Progressives Unveil Their Plan To Save The Middle Class

 

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has unveiled their framework for jobs, which augments and expands upon the President's American Jobs Act. 


The CPC's Rebuild The American Dream Framework has six parts to it. Specific policy proposals will be forthcoming, but here is the high level overview:

• Make it in America Again - focus on bolstering U.S. manufacturing
• Rebuild America - focus on infrastructure as a larger part of the jobs policy than the White House proposal
• Lead the Green Industrial Revolution - blending the first two elements into a focus on green industries and products
• Jobs for the Next Generation - Job training and education for young people
• Not Just Jobs – Good Jobs - Reinforcing Americans' right and access to collective bargaining, promoting jobs that provide wages, benefits and security that will preserve the middle class
• Fair Taxes – Shared Sacrifice - Pay for the program by taxing the wealthy in this country

At a time when poverty in this country has risen to one in six Americans, where joblessness among young people is at its highest level since the Great Depression, and jobs are the single biggest issue on the table, this framework is most welcome. It's the product of discussions caucus members had during the summer as they toured the country and spoke to people about what most concerned them.

While there are no specifics yet, there are some cues to be taken from progressives' budget proposal released earlier this year, which proposed a 45 percent tax rate on the wealthiest earners in this country, ending the wars, and preserving the social safety net for generations to come.

It's important to recognize that progressives are not trying to compete with the American Jobs Act, but instead have offered proposals which dovetail and augment his. I interpret that message as one of support not just for his plan, but for a larger vision of what can be done with the support of the American people.

Rick’s Perry’s Tall Tales of Texas

August 29, 2011

 

Behind the Curtain of the Texas Miracle

by MICHAEL WINSHIP

Although born and raised and raised in a small town in the Finger Lakes region of New York, I’m the hybrid child of an upstate NY father and a mother from Texas — they met at Fort Hood (then Camp Hood) during World War II. And you thought different species couldn’t mate.


As a result, we were the only kids on the block who said, “Y’all,” or had relatives named Bubba, Vade, Hoyt and Cleburne. My mother’s father was known in our family as Granddaddy Lloyd. CARE packages of unshelled pecans and Frito-Lay products (then largely unknown above the Mason-Dixon Line) would arrive at Christmastime. And among the books in our house was a buff-covered, dog-eared paperback titled Tall Tales of Texas.


I flipped through it over and over. Inside were wild and woolly stories of the outlaw Sam Bass, frontiersman and Texas Ranger Bigfoot Wallace, Davy Crockett at the Alamo. Even taller were tales of Pecos Bill, with his lasso made from a live rattlesnake, the toughest cowboy in the world; and his wife Slue-Foot Sue, riding down the Rio Grande on the back of a giant catfish.


So, courtesy of some Lone Star DNA and basic reading comprehension skills, I think I know a Texas tall tale when I hear one, and presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry’s tales of “the Texas miracle” are as tall as they come.


Between December 2000 and December 2010, the state did have a net gain of 907,000 jobs, more than half the 1.6 million new jobs nationwide during that same period. But a lot of the state’s success in job creation looks more like dumb luck than evidence of ole Pecos Perry’s political prowess or expertise in governance. “It’s not that the emperor has no clothes,” Dan Hamermesh, an economics professor at the University of Texas, told the website AOL Jobs. “But he’s got little more than a fig leaf over his crotch. It is a true fact, but he had nothing to do with it.”

Perry points to deregulation and low taxes, including an incentive program called the Texas Enterprise Fund, said to have created 58,000 jobs, but there were many factors largely beyond his control, including increased trade between the United States and Mexico and the high price of gasoline that pumped revenue into the state, accompanied by new technologies for oil and gas extraction. In the August 15 New York Times, Clifford Krauss reported, “The oil and gas industry now delivers roughly $325 billion a year to the state, directly and indirectly. It brings in $13 billion in state tax receipts, or roughly 40 percent of the total, financing up to 20 percent of the state budget.”

What’s more, a lot of the increase has been funded — say it ain’t so, Pecos! — by federal largesse, including President Obama’s economic stimulus. In the last ten years, federal spending in the state has more than doubled to over $200 billion a year (thanks in large part to NASA and the many military installations in the state, including the aforementioned Fort Hood, one of the world’s largest military bases and the biggest single employer in Texas).


Of all the US government jobs added in this country between 2007 and 2010, 47 percent of them were in Texas. According to Jared Bernstein, former economic adviser to Joe Biden, “Texas employment wasn’t down much at all in these years, as the state lost only 53,000 jobs. But looming behind that number are large losses in the private sector (down 178,000) and large gains (up 125,000) in government jobs.” Which shows, Bernstein goes on, that Texas has followed “a traditional Keynesian game plan: as the private sector contracts, turn to the public sector to temporarily make up part of the difference.”


In 2009, Governor Perry made a show of rejecting $556 million in federal funds for unemployment, saying there were too many strings attached. In fact, that money was equal to only two percent of the more than $20 billion in stimulus money Texas did accept, including cash used to cover 97 percent of the state budget’s shortfall for 2010, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

This, in spite of GOP attacks on the public sector, Perry’s claim that the stimulus was failed and misguided and the pledge in the announcement of his presidential candidacy that he would “work every day to make Washington, DC, as inconsequential in your lives as I can.”


As the August 20 Washington Post noted, “The significant role of government in Texas’ relative prosperity stands in stark contrast to the ‘go-it-alone’ image cultivated by Perry, who credits a lack of government interference for fostering a business-friendly environment in Texas.”

