fuckin’ Burning Man and the fuckin’ Coachella festival, never to us undeserving hicks up here.

The Buckaroo’s management hopes to put up its classic neon sign over a new location, should one be findable. There are many vacant storefronts in north-central Seattle these days, as in the rest of America. But will there be one available at the right price, with the right ambience, convenient for the Buck’s current regulars?

So Microsoft’s Kin phone was a dud, its Zune music player’s struggling to get mindshare, and its Bing search site’s still fighting to be noticed. None of these might really matter, so long as the company’s business software platforms keep selling great.

Jordan Royer at Crosscut thinks there’s a “quiet culture war” dividing Seattle.

Royer sees the drive for completing the Burke-Gilman Trail in Ballard, and the drive against a deep-bore tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, as marks of an artsy PC tree-hugging elite sneering at what’s left of Seattle’s industrial heritage.

Look: The working-family manufacturing economy has been in decline all over the country. If anything, Seattle’s damn lucky to have other things to replace it with.

We can do what we can to maintain the making-real-stuff businesses we’ve still got, AND service the more rarified citizenry as well.

We’re so lucky to live in the metro area with America’s “least miserable” economy.

Just weeks after I said the SeaTimes‘ current three-section format had a 26-page minimum size, I’m proven wrong. Tuesday’s paper was a flimsy 24 pages, including less than three pages of paid advertising. (Monday was an “observed” holiday, which meant little new political pronouncements and no stock listings.)

Last Sunday’s SeaTimes was the first I could remember (and I’m old) to have as few as 74 pages (not counting comics, TV section, magazine sections, and ad flyers).

If business at John and Fairview fails to pick up and stay picked up, management might have to impose further draconian cuts. Not to pare back to a profitable size, but to a subsidizeable size. That’s a scenario in which what’s left of the local conservative business community can prop up the paper with vanity ads, or with direct donations.

Once again, we celebrate the anniversary of colonial business bosses’ forcible  secession from the government that had made their success possible.

And once again, the American ideology of bottom-line-above-all has us in a mess. Several messes, in fact, and huge ones at that.

We now have a national economy based on, as Intel cofounder Andy Grove puts it, “highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed.”

We have wars for oil, or more precisely for geopolitical alliances based on oil.

We have massive amounts of this self-same gunk polluting a seabed of incalculable value. We now know that it’s not one company’s fault. The entire industry was spending as little money or effort as legally possible on safety and cleanup (expenses which don’t immediately contribute to profits). The particular two or three companies behind Deepwater Horizon were simply the ones that happened to lose at this very American version of Russian roulette.

And around the country, state and local governments spar over how many social safety nets they can get away with letting rot—because, after all, asking anything from Sacred Business just isn’t done. Especially not here in the state By the Upscale, Of the Upscale, and For the Upscale.

But still, there is hope.

There is always hope, so long as America’s primal contradiction continues to hold.

I speak of the contradiction between America’s ugly realities (a nation built by financiers, conquerors, slavers, and merchant middlemen) and its lofty ideals (a nation professing devotion to freedom, justice, and democracy).

We came dangerously close in the Bush era toward resolving this contradiction in the worst way possible, by junking the ideals and becoming unabashed, unshameable mega-hustlers.

It didn’t work.

Even the furthest reaches of the Far Right found they could not win even core base support for their assorted schemes without making at least nominal appeals to citizens’ more noble natures.

That’s what the professional organizers and corporate lobbyists behind the faux-populist “tea party” nonsense understand. That’s why they disguise their ultra-corporate agenda in images of patriotic kitsch.

Even the money-grubbers’ and power-grabbers’ last remaining loyal followers believe in (at least the symbols 0f) America’s higher ideals.

This is an opportunity for those of us who wish to promote a more progressive agenda.

It’s why I still believe in what this land can become.

Seattle’s most famous/notorious go-go bar, topless bar, juke box, vending machine, and non-alcohol strip club owner has died at 93, having barely outlived the last remnants of his Federally-seized businesses. There ought to be a half-mast pole dance in his honor.

Hi-tech designer/author/pundit Clay Shirky has seen too many of his NYU female students fail to become industry movers n’ shakers. His conclusion: Women today just aren’t good enough braggarts and liars.