The Exceptionally Bad State of American Workers

Yesterday was the 4th of July and among the supposedly patriotic talk was much bloviating about American exceptionalism - something that I personally view as a factually unsupported myth.  America is currently under the rule of a Republican Party that has maintained power through gerrymandered districts, a constitutional frame work that that disproportionately gives small, backward states too much power in the U.S. Senate, and pathetic levels of voter turnout - Trump won the vote of less than 30% of registered voters. Not what one can call an exceptional system. For American workers things are even worse and will worsen further if the GOP minority has its way and further dismantles unions and worker protections as if pushes to create a new Gilded Age. Indeed, compared to the rest of the developed world, America is exceptional in a negative sense in how poorly its workers are treated even as wealth inequality soars. An article in the Washington Post looks at this undesirable exceptionalism of America that con only be viewed positively by vulture capitalists and their political prostitutes.  Here are article highlights:

The U.S. labor market is hot. Unemployment is at 3.8 percent, a level it’s hit only once since the 1960s, and many industries report deep labor shortages. Old theories of what’s wrong with the labor market — such as a lack of people with necessary skills — are dying fast. Earnings are beginning to pick up, and the Federal Reserve envisions a steady regimen of rate hikes.

So why does a large subset of workers continue to feel left behind? We can find some clues in a new 296-page report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of advanced and advancing nations that has long been a top source for international economic data and research. Most of the figures are from 2016 or before, but they reflect underlying features of the economies analyzed that continue today. In particular, the report shows the United States’s unemployed and at-risk workers are getting very little support from the government, and their employed peers are set back by a particularly weak collective-bargaining system.

Those factors have contributed to the United States having a higher level of income inequality and a larger share of low-income residents than almost any other advanced nation. Only Spain and Greece, whose economies have been ravaged by the euro-zone crisis, have more households earning less than half the nation’s median income — an indicator that unusually large numbers of people either are poor or close to being poor.

Joblessness may be low in the United States and employers may be hungry for new hires, but it’s also strikingly easy to lose a job here. An average of 1 in 5 employees lose or leave their jobs each year, and 23.3 percent of workers ages 15 to 64 had been in their job for a year or less in 2016 — higher than all but a handful of countries in the study. . . . . OECD research found that an unusually large amount of job turnover in the United States is due to firing and layoffs, and Labor Department figures show the rate of layoffs and firings hasn’t changed significantly since the research was conducted.

The U.S. ranks at the bottom for employee protection even when mass layoffs are taken into consideration as well, despite the 1988 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act's requirement that employers give notice 60 days before major plant closings or layoffs.

And when you lose your job in the United States, it’s harder to find another. Fewer than half of displaced workers find a job within a year, the researchers found — that puts the United States near the bottom of the five countries for which the researchers provided recent data.

Even when Americans do find another job, their earnings don’t recover. After four years, displaced workers are still about 6 percent behind their peers in terms of annual earnings. 

These gaps at the lower end of the labor market can be traced back to weak government programs and hamstrung union bargaining, the report says.  . . . The unemployed, in particular, receive relatively little assistance. U.S. unemployment benefits provide less support in the first year of unemployment than those in any other country in the study, and the maximum length of benefits in a typical U.S. state, 26 weeks, is shorter than in all but a handful of countries. In some states, the maximum benefit length is less than half of that.

Only 12 percent of U.S. workers were covered by collective bargaining in 2016 — among all the nations the OECD tracks, only Turkey, Lithuania and South Korea have been lower at any point this millennium.  . . . These collective bargaining and government support systems might have something to do with another report finding as well: Workers’ share of national income dropped about eight percentage points between 1995 and 2013, faster than anywhere but Poland and South Korea over that time.

This aspect of America's false "exceptionalism" is an embarrassment - just like the occupant of the White House.  The first step in changing it is to vote Republicans at all levels out of office.   In Virginia, it also means ending the state's "right to work laws" that allow employees to be fired without notice and for no reason. 

Democratic Socialism vs. Right Wing Barbarism

Related to the theme in the last post is a historical review in a piece in Salon that looks at the way in which progressive policies - democratic socialist policies, if you will - save America from the fate that befell Europe in the 1930's and 1940's.  Sadly, since the Reagan era, the very policies and political norms that made America great socially and economically have been seriously eroded - mostly because of policies pushed by the right/Republicans and too often acquiesced in by Democrats.  The solution to America's funk and the economic stress faced by more and more Americans is not Donald Trumps calls to fascism, but instead more progressive policies that can undo the damage wrought on the middle and working class.  Here are article excerpts: 

About a year after the launch of both Sen. Bernie Sanders’ and Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, it’s easy to conclude that the anti-establishment backlash of 2016 was somewhat inevitable. The incredulity that many in the establishment felt when these two candidates first climbed the polls and took their respective primaries by storm has passed, and now that Trump has locked up the Republican nomination, nothing seems beyond the realm of possibility (including, terrifyingly enough, a Donald Trump presidency).