For those like Governor Perry who brag about being no-nonsense, freedom-loving cowpokes, it’s a delusion that goes all the way back to the early settlement of the American West. As Patricia Nelson Limerick writes in her seminal history The Legacy of Conquest, “At any period in Western history, the rhetoric of Western independence was best taken with many grains of salt.” Whether it was fighting Indians or gaining access to public grazing lands, the federal government has always been integral. “Nothing so undermines the Western claim to a tradition of independence,” she writes, “as this matter of federal support to Western development…

“And yet humans have a well-established capacity to meet facts of life with disbelief. In a region where human interdependence has been self-evident, Westerners have woven a net of denial.” Sounds familiar.


Accompanying Governor Perry’s denial is cronyism and patronage, both good ole boy-style and corporate (of the $102 million in campaign contributions raised for his gubernatorial races, Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote, half came “from just 204 sources,” and the
 Los Angeles Times reports, “Nearly half of those mega-donors received hefty business contracts, tax breaks or appointments under Perry.”)

So, too, with greed comes hubris and shortsightedness. The Times‘ Krauss reported, “Critics, among them Democrats… have long complained that the state’s economic health came at a steep price: a long-term hollowing out of its prospects because of deep cuts to education spending, low rates of investment in research and development, and a disparity in the job market that confines many blacks and Hispanics to minimum-wage jobs without health insurance.”

A report from the policy research and advocacy group Demos and the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities notes “27 percent of Texas workers lack health insurance compared to 17 percent nationally. The ranks of the uninsured have grown steadily as access to employer-sponsored health insurance has declined… Fewer than half (48 percent) of the state’s workers have access to a retirement plan at work, a figure that has plummeted since reaching a high of 61 percent in 2000.”


Over the past twenty years, college costs in Texas have quadrupled, with the steepest jump occurring since tuition was deregulated by the state in 2003. Former first lady Barbara Bush observed in a February op-ed that the state ranks 49th in verbal SAT scores, 47th in literacy and 46th in average math SAT scores: “We rank 36th in the nation in high school graduation rates. An estimated 3.8 million Texans do not have a high school diploma… the United Way estimates that the price tag for dropouts to Texas taxpayers in $9.6 billion every year.” But the state’s latest budget cut $4 billion from public schools.


A recent, four part series on Perry’s Texas from a team at the Houston Chronicle reports, “After a decade of Perry-style frugality the Texas welcome mat is growing increasingly threadbare as the state struggles to accommodate a booming, young populace hoping to travel its roads, get educated in its schools, drink its water and access its health care system. During Perry’s tenure the state has postponed investment or turned to debt to finance crucial infrastructure needs, experts say.”

The average urban Texan loses a week a year to traffic delays on the state’s “overburdened” highway system. While Perry boasts of luring thousands of doctors to the state, “lawmakers this year cut $805 million from doctors serving Medicaid patients” and “postponed $4 billion in Medicaid costs for payment in the next payment cycle.” Texas is 48th out of 50 states in the number of physicians per 100,000 residents.


Perry doubts climate change is real, yet, “As Texas endures its most severe one-year drought in its history, state leaders have identified $53 billion in state investments needed to expand water capacity by 2060 but have not resolved how to pay for it. Unless Texas increases its water resources, experts say 83% of Texans will not have an adequate supply of water in times of drought.” Perry issued a proclamation urging Texans to pray for rain.


With more bad news ahead, stagnant wages and an explosion in population and the labor force that now has unemployment advancing much faster that Perry’s touted job growth, “the Texas miracle” is heading into a ditch.


Which brings to mind another tall tale, the old joke about the Texan who says to an Eastern visitor, “Yessir, I can drive across my ranch all day and all night and still not get to the other end.” To which the visitor replies, “I know what you mean. I have a car like that, too.”

Why Does Rick Perry Hate Old, Poor People? 

Fox host back from maternity leave with ‘post-partum compassion’

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There's a Right Way and a Wrong Way to Deal With a Jobs Crisis -- Why Is Germany Doing It So Well?

Germany's success indicates that one way to fight unemployment would be some modest efforts to give U.S. employers incentives to cut hours, not workers. 

By John Schmitt, AlterNet
Posted on May 30, 2011

The Great Recession hit harder in the United States than in most of the rest of the world. Among the world's rich economies, we experienced the third largest increase in unemployment, trailing only Spain and Ireland. Most advanced economies saw substantially smaller increases in unemployment and one --Germany-- actually saw its unemployment rate decline.

Can we learn anything from countries that weathered the Great Recession better than we did? The experience of two countries --Denmark and Germany-- seems particularly informative. Denmark had a model labor market before the downturn, but ironically, offers a cautionary tale. Germany's economy has been up and down since unification in the early 1990s, but points one way out of our mess.

For most of the 2000s, Denmark had what was arguably the best labor-market performance in the world. Unlike most European countries, unemployment rates were at, or even below, US levels, and employment rates (the share of the population holding a job) were well above those here. Denmark managed this while offering high wages and comprehensive benefits such as health care, paid sick days, paid family leave, and union representation.

Denmark's success is widely attributed to its "flexicurity" system, which provides flexibility to employers and security to workers. Flexibility comes in the form of limited job protections for workers. In the United States, private-sector workers have almost no legal rights to their jobs and, absent a union contract, can legally be fired for almost any reason. In Europe, however, workers have a range of legal protections against dismissal. Denmark has more protections than we do here, but noticeably less than workers in the rest of Europe.

