Business Confidence In Trump is Collapsing

The Republican Party likes to maintain the myth that it is fiscally conservative and a friend to the business community.  Both are lies as the ballooning federal deficit due to the Trump/GOP tax cuts for the wealthy and the erratic at best Trump trade policies underscore in spades. Now, with the 2020 elections little more than a year away, it appears the economy may be headed for recession even as significant parts of the economy - agriculture and manufacturing - are already in recession thanks in no small part to Trump's trade wars. Making matters worse, the outlook of business leaders is pessimistic due in no small part to the uncertain the Trump/Pence regime casts across the business world.  As one Nobel prize winning economist states "they are facing up to the reality that Trump and his team . . . . have no idea what they’re doing" and are fearful to invest and/or expand their businesses when don't know what curve ball could be thrown there way at any moment. Here are highlights from a New York Times column that looks at the gathering clouds:

Last spring Donald Trump and the people around him probably thought they had a relatively clear path to re-election.

On one side, it looked as if Trump had weathered the threat of politically fatal scandal. The much-awaited Mueller report on Russian election intervention had landed with a dull thud; the details were damning, but it had basically no political impact.

At the same time, Trump was convinced that he could run on the basis of a booming economy.

What a difference a few months make.

Everyone is following the impeachment story, and I don’t have much to add, except a warning: At every stage of this process, Republicans have proved willing to engage in stunningly bad behavior. Did anyone foresee Wednesday’s physical attempt to disrupt the House inquiry? The point is that as the net closes in, the G.O.P. response is likely to be uglier than you can possibly imagine.

What’s getting less attention, understandably, is the way the Trump economic narrative is falling apart. . . . important parts of the economy are lagging. Manufacturing production is down over the past year; combined with weakness in shipping and very hard times in agriculture, around a fifth of the economy is effectively in recession. In particular, manufacturing employment has been falling in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, states that chose Trump by tiny margins in 2016, giving him a win in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote.

And overall growth, while still positive, is definitely slowing: “nowcasts,” which use partial data to estimate what official economic data will say when it’s eventually released, suggest an economy growing at an unimpressive annual rate of less than 2 percent. . . . this is not good news for Republicans.

You can see this collapse several ways. One is through surveys of business executives, who spent Trump’s first two years being very bullish, but have now become remarkably pessimistic.

You can also see it in the bond market, a much better indicator of economic expectations than the stock market. . . . 10-year bond rates have plunged, from more than 3 percent last year to 1.75 percent as I write this. The last time we saw this kind of plunge was 2010-11, when investors finally realized that recovery from the Great Recession was going to be slow and painful, not a repeat of “morning in America.”

So what happened to the Trump boom? The collapse in confidence began late last year, when it became clear that Trump was serious about waging trade war on China; it continued as evidence accumulated that the 2017 tax cut was a big fizzle, doing basically nothing to boost business investment and providing at most a brief sugar high to overall growth.

But the truth is that even pessimists expected the tax cut to do more good, and the trade war less harm, than they did. Why have things turned out so poorly? One answer, to which I’ve subscribed, is that in addition to its direct impacts on U.S. exports and businesses that rely on Chinese suppliers, the trade war has created damaging uncertainty. Businesses that rely on global supply chains won’t invest for fear that the trade war will get even worse; but businesses that might move in to replace imports also won’t invest for fear that Trump will eventually back down.

I suspect, however, that there’s even more to the story. Business interests spent a long time in denial, but now even they are facing up to the reality that Trump and his team are very strange people who have no idea what they’re doing — and the uncertainty that reality implies.

Next year’s election should be about Trump’s betrayal of his oath of office. Realistically, however, it also matters that the economy probably won’t be his friend.

Labor Department Rule Change to Bringing Overtime Pay To Millions Of Workers

One standard way for employers to get around overtime pay (and perhaps even minimum wage requirements) for their employees has been to treat them as salaried employees rather than hourly employees who are subject to minimum wage and overtime pay rules.  Recognizing this, the Labor Department had previously set a threshold for salary incomes below which the overtime pay rules would be triggered.  However, until now, that threshold has been a pathetic $23,660.00.  Now, that threshold will be increased to $47,476.  Expect shrieks and screams from Republicans and those who want to bring back the bad old days of the falsely named Gilded Age.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at this change that may positively impact millions of Americans.  Here are article highlights:

The Labor Department announced Tuesday that it completed one of the most ambitious economic reforms of the Obama era, finalizing a new rule that will extend overtime protections to millions of additional workers.

The administration will accomplish that by raising what’s known as the overtime salary threshold. Nearly all workers earning salaries beneath that threshold are entitled to time-and-a-half pay whenever they work more than 40 hours in a week.

The current threshold is just $23,660. The White House will be doubling that number, to $47,476, guaranteeing overtime rights for salaried workers earning less than that. The Labor Department will now update the threshold every three years to make sure it keeps pace with inflation.

