Mainstream Populist Democrats

Does European Left "meltdown" over immigration provide a lesson for U.S. Democrats ?

2011-05-11T16:07:00.000-07:00

Left-leaning political parties are rapidly losing ground across Europe. Working class voters have left the Labour Party and other European liberal parties over their support of open immigration policies.

Many Democratic elected officials in the United States, including President Obama, think it is great politics to support amnesty for twelve million illegal immigrants despite massive unemployment. The trends in Europe are warning signs for American Democrats to proceed with caution in dealing with immigration reform.

Toby Young writes at The Telegraph:

Tempting though it is to blame Ed Miliband for Labour’s poor performance in the local and regional elections, I doubt Labour would have fared much better under another leader. As David Goodhart pointed out in The Independent, Labour’s success has traditionally been dependent on an alliance between the traditional working-class and middle-class liberals and that coalition has now collapsed:

Labour has lost around 4 million working-class voters since 1997, and at the last general election, for the first time, Labour’s middle-class vote (in the ABC1 sense) was higher than its working-class (C2DE) vote. To win an election, Labour needs to win back lots of those blue-collar voters; the trouble is that Labour’s middle-class voters, especially the liberal graduates among them, have increasingly divergent values and interests.

The draining away of working-class support isn’t a problem confined to the Labour Party. Left-wing parties all over Europe are facing similar difficulties. Labour was punished by the British electorate last year, polling its lowest share of the vote since 1983, but not as severely as the Social Democrats were by the Swedes, polling their lowest share of the vote since universal suffrage was introduced in 1921. This was the first time in the Social Democrats’ history that it lost two elections in a row. Only 22 per cent of those Swedes in work voted Social Democrat in 2010, a number that fell to 13 per cent in the Stockholm region.

The same picture emerges wherever you look. In the European election in June, 2009, the Left took a hammering. In Germany, the Social Democrats polled just 20 per cent of the vote, their worst result since the Second World War. In France, the Socialist Party only mustered 16.5 per cent, its lowest share of the vote in a European election since 1994. In Italy, the Democrats polled 26.1 per cent, seven percentage points less than they received at the last Italian election. As David Miliband pointed out in a recent lecture: “Left parties are losing elections more comprehensively than ever before. They are fragmenting at just the time the Right is uniting. I don’t believe this is some kind of accident.”

So what are the causes of this meltdown? It’s particularly baffling given that the whole of Europe was adversely affected by the recent problems afflicting the international banking system. One of the reasons socialists believe history is on their side is because they think capitalism is inherently unstable, lurching from one crisis to another. Yet the financial crisis of 2007-08 has sent voters scurrying towards the Right, not the Left. What’s going on?

The obvious answer is immigration. The educated liberal elites who control most Left-wing parties are pro-immigration. Not only do they believe in its economic benefits, they believe in the virtue of diversity as an end itself. The traditional European working classes, by contrast, are suspicious of immigrants and worry about them taking their jobs or – worse – taking money out of a welfare pot they haven’t contributed to. These tensions were containable when the majority of immigrants were from the developed world, but have been brought into sharp relief with the increase in immigration from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America – asylum seekers as opposed to economic migrants. In Sweden, for instance, the proportion of immigrants from less developed countries increased from 13 per cent to 36 per cent between 1980 and 2000. Of the one million immigrants who’ve entered Sweden since 1990, three quarters of them aren’t in full-time employment. These are the welfare free-riders that the Right-wing Sweden Democrats drew attention to in their 2010 election campaign, polling 5.7 per cent of the vote.

On the face of it, mass immigration has been the undoing of leftwing political parties across Europe since it erodes the shared values that are an essential prerequisite of a well-funded welfare state. Why should indigenous, working populations support the high levels of taxation necessary to sustain generous welfare payments if the beneficiaries are people unlike themselves? If they can’t look at a benefit recipient and think, “There, but for the grace of God, go I”, why should they continue to pay such high taxes? This problem was spelt out by David Willetts a few years ago:

The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties that they themselves could face. If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask: ‘Why should I pay for them when they are doing things that I wouldn’t do?’ This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the United States you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity, but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.

In Britain, as in other European states, traditional working class voters no longer trust the Left-wing party to put their interests above those of recent immigrants. In a recent but as yet unpublished YouGov poll, respondents were asked whether Britain now feels like a foreign country. Working-class centre-left voters agreed by 64 per cent to 26 per cent.

But this isn’t the whole of the story. After all, the Left fared equally badly in the recent Finnish elections, yet only 2.5 per cent of the population of Finland are foreign-born, most from Russia, Estonia and Sweden. Earlier this year, the True Finns – Finland’s equivalent of UKIP – polled 19 per cent of the vote, a five-fold increase since 2007. The Social Democrats, by contrast, saw their share of the vote fall from 21.44 per cent in 2007 to 19.1 per cent. The vote-winning policy for the True Finns was their opposition to the Portuguese bail-out and their success could well be a blueprint for insurgent, Right-wing parties across Europe as the crisis in the Eurozone deepens. If working class voters can no longer empathise with those in need in their own countries, as Willetts suggests, it’s likely that they won’t empathise with those in foreign countries, either.

What seems to be happening across Europe is the fracturing of both the state and the super-state as sources of tribal identity. The European Union has only ever commanded the loyalty of the liberal middle classes and as their political alliance with traditional working-class voters collapses it seems increasingly unlikely that the EU will survive the current economic crisis, at least not in its present form. More surprising has been the decline of the state as a unit capable of commanding people’s loyalty. In Scotland, the beneficiary of Labour’s desertion by working-class voters has been the Scottish Nationalist Party and that, too, seems a pattern likely to be repeated elsewhere. Ethnicity in Europe is beginning to trump more abstract sources of collective identity, as it did in the former Soviet Union after the collapse of the Communist control system in 1989. If UKIP changed its name to the England Independence Party it might see a surge in its support comparable to that of the True Finns.

It would be premature to completely write off the Left as a political force in Europe. The most obvious direction for Labour to go in if it wants to win back its traditional working class supporters is to propose tighter immigration controls than those currently being imposed by the Coalition – and my reading of why Maurice Glasman’s “Blue Labour” is gaining traction within the Party is that it would provide the ideological fig leaf to do precisely that. But working class voters might have a hard time trusting Ed Miliband if he suddenly embraces draconian immigration controls.

What the Left needs is an intellectual colossus, someone capable of articulating a vision that re-unites the liberal intelligentsia with the traditional working class and persuades them to put the interests of the collective – whether the nation state or something larger and more abstract – before those of their family and their tribe. Ultimately, the reason for the left’s political failure is the intellectual vacuum at the heart of the Left-wing project, the absence of an intellectually robust alternative to free-market capitalism. In the meantime, Right-wing and nationalist parties will keep on making gains at the Left’s expense.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100087179/its-not-just-the-labour-party

Senator Bill Nelson calls for end of oil profit-gouging

2011-03-12T20:58:00.000-08:00

The South Florida Business Journal reports:

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said Friday that oil speculators are using turmoil in Egypt and Libya as the latest excuse for “profit-gouging.”

Nelson has made oil speculation a target in the past. On Friday, he sent a letter his fellow senators, asking them to join him in his latest effort: seeking to raise the margin requirements imposed specifically on purely speculative oil futures contracts.

Nelson wants the senators to co-sign a letter to Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, urging him to act quickly to raise the margin requirements on speculative oil futures contracts.

“The latest spike in oil prices is further evidence that our energy markets are no longer governed by actual supply and demand,” Nelson wrote. “Speculators, again, are seizing on political turmoil to drive the price of oil to unwarranted levels. This time, it’s Egypt and Libya.”

Nelson noted in his letter that speculators have increased their betting on future oil price increases by more than 35 percent, while legitimate hedgers have reduced their holdings of oil futures by more than 20 percent since the Egypt crisis began.

“The loser in this game of profit-gouging by speculators is the American consumer,” he wrote. “Higher gasoline prices mean less money for other things. And at the end of the day, the big loser is America’s economy.”

Last year, in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Congress empowered the CFTC to rein in excessive speculation, but rules haven’t been enacted yet. Speculators continue to buy oil with only 6 percent down payments – $6 down on $100 of oil futures. Ordinary investors face 50 percent down payments.

In January, eight U.S. senators called on regulators to reject lobbying by Wall Street and the financial industry aimed at watering down the new rules.

Nelson said in his letter that he would not raise margin requirements on businesses that engage in the hedging of legitimate risk.

http://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/blog/2011/03/sen-nelson-end-oil-profit-gouging.html

The Shaky Case for Free Trade

2011-03-12T09:40:00.000-08:00

Ian Fletcher, an economist with the Coalition for a Prosperous America, refutes the arguments in favor of free trade:

A crisis is a social problem that has started to hurt the middle class.

Now that offshoring of white-collar work has started to sour people on free trade who were blasé about it as recently as the dot-com boom of a few years ago, it behooves us to ask whether free trade really deserves our support. Unfortunately for this policy, as Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson put it recently, the proposition that the benefits of free trade outweigh its costs is simply "an innuendo," i.e. not provable by either theoretical arguments or empiricial data.

So what's wrong with free trade theory? Criticizing it really breaks down into two separate issues:

1. Proving that free trade isn't necessarily the best policy for a nation.

2. Deciding what is best, if it isn't.

The first involves much easier arguments, and is a logical precondition for the second, so let's look at it first.

What comes after free trade is an immensely complex question. It will be some combination, not deducible in detail today, of a dozen different policy tools. Tariffs, quotas, reciprocity agreements, offsets, fixed exchange rates ala Bretton Woods, limits on international capital flows, national-content requirements, national champions, cartels, tax incentives, environmental laws and wage policy will all be up for grabs.

Deciding this will require a debate of epic proportions, so forgive me for leaving it for later. For now, let's focus on making this debate logically possible by refuting the dogma that free trade will always produce better outcomes than any other policy.

Before anyone asks: I'm well-aware that abandoning free trade is fraught with peril because of the risk that politics will overwhelm rational policy-making and we could end up even worse off. But given the growing perils of free trade itself, we have no choice.

"Trade realism," is the best phrase to describe this critique. It is better than "fair trade" because it speaks solely to the facts of how the world does work and does not get tangled in value-judgments of how it ought to, which allow free traders to duck the question by disputing the values. We need to be discussing economics, not philosophical questions like the relative value of economic freedom vs. economic equality.

The holes in free-trade theory fall into several general categories:

Problem #1: Free trade theory is based on abstractions, not hard data.

Free trade theory, like much contemporary economics, is heavy on deductive arguments which purport to prove that certain things "must" be the case. No other social science is so skewed to theory over empricial data; a sociologist or demographer who reasoned like this would not be taken seriously. There is a whole movement in economics, called post-autistic economics, in revolt against this.

For example, free traders claim that free trade costs America low-quality jobs but brings high-quality jobs in their place, arguing that America has comparative advantage in advanced capital-intensive industries and comparative disadvantage in primitive industries. But the hard data show America losing both kinds of jobs.

And we are told that the savings in cheaper foreign goods outweigh the lost wages involved. And that we gain more from the growth of foreign nations as trading partners than we lose to them as competitors. But there is no hard data that proves this, particularly since the crucial data concerns the long-term, which by definition we have not yet had the opportunity to observe.

Problem #2: What Does Free Trade Theory Promise, Even If It Is True?

Free traders often speak as if free trade were always good for everyone. Then they admit, in the fine print, that it creates winners and losers.

Worse, the winners and losers are not random. Because free trade radically expands the supply of labor competing for the world's finite supply of capital, it radically privileges capital relative to labor, especially when combined with capital mobility and the entry into the world trading system of large formerly-socialist nations like India and China.

Free-trade theory is pretty much exclusively focused on maximizing national income; it doesn't have very much to say about who receives this income. So free trade could, even if free-trade theory is true, make America end up with a larger economy but grossly maldistributed income. Welcome to Brazil.

And remember, even this unhappy outcome is what we get if free trade theory is true, which itself controversial. If it is false, we might get this outcome without all the offsetting benefits we are promised.

Problem #3: Outdated Arguments

Free traders make outdated claims all the time, mostly about how America must win under free trade because we have comparative advantage in high-wage industries due to our superior technological base and superior entrepreneurial spirit. While the latter may still be intact, our advantage in the former is gone in a world where any new technology can be distributed around the world overnight. This is not even considering facts like half the workforce of Los Angeles county being illiterate, as recently reported.

America succeeded under relatively free trade during the Cold War, but that was a world that was half communist or socialist, and much of the rest, like Latin America, practiced an inward-looking economics that did not make them trade competitors with us. So we didn't really have to face the consequences of open competition with the entire world.

We came to believe in free trade in theory because we didn't really have to live up to it. Now we do, and it's a whole new ballgame.

Problem #4: Short-Term vs. Long-Term Arguments

Many arguments for free trade are fallacious because they ignore the time dimension. For example, the argument that free trade is not a threat to American wages because over time, increasing prosperity in foreign countries will drive up wages overseas. This may be true in the long run, but it will take a generation or more at current rates of income growth. This isn't really that hard to quantify from published figures, if one will only make the effort.

Furthermore, free trade theory draws no distinction between maximizing our short-term consumption and our long-term economic welfare. It is entirely possible, within the mathematical equations that define free-trade theory, to vindicate a policy of selling off the country's assets to finance a short-term consumption binge followed by long-term bankruptcy. Billionaire Warren Buffet has written an article about this, as have I.

Problem #5: Failure To Quantify

Free traders often make arguments that sound good until the numbers come in, like:

1. "Free trade is good for America because it means a billion Chinese are now hungry consumers of American products." But we're running a huge trade deficit, not a surplus, with China, unsurprising since most of those Chinese have annual incomes in the hundreds of dollars.

2. "Other nations are rapidly catching up to American wage levels. India, for example, has a middle class of 300 million people." The problem is that the definition of "middle class" in the Indian context is a family income about 1/5 of what it would take to qualify as middle-class in America. Middle-class over there means the middle of their class system, not ours.

3. "Free trade brings us enormous benefits." One of the dirty non-secrets of trade theory is that the actual economic gains from further expanding free trade, in the case of a large and diverse economy like the US, are fairly small.

4. "Offshoring in a tiny phenomenon." Well, it's just getting started and will be big soon enough. Amazing what 25% per year compound growth will do!

5. Free traders tell us we can sustain the trade deficit because foreigners are so eager to invest in our wonderful business climate. They don't admit that most foreign investment just goes for existing assets. Worse, much is mere government debt.

Problem #6: Illogical Comparisons

My favorite example of this is when Bush Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao claimed that the numbers of jobs offshored must be netted against the number of Americans working for foreign-owned companies in the US.

For a start, most of these jobs don't represent new jobs brought to America by foreigners, but merely foreign companies that bought existing American companies. For a second, a net-net comparison would have to either net jobs offshored from America against jobs offshored to America, or net American employees of foreign companies against foreign employees of American companies.

Since a $500 billion-a-year trade deficit dooms either of these comparisons, it is no surprise that they were evaded.

Problem #7: Trying To Have It Both Ways

One minute, free traders are arguing that exports create jobs and that America is on the verge of an export boom. Clinton was fond of this argument. The next minute, they're arguing that the trade deficit, which is what happens when exports don't thrive, doesn't matter.

One minute, they're telling us that America's labor force is so much more skilled than other nations that we may confidently expect to cream off the best jobs in the world economy. The next minute, we're being lectured on how our lack of a competitive labor force is the cause of our import problems and we should only blame ourselves.

One minute, free traders are telling us that America is so superior in competitiveness to foreign nations that it will aways be top dog in wages. The next minute, we're being told to stop being arrogant and face up to the fact that the world isn't our oyster anymore.

Problem #8: Ad Hominem Arguments

Most of these are overt or covert varieties of the following:

"Opponents of free trade are uneducated xenophobic redneck losers."

The basic argument is that free trade is cosmopolitan, cosmopolitanism is good, therefore free trade is good and people only oppose it because they aren't cosmopolitan enough. This flatters globalists by implying that support for free trade is a kind of sophistication akin to knowing which kinds of French cheese to buy.

Why xenophobia, or fear of foreigners, should be a dirty word when foreigners are economic competitors who put Americans out of work, remains unexplained. I for one am a xenophobe, albeit a moderate and reasonable one.

Problem #9: Whatever Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

When free-traders are confronted with some sign that America's trade policies are dangerously wrong, they re-interpret it as evidence that America's economy is so strong it can survive even this problem, so the problem can't be a problem after all. For example, America has survived a record trade deficit that would have produced a currency collapse in any other nation, so trade deficits can't matter. But that's just like saying that because the strong constitution of the patient has enabled him to survive cancer, cancer must be OK.

Problem #10: Non-Economic Considerations

In addition to all the problems with free trade as pure economic policy, we must recognize the non-economic problems it causes. Most of these, once one goes beyond obvious cases like narcotics and unsafe foodstuffs, concern the fact that free trade means handing over control over economic necessities to foreigners. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 is one example; the fact that the US military cannot put a single plane in the sky without foreign parts is another.

http://tinyurl.com/4folfts

http://www.tradereform.org

The Phony "Deficit Hawk" War Against Middle Class

2011-02-27T15:36:00.000-08:00

Dean Baker warns of the phony "deficit hawk" war against the middle class safety net at The Guardian:

The people insisting on cuts to social security and Medicare have revved themselves up and are now in high gear. They see their final victory on the horizon, with the possibility of a bipartisan deal involving substantial cuts to both programmes. They argue that the large deficits facing the country make it imperative that we address the long-term budget problem – meaning, the cost of these programmes – immediately.

Before anyone prepares to surrender, it is worth remembering, once again, how we got into the current situation. Before the downturn, the budget deficits were relatively modest. Even with the cost of fighting two wars, the Bush tax cuts and a poorly designed Medicare drug benefit the deficit was just over 1% of GDP in 2007, the last year before the downturn. This was arguably bigger than desired, but a deficit of this size certainly posed no imminent danger to the economy.

Then, the economy ran off the track. The reason was the collapse of an $8tn housing bubble. This bubble was easy to see for people who knew basic economics and third-grade arithmetic. It was also easy to see that the collapse of this bubble would derail the economy and lead to serious downturn. That is why some of us were warning about the bubble as early as 2002.

But where were the current group of anti-deficit crusaders back in 2002-2006, when it might still have been possible to do something to stem the growth of the housing bubble before it reached such dangerous levels? Well, they were crusading against the budget deficit, of course.

Peter Peterson, the Wall Street investment banker who is the patron saint and financier of much of the deficit crusade, was paying for the "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour", which was supposed to alert people to the dangers of the country's budget deficit. This travelling roadshow of policy wonks and economists had nothing to say about the growing housing bubble that was about to explode and sink the economy.

Then, we have the Washington Post, which is continually setting new records for imbalance on this issue, for example, by running six different columns by deficit hawks on the same day. As the bubble grew to ever more dangerous levels, the Post had no room for those warning of the risks it posed. In fact, its main source for information on the housing market was David Lereah, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors and the author of the book, Why the Housing Boom Will Not Bust and How You Can Profit From It.

The same story can be told about National Public Radio, the major news networks and all the politicians now leading the charge to cut social security and Medicare. When the country actually did face a real economic disaster, these people were nowhere in sight. They were diverting attention to other issues and dismissing those of us who tried to warn of the real danger.

Now that we are experiencing an economic disaster – 25 million people unemployed or underemployed, millions of people facing the loss of their homes, more than 10 million underwater with their mortgages – as a direct result of their incompetence, these same people are telling us again about the urgent need to cut social security and Medicare. The deficit hawks somehow think that their case is more compelling because of the damage done by their incompetence.

It should not work this way. In most lines of work, incompetence is not a credential; it should not be one in designing economic policy either. Anyone who cares to tell us about the urgent need to deal with the deficit should first be expected to tell us how they managed to overlook the growth of an $8tn housing bubble. They should also be expected to tell us why they have a better understanding of the economy now than they did before the collapse of the housing bubble.

Social security and Medicare provide essential supports to tens of millions of retirees and disabled workers. The projections are clear. The financing of social security poses no major problem – it is projected to be fully solvent for almost 30 years with no changes whatsoever. Medicare poses a problem only because the private healthcare system is broken.

Honest people talk about the need to fix the healthcare system. Less honest people scream about the need to reform "entitlements". And they think that the public somehow should listen to them because of their record of incompetence.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/22/economics-economy?

Joshua Holland: Ayn Rand Railed Against Government Benefits, But Grabbed Social Security and Medicare

2011-01-30T11:49:00.000-08:00

Joshua Holland writes at AlterNet and the United Steel Workers blog:

Ayn Rand was not only a schlock novelist, she was also the progenitor of a sweeping “moral philosophy” that justifies the privilege of the wealthy and demonizes not only the slothful, undeserving poor but the lackluster middle-classes as well.

Her books provided wide-ranging parables of “parasites,” “looters” and “moochers” using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes’ labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O’Connor (her husband was Frank O’Connor).

As Michael Ford of Xavier University’s Center for the Study of the American Dream wrote, “In the end, Miss Rand was a hypocrite but she could never be faulted for failing to act in her own self-interest.”

Her ideas about government intervention in some idealized pristine marketplace serve as the basis for so much of the conservative rhetoric we see today. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” said Paul Ryan, the GOP’s young budget star at a D.C. event honoring the author. On another occasion, he proclaimed, “Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism.”

“Morally and economically,” wrote Rand in a 1972 newsletter, “the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull.”

Journalist Patia Stephens wrote of Rand:

[She] called altruism a “basic evil” and referred to those who perpetuate the system of taxation and redistribution as “looters” and “moochers.” She wrote in her book “The Virtue of Selfishness” that accepting any government controls is “delivering oneself into gradual enslavement.”

Rand also believed that the scientific consensus on the dangers of tobacco was a hoax. By 1974, the two-pack-a-day smoker, then 69, required surgery for lung cancer. And it was at that moment of vulnerability that she succumbed to the lure of collectivism.

Evva Joan Pryor, who had been a social worker in New York in the 1970s, was interviewed in 1998 by Scott McConnell, who was then the director of communications for the Ayn Rand Institute. In his book, 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, McConnell basically portrays Rand as first standing on principle, but then being mugged by reality. Stephens points to this exchange between McConnell and Pryor.

“She was coming to a point in her life where she was going to receive the very thing she didn’t like, which was Medicare and Social Security,” Pryor told McConnell. “I remember telling her that this was going to be difficult. For me to do my job she had to recognize that there were exceptions to her theory. So that started our political discussions. From there on – with gusto – we argued all the time.

The initial argument was on greed,” Pryor continued. “She had to see that there was such a thing as greed in this world. Doctors could cost an awful lot more money than books earn, and she could be totally wiped out by medical bills if she didn’t watch it. Since she had worked her entire life, and had paid into Social Security, she had a right to it. She didn’t feel that an individual should take help.”

Rand had paid into the system, so why not take the benefits? It’s true, but according to Stephens, some of Rand’s fellow travelers remained true to their principles.

Rand is one of three women the Cato Institute calls founders of American libertarianism. The other two, Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel “Pat” Paterson, both rejected Social Security benefits on principle. Lane, with whom Rand corresponded for several years, once quit an editorial job in order to avoid paying Social Security taxes. The Cato Institute says Lane considered Social Security a “Ponzi fraud” and “told friends that it would be immoral of her to take part in a system that would predictably collapse so catastrophically.” Lane died in 1968.

Paterson would end up dying a pauper. Rand went a different way.

But at least she put up a fight before succumbing to the imperatives of the real world – one in which people get sick, and old, and many who are perfectly decent and hardworking don’t end up being independently wealthy.

The degree to which Ayn Rand has become a touchstone for the modern conservative movement is striking. She was a sexual libertine, and, according to writer Mark Ames, she modeled her heroic characters on one of the most despicable sociopaths of her time. Ames’ conclusion is important for understanding today’s political economy. “Whenever you hear politicians or Tea Partiers dividing up the world between ‘producers’ and ‘collectivism,’” he wrote, “just know that those ideas and words more likely than not are derived from the deranged mind of a serial-killer groupie….And when you see them taking their razor blades to the last remaining programs protecting the middle class from total abject destitution—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—and bragging about how they are slashing these programs for ‘moral’ reasons, just remember Rand’s morality and who inspired her.”

Now we know that Rand was also just as hypocritical as the Tea Party freshman who railed against “government health care” to get elected and then whined that he had to wait a month before getting his own Cadillac plan courtesy of the taxpayers.

But, as I note in my book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy, that’s par for the course. A central rule of the U.S. political economy is that people are attracted to the idea of “limited government” in the abstract—and certainly don’t want the government intruding in their homes—but they really, really like living in a society with adequately funded public services.

That’s just as true for an icon of modern conservatism as it is for a poor mother getting public health care for her kids.

http://blog.usw.org/2011/01/30/ayn-rand-railed-against-government-benefits-but-grabbed-social-security-and-medicare-when-she-needed-them/

Borderless Economy, Jobless Prosperity - NYTimes.Com

2011-01-17T11:31:00.000-08:00

Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, explains the jobless recovery at the New York Times blog Economix:

Why has the economic recovery left workers behind? The question keeps coming up, in slightly different versions. As the headline of a recent New York Times article by Michael Powell put it, “Profits Are Booming. Why Aren’t Jobs?” The term “jobless prosperity” – which surfaced in 1993 and again 2002 – now bobs high. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/weekinreview/09powell.html

Many journalists argue that globalization is partly to blame for historically low rates of job creation over the last year. Companies in the United States are simply less reliant on American workers – and American consumers – than they once were. Maybe they just don’t need us any more. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/comparing-recoveries-job-changes-2/

Few economists like this argument, but even some mainstream savants like Alan Blinder of Princeton University express concern about the effects of offshoring. And the effects of globalization extend well beyond job loss.

As Harold Meyerson pointed out in The Washington Post, a recent Standard & Poor’s report showed that our largest 500 publicly traded corporations get roughly 47 percent of their revenue from outside the country. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/14/AR2010121407006.html

Writing in The Atlantic on “The Rise of the New Global Elite,” Chrystia Freeland provided a vivid anecdotal account of the same phenomenon, letting the chief executive of a green-technology company explain that most of his sales come from outside the United States, and, if he were starting from scratch, most of his workers would, too. A hedge fund manager tells her why the vigorous growth of a new middle class in China and India counterbalances the decline of the American middle class. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/

A recent Wall Street Journal article by Burton Malkiel warned against “home-country bias,” urging investors to hedge their bets on the American economy by tilting their portfolios toward emerging markets in developing countries.

A recent Time magazine article by Zachary Karabell referred to the new joblessness as a part of a megatrend toward globalization that we just have to live with.

So much depends on who “we” are.

During the 25 years after World War II, the interests of American investors and workers were closely, though not perfectly, aligned. Productivity increases were passed on in the form of higher wages that, in turn, fueled increasing demand for domestically produced goods and services.

Businesses willingly paid taxes to support public programs designed to improve the education, health and security of the labor force on which they relied.

Back in 1953, Charlie Wilson, the chief executive of General Motors, famously expressed the opinion (often slightly misquoted) that what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. I doubt that was entirely true then, but it was certainly more true then than it is today.

Large corporations are no less patriotic now than they were then. But their economic incentives have changed. Facing intensified international competition, they have little reason to care about the nationality of their workers, consumers or investors.

Fans of globalization point to many economic benefits: lower-priced consumer goods, rewards for technological innovation and higher living standards for many workers in developing countries.

But however significant these benefits, the other side of the ledger reveals significant costs arising from political realignment and efforts to escape regulation and taxes.

Jobless growth is only one symptom of increased social conflict, intensified economic inequality and weakened democracy. The prosperity in jobless prosperity exists only for the rich.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/borderless-economy-jobless-prosperity/?src=busln

"Right-to-work" laws fail to create jobs, lower living standards

2011-01-10T20:54:00.000-08:00

Missouri State Senator Timothy Green explains why "right-to-work" laws fail to create jobs and lower living standards. Green wrote the following essay for The Joplin Independent:

Figures do not lie. In his opening address, the president pro tem of the Senate, my Republican colleague Rob Mayer of Dexter, stated, “Unemployment is lower in the 22 states – six of them our neighbors – that have adopted right-to-work laws.”

This is not accurate. In fact, the highest current unemployment in the country, Nevada, is 14.3%, and Nevada is what I call a “right-to-work-for-less state.” Furthermore, the state of Tennessee, through November of 2010, had an unemployment rate identical to Missouri, 9.4%. Of the 22 right-to-work states, several - including Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina - also have higher unemployment rates than Missouri.....

Claims that right-to-work-for-less states have added millions of private sector jobs [as Mayer has claimed] are very misleading. Money talks and right-to-work-for-less states like Tennessee ($577 million in 2008 subsidies for one auto plant) and Mississippi ($300 million subsidy in 2007 for another plant) offered huge incentives. These property and sales tax exemptions, income tax credits, infrastructure aid, land discounts, and training grants - not right-to-work laws - played a primary role in those decisions.

Missouri is recovering from a deep national recession, credit crisis, housing collapse and stalled auto sales which are all to blame for the state’s job losses, not Missouri’s stand on union labor. Workers that make less money are plagued with higher poverty and infant mortality rates, have less access to quality health care, and fewer educational opportunities for children.

The facts show that Missouri continues to be a nationally competitive, business-friendly state. [According to] CNBC’s report, "America’s Top State for Business 2010," Missouri enjoys the 5th lowest overall business costs in the nation. According to the Tax Foundation, Missouri has the 5th lowest corporate income tax rate in the country. Missouri also has the third lowest business energy costs in the U.S., according to the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council. Moreover, Missouri companies also enjoy the 4th lowest commercial electricity costs in the U.S., according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

A study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, funded in part by the Ford Foundation, and on whose Board sits Dr. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist, confirms that union employees have higher wages, and are more likely to have employer-provided healthcare and pensions than non-union states. Right-to-work-for-less will bring substantial increases in Medicaid costs to the taxpayer, if union membership declines in Missouri. While 58.5% of the employees of non-union employers have health insurance and 48.5% have employer provided pensions, 77.9% of unionized employees in Missouri have healthcare and 77.3% have pensions. A non-union employee is less likely to have employer provided healthcare than a union employee. Every time there’s an economic recession, a lot of people immediately blame the workers in organized labor. However, if you consider neighboring Illinois, or Minnesota or Wisconsin, they each have a higher standard of living and a better tax base for public schools, fire, police because they’re all unionized states.