Danish workers accept less job security because they know that national unemployment benefits are generous and the system spends real money getting unemployed workers into new jobs. This is the "security" half of the "flexicurity" system.

A key part of this system is a set of programs that provides training, education, job-search assistance, and other services and incentives to unemployed workers. Even before the Great Recession, the Danes spent over one percent of GDP on these activities. In the United States, we spent less than one-tenth of 1 percent of GDP on comparable programs.

Flexicurity worked well when the Danish economy was booming. Training, education, and help matching the jobless to vacancies work well when there are plenty of jobs. These same policies, however, have limitations when there just aren't enough jobs: the unemployment rate in Denmark, which was just 4.0 percent in 2007, has been rising steadily since 2008, and now stands at 7.8 percent.

The Danish experience is a cautionary tale for the United States because it has become fashionable here to argue that our current unemployment is "structural." That is another way of saying that high unemployment is largely the fault of the unemployed themselves, either they lack the necessary skills or are unwilling to relocate to where the new jobs are.

But, Denmark already does far more than we could ever hope to do here to provide training, education, and other supports to the unemployed. If unemployment were "structural," the Danish response would be near perfect. Their approach has not made a noticeable dent, however, because unemployment there, like here, is the result of deficient demand, not a deficient workforce.

There is an economy, however, that has figured its way around the Great Recession. Unemployment in Germany is lower now than it was before the downturn (not to mention lower than in Denmark, now, too).

Germany has done well because its labor-market institutions encourage employers to cut hours not workers. Instead of laying off 20 percent of workers, say, a firm can instead lower the average hours of its employees by 20 percent. Both accomplish the same goal, but from a social point of view, cutting hours is much better because it shares the pain more equally and keeps workers tied to their jobs.

The German system gives employers many incentives to cut hours instead of workers. The most obvious is their "short-time work" system, which pays partial unemployment benefits to workers who have their hours reduced. German workers who lose one day of work per week are entitled to receive unemployment benefits equal to one-fifth of the usual weekly unemployment check.

Other aspects of the German system also help. Legal protections against dismissal make it cheaper for employers to reduce hours than to fire workers. And many Germans are covered by union contracts that allow flexibility around the length of the work week and the spread of hours throughout the year.

Together, these systems helped reduce the total number of hours worked in Germany by about 4 percent between 2008 and 2009. Over the same period, total employment remained unchanged. Essentially all of the adjustment to the Great Recession in Germany fell on the average hours worked by existing employees and none fell on laid-off workers. By contrast, two-thirds of the adjustment to the downturn in Denmark and the United States fell on employment and only one-third on the average hours worked.

German successes suggest that one way to fight unemployment --at a relatively low cost to the federal government-- would be some modest efforts to give US employers incentives to cut hours not workers.

Expanding the small programs already in place in 20 states to allow "part-time unemployment benefits" --sometimes called "work-sharing"-- is an obvious place to start. Implementing a new tax credit to employers that expand paid time off --paid sick days or paid family leave, for example-- is another route.

Germany used variations on these kinds of policies to lower the unemployment rate during the Great Recession. Imagine how different the world would be if the unemployment rate in the United States today were, say, 4 percent, not 20 percent.

America Is Getting Poorer: The Proof Is In The Numbers

By Michael Snyder - Contributing Writer - 10-01-2010

How in the world can anyone claim that things are getting better?  Sometimes the numbers are so clear that they simply cannot be denied.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income in the United States fell from $51,726 in 2008 to $50,221 in 2009.  That was the second yearly decline in median household income in a row.  In other words, America is getting poorer.  


Just let that statistic above sink in for a little bit.  In 2009, American families had roughly $1,500 less coming in than the year before.  Not that the cost of living has gone down either.  Have you been to the supermarket lately?  Things are getting ridiculous out there.  In fact, middle class American families are being squeezed as never before.  More mothers and fathers are scrambling to find second and third jobs just to pay the mortgage and to keep the lights on and to put food on the table.  This is not a time of prosperity in America.  We are in a state of serious decline.

When you stop and analyze the new Census data, something jumps out at you right away.  You quickly realize that these income declines are not limited to just a few regions of the country - they are literally happening from coast to coast.

The U.S. economy is in deep, deep trouble and the proof is in the numbers.  The following are 12 statistics that reveal just how far the standard of living in America is declining....

1 - According to the Census Bureau, median household income dropped in 34 U.S. states in 2009, and the only state where median household income actually increased was in North Dakota.

2 - The Census Bureau data also revealed that of the 52 largest metro areas in America, only the city of San Antonio did not see a decline in median household income in 2009.

3 - 35 percent of all U.S. households now live on $35,000 or less.

4 - According to the Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line is the highest it has been in 15 years.

5 - The number of Americans enrolled in the food stamp program passed the 41 million mark for the first time ever in June.

6 - The number of Americans in the food stamp program increased a staggering 55 percent from December 2007 to June 2010.

7 - One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one anti-poverty program run by the federal government.

8 - Nearly 10 million Americans now receive unemployment insurance, which is almost four times as many that were receiving it back in 2007.

9 - In 2009, U.S. consumer spending experienced the biggest decline since 1942.

10 - As millions of young Americans struggled just to survive, marriages fell to a record low in 2009.  Today, only 52% of Americans 18 years or older are married. 