The White House estimates that the change will bring overtime rights to 4.2 million workers who are currently excluded. It will also clarify eligibility for another 8.9 million workers who may or may not have overtime protections under the current rules, officials said.

On a call with reporters Tuesday, Labor Secretary Tom Perez said the reform was meant to address “both underpay and overwork.”

With a minimum wage hike blocked on Capitol Hill, expanding overtime was the most aggressive way for the Obama administration to raise wages for private-sector workers. The White House is making the reforms through the executive rule-making process, under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It doesn’t need congressional approval to do so, although Republicans may still try to block the reforms through the appropriations process.

Passed during the Great Depression, America’s overtime law was meant to protect workers from being worked too long and paid too little. The rules guarantee that workers get paid extra when they work extra. The rules also discourage employers from working employees long hours by making it more expensive to do so, through a time-and-a-half premium.

But under the current regulations, many working-class employees who earn above the low salary threshold are classified as “managers” and therefore don’t have overtime rights. Employers have an incentive to pile work onto these employees, since their extra time essentially comes for free. As a result, in retail some store managers will clock 60, 70 or even 80 hours, but only take home a modest salary in the $30,000 range.

In 1975, 62 percent of salaried workers had overtime rights; now, that share is a mere 7 percent, according to White House estimates.   “And you wonder why the middle class is struggling,” Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday. “If you work overtime you should actually get paid for working overtime.”

“Overworked and underpaid managers, postdoctoral researchers, social workers, insurance claims workers, and many others will have their lives improved one way or another by this rule,” said Eisenbrey, who was one of the most vocal voices for the reform. “It’s great to see the government doing something significant to help the struggling middle class.”

EPI estimates that the effects could be greater than the White House anticipates. The group projects that 12.5 million workers will “directly benefit” from the new rules — slightly more than half of them women, and a disproportionate share of them African-American and Hispanic. The biggest effects will be felt in the South, where a larger share of workers are carved out of protections under the current rules.

Business groups lobbied hard against the new rules, claiming they would lead employers to cut back on hours, and force workers to start tracking their time as hourly employees. What the rules will undoubtedly do is give many employers a hard choice: Either limit workers’ hours to 40 per week so they don’t incur the time-and-a-half premium, or start paying workers more for the extra time they work.

What Republicans and business groups seem to never contemplate is that if workers have increased income, they will spend much of it in the marketplace and boost the economy - and the demand for goods and services.  It is not a zero sum game. I can think of many law firms and title companies that may need to revisit their wage practises.  

Stands on Social Issues Causing Civil War in GOP

As a former Republican, in my view it is far past time when the business community base of the Republican Party needed to stand up to the knuckle dragging elements of the party base best embodied by Christofascists - many of whom are also white supremacists - who want to drag the nation back to the worse aspects of the 1950's and in the process make right wing Christianity the de facto national religion.  With the ongoing fights over deceptively named "religious liberty" bills at the state level, the business faction of the GOP has finally realized that pandering to the prejudices of the Christofascists is bad for business - just ask the High Point Furniture Market which is seeing massive cancellations thanks to the North Carolina GOP.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the growing civil war between the business wing of the GOP and the religious extremists of the Christofascist elements of the party base.  Here are excerpts:

The ideological rifts breaking apart the Republican Party have moved into the states, where business leaders and evangelicals who have long coexisted in the GOP are suddenly at war over social issues such as gay rights and religious freedom.

The escalating feud has been evident in recent days in Georgia and North Carolina, where Republican governors have taken opposite approaches to dealing with these two vocal constituencies.

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, facing pressure from corporate heavyweights such as Delta Air Lines and Disney, vetoed a bill that would have allowed pastors and faith-based groups to deny services to same-sex couples. The decision by Deal, who is not running for reelection, has drawn fire from leading evangelical activists, who have accused him of being a traitor to their cause.

The legislative battles, which have played out in state capitals across the country, underscore the unusual level of disarray in a party that traditionally strives for order. Rather than unifying around a message and strategy to win back the White House and retain congressional majorities, the GOP is largely collapsing amid factional warfare. There is seemingly no issue where Republicans agree — with bitter disputes raging over trade, foreign policy, entitlements and social issues.

Trump’s rise has muddied the ideological waters for the camps that have long made up the bulk of the GOP coalition — the three-legged stool built by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s consisting of fiscal conservatives, national security hawks and social conservatives. He has railed against free-trade deals backed by big business and blasted an interventionist foreign policy embraced by GOP hawks.

But the state-level battles between businesses and evangelicals demonstrate that the Republican Party’s troubles go beyond the concerns over Trump — pointing to a potentially irreconcilable divide between core elements of the GOP base.