Sen. Mayer spoke of allowing the “free market to prevail,” but he then proposed legislation which would prohibit private employers from negotiating an agency shop provision with a union. There is nothing “free market” about such limitations. The facts are that federal law prohibits closed shops where workers are required to join the union before they can be hired. Similarly, workers can never be forced to join a union, union security clause or not. Also, under federal law workers cannot be forced to pay dues for any union political activity.

When right-to-work-for-less laws are passed, real economic data shows that wages and benefits decline for all workers. This law will not help Missouri reverse its severe job losses.

Supporters of right-to-work-for-less in Missouri want to see the majority of workers making minimum wage with no health insurance. They won’t be happy until they turn Missouri into the Mississippi of the Midwest – which has the lowest median household income in the country and one of the lowest percentage of households with health insurance. Labor unions are about dignity and respect in the workplace.

http://www.joplinindependent.com/display_article.php/jyount1294545158

In These Times: Will Anger Over Offshoring, Free-Trade Deals, Cost Obama Re-election in 2012 ?

2011-01-09T17:29:00.000-08:00

Writing at In These Times, Roger Bybee asks if public anger over free trade policies and outsourcing will cost President Obama re-election in 2012:

With nearly 9 out of 10 Americans convinced that the "offshoring" of jobs to Mexico, China, and India was a top reason for job loss and America's struggling economy, how did the Democrats manage to turn November 2 into such a massacre for their candidates?

This is a crucial question for labor, because the Republican gains not only destroyed labor's chances for moving forward on issues like the Employee Free Choice Act on easier union recognition, but also opened the gates for radical attacks on public employees and perhaps the biggest concerted push for "right-to-work" laws banning the union shop since the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947.

Essentially, President Obama and the Democrats failed to offer a credible narrative on the continued economic slump that directly blamed Corporate America for offshoring jobs. The consequences could be huge: Both a loss of faith in the Democrats among working people, and a loss of union membership due to the huge increase in Republican power.

When unemployment is high, the party in power is normally punished in midterm elections. But this was no normal year: Voters were widely and deeply convinced that corporate offshoring of jobs—not just government policy—plays a role in decimating jobs and their communities.

The public is unified as never before across class, educational, and partisan lines about the destructive effects of "free trade" agreements and the offshoring of jobs that it such FTAs promote.

An October Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported on by the Wall Street Journal showed the remarkably strong and widespread public anxiety—86% overall—over the export of jobs: “In the recent WSJ/NBC poll, 83 percent of blue-collar workers agreed that outsourcing of manufacturing to foreign countries with lower wages was a reason the U.S. economy was struggling and more people weren't being hired; no other factor was so often cited for current economic ills."

Remarkably, 90% of Republicans--compared with 84% of Democrats--expressed worry in the poll about the economic effects of offshoring. And the level of concern among blue-collar workers was lower than the general level of 86% and substantially below that expressed by professionals and managerial employees, at 95%, probably because blue-collar workers have long been subject to the threat of offshoring.

"The important change is that very well-educated and upper-income people compared to five to 10 years ago have shifted their opinion and are now expressing significant concern about the notion of...free trade," said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster.

Among those earning $75,000 or more, 50 percent now say free-trade pacts have hurt the United States, up from 24% who said the same in 1999. No doubt the fast-growing phenomenon of offshoring professional jobs helps to explain this shift.

The near-unanimous worry about offshoring (including 90% of Republicans), resentment about US corporations creating jobs overseas but not at home, and the possibility of dividing the Republicans by heavily stressing the offshoring issue—should have created the possibility of a Democratic counter-attack against the Republicans' illogical claims that government spending to stimulate the economy was somehow costing jobs.

But President Obama stepped back from pushing a strong economic narrative that would have pointed out how corporate offshoring was undermining his economic stimulus efforts. Even in staunchly pro-union communities like my hometown of Racine, Wis., Obama barely mentioned the issue of offshoring.

The offshoring issue emerged only when individual Democratic candidates began to highlight the issue with their speeches and TV ads. House candidates attacking "free trade" and offshoring were three times more likely to win than pro-"free trade" Democrats, according to a detailed analysis by Public Campaign's Global Trade Watch. The study also showed a vast explosion in the national importance of the issue as it became a central theme in many elections.

But what lessons, if any, did Obama draw from the massacre in which 63 House seats and 6 Senate seats were lost? He cavalierly turned the very next week to promoting a NAFTA-style free trade agreement with South Korea. The deal is fiercely opposed by the AFL-CIO, and the Economic Policy Institute estimates that it will cost 159,000 US jobs.

Pollster Ruy Teixeira of the Center for America's Progress views Obama's push for the South Korea free-trade aagreement as deepening the estrangement already felt by many working people.

"Trying to run around doing free trade agreements [Obama is also planning such deals with Colombia and Panama] seems counterintuitive," the pollster and analyst stated in an interview. "To a lot of voters, it will seem too cozy with the higher reaches of economic power.

"People would respond better to a more populist tone from the president, given that the party suffered nearly a 30-point deficit among moderate to low-income Democrats on Nov. 2. President Obama may be underestimating how weary people are about losing jobs and what a negative reaction that they will have," Teixeira cautioned.

Still, the issue of offshoring jobs must gain media visibility before elites in both parties must start addressing the issue, argues Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy Institute. Thus far, media "gatekeepers"—who share the pro-"free trade" perspective of corporate CEOs and their political allies in both parties—have largely dismissed concern about offshoring-caused job loss as backward-looking protectionism.

That makes it all the more vital for labor and its progressive allies to "re-frame" the issue of preserving America's productive base, saving jobs, and protecting income standards. "The debate has to be framed that it's about the future of the country," Faux stresses. "Right now, it's been framed in the mainstream media as the loss of jobs from bygone era."

But significant obstacles remain to labor and progressives pressing Obama on offshoring.

The Republicans' unwavering, fanatical attacks on President Obama and virtually every reform of the last century will tend to deny progressives the political space to challenge Obama's politically and economically disastrous "free trade" policies. "There will be a definite impulse to circle the wagons because he's under such attack from the Right, and progressives will find themselves in that circle, too," maintains Ruy Texeira.

While Obama may toss progressives an occasional concession on trade issues, he will ultimately have to win back his 2008 voters and convince them that he is sincere and serious about fighting to prevent jobs from being off-shored.

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, makes a persuasive case (Common Dreams.org, 11/3/10) that Obama cannot hope to be re-elected without taking decisive action to stop the tide of offshoring jobs and promoting an alternative "fair trade" model that protects US jobs and workers' rights and the environment around the world.

Without regaining the faith of voters in the industrial Midwest--where unions' numbers are now threatened by the "right-to-work" offensive-- who were crucial to his victory in 2008, it is hard to see any path to an Obama can reelection, says Wallach:

In 2008, Obama only won the election because he won the critical states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by differentiating himself from McCain on trade. It is pretty obvious with Dems and GOP nationwide running against the trade status quo and its job offshoring damage, that if Obama flip-flops now in favor of more job-killing NAFTA agreements, he will lose those states and end up a one-term president.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6820/obamas_weak_narrative_on_job_loss_2_could_have_huge_impact_on_labor_20/

Post and Courier: The Infrastructure Alarm

2011-01-01T11:34:00.000-08:00

From The Post and Courier:

Severe spending restraint is a fact of life for governments at all levels across the land. But if sweeping budget reductions gut our already-insufficient investment in public infrastructure, Americans could end up paying a terrible price for an illusory bargain.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell brought that urgent message to Charleston last week. Co-chair of Building America's Future, a bipartisan coalition of elected officials sounding the infrastructure alarm, he said in a visit to this newspaper: "We are in serious danger of our infrastructure collapsing. The threat to public safety is enormous."

An Associated Press story in Wednesday's Post and Courier offered a grim example of that menace. It reported on the struggles of a Goose Creek husband and his children to cope with the March loss of their wife and mother. She was killed when a chunk of asphalt flew through her windshield on I-20 near Heflin, Ala.

Gov. Rendell, formerly the mayor of Philadelphia, joined Charleston Mayor Joe Riley in decrying our decaying infrastructure's detrimental effects on not just safety but quality-of-life issues, including ever-growing traffic congestion and carbon emissions. The second-term governor offered this bottom line: "We've forgotten how businesses grow."

Gov. Rendell served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1999-2001. Now he's teamed up with two prominent Republicans -- outgoing California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- who are his BAF co-chairs.

They correctly cite the growing gap between the infrastructure improvements being made by other economic powers and the U.S. -- and the rising risks that without significant, timely upgrades in our roads, airports and port facilities, we will keep losing critical ground in the global marketplace.

Public infrastructure spending in the U.S. has dropped to less than 2.5 percent of gross domestic product. Some of our key international competitors commit three times as much of their GDPs to this vital purpose.

From a BAF fact sheet: "One-third of America's major roads are in poor or mediocre condition, and 45 percent of major urban highways are congested."

And a trend of particular interest in this port city: "By 2020, every major U.S. container port is projected to at least double the volume of cargo it was designed to handle. Some East Coast ports will triple in volume, and some West Coast ports will quadruple."

America's infrastructure needs aren't confined to transportation and commerce. For example, our overburdened and aging electrical grid increasingly suffers costly brownouts.

On the brighter side, Gov. Rendell pointed out that even in this year's election, with budget-cutting zeal running high, 71 percent of infrastructure initiatives passed, proving that "the American people get it."

He identified "Job One" as "fix it first" -- make necessary repairs to current infrastructure. However, he also stressed that we must move forward on high-speed rail.

Gov. Rendell hailed the concept of a National Infrastructure Bank to generate funds from a variety of sources (tolls, capital bonding, gas-tax increases, leveraging private capital) -- and would allocate money based on merit. He also called for more private-sector investment, while correctly warning that significant public investment will be necessary for many projects.

Certainly our own S.C. State Infrastructure Bank, created in 1997, has helped deliver such investment -- and played a crucial role in raising the state share of funding for the $632 million Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge over the Cooper River.

Of course, with government balance sheets looking as grim as they now do, any pitch to boost public spending has become a tough sell.

But as Gov. Rendell aptly put it: "We can't stop investing in ourselves."

And we can't adequately maintain -- and modernize -- our infrastructure without finding ways to get that necessary job done.

http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2010/dec/23/the-infrastructure-alarm/

The Oakland Tribune: New nuclear power is vital to the nation's future

2011-01-01T10:03:00.000-08:00

Expansion of nuclear power will not only reduce carbon emissions but also have a very positive impact on the national economy. Building more nuclear plants will create many good-paying jobs. With the U.S. importing most of its energy supply, any spike in oil prices will have a devastating effect on the economy. The U.S. must move toward energy independence and a greater role for nuclear power is critical to reaching that goal.

From The Oakland Tribune:

IN AMERICA'S effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, decrease our dependence on imported oil and move toward energy independence, no new clean technology should be ignored. Solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, clean coal and eventually fusion sources of energy must be pursued.

All of the above are either in the beginning stages of development or are unlikely to produce major quantities of energy for many years. However, there is one available source of energy that shows considerable promise in producing large amounts of electric power in a relatively short time.

It produces negligible amounts of greenhouse gases, is safe and solves another environmental problem.

It is so-called fourth generation nuclear power, which features reactors that are 100 to 300 times more fuel efficient than today's reactors.

Most important from an environmental viewpoint, fourth generation nuclear power plants consume nuclear waste rather than produce it, as do today's nuclear power plants.

This type of reactor burns all of the uranium fuel (today's reactors leave 99 percent unburned) and also burns existing long-lived nuclear waste, leaving a small volume of waste that loses its radioactivity far faster than the waste produced by current nuclear power plants.

As a result, there would be no need to bury huge quantities of nuclear waste in places like Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Instead, that waste could be burned in the new power plants.

In addition to solving the nuclear waste problem, the new reactors can operate for several centuries using only uranium that has already been mined.

This counters the argument from some environmentalists that mining for nuclear fuel will use fossil fuels and add to the greenhouse effect.

The fourth generation reactors also operate at low pressure and high temperatures, unlike current reactors. The low pressure reduces the risk of accidents, and the high temperatures convert more of the reactor heat into electricity. Leftover heat can be used for desalinating water.

The technology used in fourth generation nuclear power has been developed. What needs to be done now is build working reactors.

President Barack Obama said he wants nuclear power to be included in America's effort to reduce greenhouse gases and rely less on imported oil.

To get things moving, the $25 billion collected over the past 40 years to deal with disposing nuclear waste could be used to build the first new reactors.

Fourth generation nuclear power is safer, far more efficient and environmentally cleaner than the nuclear power that has been used for the past half century.

Moreover, there is a good chance development of these new reactors would receive broad bipartisan support in Congress as well as from the private sector. There is no good reason to delay action toward this promising source of energy.

http://www.insidebayarea.com/opinion/ci_16952183

Movie "Unstoppable" salutes working class heroes

2010-11-25T15:11:00.000-08:00

"Unstoppable" hit theaters two weeks ago and while it was no secret that stars like Denzel Washington, Chris Pine, and Rosario Dawson would save the day, the film treats audiences to an unpredictable plot twist. Spoiler alert… the heroes are actually blue-collar union members.

The movie is a Hollywood adaptation of a real crisis—a runaway CSX train loaded with hazardous materials that brought northwest Ohio to the brink of disaster in 2001—and viewers will no doubt be entertained by the dramatization and amped up action scenes. But the film also depicts a number of patently real challenges that working Americans face everyday. Company executives put profits over public safety, choosing not to derail the runaway train due to cost and the potential impact on stock prices. As a result, it's up to the workers themselves, members of the United Transportation Union (UTU), to get the runaway train under control. And that's just what they do.

The hit blockbuster immortalizes a true American story. Every day, all over the country, hardworking women and men roll up their sleeves, go to work, and do what it takes to keep our communities safe and our country moving forward. And yet America's workers are under constant assault from corporate interests that value their bottom line above all else.

The newly-elected friends of Big Business are gearing up to cut unemployment benefits, slash pay for public workers, privatize Social Security, and roll back workers' right to form a union free from intimidation. In the context of that political reality, "Unstoppable" serves as a timely reminder of the critical role workers and their unions play—whether that's serving as a check against corporate greed, ensuring public safety for all Americans, or giving ordinary nine-to-fivers a voice in the workplace.

http:/www.unstoppablethemovie.com

Washington Monthly: Don't Repeat Failure and Expect Success

2010-11-21T14:02:00.000-08:00

Steve Benen writes at Washington Monthly:

When Republican policymakers slashed taxes early in George W. Bush's first term, they had high hopes about what the policy would achieve. Americans were told, for example, that these tax cuts would create millions of jobs, keep a balanced budget, and generate robust economic growth.

As this tax policy gets ready to expire next month, it's worth noting that the Republican plan failed rather spectacularly. On job creation, Bush's record was the worst since the Great Depression. On balancing the budget, Bush racked up the biggest deficits ever, and added $5 trillion to the debt, en route to being labeled "the most fiscally irresponsible president in the history of the republic" by his comptroller general.

But what about economic growth? Did the Republican tax policy generate the robust economy Bush promised? David Leonhardt, responding to a Fox News item, sets the record straight.

Those tax cuts passed in 2001 amid big promises about what they would do for the economy. What followed? The decade with the slowest average annual growth since World War II. Amazingly, that statement is true even if you forget about the Great Recession and simply look at 2001-7.

The competition for slowest growth is not even close, either. Growth from 2001 to 2007 averaged 2.39 percent a year (and growth from 2001 through the third quarter of 2010 averaged 1.66 percent). The decade with the second-worst showing for growth was 1971 to 1980 -- the dreaded 1970s -- but it still had 3.21 percent average growth.

The picture does not change if you instead look at five-year periods.

This isn't a subjective question open to debate; we tried a policy and we can evaluate its results. In this case, Republicans said Bush's tax policy would produce wonders for the economy, and they got exactly what they wanted. We now know, however, that the policy didn't generate robust growth, didn't create millions of new jobs, didn't spur entrepreneurship and innovation, and certainly didn't keep a balanced budget.

And now, as the failed tax policy is set to expire, what's the new Republican message? That this policy must be extended at all costs, and anyone who disagrees is putting the economy at risk.

They not only say this with a straight face, the argument in support of a policy we already know didn't work manages to scare a whole lot of Dems.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_11/026700.php

Harold Meyerson: U.S. wealth moving in wrong direction

2010-10-30T15:11:00.000-07:00

The tea party movement recognizes something has gone terribly wrong with our country causing a loss of widespread prosperity but overlooks the root causes of this decline. Harold Meyerson explains what really happened to the American dream:

U.S. wealth moving in the wrong direction
October 29, 2010
By Harold Meyerson

As battle cries go, the tea party’s “Take our country back” is a pretty good one. It’s short and punchy, and it addresses a very widespread sense that the nation that Americans once lived in has changed, and not for the better.

When the tea partyers get around to identifying how America has changed and to whose benefit, however, they get it almost all wrong. In the worldview of the American right — and the polling shows conclusively that that’s who the tea party is — the nation, misled by President Barack Obama, has gone down the path to socialism.

In fact, far from venturing down that road, we’ve been stuck on the road to hyper-capitalism for three decades now. The tea partyers are right to be wary of income redistribution, but if they had even the slightest openness to empiricism, they’d see that the redistribution of the past 30 years has all been upward — radically upward. From 1950 through 1980, the share of all income in America going to the bottom 90 per cent of Americans — effectively, all but the rich — increased from 64 per cent to 65 per cent, according to an analysis of tax data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Because the nation’s economy was growing handsomely, that means that the average income of Americans in the bottom 90 per cent was growing, too — from $17,719 in 1950 to $30,941 in 1980 — a 75 per cent increase in income in constant 2008 dollars.

Since 1980, it’s been a very different story. The economy has continued to grow handsomely, but for the bottom 90 perc ent of Americans, it’s been a time of stagnation and loss. Since 1980, the share of all income in America going to the bottom 90 per cent has declined from 65 per cent to 52 per cent. In actual dollars, the average income of Americans in the bottom 90 percent flat-lined — going from the $30,941 of 1980 to $31,244 in 2008.

In short, the economic life and prospects for Americans since the Reagan Revolution have grown dim, while the lives of the rich — the super-rich in particular — have never been brighter. The share of income accruing to America’s wealthiest one per cent rose from nine per cent in 1974 to a tidy 23.5 per cent in 2007.

Looking at these numbers, it would be reasonable to infer that when the tea partyers say that they want to take the country back, they mean back to the period between 1950 and 1980, when the vast majority of Americans encountered more opportunity and security in their economic lives than they had before or since. Reasonable, but wrong. As the right sees it, America’s woes are traceable to the New Deal order that Franklin Roosevelt, working in the shadow of the even more sinister Woodrow Wilson, imposed on an unsuspecting people.

In fact, the New Deal order produced the only three decades in American history — the’50s,’60s and’70s — when economic security and opportunity were widely shared. It was the only period in the American chronicle when unions were big and powerful enough to ensure that corporate revenue actually trickled down to workers. It marked the only time in American history when, courtesy originally of the GI Bill, the number of Americans going to college surged. It was the only time when taxes on the rich were really significantly higher than taxes on the rest of us. It was the only time that the minimum wage kept pace (almost) with the cost of living. And it was the only time when most Americans felt confident enough about their economic prospects, and those of their nation, to support the taxes that built the postwar American infrastructure.

Since the ascent of Ronald Reagan, though, America’s claim to being a land of opportunity has become a sick joke. Unions have dwindled; colleges have become unaffordable; manufacturing has gone abroad; taxes on the rich have plummeted; and American infrastructure has decayed.

But the country the right wants to return to isn’t the America that the Greatest Generation built. Judging by the statements of many of the Republican and tea party-backed candidates on next Tuesday’s ballots, it’s the America that antedates the New Deal — a land without Social Security, unions or the minimum wage. It’s the land that the Greatest Generation gladly left behind whey they voted for and built the New Deal order.

All of us should want our country back, but that country should be the more prosperous and economically egalitarian nation that flourished at the time when America was not only the world’s greatest power, but also a beacon to the world.

Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of American Prospect and the L.A. Weekly. (Washington Post)

http://news.guelphmercury.com/Opinions/Editorials/article/710528

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/26/AR2010102605216.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Nyles Kendall: Republicans out of touch with working class

2010-10-16T21:31:00.000-07:00

Writing in the Arizona Daily Wildcat, Nyles Kendall exposes the anti-working families agenda of the Republican Party:

Republicans have been riding a wave of increasingly favorable public opinion for the past two years, but their anti-working class agenda will lose them votes at the ballot box this November.

In an interview on MSNBC's "The Last Word," host Lawrence O'Donnell asked Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele to specify the amount of the federal minimum wage.

After attempting to change the subject and accusing O'Donnell of "trap playing," Steele, unable to answer the question, declared that the minimum wage was irrelevant, a slap in the face to the country's estimated 980,000 minimum-wage workers.

Steele's days as chairman of the RNC are numbered. He will have plenty of time to learn about the relevance of the federal minimum wage while waiting for his weekly unemployment compensation to kick in.

But Steele is not alone in his indifference to the plight of America's minimum wage worker. Several Republican Senatatorial candidates seemingly agree with the chairman's statements.

Rand Paul of Kentucky, Linda McMahon of Connecticut and Washington's Dino Rossi have all entertained the idea of adjustments to the federal minimum wage. John Raese of West Virginia believes it should be abolished altogether. "I profess that (the) minimum wage be eliminated and we operate on the laws of supply and demand just like we did before the depression," the wealthy businessman said at a candidate forum last month.

Alaskan Tea Party candidate Joe Miller has even suggested that the federal minimum wage is unconstitutional. If he had paid attention in high school civics, he would be aware of the fact that its constitutionality was affirmed in 1941, nearly 70 years ago.

In recent months, Republicans have provided an ailing Democratic Party with plenty of political ammo. Democrats have used Steele's recent statements to hammer the theme that Republicans will repeal the minimum wage. This strategy will undoubtedly prove advantageous this November, given that the Republican Party's base is overwhelmingly blue-collar.

Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich added insult to injury last week, urging Republican candidates to portray Democrats as the party of food stamps, a program which currently serves 37.9 million Americans.

Such rhetoric alienates the independent voter as well as the nearly 50 million unemployed people struggling to make ends meet in the current economic recession.

According to a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, nearly two-thirds of Americans favor increasing the minimum wage to at least $10 an hour. 51 percent of the survey's respondents identified themselves as Republican.

The party's unequivocal opposition to the federal minimum wage, like its intent to extend the Bush tax cuts, only lends credence to the argument that Republicans are far too accommodating to the wealthy.

The federal minimum wage was established in 1938, at the height of the Great Depression, in order to ensure a "minimum standard of living necessary for health, efficiency and general wellbeing." Reducing or eliminating the minimum wage in a recessionary economy is not only economically unsound but immoral.

The Republican Party, far too concerned with serving the interests of corporate bankers and multi-millionaires, has once again proven that it is abysmally out of touch with America's working class.

http://wildcat.arizona.edu/perspectives/republicans-out-of-touch-with-working-class-1.1687255

Lee Fisher is the clear choice for Ohio voters concerned about jobs and the economy

2010-10-14T16:49:00.000-07:00

Cuyahoga Falls, OH ~ “I will not only be a vote for fair and balanced trade [in the U.S. Senate],” said Lee Fisher, Ohio’s Democratic Candidate for U.S. Senate, “I will be a tireless advocate for fair and balanced trade.”

The Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA) held the Ohio Senate Candidate Forum at the Sheraton in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio this morning. Candidate Lee Fisher (D) attended and answered voter questions. Candidate Rob Portman was invited but declined to attend due to scheduling difficulties. Mr. Portman did send a surrogate to make a statement and take voter questions back to campaign headquarters.

Fisher accused Rob Portman of helping cause the trade deficit, manufacturing decline and job losses when Portman was U.S. Trade Representative in the Bush Administration. “Rob Portman repeatedly chose not to do anything about currency manipulation when he was in a position to take action,” Fisher said.

Fisher also said that he supports HR 2378 which the House of Representatives passed on September 29, 2010 to neutralize foreign government currency manipulation. He favors tax credits for manufacturing in America to offset foreign value added taxes. Fisher further said he supports the TRADE Act which would evaluate past trade agreements for efficacy and plot a course for a new trade policy that would balance trade.

“We appreciate Mr. Fisher’s support for balanced trade,” said Michael Stumo, CEO of CPA. “The Great Recession was caused in large part by ill-conceived trade policy at the federal level. We are dedicated to educating candidates, voters and elected officials so they make smart decisions on future trade policy.”

Other speakers at the event were Jacki Adams (Northeast Ohio Campaign for American Manufacturing); Bruce Cain (Xcel Mold & Machine, Canton, OH); Peter Yoder (Yoder Agriculture); John Wagner (Tri-County AFL-CIO); Joe Logan (farmer and CPA Co-Chair for Agriculture); and Tim Burga (Ohio AFL-CIO).

“Voters need to know where their candidates stand on trade issues to make intelligent decisions on November 2,” continued Stumo. “Ohio has been particularly hard hit with job and manufacturing losses caused by federal trade policy. Only by a single-minded focus on balanced trade can we achieve full employment and sound growth for our manufacturers and farmers.”

Levin and Donnelly show leadership on manufacturing and trade issues

2010-10-13T19:40:00.000-07:00

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman and Michigan Representative Sandy Levin and Congressman Joe Donnelly of Indiana held a roundtable discussion about trade and manufacturing issues at Mack Tool and Engineering in South Bend. Also in attendance were representatives from Nucor, Reliable Metalcraft, Value Tool and Engineering, and the Alliance for American Manufacturing.

One of the most pressing concerns for Hoosier manufacturers voiced by attendees was the advantage Chinese competitors gain from that country’s unfair manipulation of their currency.

Supported by Donnelly and Levin, H.R. 2378, The Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act, passed the House of Representatives by a broad bipartisan vote on September 29 and seeks to level the playing field for our small businesses by targeting exchange rate misalignment between the U.S. Dollar, Chinese Yuan and other major trading partners in order to reduce the unnatural comparative advantages that command economies like China’s can use against market economies.

“It’s past time to crack down on Chinese currency manipulation. It is estimated that China’s continued undervaluing of its currency has already cost 55,000 Hoosier jobs, with 6,000 of those in north central Indiana alone,” said Donnelly. “I will continue to work in Congress with leaders like Chairman Levin to fight against Chinese currency manipulation and other unfair trade policies that are bad for Hoosier businesses and bad for working families.”

A report by the Alliance for American Manufacturing and the Economic Policy Institute conducted a study examining job loss due to currency manipulation and found that 6,000 jobs have been lost in Indiana’s Second Congressional District. China undervalues its currency by anywhere from 15 to 40 percent, keeping the prices of its exports artificially low, undercutting the market for American-made goods, and forcing American businesses to close.

“U.S. workers and businesses can compete if the playing field with China is level, and I am proud to have worked with Joe Donnelly to get this landmark legislation to safeguard U.S. industries and U.S. jobs from China’s currency manipulation approved by the U.S. House,” said Rep. Sander Levin, Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means. “Standing up for U.S. jobs and forcing China to play by the rules is vital to Indiana and throughout our nation’s manufacturing base.”

Jack Conway: A Fighter for Kentucky's Working Families

2010-09-11T09:36:00.000-07:00

The choice is clear in the Kenucky U.S. Senate. A fighter for Kentucky's working families like Jack Conway or Rand Paul who wants to ship our jobs overseas, privatize Social Security and legalize drugs.

Jack Conway has a record of getting results for the people of Kentucky. Elected in 2007 as Attorney General, Jack previously served as Deputy Cabinet Secretary and Deputy General Counsel in Governor Paul Patton’s administration from 1996 to 2001. While there he worked to craft economic development programs that put the Commonwealth on a path to prosperity and the landmark 1997 higher education reform bill, which won national acclaim for propelling Kentucky’s institutions of higher learning into the 21st century.

Jack Conway has always considered the highest duty of a public servant to be protecting those who are unable to protect themselves. Since the voters of Kentucky elected Jack as Attorney General, his office has increased Medicaid fraud
prosecutions by 600%, saving over $100 million for Kentucky taxpayers. He has advocated for consumers and saved Kentucky families over $100 million from proposed utility rate increases. Jack has sued the big oil companies for gas price gouging, and in his first year as Attorney General, increased elder abuse and neglect investigations by 300%. He followed through on his commitment to prosecute child predators and crack down on Internet crimes when he created a Cybercrimes Unit, which has initiated numerous child pornography investigations, eliminated over 68,000 illegal images and videos from the Internet, and continues to conduct trainings for police and prosecutors across Kentucky.

Simultaneously, Jack reduced costs in the Attorney General’s office by 26%, setting a strong example by taking a pay cut and giving his official vehicle back to the state. Jack has a proven record of combating waste, fraud, and abuse in government.

As a United States Senator, Jack has a plan to create jobs, cut the deficit, and restore accountability to Wall Street and Washington. Jack has a plan, which is estimated to create 731,000 jobs nationwide and 10,975 jobs in Kentucky through a
combination of tax credits and small business lending. He has already identified $430 billion in savings that can be recouped for taxpayers by: shutting down offshore tax shelters and closing loopholes in the corporate tax code that encourage companies to invest and ship jobs overseas; making big pharmaceutical companies negotiate with Medicare for lower prices on prescription drugs; and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare. Additionally, Jack will fight for Wall Street reform that puts taxpayers first, protects consumers, and cracks down on the big banks by preventing any institution from ever again becoming “too big to fail.”

Jack is a proud Kentuckian. His father, Tom, was born on a family farm in Western Kentucky’s Union County. He put himself through law school at night at the University of Louisville, while teaching history and coaching at Fairdale High
School. Jack’s mother, Barbara grew in up in Louisville’s South End, the daughter of a union blacksmith.

Jack Conway holds an undergraduate degree in public policy from Duke University and a law degree from The George Washington University. Conway is married with one daughter.

In contrast to Jack Conway's advocacy for working families, Rand Paul is a proven enemy of Kentucky workers.

