GOP Shifts Further Right After Cantor Defeat

The death wish of the GOP over the longer term continues as the party shifts further right after Eric Cantor's primary defeat - even as the nation as a whole fails to move in that direction.  Indeed, the GOP's fixation on appeasing a shrinking base of angry white voters has not let up.  Never mind the surging Hispanic population and the younger generation's revulsion towards the far right social issues that are dejure with the insane, Christofascist dominated GOP base.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at this continued GOP slide toward becoming the crazy party.  Here are excerpts:

If anyone doubted that the Republican Party would become more conservative after the ousting of Eric Cantor, his successor put those doubts to rest over the weekend.

In an interview with Fox News, incoming House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) revealed leadership's first significant policy shift: opposition to reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank when its current charter expires on Sept. 30, a move that would shutter the credit agency.

"One of the problems with government is it's going to take hard earned money so others do things that the private sector can do. That's what Ex-Im Bank does," he said. "I think Ex-Im Bank is one that government does not have to be involved in. The private sector can do it."

The Ex-Im Bank, first established in 1934, is tasked with boosting the exports of American goods and services through loans and guarantees. In fiscal year 2013, the Ex-Im bank supported $37.4 billion in U.S. exports and 205,000 export-related American jobs, the agency estimated.

One of the most avowed opponents of the Ex-Im Bank is Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX)  . . . . Hensarling is no ordinary conservative troublemaker. The six-term congressman is respected by Republicans and beloved by the activist right, which has been pushing him to mount a dark-horse bid to unseat John Boehner as Speaker next year.

McCarthy also shifted his tone on the issue of immigration reform. In January, the Californian, who hails from a district that is 35 percent Hispanic, championed "legal status that will allow [people living in the U.S. illegally] to work and pay taxes."

On Sunday McCarthy was singing a different tune, telling Fox News that the House should do "nothing about immigration until we secure the borders." He added: "The borders are not secure." He didn't specify what would constitute a secure border, leaving enough room to oppose immigration reform no matter what happens at the border.

The GOP’s ‘Jobs’ Hypocrisy

One of the main goals of this blog is to expose hypocrisy, particularly in the political realm and in the realm of religion.  Both areas provide plenty of topics for review.  And in the political realm, the Republican Party provides an endless stream of rank hypocrisy, including its claimed honoring of Christian values even as it pursues policies diametrically the opposite of the Gospel message.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the GOP's hypocrisy on job creation.  Here are some highlights:

I bring good news this new year! Conservatives have a jobs agenda, one that isn’t built around merely cutting taxes and regulations and getting the government out of the way so the free market can strut its stuff.

No—this includes… are you ready?… infrastructure investment, and a monetary policy less obsessed with keeping inflation under 2 percent. It’s new, it’s exhilarating, it’s brilliant! And it’s the same stuff that Barack Obama and most liberal Democrats have favored for years.

When David Frum, whom I respect a great deal, tweets that a new article should be thought of as “a ‘95 theses’ moment for the reformist right,” he gets my attention. So I clicked immediately and read through “A Jobs Agenda for the Right,” by Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, from the new issue of National Affairs. 

[R]reading it was far more infuriating than reading something by a conservative and disagreeing with every syllable, because articles like Strain’s refuse to acknowledge, let alone try to grapple with, the central and indisputable fact that the contemporary Republican Party—his presumed vehicle for all this pro-jobs reform—has opposed many of these initiatives tooth and nail.

The first big measure Strain touts in his essay is infrastructure. . . . There are people who’ve been trying to do just that. . . . . Their attempts to fund a modest infrastructure bank were supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But it could never get anywhere because of rock-solid GOP opposition. Does Strain not even know this? Or is he pretending it never existed so he doesn’t have to deal with the political reality of Republican obduracy?

From there, Strain turns to monetary policy, and this is even more comic. The Federal Reserve, he writes, should relax the 2 percent inflation target to get the unemployment numbers down. Uh, yes. It should. But it’s not as if Strain just originally thought of this. Liberals have been saying this ever since 2009, or 2008 even. And in response, conservatives have been saying that doing so will produce galloping inflation and destroy our economy. You’ve seen Ben Bernanke get badgered about inflation by Republicans from Paul Ryan on down for years.