11 - The only group that saw their household income increase in 2009 was those making $180,000 or more.

12- According to the Huffington Post, the gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew in 2009 to its largest margin ever....

The top-earning 20 percent of Americans – those making more than $100,000 each year – received 49.4 percent of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4 percent made by the bottom 20 percent of earners, those who fell below the poverty line, according to the new figures. That ratio of 14.5-to-1 was an increase from 13.6 in 2008 and nearly double a low of 7.69 in 1968.

Not that it is a bad thing to make money. 

The point is that the game is rigged and the bottom 80 percent of us are being left behind.

The middle class is being systematically destroyed.  At the rate we are going, we will eventually have a very small group of ultra-wealthy Americans and a gigantic mountain of very poor Americans that are barely able to survive.

The answer to this is not a "redistribution of wealth". 

What middle class Americans actually need are good jobs with good benefits.

You know, the kind of jobs that the U.S. economy used to produce.

For the vast majority of Americans, all they have to offer in the marketplace is their labor.  If they cannot get someone to hire them for a wage that will enable them to take care of their families then they simply cannot make it without government assistance.

But what our leaders have done in the name of "globalism" is that they have essentially merged our economy with the economies of nations such as China where blue collar workers are paid about a dollar an hour to do the same jobs that American workers get paid 15 to 20 dollars an hour to do.

As a result, jobs and factories are fleeing the United States so rapidly it is hard to even describe.  The deindustrialization of America is happening right in front of our eyes, but the American people have become so dumbed down that most of them don't even seem to have the capacity to understand what is going on. 

Quite a few advocates of "free trade" (which is not "free" or "fair" at all under our current system) have left comments on my columns telling me that the American people better just suck it up because this is how it is now and the world isn't going back.  These advocates of the globalist system say that the American people just need to toughen up and learn to compete and need to just accept that the standard of living for workers across the globe is going to be equalized and that is all there is to it.

So are you ready to have the same standard of living as a Chinese sweatshop worker who works 12 hours a day for one dollar an hour?

That is where we are headed.

But things did not have to be this way.  We did not have to merge our economy with communist China and allow them to keep their currency devalued 40 percent lower than it should be so that they could dump massive amounts of cheap goods on our shores.  We did not have to elect politicians that believe that "globalism" is the answer to all of our problems.  We did not have to sign on to the WTO, NAFTA and all the other "free trade" agreements that are destroying the American middle class.

Labor is now a global commodity.  American workers are now part of the global labor force.  The bargaining power of the average American worker has dropped through the floor.  Now the monolithic predator corporations that dominate our economy don't even have to deal with American workers if they don't want to.

Very few of our politicians admitted that merging us into a one world economy would mean a dramatic decline in the standard of living of middle class Americans.

But that is exactly what is happening.

Meanwhile, the federal government, our state governments and our local governments keep going into massive amounts of new debt in an effort to keep paying the bills. 

There are some state governments, like Illinois, that are basically flat broke.  In fact, Illinois doesn't even bother to pay many of their bills anymore.

Of course the federal government is the worst offender of them all.  The U.S. national debt is rapidly approaching $14 trillion, and most of us have gotten so accustomed to it that we don't even talk about it much anymore.

That is how bizarre things have gotten.

As America keeps getting poorer, and as U.S. taxpayers see their incomes continue to decline, how in the world are U.S. government finances going to turn around?

The truth is that our leaders should be in full blown crisis mode in an attempt to fix this thing.  Pieces of the U.S. economy are literally falling off all around us and our leaders are pushing the debt accelerator to the floor as we head toward a giant cliff.

But instead our politicians are prancing about the countryside telling us that everything is going to be just great as long as we cast our votes for them in the fall.

And the mainstream media keeps telling us that the "recession" is over and that soon the U.S. economy will be better than ever.

Is it any wonder that faith in the mainstream media is now at an all-time low?     

According to a new poll just released by Gallup, the number of Americans that have little to no trust in the mass media (57%) is at an all-time high.

Unemployment Rates and Benefits by State

More Workers Face Pay Cuts, Not Furloughs

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE | August 3, 2010 | NYTimes

The furloughs that popped up during the recession are being replaced by a highly unusual tactic: actual cuts in pay.

Local and state governments, as well as some companies, are squeezing their employees to work the same amount for less money in cost-saving measures that are often described as a last-ditch effort to avoid layoffs.

A new report on Tuesday showed a slight dip in overall wages and salaries in June, caused partly by employees working fewer hours.

Though average hourly pay is still higher than when the recession began, the new wage rollbacks feed worries that the economy has weakened and could even be at risk of deflation. That is when the prices of goods and assets fall and people withhold spending as they wait for prices to drop further, a familiar idea to those following the recent housing market.

A period of such slack economic demand produced a lost decade in Japan, and while it is still seen as unlikely here, some policy-making officials at the Federal Reserve recently voiced concern about the possibility because the consequences could be so dire.

Pay cuts are appearing most frequently among state and local governments, which are under extraordinary budget pressures and have often already tried furloughs, i.e., docking pay in exchange for time off. Warning that they will have to lay off people otherwise, many governors and mayors are pressing public employee unions to accept a reduction in salary of a few percentage points, without getting days off in exchange.

At the University of Hawaii, professors have accepted a 6.7 percent cut. Albuquerque has trimmed pay for its 6,000 employees by 1.8 percent on average, and New York’s governor, David A. Paterson, has sought a 4 percent wage rollback for most state employees. State troopers in Vermont agreed to a 3 percent cut. In California, teachers in the Capistrano and Pacheco school districts have accepted salary cuts.