From the AFL-CIO NOW Blog:

Kentucky State AFL-CIO President Bill Londrigan doesn’t pull punches when he talks about the Bluegrass State’s Tea Party-backed Republican U.S. Senate candidate. Speaking to a sun-baked crowd at Paducah’s 35th annual Labor Day picnic Monday, he warned:

A vote for Rand Paul is a vote for the continuation of the economic nightmare now facing workers across Kentucky. Vote like your job depends on it—because it does.

The state AFL-CIO unanimously endorsed Democrat Jack Conway over Paul, whose anti-union views earned him a $2,500 donation from the National Right to Work Committee.

Conway is the state’s attorney general. An ophthalmologist, Paul is the son of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). Dr. Paul is bad medicine for Kentucky’s working families, according to Londrigan.

He supports privatizing Social Security and increasing the retirement age for Social Security eligibility. He supports so-called free trade agreements like NAFTA, which are responsible for shipping millions of good-paying American jobs overseas.

When it comes to jobs safety, a vital issue for state’s coal miners and other workers, Londrigan said Paul’s response to catastrophic mine accidents and oil rig explosions is:

“‘accidents happen.” In Rand Paul’s world, corporations should be completely unregulated so they can cook the books and undermine our economy.

Londrigan went on to highlight the differences between Rand Paul’s world and the world in which most Kentucky workers live.

In Rand Paul’s world, Social Security is a burden and not a reward for a lifetime of hard work and sacrifice and something to be handed over to Wall Street.

In Rand Paul’s world, the budget deficit is a monstrous problem, but tax cuts for the rich are still a priority.

In Rand Paul’s world, teachers and the Department of Education are a hindrance to learning. In Rand Paul’s world, farm subsidies are a handout. In Rand Paul’s world, lowering workers’ wages is the way out of a recession.

And in Rand Paul’s world, property rights trump civil rights. If you’re an ordinary American, a hard-working Kentuckian, you can’t afford to live in Rand Paul’s world.

Jeff Wiggins, a United Steelworkers (USW) members and president of the Paducah-based Western Kentucky Area Council, said Kentucky union families are a vital element in the fight to send Conway to the Senate and Paul back to his practice.

But Wiggins, the Labor 2010 coordinator for western Kentucky, also says working families must be mobilized. He doubts Paul will win many union votes, but says the Republican is hoping for the next best thing: a slew of union card-carrying Kentuckians will forget that the GOP’s gospel of greed caused the recession, will blame hangover hard times on the Democrats and will show their disdain by not voting.

Wiggins has a message for potential non-voting union members:

If you stay home on Nov. 2, you’ll be helping the same sort of people who tried to push labor off the cliff under Bush. Democrats like Jack Conway want to throw us a rope and pull us away from the edge. But Republicans like McConnell and Paul still want to push us off.

http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/09/10/workers-dont-fit-into-rand-pauls-world/

Study Finds No Economic Benefit from "Right-to-Work" laws

2010-09-04T19:42:00.000-07:00

Michael Wasser, a research intern at American Rights at Work, dismantles the arguments for right-to-work (for less) laws:

Proponents of so-called “right-to-work laws,” such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Right to Work Committee, argue that they create a more business-friendly environment and lead to economic growth for states and their residents.

But is that really the case?

As Jack Hough noted in a recent Smart Money article, new research suggests that the supposed economic benefits of right-to-work laws may be little more than useful rhetoric for the law’s supporters. http://www.smartmoney.com/personal-finance/employment/do-labor-unions-hurt-employment/#

Because of a provision added to the National Labor Relations Act in 1947 through the Taft-Hartley amendments, states may pass right-to-work laws. These laws ban agreements stipulating that all employees represented by a union have to pay dues. Right-to-work laws currently are on the books in 22 states.

The new research on the economic effects of these laws comes from Lonnie Stevans, Professor of Information Technology and Quantitative Methods at Hofstra University. He compared the business formation and economic growth of right-to-work states with non-right-to-work states using recent data from the U.S. Small Business Administration. Stevans controlled for variables like education levels, population changes, and type of employment in the states to accurately measure the relationship between right-to-work laws and economic growth. http://www.bepress.com/rle/vol5/iss1/art25/

As the Smart Money article states:

Stevans found that RTW [right-to-work] states had lower per-capita income for workers, but higher income for business owners, than non-RTW states… According to Stevans, there’s little evidence of a ‘trickle down’ of benefits in RTW states from business owners to workers.

He also didn’t find evidence that right-to-work legislation affects the states’ employment rates.

Professor Stevans’s findings cast a pall of doubt over the economic claims of right-to-work supporters. Though their talking points may remain unchanged, the fact is right-to-work laws do not improve the economic viability of states and their workers. And as John Adams once said, “Facts are stubborn things…”

http://americanrightsatwork.org

Labor Day 2010: America's Workers Losing Ground

2010-09-04T17:04:00.000-07:00

The well-respected Economic Policy Institute provides some alarming statistics for us this Labor Day. There is no doubt at it. Our middle and working class in the USA faces a bleak future thanks to many years of deregulation, union-busting, so-called free trade agreements, outsourcing and tax breaks for the rich. It is time for American workers to fight back and demand an end to tax policies which allow corporations to profit for shipping our jobs overseas. The Employee Free Choice Act has to become law. We need to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the rich. President Obama must impose a 10% tariff on imports to reduce the massive trade deficit which is destroying U.S. jobs. We must hold our Democratic President and Congress accountable but the solution is definitely not to elect more reactionary Republicans with absolutely nothing to offer America's middle class.

Labor Day by the Numbers
Anna Turner
September 3, 2010
(Note that all numbers are current as of September 3, 2010. States numbers are current as of August 20, 2010.)

JOBS NEEDED TO REGAIN PRE-RECESSION EMPLOYMENT RATE: 11 MILLION

Change in total jobs in August 2010: -54,000; Change in jobs in August 2010, excluding 114,000 temporary U.S. Census Bureau jobs lost that month: +60,000
Change in private-sector jobs in August 2010: +67,000
Change in public-sector jobs in August 2010: -121,000; Change in public sector jobs, excluding 114,000 temporary U.S. Census Bureau jobs lost that month: -7,000
Change in size of the labor force in August 2010: +550,000
Accounting for population growth, number of workers that should have been added to the labor force since December 2007: +3.7 million; Actual change in the size of the labor force since December 2007: +241,000
The number of unemployed workers for every job opening: 5
Total jobs lost since the start of the recession: -7.6 million
Manufacturing jobs lost since the start of the recession: -2.0 million (14.9% of sector’s jobs)**
Construction jobs lost in the recession: -1.9 million (25.1%, one in four construction jobs)**
UNEMPLOYMENT RATE: 9.6%

Number unemployed: 14.9 million (up from 7.7 million in December 2007)**
Portion of unemployed who have been jobless more than six months: 42%
Portion of unemployed who have been jobless more than a year: 21.9%**
Underemployment rate: 16.7%; Number of under- and unemployed, marginally attached, and involuntary part-time workers: 26.1 million
Male unemployment: 10.6%; female unemployment: 8.6%
White unemployment: 8.7%; black unemployment: 16.3%; Hispanic unemployment: 12.0%
Average weekly unemployment benefit in July: $306; Average weekly benefit in July for those who still receive the $25 provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: $331;
STATES WITH DOUBLE-DIGIT UNEMPLOYMENT IN JULY 2010: 11

Highest unemployment rate: Nevada, 14.3%; lowest: North Dakota, 3.6%
Highest black unemployment rate: Michigan with 23.7%; Highest Hispanic unemployment rate: Nevada with 18.4%
Total change in number of state and local government jobs over the last two years (since the peak in August 2008): -282,000 jobs
CHANGE IN PRODUCTIVITY 2002-07: +11%; CHANGE IN MEDIAN COMPENSATION 2002-07: -0.6%**

Annual private-sector nominal hourly wage growth in the year before the recession: 3.4%; Nominal wage growth in 2010/2009: 1.6%
Share of income growth going to the top 1% of households from 1989 to 2007: 56%; Share of income growth going to the bottom 90% of households: 16%
Ratio of average CEO’s pay to typical worker’s pay in 1973: 27 to 1; Ratio right before the recession in 2007: 275 to 1
OVERALL SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFIT CUT FROM CURRENT RETIREMENT AGE INCREASE (65 to 67): 13%

Average annual Social Security benefit for a retiree: $14,050
Share of retirees receiving all their income from Social Security: more than 1 out of 4
Share of retirees receiving more than half of their income from Social Security: 69%
Share of older Americans (age 45 onwards) who prematurely took out funds from their 401(k), IRA, or other retirement investments in 2009: 18%; Share of Hispanic older Americans who did so: 22%; Share of African American older Americans who did so: 26%
Total decline in assets from pensions, 401(k)-style accounts and IRAs between 2007 and 2009: $1.5 trillion
Number of workers whose employers do not offer a retirement plan: 78 million (49%)
UNEMPLOYMENT RATE FOR YOUTH (16-24): 18.1%

Share of youth (16-24) who are neither employed nor enrolled in school:* 17.9%
Number of young people (16-24) who have dropped out of the labor force since the recession began:* 1.1 million
Youth (16-24) share of the labor force in August 2010:* 13.6%; Youth share of the unemployed:* 25.6%
Unemployment rate for young (16-24) black workers in January 2010: 32.5%; For young Hispanic workers: 24.3%; For young white workers: 15.2%
The average student debt of graduates from private four-year institutions in 2000/01: $16,906; Average debt in 2007/08: $25,350
ANNUALIZED RATE OF GDP GROWTH, 2nd QUARTER, 2010: 1.6%

When the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will cease to provide any boost to growth rate of GDP: Last quarter of 2010
Change in size of the economy since the start of the recession 31 months ago:* shrunk 1.3%
Number of full-time equivalent jobs supported through expansion of unemployment insurance since the beginning of the recession: 1.7 million

* Data is newly updated by EPI but links to original reports with older numbers.

** EPI calculation using Bureau of Labor Statistics

http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/labor_day_by_the_numbers1

Labor and Democratic Party leaders backing Charlie Crist

2010-09-04T16:10:00.000-07:00

Florida Governor Charlie Crist is picking up strong Democratic backing in his independent campaign for U.S. Senator. Al Lawson, Florida Senate Minority Leader, is the latest prominent Florida Democrat to embrace the Crist campaign. Labor leaders and Democratic activists are leaning toward Crist as they become increasingly skeptical of the Kendrick Meek candidacy. Meek is consistently running third place in the polls and has a questionable track record on working families issues.

Five Florida Teamster locals have announced their support for the U.S. Senate candidacy of Crist. Endorsing Crist are Local 79 in Tampa, Local 173 in Bradenton, Local 385 in Orlando, Local 947 in Jacksonville and Local 991 in Mobile, Ala., with Teamster members in the Panhandle.

The Teamsters decided to endorse Crist because of his commitment to creating jobs and rebuilding the economy, issues vital to working families.

"Charlie Crist is a good governor who cares more about people than party," said Local 79 President Ken Wood. "He stood up for President Obama's stimulus package when he thought it would help working families in Florida, even though he took a lot of flak from his own party for doing so."

Crist supports relief for pension funds hurt by Wall Street's meltdown, said Wood, who is also an International Vice President for the union and President of Joint Council 75.

Crist also advocates the Express Carrier Employee Protection Act, which would put employees of all express package delivery companies under the same labor law, Wood said.

"We need to elect politicians who listen to us, who represent us and who protect us, and that's exactly what Charlie Crist has done for Florida's working families," Wood said.

In contrast, an essay from Working Life questions Kendrick Meek and his votes as a Congressman for free trade agreements. Instead of protecting American jobs, Meek has sided with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others who want more outsourcing and free trade deals.

Why Should Labor Support Kendrick Meek?
11/15/2009

When NAFTA was passed in 1993, I, and others, argued that the labor movement should mount primary challenges to every Democrat who voted for the legislation,” writes Jonathan Tasini in the on-line Working Life. “After all, labor correctly saw NAFTA as the underpinning for a trade policy that would hasten the evolution of a global economy based on one thing: the search for the lowest wage possible. And that is the kind of trade policy that we now have. The labor movement did nothing, however, to hold the pro-NAFTA Democrats accountable.

“Then came CAFTA -- the Central American Free Trade Agreement. It passed thanks to 15 Democrats who voted for the deal in the House. I argued back then that those 15 Democrats should be held accountable for that vote. But, again, they were not. And, in response, the labor movement has had to fight more NAFTA-style trade agreements.

“Which brings us to the current moment. I pointed out recently that Rep. Kendrick Meek dropped his support for a very important piece of legislation spearheaded by Rep. Mike Michaud. There is only one reason Meek did so -- he is running for the U.S. Senate seat in Florida and wants to attract corporate money to his campaign. Ringing up dollars from sources that are not friendly to the labor movement is not a new thing for Mr. Meek: he took in thousands of dollars from Wal-Mart (as did, in fairness, other Democrats). And it is likely his sudden change of heart on the TRADE Act will aid him again, as reported by CongressDaily PM [Thursday]:

“‘The U.S. Chamber of Commerce this week wrote to Rep. Kendrick Meek, D-Fla., thanking him for removing his name from a bill that could force the United States to renegotiate several existing and pending trade agreements...

“‘"The Chamber appreciates your record of support for agreements that have opened foreign markets for U.S. exports and created American jobs," Josten wrote. He added his group thanked Meek for recognizing the Michaud bill "would have the opposite effect."’

“Let's be clear -- the Chamber is doing what it does in the current electoral financing system. I don't fault the Chamber. Those are the rules, as bad as they are and as much as they pervert our system of governing.

“The real question is: what will labor do? If Meek continues to get labor support -- financial and otherwise -- will that not simply signal other Members of Congress that they can do as they please and jump ship on critical labor legislation? I think the answer is obvious.

“The question should be: who does Meek work for? The people? Or the Chamber?”

https://www.editorsguild.com/LaborNews.cfm?LaborNewsid=2393

ADA Calls For Action To Boost Manufacturing Jobs

2010-09-03T20:56:00.000-07:00

The Labor Day celebration will be muted for 27 million Americans and their families
this weekend”, said Michael J. Wilson, National Director of Americans for Democratic Action,commenting on unemployment data issued today, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The rest of us can honor American workers and go to the beach, but we as a Nation should be taking further robust action to put Americans back to work.

The BLS reported that the total non-agricultural employment jobs declined slightly by
54,000 in August, while the overall unemployment rate remained at 9.6%. Federal government employment fell, as 121,000 temporary workers hired for the decennial census completed their work. On the other hand, the private-sector payrolls increased by 67,000 workers. This summer,the unemployment rate of 9.6% meant that 14.8 million would-be workers were unemployed.

An additional 2.2 million were marginally attached to the workforce, 1.1 million more were so discouraged by long-term job searches that they stopped looking for work, and 8.8 million took part-time work when they wanted and needed a full-time job. In other words, the real rate of unemployment was 16.7%, or 27.2 million individuals needing full-time jobs.

The only bright spots in the report were the growth of health care by 28,000, mining
by 8,000, professional and business services by 17,000, construction up 19,000, and retail trade gained 8,000 among motor vehicle and parts dealers.

On the other hand, manufacturing employment declined by 27,000 and offset the small but important gain of 36,000 manufacturing jobs in July . Employment of fabricated metals rose by 9,000. The country added 183,000 manufacturing jobs since December 2009. Our future prosperity rests on the restoration of manufacturing. America’s economic greatness has rested on making things, not on Wall Street’s shuffling of money by trading in obscure credit default swaps and derivatives that almost sent our economy over a cliff. According to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, the federal government, working in partnership with businesses, local and state governments, resulted in 11 straight months of growth in the manufacturing industry, creating 135,000 jobs over the six months preceding August.

Wilson advocates ADA’s agenda calling for additional actions that Congress should
take to put our nation’s unemployed back to work in good middle-class jobs, restoring our manufacturing base, boosting our exports, and refurbishing our infrastructure. “The federal government, working with private industry, state and local governments and together can support the growth of U.S. manufacturers for the markets of the future. Blather about the deficit is hypocritical nonsense and counter-productive until we have achieved full employment, so our workers are taxpayers”, he said.

Congress needs to develop, and the executive branch needs to implement, a National
Clean Energy Technology Export Strategy, and help U.S. firms find and navigate foreign markets. We should be building wind turbines, battery technologies, and solar panels to power our homes and businesses, not importing them from low-wage countries. To do so, Congress can help the clean-tech manufacturing sector to reduce production costs and encourage innovation, investment, and productivity. Clean energy technology exports could increase by $40 billion per year and create more than 750,000 jobs by 2020.

A Clean Energy Technology Manufacturing and Export Assistance Act of 2010, H. R. 5156, passed the House on July 28, but is currently languishing in the Senate.
Congress should close tax loopholes and enforce corporate accountability by
preventing corporations from shipping jobs overseas and sticking American taxpayers with the bill. By passing HR 1586, the $26 billion jobs bill, Congress has already closed one loophole, the misused foreign tax credit, which encouraged corporations to shift jobs and profits off shore. But those who blocked a more robust jobs bill should be ashamed.

Another example: the House passed, but the Senate has held up, extending TANF Emergency Funds beyond September 30. The program employed 250,000 parents and youth, providing them with much needed job skills.

Congress should raise $100 billion by repealing myriad corporate deductions, like
those for the oil industry, which interfere with sound investment decisions and shift the tax burden onto working people. By enacting President Obama’s proposals to crack down on off-shore tax avoidance by corporations, Congress could raise $122 billion in a decade, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.

Wilson reiterated his call for effective job creation, restoration of America’s
manufacturing base, while fully paying for our action agenda by restoring basic tax fairness.

http://www.adaction.org/

Where are the economic patriots to save America ?

2010-09-03T16:35:00.000-07:00

Tula Connell writes at Our Future:

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka yesterday described the upcoming elections this way:

This election is about economic patriots, and it’s also about corporate traitors.
Economic patriotism resonates among working people and the millions ofAmerica's jobless workers--and corporate traitors is an all-too apt description of many in Big Business, such as anti-patriotic corporations moving jobs out of this country. A graf buried in an a New York Times article on Wall Street this week me hard:

Just last week, Paul S. Otellini, chief executive of Intel, said at a dinner at the Aspen Forum of the Technology Policy Institute that "the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here."

Mr. Otellini has overseen two big acquisitions in the last two weeks — the $7.7 billion takeover of the security software maker McAfee and the $1.4 billion deal for the wireless chip unit of Infineon Technologies. If he is true to his word, those deals will most likely lead to job cuts in the United States, not job creation.
Otellini is not an outlier. Reports this week say Citigroup--which received $45 billion in taxpayer bailout funds--now is creating 12,000 jobs. In China.

Also this week, a new report shows that between November 2008 April 2010, the CEOs of the top 50 job-cutting companies made $598 million in compensation. The top 50 layoff firms reported a 44 percent average profit increase for 2009, the Institute for Policy Studies report said.

Calling out such behaviors and casting them for what they are--unpatriotic, anti-American--can help us take back the ground grabbed by reactionaries for so long, with the Tea Party just the latest manifestation of such warped usage of the red, white and blue.

Patriotism means more than lip service. It means taking action to ensure that working families have the good jobs they need to support their families--creating an environment that's worthy of our American Dream.

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010093502/wanted-economic-patriots-save-american-dream

The Great American Stickup exposes how Wall Street and corrupt politicians destroyed our economy

2010-09-03T05:04:00.001-07:00

Check out this review from Nation Books:

In The Great American Stickup, celebrated journalist Robert Scheer uncovers the hidden story behind one of the greatest financial crimes of our time: the Wall Street financial crash of 2008 and the consequent global recession. Instead of going where other journalists have gone in search of this story—the board rooms and trading floors of the big Wall Street firms—Scheer goes back to Washington, D.C., a veritable crime scene, beginning in the 1980s, where the captains of the finance industry, their lobbyists and allies among leading politicians destroyed an American regulatory system that had been functioning effectively since the era of the New Deal.

This is a story largely forgotten or overlooked by the mainstream media, who wasted more than two decades with their boosterish coverage of Wall Street. Scheer argues that the roots of the disaster go back to the free-market propaganda of the Reagan years and, most damagingly, to the bipartisan deregulation of the banking industry undertaken with the full support of "progressive" Bill Clinton.

In fact, if this debacle has a name, Scheer suggests, it is the "Clinton Bubble," that era when the administration let its friends on Wall Street write legislation that razed decades of robust financial regulation. It was Wall Street and Democratic Party darling Robert Rubin along with his clique of economist super-friends—Alan Greenspan, Lawrence Summers, and a few others—who inflated a giant real estate bubble by purposely not regulating the derivatives market, resulting in the pain and hardship millions are experiencing now.

The Great American Stickup is both a brilliant telling of the story of the Clinton financial clique and the havoc it wrought—informed by whistleblowers such as Brooksley Born, who goes on the record for Scheer—and an unsparing anatomy of the American business and political class. It is also a cautionary tale: those who form the nucleus of the Clinton clique are now advising the Obama administration. http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/29/how-obama-got-rolled-by-wall-street.html

http://www.nationbooks.org/book/213/The%20Great%20American%20Stickup

Bernie Sanders: No More Tax Breaks for Billionaires

2010-07-25T16:10:00.000-07:00

Sanders Op-Ed: No More Tax Breaks for Billionaires

By Sen. Bernie Sanders

July 20, 2010

Four facts:

One: The United States is in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the 1930s. More than 16 percent of working-age Americans are unemployed or underemployed. Long-term unemployment is the highest on record. Millions of people have lost their homes, their savings and their pensions.

Two: The United States today has a $13 trillion national debt and a record-breaking deficit. Last year alone, the federal government spent more than $186 billion just paying interest on that debt. We are leaving our children and grandchildren a huge financial obligation which will not only impact them personally but affect the well-being of the entire country as we compete in the global economy.

Three: The United States has the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country. Today, the top 1 percent earns more income than the bottom 50 percent and the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. During the Bush years, when the middle class saw a $2,200 decline in median family income, the 400 wealthiest families saw their income more than double while their effective income tax rates were slashed almost in half over the past 15 years. The wealthiest 400 Americans have now accumulated $1.27 trillion in wealth, while the highest paid 400 Americans had an average income of $345 million in 2007 alone. As a result of Bush tax policy they pay an effective tax rate of 16.6 percent, the lowest on record. (Warren Buffet, one of the richest people on earth, has often commented that he pays a lower effective tax rate than his secretary).

Four: Last March, Dan Duncan, the wealthiest person in Houston, Texas, died and left his family some $9 billion dollars. For the first time since 1916, Mr. Duncan’s heirs will pay no inheritance taxes. Not one dime. This occurred as a result of President Bush’s $1.35 trillion dollar tax break enacted into law in 2001.

In other words, at a time when this country has a devastatingly high rate of unemployment, a huge debt, massive unmet needs and a growing gap between the very richest people and everyone else, we are currently providing enormous tax breaks to millionaire and billionaire families. This is absurd!

Under the Bush tax law, inheritance taxes eliminated this year would be restored to the pre-2001 estate tax rates in 2011 unless Congress acts. Needless to say, a united Republican Party and a few Democrats, representing the interests of the very wealthy few, are working hard to either eliminate the inheritance tax forever or make it as low as possible. (In fact, in 2006, every Republican but two voted in favor of eliminating the estate tax completely).

A century ago, President Teddy Roosevelt, a good Republican, called for a graduated inheritance tax on wealthy estates. In 1916, Congress passed that law. Here is what Roosevelt said in 1910.

“The absence of effective state, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise… No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered – not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is passed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective – a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.”

I agree with Teddy Roosevelt. What he proposed is exactly what The Responsible Estate Tax Act that I have introduced (along with Senators Harkin, Whitehouse, Franken and Sherrod Brown) will do. Specifically, my bill exempts the first $3.5 million of an inheritance from paying any federal estate tax whatsoever. Doing this means that 99.7 percent of Americans who receive an inheritance would not pay one penny in federal estate taxes. This legislation would impact only the very wealthy – the top three-tenths of 1 percent.

Under my bill, the value of estates above $3.5 million and below $10 million would be taxed at 45 percent; the value of estates above $10 million and below $50 million would be taxed at 50 percent; and the value of estates above $50 million would be taxed at a rate of 55 percent, the same as the 2001 level before the Bush tax cuts. Further, my bill includes a10 percent surtax on the value of estates above $500 million ($1 billion for couples). According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, this legislation, over a 10-year period, would bring in over $315 billion – a good step forward in addressing our national debt.

This legislation would do something even more important. In the midst of these enormously difficult times, it makes clear that we are one country and that all Americans must accept shared responsibility. It is immoral and unfair that, while the middle class struggles to survive, millionaires and billionaires get tax breaks.

U.S. Rep. Debbie Halvorson has a plan to boost U.S. manufacturing

2010-07-24T18:15:00.000-07:00

From Trade Reform.Org

Congresswoman Debbie Halvorson (D-Illinois) understands that America’s economic prosperity depends on the success of our manufacturing sector. Over the last few decades millions of American manufacturing jobs have moved overseas. We need to jumpstart our nation’s manufacturing sector with policies that will create new, good-paying manufacturing jobs here in America.

Halvorson’s plan to boost American manufacturing:

Implement a National Strategy for Manufacturing

Halvorson is a co-sponsor of the National Manufacturing Strategy Act (H.R. 4692), legislation she is working to pass that would direct the President to submit a National Manufacturing Strategy to Congress every four years. The plan would include legislative proposals to train the manufacturing workforce, boost productivity, incentivize growth, and create new jobs.
Modernize Workforce Investment Programs

Halvorson believes with the proper training, American workers can outperform foreign competitors. Unfortunately, too many of our workers are not trained in the skills needed to compete in a rapidly changing global economy. This is why Halvorson co-authored and introduced the AMERICA Works Act (H.R. 4072), legislation to modernize federal workforce training programs to better prepare participants for high-tech jobs in the manufacturing sector.

Halvorson has heard from manufacturing employers that we must do more to provide educational options for our youth for careers in manufacturing. She is working with manufacturers to fight for increased investment in K-12 career and technical education, as well as in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education.

End Unfair Trade Practices

Halvorson is fighting unfair Chinese trade practices that put American manufacturers at a competitive disadvantage. For years China has undervalued its currency, which allows Chinese producers to sell its goods in the U.S. market at artificially low prices, undercutting American manufactures. Halvorson is a co-sponsor of the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act (H.R. 2378), legislation that will respond to countries that manipulate their currency by accounting for their artificially low costs.

Halvorson is also fighting to ensure the U.S. government purchases goods manufactured in America. She is a co-sponsor of the Reciprocal Government Procurement with China Creates American Jobs Act (H.R. 5312), which will limit the U.S. government from purchasing goods made in China until the Chinese government allows procurement of goods made in the United States.

Tax Incentives for American Manufacturing and Clean Energy

Tax Relief for Manufacturers: Halvorson has led the way in sponsoring legislation that incentivizes manufacturers to make capital investments. Halvorson introduced the Bonus Depreciation and Enhanced Expensing Extension Act (H.R. 4311), legislation that extends tax incentives that allow manufacturers to more quickly recover the cost of purchasing new equipment and machinery. Provisions from Halvorson’s bill were signed into law by the President and are already in effect. Halvorson is also proposing additional investment tax credits that allow manufacturers to immediately deduct the cost of new equipment and machinery purchases.

Tax Incentives for U.S. Expansion: Halvorson is also proposing new federal tax incentives through the Economic Development Agency for manufacturers that choose to expand a current facility or open a new facility in the United States instead of overseas. These incentives will match state and local incentive packages.

Clean Energy Tax Credit: Halvorson supports the Security in Energy and Manufacturing Act (H.R. 5041), which extends a tax credit for investments in clean energy manufacturing projects. The tax credit gives priority to projects that manufacture (not just assemble) clean energy components in the United States.
Mechanical Insulation Tax Credit: Halvorson authored the Mechanical Insulation Installation Incentive Act(HR 4296), a 5-year tax incentive for non-residential building owners to install mechanical insulation above industry standards into new construction/retrofit projects to be more energy efficient. This bill will save $47 billion over 5 years in energy costs and support 89,000 jobs annually across the country.

Increase Access to Capital for Manufacturers through Loan Guarantees

Halvorson believes that small and medium sized manufacturers should have the resources they need to grow and hire new workers. With credit markets still very tight, many manufacturers are having difficulty accessing the capital they need to expand, even manufacturers with strong credit histories. Halvorson proposes the creation of a new loan guarantee program under the Department of Commerce that will guarantee private loans made to small and medium sized manufacturers who implement job creating expansion plans.

http://www.tradereform.org/2010/07/creating-the-next-generation-of-manufacturing-jobs/

Proposed Social Security Cuts Will Hurt The Middle Class

2010-07-17T09:31:00.000-07:00

Despite the fact that Social Security is fully funded through 2039, there have been calls to cut Social Security benefits in an effort to reduce the long-term budget deficit. A new analysis from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) finds that three of the most common proposals to cut Social Security would have a substantial negative impact on low- and middle-income families.

“There is a great deal of talk in policy circles about cutting Social Security, but very little discussion of the financial situation of those affected by the cuts,” said Dean Baker, co-director of CEPR and an author of the report.

The study, “The Impact of Social Security Cuts on Retiree Income,” analyzes three of the most common proposals for reducing Social Security benefits and calculates the implied cut in benefits and income for various age groups and income quintiles of near and current retirees. The proposals examined are the adoption of progressive price indexation, raising the retirement age to 70 by 2036 and reducing the annual cost-of-living adjustment or COLA by 1.0 percent below the rate of inflation. It is worth noting that these proposals would only have a negligible impact on the deficit over the course of the next 10 years.

The analysis of the proposed cuts show:

The most frequently suggested PPI formula would imply cuts in benefits of 6.2 percent for a household in the in the middle income quintile between the ages of 45-49 in 2007 and 9.6 percent for a household in the middle quintile between the ages of 40 and 44 in 2007.

Raising the normal retirement age 70 in 2036 would result in a 4.0 percent reduction in benefits for workers between the ages of 50 and 54 in 2007 and a 10.0 percent reduction for workers between the ages of 40-44.

Reducing the COLA by 1.0 percent would result in a benefits cut of 12 percent for a retiree at age 75 and more than 20 percent at age 85.

For retirees in the bottom income quintile at age 85 who were between the ages of 55 and 59 in 2007, reducing the COLA by 1.0 percent implies a 14.6 percent reduction in income and a cut of 16. 5 percent for retirees in the bottom quintile at age 85 between the ages of 40-44.