Each side remains influential. Evangelical leaders can mobilize large numbers of activists and voters in key states and congressional districts. Corporations, meanwhile, operating in a post-Citizens United world of unlimited political spending, have the ability to put enormous pressure on policymakers.

“You are talking about two portions of the Republican Party who don’t fundamentally understand one another. . . . . The anger among evangelicals was especially raw this week after Deal’s veto.  “The devil has gone down to Georgia again, but this time it was in the form of big business and cowardly politicians,” said Tony Perkins, president of the evangelical Family Research Council.

Evangelical activists began pushing measures they describe as promoting “religious liberty” — aimed at protecting people such as wedding cake bakers or photographers who object to same-sex marriage from being legally compelled to participate in ceremonies. But these protections are often written broadly, with critics arguing they allow discrimination against the LGBT community in other ways, such as in employment and providing charitable services.

The focus on gay marriage ran counter to recommendations in a post-2012 election autopsy report published by the Republican National Committee. The report urged the party to move away from social issues as a way to expand the GOP’s reach beyond core conservatives.

Many Republican elites, including executives at big companies, feel like gay marriage is settled law and do not think special measures are needed to protect religious conservatives.

“Generally, in the past, big business wanted to keep out of social issues,” said David Boaz, a longtime leader at the libertarian Cato Institute. “The corporate world has moved more to the cultural left. The religious right is feeling more and more embattled, isolated, and that makes them even angrier about things like this veto in Georgia.”

The [2016 gubernatorial] campaign in North Carolina could hinge on how evangelicals and business leaders respond.  The state’s attorney general, Roy Cooper, a Democrat vying to unseat McCrory, on Tuesday called the law a “national embarrassment” and said he would not defend it in court.

The feuding will likely unfold in additional states over the coming weeks and months. . . . Gregg Keller, the Missouri-based GOP operative who was tasked with outreach to conservative activists on Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s presidential campaign last year, said the business wing should recognize that religious conservatives will not go away.

“One of the largest cultural imperatives that helped lead to the rise of Christianity was the view of the sexually licentious nature of the Roman Empire,” he said. “This is not a bug of evangelical Christianity; this is a feature. This is a hill on which evangelical Christians are going to be willing to die.”  He added: “The business community has caught the bull by the horns on this one.”

What is laughable about the Christofascists complaints about "sexual licentiousness" is that it is they themselves (especially in the Bible Belt) who have the highest divorce rates, the highest Internet porn usage, the most teen pregnancies and a seemingly endless string of sex scandals.  They want to police everyone else's sex life, yet their own are lives are veritable soap operas with white trash characters.

Is Corporate America Finally Ready to Turn Its Back on Christian Extremists?

With the veto of Georgia's falsely named religious liberty bill by GOP Governor Nathan Deal, some are conjecturing that corporate America has finally decided that it is time to turn its back on ignorance embracing, anti-modernity far right Christians.  The fact that North Carolina Republicans chose to ram through that state's anti-LGBT in a single day so as to close the door to corporate reaction before the bill's passage was a fait accompli in someways further the argument.  Simply put, business thrives the most when the best and brightest can be recruited and made to feel welcome and at home, yet this is the antithesis of the hate and bigotry based Christofascist agenda.  A column in the Washington Post looks at big business' overdue wake up call.  Here are excerpts:

On Monday, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a conservative Republican, said he would veto a bill that would have legalized discrimination against gay people, responding to an outcry from corporate interests including Coca-Cola, Home Depot, UPS, Walt Disney, Delta, Time Warner, Comcast, Netflix, Apple and the National Football League. As state legislators pushed the “religious liberty” bill through, Deal told them: “I hope that we can all just take a deep breath, recognize that the world is changing around us.”

Headlines of the past week show seemingly contradictory developments: Even as Georgia’s governor took a bold stand against discrimination, North Carolina’s Republican governor last Wednesday signed into law similar legislation enshrining discrimination again lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents.

But there is really no contradiction: Georgia’s governor vetoed the bill because it received massive public exposure and there was a resulting outcry from corporations concerned that it would offend customers and workers. North Carolina’s governor signed the bill literally in the dark of night, just before the Easter holiday weekend, after legislators introduced and passed it in a single day at a hastily convened special session — essentially slipping it into law before it could get attention and business interests could state their objections.

In both cases, you can see the effects of a new corporate citizenship that is emerging. Corporate America is traditionally conservative, reluctant to react to social controversy and divisive issues. But as public sentiment shifts dramatically on gay rights and as pro-equality millennials become a large bloc of consumers, business is shedding its reticence. This has happened, to a lesser extent, on immigration, various environmental issues and, recently, in support of Apple’s stand for consumer privacy.

Democrats and progressives see potential for a larger shift nationally in corporate political behavior, as Republicans take ideological stands on education, the Export-Import Bank, the debt ceiling and infrastructure spending that put them at odds with their traditional corporate allies. 