“We’ve seen pay freezes before in the public sector, but pay cuts are something very new to that sector,” said Gary N. Chaison, an industrial relations professor at Clark University. Outsize pension costs and balanced budget requirements are squeezing many states as tax revenue has come up short.

It is impossible to say how many employers have cut workers’ pay, because the government does not keep such statistics. Economists say a modest but growing number of employers have ordered wage cuts, especially in the public sector. In a 2010 survey by the National League of Cities, 51 percent of the cities that responded said they had either cut or frozen salaries of city employees, 22 percent said they had revised union contracts to reduce some pay and benefits, and 19 percent said they had instituted furloughs.

Some businesses are also cutting workers’ pay, often to help stay afloat or to eliminate their losses, although a few have seized on the slack labor market and workers’ weak bargaining power to cut pay and thereby increase their profits and competitiveness.

Economists note that wages continued to increase in 2008 after the recession began, even adjusted for inflation. But those wages have been flat for the last 18 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Mr. Chaison says the latest wave of private-sector pay cuts is reminiscent of those in the early 1980s, when many companies — especially those with unionized work forces — cut wages in response to a recession, intensified competition from imports and new low-cost competitors spawned by government-backed deregulation. Now, as then, companies frequently say that compensation for unionized workers, in both wages and benefits, is out of line. For instance, the Westin Hotel in Providence, R.I., after failing to reach a new contract with its main union, has sliced wages 20 percent, saying its previous pay levels were not competitive with those at the city’s many nonunion hotels.

Factory owners sometimes warn that they will close or move jobs to lower-cost locales unless workers agree to a pay cut. In its most recent union contract, General Motors is paying new employees $14 an hour, half the rate it pays its long-term workers.

Sub-Zero, which makes refrigerators, freezers and ovens, warned its workers last month that it might close one or more factories in Wisconsin and lay off 500 employees unless they accepted a 20 percent cut in wages and benefits. Management warned that it might transfer those operations to Kentucky or Arizona, saying it needed lower costs because sales were weaker than hoped.

The pain is felt across industries. At the Seattle Symphony, musicians have taken a 5 percent pay cut, while ABF Freight System, a major trucking company, has asked the Teamsters to agree to 15 percent less. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has lowered pay 6 percent, while Newsday has gotten its staff to accept a 5 to 10 percent pay cut.

While most of the pay cuts seem to hit unionized workers, David Lewin, a professor of management at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written extensively on employee compensation, says some cuts are also quietly taking place among nonunion employers.

Reed Smith, a firm with 1,500 lawyers, has cut salaries for first-year associates in major cities to $130,000 from $160,000. Warren Hospital, a nonunionized facility in Phillipsburg, N.J., ordered pay cuts of 2 to 4 percent because lower Medicaid reimbursements had squeezed the hospital’s finances.

Fast-rising pension and health costs are making benefit costs grow more rapidly than wages, some employers say, and cutting wages is often easier than other ways to pare labor costs. But some workers say these cuts are unfair at a time when corporate profits and employee productivity have risen strongly.

Sometimes unions and their workers cooperate with management on pay cuts, hoping to recoup some wage increases when conditions improve. In Madawaska, Me., 460 unionized workers accepted an 8.5 percent wage cut in May to help keep their paper mill in business.

“Workers, of course, do not like to have their pay cut, but I think that workers’ major concern now is, ‘Do I have a job?’ ” Professor Lewin said. “If the unemployment rate were lower, we’d see a lot more resentment toward pay cuts.”

But workers sometimes fight back — particularly if an employer doesn’t show signs of distress.

In Albuquerque, where the mayor pushed through pay cuts to bridge a $66 million budget deficit, the largest union of municipal workers is suing, arguing that the mayor’s plan should include furloughs.

The mayor, Richard J. Berry, rejected that idea. “You want to keep people employed. You want to preserve public services. And you don’t want to raise taxes,” he said. “When you’re trying to lower the cost of government while maintaining services, furloughs don’t do the trick.”

Albuquerque would have to trim at least 100 jobs without the cuts, he said, which top out at 3.5 percent for employees earning more than $90,000. Those earning under $30,000 will not be affected.

At the Mott’s apple juice and sauce plant in Williamson, N.Y., 30 miles east of Rochester, 300 unionized workers have been on strike since May 23 over management’s demands for a $1.50-an-hour wage cut, a reduction in company 401(k) contributions and higher employee contributions to health insurance. The strikers are seething over management’s demands because the plant has been profitable and Mott’s corporate parent, the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, reported record profits last year.

“They keep piling more and more work on us, but they want to pay us less and less,” said Michele Morgan, a Mott’s employee. “It’s a slap in the face.”

Chris Barnes, a company spokesman, said the Mott’s employees were overpaid, at $21 an hour, given that the average in the area for food manufacturing workers was $14 an hour. The union disputes those figures.

“Our only objective,” Mr. Barnes said, “was to continue to enhance the competitiveness and flexibility of our operations.”

GOP Sen Kyl: Extend Bush Tax Cuts Even If They Add To Deficit

Extend Bush Tax Cuts for wealthy even if they add to deficit, but don't extend unemployment benefits for those who really need it
Sam Stein | 07-12-10

Top Senate Republican Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) insisted on Sunday that Congress should extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans regardless of their impact on the deficit, even as he and other Republicans are blocking unemployment insurance extensions over deficit concerns.