As I said, I agree with Strain. I agree when he writes: “In short, conservatives should see that there is a role for macroeconomic stimulus in getting the labor market back on its feet” and that “monetary policy with its eye on enabling growth can make a big difference.” Yes, they should. Well… how are they going to see that? Does Strain have some special pixie dust?

It’s astonishing that he can write this way, but it’s what they all do on the right. They maintain the fiction that their party is a party of rational people who will listen to rational argument and isn’t simply dug into a state of psychotic opposition to anything Barack Obama wants to do. Everyone watching our politics for the last five years knows that if Obama is for it, the Republicans will oppose it.

[W]ith regard to jobs and wage stagnation and poverty and so on, the problem is that conservatives deny empirical reality. This gives us people like Paul Ryan, for example, who genuinely seems to believe, in the face of the mountains of evidence about how the social safety net and federal entitlements have saved millions from lives of far worse destitution, that all government can do is make slaves of people. That’s bad enough.

But now, we have conservatives who accept enough empirical reality to agree that public investment is not a crime against nature, but who deny the political reality that the Republican Party stands in the way of progress.

If conservative intellectuals keep pretending this isn’t a problem, there is no hope that it will change.

American Workers Have Unprecedented Anxiety About Jobs

The Republican Party gives a lot of lip service to caring about jobs and the economy, yet rather than pass meaningful legislation to spur the economy upward, the GOP's sole focus - when not maligning gays to please the Christofascists - is obstruction of anything and everything Barack Obama proposes, the Affordable Health Care Act in particular.  Meanwhile, other than the wealthy who are getting richer, the rest of us are experiencing downward mobility and increased fears of job loss and/or whether or not we can pay our bills and support our families.  The GOP truly has its head up its ass.  A new survey reveals just how anxious many Americans are about jobs and the economy.  The Washington Post has details.  Here are excerpts:

American workers are living with unprecedented economic anxiety, four years into a recovery that has left so many of them stuck in place. That anxiety is concentrated heavily among low-income workers such as Stewart.

More than six in 10 workers in a recent Washington Post-Miller Center poll worry that they will lose their jobs to the economy, surpassing concerns in more than a dozen surveys dating to the 1970s. Nearly one in three, 32 percent, say they worry “a lot” about losing their jobs, also a record high, according to the joint survey, which explores Americans’ changing definition of success and their confidence in the country’s future.
Job insecurities have always been higher among low-income Americans, but they typically rose and fell across all levels of the income ladder. Today, workers at the bottom have drifted away, occupying their own island of in­security.

Fifty-four percent of workers making $35,000 or less now worry “a lot” about losing their jobs, compared with 37 percent of ­lower-income workers in 1992 and an identical number in 1975, according to surveys by Time magazine, CNN and Yankelovich, a market research firm.
Lower-paid workers also worry far more about making ends meet. Fully 85 percent of them fear that their families’ income will not be enough to meet expenses, up 25 points from a 1971 survey asking an identical question. Thirty-two percent say they worry all the time about meeting expenses, a number that has almost tripled since the 1970s.

Americans’ economic perceptions often divide along political lines; supporters of the incumbent president are usually more optimistic about the job market and the health of the economy. But that’s not the case with this new anxiety. Once you control for economic and demographic factors, there is no partisan divide. There’s no racial divide, either, and no gender gap. It also doesn’t matter where you live.

There is a reason workers like Stewart are so nervous in today’s economy. That reason is the economy itself. There are still 11 million Americans looking for work who can’t find a job. The unemployment rate is 7.3 percent, higher than it has been since 1980, except during recessions and their immediate aftermaths. Adjusting for inflation, average household incomes for the poorest 40 percent of workers have fallen steadily — by more than 10 percent, total — since 2000.

There's more and it is depressing.  And most of these workers likely have no healthcare coverage.  Not that today's Republicans give a damn. 