Both Sanders and Trump have tapped into a widespread discontent with the political system, as well as a decline in economic prospects that many Americans have experienced since the Great Recession. But while the media has labeled them both “populist” (which is fair enough, populist can be an ambiguous term), the two candidates have diametrically opposed worldviews, with very different solutions (And I’m being generous by suggesting that Trump actually has any kind of real solutions).

Sanders is a democratic socialist, Trump is a right-wing nationalist (although some mainstream commentators have simply gone with “fascist”). The one thing that they do have in common, however, is that they are both leading revolts against the neoliberal status quo, which has prevailed for the past several decades.

The neoliberal era began sometime in the 1970s, following what is commonly called the Keynesian era, i.e. the post-War period (1945-1970s), which saw unprecedented economic growth and prosperity in the West, along with the spread of Social democracy in Europe and, to a lesser extent, the United States. During this period, the capitalist system became gentler and friendlier towards the proletariat, which was not an accident.

By the time Keynes published his epochal book, Hitler and the Nazi’s had destroyed Germany’s short Democratic experiment, while Stalin had attained autocratic control in the Soviet Union. The capitalist system was being threatened from both sides, and its volatility and excesses had made it vulnerable to radical movements and revolt from below.

Keynes wanted to save market capitalism from itself by curbing its inequities and limiting the instability of the business cycle to help stave off extreme political movements that were threatening its very existence.

And in America and Europe this is exactly what Social democracy did. FDR’s New Deal rejected laissez-faire capitalism and promoted a mixed economy with strong labor unions and safety nets, which helped avert radical movements — particularly from the left. Economic inequality steadily declined during this period and wages increased proportionately with productivity. The proletariat became the middle class, and capitalism became an economic system that promoted widespread prosperity (of course, in America, minorities — especially African Americans — were largely excluded from this prosperity for decades). There was no longer any need for radicalism, and right-wing extremists were pushed to the fringe of the GOP (Dwight Eisenhower was the first Keynesian Republican).

Economic deregulation, corporatist trade deals, massive tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization, welfare reform, union busting; these reactionary policies were embraced to an extent by both parties, and as the Democrats shifted to the right, the Republicans went even further.

Since this era began, labor unions have been decimated, while corporations have acquired unprecedented economic and political power. This is the direct opposite of what happened in the post-war period, when labor unions and workers managed to secure great political power and stand up to their employers, i.e. capitalists. Not surprisingly, the majority of workers have seen their wages stagnate during this period — even as productivity has increased rapidly — while the top one percent of income earners have seen their compensation surge. Additionally, since the recession, the top one percent of earners have received the majority of economic gains. 

Now, some may be thinking: what does this all have to do with the 2016 election?  . . . . Donald Trump has ridden a wave of right-wing populism that is reminiscent of another popular movement of Keynes’ time. In his widely shared column in the Washington Post, “This is how Fascism Comes to America,” Robert Kagan describes Trump’s strongman appeal, which is frighteningly similar to the appeal of 20th century fascist leaders.

[R]ather than offering real solutions, Trump has employed the same kind of scapegoating of minorities and foreigners that fascist leaders once used. Even on trade, instead of directing his rhetoric at the real foes — i.e. corporations and their incessant drive cheap labor and intellectual property expansions — he has gone after foreign countries and their impoverished citizens, who are exploited by American corporations.

History seems to be repeating itself, as it is apt to do. Over the past 40 years, the capitalist system has reverted back to being a highly unequal and unstable economic system, engendering widespread discontent; and in the wake of the Great Recession, both the left and right have made a political comeback. Neoliberalism has failed, and is now facing widespread revolt. The election of Trump is a terrifying prospect, but even more terrifying is the neo-fascist — otherwise known as the “alt-right” — movement that he has helped create.

Eighty years ago, Social democracy provided an alternative to the volatile and exploitive system of laissez faire capitalism, and warded off extremist politics; . . . . today’s era may require even more radical solutions (especially when considering the existential threat of climate change). But it seems clear after 2016 that neoliberalism is no longer viable for the long term health of America.

Reminder: John Kasich Is Also Evil

Given the insanity and freak show nature of the Republican presidential nomination contest, it is easy to be lulled into believing that Ohio Governor John Kasich might be somewhat acceptable as the GOP nominee or as president.  Unfortunately, that view overlooks the reality of Kasich's record and that, among other things, he is anti-gay and anti-woman when not engaging in union busting and diverting funding from public education.  Only  the extremism of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz make Kasich seem sane and moderate in comparison.  Gawker has a timely piece that reminds us that Kasich is just as scary  as his opponents, just in a less flamboyant way.  Here are article highlights:

With Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio out of the running, Ohio Governor John Kasich is the establishment candidate no one saw coming. And sure, compared to the rest of the GOP’s increasingly terrifying sideshows in suits, Kasich comes across as sane. But don’t be fooled: John Kasich is just as much of a monster as the rest—he just hides it better.