"[Y]ou should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes," said the Arizona Senator during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. "Surely Congress has the authority, and it would be right to -- if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that's what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans."

White House aides immediately seized on the comments. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs wrote on Twitter, "Kyl says wealthy need big Bush tax cuts while middle class families are on their own to fend for themselves as a result of Bush economy."

In private, administration officials say that the framing of the argument couldn't be more advantageous: "It's cutting taxes for the wealthy and letting the unemployed to fend for themselves," said one White House ally.

"If all of this has a familiar ring to it, it's because unpaid for tax cuts for the rich at the expense of working people is the same backward policy Republicans used to put the nation in this hole, and it's the same policy they promise to return to if put in a position of power again," added Hari Sevugan, press secretary for the Democratic National Committee.



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Asked to expand on his tweets, Gibbs declined comment, save to clarify that "the question [host Chris] Wallace specifically asked Kyl was [about] the upper end of the Bush tax cuts (above $250,000)."

But the politics already are fairly obvious. For the past few months, congressional Republicans have demanded that any additional spending be offset by budget cuts or revenue increases elsewhere. Also on Sunday, White House senior adviser David Axelrod blamed deficit concerns for the difficulty in finding a 60th vote in the Senate for unemployment benefits even though, as of Friday, 2.1 million people have not received checks that they were expecting in June.

And yet, Kyl is now suggesting that the same budget rules shouldn't apply with respect to tax cuts for the wealthy, which are set to expire unless Congress acts to renew them. As Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly notes:

It's quite a message to Americans: Republicans believe $30 billion for unemployment benefits don't even deserve a vote because the money would be added to the deficit, but Republicans also believe that adding the cost of $678 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy to the deficit is just fine.

Kyl is one of the most prominent members of Congress to advance the argument that jobless benefits  make people not want to look for work, a position disputed by economists across the political spectrum. Unemployment insurance "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work," Kyl said last March on the Senate floor.

The chart below shows the deficit impact of the Bush tax cuts over the next decade.

Honey, I Shrank the Labor Lobby

Is Lip Service Dead?
By DAVID MACARAY

Because he expected Nixon to beat Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, comedian Mort Sahl prepared several appropriate jokes, one of which had JFK’s father, the wealthy and powerful Joe Kennedy, going on television and lamenting sadly, “What’s happened to our values….does money mean nothing?”

Labor must be asking a similar question regarding the Democrats: “What’s happened to our political rhetoric….is sanctimonious lip-service dead?” While the Democrats have always been squeamish and unreliable when it came to important votes, their high-minded, proletarian bullshit always managed to raise labor’s morale.

Apparently, that’s all changed. Not only are the Democrats no longer finessing organized labor, they’re insulting it publicly. On June 9, a White House staffer mocked labor for “flushing $10 million….down the toilet” in its support of progressive Bill Halter against Blanche Lincoln in the Arkansas Senate primary. Following the rebuke, pundits instantly piled on, depicting the smackdown as further evidence of labor’s decline.

One reason the Democrats feel they can freely ridicule labor is because the relationship has always flowed in one direction. Organized labor clings to the Democrats for the same reason frustrated citizens cling to a corrupt or grossly inefficient police force—viewing inferior cops as better than no cops at all.

Clearly, America’s post-industrial unions are suffering. You don’t lose a critical mass of automobile manufacturing, along with the steel, toy, paper, plastics, rubber, chemical, heavy equipment, furniture, textile, appliance, building materials, and mining industries—most of which offered good wages and benefits—without feeling the pain.

Still, even though union membership has dropped significantly (only 12.4-percent of the workforce belongs to a union, down from a high of 35-percent in the 1950s), organized labor has no reason to panic or sulk, and certainly no reason to apologize. It does, however, have reason to recalibrate.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more than 16 million union members in this country. Sixteen million of anything is impressive. The Chinese Army has 2.5 million active troops. The population of Israel is 7.5 million. Sixteen million union members is a tremendous resource.

To get the recognition it deserves, labor needs to circumvent disloyal Democrats—factor them out of the equation—and appeal directly to the American people. One way of doing that is by adopting a catchy advertising slogan and hiring celebrities (singers, actors, athletes) to go on television and repeat it.

Catchphrases work. “Things go better with Coke” worked. Nike’s “Just do it” worked. Volkswagen’s “Think small” worked. The Energizer bunny works. The appeal to “death panels” worked. Even labeling Barack Obama a “socialist” sort of worked (although “Rockefeller Republican” would have been more accurate).

Here’s a slogan: “Working people have never had a better friend.” The message is clear, concise and—unlike “Things go better with Coke”—demonstrably true. Organized labor needs Americans to recognize it as the best friend working people ever had, and to recognize it in the same way and to the same extent that they recognize “Got milk?”

Anyone who denies the accuracy of the slogan must be required to name a better friend. Of course, they won’t be able to do that because there’s never been one; and those naïve enough to suggest the U.S. Congress have to be reminded that the only reason Congress passed any pro-labor legislation was due to the labor lobby.

The beauty of the slogan is that, unlike typical advertising copy, it’s neither a lie nor an exaggeration. It’s an irrefutable fact. Organized labor is the working man and woman’s best friend. It always has been….and always will be. Simple as that.