Though it’s not clear whether that broader shift to the left will occur among corporations, there is no doubt that a dramatic change has occurred on gay rights. When the Georgia legislature took up legislation giving religious groups the right to deny services to gay people, corporations by the dozen voiced their objections. Disney and Netflix said they would stop filming in Georgia, and the NFL said the bill would jeopardize Atlanta’s hopes of hosting the Super Bowl.

On Monday, he [Governor Deal] said the religious community’s request for government protection is “ironic,” because if “indeed our religious liberty is conferred by God and not by man-made government, we should heed the ‘hands-off’ admonition of the First Amendment.”

In North Carolina, Pat McCrory and state Republicans tried to avoid the trouble Deal faced, and the similar trouble Indiana Gov. Mike Pence faced in 2014. . . . [Yet] American Airlines, Apple, Dow Chemical, PayPal and others rushed to criticize the new law. The National Basketball Association suggested it might move its 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte.

On Tuesday, more than 80 top executives from blue-chip companies signed a letter to McCrory saying the legislation is “bad for our employees and bad for business” and will “make it far more challenging for businesses across the state to recruit” and will “diminish the state’s draw as a destination for tourism, new businesses and economic activity.” 

McCrory, unlike the term-limited Deal, is up for reelection and likely hopes the issue will rally his conservative supporters.  Now North Carolina will face the economic consequences of his poor choice. McCrory should have done what Georgia’s Deal proposed: take a deep breath, and recognize that the world is changing.

 

Big Business is Dragging the GOP into the Future on Gay Rights

I left the Republican Party for a number of reasons, the most important of which was the GOP's refusal to recognize the concept of separation of church and state.  Loosely related to this issue was the GOP's growing insistence to denigrate gays and make LGBT Americans forever legally inferior via so-called "marriage amendments."  Neither of these agendas fit with the Party's supposed allegiance to personal freedom and a smaller, less intrusive government.   As a column in Politico notes, the GOP has lost the battle against gay rights and big business has been a major factor in this defeat.  Moreover, some Republicans - namely, the non-Christofascists - are pleased with the outcome.  Here are some column highlights:

I'm not among those Republicans who have “evolved” on the issue of gay rights. I didn’t need to. I’ve always been attracted to the GOP message of more freedom and less government, but thought it hypocritical and counter to the core of our philosophy that Republicans would not apply those tenets to gay rights. But of course I was often the black sheep in campaign meetings during the 1990s and 2000s.

[T]he wedge issue [of gay rights] has now lost its edge, even, I would argue, in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. No Republican can win the nomination without the support of the business community. And Big Business is now at odds with the social conservative faction of the Republican Party over gay and transgender equality — and Big Business is winning.

Look at what’s happened in four states dominated by the GOP in the past year.

Weeks before the Super Bowl kickoff in 2014, the Arizona Legislature passed a bill allowing businesses to refuse service to gay customers. This “religious freedom” measure made it OK for business owners to kick customers out of their establishments if they opposed homosexuality on religious grounds. Scores of corporate titans in the travel and tourism industry, together with the NFL, opposed the bill. Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed it.

In Indiana this March, lawmakers tried to pass similar legislation, followed by a hell-hath-no-fury response led by Eli Lilly, Salesforce and Angie’s List, which canceled a $40 million project planned for Indianapolis. Marriott’s CEO said the legislation was “pure idiocy from a business perspective.” Gov. Mike Pence modified the bill, but the damage was done. (The state has since hired a global PR firm to resuscitate its image following the brouhaha.)

In Arkansas, same story. Seeing the firestorm that occurred in Indiana, Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson didn’t sign the original bill that hit his desk after calls for him to veto it came from his own son, and from Arkansas-based Wal-Mart, which said the bill ran counter to the company’s values. In the end, the governor signed a less toxic, less controversial bill.

And this week, Texas became the latest to join the fray.  The Lone Star State just wrapped its legislative session, which included two “religious freedom” constitutional amendments. Learning from what happened in the above states, industry groups and major businesses went out pre-emptively — let me say that again: pre-emptively — before such bills made it too far in the Legislature. The conservative state chamber of commerce, the Texas Association of Business, took the lead.

The amendments “would devastate economic development, tourism and the convention business,” said Bill Hammond, TAB’s CEO.

More than 250 Texas companies — American Airlines, Dell, Texas Instruments, Dow Chemical, the Dallas Mavericks — went on record with a general pledge in support of treating gay and transgender Texans fairly and equally under the law — and that welcoming and inclusive communities are essential to their bottom line.

Both amendments in the Texas Legislature died a quick death.

So: four states, same story and same result. If the “religious freedom” strategy can’t work in Texas — the bastion of conservatism and beacon for business — where can it work?

