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Kathy Newman

By Kathy M. Newman
Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University

In 2009 Emagazine represented the coming together of labor and environmental activists as the marriage of “blue” and “green.”  Environmental journalist Ethan Goffman chronicled the new alliances being made between the two (previously opposed) camps, such as the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club’s BlueGreen Alliance.

Another place where blue and green are coming together is in the documentary films being distributed by Bullfrog Films.  The Reading, PA company was founded in 1973 by an Englishman, John Hoskyns-Abrahall (now an American citizen) and his wife, Winnie Scherrer.  The young idealists met in the early 1970s at the Annenberg School for Communication in Philadelphia, and, to their mutual delight, they have been able to make a living distributing progressive documentaries for the last three and a half decades.

Bullfrog Films tackle the core themes of environmentalism and sustainability.  The name of the company references the “chorus of bullfrogs” that Hoskyns-Abrahall and Scherrer hear around the pond at their home/business outside Reading, PA—on a plot of land that was once a turkey farm.  As the company website explains, the bullfrog is also a “symbol of survival and adaptability.”  One final reference:  the 1969 British independent film, Bronco Bullfrog, was the first film that Hoskyns-Abrahall worked on when he thought he was on route to become a solicitor.  Now a cult classic, Bronco Bullfrog chronicled the lives of down-and-out teens in the depressed back alleys of East London in black and white.

Today Bullfrogs Films has hundreds of eclectic titles on subjects ranging from the children of Mexican immigrants, Which Way Home, a film about an overlooked ubiquitous resource; Dirt!  The Movie; and a film that chronicles the high-stakes pranks of a group of crafty performance artists, The Yes Men Fix the World.  You can search their titles by “subject,” with subject keywords as diverse as Opera, War and Peace, Labor and Work Issues, Death and Dying, Genetically Modified Foods, Burma, Habitat, Recycling, Reproductive Rights, and Capitalism. (more…)

Zach Carter

Zach Carter
Economics Editor, AlterNet; Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

A lot of CNBC anchors do not seem to understand how regulation works. In fact, it appears that the network’s hosts don’t really grasp how basic economic competition works. If you’ve tuned into the business channel this summer, chances are you’ve heard its star reporters pushing the ridiculous bank lobbyist mantra that new consumer protections will actually make life harder for consumers. It’s simply not true. Wall Street reforms aimed at credit card billing practices and overdraft fees are already protecting the pocketbooks of ordinary citizens all over the country.

Bankers don’t like consumer protections for a reason: they’ve been able to make a lot of money in recent years by gouging consumers and tricking them into paying absurd fees. So financiers have dispatched CEOs and lobbyists to CNBC to make the case that their predatory profits are actually good for consumers. Here’s how the perverse argument goes: If you force banks to stop abusing some of their customers, banks have to make their money by charging higher prices to all of their customers. The argument flies in the face of basic facts about how markets work, but even if it was essentially true, the banker dystopia looks much better for consumers than the past decade’s status quo.

Take a look at Maria Bartiromo’s obsequious July 22 interview with BB&T CEO Kelly King (who personally took home over $5 million last year, with the economy in the doldrums). You can also find Wells Fargo CFO Howard Atkins making a similar case on July 21, and megabank lobbyist Steve Bartlett pushing the agenda on July 20 (to CNBC’s credit, the anchors push back a bit against Bartlett late in the interview). From Bartiromo’s King interview:

MB: So many people have said the fee business is a profitable and a substantial one for so many banks, whether it’s overdraft fees or any other fees. And if we have rules that they won’t be able to charge that, they’re going to find some other place to put those fees.

KK: Well that’s right. You know Maria, we have to cover our costs . . . we simply have to find a way to recover our costs, which ultimately means that there will be increased charges to the consumer. (more…)

I think that the U.S.A. would benefit from some greedy U.S. citizens to emulate Henry Ford, Thomas Alva Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Westinghouse, Lee Iacocca, George Washington Carver, Thomas Davenport, George Eastman, Philo Taylor Farnsworth, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Hutchings Goddard, Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, Edwin Herbert Land, Cyrus Hall McCormick, Elijah McCoy, Samuel Finley Breese Morse, Elisha Graves Otis, Jonas Salk, Wilbur Wright, Orville Wright and many others to create new industries to make new products that can be sold to the world in order to reverse the U.S. foreign trade deficit and re-build the gold reserves in the U.S.A.while enriching these creative individuals.