Say goodbye to full-time jobs with benefits

Many people looking for work are having trouble finding the traditional full-time job with benefits. 
By Chris Isidore, senior writer
June 5, 2010

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Jobs may be coming back, but they aren't the same ones workers were used to.

Many of the jobs employers are adding are temporary or contract positions, rather than traditional full-time jobs with benefits. With unemployment remaining near 10%, employers have their pick of workers willing to accept less secure positions.

In 2005, the government estimated that 31% of U.S. workers were already so-called contingent workers. Experts say that number could increase to 40% or more in the next 10 years.

James Stoeckmann, senior practice leader at WorldatWork, a professional association of human resource executives, believes that full-time employees could become the minority of the nation's workforce within 20 to 30 years, leaving employees without traditional benefits such as health coverage, paid vacations and retirement plans, that most workers take for granted today.

"The traditional job is not doomed. But it will increasingly have competition from other models, the most prominent is the independent contractor model," he said.

Doug Arms, senior vice president of Ajilon, a staffing firm, says about 90% of the positions his company is helping clients fill right now are on a contract basis.

"[Employers] are reluctant to bring on permanent employees too quickly," he said. "And the available candidate landscape is much different now. They're a little more aggressive to take any position."

Cathy, who asked that her last name not be used, lost her job as a recruiter for a financial services firm in February 2009. She started working on a contract basis four months later. She believes that many employers are taking improper advantage of the weak labor market.

"I work in HR, I understand that sometimes you need to hire a contractor because you have a project and you won't need the person when it's done in three months," she said. "But that's not what's happening here."

Cathy said her co-workers who had permanent jobs didn't treat her differently, but she still felt like a second-class citizen.

"At one job they were giving out H1N1 flu shots but the contract workers weren't eligible to receive them," she said. "I said 'You guys are still in trouble if I get the flu.'"

Much of the change is due to employers' desire to limit their costs. Stoechmann equates the shift to the one seen in retirement plans, in which employers moved away from the traditional pension plan toward defined contribution plans, which passes more of the burden onto the employee.

Demographic factors are feeding the shift as well. Stoechmann said many younger workers are more open to the idea of not tying themselves to a single employer.

And as baby boomers reach the age when they are eligible for Medicare and not dependent upon their employer for health insurance, many are more open to contract work.

Health care reform legislation passed earlier this year, which will create a mandate for employers to provide health benefits for employees but not contractors, will also feed the trend.

"Once you have an employer mandate in place, you create an incentive for employers to get around that mandate," said Susan Houseman, a senior economist studying labor issues at the W.E. Upjohn Institute.

Houseman also believes the jobs market could stay tilted in favor of employers for much of the coming decade, because of the depth of job losses and the lingering weakness in the economy.

Sara Horowitz, the founder and executive director of the Freelancers Union, an advocacy group for freelancers and independent contractors, said that employment laws and protections have been slow to recognize the shift. For example, independent contractors aren't eligible for unemployment benefits. And they have to pay both the employee and the employer match on their Social Security taxes.

But Horowitz said not everyone who works as a freelancer or independent contractor is unhappy with their situation.

She estimates about 30% are satisfied with the arrangement, about equal to the number who desperately want to find a full-time job with benefits. The other 40% are somewhere in the middle, feeling pleased by aspects of their job and unhappy about others.

"It's not that most want to be freelancers or don't want to be freelancers. They're just following the work, and the work itself is evolving," she said.