Elections are always about the future, never about the past. And so my advice to GOP candidates is to recognize that since our society has largely moved on, and business has moved on, so should the party of Abraham Lincoln, who fought a civil war over civil rights.

Discrimination is now simply bad for the bottom line and bad for any brand, whether a company’s or a state’s. When it comes to recruitment and retention, the millennial generation, which will be 75 percent of the workforce by 2030, doesn’t have much tolerance for anti-gay anything. In fact, it’s become somewhat of a litmus test. 73 percent of millennials support LGBT nondiscrimination, according to Public Religion Research Institute. Surely, they use it as one criterion when deciding where to work.

Negative national headlines on religious freedom continue to fuel a negative image of the entire party. Both in my private conversations with and in public (and private) polling, conservatives are moving ever closer to supporting full equity for LGBT Americans.

Shockingly, it’s still legal in the United States of America, even as we may be on the brink of having marriage equality in all 50 states, to fire and evict gay and transgender folks — and kick them out of a restaurant — simply for being who they are. This is patently wrong and needs to be fixed.

Democrats and Big Business are at work fixing it, together. That would have been an odd pairing years ago. The GOP position is untenable — and out of step with one of its key constituencies. It’s time to stand up to the social conservative wing and move into the future.

Is Corporate America About to Kick Social Conservatives to the Curb?

The twin pillars of the Republican Party over the last 30 years or more have been big business on the one hand and so-called social conservatives - those I call the Christofascists.  As a piece in Salon traces out, the union of big business and the Christofascists within the Republican tent was a marriage of convenience with big business and Republican candidates using social issues to turn out voters to vote ultimately against their own best interests.   The marriage of convenience first arose out of the use of racism and reaction to desegregation and later trended toward issues such as abortion and gays, not that racism and anti-immigrant bias ever disappeared from the mix.  Now, however, with the ranks of the Christofascists dwindling and social disapproval of the stridency and general hatefulness of the Christofascists growing, the marriage of convenience may be headed for divorce.  Here are excerpts from the article that focus on the hopefully coming divorce:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s op-ed in the New York Times marks the whimpering end of an unholy alliance. The letter itself was a ham-handed attempt to capture the 2016 evangelical vote before Sen. Ted Cruz does. But the very crudity of his piece revealed that the union at the heart of Movement Conservatism is ripping apart.

In his op-ed, Jindal undertook to explain to business leaders how Movement Conservatism works. Its political strategy, he lectured, “requires populist social conservatives to ally with the business community on economic matters and corporate titans to side with social conservatives on cultural matters.” The governor is right: Since the 1980s big business interests have managed to secure policies that have concentrated wealth at the very top of the economic ladder, and they have managed their coup only with the help of the votes of social conservatives.
 
But Jindal’s hyperbolic posturing as he warns “any corporation” “bullying” social conservatives into accepting same-sex marriage to “Save your breath,” reveals a touchstone moment: This grand alliance is over.

[I]ts stability depended on convincing evangelicals and social conservatives that slashing taxes and destroying business regulation served their social ends. Since 1980, those economic policies have concentrated wealth upward and left values voters with less and less. Rumblings of discontent have disturbed the coalition as real wages have stagnated and tax burdens have shifted down the ladder. Movement Conservatives continued to be able to rally support from evangelicals as they limited women’s reproductive choices and attacked minorities and immigrants as lazy criminals, but their power has slipped as the programs they slash increasingly harm values voters. Same-sex marriage marks the beginning of the divorce. Big business Movement Conservatives were happy to pay lip service to right-wing populism so long as it kept Republicans in power. But supporting it now will do the opposite, as most Americans swing behind non-discrimination.

Jindal’s op-ed offers Republicans a great opportunity. It employs the same rhetorical techniques Buckley did in 1951 — turning the popular majority in favor of equal rights into “the radical left,” for example — but now those techniques seem transparently, almost laughably, disingenuous. Seeing such a caricature of the bargain that made Movement Conservatism succeed could create the magical moment in which the party finally rejects the devil’s bargain it struck in the 1950s.

How Big Business is Pushing the Fight for Equality

As Republicans continue to reel over the reaction to Indiana's animus inspired "religious freedom restoration act" - a/k/a license to discriminate law - one thing that has caught them most by surprise is the sharp condemnation and threats of boycotts spearheaded by big business.  In the past Republicans pandering to Christofascists and hate groups like Family Research Council and the American Family Association have believed that they would suffer little push back for their bigotry and subversion of the religious freedom rights of non-Christofascists.  Now, that dynamic seems to have flipped and retribution by the business community seems assured.  The CEO of Starbucks even has gone so far as to tell anti-gay shareholders to sell their stock if they don't like the company's pro-gay stances. Hence on reason Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson had a sudden epiphany and declared that he would not sign the Arkansas bill without a number of changes.  Hopefully, the GOP is learning a harsh lesson.  Here are highlights from a Washington Post column on this new dynamic:

The outrage directed at the Hoosier State and others is being led by big business. And that’s awesome.