A side effect could be to create jobs for US citizens to manufacture the products that these people might create, except that other countries would soon copy these products and infringe upon those patents.

I believe that these individuals invented these products and started mass manufacturing mainly because they were greedy for more wealth, and secondarily to satisfy their scientific curiosity. Why else would they have worked 16-hour days, seven days a week to start their production industry except to earn more U.S. dollars to enrich themselves financially for the benefit of their families financially?

I do not think that any of the inventors and industrialists I mentioned enjoyed working that hard or that they did it to improve their health, or to improve the welfare of their workers, even though this was a side benefit to the U.S. citizens who they employed. They were greedy and wanted more financial reward for themselves and their families!

The U.S.A. is no longer the world technology leader that it was until maybe the early 1970′s. Asian countries are now are the technology leaders. The best and brightest students in the U.S.A. have pursued the more financially-rewarding non-scientific financial careers, instead of educations that might have created technically innovative products that people in foreign countries might purchase.

Asia is now the primary source of the most advanced engineering and scientific talent because their public technical education process starts early and continues to produce a stream of highly-qualified young people that is quite large compared to what is produced by the US undergraduate programs.

American students will generally not endure the hard work and intense focus that is required for science and engineering degrees, especially since there is such limited financial rewards and respect for that effort after graduation.

Gerald R. Spencer, P.E., President
Spencer Engineers, Inc.
Houston, Texas

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Robert Kuttner

Robert Kuttner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect

When you think about it, Alan (“Tits”) Simpson is the ideal jester to deflect attention from the bigger joke — the fiscal reform commission itself. The problem is less Simpson’s dopey comments and more the idiocy of the rest of the commission.

Given what is happening to the real economy in the real world, the prospect of a double-dip recession and the prospect of a lost decade of high unemployment, the idea that the bigger menace is Social Security is just whacko. Let’s recall that Social Security is in surplus until 2037!

Yet the idea that the road to recovery leads though cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and other social outlays that are keeping the depression from worsening, if anything, is gaining traction among opinion elites.

Exhibit A is a doubly dishonest column by the New York Times‘ new whiz-kid pundit, Matt Bai, who used a liberal congressman, Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, as a prop to make his misleading case.

According to Bai’s column, Security is like a giant lottery, based on IOU’s that will require a Ponzi Scheme of further debt. Now, it turns out that Bai is not just wrong on the issues, but Blumenauer doesn’t believe what Bai attributed to him. In attacking the progressive coalition Strengthen Social Security, Bai wrote:
The coalition bases its case on the idea that Social Security is actually in fine fiscal shape, since it has amassed a pile of Treasury Bills — often referred to as i.o.u.’s — in a dedicated trust fund. This is true enough, except that the only way for the government to actually make good on these i.o.u.’s is to issue mountains of new debt or to take the money from elsewhere in the federal budget, or perhaps impose significant tax increases… So this is sort of like saying that you’re rich because your friend has promised to give you 10 million bucks just as soon as he wins the lottery.

But this is total malarkey. In fact, the 75-year projection of Social Security’s finances shows that under fairly pessimistic assumptions about economic growth, the shortfall in Social Security’s finances is just over half of one percent of GDP. Lift the cap on earnings subject to Social Security taxes, and the problem disappears.

More importantly, get wage growth back to its historic trend of increasing as productivity increases (rather than the top getting the benefit of all the economic gains) and the problem vanishes without changing the tax code. Raise wages, and we could increase Social Security benefits.

Bai not only distorted the reality of Social Security, but he also distorted Blumenauer’s views, cherry picking quotes from two interviews to make it seem that the congressman favored such drastic measures promoted by deficit hawks as cutting benefits or raising the retirement age. But the quotes in the column don’t say that — only Bai’s gloss on them — and the congressman believes nothing of the sort.

The trouble is that too many legislators make Delphic comments about whether Social Security should be “on the table,” Bluenenauer’s past vagueness gave Bai an opening, and Bai is all too representative of opinion elites — including the Washington Post editorial page, columnists like David Broder, many Democratic as well as Republican congressmen, and some in the Obama administration.

It was former Budget Director Peter Orszag, seconded by chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and the pollsters, who persuaded President Obama that the fiscal commission was a good idea. The theory was that the commission would give the president “cover” and demonstrate that he was fiscally responsible.

But as events have played out, this premise totally backfired. The commission provides plenty of cover all right, as in burial cloth. Its proposals could bury both the economy and this presidency.