In March of 2009, Kasich infamously (at least in Ohio) noted that the state needed to “break the back of organized labor in schools.” Which is to say, John Kasich would like to break the back of the teachers unions. The same teachers unions that have, according to him, “smeared my record and distorted it.” It’s not just teachers Kasich wants to bust; it’s organized labor in general. From The Columbus Dispatch:

Kasich, who is backed by business groups, also opposes paying prevailing wages on state-funded construction projects. And as part of a sweeping review of state laws and regulations, he wants to reexamine the 1983 law that gave public employees in Ohio the right to collective bargaining, arbitration and strike (except for safety forces).

John Kasich loves to talk about how he brought jobs back to Ohio after the recession. The problem with that line of thinking, though, is that every state regained jobs after the recession. In fact, most states even managed return to pre-recession employment rates. Ohio was not one of those states.

According to Cleveland.com, by May of 2014, Ohio actually had 119,900 fewer jobs than when the recession began. As for the jobs Kasich did create, the majority were low-wage. According to a 2014 report by a progressive Cleveland think tank, Ohio’s median wage was nearly a dollar below the national average at $15.81 per hour.

Kasich is big on charter schools, which in his case meant spending over $1 billion on a program that exists to divert public funding to private pockets. According to progressive advocacy group Innovation Ohio:

·        Traditional public schools, which educate 90 percent of Ohio’s kids, receive $515 million less state funding than before Gov. Kasich took office.
·        Charter school funding has increased by 27 percent, and charters now receive more state money per pupil than do traditional public schools.

What’s more, The Akron Beacon Journal reported that “state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival the worst in the nation.”

It’s incredibly fortunate for John Kasich that Ted Cruz is Ted Cruz. Because if he weren’t standing next to an opponent so phenomenally, nauseatingly unlikeable, we all might realize that Kasich himself is also a dick.

Back in 2014, John Kasich was asked about his decision to sign into law a provision prohibiting rape crisis counselors from referring rape victims to abortion services. In other words, John Kasich imposed a rape crisis counselor gag rule. Instead of answering a perfectly reasonable question about an incredibly pernicious law, Kasich just... ignored it. . . . . Dangerously backwards women’s health laws aren’t just for the South anymore. In fact, Ohio has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, mostly thanks to John Kasich.

In just five years, Kasich manged to pass 11 different laws restricting abortion rights for women. Mother Jones points out that “since 2011, half of Ohio’s 16 clinics have closed, and according to The Columbus Dispatch three of the remaining eight are in risk of closing if they cannot find a hospital within 30 miles willing to enter a transfer agreement.”

As Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, told Mother Jones, “He is, if not the worst, among the worst of anti-choice governors in this country’s history.” There’s your reasonable, moderate Republican, everyone!

Antonin Scalia’s Death has Changed the Supreme Court

As regular readers know, I was never a fan of Antonin Scalia and, in fact, on more than one occasion opined that he needed to be removed from the U.S. Supreme Court because of his inability to put aside his own religious, racial and male chauvinist prejudices when confronted with cases.  Nature - or God, if one is a Christofascist - stepped in and Scalia was removed from the Court in a manner I had not contemplated.  Now, if only Clarence Thomas would be removed, we might begin to see a Court with mostly responsible justices (Alito remains a boil on the Court, but might come around if sufficiently isolated).  A piece in Slate looks at how the passing of one bigot and opponent of modernity has changed the Court - most likely for the better, especially  if the Republicans fail to win the White House.  Here are column highlights:

Nobody quite knows what to make of it yet, but nobody disputes it, either: The Supreme Court of March looks nothing like the court we knew in February. The loss of a single justice, Antonin Scalia, has blown up the court and reshuffled everything. It’s the early days yet, and much of the evidence of newish, liberalish outcomes at the court lies in routine housekeeping matters: unsigned orders and withdrawn appeals. Still, it’s safe to say the high court is no longer going to be a candy store for pro-business and socially conservative litigants. What will rise in its place is still a work in progress.

The crazy new vibe at the court isn’t even limited to the raft of orders that have come down in the past week. Those include a critical and unanimous order affirming the right of same-sex partners to adopt children and the tossing of a death penalty conviction in Louisiana because the state withheld significant exculpatory evidence.

There was also last Friday’s unsigned order allowing several abortion clinics in Louisiana to reopen their doors, following an emergency decision from the 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that would have shuttered all but one clinic in that state. In one sense, the order to keep the clinics open while the case progresses was not a massive surprise. Last June, the Supreme Court issued a similar last-minute stay of the 5^th Circuit’s Whole Woman’s Health decision that would have closed a significant number of clinics in Texas. . . . .   in choosing to reinstate the Louisiana abortion rules, the 5^th Circuit brushed aside the fact that the Supreme Court had prevented Texas’ clinics from closing last June. Faced with the snub, the court tartly reminded the 5^th Circuit that keeping the Louisiana clinics open is “consistent with the Court’s action granting a stay in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole.” In other words, says the Supreme Court to Louisiana, “We may be 4–4 now, but we are still here. Thank you.”

