Harold Meyerson

The Great Recession rolls on, but it's not too early to single out the major powers that have come through the wreckage in the best shape. They are the ones the other major nations implore for help -- to bail out weaker economies, to diminish their dominance of the world's production and start consuming more themselves. There are just two such nations: China and Germany.

Global unemployment might remain stratospheric, but in China, long-suppressed wages are finally increasing for millions of industrial workers. China's stimulus -- effectively the world's largest -- has funded bullet trains, airports and wind turbines. In Germany, unemployment has been running a point or two below ours, and exports remain high. Thanks to its favorable trade balance, Germany's finances are the strongest in Europe, which is why German monetary guarantees have been key to the future of both Greece and the euro.

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Liberal Democrats know what they're for: a second stimulus to create more investment and jobs at a time when the economy is still dangerously weak. Republicans ("conservative Republicans" is redundant) know what they're against: anything the Democrats are for. That leaves the centrist Blue Dog Democrats, who don't really know what they're for or what they're against.

Earlier this year the Blue Dogs, and many other Democrats, were saying they would welcome an end to the debate over health-care reform so they could turn their attention to jobs, jobs, jobs. But now that President Obama and Democratic legislative leaders have done that, the Blue Dogs have largely turned skittish.

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The workers are rising in the workers' republic. In China's south coastal provinces, which long ago supplanted the American Midwest as the world's premier manufacturing belt, employees have gone on strike at a series of factories. Nobody knows how many plants have been threatened with shutdowns or have ground to a halt; one American attorney who's spent a good deal of time with such workers estimates that it may be close to 1,000.

The cause of the unrest is no mystery. China's rise to industrial preeminence (in a quantitative if not qualitative sense) has come on the backs of workers whose wages the government has, until recently, suppressed to keep the price of exports artificially low. The official Communist Party-dominated All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) is not really a union. Workers do not choose its leaders, who most frequently come from management. "The union," says the attorney, "is less state-dominated than employer-dominated." That is a logical consequence of two party priorities: to build an industrial sector that dominates global markets through low prices; and to prohibit the existence of any organizations that could eventually challenge party control.

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Growing up in Movieland

I grew up in Movieland -- Los Angeles' Westside in the 1950s and 1960s. I went to school with the kids of people in the industry, which was so hopelessly uncool, we didn't even talk about it. (The guy with whom I co-edited my high school literary magazine never mentioned that his father had created a well-known sitcom -- I Love Lucy . I found out when he wrote about it 30 years later.) A sclerotic studio system was churning out The Sound of Music while we were deciphering Dylan and watching Vietnam burn every night on the tube. When I showed up in New York to go to college, the last thing I expected to study, or love, was the movies.

But New York, circa 1968, had other ideas. There was, of course, no shortage of politics to entice me, but by the late '60s, New York also offered the closest thing to an overview of film history that anyone had yet assembled. There were a dozen or so theaters scattered across Manhattan where the Marx Brothers or Bogart or Jean Renoir were in seemingly constant rotation. In 1969, the Elgin Theater down in Chelsea presented the first retrospective of Buster Keaton's silent comedies, most of which hadn't been screened since they'd been dumped in assorted attics 40 years earlier.

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The good news for Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina here in California was that they won their Republican primaries. The bad news was that they had to run in Republican primaries.

Whitman, now the GOP nominee for governor, and Fiorina, the GOP nominee for senator, dispatched their nearest primary rivals by margins of better than 2 to 1. Each spent a queen's ransom to do so -- in Whitman's case, close to $80 million of her own money -- but both former CEOs have plenty left over to take on their Democratic opponents this fall: in Whitman's case, Jerry Brown, the once and, he hopes, future governor; in Fiorina's case, incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer.

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How to spend $80 million of your own money in the primary and render yourself unelectable in the process.

LOS ANGELES -- As California Republicans wind up a costly party primary election, they'd do well to remember how Arnold Schwarzenegger became the only Republican elected to a major statewide office since 1994.

It wasn't his celebrity. It wasn't his program. It wasn't his opponent (though Gray Davis was certainly an unpopular governor). It wasn't even his accent.

Schwarzenegger was elected governor in 2003 chiefly because he didn't have to enter a Republican primary. The contest in which he won the statehouse was that most unusual of electoral animals, a recall election, in which candidates of all parties, and voters of all parties, participated. Arnold never had to careen rightward to win a plurality of Republican voters in a Republican primary. The electoral recall process eliminates primaries altogether.

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