“The vast majority of near-retirees will rely on Social Security for most of their income in retirement,” said Baker. “All of these proposals will result in significant cuts in income for low- and/or middle-income families.”

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/ss-2010-07.pdf

Worker-owned cooperatives help restore the American dream

2010-06-20T12:24:00.000-07:00

A recent report by the New America Foundation calls attention to worker-owned cooperatives and employee ownership of corporations as a means of expanding economic prosperity.

Heath McCulloch writes:

Economic downturns typically galvanize interest in alternative economic models, and this one is no exception. Employee ownership is one such alternative that has, in recent months, captured the attention of the mainstream media including CNN Money, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, and Business Week. Employee ownership leaders and asset-building practitioners share a common goal of broadening access to ownership opportunities, but these strategies are still off the radar screen of the asset-building movement. It’s time to give them the attention they deserve.

Asset-building advocates have long included investment strategies – home and business ownership, in particular – as critical steps along a path to financial security for low-income working families, but we have typically focused on individual ownership strategies. Notable exceptions include recent Ford Foundation investment in the exploration of shared equity homeownership as a way to enable low-income families to build home equity while preserving public subsidies and keeping housing affordable over time and the Annie E. Casey Foundation has supported a national work group focused on the asset-building value of shared business ownership.

Today, there are new windows of opportunity to bring funders, investors, advocates and practitioners of shared business ownership strategies into the broader asset-building movement. Two common employee ownership strategies are a logical place to start—
Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and worker-owned cooperatives. These strategies have long supported U.S. workers – across the wage spectrum – to build financial assets through ownership of an equity stake in the businesses where they work. ESOPs are one type of employee benefit plan that buys and holds company stock on behalf of workers. Worker-owned cooperatives are companies that are owned and democratically managed by their employees.

The National Center for Employee Ownership reports that more than 10,500 ESOP plans cover almost 13 million workers and over $900 billion in U.S. company assets. ESOPs hold great potential as asset-building vehicles for U.S. workers, at all wage levels: the average ESOP participant has $47,000 of savings in the ESOP alone (the majority of ESOP companies offer additional, direct contribution retirement plans, typically 401(k)s).

Worker cooperatives represent a small segment of the U.S. economy: According to a recent federally-funded study, 223 worker coops in the U.S. employ 2,380 full-time worker-owners. But they are particularly relevant to asset-building advocates because they are increasingly being established in low-income communities, targeting low-skilled and/or immigrant workers. For example, the Cleveland Foundation, City of Cleveland, business and university leaders have established the Evergreen Cooperative Development Fund to create a network of coops targeting low-income community residents. In the San Francisco Bay Area, two nonprofits – WAGES and Teamworks – are supporting networks of worker-owned cleaning cooperatives owned by immigrant workers.

http://assets.newamerica.net/blogposts/2010/shared_business_ownership_an_asset_building_strategy-32264

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont introduced legislation last year to expand employee ownership and worker-owned cooperatives. The text of the bill introduced by Senator Sanders reads as follows:

United States Employee Ownership Bank Act - Directs the Secretary of the Treasury to establish the United States Employee Ownership Bank to foster increased employee ownership and greater employee participation in company decision making throughout the United States. Authorizes the Bank to make loans, on a direct or guaranteed basis, and which may be subordinated to the interests of all other creditors, to employees to purchase a company through an employee stock ownership plan or eligible worker-owned cooperative which is at least 51% employee owned, or will become so as a result of Bank assistance. Authorizes the bank also to allow:

(1) a company that is less than 51% employee owned to become at least 51% employee owned; and

(2) allow a company that is already at least 51% employee owned to increase the level of employee ownership, expand operations, and increase or preserve employment.Amends the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act to require the employer, if it orders a plant or facility closing in connection with the termination of its operations there, to offer its employees an opportunity to purchase such plant or facility through an employee stock ownership plan or an eligible worker-owned cooperative that is at least 51% employee owned. Exempts from such requirement an employer that orders a plant closing:

(1) but will retain the plant assets to continue or begin a business within the United States; or

(2) intends to continue the business conducted at such plant at another plant within the United States. Amends the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 to authorize the appropriate federal financial supervisory agency, in assessing and taking into account the record of a financial institution during an examination, to consider capital investments, loans, loan participation, technical assistance, financial advice, grants, and other ventures undertaken by the institution to support or enable employees to establish employee stock ownership plans or eligible worker-owned cooperatives that are at least 51% employee-owned.

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-s2914/show

A very interesting history of the role of labor unions in creating worker cooperatives is provided by the Worker-Ownership Institute:

The concept of employee ownership in North America dates back to the settlement of the continent by men and women breaking the land to establish their farms and building their own stores and workshops. Unlike Europe, where peasants were bound to the land and ownership of productive property was concentrated in the hands of the few, in North America a society of relative equals who owned their own productive assets was built: farms, tools, workshops, stores, etc.

The independent farmers, shopkeepers and artisans who populated revolutionary North America yielded in the latter part of the 19th century to the rapid growth of the large corporations and increasing concentration of ownership. The farmers set about establishing cooperatives to buy their supplies…seed, fertilizer, etc….and to process and market their products jointly. The co-ops were owned by the farmers who bought from them and supplied them. Today family farming in the United States and Canada is sustained by an elaborate network of purchasing, processing and marketing cooperatives that provide the economics of large scale production within family ownership of land. Even electricity in large parts of rural America is provided by co-ops.

Consumer co-ops took hold in town and country. Credit unions, mutual savings banks and mutual insurance companies are owned by their depositors or policy holders, not by large companies, and provide lower rates and patronage dividends to their owners.

The early unions, such as the Knights of Labor in the 1870s and 1880s, and the craft unions in the 1880s and 1890s, sought to do the same by sponsoring worker cooperatives in which workers pooled their tools and resources to compete with the growing corporations.

For the better part of a century, the growth of worker co-ops was stymied by a structural problem. Those co-ops that failed in the market disappeared for the obvious reasons. But those that succeeded disappeared also. The problem lay in the design of ownership: each member owned one equal share. If the co-op did well, all shares appreciated in value. When founding members wanted to retire, new workers could not afford to buy the retiring members’ shares. So success was as fatal as failure because retiring members sold to outside buyers, and the cooperatives were converted into conventional corporations.

Despite this difficulty, the concept of co-ops was revived regularly in crises as a means to put the unemployed back to work. The Depression generated hundreds of co-ops; the oldest surviving worker-owned businesses of any size in the United States, the plywood co-ops in the Pacific Northwest, were purchased by their employees to avert shutdowns beginning in the 1930s.

But cooperatives gradually disappeared from labor’s agenda as industrialization advanced. While setting up co-ops was realistic in the traditional crafts, it was hard to see how it could work in mass production. How do you start up a cooperative steel mill or auto plant? After the turn of the century, radicals in the labor movement, like the Industrial Workers of the World before the First World War, or the CIO unions in the 1930s, focused on fighting the bosses instead of replacing them. The real economic gains from collective bargaining so far outweighed the hypothetical benefits from production cooperatives that, by the 1950s, the concept had virtually disappeared as a subject of union interest.

http://web.archive.org/web/20060112230115/www.workerownership.org/history.html

Unions have once again embraced the concept of worker co-ops. In October 2009, The United Steel Workers Union, North America's largest industrial trade union, announced a new collaboration with the world's largest worker-owned cooperative, Mondragon International, based in the Basque region of Spain.

Worker co-ops and employee owned companies contribute to restoring opportunity and security for the American middle class. For one thing, employee owned enterprises in the USA are going to be far less likely to outsource, lay off workers and move to China.

Schauer pushes for fair trade with China at House hearing

2010-06-17T16:22:00.000-07:00

Congressman Mark Schauer (D-MI) was invited yesterday to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee about current trade policies with China. During his testimony, Schauer pushed for action on his bipartisan legislation (HR 5312) to stop wasting U.S. taxpayer dollars on goods that are made in China, while it continues to block American goods from its own government contracts.

“When will we play tough? When will we get it?” asked Schauer. “At the very least, we need to show China that we are willing to be strong until they open their procurement markets to us. American workers can build anything if they’re given half a chance to do it. We can’t afford to continue to let China eat the lunches of American workers.”

Currently, goods that are produced in China are being used for government contracts in the United States across multiple industries – such as manufacturing, construction and renewable energy – instead of goods produced by American workers and businesses. Since China has blocked American goods from its own government contracts, Schauer’s bill would level the playing field and make sure taxpayer-funded projects create jobs for U.S. workers.

According to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, 2.4 million American jobs have been lost or displaced as a result of the growing trade deficit with China since it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. During that time, the State of Michigan lost 67,800 jobs, including 4,700 in the 7th district alone, due to unfair trade with China.

A copy of Schauer’s testimony is available below:

Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Camp, members of the Committee - it’s a pleasure to come here to discuss our trade issues with China. I appreciate the invitation and look forward to working with the Committee on these issues.

I’m pleased that the committee is examining the indigenous innovation issue, because it is perhaps the best example we have of China overtly favoring its captive industries. Because China is not an open society, there is little we can do except count the missing jobs, unless we are willing to take a strong stand against favoritism as evidenced in China’s indigenous innovation initiative. My legislation is one tool that can be used to discourage China from continuing to go down this path.

Although the committee is examining a number of issues today, I’d like to focus on the patent unfairness of China’s government procurement policy, as contrasted with the U.S.’s open procurement policy.

Although I represent a manufacturing state that has longstanding concerns with China, my most recent involvement in this issue started rather innocently. This year, I was provided a bag of Census promotional materials. As is my custom, I inspect the labels of the product to determine the country of origin.

The first article was this hat. Now, we all get hats from every group in our district, and I proudly display a number of hats in my Congressional office.

Of all the hats I’ve ever received, I’ve never seen one of as poor quality as this. I can’t imagine anyone wearing this hat. I was shocked to see that this hat was made in China. I wasn’t shocked because the quality was poor; I was shocked because I couldn’t believe that our Census was procuring promotional goods from China.

In the same package of goods, there was a Census 2010 keychain – you guessed, “Made in China.”

I was outraged that our taxpayer dollars were going to our competitors, and I really hit the ceiling when I realized that China shut out US firms from its $580 billion stimulus plan. Something is fundamentally wrong here when a trading relationship is a one-way street that drives jobs out of the US.

When I began talking about my concerns with this procurement publicly, I received an email from the Census. To the extent I understand it – and I’m not certain that I do - the Census seems to believe that these articles were “substantially transformed” by an American company adding the words “Census 2010” to these Chinese goods. The email also contained an explanation stating that “it is extremely difficult to find vendors that sell entirely U.S. made products.”

That answer is unacceptable – if U.S. vendors exist AT ALL, there needs to be a damn good reason why they didn’t get this work.

The Census’s reasoning here is circular: they can’t find a U.S. firm to make the hats, because they don’t give contracts to U.S. firms to make the hats. Well, as I am inclined to do, I looked into this: in my own office I found this, and this, and this (showing U.S.-made hats). All of these are U.S.-made hats of recent vintage.

I also spent about 3 minutes on the internet and came up with a number of options to have these goods made in the U.S. There is no question but that there is sufficient U.S. manufacturing capacity to make these goods, so what went wrong and how did this money find its way to China? We’re still looking into this issue, but it’s clear that something went wrong, especially when the American Chamber of Commerce in China is reporting that U.S. companies – even U.S. companies that have operations in China – are being shut out of that market.

China is playing us for fools regarding the Government Procurement Agreement – the GPA. Upon joining WTO in 2001, China said it would sign the GPA as soon as possible. [noted in USCBC July 2009 “PRC Government Procurement Policy, page 4]. Nine years later, that still hasn’t happened. The U.S.-China Business Council notes in its 2010 White Paper that there has been zero progress on China submitting a commercially-meaningful accession offer to the GPA. It would be interesting to know how many billions of taxpayer dollars have gone to China during this 9-year waiting period.

When they do submit an offer, you can bet that it will be full of exceptions that will end up costing American jobs.

So, when will we play tough? When will we get it? At the very least – the very least - we need to show China that we are willing to be strong until they open their procurement markets to us.

I’ve offered one way of addressing this issue, and that is to cap the amount of US government procurement of Chinese goods to the amount of American goods purchased by the Chinese government.

My bill, H.R. 5312, includes a provision that requires the Secretary of Commerce to perform both a legal and factual analysis of whether China has opened its procurement practice to U.S. goods. Since China isn’t a transparent society, we need more than China’s signature to be assured that they, in fact, are buying U.S. goods.

Under H.R. 5312, the International Trade Administration would report the total value of American goods procured by the Chinese government. The Secretary of Commerce would then certify the amount of that year’s cap for US procurement of Chinese goods – in short, a dollar out, a dollar in. We need this type of basic fairness to bring jobs back to America.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that we’ve lost 2.4 million American jobs since China joined the WTO in 2001, and that doesn’t include 2009, which was probably a very good year for the Chinese. Will this program be easy to administer? Perhaps it presents challenges, but there are 2.4 million American families that want us to face those challenges.

To a casual observer, it might look as if there are sufficient laws on the books to favor U.S. goods, but it is apparent that the current laws have not been sufficient to stem the flow of jobs heading out. I suspect that the exceptions and waivers have swallowed the rule, and it’s time to reexamine this relationship. At the very least, if we take some positive action, China may understand that it needs to put forth a meaningful accession offer to the GPA, and they’ll stop this “indigenous innovation” program.

There’s a right way to do this. Secretary LaHood travelled to China to tell them that rolling stock for our new railroad investments needs to be made in the U.S., and that waivers won’t be granted. That’s the right message.

American workers can build anything if they’re given half a chance to do it. Earlier I showed you the worst ballcap I’ve ever seen – here is the best one … made right here in the U.S.A. in Newark, New Jersey. Anyone involved in this industry knows that there is sufficient U.S. capacity to make these hats and keep these jobs in the United States.

We can’t afford to continue to let China eat the lunches of American workers through currency manipulation, “indigenous innovation,” and other means.

Kathy Dahlkemper on the benefits of health care reform

2010-06-14T19:22:00.000-07:00

New Health Care Rule Delivers on Promise to Keep Existing Plans
by Congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper (D-PA)
Monday, 14 June 2010

WASHINGTON—Western Pennsylvanians who like and want to keep their health care plans can be reassured that the Affordable Care Act will protect their existing coverage and provide them new consumer protections that will make their health insurance better. The U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and Treasury today issued a new regulation under the Affordable Care Act on “grandfathered” (or existing) health plans that will protect the rights of those who want to keep their insurance.

“During the health care debate, I told concerned citizens that if they liked their health insurance, they could keep it under the new reform. Today, we are delivering on that promise,” Rep. Dahlkemper said. “The new regulation protects your ability to keep your insurance and provides new benefits and consumer protections to make your coverage even better. Consumers want more choice and more control when it comes to their health insurance, and we’re giving that to them through the new health care reform.”

The rule announced today ensures that consumers can keep their current plan if they like it. It also gives these consumers new benefits, including:

No lifetime limits on coverage for all plans,
Ending the insurance company practice of rescinding coverage when people get sick and have previously made an unintentional mistake on their application; and
Rep. Dahlkemper’s Young Adult Healthcare provision which offers parents the option to keep their adult children up to age 26 on their insurance plan.
“Grandfathered” plans include those that existed on March 23, 2010. Plans will lose their “grandfather” status if they choose to significantly cut benefits or increase out-of-pocket spending for consumers. Those in plans that make such changes will gain new consumer protections under the Affordable Care Act.

Most of the 133 million Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance through large employers will maintain the coverage they have today. Large employer-based plans already offer most of the comprehensive benefits and consumer protections that the Affordable Care Act will provide to all Americans this year and in the future, such as preventing lifetime limits on coverage.

People who work in smaller firms and those who purchase their own insurance—both of whom change insurers more often than those covered through large employers—will enjoy all of the benefits of the Affordable Care Act when they choose a new plan. These Americans also will benefit from the new competitive Exchanges that will be established in 2014 to offer individuals and workers in small businesses with greater choice of plans at more affordable rates—the same choice of plans as members of Congress.

For the vast majority of Americans who get their health insurance through employers, additional benefits will be offered, irrespective of whether their plan is grandfathered, including:

No coverage exclusions for children with pre-existing conditions; and
No “restricted” annual limits (e.g., annual dollar-amount limits on coverage below standards to be set in future regulations).

For a comprehensive fact sheet, check out the link below.
http://dahlkemper.house.gov/images/stories/2010-6-14_Grandfather_fact_sheet.pdf

New book by economist explains why "Free Trade Doesn't Work"

2010-04-24T20:33:00.000-07:00

In his latest book, "Free Trade Doesn't Work: What Should Replace it and Why" Ian Fletcher, renowned California Economist and Adjunct Fellow at the U. S. Business & Industry Council, takes a hard look at the problems of free trade and its disastrous affect on the U.S. economy.

Unlike many books written in political jargon and confusing cross-semantics that only economists and bankers can understand, this book is focused on bringing important information and details to the average citizen. You will learn the real facts about why politicians keep denying there is a problem when America is sinking in an ever-growing ocean of debt. How the U.S. will not be able to regain its power on the world market until it moves from the industrial infrastructure that it currently is caught in, and more.

This great book explains in detail why free trade beliefs are unrealistic and the steps that must be taken by the nation to become powerful and strong in this changing work dynamic. After a short review of the history of free trade, the book will discuss politics and semantics that have left most average people lost in a fog of indecipherable, encrypted codes.

Economist Ian Fletcher provides the proactive steps that the American people are in a position to take in detail and how you can affect the political climate and understand the effects of economic globalization. Different trade regulations, pacts, and policies are discussed and after reading, you will have a clear understanding of how your life is affected by NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and more.

To get access to this most forthright book, you will want to buy a copy of "Free Trade Doesn't Work: What Should Replace it and Why" today! Find information and details at the California Economist, Ian Fletcher, Releases New Book on Problems of Free Trade check out http://www.freetradedoesntwork.com now!

Will Obama begin to fight offshoring of U.S. jobs ?

2010-03-27T08:10:00.000-07:00

Roger Bybee argues that standing up to Benedict Arnold CEO's is a winning strategy for President Obama and the American middle class. The full essay which appeared in the March 26 edition of In These Times is worth a read.

Bybee writes:

Public support for moving against the relocation of jobs to low-wage states is broad, now including Republicans, the college-educated, and, I would venture, more than a few Tea Party types. Here are summaries of some of the most important studies:

77 percent of Americans oppose the outsourcing of jobs to foreign nations, according to Pew Research. "The U.S. public is nearly unanimous in its support of requiring that both labor (93 percent) and environmental standards (91 percent) be included in trade agreements," according to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. In ranking the importance of possible foreign policy goals, 76 percent of Americans gave the top rating to "protecting the jobs" of the country's workers, according to the same poll.

"A large majority—68 percent—of those surveyed in a new Fortune poll says America's trading partners are benefiting the most from free trade, not the U.S." The explanation for the current economic slowdown most frequently cited by respondents: "U.S. companies sending jobs overseas where labor is cheaper," says Fortune magazine.

An AP-Yahoo News poll conducted mostly in April 2008 "found that most Americans have a negative view of trade agreements." Of those polled, 64 percent said that increasing trade between the United States and other countries has hurt the economy, while just 22 percent said it has helped.

"By greater than six-to-one (61 percent to 9 percent), the public says free-trade agreements result in job losses rather than in new jobs," according to a Pew study. "A solid majority (56 percent) says that free trade makes wages lower in the United States.... A majority of independents, or 52 percent, had a negative view of free trade, compared to 50 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans."

A University of Maryland/Knowledge Networks poll found that 53 percent of the American public is critical of U.S. government trade policy and wants greater efforts to improve the lives of workers at home and abroad, and to protect the environment.

"In 1997, 58 percent of college graduates said globalization had been good for the U.S. while 30 percent said it had been bad, according to a poll conducted for the Wall Street Journal and NBC News," Greg Ip reported in the Journal. "When the poll asked a similar question this past March, opinion had flipped: 47 percent of graduates thought globalization was bad and just 33 percent thought it was good."
GO AFTER 'BENEDICT ARNOLD' CEOs

This opposition is not new, it has just reached a critical mass where the major media can no longer totally ignore it or merely mock it as "protectionist." For example, NAFTA was opposed by 64 percent of Americans, but was promoted by the full weight of the Clinton administration, corporate America, Mexico, and virtually all of mainstream media including all but two or three of daily papers then in existence.

Similarly, the Permanent Normalization of Trade with China in 2000 generated the opposition of 79 percent of the public, according to a Harris poll (4/00). But again, an all-out lobbying campaign by the Clinton-Corporate America team prevailed—including $26.5 million for a single fundraising event.

Clinton was able to get away with those kinds of shameless anti-worker ploys because the economy was producing some wage increases and generating jobs during his term. But Obama walked in after eight years of George Bush and zero job growth and with wages falling, and some 7.8 additional job losses following the Wall Street meltdown.

American workers are in no mood to see their communities decay before their eyes while their tax dollars help send Whirlpool to Mexico, or Chrysler, which after receiving government "bailout" dollars also moved some of its U.S. operations to Mexico.

If Obama wants to get serious about jobs and recouping the sharp drop in enthusiasm among working people, he needs to challenge what John Kerry once called "Benedict Arnold CEOs."

http://www.inthesetimes.org/working/entry/5751/will_bolder_obama_be_willing_to_lash_out_on_job_relocations

Senator Webb Introduces the Clean Energy Act of 2009

2009-11-19T16:36:00.001-08:00

“The Clean Energy Act of 2009” introduced by Senator Jim Webb D-VA appropriates $20 billion over the next 10 to 20 years to fund a series of loan guarantees; nuclear education and workforce training assistance; research into nuclear reactor lifetime-extension; and the development of solar power, biofuels, and alternative power technologies. The bill follows the urging of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to increase funds available for the development of nuclear power facilities and technology.

“This legislation is measurable, achievable, and targeted. By making a concerted investment in nuclear power and other renewable energy technologies, we can effectively address our nation’s energy requirements and also the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions,” said Senator Webb. “This legislation is a practical approach to move the United States toward providing clean, carbon-free sources of energy, to help invigorate the economy, and to strengthen our workforce with educational opportunities and high-paying jobs on U.S. soil.”

The legislation directs the Department of Energy to conduct five “Mini-Manhattan Projects” to study carbon capture technologies, non-ethanol biofuels, electric vehicles and electricity storage, cost-competitive solar power, and Generation IV reactors and technologies that will ultimately reduce nuclear waste

This initiative is also designed to keep the United States competitive in a global marketplace that has accelerated the development of nuclear power. While the U.S. has been at a stand-still in developing nuclear power in the last 30 years, others are forging ahead. France – with the lowest electric rates in Europe - now gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear power, while Japan’s nuclear fleet accounts for 35% of its electricity. And this week the United Kingdom announced plans to expand its reactor fleet.

“The Clean Energy Act of 2009” provides a framework that will facilitate the revival of nuclear power and the expansion of renewable energies in the United States, including:

A $10 billion appropriation that can leverage up to $100 billion in government backed loans for the development of clean, carbon-free energy to bring in investors and project developers to jump start efforts that are otherwise too capital-intensive up front.

$100 million per year for 10 years toward nuclear education and training. The nuclear revival cannot take place without a workforce and for that reason the bill provides much-needed support to educate and train craftsmen, engineers, operators and other workers.

$200 million per year for 5 years for a cost-sharing mechanism between government and industry to enable the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to review new nuclear reactor designs such as small and medium reactors and help bring those technologies from concept into the market place.
$50 million per year for 10 years for much needed research to extend the lifetime of our current nuclear fleet and maximize the production of low-cost nuclear power.

$750 million per year for 10 years for research and development of low-cost solar technology, battery technology, advanced bio-fuels, low-carbon coal, and technologies that will reduce nuclear waste. Each of these will be funded at $150 million, annually.

U.S. is the only advanced economy without paid vacation law

2009-05-22T21:09:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON,DC: The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers any paid vacation time, according to a report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. As a result, 1 in 4 private-sector workers in the U.S. do not receive any paid vacation or paid holidays.

The report, No-Vacation Nation, by Rebecca Ray and John Schmitt, finds that European workers are legally guaranteed at least 20 paid vacation days per year, with 25 and even 30 or more days common in some countries. The gap between paid time off in the United States and the rest of the world is even larger when legal holidays are included. The United States does not guarantee any paid holidays, but most rich countries provide between 5 and 13 per year, in addition to paid vacation days.

“The United States is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation days and paid holidays,” said John Schmitt, senior economist and co-author of the report. “Relying on businesses to voluntarily provide paid leave just hasn’t worked. It’s a national embarrassment that 28 million Americans don’t get any paid vacation or paid holidays.”

The sum of the average paid vacation and paid holidays provided to U.S. workers in the private sector ― 15 in total ― would not meet even the minimum required by law in 19 other rich countries.

A review of international standards shows that the United States lags far behind the rest of the world's rich countries. The lack of paid vacation and paid holidays in the U.S. is particularly acute for lower-wage and part-time workers, and for employees of small businesses. The report finds:

Employees of small businesses in the U.S. are less likely to have any paid vacation (70 percent) than those in medium and large establishments (86 percent).

Lower-wage workers in the U.S. (those making less than $15 per hour) are even worse off. Only 69 percent have paid vacation, compared to 88 percent of higher-wage workers.

Part-time workers in the U.S., who are much more likely to be women, are far less likely to have paid vacations (36 percent) than are full-time workers (90 percent).
The authors also found that several foreign countries offer additional time off for younger and older workers, shift workers, and those engaged in community service such as jury duty or voting.

The report reviewed the most recently available data from a range of national and international sources on statutory requirements for paid vacations and paid holidays in 21 rich countries (16 European countries, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States).

http://www.cepr.net

Fiscal Year 2010 budget will restore funding for worker protection programs

2009-05-16T19:07:00.000-07:00

SECRETARY OF LABOR HILDA SOLIS

From the AFL-CIO's NOW blog:

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis told two congressional committees this week that the Department of Labor’s fiscal year (FY) 2010 budget will restore capacity in our worker protection programs, which have languished for years.

Appearing in separate hearings before the Senate and House Appropriations committees’ Labor, Health and Human Services and Education subcommittees, Solis said the department’s budget—including a 10 percent increase for worker protection programs—will fund three priorities:

Renewed capacity of programs that protect workers’ safety and health, pay and benefits; new and innovative ways to promote economic recovery and the competitiveness of our nation’s workers; and carrying out programs in a way that is accountable and transparent to the public and our stakeholders.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said the budget will allow significant improvements in labor protections and workplace safety and health.

At the House hearing, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said during the past eight years, the department relied far too heavily on voluntary employer compliance programs for workplace safety and other worker protections.

Your budget makes it clear that your department is in competent hands.

Solis said the proposed funding for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) will restore OSHA’s capacity to enforce statutory protections, provide technical support, promulgate safety and health standards, and strengthen safety and health statistics.

The increased funding for worker protection programs, Solis said, will allow the department to hire an additional

130 safety and health inspectors (a 10 percent increase from FY 2009);
25 whistle-blower investigators (a 33 percent increase);
13 full-time employees to strengthen OSHA’s capacity to quickly respond to the sudden emergence of safety and health hazards, such as a pandemic influenza;
20 full-time employees to restore OSHA’s rule-making capabilities, allowing the agency to simultaneously address multiple complex longstanding and emerging regulatory issues.

Solis told the committees the budget request for the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA)—including funds to hire 15 new inspectors for metal and nonmetal mines—will allow MSHA to ensure a 100 percent completion rate for all mandatory safety and health inspections; support MSHA’s enhanced enforcement initiatives, which target patterns of violation, flagrant violators, and scofflaws.

In March, a report from the Government Accountability office (GAO) found the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division under the Bush administration had a pattern of failing to investigate worker complaints of employer wage theft. The report followed up two earlier GAO investigations outlining the Wage and Hour Division’s failure to investigate worker complaints of employer wage violations.

Solis told the panels that the Wage and Hour Division’s budget includes a $35 million increase over the last Bush budget and allows the hiring of 288 more inspectors to help revive its customer service focus by supporting improved complaint intake and more in-depth complaint investigation processes. In FY 2010, the Wage and Hour Division will hire additional investigators to strengthen enforcement resources on behalf of vulnerable workers; verify future compliance of prior violators; and conduct high quality, responsive complaint investigations strategically, to increase protections for the greatest number of workers.

Rep. Shuler joins with Progressives for Immigration Reform to promote SAVE Act

2009-05-16T18:55:00.000-07:00

CONGRESSMAN HEATH SHULER D-NC WORKING FOR REAL IMMIGRATION REFORM

The Washington Examiner reports:

Rep. Heath Shuler will soon reintroduce the SAVE Act (Secure America through Verification and Enforcement) within the next few weeks. The legislation is built around a three part plan to reduce illegal immigration. This includes: a strict emphasis on border security, the verification of an employee’s legal status, and increased enforcement of existing laws.

Shuler outlined his plan and discussed its prospects at a forum held near Capitol Hill Tuesday evening at the office of Progressive for Immigration Reform.
Shuler emphasized the importance of “interior enforcement” in his talk and said the E-Verify program could serve as a foundation for future efforts aimed at reducing the flow of illegal immigration. The electronic system would provide local officials with the ability to cross check federal databases and would essentially work like a Google search, he explained.

“This is not about discrimination because E-verify is activated after someone has been hired,” Shuler said. “This helps to ensure that local officials can identify who they arrest. Interior enforcement is crucial.”

Shuler also said there were not enough immigration judges available to hear cases and this complicates the interior enforcement of federal law. But he sees enough common ground among members in both parties to rally around key provisions in the SAVE Act that would help change the current dynamic.

Up until now the cause of tighter border security and interior enforcement has been identified with conservative Republicans but Leah Durant, executive director of Progressives for Immigration Reform, believes there is an opportunity to broaden this base of support.

“We started this organization because we wanted to bring in more liberals on the side of tighter enforcement,” Durant said. “There is a lot of concern about the impact mass immigration will have on the environment. In fact, there is a natural marriage here between immigration reform and environmental preservation. So we can have people across the political spectrum.”