Americans' Increasingly Bleak Labor Picture

Most people know that America's economy remains less than stellar.  But often missed in the analysis is how the prospect of good paying jobs is spirally downward even as the Republican Party continues relentless attacks on labor unions which historically brought better paying jobs and benefits such as health care insurance coverage.   A lengthy article in American Prospect looks at the bleak picture of an economy where higher paying jobs are disappearing while low wage jogs are increasing.  Some of the information on Wal-Mart is both informative and shocking - I won't be shopping at Wal-Mart any time soon.  And overall, the article is disturbing.  Welcome to the vision of the GOP and corporate vultures who long for the "good old days" of the Gilded Age.  Here are extended excerpts:

That year [1974], for the first time since the end of World War II, Americans’ wages declined. 

Since 1947, Americans at all points on the economic spectrum had become a little better off with each passing year. The economy’s rising tide, as President John F. Kennedy had famously said, was lifting all boats. Productivity had risen by 97 percent in the preceding quarter-century, and median wages had risen by 95 percent. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted in The Affluent Society, this newly middle-class nation had become more egalitarian. The poorest fifth had seen their incomes increase by 42 percent since the end of the war, while the wealthiest fifth had seen their incomes rise by just 8 percent. Economists have dubbed the period the “Great Compression.”

This egalitarianism, of course, was severely circumscribed. African Americans had only recently won civil equality, and economic equality remained a distant dream. Women entered the workforce in record numbers during the early 1970s to find a profoundly discriminatory labor market.

What no one grasped at the time was that this wasn’t a one-year anomaly, that 1974 would mark a fundamental breakpoint in American economic history. In the years since, the tide has continued to rise, but a growing number of boats have been chained to the bottom. Productivity has increased by 80 percent, but median compensation (that’s wages plus benefits) has risen by just 11 percent during that time. The middle-income jobs of the nation’s postwar boom years have disproportionately vanished. Low-wage jobs have disproportionately burgeoned. Employment has become less secure. Benefits have been cut.

As their incomes flat-lined, Americans struggled to maintain their standard of living. In most families, both adults entered the workforce. They worked longer hours. When paychecks stopped increasing, they tried to keep up by incurring an enormous amount of debt. The combination of skyrocketing debt and stagnating income proved predictably calamitous (though few predicted it). Since the crash of 2008, that debt has been called in. 

All the factors that had slowly been eroding Americans’ economic lives over the preceding three decades—globalization, deunionization, financialization, Wal-Martization, robotization, the whole megillah of nefarious –izations—have now descended en masse on the American people. Since 2000, even as the economy has grown by 18 percent, the median income of households headed by people under 65 has declined by 12.4 percent. Since 2001, employment in low-wage occupations has increased by 8.7 percent while employment in middle-wage occupations has decreased by 7.3 percent. Since 2003, the median wage has not grown at all. 

The economic landscape of the quarter-century following World War II has become not just unfamiliar but almost unimaginable today. . . . .  The defining practice of the day was Fordism (named after Henry Ford), under which employers paid their workers enough that they could afford to buy the goods they mass--produced. The course of Fordism never ran as smoothly as it may seem in retrospect. Winning pay increases in halcyon postwar America required a continual succession of strikes. 

[T]hroughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, many corporate executives believed that their workers’ well-being mattered. “The job of management is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups: stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large,” the chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon) said in 1951. Once hired, a good worker became part of the family, which entitled him to certain rewards. “Maximizing employee security is a prime company goal,” Earl Willis, General Electric’s manager of employee benefits, wrote in 1962.

Although the biggest contributor to inflation was the increase in energy prices, a growing number of executives and commentators laid the blame for the economy’s troubles on the wages of American workers. “Some people will have to do with less,” Business Week editorialized. “Yet it will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow—the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.”