This week, the Wall Street Journal’s Jess Bravin also noted that a new alliance seems to have cropped up between the court’s two most conservative members, Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito. The emerging split between these two determined conservatives and their colleagues might be in reaction, writes Bravin, to Chief Justice John Roberts “apparently seeking consensus where he can on a court hobbled by potential 4-4 ideological splits.” By contrast, Thomas and Alito seem to be redoubling their efforts to form a bulwark against “the path set out by their six colleagues.” . . . . . The two conservatives also aligned in an effort to uphold the right of states to sentence juveniles to life in prison without parole.

But changes at the court itself are only half of it. There’s also a growing sense among conservative interest groups and litigation shops that the good times and rich bounty of the old Roberts court are no longer on offer and that it may be better to cut and run than stick around and lose.

In an incredibly short time frame we have seen, for instance, a major antitrust appeal from Dow Chemical settled for $835 million last month, when the company determined that it wasn’t worth the risk to spin the wheel at a 4–4 court. Having only last month granted a completely unprecedented stay in a challenge to President Obama’s new environmental regulations—before the case had even been adjudicated in a lower court—Roberts batted away a similar request challenging a different pollution regulation without comment last week. Not here, he seemed to be cautioning Michigan and the other states that wanted to challenge the law. Not anymore.

Consider, too, that in New York this week a key gun rights group opted to drop its challenge to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s SAFE Act—the big post–Sandy Hook gun control initiative—out of a concern that it could not prevail at the high court without Scalia on the bench. According to the New York Daily News, a National Rifle Association board member explained that the challenge had been halted en route to the court because “it’s just the wrong time.” His lawyers advised that “going forward could damage the case because the High Court at the very least would likely deliver a split 4-4 decision that would leave the law in place.”

This is a shocking turn from how the judicial landscape looked earlier this year. Going into this term, a number of important cases had been seen as likely to change the way we vote, the way we regulate abortion, and the way we fund public-sector unions. So certain were some plaintiffs of their likelihood of success that they had their appeals rocketed to the Roberts court on a fast track.

Suddenly, in a scenario where the conservative justices have been reduced to four, the high-speed pipeline looks far less attractive. It’s not at all clear these fast-track appeals will continue, so long as outcomes are uncertain and given the possibility of a long-term vacancy. By the same token, the tactics deployed to hustle last year’s big Obamacare challenge to the high court will likely lose their allure now. Nobody wants to rush a case to the court with even odds. Watch for a lot of hurry up and wait from conservatives groups that used to be all hurry.

Expect a lot more weirdness and subtle signaling from the court as the term rolls on. An institution that never wished to be an election issue has become one. What might have once been routine orders have now turned into a complex game of reputation management. Whether it’s the chief justice trying to appear apolitical, the conservative justices trying to fly the flag of ideology, or the liberals making hay while the sun briefly shines, nothing at the court these days is exactly what it appears to be, and it appears it will be that way for a while.

[T]he sudden frailty of the conservative bloc and the almost giddily emboldened left reveal how high the stakes will be in the general election. These past few weeks have proved to the right that its fears about the post-Scalia court are justified and tantalized the left with promises of a golden era with Ruth Bader Ginsburg tossing thunderbolts around from on high. Even as it tries to speak softly and subtly this month, the court reveals just how much now hangs in the balance. 

The Killing of Middle America

I frequently note that the Republican Party has turned duping working class whites into voting against their own best financial and social interest into an art form.   The GOP wants to kill unions - the cornerstone of Middle America's financial security in the 1950's through at least part of the 1970's - completely, to slash the social safety net, kill efforts to raise the minimum wage, slash regulations so that large corporations and businesses can loot the economy even more thoroughly, and, of course, give massive tax cuts to the wealthy.  The result of the GOP agenda is literally killing less educated middle class whites who are seeing longevity fall.   A piece in Salon looks at the phenomenon and the slow suicide these people are committing by allowing themselves to be duped through plays on religion, race and other prejudices to vote for their real enemies.  Like the author, I have lost friends who refuse to see that their own so-called conservatism is destroying their future.  Here are column highlights: 

I have a friend I grew up with in white, working class rural Nevada. He was one of the coolest guys I knew, and I admired him. We reconnected a few years ago, and he has become a rightwing warrior, filled with rage and spouting a startling amount of hate for Mexicans, Muslims, the government and most especially Barack Obama. He has advanced little in his career, and because of my public embrace of liberalism, we aren’t friends anymore. I still check his Facebook page on occasion, because I want to understand what happened to him, and what happened to people like him, with whom I share a common past, but a very different present.

A recent, shocking study has laid bare the cost of his (and many others) nonstop, futile outrage. Middle-aged, white people between ages 45 and 54, and specifically those with a high school education or less, have seen increased sickness and early death. This is the only demographic to see this kind of increase in mortality anywhere in the first world. They are dying sooner than they should in a merciless war they’ve declared on themselves.

The much-covered study has generated plenty of chattering among fancy people about underlying causes, from economics to failing masculinity, demographics and divorce, to a growing powerlessness among the white working class, but I think most of the answers have failed to nail it. Middle-aged white America is reaping the fruit of two decades of outrage and hate aimed at minority groups, government programs, unions and anyone who dares to point out the dysfunction of “wholesome, Christian” America. They vote against any program that aims to tackle our social or financial problems as a society, instead opting for the same bootstrap, libertarian, anti-government rhetoric that has failed us since the days of Ronald Reagan. In short, they are committing suicide en masse via the voting booth.