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/Examiner-Opinion-Zone/Rep-Shuler-Joins-with-Progressives-for-Immigration-Reform-to-Push-SAVE-Act-44135177.html

ADA says real unemployment at 15.8%

2009-05-09T21:36:00.000-07:00

Washington, DC - The real unemployment rate released on Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is 15.8%, nearly 7 points higher than the rate officially reported according to Americans for Democratic Action (ADA).

The real rate includes marginally attached workers which the BLS reports “are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not looking currently for a job. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.”

Since April 2008, 6 million people have lost their job. ADA’s Real Rate of Unemployment represents a staggering 23 million people who are unemployed or underemployed.

The increase of another 563,000 jobless claims for April 2009 was the smallest rise in 6 months, providing some evidence that government stimulus is working but underscoring the urgent need to put more government dollars to work motivating the private sector to begin hiring laid-off workers.

ADA National Director, Amy Isaacs, said: “While the Republican Party of No is looking backwards, rather than coming up with new ideas to help America’s working families, President Obama and Democrats in Congress are moving forward with a bold agenda. There is still much to do as record lay-offs continue and economic challenges abound, but we share the optimism of leading economists who believe the worst is behind us.”

http://www.adaction.org

Facing South: Are the Blue Dogs getting a bad rap ?

2009-05-09T15:45:00.000-07:00

In a post at the Institute for Southern Studies blog Facing South, Chris Kromm asks if Blue Dog Democrats are facing unfair criticism from the netroots. As Kromm notes, most of the Democrats who vote more conservative than their districts (especially on economic issues) are not members of the Blue Dog Coalition.

Kromm writes:

The Blue Dog Democratic Coalition is one of the favorite punching bags of the progressive blogosphere. From DailyKos to OpenLeft, the Blue Dogs -- a group of 51 "moderate and conservative" House Democrats -- are routinely held up as a symbol of all that's wrong with the Democratic Party.

A piece yesterday in Firedoglake is typical of the anti-Blue Dog genre, in which they are savaged for being hypocritcal about government spending, opposed to hate crime laws and being the descendants of racist Dixiecrats (although the majority of Blue Dogs aren't in the South). http://firedoglake.com/2009/05/07/the-other-white-meat-blue-dogs-hate-pork-unless-its-theirs/

Defenders of the Blue Dogs respond by saying that these Democrats come from "hard districts," and they can't take progressive stands because they'll get voted out of office by their conservative constituents.

Put aside for the moment the unpleasant implication that Blue Dog votes are devoid of moral conviction and based purely on political calculation. Even on its own terms, is the idea that Blue Dogs come from uniquely conservative "hard districts" even true?

An analysis by the Swing State Project this week might give the Blue Dogs some backup.

In a widely-circulated post, blogger Crisitunity ranked members of the 110th Congress by their votes compared to their districts' Partisan Voting Index, a measure first developed by political analyst Charlie Cook in 1997. The idea is to find out if a Representative's voting record in 2008 was more or less "Democratic" than his district. http://www.swingstateproject.com/diary/4578/pvivote-index-for-2008

"Under-performing" Democrats are those that consistently vote more conservative than they could likely get away with given their district's Democratic leanings. "Over-performing" Democrats are those that somehow manage to vote more Democratic-friendly than their constituency.

So how do the Blue Dogs stack up? According to the Swing State Project's analysis:

* Only three of the top 20 "under-performing" Democrats in 2008 were in the Blue Dog Coalition: Reps. Scott (GA-13), Harman (CA-36) and Cooper (TN-5).

* By contrast, six of the Blue Dogs were among the 20 most "over-performing" Democrats: Reps. Taylor (MS-4), Matheson (UT-2), Pomeroy (ND-AL), Lampson (TX-22), Herseth (SD-AL) and Chandler (KY-6).

An analysis of Cook's own PVI rankings for Congressional districts shuffles some of the names but arrives at the same conclusion: there are more Blue Dogs topping the list of Democratic "over-performers" than "under-performers." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook_Partisan_Voting_Index

What does it all mean?

One take is that, in key cases, the Blue Dogs are right about the makeup of their districts and the amount of political room they have to maneuver.

Furthermore, Blue Dogs are hardly unique -- in fact, most of the top Democrats who are voting more conservative than their constituents aren't Blue Dogs.

But then there are those representatives who cement the case that Blue Dogs can be out of touch with their districts. Exhibit A is Rep. David Scott whose conservative, business-friendly votes are a mismatch for his diverse and strongly Democratic district in the Atlanta suburbs. Rep. Jane Harman is clearly another.

An important note: The PVI is a limited tool. It measures the political lean of a district by presidential votes -- useful shorthand, but one that ignores complicated questions like the way a presidential election played out in a particular district.

And it clearly doesn't capture the breadth of political views among constituents -- for example, what about Southern populists who may vacillate on social issues but be progressive on economic ones?

The Blue Dogs also have to answer another question: Many Democrats, either due to conviction or opportunism, vote more conservative than their districts. But why have Blue Dogs taken the extra step of organizing/joining a political bloc that often defines itself by its opposition to the broader Democratic agenda -- as with the stimulus bill and Obama's budget?

In other words, the question for Democrats isn't necessarily whether the Blue Dogs are too conservative, but why they've organized in a way that frequently undermines the Democratic brand.

http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/05/do-blue-dog-democrats-get-a-bad-rap.html

Dissent: We Need a Permanent Solution for Our Banks

2009-04-25T21:06:00.000-07:00

Writing in Dissent Magazine [www.dissentmagazine.org], Greg Smithsimon makes a strong argument for bank nationalization. As Smithsimon points out in the article, publicly owned does not have to mean government owned.

Smithsimon writes:

The Obama administration has gone to great lengths to insist that if nationalization of banks is necessary, it will only be temporary—as if the general public thinks the U.S. government was planning to permanently nationalize banks.

Yet that’s exactly what should be done. Time and time again, our experiences in the United States and in the global economy have taught us that banks are like weapons of mass destruction: they can cause so much damage to our society that they have to be guarded by stable states rather than rogue private interests who will exploit them for their own dangerous ends. On a regular basis privately held banks decimate our economy and those of an inexhaustible list of other countries. The inevitability of privately owned banks wriggling free of regulation and engaging in dangerous speculative activity for private gain is by now clear. The cost is unacceptably high.

The Realities and Benefits of Nationalized Banks
Nationalizing the banks can bring us two different sets of improvements to our current situation: As retail banks, they will provide consumers with healthy, stable replacements for the bankrupt zombie banks now paralyzing the economy. As democratized versions of the Federal Reserve Bank, they can oversee financial reform and fiscal policy that serve the needs of real Americans.

If we nationalize retail banks, they can provide checking and savings accounts, make loans for homes and small businesses, and do so without the speculative madness that private banks recently exhibited. Thus state banks would restore liquidity to the credit markets, confidence in the banking system, and sanity to lending practices.

What would this look like? Dozens of countries already have such state-owned banks. The state-owned CGD is Portugal’s largest bank. Most such countries have “post banks,” including Greece, New Zealand, and Ireland. Typically, they are state-owned banks in which customers make deposits and withdrawals at the counter of their local post office. Israel just created a separate postal bank company in 2006. Great Britain’s National Savings and Investments is state owned, and just last month a British survey showed 75 percent of the public supports creation of a new, publicly owned post bank as an alternative to private banks.

This would not be a new idea in the United States, which had a post bank until 1967. (The attraction of the bank originally was that only its deposits were insured by the full faith and credit of the United States. The FDIC eventually extended that benefit to private banks as well, but the recent banking debacles raise the question of whether such public guarantees should be made without the kind of oversight offered by public control.) Thus one promising model is for the United States to convert failed private banks into a system of publicly owned banks that could use depositor savings to make responsible home and business loans.

Beyond creating stable retail banks, public banks are also useful for macro-level policy purposes: state-run central banks set interest rates and implement de facto regulatory safeguards, and the more that macro-level banks are in the hands of the public instead of bankers on loan from Citibank, the more they can operate in the public interest rather than in the interest of speculative investment banks.

The Federal Reserve is already a state-run, not-for-profit, macro-level bank. But while it’s a government agency, its board of directors are made up of bankers from the very institutions that have lately run amok (and then aground). The Fed sets interest rates and makes important policy decisions about the U.S. economy. But in a perverse reversal of democracy, many of its executives are actually picked and installed in their positions by the private banks themselves. The desire for a more democratic bank dates to the Fed’s creation. Populists like William Jennings Bryan wanted the bank under public control, but banks wanted it controlled by bankers. The bankers won. While most Fed directors are picked by the private banks, the board of governors at the top is appointed by the president. And past presidents have almost always selected yet more bankers for those fourteen-year governorships.

At the moment, the Fed has two vacancies that could be filled by people who actually live up to the Fed’s mandate that governors represent groups like consumers and labor unions. While the first step is to begin appointing Federal Reserve governors who don’t represent the banking industry, the next step would be to let the public choose the second-tier directors rather than the banks, either through elections, state appointments, or other more representative means. If done poorly, political control could mean the bank would do the bidding of whatever political party was in power. But just as the Fed has successfully assuaged private banks’s fears that a member from Citibank would only represent Citibank interests (rather than those of Citibank and the rest of its ilk), so insulation from political influence can be structured into a more responsive, democratic, and transparent Federal Reserve Bank. In this model, nationalizing a bank would mean giving the public a real voice in an institution it already owns.

Read the complete article at:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=232

The Atomic Show: A view from the Left on nuclear energy

2009-04-25T16:48:00.000-07:00

David Walters from Left Atomics and Daily Kos joins Rod Adams for a discussion about atomic energy from a far left point of view. Check out this link to a podcast of the Atomic Show.
http://atomic.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/04/14/the-atomic-show-131-view-from-the-left-on-atomic-energy/

Rod Adams, host of the Atomic Show and pro-nuclear blogger www.atomicinsights.blogspot.com writes:

It is well known that much of the opposition to nuclear power in the US, Europe, and Australia comes from people who are normally considered to be on the political left. David Walters, a self confessed socialist and long time labor activist has a different point of view. He believes, like I do, that abundant, clean, reliable, atomic energy is a boon for the working class.

Power plants provide good, stable jobs, often at union wage scales. They enable a vibrant local economy and good public infrastructure based on the plant’s addition to the property tax base and the salaries of the workers that get spent in local establishments. They allow generational employment with opportunities for young people to keep living and working in the towns where they grow up if they want to.

Link to Dave Walter's Blogs and Left Manifesto on Nuclear Energy
http://left-atomics.blogspot.com/
http://left-atomics.blogspot.com/2007/06/left-manifesto-for-nuclear-energy.html
http://davidwalters.dailykos.com/

David Sirota: Populism is Popular

2009-04-24T20:56:00.000-07:00

David Sirota writing for In These Times www.inthesetimes.com:

April 24, 2009
Newsflash: Populism Is Popular
by David Sirota

In 2006, journalist Christopher Hayes wrote a little-noticed article for In These Times magazine about a proposal in Oregon to crack down on predatory lending. http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2733/ The initiative had become so popular that conservative legislators supported it fearing that if it were put on the state’s ballot, the resulting gusher of grassroots support would not only ratify the measure, but depose the bank-allied Republican Party, too.

Hayes’ piece was titled “Economic Populism Proves Popular,” the headline a sarcastic middle finger flashed at a political and media Establishment that portrays policies “supporting the rights and power of the people”—i.e., the dictionary definition of “populism”—as somehow anathema to the people.

That depiction, of course, continues today. But now, populism isn’t just popular in America; it is becoming the dominant paradigm, and that has the Establishment frightened.

For years, the country watched its populist desire for health care, tax, trade and financial reform run into the reality of elite politicians handing out trillions of dollars worth of corporate welfare and bank bailouts as the economy collapsed. Not surprisingly, a new Rasmussen poll on attitudes toward government and corporations shows 75 percent of the country “can be classified on the populist or Mainstream side of the divide” while just 14 percent “side with the political class.”

As if to confirm the chasm, this “political class”—consultants, politicians, lobbyists and commentators—has been denigrating populism as too overwrought to be taken seriously. Listen to a typical pundit defending AIG’s bonuses or criticizing demands for a new trade policy, and you will inevitably hear the word “populist” accompanied by the word “rage” and/or “dangerous,” followed by tributes to the status quo.

This elite propaganda, says Georgetown University’s Michael Kazin, dismissively implies “that anger from ordinary people is emotional, coming from people who don’t understand how the economy works and are just lashing out at their social betters.”

The caricaturing cribs from Richard Nixon’s playbook. Whereas the 36th president got himself re-elected by steering the country’s anger at the Vietnam War into anger at countercultural war protestors, today’s political class portrays the public’s outrage as the nation’s biggest problem, rather than what the public is justifiably outraged at.

Today, though, Tricky Dick’s tactics aren’t working, and not just because 2009’s economy is far worse than 1972’s.

This is the era when “You” are Time magazine’s person of the year—an era whose information and interactivity revolution now has us looking to ourselves for direction, not officialdom’s gatekeepers. Additionally, America has lately been taught to expect results from democracy. TV viewers get to decide “American Idol” winners, Facebookers get to change their site’s bylaws and voters get to autonomously use Obama campaign resources to win elections—and we get to do all this from outside the press clubs and smoke-filled rooms.

This profound rewiring of instincts and expectations is why the vilification of “populist rage” has failed as a political barbiturate, why the country still seethes, and why both parties are suddenly listening to “the people” instead of the Establishment. This is why, for instance, Republicans are staging “Tea Party” protests against federal spending and why Democrats are pushing bills to expand health care, re-regulate Wall Street and cap executive pay — because they know the political class, however offended, can no longer stop a voter backlash.

Admittedly, contradiction is everywhere: Republican rallies bewail deficits the GOP manufactured, and Democrats lament deregulatory schemes they originally crafted. But no matter how hypocritical the response is, it is a response, and that represents change from decades of aloof government. It suggests a democratic renewal whereby populism—i.e., advocating what the public wants—isn’t merely one popular brand of politics, but is politics itself.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4388/newsflash_populism_is_popular/

Progressive Mayor supports school vouchers

2009-04-23T16:28:00.000-07:00

Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch

Columnist Rick Green, writing for the Hartford Courant [www.courant.com], notes that a progressive Democratic Mayor is supporting an experiment with education choice. Support for vouchers is really a liberal position - if not a civil rights issue.

Before More Kids Fail, Try School Vouchers
Rick Green
Hartford Courant
April 21, 2009

Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch isn't crazy about school vouchers.

But the inequality of our failed system of urban education is even less appealing.

Finch, a liberal Democrat and former state senator in his first term as mayor, stunned observers not long ago when he unexpectedly suggested that using public money to pay for children to go to private schools might help his financially strapped city out -- and provide some hope for poor, minority children.

"It's a shock when you become the mayor of a Connecticut city," said Finch, faced with laying off teachers, shutting programs and perhaps even closing schools this year.

"There is no there, there," he said, bluntly describing his city's inability to pay for vital services.

"We could send children to private school in our city for a fraction of what we spend on public schools," he said. "We need to reduce the number of children in the public school system."

Private schools -- and we're talking Catholic schools -- can do the job "just as well," said Finch. His endorsement of vouchers is based in reality, not antipathy toward public education or some new-found belief in the free market.

He's watching another generation fail.

It's as simple as this: We have been unable to come up with a way to fund public education so that our neediest children get what they need.

Finch's schools are growing more crowded while he sees empty seats in parochial schools.

This makes it pretty hard to argue that the system is working.

Education Commissioner Mark McQuillan cautioned me that while "these are desperate moments for Bridgeport," it is not time to turn away from public schools.

"I don't know that vouchers have proved to be a worthy mechanism or tool to assist poor students," he said. "The real issue is not vouchers but to have adequate funding."

This is what a long line of education commissioners, mayors and urban superintendents of schools have concluded for decades. But what do you do when the politicians and the courts can't come up with a better system? While we wait, the nation's biggest achievement gap between whites and minorities only grows wider.

That's the frustration that Finch faces in Bridgeport. At least he's looking for an immediate solution instead of waiting for a court ruling that may never come.

"I perpetuate the creation of an underclass every day I open my [schools] up, because I can't catch up," Finch explained. "I can't get my kids to catch up."

At some point somebody has to be courageous enough to try something else.

We fund schools based on how wealthy a municipality is, not where the need is.

Meanwhile, our future workforce -- the people who will pay for your retirement -- is going to come from Bridgeport, Hartford and New Haven, where the schools are failing.

John Cattelan, director of the Connecticut Federation of Catholic School Parents, said there are about 400 seats open in Catholic schools in the Bridgeport area, with another 1,000 in Hartford.

"This is a way to relieve the financial stress on these municipalities," said Cattelan, who would like to see tax credits for corporations that help fund private school scholarships.

We can declare that it isn't right to use public money at one of Cattelan's Catholic schools.

But then we must accept over-crowded schools and inferior programs for city children who are years behind their suburban counterparts.

It's what voucher advocate Jay Greene, a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, calls "a very uncomfortable choice."

"For how long," Greene asked me, "can you say we don't need vouchers because you are going to improve public schools?"

Finch isn't willing to wait. That's far better than pretending we're fixing the problem.

http://www.courant.com/news/local/columnists/hc-rick-green-0421-column,0,1145473.column

SIngle Payer Health Plan Blows Away the Competition

2009-04-19T11:37:00.001-07:00

A new TV commercial promoting Medicare for All a/k/a Single Payer Health Care. Our present medical care system is broken. A single payer health plan would provide universal coverage at a lower cost.

Dean Baker on the Need to Tax the Wealthy

2009-04-19T11:16:00.001-07:00

After thirty years of class warfare against the middle class, it is time for the wealthy to pay their fair share. Dean Baker makes an excellent case for why we need a tax on financial transactions.

The Need to Tax the Wealthy
By Dean Baker

April 14, 2009, The Economist

This article is a guest opinion on an Economist online debate on whether or not the rich should pay higher taxes.

The quest to increase taxes on the wealthy is not a gratuitous attack on upper income households; it is driven by the need to raise more revenue to run the government. While many deficit hawks been irresponsible in raising fears of an impending collapse of the American government, the projected deficits for years following the recovery are in fact larger than is desirable.

There are areas of American spending at the federal government level that could be reasonably cut, but even after we have zeroed out the "waste, fraud, and abuse" category of federal spending we will still likely need additional revenue of between 1-2%t of GDP to keep budget deficits in an acceptable range. That leaves a choice between increasing taxes on the wealthy or imposing more taxes on the middle class.

The vast majority of the income gains in the United States over the last three decades have gone to the richest 5% of the population, largely as a result of policies that were explicitly designed to redistribute income upwards. Therefore it is far more appropriate to tax the richest 5%t of families who have prospered than the broad middle class who have suffered.

Of course taxes can be designed in a better or worse manner. The best way to increase taxes on the wealthy, in addition to allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, would be to apply a modest financial transactions tax (FTT).

There is a long history in both the United States and the rest of the world with FTT. Until 1964, the United States imposed a tax of 0.12% on new stock issues and 0.04% on stock trades. Britain still has a tax of 0.25% on each stock sale or purchase, raising five billion pounds a year. This would be equivalent to roughly $30 billion a year in the American economy.

Robert Pollin and I calculated that a scaled set of FTT on stock, futures, options and other financial instruments could raise approximately $150 billion a year. This would go far towards bringing the long-term budget deficit down to a manageable level.

A FTT would be hugely progressive. While many middle income families own stock, their holdings are dwarfed by the holdings of the wealthy. Furthermore, few middle income families are active traders. Their intention is to hold their stock to support their retirement or their kids' education, not to shuffle it around on a daily or hourly basis. Some mutual funds do engage in frequent trading. An FTT would encourage investors to move their money to funds that are less active traders, thereby allowing them to escape most of the impact of the FTT.

Most of the burden of the FTT will fall on wealthy individuals who are active traders and also on the financial industry itself. Either way, the tax will be overwhelmingly borne by the wealthy. By raising the cost of trading, the tax will discourage the trading that provides the revenue for the financial industry. A well-designed tax should also discourage the creation of exotic assets that may serve little useful purpose, since it could lead to the tax being paid multiple times. For example, the holder of an option on a stock would both pay the tax on the purchase and sale of the option and also on the purchase and sale of the stock itself, if the option was ever exercised.

While most taxes impose some economic cost in addition to the revenue raised, a FTT may actually increase economic efficiency. By discouraging financial transactions that are entirely rent-seeking in nature, a FTT will reduce the resources used up by the financial sector, without affecting at all its ability to serve the productive economy. The reduction in trading volume will of course reduce liquidity to some extent, but American financial markets will still be quite liquid. Even with a 0.25% tax on a stock sale or purchase, transaction costs will still only be raised back to their mid-80s levels. And, the United States had a large and very liquid stock market in the 80s.

There also is a powerful element of justice in imposing a FTT in the current situation. The main reason that the budget situation has deteriorated so much in the last two years has been the damage caused by the irresponsibility and greed of the financial industry. In this way, a FTT can be seen as sort of a user tax, where the industry is effectively forced to pay for some of the damage caused by its practices, just as we might like to tax the output of industries that pollute our air or water.

In short, there is a very good argument for increasing taxes on the wealthy given the current budget situation. The alternative is taxing those who are not wealthy. And, there is no better way to tax the wealthy than to tax their gambling in financial markets. A financial transactions tax will raise revenue at the same time that it makes the economy more productive. This is a genuine win-win situation.

http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/299

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy. He also has a blog on the American Prospect, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.

Why don't pro-lifers protest insurance industry's discrimination against expectant mothers ?

2009-04-19T11:02:00.000-07:00

We never hear complaints about this from the pro-life movement or the many "pro-life" Republicans in Congress, but insurance companies and HMO's are routinely denying maternity coverage to expectant mothers. Why don't pro-lifers protest the outrageous practices of the insurance industry which provides an incentive for abortion ?

The Miami Herald has uncovered the secret rules of HMO's when it comes to pregnancy. According to a handbook by VISTA, an HMO, it says:

"There is no coverage for maternity and routine newborn charges until the initial 15-month waiting period is satisfied. During the first 15 months from the effective date, no coverage is available for pre-natal, post-natal or delivery charges. For all plans, complications of pregnancy are covered the same as any other illness. If it is determined that conception was prior to the effective date, coverage will be voided, and the premium will be refunded less benefits provided. This also excludes elective abortion."

http://media.miamiherald.com/smedia/2009/03/28/19/Vista_Producer_Guide.source.prod_affiliate.56.pdf

With the passage of the Pregnant Women Support Act sponsored by Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), pregnancy will no longer be a pre-existing condition in American health insurance. It will also eliminate the "abortion incentive" that too many women and families face everyday. This is one of the many reasons why Democrats for Life is working so hard to pass PWSA. We want to bring both sides together to agree that there is much we agree on, and making sure that women who want to carry their child to term shouldn't be coerced to end their pregnancy so they can obtain their health insurance.

www.democratsforlife.org

Ed Show: Bailout Banks Double Dipping (HQ)

2009-04-19T00:07:00.001-07:00

There May Be an Answer to Detroit's Problems

2009-04-08T20:07:00.001-07:00

Greenpeace Founder Supports Increased Nuclear Power

2009-04-07T20:14:00.000-07:00

The Daily Northwestern [http://media.www.dailynorthwestern.com] reports:

When Patrick Moore co-founded Greenpeace International in 1971, he was firmly against the use of nuclear energy to power Americans' lives. Fifteen years later, Moore split from the environmental organization when he began studying nuclear energy more in-depth.

The activist spoke Monday night at the McCormick Tribune Center about America's need to increase its use of nuclear power.

"I lost my fear of nuclear energy when I started studying it more closely," Moore said. "It is one of the safest technologies we ever invented - it's an excellent job-creation technology."

Moore took time during his speech to reflect on his experience with Greenpeace, an organization that is now known for its outspoken advocacy for environmental issues. He said Greenpeace was "quite a ride - we got a lot of things right in the early years."

"In retrospect â€¦ we painted 'nuclear' with too broad a brush," Moore said. "We lumped nuclear energy with nuclear war as if 'nuclear' was evil. We were young and enthusiastic and we made the mistake of ignoring the benefits of nuclear energy."

Moore dispelled myths about nuclear energy and discussed the safety and practicality of nuclear technology.

He cited a study which found that 52,000 nuclear plant workers had fewer occurrences of cancer and disease and enjoyed a longer lifespan than that of the general population. The nuclear industry is "safer to work in than real estate and financial services," he said.

Moore is now the co-chairman of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition and chairman of Greenspirit Strategies.

"I want to promote nuclear energy and this is a vehicle to do it," Moore said. "The purpose of Greenspirit to build a strong grassroots coalition which includes industry labor politicians of all stripes and community leaders to support new nuclear plants."

He said Greenspirit is "based more on science and logic" than Greenpeace, which he said "depends on scare tactics where there's no evidence."

http://media.www.dailynorthwestern.com/media/storage/paper853/news/2009/04/07/Campus/Greenpeace.CoFounder.Lauds.Benefits.Of.Nuclear.Energy-3700036.shtml

Additional resources on nuclear energy:

www.pronucleardemocrats.blogspot.com
http://www.ecolo.org/
http://left-atomics.blogspot.com/

Senator Specter on the Employee Free Choice Act

2009-04-07T20:05:00.001-07:00

Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) was a strong supporter of the Employee Free Choice Act before recently declaring his opposition under intense pressure from corporate lobbyists and fellow Republicans. Specter makes a strong case in 2005 for this pro-middle class legislation and against his present position on EFCA.

Protest The Banks

2009-04-01T05:13:00.000-07:00

The Threat of China

2009-03-28T17:57:00.001-07:00

Thom Hartmann - Founding Fathers and the Constitution

2009-03-28T11:00:00.001-07:00

What is Single Payer ?

2009-03-24T18:38:00.001-07:00

China Environmental Practices Cast Pall on Climate Issue

2009-03-21T21:56:00.000-07:00

Public Health, U.S. Jobs at Stake in China’s Industrial Spew;

New Report Focuses on Failures of China’s Environmental Regulation

WASHINGTON – With China now among the world’s leading polluters, climate change can not be achieved unless the Administration and Congress hold China accountable for its reckless environmental practices. A new report provides the most in-depth and detailed examination to date of the serious flaws in China’s pollution-control regime and the damage it is doing to human health and global efforts to address climate change.

Released on the eve of a Congressional hearing on climate issues, the report focuses on China’s rapidly growing steel industry, and documents China’s ineffective enforcement of weak pollution-control standards, its failure to use adequate pollution-prevention measures, and the resulting high levels of pollution.

The extensive research was conducted by the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) with a team of environmental and legal experts, including investigators working in China. Last year, AAM released a report by Dr. Usha Haley, of the University of New Haven, that found China’s steel producers have received more than $27 billion in governmental energy subsidies since 2000.

“China’s steel industry is not only harming the health of its own people, but spreading pollution around the world and contributing to global warming,” said Scott Paul, executive director of AAM. “At the same time, China benefits economically from its failure to control pollution, giving it a significant advantage over its foreign competitors.”

“Ironically, China pays a heavy price for the serious harm it is inflicting on its citizens, resources, and environment,” he said. “And we suffer from the damage China is doing to the planet and unfair competition in the steel industry that’s vital to American jobs and our economic future.”

China’s production of steel has quadrupled this decade, making it by far the world’s largest source of steel. It now produces more than the United States, Russia, and Japan combined. And, while China produces one-third of the world’s steel, it is responsible for half of the world’s carbon dioxide from steelmaking, making it a leading contributor to global warming.

Propelled by its rapid industrial expansion and low environmental standards, China has also become one of the world’s biggest polluters. It now produces more sulfur dioxide than any other country, and has taken the lead in generating carbon dioxide as well.

The resulting pollution is taking a heavy toll within China. It causes as many as 750,000 premature deaths in China each year, according to the World Bank, and 99 percent of the 540 million Chinese who live in urban areas breathe unsafe air. But it also raises global threats. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), on some days, one-fourth of the particulate matter (dust and soot) in Los Angeles comes from China.

Low standards combined with heavy industry investments to expand capacity, as well as poor regulation and enforcement, result in far more pollution from steel plants in China than in the U.S. Although both the Chinese government and leading companies in the steel industry claim they want to address the industry’s environmental problems, the levels of pollution are still three to twenty times higher per ton of steel produced in China than in the U.S., depending on the specific pollutant and industrial process analyzed.

“American jobs are at stake and so is the health of the planet,” said Leo W. Gerard, International President, United Steelworkers (USW). “This report should be used as a guide for China and the U.S. to make Chinese pollution standards and enforcement efforts more consistent with programs in other steel producing countries.”

Gerard will testify on Tuesday, March 24, before Congress at a House Ways and Means hearing on climate issues. The USW represents more than 85,000 active workers in the basic steel industry, plus hundreds of thousands of retired steelworkers who are impacted by the inequities of environmental standards for China steel production.

Perhaps the most glaring example of the huge gap between environmental protection in China and the United States is the resources and personnel devoted to regulation and enforcement. China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has only about 300 employees, compared to the 18,000 who work for its U.S. counterpart, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). With few employees, most of whom are confined to Beijing, MEP relies on provincial and local governments to implement generally vague environmental laws. But these local entities often give higher priority to economic growth and employment.

Even if China’s environmental infrastructure was sound, its air and water pollution standards applicable to the steel industry are far less stringent than in the U.S. For existing equipment in integrated steel mills, emission-control standards for particulate matter, for example, are from two to six times more stringent in the U.S., depending on the steelmaking process. Chinese limits on sulfur dioxide are so low that most companies do not need additional pollution-control equipment to meet them.

In addition to low standards, the new report found that “the Chinese steel industry operates in an environment in which enforcement of existing standards is weak, the permit system is ineffective, and facilities do not do an adequate job of monitoring their emissions and discharges. Financial penalties for violations are too low to have a substantial deterrent effect.”

For example, the maximum fine for non-compliance in China is $14,000 for most violations, and repeated violations don’t necessarily lead to additional penalties. By contrast, American companies may incur penalties of as much as $32,500 per day.

Due to China’s low standards and lax enforcement, U.S. steel companies in recent years spent 80% more than their Chinese counterparts per ton of steel –$8.83 vs. $4.85—on controlling air and water pollution alone. This meant a yearly savings for China’s steel sector of more than $1.7 billion at 2006 production levels. With respect to capital expenditures on pollution control equipment, estimates suggest that Chinese steelmakers would have to triple or quadruple their capital expenditures to reduce emissions to U.S. levels.