The commission has given a platform to clowns like Simpson. But worse, it has lent credibility to the idea that Social Security is somehow a drag on the economy — creating a vicious circle of hawkish legislators and dishonest pundits like Bai feeding on each other.

The reality, of course, is that if the economy (and Obama’s fortunes) are going down the drain, the reason has nothing to do with Social Security’s finances in 2037 — and everything to do with slow growth, high unemployment, and the lingering effects of a damaged banking system right now.

Yet the storyline being peddled by the commission, of a dire fiscal crisis, makes it politically more difficult for Obama to take the necessary steps to get a recovery going.

There is a whole other path to economic recovery and fiscal balance. That other path has five parts:

• A lot more emergency federal spending now to create jobs and purchasing power.
• Increased taxes on the top two percent.
• A continued program of public investment in physical and social infrastructure
• A real public option on health insurance, to restrain medical inflation, which is the prime driver of federal deficits in the long run.
• A defense of Social Security as a key source of income for the elderly.

This strategy is better economics and better politics. Voters, by overwhelming margins, support Social Security. Over the years, Republicans have tried to tamper with it. And it is lunacy for Democrats to associate themselves with efforts to cut it.

But Obama’s own fiscal commission has painted the president into a corner. Virtually all of the remedies we need to get a strong recovery going are seen as fiscally too costly; and willingness to go after Social Security is being touted as the test of fiscal responsibility.

The campaign to fire Simpson has the right spirit but the wrong target. Obama should draw a line in the sand and make clear that if the commissioners propose cuts in Social Security, he will consider the whole exercise tainted.

Maybe we should be grateful for Simpson and his 310 million tits. If his antics lead serious commentators take a closer look at the commission, perhaps they will also look deeper into the fiscal foolishness of Simpson’s colleagues.

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Robert Kuttner is a senior fellow at Demos. His  new book is “A Presidency in Peril.” His other books include “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency.”

Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Can the Fed rescue the economy by making money even cheaper than it already is? A debate is being played out in the Fed about whether it should return to so-called “quantitative easing” — buying more mortgage-backed securities, Treasury bills, and other bonds — in order to lower the cost of capital still further.

The sad reality is that cheaper money won’t work. Individuals aren’t borrowing because they’re still under a huge debt load. And as their homes drop in value and their jobs and wages continue to disappear, they’re not in a position to borrow. Small businesses aren’t borrowing because they have no reason to expand. Retail business is down, construction is down, even manufacturing suppliers are losing ground.

That leaves large corporations. They’ll be happy to borrow more at even lower rates than now — even though they’re already sitting on mountains of money.

But this big-business borrowing won’t create new jobs. To the contrary, large corporations have been investing their cash to pare back their payrolls. They’ve been buying new factories and facilities abroad (China, Brazil, India), and new labor-replacing software at home.

If Bernanke and company make it even cheaper to borrow, they’ll be unleashing a third corporate strategy for creating more profits but fewer jobs — mergers and acquisitions.

The M&A wave has already started. Continental and United Airlines just got approval to merge. Biotech giant Genzyme is on the auction block after Sanofi-Aventis announced a $18.5 billion bid. On Friday, 3Par, a data storage company, accepted a $1.8 billion takeover offer from Dell — one day after Hewlett-Packard raised its offer. Campbell’s Soup is eying parts of United Biscuits, BHP Billiton has put in a takeover bid for Potash, Oracle or H-P are likely to pay up to $1.5 billion for security software maker ArcSight. Bain Capital is expected to acquire Air Medical Group for almost $1 billion. The insurance industry is headed for the biggest merger boom in recent history.

Who wins from all this? If history is a guide, shareholders of acquired companies do better than shareholders of companies doing the acquiring. Top executives who end up running bigger corporations get fatter pay packages. And Wall Street and big-name corporate law firms who engineer the M&As reap a bundle.

Who loses? Large numbers of ordinary workers will lose their jobs. After all, the purpose M&As is to create greater economies of scale and more “synergies.” Translated: More pink slips.

Last week in Jackson Hole, Ben Bernanke insisted the Fed will do what’s necessary to increase consumer and business spending in order to keep the economy growing. But cheaper money won’t necessarily create the kind of spending that generates more jobs. In fact, right now it’s having the opposite effect. When consumers and small businesses can’t and won’t borrow more, big businesses use cheap money to bid up the prices of corporate assets and cut payrolls.