[T]he elevated death rates are being driven by a small subset of the white working class.  . . . . There is no better example of extremism and hopelessness of the white working class than the current standard bearer in the GOP primary. Donald Trump leads with less-educated, working-class white people—the same group that is driving the increased mortality overall. Like a half empty bottle of Scotch, they are reaching for Trump out of desperation, outrage and xenophobia, because they have no idea what else to do. Their jobs are gone, wages are flat and the very idea of building a middle class life with a high school education is folly these days. Thus they have turned to ever more extreme rightwing politics, and with every win things only get worse.

The saddest part is working class America benefits the most from an activist, effective and liberal government, something they fight hardest against.  . . . . It’s not all their fault. They’ve been fed a steady stream of total nonsense that both enrages and distracts them from reality. . . . . From coffee cups at Starbucks to the removal of Confederate Flags to Syrian refugees, it doesn’t even matter so long as we fit in our two minutes worth of hate. It’s all an elaborate stage production, manufactured by Fox News, talk radio and rightwing politicians, that fills the lives of the working class with terrorists, feminist, atheists and gay people, convenient groups used to distract from who is really screwing them over this week. The votes of the working class have been neutralized or co-opted with tidy scapegoats, the Second Amendment, Jesus and white victimhood.

As a voting bloc white America turned the reins of society over to angry assholes, out-of-control corporations and pandering politicians thinking their community would be spared, but once the beast was unleashed, it was never going to be satisfied.

Pope Francis Poses a Threat to the GOP Economic Order

Up until now, Republicans have been only too happy it inject religion into politics and make one's adherence - at least outwardly, if not in fact - a litmus test for running for office and, most of all, to hold public office. Ben Carson's recent anti-Muslim statements illustrate this reality.  Now, however, the same folks who readily prostitute themselves to Christofascists as a means to garner votes are up in arms that Pope Francis is pushing for action on climate change and arguing that religion and churches, such as the Catholic Church, have no business in raising the issue of, much less discussing climate change.  They take similar offense at the Pope's targeting the evils of vulture capitalism and support for labor unions.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the GOP hostility towards Francis and his message.  Here are excerpts:

The pope addresses Congress Thursday, and conservatives are fearing the worst. Their belief systems can tolerate a lot — laissez-faire economics, xenophobia — but Pope Francis’s emphasis on the Roman Catholic Church’s historic antipathy to capitalism has them in a dither.

The Wall Street Journal laments his overt embrace of the “progressive political agenda of income redistribution.” My Post colleague George F. Will writes that, “Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation’s premises.”

It’s not clear, however, whether the Journal and Will’s argument is with the pope or with the Christianity of the saint whose name he took, or even more fundamentally, with the Nazareth carpenter whom Christians believe was the son of God.

Suppose, for instance, that the pope elects, in his address to Congress, to repeat one of that carpenter’s most famous quotes: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

Based on past performance, can we expect some Republican congressman to leap to his feet and shout, “You lie,” or Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. to shake his head in dissent? Both occurrences greeted addresses to Congress by President Obama, speeches that were nowhere remotely as inflammatory as those in a recent papal encyclical, much less the Sermon on the Mount.

In place of our current system, Francis has recommended giving workers more power — in particular, promoting worker-owned and -run cooperatives. . . . . On the U.S. political spectrum, this kind of advocacy for worker control plunks you down firmly on the left: Indeed, the primary author of legislation that would promote worker co-ops if Congress ever sought fit to pass it is one Bernie Sanders. But Francis’s critiques of capitalism aren’t peculiar to the left wing of the church. 

Where Francis has departed from his predecessors is that he has moved from talking the talk to walking the walk. The simplicity of his lifestyle, his emphasis on spending time among the poor and giving workers more control of economies where the deck, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has said, is stacked against them, are all radical departures from past papal practice. So, too, is the tolerance he has shown to gays, lesbians and divorcees — a tolerance that has roused the ire of church conservatives, for whom intolerance to these and kindred groups seems to express the essence of their Catholicism.

These conservatives lament that Francis has de-emphasized the church’s traditional fear and loathing of women and sex. How a church governed by male celibates should have come to view its areas of core competency as gender relations and reproduction is a good question.  By returning to the kind of issues that St. Francis and the Nazarene focused on — stewardship of the Earth, championing of the have-nots — Francis has been a great disappointment to those Catholics nostalgic for the spirit, if not the letter, of the Inquisition. 

A pope infused by the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi and Jesus poses a threat to the current economic order. Conservatives are right to fear and despise him, as they would be right to fear and despise his role models.

The final scene of George Bernard Shaw’s play “Saint Joan” places Joan of Arc in a dream sequence in which all her persecutors, once she’s safely dead and canonized, praise her and acknowledge her sainthood. When she asks them if she should return to Earth and live again, however, they answer with fear, loathing and a resounding “no.” That, in essence, is the conservatives’ response to Pope Francis, and to the spirit and faith he embodies. 