“This report shows that China does not enforce its own environmental regulations,” said Terrence D. Straub, Senior Vice President, Public Policy & Governmental Affairs, United States Steel Corporation. “Since Beijing has been unwilling to impose reasonable emissions regulations on provincial and local governments, there’s little anticipation that they will address carbon emissions and global climate change either.”

Other factors contributing to the Chinese steel industry’s pollution problems include higher use of energy (20 percent more energy per ton of steel than the international average), a heavy reliance on coal to produce that energy, a large number of smaller steel companies, and low use of recycled steel.

The report said it’s misleading to compare the Chinese steel industry’s practices to those in the U.S. decades ago, before regulations and pollution-control technologies existed. “Environmental technology that is in widespread use today has made the human and environmental impacts of industrial pollution both quantifiable and controllable,” the report noted.

China now has access to “the know-how needed to address effectively the industry’s environmental problems,” the report notes. And if China doesn’t take steps “to bring pollution levels closer to those in the rest of the world, China’s trading partners can justifiably complain that China’s failure to act confers on its domestic steelmaking industry an unfair competitive advantage.”

The Alliance for American Manufacturing is a unique non-partisan, non-profit partnership forged to strengthen manufacturing in the U.S. AAM brings together a select group of America’s leading manufacturers and the United Steelworkers to promote creative policy solutions on priorities such as international trade, energy security, health care, retirement security, currency manipulation, and other issues of mutual concern. For more information: www.americanmanufacturing.org.

Explaining the Employee Free Choice Act

2009-03-21T20:59:00.001-07:00

How Unions Can Help Restore the Middle Class

2009-03-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

The following testimony on the importance of unions to restoring a solid middle class was given to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on Tuesday, March 10, by Dr. Paula B. Voos, a professor in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers, and an Economic Policy Institute [www.epi.org] research associate.

Thank you for the invitation to speak today. I am pleased to have the opportunity to consider the role unions can play in rebuilding the American middle class, a matter of utmost importance not only for ending the current economic downturn, but also for our nation in the longer term. As an economist, I have been studying the role unions play in our economy for some time and in 1993-94, I had the opportunity to serve on the Dunlop Commission in its consideration of how labor law should be modernized to serve the “Future of Worker Management Relations in the United States.”

There is now a substantial body of research evidence on the economic impact of U.S. unions. Unions typically:

- Raise the wages of the employees they represent;

- Increase the fringe benefits of those same employees, usually by a greater extent than they increase wages;

- Reduce income inequality within the represented firm, by reducing differentials between low-paid and high-paid employees, men and women, various racial/ethnic groups, younger and older employees, and so forth;

- Increase pay of nonunion workers in occupations and industries with substantial union presence as nonunion employers move closer to union standards;

- Reduce income inequality in the wider society by reducing inequality not only within and between represented firms, but also across entire industries as nonunion employers increase compensation to discourage unionization, all of which strengthens the middle class (Card, Lemieux, and Riddell, 2007).

- Reduce employee turnover by lessening the number of quits (voluntary separations); and

- Thus increase the retention of skilled employees, enhancing human capital and productivity in both the firm and the economy as a whole;

(See Freeman and Medoff, 1984; Bennett and Kaufman, 2007).

Furthermore:

- Because they suffer less turnover, unionized employers have greater incentives for employee training and for high-skill, high commitment human resource policies, rather than low-skill, high-turnover or other “low road” approaches to human resources. Reduced turnover avoids costs to employers but also lessens society’s costs associated with unemployment, such as Food Stamps, uncompensated care and other social programs.

- Union-represented employees have been found to be more productive, on average. This is probably both due to the fact they have more work experience and due to greater employer investments in them and in physical capital (see Doucouliagos and Laroche 2003 for an overview of seventy-three statistically independent studies);

- The nature of the labor-management relationship is crucial in this regard: good union-management relationships are ones that foster high workforce productivity, but workplaces characterized by labor strife and worker resentment—whether union or non-union—do not (Belman, 1992).

- Union employees typically cannot be disciplined or discharged without a reason, termed “just cause.” This assurance of fair treatment is one reason union employees have greater “voice” than non-union employees and typically are more willing to make suggestions or speak up to improve business operations.

The most important reason to improve the ability of employees to organize into unions is that such membership is a fundamental right in democratic societies, related to freedom of association and the right of all human beings to band together to improve their lives. For that reason alone, I would urge you to pass legislation to make real in the U.S. once again the promise of the National Labor Relations Act. Section 1 of that Act puts federal law behind “the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and ... the exercise by workers of the full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing.” (NLRA Sec. 1).

Nonetheless, some may be concerned with the economic consequences of increased unionization at this moment in time. They should be assured that the economic consequences would be positive. There are two main reasons:

- First, greater union membership would help the United States recover from the current economic downturn and help prevent future economic crises.

- And second, greater union membership would help the United States make the transition to competing internationally on the basis of high productivity, high quality, and innovation, rather than on the basis of low wage labor or long hours - a race to the bottom that we can never win against nations like China.

http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/how_unions_can_help_restore_the_middle_class/

Dissent Magazine: Our Economy Fails Without Manufacturing

2009-03-15T09:08:00.001-07:00

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argues that the United States cannot prosper with a substantial manufacturing sector.

Our Economy Fails Without Manufacturing
By Dean Baker

March 12, 2009, Dissent Magazine

I have often thought that economists should be required to have a better grasp of simple arithmetic. It would prevent them from repeating many silly comments that pass for conventional wisdom, such as that the United States will no longer be a manufacturing country in the future.

Those who know arithmetic can quickly detect the absurdity of this assertion. The implication of course is that the United States will import nearly all of its manufactured goods. The problem is that unless we can find some country that will give us manufactured goods for free forever, we have to find some mechanism to pay for our imports.

The end of manufacturing school argues that we will pay by exporting services. This is where arithmetic is so useful. The volume of U.S. trade in goods is approximately three and half times the volume of its trade in services. If the deficit in goods trade were to continue to expand, we would need an incredible growth rate in both the volume and surplus of service trade and our surplus on this trade in order to get to anything close to balanced trade.

For example, if we lose half of our manufacturing over the next twenty years, and imported services continue to rise at the same pace as the past decade, then we would have to see exports of services rise at an average annual rate of almost 15 percent over the next two decades if we are to have balanced trade in the year 2028.

A 15 percent annual growth rate in service exports is approximately twice the rate of growth in service exports that we have seen over the last decade. It would take a very creative story to explain how we can anticipate the doubling of the growth rate of service exports on a sustained basis.

The story becomes even more fantastic on a closer examination of the services that we export. The largest single item is travel, meaning the money that foreign tourists spend in the United States. This item alone accounts for almost 20 percent of our service exports.

There is nothing wrong with tourism as an industry. However, the idea that U.S. workers are somehow too educated to be doing manufacturing work, but instead will be making the beds, bussing the tables, and cleaning hotel toilets for foreign tourists is a bit laughable. Of course, with the right institutional structure (e.g. strong unions) these jobs can be well-paying jobs, but it is certainly not apparent that they require more skills than manufacturing.

The category “other transportation” accounts for another 10 percent of exported services. These are the fees for freight and port services that importers pay when they bring items into the United States. This service rises when our imports rise. It is effectively money taken out of our consumers’ pockets because it is included in the price of imported goods.

Royalty and licensing fees account for another 17 percent of our service exports. These are the fees that we get countries to tack onto the price of their products due to copyright and patent protection. It might become increasingly difficult to extract these fees as the spread of the Internet increasingly allows more movies, software, and recorded music to be instantly copied and exchanged at zero cost. It’s not clear that the rest of the world is prepared to use police-state tactics to collect revenue for Microsoft and Disney. The drug patent side of this equation is even more dubious. Developing countries are not eager to see their people die so that Pfizer and Merck can get high profits from their drug patents. This component of service exports is likely to come under considerable pressure in future years.

Another major category of service exports is financial services. This category accounted for approximately 10 percent of service exports in recent years. It is questionable whether this share can be maintained in the years ahead. Wall Street had been known as the gold standard of the world financial industry, with the best services and the highest professional standards. As a result of the scandals that have been exposed in the last year, Wall Street no longer has this standing in the world. After all, investors don’t have to come to New York and give their money to Bernie Madoff or Robert Rubin to be ripped off; they can be ripped off almost anywhere in the world. Perhaps the Obama administration will be able to implement reforms in the financial sector that will restore its integrity in the eye of world investors, but that will require serious work at this point.

Finally, there is the category of business and professional services, which accounts for roughly 20 percent of service exports. This is the area of real high-tech and high-end services. It includes computing and managerial consulting.

Rapid growth in this sector would mean more high-end jobs in the United States, but the notion that it could possibly expand enough to support a country without manufacturing is absurd on its face. First, even though it is a large share of service exports, it is only equal to about 0.8 percent of GDP. Even if it quadrupled over the next two decades, it wouldn’t come close to covering the current trade deficit, to say nothing of the increase due to the loss of more manufacturing output.

More important, it is implausible to believe that the United States will be able to dominate this area in the decades ahead. The United States certainly has a head start in sophisticated computer technologies and in some management practices, but it is questionable how long this advantage can be maintained. There are already many world-class computer service companies in India and elsewhere in the developing world, and this number is increasing rapidly.

The computer and software engineers in these countries are every bit as qualified as their U.S. counterparts and are often prepared to work for less than one-tenth of U.S. wages. Furthermore, unlike cars and steel, which are very expensive to transport over long distances, it is costless to ship software anywhere in the world. Given the basic economics, it seems a safe bet that the United States will lose its share in this sector of the world economy. In twenty years it is quite likely that the United States will be a net importer of this category of service, unless of course wages in the United States adjust to world levels.

In short, the idea that the United States can survive without manufacturing is implausible: it implies an absurdly rapid rate of growth of service exports for which there is no historical precedent. Many economists and economic pundits asserted that house prices could keep rising forever in spite of the blatant absurdity of this position. The claim that the U.S. economy can be sustained without a sizable manufacturing sector is an equally absurd proposition.

http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=214
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/our-economy-fails-without-manufacturing/

Waking Up The "Fiscal Wake-Up" Tour

2009-03-15T09:04:00.001-07:00

Rally Against the Insurance Industry

2009-03-15T08:58:00.001-07:00

Michael Lind: Obama needs to follow FDR, Eisenhower

2009-03-07T12:28:00.000-08:00

Michael Lind explains that no matter what the radical free market types say, public provision of public goods isn't socialism. And Republicans like Dwight D. Eisenhower would agree.

Obama's Timid Liberalism

By Michael Lind, New America Foundation www.newamerica.net

Salon www.salon.com, March 6, 2009

Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital, FDR boldly chose to make all other forms of energy in the U.S. uneconomical, by slapping high taxes on kerosene and coal. With the money from the new federal Kerosene Cap and Trade system, President Roosevelt and Congress funded a small-scale federal research program, in the hope of attracting much greater private investment ...

Wait. What's that you say? FDR didn't do that? He poured federal money into the all-public Manhattan Project and created the first atomic bomb in a couple of years? He didn't tax kerosene to make it uneconomical and to encourage private investment in atomic power?

Oh. OK. Never mind.

But what about Social Security? In 1935, FDR signed the historic Social Security Act. It created a complex "retirement mandate" system, forcing all elderly Americans to buy expensive annuities from private insurance companies, without, however, imposing price controls on the insurance companies ...

What? FDR didn't force the elderly to subsidize private annuity brokers? He imposed a single, simple, efficient tax to pay for a single, simple, efficient public system of retirement benefits?

All right, then, forget FDR. He was a socialist, anyway. Let Dwight Eisenhower serve as a model for the Obama administration. President Eisenhower authorized the biggest infrastructure program in American history, when he signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. The interstate highway act created an elaborate system of private tax incentives and public-private partnerships (PPPs) to encourage private corporations to build national highways. To begin with, all U.S. highways were leased to domestic and foreign corporations for a period of decades. Second, all U.S. highways were set up with toll booths, so that American drivers would be forced to repay the corporate owners of the national highways every few dozen miles. Finally, a system of high-speed lanes with higher tolls was created, so that the rich could whiz down the road while middle-class and poor Americans were stuck in traffic jams ...

All right, what now, wise guy? So that's wrong, too? Eisenhower's national highway system wasn't based on tolls, leases to foreign companies, income-based pricing, and tax credits for private corporations? It used gasoline taxes to fund free public highways?

Free highways without toll booths, owned by the public, paid for out of taxes? My God. So the John Birch Society was right after all. Dwight Eisenhower was as much of a socialist as Franklin Delano Roosevelt!

The point of this imaginary monologue is simple. Once upon a time in the United States, public goods -- from retirement security and energy research to public roads -- were provided by the government and paid for by taxes. As late as the Nixon administration, the provision of public goods by government was considered perfectly compatible with a robust market economy by so-called Modern Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon as well as New Deal Democrats like Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. In the intervening 40 years, however, free-market fundamentalists of the Chicago School have managed to change the debate, redefining "socialism" to mean not only public ownership of the means of production, but also public provision of public goods.

Rather than fight back, most Democrats in the last generation adapted to this hostile conservative political climate by jettisoning New Deal "big government" liberalism for "market-friendly" neoliberalism. Neoliberals shared the right's enthusiasm for deregulating industries that New Deal Democrats had regulated in the public interest. Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy supported the deregulation of trucking and airlines, while Bill Clinton presided over the dismantling of the New Deal era's banking regulations and declared: "The era of big government is over." Neoliberals and conservatives agreed that public goods should be provided by private, for-profit or nonprofit entities, rather than government agencies. If private corporations or universities had no motivation to provide public goods, well, then, they would be bribed with tax credits or other government subsidies.

Neoliberals are liberals in one sense -- they fret about unequal outcomes. But rather than help middle- and low-income Americans by regulating the prices of privately provided public goods, as the crude and direct New Dealers would have done, neoliberal Democrats have argued for allowing the "market" (translation: the publicly subsidized entities) to set prices and then promised to provide tax subsidies or grants to help middle- and low-income Americans pay for the expensive, privately provided public goods.

You might have thought that the Crash of 2008 would have led Democrats to reconsider this neoliberal approach to providing public goods by private means. But to judge from President Obama's budget, the White House is still living back in the neoliberal era, when the diminutive Milton Friedman cast a giant shadow.

Consider Obama's education proposals. The problem with higher education is that it costs way too much. Tuition costs at private universities and some state universities have been growing far more rapidly than inflation. A crude, old-fashioned, old-thinking New Deal liberal would see the problem as one of excessive prices demanded by universities, not insufficient funds on the part of the students whom the universities gouge. The hypothetical New Deal liberal would threaten to deny universities their privileged tax-exempt status unless they spend more of their endowments on tuition and keep their prices affordable.

The neoliberal alternative is to avoid impolite and divisive inquiries into the reasons for skyrocketing tuition costs. That would entail the government concluding that prices in a particular industry (in this case, a nonprofit industry) are too high, something that government should not do. Instead, the taxpayer will be forced to cough up money to help students meet the exorbitant fees. Thus Obama's first budget calls for maintaining the $2,500 New American Opportunity Tax Credit for middle-class students, while converting Pell Grants up to $5,550 into a permanent government entitlement. If I were a university, I'd raise my tuition by ... oh ... let's say $5,550 a year. Government subsidies without government price controls would encourage cost inflation, one might think, but this possibility appears not to bother the brilliant economists on Obama's team.

Then there's energy. The problem with alternative energy sources like solar power and wind power is that they are still too expensive, compared to coal, natural gas and nuclear energy. The answer, according to a minority of enviromentalists like Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, should be massive, Manhattan-style public sector R&D to discover ways to bring alternative energy prices down -- in absolute, not just relative, terms, to maintain cheap electricity for American industry and American households. That would be the Roosevelt approach. But the Obama approach is to use a cap-and-trade system to artificially raise the prices of conventional energy, in the hope that private capital (with modest help from public capital) will pay for efforts to invent a cheaper solar cell or wind turbine. The fact that most of the left embraces cap-and-trade should not blind us to the fact that cap-and-trade is a classic example of an indirect, overly complicated, "market-friendly" neoliberal approach, touted originally by conservatives and neoliberals as an alternative to the allegedly discredited "top-down, command-and-control" approach that gave us, among other things, the TVA, the Manhattan Project and the Internet.

And healthcare? The Obama administration deserves credit for trying to reduce prescription drug costs and to promote electronic medical records. Obama's budget director Peter Orszag in particular deserves praise for pointing out that escalating economy-wide healthcare costs, not the Social Security and Medicare costs associated with the aging of the boomer generation as such, represent the real long-term threat to the U.S. economy. Even so, it seems likely that whatever ultimately emerges as the consensus Democratic healthcare plan will be yet another Rube Goldberg scheme for massively subsidizing employers, private health insurers, or both.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that the public, after nearly half a century of conservative anti-government propaganda, will oppose the direct provision of public goods paid for out of straightforward taxation -- the "socialistic" old Eisenhower-Roosevelt approach. It was the conviction that a single-payer healthcare system was politically impossible that led me to endorse the individual mandate system as the next best alternative, in "The Radical Center," a book I co-authored with Ted Halstead in 2001.

But a lot has changed since Wall Street imploded last fall. The great investment banks are gone, the U.S. has nationalized much of the financial system, and appears to be on the way to effectively nationalizing the automobile and housing sectors as well. In this environment, we need to consider some heresies, like the idea that the best way to provide a public good is not necessarily to pour subsidies on middlemen, and then bail them out with more subsidies when they fail at their public function.

The fundamental barrier today is the way that the issues are framed, by Democrats and Republicans alike. Thus the problem is defined not as making credit available for individuals and businesses, but as saving the banks and the shadow banking system. The goal is not to provide healthcare to all citizens, but to enable all citizens to purchase private health insurance. The objective is not to ensure universal access to higher education; it is to insure universal access to colleges and universities. In these and other cases, the means is confused with the end. The ultimate goal -- providing credit, healthcare or education -- is identified with the interests of non-governmental for-profit or nonprofit providers of that service. If these private institutions fail to provide the public service in a low-cost, effective and equitable way, then they must be subsidized even more. The idea of achieving the same public goals through simpler, more direct and efficient means that would cut out the middleman appears to be heresy to the Obama administration.

It's not necessary to nudge the Obama administration leftward until it arrives at socialism. When it comes to the public provision of public goods, Eisenhower Republicanism would be just fine.

http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2009/obamas_timid_liberalism_11559

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/03/06/neoliberalism/index.html

Time to Protect American Jobs

2009-03-06T21:46:00.001-08:00

Taiwan may provide a health care model for the U.S.

2009-02-25T20:51:00.000-08:00

A National Public Radio profile from last year points out that Taiwan has one of the world's best health care systems and it is cost efficient too.

All Things Considered, April 15, 2008 · At the end of the 20th century, Taiwan became a rich country, almost overnight. But it still had a poor country's health care — about half the population had no coverage at all. So Taiwan set out to design a national health care system from scratch. What makes Taiwan unique is the way the country figured out how to cover everyone.

Follow the Oxcart

Hongjen Chang was one of the officials in charge back then. Walking through Taipei's imposing Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Park, he recalls how they did it.

"Taiwan is a small island," he says. "We always look abroad internationally for ideas."

Chang quotes a Chinese saying: "'The track of the previous cart is the teacher of the following cart.'"

In other words, if someone else's oxcart has found a good route to universal health coverage, follow those tracks. "If they were trapped in trouble, avoid that track. Find a new track," Chang says.

The government consulted experts from around the world, like Taiwanese American health economist Tsung-mei Cheng.

"In the end, the program that they finally set up in 1995 really is like a car that was made of different parts, imported from overseas, but manufactured domestically," Cheng says.

A Consolidated System

They wanted a system that gave everybody equal access to health care — free choice of doctors, with no waiting time — and a system that encouraged a lot of competition among medical providers.

To finance the scheme they chose a national insurance system: a single, government-run fund that forces everybody to join in and pay.

The result is a system that works a lot like Canada's, or like the U.S. Medicare system, but with more benefits.

"It has drug benefits, vision care, traditional Chinese medicine, kidney dialysis, inpatient care, outpatient care, just about everything under the sun," Cheng says.

To satisfy the patients in Taiwan, there's no gatekeeper who controls access to specialists and no waiting lines.

If you woke up in Taiwan with shoulder pain, for example, Chang says that you would be able to see an orthopedic specialist the same morning, no recommendation from a general practitioner required.

"Our people don't like the idea of gatekeepers. They want to decide by themselves," Chang says.

Don't Forget Your Smart Card

By consolidating so much — one government plan that covers everybody — Taiwan achieves remarkable efficiency.

Everybody here has to have a smart card to go to the doctor. The doctor puts it in a reader and the patient's history and medications all show up on the screen. The bill goes directly to the government insurance office and is paid automatically.

So Taiwan has the lowest administrative costs in world: less than 2 percent.

They also use that smart card to track patterns of use.

"If a patient goes to see a doctor or hospital over 20 times a month, or 50 times in a three-month period, then the IT picks that person out. The person then gets a visit from the government, the Bureau of National Health Insurance, and they have a little chat. And this works very well," Cheng says.

That may be too much like Big Brother for some people in the United States, but surveys show the Taiwanese are highly satisfied with their health care.

Plus, no one goes bankrupt because of medical bills, Chang says.

A Strained System

So the patients are safe from bankruptcy. But the system itself is under strain. Chang says that Taiwan spends 6.23 percent of its GDP on health care, compared to 16 percent in America.

So the United States spends too much on health care, and doesn't even cover everybody. But the Taiwanese don't bring in enough money to pay for all the services they offer.

"So actually, as we speak, the government is borrowing from banks to pay what there isn't enough to pay the providers," Cheng says.

Taiwan's politicians are reluctant to increase premiums: they're afraid the voters will punish them.

So that's the problem here. And frankly, the solution is fairly obvious: increase the spending a little, to maybe 8 percent of GDP.

Of course, if Taiwan did that, it would still be spending less than half of what America spends.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89651916

Link to Dissent Magazine article from Winter 2008, Health Care in Taiwan: Why Can’t the United States Learn Some Lessons?

http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=985

Lew Daly - Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance

2009-02-22T11:00:00.001-08:00

Here is some information from The New Press about a new book titled "Unjust Deserts" which challenges long-held assumptions about wealth and inequality.

UNJUST DESERTS
HOW THE RICH ARE TAKING OUR COMMON INHERITANCE
AND WHY WE SHOULD TAKE IT BACK
WEALTH AND INEQUALITY IN THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly
The New Press

As our financial system lurches into an unknown future, traditional views of wealth and personal rewards are being questioned. Consequently, there is no better time for a conversation about the creation of wealth today—who is entitled to it and who will control it. As our national financial crisis puts into stark relief, aren’t we are all in the economy together, whether rich or not?

With a bold salvo challenging the status quo, authors Professor Gar Alperovitz and Demos fellow Lew Daly tip the scales with the answers to these questions in what will be one of the most talked about books of the season: UNJUST DESERTS: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back.

Alperovitz and Daly are in good company when they write that culture has more to do with individual success than we generally acknowledge. One of the wealthiest men on the planet, Warren Buffett,with a current net worth of $60 billion, acknowledges that “society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned.” Bill Gates, Sr. agrees when he writes, “Success is a education and research are subsidized, where there is an orderly market, where the private sector reaps enormous benefits from public investment. For someone to assert that he or she has grown wealthy in America without the benefit of substantial public investment is pure hubris.”

Drawing on cutting-edge research as well as their knowledge of philosophy and economics, Alperovitz and Daly prove that up to 90%—or even more—of private earnings are the result not of individual ingenuity, effort or investment, but of what they describe as the “unjust” appropriation of our collective inheritance. In other words, the cumulative or aggregate knowledge that we all inherit is key to individual achievement.

The authors demonstrate that if the market rewarded people according to their contributions it would make up only 10-20% of their income. The rich don’t work harder and are not morally justified in deservingness, or “deserts” as philosophers describe it than the rest of us. We get the commonly held viewpoint that we are entitled to own whatever wealth we create from philosopher John Locke. In his
agrarian society and that of our Founding Fathers, wealth was mostly based on physical labor. In our knowledge-based society, Locke’s argument doesn’t work, since all knowledge that we receive from previous generations is a social contribution.

The individual’s role in advancing art, science and technology again is mostly based on our common heritage, too. The authors make a historically-based case for the wave of cultural and scientific knowledge that pushes a few people to the next level, the “geniuses” who create what happens next.

Alperovitz and Daly rightly conclude that the individual isn’t really important in the case of each breakthrough. Instead, the development of knowledge is society’s forward-moving catalyst. And the reader understands that there has always been this debate about what society owns and what is rightly owned by the individual.
Alperovitz and Daly suggest reforms that could begin the process of income redistribution along the lines of social justice including: income taxation for the top 1-2% should be increased, raising the current cap on Social Security taxes, increasing corporate taxes—especially on windfall gains in connection with oil industry profits, and increasing inheritance taxes on large estates would be a
beginning. Proceeds from the new taxes could be used for the common good, such as instituting universal health care or propping up decaying infrastructures like bridges and tunnels. In addition, education and research could receive additional funds. There is a promising plan put forth by Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Anne Abbott that suggests and “capital stake” or allocation of $80,000 to every citizen upon reaching adulthood—to be used most likely for a college education.
The capital stake would be recouped at death through an inheritance tax.

Bound to be a flashpoint of discussion and contention, UNJUST DESERTS will be the talk of the political circles this fall and to come.

About the Authors

Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland and a Founding Principal of the Democracy Collaborative. His previous books include The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and America Beyond Capitalism. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Lew Daly is senior fellow at Demos, the New York City progressive think tank, and the author of God and the Welfare State. He lives in New York City.

UNJUST DESERTS:
How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back
By Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly
The New Press
Hardcover | $24.95 | 230 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59558-402-1

The New Effort To Steal Social Security

2009-02-21T06:47:00.001-08:00

In Defense of the New Deal

2009-02-19T20:31:00.001-08:00

Scott Lehigh demolishes the right-wing arguments against the New Deal in an column at Boston.Com:

The New Deal and right-wing revisionism
By Scott Lehigh
Boston Globe
February 18, 2009

ONE OF THE most diverting aspects of the debate over President Obama's stimulus plan has been the concerted conservative attack on the New Deal.

One might have thought that voters of that day had pretty much settled the question of whether the New Deal worked by enthusiastically reelecting FDR, and not once but three times. But since right-wing revisionism is really an arrow aimed at the current stimulus plan, the effort to discredit the New Deal is worth examining.

The argument that the New Deal failed is easy to make.

You start with unemployment figures that exclude those who labored in work-relief programs like the WPA or its various cousins. Yes, that's passing strange, given the many worthwhile tasks those public employees accomplished, but sophistry has its demands.

Next you present a misleading juxtaposition of that exclusionary unemployment data, noting that the 19 percent joblessness rate in 1938 wasn't all that much better than the 25 percent of 1933, FDR's first year in office.

Then you add the well-worn 1939 quote from Henry Morgenthau Jr., FDR's treasury secretary, that government spending hadn't produced a recovery, and, for professorial effect, perhaps even toss in George Santayana's observation about those who cannot learn from history.

Presto: You've got yourself a paint-by-numbers conservative polemic.

But what do unemployment figures from the era actually show? The best regarded data excluding public-works employees traces a steady decline in joblessness through the first five years of the New Deal, from 25 percent when FDR took office to 14.3 percent in 1937. Then, however, joblessness rose, hitting 19.1 percent in 1938 before dropping back to 14.6 percent in 1940 and 9.9 percent in 1941.

Include work-relief employees, and unemployment declined more steeply, falling to 9.2 percent in 1937. It then rose to 12.5 percent in 1938 before dropping back to 6 percent in 1941.

Given that pattern, comparing 1938 with 1932 to argue that the New Deal didn't work is akin to claiming that the economy scarcely recovered under Ronald Reagan because unemployment, which hit 9.7 percent in 1982, was at 7.5 percent in 1992 under George H.W. Bush. It ignores the larger drop in joblessness in between.

Still, the New Deal debate does raise an interesting question: Why did Roosevelt's recovery falter?

Unfortunately for conservatives, the evidence cuts against their conclusions. The rise in unemployment followed FDR's cutback in government spending in 1937. The resulting spike in unemployment prompted him to shift courses and expand spending again, whereupon unemployment again fell.

Gross Domestic Product tracks the same way, notes economist Dean Baker, who has matched the increase in federal spending during each Depression year with the following year's growth in GDP. A 23.7 percent increase in federal spending in 1933 was followed by a 10.8 percent increase in GDP in 1934, for example, while a 34.2 percent increase in 1934 was followed by an 8.9 percent GDP increase in 1935. But when FDR retrenched and spending fell by 10 percent in 1937, the next year's GDP shrank by 3.4 percent.

Interestingly, one scholarly criticism of the New Deal is that federal spending wasn't expansionary enough at a time when other levels of government were slashing budgets. "[I]f we take the seven years from 1933 on, in only two was the federal share significantly more than enough to offset state and local shrinkages," MIT economist E. Cary Brown wrote in his well-regarded study of the era.

There's virtually no disagreement that World War II gave the country the strong final tug out of the Depression. Yet that reality also argues for the efficacy of Keynesian remedies; economically, the war constituted a huge government stimulus, financed by massive deficit spending.

In sum, determined efforts at revisionism notwithstanding, the New Deal was hardly a failure. It's more accurate to say that it was a success, but a limited one - and that there are important lessons to be learned from its shortcomings.

But those lessons would be hard for conservatives to square with their beliefs.

And where ideology's amiss, 'tis jolly to revise.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/02/18/the_new_deal_and_right_wing_revisionism/

Employee Free Choice Act Rally

2009-02-15T15:51:00.001-08:00

AFL-CIO: Buy American Will Create Jobs

2009-02-11T20:02:00.000-08:00

Tula Connell defends Buy American in AFL-CIO's NOW Blog:

The Buy America provision in the economic recovery package Congress now is finalizing has some rich and powerful voices against it.

AT&T, Dow Chemical, Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, the Computer and Communications Industry Association and the Consumer Electronics Association sent a letter last week to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) saying the provision “will harm American workers and companies across the entire U.S. economy, undermine U.S. global engagement, and result in mirror-image trade restrictions abroad that would put at risk huge amounts of American exports.”