In a terrific column yesterday, Catherine Rampell wrote about how “the economics of discrimination seems to have been flipped on its head.” In the past, if the employers, employees and customers of a business “had a taste for discrimination” then that business had every incentive to condone it. It wasn’t bad for business. Today, the dynamic has changed. “If … firms feared that customers would punish them for inclusiveness,” Rampell writes, “today firms fear customers will instead punish them for exclusiveness.”

Here’s another way the dynamic has changed. The loudest voices demanding integration of lunch counters and other public accommodations in the 1960s belonged to African Americans. Through courage and moral conviction they changed hearts and minds on civil rights and racial equality. Today, in this current fight over equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans, what we are seeing is business not so much acting out of fear, but acting out of conscience.

“Men and women have fought and died fighting to protect our country’s founding principles of freedom and equality,” wrote Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook against the Indiana law. “We owe it to them, to each other and to our future to continue to fight with our words and our actions to make sure we protect those ideals.” Apple is ranked No. 5 on the Fortune 500 list, is worth $700 billion and has $178 billion in cash on hand.

“This is just plain wrong and … and we will not stand for it,” said Arne Sorenson, president of Marriott International, of the Indiana law.

And after a religious-freedom bill passed the state House yesterday on its way to the desk of Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R), Wal-Mart Chief Executive Doug McMillon urged a veto.  . . . .  Wal-Mart, headquartered in Bentonville, Ark., ranks No. 1 on the Fortune 500 list and is the largest private employer in Arkansas and in the United States. Surely this explains why Hutchinson announced today that he would not sign the religious freedom bill on his desk until it was changed to reflect the federal version.

They didn’t do it because of public pressure from LGBT rights groups. They all did this of their own volition. So, “Where the f— are the gay groups?” For once, they are following as the allies they’ve spent decades cultivating take the lead in a fight for their rights and dignity without having to be asked.

Decent, fair minded Americans are growing in numbers while the Christofascists become a shrinking toxic force in society.  Hopefully, big business will continue to support equality for all and the GOP will ultimately be forced to cast the Christofascists into the political and social wilderness where they belong. I hope the Virginia GOP is watching closely what's happening in Indiana and now Arkansas and will opt to come into the 21st century. 

The Cantor Effect for Big Business and the G.O.P.

I noted yesterday in a post that Eric Cantor's loss to David Brat had more more to it than Brat's savaging of Cantor for his support for some sort of immigration reform, the theme most talking heads like to latch onto.  Most frighteningly for the so-called GOP establishment and its big business benefactors is Brat's hostility to big businesses and populist message that hearkens back a century ago when big business and the ultra wealthy trampled on average Americans. That populist message ultimately lead to labor unions , the social safety net and other government programs that today's GOP is seeking to dismantle as it works to bring back the Gilded Age of the Astors, Rockefellers, Goulds, et al.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the fear Cantor's defeat has ignited in some in big business circles and within their lap dogs in Congress.  Here are article excerpts:

The day after Representative Eric Cantor became the first congressional leader in modern times to lose his seat in a primary, one of the biggest aftershocks occurred not on Capitol Hill or in the sprawling Richmond suburbs he has represented for more than a decade but on the New York Stock Exchange.

The share price of Boeing tumbled, wiping out all the gains it had made this year, a drop analysts attributed to the startling defeat.

While he was often an adversary to both the Tea Party and Democrats in Congress, Mr. Cantor, a Republican and the House majority leader, was also a powerful ally of business big and small, from giants like Boeing to the many independently owned manufacturers and wholesalers that rely on the federal government for financial support.

His loss at the hands of David Brat, a Tea Party-inspired economics professor who campaigned on throwing corrupt Wall Street bankers in jail, railed against crony capitalism and insisted that immigration reform would only reward lawbreakers, spurred business leaders to mobilize to preserve their clout in Congress. 

Mr. Cantor’s loss is much more than just symbolism. He has been one of Wall Street’s most reliable benefactors in Congress. And Mr. Brat used that fact to deride the majority leader as someone who had rigged the financial system. In one recent speech, he accused lawmakers like Mr. Cantor of favoring “special tax credits to billionaires instead of taking care of us, the normal folks.”

The majority leader stopped a provision — reviled by the industry — in the Stock Act of 2012 that would have required hedge funds to disclose more about how they gather market-sensitive intelligence. He battled with conservative lawmakers to extend the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, a top priority of the insurance industry, which has helped it recover from losses after the Sept. 11 attacks. He helped scuttle White House proposals to collect more taxes from private equity firms.

No industry was more generous to Mr. Cantor’s campaign than financial services. The three largest contributors in this election cycle, in which he collected $5.4 million, were Goldman Sachs, the Blackstone Group and Scoggin Capital Management.