It would be delicious to see the tables turned on the GOP which has insidiously used religion to do evil and support greed.

Scott Walker Stumbles with Anti-Union Agenda

With his campaign in crash and burn mode, in obvious desperation, Scott Walker has stated that he wants to take his anti-union campaign nationwide.  In one report, Walker said he wanted to end all federal employee unions.  This message is supposed to electrify working class voters who ironically have seen their wages stagnate for 40 years largely because of the decline in labor unions.  Walker's message may play well with plutocrats, but average Americans need to run screaming from Walker.  I make no secret of the fact that I find Walker to be a thoroughly despicable individual.  Let's hope that this is the beginning of the end of Walker's presidential campaign.  Here are highlights from Politico:

Scott Walker is doubling down on his anti-union message. But GOP voters don't seem to be listening.  Walker traveled to union-friendly Las Vegas Monday to inveigh against "big-government union bosses."

He pledged elimination of the National Labor Relations Board. He promised a national “right to work” law freeing workers from mandatory payments to unions that bargain collectively on their behalf. And he said he’d block President Barack Obama’s proposal to expand overtime eligibility to 5 million new workers.

For Walker it may be a last stand as his support tumbles from double digits as recently as July to a dismal 2 percent, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Monday. 

Walker’s presidential campaign is premised in a large part on the idea that GOP primary voters will flock to a candidate willing to confront and diminish the power of organized labor. Walker aides say his anti-union platform is designed to portray the Wisconsin governor as a politician who can easily translate his statewide successes to the federal government. 

But one of 2016’s biggest surprises is that the anti-union message isn’t selling, either for Walker or for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, another GOP candidate who’s built much of his campaign around his willingness to face down union bosses. Unions don't seem to loom especially large as a problem to rank-and-file Republican voters.

Also working against Walker and Christie is the Donald Trump factor. The billionaire mogul has excited a wave of populist-minded, lower-income voters who, when it comes to unions, are hardly conservatives at all. Trump himself is mildly pro-union, an occupational necessity for any real estate magnate operating in the Northeast. "Unions still have a place in American society," Trump wrote in 2000.

Harold Schaitberger, the president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, said, “Mr. Trump, who I don’t believe has very much in common with our goals and our agenda, even he calls out recently the gross CEO pay and the disparity between the CEO class, if you will, and the workers that actually help make their companies successfully." Roughly half of Schaitberger's rank and file is Republican.

Perhaps some of the moronic racists and anti-immigrant bigots are finally figuring out the reality that the GOP's anti-union agenda only aids huge corporations and the wealthy and only serves to speed the movement of the nation to a new Gilded Age where the 1% have all the wealth and the rest of us scramble for the crumbs they drop.

Donald Trump is Brilliant Revenge on the GOP

For years the Republican agenda has been to use feigned religiosity, racism, anti-gay bigotry and anti-immigrant animus to dupe large sections of the population to vote against their own best economic interests.  Over time, the current lunacy of the GOP base was built on this agenda that ultimately sought to protect the rich while trashing labor unions and other policies that protected the little man from corporate and Wall Street greed.  Now, that GOP base is perhaps finally beginning to wake up to the fact that it has been played for fools.  Despite his reliance of racism and anti-immigrant fervor, Donald Trump has made comments that the GOP establishment deems to be heresy, including a call for the rich to pay more in taxes.  Some, as laid out in a piece in Salon, believe that perhaps the GOP is headed toward a major realignment such as which happened in the 1890's and first part of the 20th century.  Here are column excerpts:

Why is Donald Trump so popular? He has captured the moment when voters recognize that Republican political rhetoric has nothing in common with reality. Trump brings rhetoric and reality together in a cartoon caricature of a Republican politician that anyone can understand. That gives him a vital role in history. He is the perfect exorcist to drive a stake through the heart of the modern Republican Party. But he is not the first in history to perform this operation. The same crisis hit the party in the 1890s.

When it was over, the nation had a reformed Republican Party, and a new historical era.

Today’s Republican Party is enslaved to Movement Conservatism, and Trump trumpets the rhetoric of that movement in crude sound bites. Since the 1950s, Movement Conservatives have been determined to roll back the business regulations of the New Deal. But those protections are popular. So to undermine them, Movement Conservatives hammer home the idea that legislation protecting workers, people of color, or women is socialism, a con that sucks money out of the pockets of hard-working whites and siphons it into the pockets of grasping workers, shiftless blacks, or slutty women.

Movement Conservatism was a fringe force from the 1950s until the 1980s, when voters elected Movement Conservative Ronald Reagan to the White House.

In 1986, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, a former economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, created an army of evangelical voters to boost the numbers behind Movement Conservatism. He promised born-again voters pro-life and pro-Christian activism so long as they lined up behind big business economic policies.