Wrong. Such cries of protectionism are red herrings for the corporate search for the lowest-wage labor possible—at the expense of America’s workers and the U.S. economy.

United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard sums up Buy America this way:

This isn’t about a trade war. It’s about making sure we’re not putting our jobs out to bid for China.

Buy America would help ensure that our tax dollars funding the economic recovery package are spent on products that are made in America—to the maximum extent possible. When we buy products made in the United States, that creates jobs. And with 3.6 million jobs lost in this country since the recession started in December 2007, job creation is fundamental.

But if the big corporations can’t understand how that works, they can take a lesson from the president. The inauguration of President Obama was not just American-made, but union-made from start to finish. Here are just a few examples from the AFL-CIO Union Label & Service Trades Department about the inauguration:

Members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) employed by the all-union Hargrove Co., along with electricians, carpenters, Teamsters and assorted skilled building trades workers worked for weeks crafting parade floats, and designing and executing décor for 10 official inaugural balls, a prayer breakfast, dozens of formal dinners and 30 other “unofficial” inaugural events.

All official inauguration printed materials—programs, schedules, tickets—carried a union “bug,” indicating members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), Teamsters Graphic Communications Conference or both produced them.

Except for the military bands, musicians performing on the official inaugural stand were members of the American Federation of Musicians. Performers entertaining at the various balls were union members as well, as were the sound and lighting engineers and backstage personnel.

Hundreds of thousands of spectators who opted for public transportation to the formal inauguration ceremony were served by members of the Amalgamated Transit Union who operate the city’s Metrorail and Metrobus systems.
So rather than yelling “trade wars,” Big Business should repeat the following: “Investing in America makes the nation stronger. Investing in America makes the nation stronger…”

It’s really not a hard concept.

http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/02/09/buy-america-will-create-us-jobs-we-need-lots-of-jobs/

Loudon Wainwright III - Times Is Hard

2009-02-07T11:58:00.000-08:00

From NPR's All Things Considered

Songwriter and actor Loudon Wainwright III has composed numerous musical commentaries for NPR over the past two decades. He's sung about everything from the World Series to Christmas in besieged Sarajevo.

This time — like many people around the world — he's feeling hammered by all of the bad economic news. So he wrote "Times Is Hard." It's not intended to cheer us up. Read the lyrics below:

Times Is Hard

Times is hard. Times is tough.
Nothin's easy. It's all rough.
There's not much right; so much gone wrong.
All I can do is play this song.

You're watchin' the news. It all looks bad.
The worst half-hour you ever had.
What in God's name is goin' on?
All I can do is play this song.

You're losin' your job, your house and your car.
Hittin' rock bottom don't feel that far.
Nothin' good is gonna come along.
All I can do is play this song.

Folks are scared watchin' that news.
Folks feel bad. They're gettin' the blues.
My poor stomach, it ain't that strong.
All I can do is play this song.

Times is rough. Times is hard.
Take a pair of scissors to your credit card.
Circuit City just said, 'So long.'
All I can do is play this song.

Who's at fault? Who gets the blame?
Let's string up Bernie what's-his-name.
And ask Alan Greenspan to come along.
All I can do is play this song.

They want your gold, and they'll pay cash.
The only silver lining is the price of gas.
Money's short and the odds are long.
All I can do is play this song.

The factory's closed. The bank is bust.
On the money it says, 'In God We Trust.'
So pray for all your stocks and bonds.
All I can do is play this song.

Outta luck. Outta hope.
I'm wonderin' why I even cast that vote.
I took that sign offa my front lawn.
All I can do is play this song.

There's a new man down there in D.C.
They say he's gonna help you and me.
They sure know how to bang the gong.
All I can do is play this song.

Last man in D.C., he had eight years.
Now the whole damn country is in arrears.
We got two, three, four wars goin' on.
All I can do is play this song.

Times is hard. Times is rough.
I guess you folks need some cheerin' up.
Well it ain't me babe. You got that wrong.
All I can do is play this song.

You heard it here. I sang it first.
Don't feel so bad; things are gonna get worse.
Consider yourselves all strung along.
All I can do is play this song.

All I can do is ...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100261261

Listen at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=100261261&m=100256269

Democrats Discuss January Jobs Report

2009-02-06T16:51:00.001-08:00

Washington, DC—Democratic Senators Robert Menendez and Bob Casey joined Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney at a press conference this morning to discuss the Labor Department’s release of its monthly jobs report and unemployment rate. This morning, the Labor Department reported that employers cut 598,000 jobs in January, the most since 1974, bringing the unemployment rate to 7.6 percent. Facing the most severe economic crisis in generations, Democrats are working quickly and responsibly to enact a bold plan that creates jobs and cuts taxes for the middle class.

“There is nothing more indicative of the economic condition of America’s families than how we are doing with respect to job creation and job losses,” Menendez said. “Today, the latest snapshot of our economic condition shows that more and more American families are falling on harder and harder times, plain and simple. We have to act on the economic recovery plan quickly because we are in a crisis, and we have a responsibility to the American people. It is our responsibility to enact a plan that is bold, fast-acting and effective enough that it gets people back to work, and does so in short order.”

Said Casey: "Today's report is the latest in a string of bad news for American workers. Years of bad policy during the Bush Administration has driven our economy off a cliff. We don't have time for endless debate and must act swiftly to enact a recovery package to create jobs and move our economy in the right direction."

“Today’s grim job loss numbers underscore the human toll of our economic crisis and add to the overwhelming evidence for getting a recovery package to the President’s desk fast,” Maloney said. “Even the bright spots are dim. The 3.6 million jobs erased since the recession started, including 598,000 last month, is why President Obama and Congressional Democrats are dedicated to acting in a bold and targeted way to revitalize the economy. We have a plan to create and save up to 4 million jobs while cutting taxes for middle class Americans. Democrats have tried to work with Republicans to find middle ground, but so far House Republicans seem intent on letting the economy slide off a cliff for political gain. Democrats must and will ensure that they don't take our country with them.”

American Worker Ad: It's Time to Protect American Jobs

2009-02-02T18:40:00.001-08:00

Chamber of Commerce Leading Congress Astray

2009-01-31T15:28:00.001-08:00

January 30, 2009
Economy in Crisis ww.economyincrisis.org
by Craig Harrington

The United States Chamber of Commerce is supposed to represent the best interests of American corporations and act as their legislative lobby. Unfortunately many of its efforts are counterproductive and effectively work to undermine the overall competitiveness and stability of U.S. companies. In the past week the Chamber of Commerce has petitioned Congress to drop “buy American” clauses from the newly approved Obama stimulus package – which is already wrought with wasteful spending. It has also increased its efforts to stimulate the development of new broader “free trade” agreements (FTAs) with nations around the world.

The reason the Chamber of Commerce is against so-called “buy American” clauses is due to its belief that such measures would increase the cost of projects while simultaneously creating a “trade war” with those nations who were left out of the bidding. The concept it fails to grasp is that there already is a trade war and the United States is being severely beaten.

The Chamber of Commerce's reasoning for even more FTAs is the misguided belief that the agreements actually result in surpluses for the United States. They highlight the fact that the U.S. is running surpluses with 9 of the 10 nations it entered into FTAs with since 2004. Unfortunately this statistic is misleading. The nations with whom we have established FTAs in the last four years are marginal developing economies; the nations which we run deficits with are massive and well developed economies. For example, the United States has a $10 billion surplus with Australia (one of the 9 successes) – and our largest surplus was $14.5 billion with the Netherlands in 2007. No export surplus exceeds $15 billion annually.

Meanwhile, the U.S. runs simultaneous import deficits with dozens of other countries and our 20th largest deficit (Thailand) roughly cancels out our largest surplus – our deficit to Thailand is $14.3 billion. We were in deficit $256 billion to China alone in 2007. If you add up our five largest surpluses you get roughly $58 billion gained. If you add up our five largest deficits you get roughly $522 billion lost. That is a net loss of $470 billion from just five countries. (Trade Stats Express)

The Chamber of Commerce also points out that nearly half of our trade is with countries that have FTAs with the United States. This statistic is meant to imply that we could make international exchange cheaper with the other half if we enter into FTAs with them. However, this overlooks the fact that our international trade is a net loss for the U.S. Why would we want to make a bad situation worse by giving nations even more reason to send their shoddy products here in exchange for our money?

The Chamber of Commerce has a strong voice in Washington and if history is any proof it will likely carry the day. “Free trade” will probably be the linchpin of American economic policy as long as the same old talking heads preside over the halls of Congress. The Chamber of Commerce is funded by business elites and these elites benefit from international economic liberalization. They have an agenda which serves them and they have the right to that self serving idealism. The United States government on the other hand should have only one agenda in mind – our best interests. It is being sold snake oil by the business interests of this country as well as those from overseas.

If we have no means of cutting off or drowning out this bad information we have to put people in office who know their way around the flashy sales pitches. They need to realize that the Chamber of Commerce represents just what its name implies – Commerce. Commerce has increased in the “free trade” era, but living standards have fallen and that is all that matters to the rest of us.

We Don't Ask - National Ad for the Employee Free Choice Act

2009-01-27T16:37:00.001-08:00

Tim Shipe: A Child's Right to Thrive

2009-01-27T16:27:00.000-08:00

Excellent column by Tim Shipe from Florida Today:

Pro-life advocates should back programs to aid children
Florida Today www.floridatoday.com
Tim Shipe, Guest Columnist
January 25, 2009

The issue of abortion was not the compelling concern for a majority of Americans in the last elections, but it is still a powerfully divisive legal and moral contest that pits pro-life versus pro-choice in a heated competition for hearts and minds.

It is tough to find common ground or fresh areas for public debate, but as a pro-life Democrat I am accustomed to thinking outside the pack.

Most pro-choice political leaders are quick to say that they are not pro-abortion, but are interested in abortion reduction without outlawing the procedures. Many pro-life leaders similarly claim they are also committed to reducing the numbers of abortion even as they seek a final legal solution of defining the right to life.

There are a couple of bills coming back for consideration in Congress that will test the truthfulness of these politicians’ claims.

The Pregnant Women Support Act is being promoted by Democrats for Life as a means of reducing abortions 95 percent over the next 10 years.

This bill would provide more adoption incentives, much needed funding for WIC programs that provide food for women, infants and children, and provide resources and support to help women continue their education if they keep their child or make an adoption plan for their child.

There is so much good in this bill I can only pray President Obama will seize upon it to demonstrate he isn’t going to be the most pro-abortion president in history, as is now claimed about him in pro-life circles.

The Feminists for Life organization has been spreading the word that “45 percent of women who have abortions are college age” and that “women with some college had the highest abortion rate of any educational group.”

They also tout statistics that 71 percent of 18-19 year olds and 58 percent of 20-24 year olds said they had abortions because having the child would interfere with their education or career. Feminists for Life have been promoting the “Elizabeth Cady Stanton Pregnant and Parenting Student Services Act” to address these sad realities.

I would like to introduce a fresh approach to the abortion wars. I like to say there is a right to thrive that encompasses the right to life and it addresses the fact that we have a societal obligation to all children.

When I hear fellow pro-lifers rage against social programs and government’s role in ensuring the common good, I cringe. When I hear fellow Democrats rage against traditionally religious folk who are trying to take responsibility to stop the killing of unborn human lives, I want to weep.

When I want to make the pro-life case to my students in the classroom, I don’t show shocking pictures of aborted fetuses. I show the National Geographic documentary “In the Womb.”

It is my belief the unborn will win their human rights when everyone opens their eyes to the fact that every human life passes through the same stages.

Pro-life must also be whole-life. For me economics, war, immigration, health care and education are all life issues, and children and pregnant mothers take priority over the rest of us.

Shipe is a teacher at Melbourne Central Catholic High School and serves on the board of advisors of Florida Democrats for Life.

http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20090125/COLUMNISTS0205/90123037/1138/OPINION

NY Gov Paterson Announces Kirsten Gillibrand to Fill Senate Seat

2009-01-23T20:17:00.001-08:00

NEW YORK, Jan. 23 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following is a statement by Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU, UFCW):

The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) welcomes the choice of Kirsten Gillibrand as the new United States Senator from New York.

The labor movement worked hard to elect Ms. Gillibrand in both her previous races for Congress. Representative Gillibrand has a near perfect voting record on pro-worker legislation and is a co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act.

As Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand will be a strong and vocal advocate for issues that are important to working families and the RWDSU looks forward to continuing our work with her.

SOURCE Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union http://rwdsu.info/

Barack Obama speech at the Lincoln Memorial

2009-01-19T16:18:00.001-08:00

Digital Journal: Clean Energy Could Mean More Nuclear

2009-01-18T10:20:00.000-08:00

From Digital Journal.Com
January 17, 2009
by Joan Firstenberg

Nuclear Energy - we haven't talked about it for 30 years in this country. But now it's the talk of the town as far as clean energy is concerned and it could be the perfect solution to President-Elect Obama's goal of reducing carbon emissions.

Nuclear power is back in vogue. A number of big U.S. companies are banking on President-elect Barack Obama's goal to reduce carbon emissions in this country by 80-percent by 2050 to propel the nation into a nuclear-power building boom. In fact, Barrons reports that nuclear plants produce the most amount of energy without emitting any greenhouse gases. And there are plans to build 26 new nuclear plants. No new plants have been built in the U.S. for 30 years.

Some scientists are approving of the idea. Tom Neff, a physicist and research affiliate at MIT's Center for International Studies says,
"Nuclear power is in a renaissance."

Nuclear energy has re-emerged as a good energy source as fears about its safety have eased. Exelon, the biggest nuclear-power generator in the U.S. and other operators have addressed the problem of nuclear-waste disposal with "dry-cask storage" -- high-tech sealed containers that they keep on their sites. Because of innovations like that, many of the safety concerns that arose after accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and Chernobyl in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) in 1986 have eased.

Nuclear plants now have the stamp of approval from a founding member of Greenpeace. Patrick Moore, a scientist who began supporting nuclear energy a few years ago, says,

"It's safer to work in a nuclear plant than it is in real estate."

Moore points to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and says that a Columbia University study published in 2004, which followed 54,000 nuclear-plant workers for 15 years, found that they had fewer cancers, less disease and lived longer than the average person.

The only fly in the ointment of getting these plants going could be obtaining the financing necessary because of the recent credit crisis. But Sheila Slocum Hollis, a partner at the Washington law firm of Duane Morris, which specializes in energy law says,

"If you honestly believe that greenhouse gas is the seminal issue of the day, as world population and economic growth continue to expand, so will the need for electric capacity. Whether to power electric vehicles or for general manufacturing needs, ultimately people are looking toward nuclear as the big power source. I have seen a sea change in public acceptance of nuclear power. People have seen it for 35 years now, and it's working and it has a lot of jobs associated with it in many communities."

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/265396#tab=article&sc=0&local=

Jeff Madrick: The Case for Big Government

2009-01-17T15:26:00.001-08:00

Make America Happen - Again

2009-01-16T19:58:00.001-08:00

Senator Sherrod Brown: A Fighter for American Workers

2009-01-15T17:11:00.000-08:00

Economy in Crisis pays a well-deserved tribute to Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio. A leader in the fight for fair trade, Brown has worked tirelessly to protect American jobs.

Our Current Economic Environment is No Longer Sustainable
Published 01/15/09 Dustin Ensinger
www.economyincrisis.org

Editor's Note: American government officials are elected for one
purpose: To represent the best interest of their constituents. In
today's society more and more elected officials shun their duties
after taking office, and opt to pursue their own best interests to
the detriment of America as a whole. However, in the midst of a
politically corrupt sea of ill-willed politicians, a few individuals
remain fighting the good fight, these individuals are our "Free Trade
Foes."

If it were more than a mere symbolic accessory intended to signify
that "the struggle continues," the canary lapel pin worn by Sen.
Sherrod Brown might forewarn of the toxic air that is the modern day
American economy. Life is gradually sucked out by ill-conceived trade
policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World
Trade Organization, leaving a gigantic void in what was once the
backbone of America`s flourishing economy: its manufacturing base.

But, that emblematic gesture does indeed mean so much more.

You see, for centuries miners died by the thousands each and every
year because there were no safety laws or trade unions to demand
protections or lawmakers ordering more precautionary measures be
taken. It was just the hard-working men and a caged canary toiling
miles under the earth`s surface. The bird was no mascot, however, it
was the only tool the miners had to warn them of potentially
hazardous air conditions: if the bird croaked, it was time to get
out - and quickly. Today, the canary symbolizes the progress made by
working men and women over the intervening years - child labor laws,
mandatory safety regulations, 40 hour work weeks, collective
bargaining rights - and the ongoing struggle that continues today.

It is fitting then that the bird known for protecting the working men
of years past is now proudly worn by the one of the working men and
women's strongest advocates in Congress, the junior Senator from
Ohio, Sherrod Brown.

Throughout the course of his career Brown has been derided by critics
as "a demagogue on trade," a "protectionist" and as someone standing
in the way of progress in the perennially downtrodden economies of
Third World nations. Washington Post columnist David Broder once
described Brown as "a loud advocate of protectionist policies that
offers a false hope of solving all our trade and job problems."

The reality, however, is that Brown just gets It, writing in an April
Op-Ed piece "Eight times I have taken the oath of office to support
and defend the United States. My colleagues and I commit ourselves to
protecting our nation from all enemies, foreign and domestic. That
includes protecting our neighborhoods from unsafe products. And, yes,
that also means protecting our workers and businesses from unfair
competition."

Protecting American businesses and workers is how Brown made a name
for himself in the me-first world of American politics. An economic
populist with both a homespun, down-to-earth Midwestern style and an
Ivy League background, he rejects the conventional wisdom that "free
trade" is great for everyone involved and is not afraid to make
blunt, politically unpopular assessments of the consequences of
unfettered "free trade."

"This is what's at stake when we talk about trade policy: America`s
middle class and the American Dream" Brown wrote in a 2006 Washington
Post Op-Ed piece.

By rejecting the gospel of "free trade," Brown, in 2006, became the
first Democratic senator from the state of Ohio since John Glenn
retired in 1998. Brown's 2006 defeat of Republican incumbent Mike
DeWine was the pinnacle of a political career that began soon after
he graduated from Yale. State Democratic officials persuaded him to
run for a seat in the state legislature at the ripe old age of 21.
Showing the fight and determination that is readily evident in the
working men and women Brown has supported throughout his career, he
knocked on 20,000 doors in his district, helping him defeat a popular
incumbent Republican. By age 29, Brown was elected Secretary of
State. In 1992, he was elected to represent Ohio's 13th District in
the U.S. House of Representatives, where he would serve six terms.

It was here, during his time in Congress, that Brown built a
reputation as a fiery populist ready to fight tooth-and-nail for the
working-class families of his district. He fought on issues ranging
from minimum wage, to universal health care, to sick leave, but
especially on trade issues, which had become a political lightning-
rod in Rust Belt states like Ohio as good-paying jobs seemingly
disappeared faster than a field of snow in May. "Free trade" had
decimated the industrial base of Ohio and left its victims jobless
and demoralized, but Brown was there to fight the good fight.

His father a local physician and his mother a one-time civil rights
activist, Brown had been instilled with a sense of righteous justice,
and seeing none in America's trade policies he was determined to
deliver it.

In 1993, in a losing effort, Brown led the fight against NAFTA -
which since has cost Ohio manufacturing 200,000 jobs. Not to be
deterred, members of the Democratic leadership in the House would
appoint him liaison in trade policy fights because of his manifest
grasp and passion of the issue. In 2005, Brown was charged with
leading the opposition to the Central American Free Trade Agreement
Though CAFTA would pass, the fact that it was carried by just two
votes, 217-215, in contrast to the passage of NAFTA by 34 votes 12
years prior, heartened Brown. He decided to make a run for the U.S.
Senate, where he is now one of the upper chamber's leading advocates
of "fair trade," describing America's current trade policies as "a
global race to the bottom as corporations troll the world for the
cheapest labor, fewest health, safety and environmental regulations
and the governments most unfriendly to labor rights."

On nearly every major piece of trade legislation over the past 15
years, Brown has been there, fighting for the rights of American
workers against unfair trade policies. In addition to his opposition
to NAFTA and CAFTA, Brown has actively and vigorously opposed trade
bills with the Andean nations, Singapore, Chile and Oman among
others. He has twice voted for the immediate withdrawal of the U.S.
from the World Trade Organization. He opposed giving the president of
his own party fast-track authority, which would have effectively cut
Congress out of any negotiations on further trade deals. He has been
a proponent of country-of-origin labeling on imported food products.
He has railed against corporations' corrupting influence on
government. Until recently, after urging from his wife, Brown refused
to accept the Congressional health insurance. He paid for it out of
his own pocket because many hard working men and women are unable to
afford health insurance. And Brown is the author of Myths of Free
Trade: Why American Trade Policy Has Failed.

America needs more lawmakers like Sen. Sherrod Brown, fighting for
the working men and women of America. Without them, the canary-in-the-
cage may keel over and die, warning us that our current economic
environment is no longer sustainable.

To learn more, or to encourage Senator Brown to keep fighting the
Good Fight, click here.

To contribute to Senator Brown's campaign war-chest to ensure that he
remains one of the leading voices of the fair trade movement in
Congress, click here
http://sherrodbrown.com/pages/about

http://www.economyincrisis.org/articles/show/2333

Thom Hartmann - Conservative Economics Is Toxic

2009-01-11T15:10:00.001-08:00

Obama Economic Plan: Create Made in America Jobs

2009-01-11T14:46:00.000-08:00

From AFL-CIO Now Blog
by Tula Connell, Jan 10, 2009

President-elect Barack Obama today laid out some of the details of his economic recovery plan. While the current President focuses on giving the Medal of Freedom to the leader of a country that has the highest number of trade union murders in the world and on spending nearly $600,000 on new china for the White House days before leaving office, Obama is moving to clean up the Bush economic mess. Giving the Democratic radio address this morning, Obama said:

Our first job is to put people back to work and get our economy working again. This is an extraordinary challenge.

Obama said his plan was in part crafted by economist Jared Bernstein, an ally of the labor movement at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and now economic advisor to Vice President-elect Joe Biden.

We’ll create nearly half a million jobs by investing in clean energy–by committing to double the production of alternative energy in the next three years, and by modernizing more than 75 percent of federal buildings and improving the energy efficiency of two million American homes. These made-in-America jobs building solar panels and wind turbines, developing fuel-efficient cars and new energy technologies pay well, and they can’t be outsourced.

“Made-in-America jobs.” What sweet words after eight years of an administration bent on giving endless corporate incentives to move U.S. jobs overseas. Here’s more from Obama’s radio address:

Put nearly 400,000 people to work by repairing our infrastructure–our crumbling roads, bridges and schools.
Build the new infrastructure we need to succeed in this century, investing in science and technology, and laying down miles of new broadband lines so that businesses across our nation can compete with their counterparts around the world.
Work to achieve bipartisan extensions of unemployment insurance and health care coverage; a $1,000 tax cut for 95 percent of working families; and assistance to help states avoid harmful budget cuts in essential services like police, fire, education and health care.

http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/01/10/obama-economic-plan-create-made-in-america-jobs/

Free Market Baloney

2009-01-02T14:18:00.001-08:00

Single payer is the solution to medical care crisis

2008-12-21T21:38:00.000-08:00

Dr. Oliver Fein, President of Physicians for a National Health Program www.pnhp.org, makes a strong argument for single payer health care in the United States. Single payer isn't such a radical idea. In fact, President Harry Truman advocated national health insurance back in 1948. Truman stated “Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection.” Sixty years later, it is long past time for America to provide decent medical care to all citizens.

There is a cure available for our health care woes
By DR. OLIVER FEIN
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, December 14, 2008

The report last week that the U.S. economy lost nearly 2 million jobs this year, and 533,000 jobs in November alone, sent shudders through our nation’s households. That’s the biggest one-month plunge in jobs in 34 years. “Horrendous” was how one economist put it, while others said the number of unemployed, and underemployed, could easily double over the next year.

These job losses spell disaster for our health. Millions of people are losing their employer-sponsored health insurance, joining the 46 million who already lack coverage. Millions more are finding it harder to pay their co-pays and deductibles and are scrimping on their medications and doctor visits. Many go without care, risking their health and often their very lives.

In short, affordable health care has never been more urgently needed. Yet most of the health reform proposals coming out of Washington these days won’t get us there.

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) recently unveiled his proposals for incremental health reform, which largely mirror the ideas of President-elect Barack Obama and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.).

However well-intentioned, the Obama/Baucus/Kennedy approaches share a fatal flaw: they preserve a central role for the private health insurance industry.

To varying degrees, they would mandate that everyone buy private health insurance — the private insurance that is failing us today. Some of these plans offer a Medicare-like, public option that people could buy into, but experience with Medicare shows that the private plans refuse to compete on a level playing field. They cherry-pick healthier patients and insist on more than their share of payment.

Experience with mandate-based plans in Washington state (1993), Oregon (1992) and Massachusetts (1988 and today) shows that they simply don’t work, achieving neither universal health care nor cost containment.

As long as we rely on private health insurers, universal coverage will be unaffordable. These companies generate immense overhead costs and force doctors and hospitals to spend heavily on billing and paperwork.

Administration consumes about one-third of every health care dollar in the U.S. By contrast, in countries with nonprofit national health insurance, administrative costs consume only half that amount.

There is a cure, however. Eliminating the private insurance industry would save $400 billion annually in administrative costs, enough to ensure that everyone is covered and to eliminate all co-pays and deductibles.

At this critical juncture, a single-payer plan is the only medically, morally and fiscally responsible path to take.

We already have an example of an American single-payer system that works — traditional Medicare. It’s not perfect, but people with Medicare are far happier than those with private insurance. Doctors face fewer hassles in getting paid, and Medicare has been a leader in keeping costs down, at least until Washington politicians decided to pay private insurance plans to enroll seniors at a cost 12- to 19-percent higher than traditional Medicare.

Single-payer systems give patients complete freedom to choose their doctor and hospital. They also enhance cost containment through global budgeting, the bargaining power of being the sole buyer, and an emphasis on primary care and prevention.

With a universal plan of this type, doctors and other health professionals could return to their main task: caring for their patients.

Single payer, or an improved Medicare for All, is embodied in the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, H.R. 676, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and 92 other members of Congress.

Opponents of single payer often admit it’s the best, most efficient and equitable way to provide quality care, but say it’s not politically feasible and is therefore off the table in this round of the debate. How so? A solid majority of physicians, 59 percent, and an even higher percentage of the public, 62 percent or more, support national health insurance, recent surveys show. Single payer should be front and center.

Medicare for All is within reach, but only if we are prepared to take on the private health insurance industry. The time is now. It requires only the political will.

http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2008/12/14/equaled.html

Dr. Oliver Fein is associate dean and professor of clinical medicine and public health, Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and president of Physicians for a National Health Program.

http://www.pnhp.org

Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man) - Randy Newman

2008-12-20T21:43:00.001-08:00

Great tune from 1974 by New Orleans-born singer/songwriter/pianist Randy Newman.

Lyrics

We've taken all you've given
But it's gettin' hard to make a livin'
Mr. President have pity on the working man

We're not asking you to love us
You may place yourself high above us
Mr. President have pity on the working man

I know it may sound funny
But people ev'ry where are runnin' out of money
We just can't make it by ourself

It is cold and the wind is blowing
We need something to keep us gong
Mr. President have pity on the working man

Maybe you've cheated
Maybe you've lied
Maybe you have finally lost your mind
Maybe you're only thinking 'bout yourself

Too late to run. Too late to cry now
The time has come for us to say good-bye now
Mr. President have pity on the working man
Mr. President have pity on the working man

Stimulus package must include fiscal accountability

2008-12-13T22:11:00.000-08:00

All too often conservatives accuse those of us who favor a strong role by government of enabling waste and abuse by bureaucrats. Given the record of our private sector in recent years, it is clear that inefficiency is by no means limited to government but we do have a responsibility to make sure tax dollars are being used wisely. I can think of two Democratic leaders from the past who point the way to how Democrats can support activist and efficient government.

The late Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, a traditional New Deal Democrat, often admonished his colleagues that "to be a liberal, one does not have to be a wastrel. We must, in fact, be thrifty if we are to be really humane." Democrats need to be leading efforts to make government work effectively to provide services and enforce regulations to protect workers and consumers. During his long Senate career, the late Senator William Proxmire was a strong believer in activist government and yet a zealous opponent of bureaucratic waste. Proxmire introduced the "Golden Fleece" awards, which exposed wasteful practices in government. Proxmire noted that "highlighting specific, single wasteful expenditures is more effective than simply complaining in a general way about government waste."

Along the same lines, Dustin Ensinger at Economy in Crisis stresses the importance of accountability for the billions of dollars in economic stimulus spending.

Obama's Early Wish List: $500 billion
Published 12/12/08 Dustin Ensinger
Economy in Crisis www.economyincrisis.org

One of the things on President-elect Barack Obama's early wish list
in the first few days of his administration is a huge stimulus
package, reportedly in the area of $500 billion to $1 trillion
dollars. According to Robert Puentes, a fellow with the Brookings
Institution's Metropolitan Policy Project, the money could be a
blessing or a curse, depending on how much oversight is in place to
ensure that the money is being spent properly.

Obama's stimulus package would provide the perfect opportunity for
Obama to implement one of his campaign promises: Google for
government. He has proposed creating a digital database that details
how each and every dollar of taxpayer money is being spent and this
huge infrastructure project provides ample opportunity to do so.

Because a large chunk of that money will be funneled to state and
local governments to be spent on infrastructure projects, there are
enormous opportunities for waste, fraud and abuse.

"It's the closest thing we have to a blank check," Puentes
said. "it's a fact-free zone."

While Puentes acknowledges that the money needs to be spent quickly
to put people to work, he also said there must be strict oversight
and accountability, otherwise it could be a giant waste of taxpayer
money.

"We should only spend quickly on the existing system," said
Puentes. "We shouldn't use this as an opportunity to build more
projects on the fringe" of cities.

According to Puentes, Obama should focus on repairing roads, bridges
and water and sewer systems, focusing on more long-term projects only
after comprehensive oversight is in place.