What we need now is more jobs, not bigger corporations.

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Cross-posted from Robert Reich’s Blog

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Robert Reich served as the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor and now is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book, “Supercapitalism,” is out in paperback. For copies of his articles, books, and public radio commentaries, go to www.RobertReich.org.

Mark Gruenberg

By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer

The Steelworkers’ drive for decent wages, working conditions and back pay for 18,000 exploited workers in Los Angeles-area car washes — a drive that produced a federal ruling precisely a year ago — yielded a big victory in court on Aug. 13: The two owners of the most-notorious car wash were sentenced to a year in jail, four years’ probation, ordered to open their records to government probes and will pay tens of thousands of dollars for environmental and safety violations.

The workers celebrated their win with a mass rally on Aug. 17 in front of the facility, the Vermont Hand Wash, reported Chloe Osmer of Steelworkers District 12.  The Steelworkers backed the car wash workers’ 2-1/2-year campaign for union recognition, dignity and respect on the job, and safe working conditions.

In late August 2009, that campaign had produced a sweeping National Labor Relations Board ruling for the workers, which Vermont Wash owners Benny and Nissan Pirian agreed to.  The owners also had to allot more than $52,000 in back pay to four workers they illegally fired for their union activities, and another $8,925 for work time the entire labor force lost when Vermont unplugged its time clock during union picketing

The job safety and health violations were turned over to city and state officials.

After settlement on those charges against the Pirians, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Maria Elena Durazo declared: “Today, carwash owners are on notice this is a new day in Los Angeles.  Abuse of workers will no longer go unchecked.”

The fine for those violations could be up to $1.25 million, radio news reports said.

“The Pirian brothers were held accountable because workers at the Pirian carwashes collectively stood up for their rights and for better conditions on the job. Their efforts to organize for a voice are finally bringing accountability to the carwash industry,” said Henry Huerta, director of the CLEAN Carwash Campaign.

In early 2009, the city attorney charged the Pirian brothers with 172 counts of violating job safety, environmental and state wage and hour laws at their four car wash businesses.  Each brother pleaded no contest to six counts, including conspiracy, grand theft and labor code violations, the city attorney’s office said.

Besides the year in jail, each Pirian received on four years’ probation, and they were ordered to keep detailed payroll and job health and safety records open for inspection by city, state and federal agencies.  The court also banned them from attempting to intimidate worker victims or witnesses.

Most of the car wash workers had to arrive 15 minutes before their shift started,  were forced to stay half an hour after the car wash closed — and weren’t paid for either hunk of time.  They were also discouraged or denied rest breaks, even in extreme heat. Most were paid a flat $35-$40 daily and four were paid only by their tips.

In the NLRB case, the agency issued a broad “cease and desist order,” which it uses “only against the most egregious labor law violators,” USW said.  It called the order “a dramatic victory for workers in an industry afflicted with sweatshop conditions.”

“Justice has been served.  We are proud to join car wash workers and others in the community in standing up to employers who intimidated, harassed and fired their employees for pursuing their legal right to safe working conditions and a voice on the job.  Their struggle for justice is our struggle,” USW President Leo Gerard said then.

The car wash workers and the Steelworkers mobilized an area-wide campaign, the Community-Labor Environmental Action Network (CLEAN) to demand justice for the car wash workers.

Luz Elena Oseguera, a union supporter fired from Vermont Hand Wash, told the crowd at the Aug. 17 rally, “I want to say to all carwasheros that what happened to the owners of this carwash means there is justice for us workers.  We are going to keep fighting until we have a union, because that’s the only way that we are going to have real justice on the job.”

“Carwash workers reported the violations that led to the criminal complaint, and to this conviction.  Owners should take notice that workers can — and will — continue to expose illegal workplace conditions in their fight for a voice at work,” added Huerta.

Press Associates, Inc. (PAI)

Richard Eskow

By Richard (RJ) Eskow
Senior Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

Alan Simpson is the co-chair of President Obama’s Deficit Commission, which is charged with creating a bipartisan consensus for balancing the budget. Lately Simpson’s foulmouthed tirades have drawn at least as much attention as the Commission’s actual work. His latest rant — which includes denigrating an activist for women’s issues with remarks about “a milk cow with 310 million tits” — crosses the line once and for all. It demonstrates conclusively that he possesses neither the judgment, the ability, nor the emotional stability to carry out his mission. He’s become an embarrassment to the President and an impediment to his Commission’s objectives. He must resign immediately. If he’s unwilling to do so, the President must fire him.