Trump presents a crude version of these Movement Conservative themes.  . . . It is a simple idea: that “takers” want a handout. Similarly, while observers have expressed surprised that the thrice-married, non-churchgoing Trump attracts more support from evangelical voters than, say, the aggressively religious Mike Huckabee, that support reflects a Movement Conservative pattern established a generation ago.

But Trump’s danger to the Republican Party is not simply that he rips the veneer off the racism, sexism, and religious hypocrisy of Movement Conservatism . . . . Trump also articulates the anger of a generation of voters who see that they have been taken for a ride. Movement Conservatives promised voters who were falling behind in the modern world that if they voted Republican, tax cuts and a smaller government would create a roaring economy and they would prosper.

In fact, the opposite was true. Since 1980, tax cuts have not actually lowered taxes; they have moved them from the wealthy onto poorer Americans. The deregulation of the economy has indeed redistributed wealth—upward.

Donald Trump doesn’t simply echo the racism and sexism of the last several decades, he calls—in his loose, vague way—for a fairer tax code and for tariffs to protect American workers. Even more important to his supporters, he is outside politics as usual. He is outside a system that has been bought and paid for by businessmen.

By the 1870s, big-business Republicans leveraged white fears of immigrants and hatred for black Americans to retain control of the government. Democrats who advocated laws that would regulate business were socialists, Republicans insisted. They were intent on redistributing wealth from hardworking white men to lazy immigrants and African Americans. On the Republicans’ watch, the late nineteenth century became the era of the “robber barons,” when monopolies and trusts ran the government with the sole intent of protecting big business. Under Republican policies, wealth moved upward, creating an era historians later dubbed the Gilded Age.

By 1890, the protests against Republican government had spread beyond the Democrats and into an upstart movement of farmers’ “Alliances.” Its leaders warned that “Wall Street owns the country…. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.” In that year, as Republicans passed even stronger pro-business legislation with the promise that it would, this time, bring back prosperity, voters gave the Democrats a two-to-one majority in the House.

The Populists organized the following year. . . . . Rather than apply accusations of redistribution only to the poor, Populists turned it against the rich. Wealthy men, they warned, had brought the nation to “the verge of moral, political, and material ruin.” . . . . Crucially, the Populists were not Democrats: They condemned both parties. Party leaders on both sides, their platform announced, were willing “to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires.”

The political see-sawing showed that a new era was at hand. Younger Republicans recognized that their party could no longer embrace an ideology that served the wealthy alone. Moreover, they recognized that catering to the super rich was changing the nature of the nation, threatening to turn it from a democracy to an oligarchy. The leader of this Republican reformation was a young upstart named Theodore Roosevelt, and he, and his Progressive Republicans, ushered in the Progressive Era.

The present era is so similar to the late nineteenth century that it has been dubbed the second Gilded Age. In the 1890s, the Populists pointed out that the Republican emperors of their time, the first Gilded Age, had no clothes. Today the unsavory Donald Trump and his supporters are doing the same thing.

The Pushback Against Unfair Labor Practices

As noted in a post yesterday, the wages of most Americans have stagnated over the last 40 years and most of the profits of soaring worker productivity has gone to business owners and large corporations.  The power of labor unions which helped build America's middle class has been crippled and far too many employees find themselves with no real bargaining power.  Adding to the employment racket is the practice of making employees "salaried workers" and then demanding hours of work that effective drive down the real hourly wages paid to the ridiculous with no chance for overtime pay.  Jeb Bush thinks American need to work longer hours and the GOP wants to destroy unions to further erode workers' power.  As a column in the Washington Post notes, some efforts are being made to even the playing field.  Here are highlights:

On this Labor Day, American workers may be beginning to reclaim what by right should be theirs. To be sure, the economic statistics continue to appall: In the second quarter of this year, for instance, labor costs rose at their lowest rate since the early ’80s — a measly 0.2 percent, despite steady economic growth and falling unemployment. That’s what happens when the income gains from work accrue almost entirely to owners, stock players and top executives.

But the pushback against the imbalances of power and income between workers (who have little) and employers (who have lots), which has been spurred by fast-food workers’ “Fight for 15,” is showing some distinctly positive results. Ordinances to raise the local minimum wage, for instance, which first popped up in liberal strongholds such as San Francisco and Seattle, have in the past few weeks been enacted in St. Louis; Kansas City, Mo.; and Birmingham, Ala. A proposed ballot measure to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2021 in California — home to one of every eight U.S. workers — commanded 68 percent support in a Field Poll survey last week.

Unions are polling better, too: In a mid-August Gallup Poll, they had a 58 percent approval rating, including 66 percent among adults under 35. That’s radically at odds, of course, with the percentage of private-sector workers who actually belong to unions, which is just 6.6 percent. The chasm between the number who approve and the number who belong stems from decades of union smashing by employers

Last week, the President Obama-appointed majority on the National Labor Relations Board ruled that a local union representing staffing agency employees at Browning Ferris, a California waste-management company, could bargain with Browning Ferris itself: The parent company, the board members said, was really a joint employer. The new joint-employer standard will help fast-food workers seeking to unionize chains such as McDonald’s, but it likely will spur even more immediate unionization efforts in such permatemp-reliant workplaces as warehouses, hotels and factories.