With the second oil shock, inflation surged to 13.5 percent. Volcker responded by inducing a recession. “The standard of living of the average American,” he said, “has to decline.” Raising the federal funds interest rate to nearly 20 percent throughout 1981, the Fed chairman brought much of American business—particularly the auto industry, where sales collapsed in the face of high borrowing costs—to a standstill. By 1982, unemployment had risen to a postwar high of 10.8 percent.

[In 1981] Three signal events—Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker’s deliberately induced recession, President Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air-traffic controllers, and General Electric CEO Jack Welch’s declaration that his company would reward its shareholders at the expense of its workers—made clear that the age of broadly shared prosperity was over. 

Reagan’s union busting was quickly emulated by many private-sector employers. In 1983, the nation’s second-largest copper-mining company, Phelps Dodge, ended its cost-of-living adjustment, provoking a walkout of its workers, whom it replaced with new hires who then decertified the union. The same year, Greyhound Bus cut wages, pushing its workers out on strike, then hired replacements at lower wages. Also in 1983, Louisiana Pacific, the second-largest timber company, reduced its starting hourly wage, forcing a strike that culminated in the same kind of worker defeats seen at Phelps Dodge and Greyhound. Eastern Airlines, Boise Cascade, International Paper, Hormel meatpacking—all went down the path of forcing strikes to weaken or destroy their unions.

The loss of workers’ leverage was compounded by a radical shift in corporations’ view of their mission. In August 1981, at New York’s Pierre Hotel, Jack Welch, General Electric’s new CEO, delivered a kind of inaugural address, which he titled “Growing Fast in a Slow-Growth Economy.” GE, Welch proclaimed, would henceforth shed all its divisions that weren’t No. 1 or No. 2 in their markets. If that meant shedding workers, so be it. All that mattered was pushing the company to pre-eminence, and the measure of a company’s pre-eminence was its stock price.

Between late 1980 and 1985, Welch reduced the number of GE employees from 411,000 to 299,000. He cut basic research. The company’s stock price soared. So much for balancing the interests of employees, stockholders, consumers, and the public. The new model company was answerable solely to its stockholders. 

By the end of the century, corporations acknowledged that they had downgraded workers in their calculus of concerns. In the 1980s, a Conference Board survey of corporate executives found that 56 percent agreed that “employees who are loyal to the company and further its business goals deserve an assurance of continued employment.” When the Conference Board asked the same question in the 1990s, 6 percent of executives agreed. “Loyalty to a company,” Welch once said, “it’s nonsense.”

The definitive Southern company, and the company that has done the most to subject the American job to the substandard standards of the South, has been Wal-Mart, which began as a single store in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962. That year, the federal minimum wage, set at $1.15 an hour, was extended to retail workers, much to the dismay of Sam Walton, who was paying the employees at his fast-growing chain half that amount. Since the law initially applied to businesses with 50 or more employees, Walton argued that each of his stores was a separate entity, a claim that the Department of Labor rejected, fining Walton for his evasion of federal law.

Undaunted, Wal-Mart has carried its commitment to low wages through a subsequent half-century of relentless expansion. In 1990, it became the country’s largest retailer, and today the chain is the world’s largest private-sector employer, with 1.3 million employees in the United States and just under a million abroad. As Wal-Mart grew beyond its Ozark base, it brought Walton’s Southern standards north.

When a Wal-Mart opens in a new territory, it either drives out the higher-wage competition or compels that competition to lower its pay. David Neumark, an economist at the University of California, Irvine, has shown that eight years after Wal-Mart comes to a county, it drives down wages for all (not just retail) workers until they’re 2.5 percent to 4.8 percent below wages in comparable counties with no Wal-Mart outlets. 

Wal-Mart’s antipathy to unions and affinity for low wages merely reflects the South’s historic opposition to worker autonomy and employee rights. By coming north, though, Wal-Mart has lowered retail-sector wages throughout the U.S.

A cumulative effect of Wal-Martization is that incomes in the industrial Midwest have been dropping toward levels set in Alabama and Tennessee. According to Moody’s Analytics, the wage-and-benefit gap between Midwestern and Southern workers, which was $7 in 2008, had shrunk to just $3.34 by the end of 2011.