Budget Genocide Sweeps Across the Nation

(This article will go against the grain for some of you. Sorry...but it's too easy to blame poor people for being poor. That they alone are responsible for their situation. It's not true in most cases.--jef)

~~~o~~~

Budget Genocide Sweeps Across the Nation
Thursday 15 April 2010
by: Lisa Gray–Garcia

Thousands of poor people of color face hunger, illness, death and homelessness due to welfare, housing and health care budget cuts across the nation.

How long does it take to kill the spirit of 7,000 people? How long does it take to forget about 7,000 people? Or 600 people, 10,000 or 22,000 people? There are 7,000 residents of Alameda County facing hunger, desperation and death in April when their general assistance (GA) (welfare) benefits are cut off; 10,500 people face homelessness in New York due to cuts to Section 8. In 2009, 600 people were cut off of GA in Salt Lake City, Utah, and 22,000 recipients of GA in Minnesota were denied access to even the most meager health benefits.

So, why does hardly anyone care?

Perhaps, because people believe the lies perpetuated about poor people barely surviving on welfare and housing subsidies everyday. The lie that we are all substance users; that we are "lazy"; that we are criminals "cheating the system"; that Section 8 is free housing as opposed to "affordable based on your income; that welfare is "free money" as opposed to a loan, which we are expected to repay; or that we don't work hard at below minimum wage jobs, like cleaning the streets or cleaning buses.

Actually, welfare, Medi-Cal and Section 8 recipients are low-waged and no-waged laborers, unemployed construction workers, domestic workers, secretaries, waiters, dry cleaners, day laborers, artists, musicians, gardeners, child care workers, mothers, fathers, daughters and sons - as a matter of fact, we are you.

My mother and I barely survived on the little bit of nothing called welfare for much of my life. As an adult caring for my mama, an African, Puerto Rican, survivor of abusive, racist foster homes and orphanages, who struggled for years to get an education by any means necessary while working as a domestic laborer, until she became disabled and unable to work. After living outside and in our car throughout my childhood, and later incarcerated for that crime of poverty (it's illegal to be houseless in the US), I paid a portion of our rent with the meager $341.00 the welfare system loaned me. It kept me and my disabled mama housed for over a year before we were gentrified out of our low rent apartment.

I was told several times by two of my more abusive caseworkers while on welfare that I was a drain on society and not worth the ground on which I was standing. When the welfare (de)reform bills were signed and all welfare recipients began being fast-tracked into a job, any job, I was being illogical to conceptualize of myself as a journalist or writer, and needed to get enrolled in a 30-day janitorial or secretarial training programs.

With every threat by my welfare worker, my mother and I tried to work harder at our unlicensed, street-based, art micro-business to apply for endless loans we were turned down for, to work 12- and 18-hour days trying to sell products whether the market would bear or not. In the end, the adage that it takes money to make money is sooo true, we could never get ahead, much less fed, and we always ended up back on some type of welfare, hated, misunderstood and criminalized.

My mama is an indigenous Taina, a tribe of the Caribbean, thought like many tribes across the globe to be completely destroyed and annihilated, taken down by countless colonizers and empires, lands stolen, natural resources raped, and robbed of her ancestors until all that was left were a destroyed people, and her an unwanted, poor child of color.

Many of the folks who are facing cuts to meager benefit crumbs are indigenous people, people of diasporas, colonizers destruction and oppressors domination, war, globalization, racism, violence and the violence of poverty. Long ago, taken from their lands of origin, their cultures, their deep structures, their power, they are brought eagerly into the arms of the inhuman systems of capitalism and consumerism, where if you don't have some capital or capitalist in your corner, you quickly become the product, either of the nonprofit industrial complex (a client) or the prison industrial complex (an inmate)

The Scarcity Model

The history of welfare and housing subsidies in the US is a racist, classist tale of the deserving versus undeserving poor scarcity model. From the beginning, welfare and subsidized housing were only meant for some people, "the deserving poor" white, married women whose husbands were killed in the war. If you were anything outside of that racist norm, you were considered pathological, broken, aberrant.

Why was it important to set up the system like this? So an institutionally racist US corporate media could create a web of lies, and a racist US society would believe them, and then could look away when one fell through the cracks and became hungry, houseless or sick. The scarcity model is already set up to be cut/pulled/rescinded as it's based on how few people we can support, rather than who needs support.

"It's going to cost the City so much more to have all the people sick, and not be able to get treatment," Johnny Longtree, an indigenous poverty scholar and Poor News Network (PNN) reporter from Minnesota said, speaking with me about Minnesota's proposed cuts last year.

In every US city and state fighting these inhumane cuts, tireless advocates, researchers and lawyers for the poor present their meticulously gathered statistics on why acts of budget genocide to housing, welfare and services should never happen, how they will cost the cities and states so much more in lost revenue, overwhelm existent strapped services and cause the illness and death of thousands of people. National studies like Without Housing (Western Regional Advocacy Project 2010) directly correlates the connection between the increase of homelessness, criminalization and hunger with the drastic cuts to housing and social services budgets across the nation. And, yet, the deadly lie of the scarcity model prevails.

I say lie, because, contrary to corporate media perpetuated lies, there is enough money for everyone. It is more myth making to act like there is only a little bit to go around. It is a myth promoted by corporate government and corporate media, which have already stolen our collective resources, consistently silenced our voices and want to keep all of the stolen resources in exactly the unjust place they now exist, a few people's pockets.

Hoarding and Cluttering Capital

A capitalistic system leads to the obsessive hoarding of cash and resources, and as all people afflicted with hoarding and clutterering illness will attest to, once you begin hoarding, it's very hard to stop. Once the corporations, corporate governments and legislators begin collecting corporate kick-downs, they can't stop.

This inhuman system that encourages the obsessive hoarding and cluttering of resources seems insane to indigenous cultures like the Malawi people who believe that if I have met you once, you are related to me and I am responsible for your well-being. A culture rooted in interdependence and care giving views people who hoard resources as having something wrong with them, as they understand that sharing is key to the survival of all people, rather than just some people.

The lies and greedy agendas of capitalism have led myself and many of my fellow indigenous and poor revolutionaries to launch, "I am not the lie," a series of testimonies and first-person narratives, which will demystify the lies told about poor folks on welfare, low-wage and no-wage workers, immigrants, subsidized-housing residents, and many other communities consistently misunderstood and disrespected. As well, many indigenous-people-led organizations have begun to look into the roots of budget lies and decades and generations of resource theft of people and cities. From these historical to present investigations, several of us have begun to implement the UN declaration on Indigenous people, a powerful, pro-active document that frames the reclaiming of stolen resources and land to the colonization of people and land.

Many of the nationwide Take Back The Land advocates and actions by many grassroots organizations also act as resistance to the lies of the budget cuts, corporate loan scams, billion dollar bailouts (corporate welfare) and rampant real estate speculation. In the Bay Area, a group has just formed called Revenue for All, which is promoting a taxation movement for all.

So, as over 17,000 people face starvation and homelessness in Northern California and New York, and countless others across the nation affected by these acts of budget genocide, I wonder what it would mean if we began challenging the scarcity models presented as fact by our legislators and began to re-envision another type of budget based on sharing with all rather than sharing with a few; and I wonder what it mean if no one had a lie to lean on about why I don't need to care about my fellow human. Perhaps then, we as a capitalized, consumerist, self-centered culture would have to look at ourselves and our own greed, so we could all resist this lie called the budget cut and realize there is enough for all of us to not only survive, but to thrive.