To ensure that taxpayer money is not simply wasted, the government
needs to create an independent panel to oversee how and where the
money is spent. In addition, there should be an unprecedented amount
of transparency to instill confidence in taxpayers that their money
is not being frivolously spent on pork projects.

Please write to President-Elect Obama and encourage him to implement
a digital database that details every cent of government spending, so
we can ensure our tax dollars are not spent in vain.

Source CNNMoney:

In just over a month, hundreds of billions of dollars of your money
could be funneling through the hands of every politician, from the
president to the mayor of the smallest American town, in a plan to
jumpstart the economy.

For maximum effect, experts say the cash should be doled out quickly.
The plan could be approved just days after President-elect Obama
takes office. Done right, it could create millions of jobs and
lubricate the economy. Done wrong, it presents innumerable
opportunities for waste and fraud.

http://www.economyincrisis.org/articles/show/2194

Thom Hartmann - Why Do We Have An Economy?

2008-12-13T21:35:00.001-08:00

New book says globalization causes inequality, insecurity and wage loss

2008-11-20T19:57:00.000-08:00

A new book by economist Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute www.epi.org provides a compelling reason for the Obama administration and Congress to think big about how to reduce economic inequality and insecurity in the years to come: Most working Americans have suffered steady and significant income losses that stem from global integration.

Everybody Wins Except for Most of Us: What Economics Teaches About Globalization finds that trade flows likely cost a full-time U.S. worker earning the median wage $1,400 in 2006. This loss rivals or exceeds what median wage-earners experienced during the recession of the early 2000s. For workers on its losing end, globalization has felt like a chronic (if largely unseen) recession – one that requires a policy response as ambitious as that offered against today's very visible economic downturn.

Bivens shows even as total national income rises due to trade, the majority of workers lose – not just those displaced by imports but also those competing with these laid-off workers for the jobs that remain. Meanwhile, the benefits of trade flow mainly to a small number of employees and managers whose capital, skills and credentials insulate them from global competition. This redistribution of income is best measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and has contributed to the widening gap between growth in typical workers' wages and national productivity.

In Everybody Wins…, Bivens explains the best-practice techniques that scholarly research has developed to quantify the impact of trade on U.S. wages and then uses them to reach unconventional-sounding but well-documented conclusions about how globalization affects working Americans. Lastly, he translates these research findings into understandable numbers to inform the public debate.

Besides finding that globalization now costs most American workers on the order of $1,400 in annual earnings, Bivens also notes that globalization may well reduce American wages in the future to a much greater degree than experts once thought possible as new technologies make industry that can transfer its output via data lines vulnerable to global competition.

“If the predictions of some very well-credentialed economists about the reach of service-sector offshoring hold true, this could potentially drag on the growth of living standards for a huge number of American workers for decades to come,” Bivens warns.

Bivens, a Ph.D. economist, writes that the basic patterns of these outcomes are predicted by basic economic theory but have been too often ignored in the rush to sign ever more trade agreements. He notes, "The irony is that those worried about what the integration of the rich U.S. economy and a much poorer global economy means for their living standards have a much better grasp of their underlying economics.”
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States and around the world. EPI's mission is to inform people and empower them to seek solutions that will ensure broadly shared prosperity and opportunity.

The book's findings indicate that much more needs to be done to cushion the blow of global competition. “To deal with harm as serious and widespread as that imposed by globalization, we need to think much more ambitiously about public policy that re-links aggregate and individual prosperity.” He urges policymakers to “think big,” and to use "all of the levers available to re-link the aggregate and individual prosperity that globalization has helped wedge apart: social insurance, public investment, fairer economic rules, and redistribution through the government budget and tax policy when other measures fail to provide egalitarian outcomes.”

Presented previously in research papers and interviews, Bivens’ analysis has helped shape public debate on the need for policy-makers to insure U.S. workers’ livelihoods in the face of expanded global trade. Among other outlets, his work has been cited by: New York Times columnist and Nobel winner, Paul Krugman; the Times editorial page; the Economist magazine; and three of the most widely read economics bloggers: Brad DeLong, Dani Rodrik, and Mark Thoma.

About the author Bivens joined EPI in 2002. His research concerns the effects of globalization on developed and developing nations, macroeconomics, and social insurance. His writing has appeared in The American Prospect, Challenge Magazine, the Guardian and Worth, as well as in academic journals including the International Review of Applied Economics and the Journal of Economic Issues. He was an editor and contributor to Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, No Jobs: Labor Markets and Informal Work in Egypt, El Salvador, India, Russia and South Africa.

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/books_everybody_wins#exec_summary

Saxby Chambliss out of touch on the economy

2008-11-19T21:21:00.001-08:00

IAVA - Welcome Back Veterans

2008-11-11T13:27:00.001-08:00

EPI: A New Day for U.S. Economic Policy

2008-11-11T11:18:00.000-08:00

A statement on the economic implications of Barack Obama's historic election victory, by Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington DC think tank founded in 1986:

At long last, the center of economic thinking in the United States has shifted, and we can declare with confidence and relief that the conservative era is over. It is now possible to build an economy with widely shared prosperity.

The bundle of approaches favored by supply-siders from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, and embraced by candidate John McCain — featuring tax cuts for corporations and the rich; deregulation of business and financial activity; weak environmental, consumer and workplace protections; and unrestrained globalization — has been soundly rejected by voters, who overwhelmingly identified the economy as their single most important issue.

It is now clear that the failed supply-side, market fundamentalist experiment has wrecked the economy. Misguided monetary policies, deregulation and lax oversight created stock market and housing bubbles that suddenly popped, erasing trillions of dollars in household wealth. Meanwhile, middle class wages and incomes have stagnated, inequality has soared, manufacturing has been put on life support, and millions have been thrown out of work. Voters realized that the policies that led us into the current crisis won't get us out. They want pragmatic government intervention to solve our energy problems, fix the health care system, restore manufacturing competitiveness, obtain more progressive taxation, generate broad-based wage growth, and provide retirement security for working Americans.

Democrats were already aligning their policies to this new reality before the recent financial meltdown made change all the more urgent. This can be seen by comparing the proposals of the leading candidates in the recent Democratic primaries to those offered in 2000 and 2004. All the recent candidates emphasized major public investments in energy efficiency and alternative energy sources (green jobs), and endorsed universal health care proposals relying on a large, public plan (such as Medicare) alongside existing employer-provided plans. They recommended caution in moving ahead with further globalization and endorsed enforceable labor standards as a core element in trade policies. All were vocal in their support for a vibrant labor movement (and thus, the Employee Free Choice Act) and for substantially raising the minimum wage. There was less talk about balancing the budget and more talk about balancing the need for public investment with other fiscal goals.

The fact that the American people are now open to change does not mean that they are no longer skeptical of government intervention. Who would not be skeptical after the last eight years of misguided or incompetent policies, a time when the effect of government intervention was mostly to erode individuals' constitutional rights?

The task ahead is to fashion policies that will improve the economic circumstances of the vast majority, and thereby restore confidence. There is much to overcome. For roughly thirty years, with the exception of the late 1990s expansion, there has been little wage growth for the vast majority and increased economic insecurity, primarily related to health care and retirement security. The last business cycle from 2000 to 2007 failed to generate any growth for middle class working families — on average, they lost over $2,000 a year in inflation-adjusted income. This erosion of earning power happened even as the economy, through its workers, became increasingly productive. In fact, productivity growth — which measures the creation of goods and services per hour worked — has been historically high since 1995, but the fruits of that growth have gone to the already-wealthy. Our economy has been a huge skimming operation for the well-to-do.

On top of these long-term problems, a new recession brought us to 6.1% unemployment in September, even before the global financial meltdown. Now we are looking at several years of high unemployment (peaking at 8% or more) and widespread income losses that will take many more years to overcome.

To address this set of challenges we will need bold — even 'audacious' — policies. We at EPI have compiled an Agenda for Shared Prosperity to get us back on track and an economic recovery package to pull us out of the unfolding recession. The basic capacities of government will need to be rebuilt and policymakers will need to rigorously focus on cost-effective policies. The solutions will need to be ambitious, at the scale of the problems we face, rather than a timid tweaking at the margins.

We certainly can no longer grow based on asset bubbles in housing or in stocks or from increased personal debt: the demand for goods and services from our increased productivity will need to come from consumers who earn family-supporting paychecks. We will need new government spending on infrastructure, education, health care and the safety net, re-regulation of the financial and insurance markets, changes in and enforcement of our labor laws. Above all, we need a guiding philosophy that understands the purpose of government is not to get out of the way, but to help lead the way through difficult times.

Saxby Chambliss: No Friend of America's Veterans

2008-11-11T08:44:00.000-08:00

We owe our veterans our freedom, and our respect. Jim Martin knows that. He served with distinction in Vietnam.

But Saxby Chambliss?

He voted against a new GI Bill to help them build a future. Voted twice against giving them more time with their families between tours. Chambliss has voted 23 times against increasing health care funding for veterans, with many of his votes coming after the Scandal at Walter Reed.

Why doesn’t Saxby Chambliss understand?

Maybe it’s because he got elected by attacking a veteran in a campaign John McCain called “disgraceful” and “reprehensible”.

Maybe it’s because he never served, taking five deferments from Vietnam.

Saxby Chambliss, what could be more important than our veterans?

BACKGROUND:

John McCain criticized Chambliss’ 2002 race against Max Cleland.

"I've never seen anything like that ad," says McCain. "Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to a picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield -- it's worse than disgraceful, it's reprehensible."" (Washington Post, 7/3/2003)

Chambliss Voted Against the New GI Bill for Veterans of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Chambliss Voted Against the New GI Bill for Veterans of the Wars in Iraq & Afghanistan. According to the IAVA, Saxby Chambliss voted against the new GI Bill for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. (The Post-9/11 GI Bill: Fair Education Benefits for Veterans second vote.) The emergency supplemental funding for the Iraq War, to which the GI Bill was attached, bounced from the House to the Senate twice while legislators ironed out differences between the House and Senate versions of the legislation. In the second round of emergency supplemental voting on the Senate side, a new “transferability” provision had been added to the GI Bill at the behest of the Bush Administration. The new provision offers current service members who agree to remain in the military for ten years the opportunity to transfer their GI Bill benefit to their spouse or children. In a procedural vote to waive a Senate budgetary rule and bring the supplemental with the GI Bill to the floor, the GI Bill advanced by a margin of 77-21. For more information about this legislation, please see House votes 330 and 432 in the House Vote Descriptions, and Senate votes 137 and 162 in this section. [ http://www.iava.org; Senate Vote #161, 6/26/08; http://www.veteranreportcard.org/reportcard.pdf]

Chambliss Has Voted Against Veterans Programs at Least 23 Times Since Joining the Senate

Chambliss Has Opposed Vets’ Program Funding At Least 23 Times in the Senate Alone. Since joining the Senate in 2003, Chambliss has voted against increased funding for veterans’ health care programs at least 23 times. [Vote 161, 6/26/08; Vote 114, 3/23/07 ; Vote 172, 5/17/07; Vote 222, 8/2/06; Vote 67, 3/16/06; Vote 63, 3/16/06; Vote 41, 3/14/06; Vote 15, 2/13/06; Vote 7, 2/2/06; Vote 343, 11/17/05; Vote 251, 10/5/05; Vote 114, 4/28/05; Vote 89, 4/12/05; Vote 90, 4/12/05; Vote 55, 3/16/05; Vote 145, 6/23/04; Vote 48, 3/11/04; Vote 40, 3/10/04; Vote 34, 3/9/04; Vote 379, 10/14/03; Vote 83, 3/25/03; Vote 81, 3/25/03; Vote 74, 3/21/03]
Chambliss Voted Against Additional Funding to Research Traumatic Brain Injury—thee “Signature Wound” of the Iraq War.

Chambliss Opposed Additional Funding for Traumatic Brain Injury Research—A “Signature Wound” of the War in Iraq. According to the IAVA, Saxby Chambliss voted against additional funding for research of Traumatic Brain Injury. “Senators who voted FOR this motion were voting AGAINST increasing funding for Traumatic Brain Injury research by $2 million. IAVA Action Fund opposed this motion. Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) has become the signature wound of the Iraq war. In a spending bill appropriating more than $400 billion, in a war that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars and counting, it is unconscionable that Congress can’t find an extra $2 million to treat an injury affecting more than 100,000 American Troops. Despite a clear need for greater funding for TBI research, this motion passed. [http://www.iava.org; 109 th Congress; Senate vote #222; 8/2/06]
Chambliss Opposed the Webb Amendment Guaranteeing Troops Time At Home Between Deployments

Chambliss Twice Opposed Guaranteeing Troops Time At Home Between Deployments. In 2007, Chambliss twice voted against the Webb dwell time amendment. The amendment guaranteed active duty forces as much time at home as they served while deployed. Further, it guaranteed National Guard and reservists three years at home between deployments. [CQ Bill Summary; Vote 241, 7/11/07; Vote 341, 9/19/07]
Chambliss Said Troops Don’t Need Rest Because In WWII They Didn’t Come Home For Years – Call’s Webb’s Proposal Out Of Touch With History. Chambliss said, “During World War II and other wars of this country, service members participating in those wars deployed for 3 and 4 years with little or no break. With this in mind the current proposal by Senator Webb seems out of step with history and what it has taken to win the wars of this country. I can think of no way in which the Webb amendment will help our Nation succeed in Iraq.” [Congressional Record, Pages S8974-S8975, 7/11/07]
Chambliss: Military Shouldn’t Worry About How Long Units Are At Home When Deciding Who To Redeploy. One reason Chambliss gave for objecting to Webb’s dwell time amendment was, “Units would need to be selected for deployment based on dwell criteria that may in fact cause significant disruption to needed reset, planned transformation or unit training schedules.” [Congressional Record, Pages S8974-S8975, 7/11/07]
Chambliss: “This Is A Long And Enduring War.” [Congressional Record, Pages S11712- S11713, 9/19/07]
Chambliss: War’s Going Too Good To Let Troops Have Time With Their Families. “What I heard from those men who are the leaders from a diplomatic standpoint as well as from the military standpoint is we are seeing great progress made on the ground by our military that is unlike any progress we have seen during the last 4\1/2\ years. That is significant. If you are not impressed by that, then you simply did not hear what they had to say. So I think now to say to them: Well, we appreciate the great job you have done leading our troops, but we are going to take the decision-making process out of your hands, and we are now going to decide how the war is going to be prosecuted, that, I think would be a huge mistake.” [Congressional Record, Pages S11712- S11713, 9/19/07]
Chambliss Repeatedly Voted Against Additional Funding to Give the Men & Women in Uniform the Armor and Equipment They Need

Chambliss Twice Voted Against Funding for Armored Vehicles. In October 2005, Chambliss joined the majority of his Republican colleagues and voted against an amendment to the Defense Appropriations for $360.8 million to provide armored vehicles to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. In April 2005, Chambliss voted against an amendment offered by Senator Kennedy which would provide an addition $213 million to ensure that Humvee production remained at its maximum level through the fiscal year. [Vote 248, 10/5/05; Vote 108, 4/21/05]
Chambliss Opposed Funding For Equipment And Armor For Troops. In 2003, Chambliss voted against providing an additional $322 million for safety equipment, including body armor, to troops in Iraq. Earlier that year, Chambliss voted against providing an additional $1.047 billion for procurement of National Guard and Reserve equipment. According to Mary Landrieu, the bill’s sponsor, much of the money would have been used for protective gear for Guard and Reserve troops. [Vote 376, 10/2/03; Vote 116, 4/2/03]
Chambliss Voted Against $50 Million to Repair Military Equipment. In 2006, Chambliss voted against instructing conferees on the tax reconciliation bill to including funding to strengthen the military instead of extending capital gains and dividends tax cuts for the wealthy. Sen. Reed, who sponsored the motion, asked that $50 million be spent to repair military equipment, arguing, “Because they depend upon this equipment for their lives, we can’t tolerate equipment that won’t operate properly.” [Vote 18, 2/14/06; Congressional Record, 2/13/06]
Chambliss Voted Against Funding for Military Equipment Repairs. In 2006, Chambliss voted to kill a proposal to provide $44 billion to improve and repair military equipment. According to sponsor Sen. Jack Reed, “$47 billion worth of equipment which they have used in Iraq and Afghanistan needs to be repaired and reconditioned.” The funding would have been offset by repealing capital gains and dividends tax cuts, while extending protections for middle-class taxpayers. [Vote 8, 2/2/06; Congressional Record, 2/2/06]

Chambliss Voted Twice Against Protecting Soldiers’ Salaries When Forced to Take Leave From Work For Iraq Deployment. In 2005, Chambliss tried to kill a proposal to require that federal employees who take a leave without pay to serve as a member of the military or National Guard be reimbursed for the difference between their salary and the pay and allowances they receive while on duty. In 2003, Chambliss helped kill a proposal that would have provided a 50 percent tax credit on the salaries employers pay workers who are in the National Guard or Reserves and have been put on active duty. [Vote 91, 4/13/05; Vote 163, 5/15/03]

Chambliss Voted Against Health Care Funding for Active Duty Military. In 2003, Chambliss rejected an amendment to increase TRICARE funding by $20.3 billion over 10 years to allow more members of the National Guard and Reserves to benefit from the program. [Vote 81, 3/25/03; National Journal’s Congress Daily, 3/27/03]
Chambliss Repeatedly Voted Against Increased Funding for the Men and Women in Uniform in the FY09 Defense Bill

Chambliss Votes Against 2008-09 Defense Authorization Bill. Saxby Chambliss voted against the National Defense Authorization Bill for Fiscal Year 2009. [Vote 195, 7/31/08]
Chambliss Voted Against 3.9 Percent Pay Raise for Military Personnel. The bill Chambliss voted against authorizes a 3.9 percent across-the-board pay raise for military personnel. [Senate Armed Services Committee Press Release, 5/1/08]
Chambliss Voted Against Increasing Healthcare for Troops. The bill Chambliss voted against authorizes $26.1 billion for the Defense Health Program, which includes $1.2 billion to reverse the Bush administration’s proposal to raise fees on troops and their families. [Senate Armed Services Committee Press Release, 5/1/08]
Chambliss Voted Against Additional $3 Billion to Protect Troops from IEDs. The bill Chambliss voted against authorizes $3 billion in funding to protect troops in Iraq and Afghanistan from improvised explosive devices, which have killed 1,713 American service members in Iraq. [Senate Armed Services Committee Press Release, 5/1/08; iCasualties, accessed 8/1/08]
Chambliss Has Repeatedly Opposed Efforts to Increase Funding for Veterans Health Care

Chambliss Voted Against Making a Portion of VA Funding Mandatory or Automatic, Like Other Health Related Programs. The VA’s enrolled patient population has grown 134 percent since 1996, while appropriations have risen only one-third as quickly. The Partnership for Veterans Health Care Budget Reform, which represents 26 million veterans, supported this amendment because quality health care should be a right for all veterans. (S 2400, Vote #145, 6/23/2004 Failed 49-48; R 3-46; D 45-2; I 1-0)
Chambliss Voted Against Funding for Veterans’ Health Care. Daschle amendment to create a reserve fund to allow for an increase in Veterans’ medical care by $2.7 billion and lower the national debt by reducing the President’s tax breaks for taxpayers with incomes in excess of $1 million a year. (SCR 95, Vote #34, 3/9/2004 Failed 44-53; R 1-50; D 42-3; I 1-0)
Chambliss Voted Against Increasing FY06 Veterans’ Health Care Funding by $2.8 Billion and Reducing the Deficit by $2.8 Billion. Akaka, D-Hawaii, amendment that would increase funding for veterans health care by $2.8 billion for fiscal 2006 and reduce the deficit by $2.8 billion. (SCR 18, Vote #55, 3/16/2005 Failed 47-53; R 2-53; D 44-0; I 1-0)
Chambliss Voted Against $3.5 in Additional Funding for Veterans in the FY08 Budget. Saxby Chambliss voted against both the initial and final versions of the Fiscal Year 2008 budget resolution, which provided for over $3.5 billion more in funding for Veterans than the Bush Administration’s proposal. Bush’s budget called for $39.6 billion in funding compared to the Democratic plan for $43.1 billion. The budget Chambliss opposed included $6.7 billion more for veterans than 2007. [Vote #114, 3/23/07; Vote #172, 5/17/07; Senate Budget Committee, 3/20/07, 5/17/07]
Chambliss Choose Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Over Additional Veterans Spending. In February 2006, Saxby Chambliss voted against an amendment that would have provided at least $19 billion for military and veterans hospitals, to be offset by rolling back tax cuts for millionaires. According to an official from the American Legion, the proposed funding “acknowledges the need for adequate funding to ensure our nation's veterans receive the healthcare and other benefits to which they are entitled.” [Vote #7, 2/2/06; Dodd Floor Speech, 2/2/06]
Chambliss Supported Budget Which American Legion Said “Short-Changed” Vets. In 2005 Chambliss supported the Senate Republicans’ initial FY06 budget resolution which slashed domestic discretionary programs by $204 billion over five years, including significant cuts to veterans’ benefits. Arguing against the budget, the leader of the American Legion said, “ No veteran should be shortchanged by those in Congress with higher national priorities than the ongoing cost of war.” The final version of the budget included $212 billion in cuts to domestic discretionary programs, including veterans’ health care. [Vote #81, 3/17/05; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 4/1/05; American Legion Press Release, 3/18/05; Vote #114, 4/28/05; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 5/6/05; Congressional Record, 4/28/05]
Chambliss Has Either Poor or Mediocre Grades from Veterans’ Organizations

Disabled American Veterans
2006
60%

Disabled American Veterans
2005
35%

Disabled American Veterans
2004
0%

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America
2006
D-

Vietnam Veterans of America
2006
57%

Vietnam Veterans of America
2005
33%

Vietnam Veterans of America
2004
0%

Vietnam Veterans of America
2003
50%

Chambliss Asked for and Received Five Student Deferments from the Draft

Selective Service Records for Clarence Saxby Chambliss (1961-1967)

11/10/43: Chambliss born in Warrenton, NC

11/10/61: Chambliss turns 18

12/08/61: Classification questionnaire mailed

12/12/61: Questionnaire returned

12/21/61: Chambliss classified 1-A (Available for military service)

01/22/64: Chambliss classified 2-S ( First student deferment)

11/17/64: Chambliss classified 1-A (Available for military service)

01/04/65: Chambliss scheduled for physical that was cancelled

01/26/65: Chambliss classified 2-S ( Second student deferment)

11/17/65: Chambliss classified 2-S ( Third student deferment)

10/10/66: Chambliss classified 2-S ( Fourth student deferment)

10/24/67: Chambliss classified 2-S ( Fifth student deferment)

[Source: United States Selective Service System Records]

Chambliss Claimed a “Bum Knee” Kept Him Out of Draft…

In 2002 Chambliss Said a “Bum Knee” Kept Him Out of Vietnam. “Uh...I was...uh...determined not to be physically fit. I had a bum knee. I had an old football knee that unfortunately they wouldn’t take me.” [Georgia Public Television; GOP Senate Debate, 8/16/02]
…But He Went On to Become the 2 nd Best Golfer in the Senate, 33 rd Best in Washington and Played in the Congressional Baseball Game Year After Year

Chambliss Ranked #2 Golfer in Senate. [Roll Call, “Saxby’s Day Off,” 11/8/05; Golf Digest, October, 2005, http://www.golfdigest.com/rankings/2007/politicalrankings_gd2007]
Chambliss Ranked #33 Golfer in Washington, DC. with Just a 6.8 “Handicap” [Roll Call, “Saxby’s Day Off,” 11/8/05; Golf Digest, October, 2005, http://www.golfdigest.com/rankings/2007/politicalrankings_gd2007]

Chambliss Practiced as an Outfielder for the Republican House Members During the Congressional Baseball Game. “At the sparsely attended Republican practice Thursday…Rep. Jack Fields (Texas) was back at third, and the outfield included Reps. Peter Blute (Mass), Peter Torkildsen (Mass), Saxby Chambliss (Ga), and John McHugh (NY). [Roll Call, “Democrats Stay Upbeat, Republicans Flaunt Largent as Congressional Classic Approaches,” July 24, 1995]

Chambliss Made it to Most of the Practices and May Have Seen Time at the “Hot Corner.” “Saxby Chambliss (Ga); Home: Moultrie; Elected: 1994; Position: Outfield; Bats/Throws: R; Votes: R; Glory days may be here again for freshman Chambliss, who played second base at the University of Georgia for two seasons in the 1960s. Has been to most of the early morning practices and may see some time in the outfield or at the hot corner. Will be wearing an Atlanta Braves number 95 jersey.” [Roll Call, 1995 Congressional Baseball Game Program]

Chambliss Once Again Made the Baseball Roster in 1996. “REPUBLICAN ROSTER: Dan Schaefer – Manager; Joe Barton, Peter Blute, Ed Bryant, Steve Buyer, Saxby Chambliss , Jon Christensen, John Ensign, Jack Fields, Jon Fox, Wally Herger, Ernest Istook, Scott Klug, Steve Largent, John McHugh, Mike Oxley, Richard Pombo, Frank Riggs, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Rick Santorum, Chris Smith, Todd Tiahrt, Peter Torkildsen, Jim Walsh, and J.C. Watts.” [Press release, Office of U.S. Rep. Martin Sabo, “Annual Congressional Baseball Game,” 7/16/96]

Chambliss Considered Another Baseball Game in 2003. “Still, Santorum and Sununu said they are hoping to lure more Senators out to the game, with age not being a factor at all. Sununu said he's lobbying Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) - a former University of Georgia baseball player elected to the Senate last fall after four House terms - to play in this year's game. Informed of Sununu's revelation of the lobbying effort, Chambliss, who turns 60 this fall, said it's very doubtful he'll be playing this year. ‘He's going to have to lobby a lot harder,’ Chambliss said.” [Roll Call, 7/10/04]

Del McCoury Band - Moneyland

2008-11-02T19:47:00.001-08:00

Now it’s a pity to see
When the land of the free
Turns out to be
Nothin’ but a free for all

If you got dough
You’re freer than most
Cause your freedom goes up
With the size of your bank roll

You can buy a judge or a bribe
Or a thug or a bomb or a shredding machine
You can buy your way through into
And onto any ticket or TV screen

Chorus
It’s a money disease
It’s a thing called greed
And it feeds on those
Who need the money most
In moneyland
Oh it ain’t so funny
It you ain’t got the money
In moneyland

Now a corporate crime
You just do a little time
Pay a little fine
And then you’re in the clear

Murder and robbery
Cause by snobbery
Doesn’t mean a thing
It just falls on deaf ears

Now money is the thing
We all sweat for
It’s what some dreams
Are made of
But then there’s those
Who want it all
And enough is never enough

Chorus

Oooh money money money
Oooh more more more
Oooh money money money
Oooh more more more

Now a piece of the action
Is the main attraction
Get a big house fast car
Honey you got class

What’ll it get me
How much what’s mine
Are the only questions anybody seems to ask

Now who got beat got fought
Got bled
And who got burned today
Who got fixed got fooled got framed
And who got in the way

Chorus

Jim Martin for U.S. Senate - Saxby economics at the root of crisis

2008-11-02T19:05:00.001-08:00

Real Americans on the Need For Health Care Reform

2008-11-02T18:49:00.001-08:00

Amendment 47 is Wrong for Colorado

2008-11-02T18:44:00.001-08:00

Colorado's "right to work for less" Amendment 47 is a bad idea.

• Unions protect workers' rights and working conditions when unscrupulous business owners won't. For over 125 years in Colorado, through collective bargaining, unions have pushed business back from infringing on workers' rights. Millions of workers have experienced the benefits brought by collective bargaining through unions.

• Amendment 47 is corporate-crafted legislation attempting to destroy and eliminate the union collective bargaining system. It attempts to strip away workers' wages and rights in Colorado, depicting union membership as an infringement upon freedom of choice.

• The sponsors of Amendment 47 are attempting to drive down wages, benefits and working conditions of workers in Colorado. These results have already been seen in other states that have passed similar bills. This legislation fosters wage suppression to create larger profits for rich corporations.

• Amendment 47 is not about workers' rights. It falsely claims to grant a new freedom to workers before being hired. Once hired and without the union, the worker must play by a new set of rules in favor of the corporation and bent against the worker's freedoms.

• Unions are non-profit organizations designed to protect employees. The sponsors of Amendment 47 know that this legislation will drastically alter the funding of unions through membership. Without funding, the union will cease to exist, leaving employers free to cut wages, benefits, and training with no organization to defend the rights of the worker. No non-profit organization can operate without a budget.

Major Central Florida daily endorses Amendment 2

2008-11-02T18:27:00.000-08:00

Florida's Marriage Protection Amendment has received the endorsement of a major Central Florida newspaper. In a Sunday editorial, The Winter Haven News-Chief called for passage of Amendment 2:

The "Florida Marriage Protection Amendment" is the only citizen-sponsored amendment on the ballot. The rest were placed by the Legislature and a state tax commission.

The purpose of the amendment is to define marriage as the legal union of only one man and one woman. Supporters say that following state supreme court rulings allowing gay marriages in Massachusetts, California and Connecticut, the 1997 Florida Defense of Marriage Act isn't safe from being overturned by the Florida high court. They want the "one man-one woman" definition of marriage embedded in the Florida Constitution, just like 27 other states have done.

Opponents fear the amendment would invalidate domestic partnerships offered by some counties and private companies, but we don't see this provision having that kind of reach.

We support this amendment but also recognize that same-sex partners should have other civil means to enter into agreements covering property sharing and transfer, health and medical matters, insurance benefits and end-of-life decisions.

http://www.newschief.com/article/20081102/NEWS/811020306/1013/OPINION?Title=Vote__Yes__on_all_state_measures

Jerry Springer on C-SPAN - Believe It or Not, Worth Watching !

2008-11-02T12:13:00.001-08:00

I am not a big fan of Jerry Springer - the TV talk host - but Springer gives an excellent speech on how to fix what is wrong with America on C-SPAN. Springer presents the best case of progressive ideals that I've heard in a long time. Toward the end of the speech, Springer takes liberals to task for elitism and cautions against making fun of religion and middle America. It's well worth watching.

FDR Tribute

2008-10-28T20:22:00.001-07:00

Union Veterans Tell It Like It Is

2008-10-28T19:57:00.001-07:00