Today, the share of the nation’s income going to wages, which for decades was more than 50 percent, is at a record low of 43 percent, while the share of the nation’s income going to corporate profits is at a record high. The economic lives of Americans today paint a picture of mass downward mobility. According to a National Employment Law Project study in 2012, low-wage jobs (paying less than $13.83 an hour) made up 21 percent of the jobs lost during the recession but more than half of the jobs created since the recession ended. Middle-income jobs (paying between $13.84 and $21.13 hourly) made up three-fifths of the jobs lost during the recession but just 22 percent of the jobs created since.

The decline of the American job is ultimately the consequence of the decline of worker power. Beginning in the 1970s, corporate management was increasingly determined to block unions’ expansion to any regions of the country (the South and Southwest) or sectors of the economy (such as retail and restaurants) that were growing. An entire new industry—consultants who helped companies defeat workers’ efforts to unionize—sprang up.

The collapse of workers’ power to bargain helps explain one of the primary paradoxes of the current American economy: why productivity gains are not passed on to employees. . . . . the share of revenues going to wages and benefits in manufacturing has declined by 14 percent since 1970, while the share going to profits has correspondingly increased.

Only if the suppression of labor’s power is made part of the equation can the overall decline in good jobs over the past 35 years be explained. Only by considering the waning of worker power can we understand why American corporations, sitting on more than $1.5 trillion in unexpended cash, have used those funds to buy back stock and increase dividends but almost universally failed even to consider raising their workers’ wages. 

This May, a Pew poll asked respondents if they thought that today’s children would be better or worse off than their parents. Sixty-two percent said worse off, while 33 percent said better. Studies that document the decline of intergenerational mobility suggest that this newfound pessimism is well grounded.

The extinction of a large and vibrant American middle class isn’t ordained by the laws of either economics or physics. Many of the impediments to creating anew a broadly prosperous America are ultimately political creations that are susceptible to political remedy. Amassing the power to secure those remedies will require an extraordinary, sustained, and heroic political mobilization. Americans will have to transform their anxiety into indignation and direct that indignation to the task of reclaiming their stake in the nation’s future.

 

GOP Smackdown: Wonks vs.Politicans

Bill Kristol, Peggy Noonan, Newt Gingrich and John Boehner

As noted any number of times on this blog, the remaining rational Republican/conservative pundits are increasingly distressed with the GOP's refusal to reform itself and face a changing political landscape.  Instead of reform and innovation, elected officials in the GOP continue to listen to the same religious extremists - e.g., the Family Research Council, the U.S. Catholic bishops, and other Christofascist groups - and anti-tax groups such as Grover Norquist's outfit that helped settle the stage for the 2012 election debacle.  A debacle that would have been complete at the national level but for the gerrymandering of Congressional districts.  A piece in Politico looks at the intra-party infighting.  Here are highlights:

The latest front in the battle for the future of the Republican Party: the wonks versus the pols.  Conservative thinkers are increasingly agitated that, four months after a second straight presidential drubbing, GOP officeholders are not taking bold steps to bring a 1980s-style Republican platform into the 21st century.

Almost daily, there is a fresh op-ed or magazine piece from the class of commentators and policy intellectuals urging Republicans to show a little intellectual leg and offer some daring and innovation beyond the old standbys of cutting income taxes and spending. It’s not that the eggheads are urging moderation — it’s more like relevance. The standard plea: The GOP will rebound only when it communicates to working-class and middle-class voters how its ideas will improve their lives.

But there is virtually no evidence that these impassioned appeals for change are being listened to by the audience that matters — Republican elected officials. With few exceptions, most of the GOP leadership in Washington is following a business-as-usual strategy. The language and tactics being used in this winter’s battles with President Barack Obama are tried-and-true Republican maxims that date back to the Reagan era or before. And that, say the wonks, spells political danger and more electoral decline.

Some of the conservative thinkers allow that the politicians are lagging indicators and have time before the next election. But the volume of the grumbling is ratcheting up as the party’s poll numbers continue to fall and the GOP’s fixation on austerity — and only austerity — appears increasingly out of tune.