No effort to reduce our towering levels of inequality can succeed unless workers can amass more power. On this Labor Day, they appear to be finding ways to do just that. 

The Republican War on Wages

With wealth inequality in America now at levels rivaling the banana republics of the past and many working Americans having seen no increase in the buying power since 1979, both political parties are talking about the need to spur economic growth and jobs.  The problem, as laid out in a piece in Politico Magazine by former Congressman Barney Frank, the supposed solutions being offer by the Republicans is in reality more of the same policies that have spurred soaring wealth for the few and wage stagnation for the many.  How do they get away with it?  In a number of ways.  First, much of the GOP base is ignorant and uneducated in contrast to the country club Republicans who are benefiting from toxic GOP policies.  Perhaps more importantly, the GOP cynically use appeals to religious - read Christian - extremism, racism and mindless patriotism to sucker voters into voting against their own best financial interests.  Here are column highlights:

The conflict between the two major parties over inequality has given rise to the most fundamental debate about economic issues since the end of World War II. Superficially, there has been some convergence. The reality that our increasing national wealth has gone disproportionately to a small percentage of the population has become impossible to ignore — even by Republican candidates seeking to appeal to a very conservative primary electorate. Yet the proposed solutions suggested to the problem by the two parties are even more diametrically opposed than often realized.

To a great extent, the inequality debate has been presented as a choice between Democrats advocating specific interventions to diminish the wealth and income gaps, and Republicans countering that this will only exacerbate the situation; instead, they call for removing obstacles to economic growth. 

But this is a very incomplete picture of the Republicans’ agenda. What is too infrequently made explicit is that prominent on their list of impediments to that growth are both that wages earned by many working people are too high, and that several legal and institutional factors obstruct efforts to lower them.

The Republican tax agenda actually seeks to increase the inequality gap, both by diminishing the share of taxes paid by the wealthiest, and in turn, reducing the revenue available for paying public sector salaries, subsidizing higher education for working and middle-class families, providing income supplements to the working poor and easing the cost of health care.

Republicans actively pursue efforts to restrain wages — and push them lower. One of the most important is the assault on the bipartisan efforts of the Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen to combat unemployment through quantitative easing and low interest rates. Paul Krugman has documented the persistence of conservative predictions that these policies would somehow simultaneously cause inflation, recession and general economic malaise — outcomes in total contradiction to the impact they have actually had since their adoption in 2010.

Some other Republican income-depressing initiatives are more familiar: fighting any increase in — or even the very concept of — the minimum wage; denouncing any move toward local efforts to require a “living wage”; repealing Davis-Bacon so that construction workers can be paid less; and their general assault on unions both in the public and private sectors. 

Collectively, these efforts add up to a comprehensive, intellectually interlinked program to diminish the compensation paid to a very wide range of wage earners. The efforts are given greater force by the interaction of two important factors: the conservative drive to dismantle federal programs and send their missions to the states; and the interstate competition for economic activity that then ensues.

Once again, this first phenomenon is an indication of how far right the Republicans have moved. Prominent among the Federalizers of public functions whose work they now seek to undo is Dwight Eisenhower, whose signal accomplishment of the interstate highway program would be essentially de-federalized and turned back to the states by today’s conservatives. One the main attractions this effort holds for its advocates is the substantially lower pay for those who build highways.

[O]ne of the most significant and least generally recognized examples of the Republicans assault on working people’s wages I have seen: The use of public money by Tennessee Republicans to coerce the company and the workers at a Volkswagen factory there to abandon what had been a mutual desire to recognize the United Auto Workers as the bargaining agent at the plant.

[T]he Tennessee Republican Party intervened, using public money as an anti-union club. State Sen. Bo Watson, a Republican from Chattanooga, said in a statement, “Should the workers choose to be represented by the United Auto Workers, then I believe additional incentives for expansion will have a very tough time passing the Tennessee Senate.” Tennessee had planning to give VW public funds to increase its manufacturing capacity — funds which, evidently, were to be withheld if the majority of workers exercised their federal statutory right to support union representation.

The last crucial part of this tale is why Corker and his colleagues used so much muscle to protect Volkswagen from a union it welcomed. Why was this a victory for his “community … state … (and) … citizens”? The answer he and others give is that it helped hold down wages, not just at the Volkswagen plant, but throughout the state. Had the UAW won, they said, it could have boosted pay for their members. This, in turn, would have put upward pressure on wages elsewhere in the state, and this, in turn, would have made it harder for Tennessee to lure businesses from other, higher wage jurisdictions.

The morals — and morality — of this sordid story are too important not to emphasize. First, it stands as a repudiation of the argument that unions do not help raise wages.

Second, it is an even more explicit acknowledgment that keeping wages lower than they might otherwise be is a deliberate part of the conservatives’ strategy for economic development in their states.

Finally, it demonstrates that if Republicans succeed in having more and more programs conducted at the state as opposed to the national level, it would make it easier and easier to depress the wages of those who carry them out — and that’s an agenda that should concern every working family in America.