Those business interests, caught off guard by Mr. Cantor’s defeat, are moving quickly to ensure that Mr. Cochran does not meet the same fate.

One priority of business that is in the most immediate jeopardy given Mr. Cantor’s defeat is the Export-Import Bank, which companies like Boeing and General Electric and hundreds of smaller companies rely on to provide subsidized loans to foreign customers. Eliminating the bank has become a conservative cause on par with repealing the Affordable Care Act.

“Cantor was the hub for finance, the hub for a host of big corporations that could trust him to get things done,” said Sean West, the head of United States analysis for the Eurasia Group, which advises corporations about political risk. “He was the one standing between the conservative pitchforks and the business community on a whole host of issues.”

Another issue seen as fundamental to businesses all over but probably more imperiled given Mr. Cantor’s loss is financing for the nation’s crumbling highway system. Many conservatives have balked at replenishing a highway trust fund that is about to run out of money. But business groups, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have argued that the trust fund is essential for the nation’s competitiveness given the major infrastructure investments made by competitors like China.

What has concerned many businesses with a stake in federal policy is a growing anger on the right from people who can sound more Occupy Wall Street than Tea Party.

“You could even make a case that there’s a lot in common between the Tea Party types and the Elizabeth Warren liberals,” said Gregory R. Valliere, the chief political strategist for the Potomac Research Group. “The impact of what’s happened is going to make Republicans in the House apprehensive about appearing to be too cozy to business.”

Beyond their priorities in Congress, what has unsettled business executives is what they sense as a growing anger over the “corporate welfare” and “crony capitalism” among many associated with the Tea Party.

I find most aspects of the Tea Party to be down right scary, especially the Tea Party elements that embrace ignorance and bigotry.  On the other hand, if insurgents like Brat can push the GOP to cease its war on the working and middle classes, perhaps some partial positive good might come out of the movement. 

The Republican War on Workers’ Rights

One of the hallmarks of the Gilded Age of the Vanderbilts, DuPonts, Astors, Rockefellers and others was that unions did not exist and workers rights were few and far between.   It is a situation that the Republican Party is striving hard to again replicate even as it seeks to destroy the social safety net that progressives built over the years.  It is one of the phenomenon that are fueling the growing wealth disparity in America and that have caused social mobility in the USA to now lag behind that of Europe and Canada.  Sadly, too many Americans aren't paying attention and they do so to their own detriment.  A column in the New York Times looks at the GOP's insidious war against workers.  Here are excerpts:

Midterm elections are like fancy software: Experts love them, end-users couldn’t care less. But if the 2010 elections are any indication, we might not want to doze off as we head into the summer months before November. Midterm elections at the state level can have tremendous consequences, especially for low-wage workers. What you don’t know can hurt you — or them.

In 2010, the Republicans won control of the executive and legislative branches in 11 states (there are now more than 20 such states). Inspired by business groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, they proceeded to rewrite the rules of work, passing legislation designed to enhance the position of employers at the expense of employees.

The University of Oregon political scientist Gordon Lafer, who wrote an eye-opening report on this topic last October for the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, looked at dozens of bills affecting workers. The legislation involved unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, child labor, collective bargaining, sick days, even meal breaks. Despite frequent Republican claims to be defending local customs and individual liberty, Mr. Lafer found a “cookie-cutter” pattern to their legislation. Not only did it consistently favor employers over workers, it also tilted toward big government over local government. And it often abridged the economic rights of individuals.

Take the case of tipped workers and the minimum wage. In most states, tipped workers earn an hourly wage that is less than the federal minimum — the federal subminimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 per hour — because they’re supposed to make up the rest in tips. (They often don’t; the poverty rate among waiters and waitresses is 250 percent higher than it is among the general work force.) But non-serving staff who don’t get tips must be paid the minimum wage.

Republican state legislators have devised a way around that. In 2011, lawmakers in Wyoming introduced a bill that would have allowed restaurants and other employers to force their serving staff to pool their tips; tips would be redistributed among the nonserving staff, who could then be paid the subminimum wage.

[C]onservative Republicans supported the right of employers to take money that workers had earned. This disregard for the earnings of workers is only an extreme manifestation of a more common phenomenon among Republican legislators: their indifference to the problem of wage theft. Wage theft refers to the practice among employers of taking money from their employees by illegally paying them less than the minimum wage or not paying them overtime.

One of the causes of this epidemic of wage theft . . . . . is lax enforcement of the country’s wage and hour laws. In 1941, there was one federal inspector for every 11,000 workers. As of 2008, there was one for every 141,000 workers. “The average employer has just a 0.001 percent chance of being investigated in a given year,” Mr. Lafer estimates. Because there is so little risk of getting caught, one-third of all employers who have been found guilty of violating wage and hour laws continue to do it.