Simpson’s notoriously thin-skinned, and he’s in the habit of pelting his critics with abusive monologues or emails. That argumentative streak, which has only gotten worse in recent months, leaves him spectacularly ill-suited to the mission the President laid out for him when he announced the formation of his Commission. The President said “I’m confident that the Commission I’m establishing today will build a bipartisan consensus to put America on the path toward fiscal reform and responsibility.”

Instead of building consensus, Simpson’s been showering skeptics with abuse, rather than persuasion. His run-in with activist Alex Lawson became an Internet sensation, both for Simpson’s unbalanced demeanor and for the sheer irrationality of his attempted counter-arguments. A Simpson email to Dean Baker read in part: “if this is the way that you do your reporting, I would think that you would have damn few fans or readers!” (He seems unaware that Baker’s a highly respected economist.) Simpson adds: “I loved the picture accompanying your piece. With chin in hand, I first thought of Rodin’s The Thinker — but after reading the piece I can see you haven’t done very much of that!” (more…)

Bill Scher

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

The Recovery Act, often known as the stimulus, was the first major act of active government in at least decade. After the unmitigated failure of conservatism, the stimulus has likely be viewed by many voters as a test of whether active government can work and should be used more often.

The evidence is in. The stimulus is working. And we need more of it.

The Congressional Budget Office released this week its updated estimates of the Recovery Act’s impact on the economy:

…CBO estimates that [the Recovery Act's] policies had the following effects in the second quarter of calendar year 2010:

* They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent,

* Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points,

* Increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million, and

*Increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 2.0 million to 4.8 million compared with what would have occurred otherwise. (more…)

Dave Johnson

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) gave a speech this week describing his party’s positions on jobs and the economy going into the fall election. Summary: Our economic policies destroyed the country’s economy and millions of lives, but it made a few of my buddies really REALLY rich, so let’s do more of it.

I write about the specifics of Boehner’s call to return to disastrous trade policies below, but first I just have to say a few words about his economic ideas in general and how utterly wrong they are. In the speech Boehner said we have an “economy stalled by ‘stimulus’ spending.” But according to FOX News’ Wall Street Journal, yesterday the CBO reported that “the impact of the stimulus program estimated … the plan lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points.” In addition, the Washington Post reported, “The CBO said the act also increased the nation’s gross domestic product by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent in the second quarter, indicating that the stimulus may have been the primary source of growth in the U.S. economy.”

Boehner also said that “each dollar the government collects is taken directly out of the private sector.” This is the old “taxes take money out of the economy” argument, which is intended to trick people into thinking that the money just disappears instead of being used to pay for the schools, courts, agencies and infrastructure that enable businesses to thrive and drive the country’s prosperity. If you think that President Eisenhower’s spending on the Interstate Highway System “took money out of the economy” you really need to see someone about your problems and not take them out of the rest of us. (more…)

James Parks

By James Parks
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Unlike our nation’s economic competitors, such as China and Germany, which have national policies geared to increasing their economic development, the United States does not. While we admonish such countries to consume more and export less, they are figuring out ways to increase exports and consume less—and, in turn, are growing their economies far faster than the United States.

In a recent letter to President Obama, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and a group of bipartisan senators wrote that the key to turning our economy around and creating good new jobs is a national industrial policy that would emphasize long-range actions to rebuild our manufacturing base, which has been decimated over the past few decades. In short, they urged the adoption of a national manufacturing policy.

The loss of manufacturing plants and jobs has stifled economic opportunity for middle-class families and compromised our ability to compete in the 21st century economy. Indeed, for the last several decades, administrations have passed up critical opportunities to formulate a rational and comprehensive manufacturing policy. Continued apathy will undermine our country’s ability to achieve energy independence and place our military readiness at risk.

One-third of American manufacturing plants have shut down in the past 10 years, and today only 1,000 U.S. factories employ more than 1,000 workers, according to the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM). And we are losing high-tech workers at a faster rate than traditional manufacturing jobs, AAM says.

An emphasis on manufacturing is not only good policy, it’s popular. In a recent poll by Mark Mellman and Whit Ayers, 86 percent of the respondents say they back increased government support for manufacturing. A whopping 95 percent believe Congress and the president should spend more time creating jobs, and 85 percent believe they should focus on creating manufacturing jobs. (more…)