“The problem with the deficit as an issue is that people care about economic growth more, and the problem with spending cuts is that people like them more in the abstract than in reality,” wrote National Review editor Rich Lowry in a POLITICO column last week, adding: “At times, it seems as if ‘we have a $16 trillion debt’ is the sum total of the party’s argumentation.”

Criticizing GOP inaction on the sequester, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol lashed Republicans in the current issue of his magazine for being “complicit in the failure of political responsibility and national seriousness we’re now witnessing.

As long as the GOP remains beholden to the Tea Party lunatics and religious extremist who have taken over the party base, the pundit and wonk class can rant and complain all they want, but no real change will occur.  Change and innovation do not occur when elected officials are pandering to those detached from objective reality and those who want to turn time back by at least a century.

Mitt Romney's Trade Policy Claims Versus Bain Capital's Practices

One of the things that Mitt Romney claims that he would do is "get tough on China" should he win election.  The sound bite plays well with the Christofascist/Tea Party element in the GOP.  The problem is that the claim isn't even consistent with what Romney's former buddies at Bain Capital are doing as they help ship American jobs to China.  The New York  Times looks at example where automotive manufacturing jobs have been and/or are soon to be outsourced to China.  As seems to always be the case, Romney says one thing yet reality is something very different.  Here are some story excerpts:

The tale of Asimco Technologies, an auto parts manufacturer whose plants dot eastern China, would seem to underscore Mitt Romney’s campaign-trail complaint that China’s manufacturing juggernaut is costing America jobs.
 

Nine years ago, the company bought two camshaft factories that employed about 500 people in Michigan. By 2007 both were shut down. Now Asimco manufactures the same components in China on government-donated land in a coastal region that China has designated an export base, where companies are eligible for the sort of subsidies Mr. Romney says create an unfair trade imbalance. 

But there is a twist to the Asimco story that would not fit neatly into a Romney stump speech: Since 2010, it has been owned by Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mr. Romney, who has as much as $2.25 million invested in three Bain funds with large stakes in Asimco and at least seven other Chinese businesses, according to his 2012 candidate financial disclosure and other documents. 

As a candidate, Mr. Romney uses China as a punching bag. He accuses Beijing of unfairly subsidizing Chinese exports, artificially holding down the value of its currency to keep exports cheap, stealing American technology and hacking into corporate and government computers.  . . . . .  But his private equity dealings, both while he headed Bain and since, complicate that message. 

Among the companies in which the Bain funds have invested is a global auto parts maker that is in the process of closing a factory in Illinois and moving most of the equipment and jobs to Jiangsu Province, where the Chinese government has built it a new plant; a Chinese electronics retailer accused by Microsoft of selling computers with pirated software; and a Hong Kong-based Chinese appliance maker that was sued for copying another company’s design for a deep-fat fryer. 

Mr. Romney continues to have money in Bain funds with sizable holdings in China. He has as much as $250,000 in the Bain Capital Asia Fund and as much as $1 million each in Bain Capital Funds IX and X, all Cayman Islands entities used by Bain to make sizable investments in China . . . . 

Bain’s interest in China dates to when Mr. Romney ran the firm. During a panel discussion at the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston in February 1998, he told of touring an appliance factory in China where 5,000 employees “were working, working, working, as hard as they could, at rates of roughly 50 cents an hour.” 

Mr. Romney also has millions invested in a series of Bain funds that have a controlling stake in Sensata Technologies . . . . Two years ago, Sensata bought an operation that made automobile sensors in Freeport, Ill. At the first meeting with the plant’s 170 workers, Sensata managers announced that by the end of 2012 all the equipment and jobs would be relocated, mostly to Jiangsu Province. 

There is more to the article, but the foregoing paints a clear picture: Romney says one thing on the campaign trail, but his own investment strategy and that of his former Bain compatriots tells a very different story.  Is Romney a liar?  Draw your own conclusions.  I've drawn my own: Romney is a pathological liar and money is his only real god.