Over the last four decades, for example, low-wage workers have been hit hard by the declining value of the federal minimum wage. In the absence of federal action, states, cities and counties have increased the minimum wage or indexed it to inflation (or both) to ensure that it keep pace with rising costs.

Republican politicians in state capitals have tried to check them at every point. Florida, Indiana and Mississippi have banned local governments from increasing the minimum wage. In Nevada, Missouri and Arizona, state legislators tried to overturn constitutional amendments and ballot initiatives. In 2011, New Hampshire’s Republican legislature simply abolished the state’s minimum wage.

The overall thrust of this state legislation is to create workers who are docile and employers who are empowered. That may be why Republican legislators in Idaho, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, Minnesota, Utah and Missouri have been so eager to ease restrictions on when and how much children can work.

What might Adam Smith, often claimed as the intellectual godfather of the American right, have said about these legislative efforts? “Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen,” wrote Smith in “The Wealth of Nations,” “its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.”

 Republicans may claim to care about working families but in truth, they do not give a damn.  The working population needs to quickly wake up to this reality.

Corporate America’s Gay-Rights Conversion

In the wake of the GOP debacle on Arizona's SB 1062 - a/k/a, the turn the gays away bill - one of the most interesting developments was the obvious miscalculation on the part of the Republican political whores who prostituted themselves to the Christofascists and "family values" crowd as to how corporate America would react, and react it did.  At least 83 major corporations and numerous chambers of commerce all read the GOP the riot act and threatened dire consequences if the bill was signed into law.  Even the homophobic NFL found the bill so distastefully that, as Sports Illustrated reports, investigations were set in motion on what needed to be done to move the Super Bowl out of Arizona.  I believe that increasingly the GOP is going to find itself having to decide whether it will (i)  prostitute itself to the Christofascists and alienate corporate America, or (ii) kick the Christofascist to the curb where they belong.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the conversion of corporate America on the issue of gay rights.  Here are highlights:

[T]he defeat of the bill [SB 1062] in Arizona also revealed an evolution of sorts for Corporate America. 

Companies lined up against the legislation, with major corporations including American Airlines, Apple and Intel announcing their opposition. The NFL said it was following the situation closely, raising questions of whether it might pull the 2015 Super Bowl in Arizona if the bill became law. And dozens of local and national companies signed a letter to Gov. Brewer or made their own statements of opposition, citing the damage it would do to the local economy, their ability to seek the most talented workers, and tourism in the state. 

"If passed into law, these proposals would cause significant harm to many people and will result in job losses," read part of a statement from Delta Air Lines. "They would also violate Delta's core values of mutual respect and dignity."

While such economic arguments coming from business leaders may not be much of a surprise, their vocal and highly public role in the debate still represents a big shift — and a welcome one — from just a few years ago. For years, business leaders have eschewed social issues, grasping onto neutral stances to avoid criticism from shareholders or customer groups. 

 "What's changed even in the last five years is that business has gone from implementing policies aimed at their own employees to turning around and weighing in forcefully on public policy beyond the four walls of their business," says Deena Fidas, the director of the workplace equality program at Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group for gay rights. "They've become legislative and social change agents." 

For instance, says Fidas, fewer than five businesses publicly came forward as supporters of same-sex marriage rights when Proposition 8, a ballot measure which would ban gay marriage in California, was up for a vote back in 2008. Yet last year, hundreds of large corporations signed a brief in favor of overturning the Defense of Marriage Act.

Obviously, the change in Corporate America mirrors the rapidly evolving shift in Americans' attitudes toward gay rights. Business leaders don't want to appear out of touch with their customers, a majority of whom now support same-sex marriage. And as a growing number of state judges strike down bans on gay marriage — including one in Texas on Wednesday — many companies surely sense that staying mum on gay-rights issues would not only hit their bottom lines, but would put them on the wrong side of history.

"Corporate support is no longer a coastal phenomenon," she says. "We're seeing heartland and manufacturing companies making the case for business equality" far more often than they did five years ago.

In Indiana, for instance, Eli Lilly and Cummins made donations of $100,000 each to a campaign supporting the constitutionality of same-sex unions. In an interview with Bloomberg last month, Eli Lilly's senior director of corporate responsibility, Robert Smith, said "it was important for us to lead. If we didn’t do it, who would?”

That question, ultimately, is the right one. Corporate leaders may have self-interested reasons for promoting gay rights. But as we saw in Arizona, they are also in a unique position to create bridges between political parties and to be voices not only for the rights of their own employees and customers, but for everyone.

While not noted in the article, it is also likely that corporate leaders are coming to see the far right's "family values" organizations for what they always have been: religious extremists and white supremacists who are anti-gay, anti-black, anti-Hispanic and anti-social progress.  These "godly Christians" are not nice folks and they belong outside of the political and social mainstream.