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OFT President Sue Taylor on the importance of voting NO on SB 5 Issue 2 on November 8.

SB 5 = Issue 2. Vote no on November 8.

 
Celebrate Labor Day.  Really, celebrate. It’s important.

Wear a t-shirt announcing to the world the name of your union and march in a parade, chanting and whooping it up about how glad you are to belong to an organization whose members are devoted to looking out for each other. If you’re among those without a union, proclaim your profession and declare your pride in the hard work you do. Make some happy noise. Infect your fellow marchers with your zeal.

Invite your most beleaguered neighbors, friends and co-workers over for a picnic. Raise a pint, braise some burgers and praise your companions for their skill, devotion and compassion. Recognize them for all they’ve persevered through since this relentless recession began in December of 2007.  Build esprit de corps among your fellow workers.

This is one day devoted to labor, to the middle class, to the majority. One day out of 365. On this holiday, everyone gives an obligatory nod to workers. So don’t fret this Labor Day. Don’t waste it away in apathetic doldrums. Don’t let the minority rich and their purchased politicians take this celebration away from us too.

Some, including former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, have called for protests on Labor Day. They say workers must use this opportunity to demand that Washington solve the real crisis debilitating this country – dogged joblessness.

Reich is right. But it’s too early for that. Ultimately, workers must flip this ugly situation upside down so that once a year it’s Rich People’s Day. Once a year, the middle class gives the frivolous Kardashians and tax-shirking GEs of the world an obligatory nod. But every other day, 364 days a year, is labor day. (more…)

 

A few weeks ago, England erupted with protests that many saw as tied to the global economic crisis.  What began as a peaceful protest against the police, who had shot dead a suspect in Tottenham North London on August 6, rapidly spread across London and then to other parts of the country. Over the space of the next five days, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester all experienced a wave of rioting and looting.

Politicians and commentators proceeded down a well-worn path of analysis and political point scoring. Most politicians were quick to blame “mindless thugs,” “gangs,” and “feral youth.”  They pointed to the lack of moral values in contemporary society, and the Conservatives, who are the senior partners in our coalition government, saw the riots as yet more evidence of their narrative of “Broken Britain” (conveniently ignoring the fact that other parts of Britain, such as Wales and Scotland, suffered no problems).

What was lacking, initially at least, was any mention of class. It appeared only in references to an underclass. Rhetorically this is a really useful piece of shorthand for the political classes in Britain, as I guess it is in the US. Talk of the underclass allows critics to blame society’s troubles on an ill-defined amorphous band of cultural stereotypes and folk demons.  It also allows for a wider sidestepping of questions of class and inequality that has been rising for the last three decades or more and is sure to increase further in the age of austerity. In this narrative, the riots are defined as the work of the work shy, the amoral, and the feckless; looting represents a mindless opportunism of those lacking a basic ethic of responsibility. (more…)

Problem: Your right-wing brother-in-law is plugged into the FOX-Limbaugh lie machine, and keeps sending you emails about “Obama spending” and “Obama deficits” and how the “Stimulus” just made things worse. Solution: Here are three “reality-based” charts to send to him. These charts show what actually happened. (more…)

This video produced by ThinkProgressVideo on Aug 27, 2011

Whenever protectionists like myself demand that the U.S. government do something to stand up for America in global trade, we are shouted down with the stern admonition, “You’ll start a trade war.”

I wish.

The reality is that nobody in America is going to start a trade war, for the simple reason that we are already in one. Foreign governments understand, as ours does not, that international trade is an arena of national rivalry, and they play the game in their own national interests. Our government is hostage to an outdated 19th-century economic theory of global harmony, and on this basis conducts our trade relations with blissful naiveté.

Am I saying that our policy is determined by a theory? No. It’s quite obviously determined by the campaign contributions of the multinational (aka “who cares about America?”) corporations who profit from it. But it is this theory that makes their demands respectable. All the money in the world couldn’t bribe Congress to pass a law requiring everyone to roller-skate to work; policy always requires some non-laughable justification.

Thanks for nothing, David Ricardo. You’ve made a fine mess.

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“Newt Gingrich: Obama’s ‘Bureaucratic Socialism’ Kills Jobs” is one of many similar headlines appearing on dozens of web-based news portals in this 2012 election season. This one keeps popping up, and I’m getting sick of seeing it.

The reason? It manages to pack several major lies, each of which you could write a book about, into just five words—and hardly an editor anywhere takes a blue pencil to it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got no problem with ‘socialism.’ My shoot-from-the hip response when someone spits the ‘S’ word out in a political argument is, “Socialism? I’ve been a socialist all my life, and proud of it. We should be so lucky as to have some socialism around here. Unfortunately, we’re not even close.”

First of all, Barack Obama is not a socialist. Even back in his more youthful years in Illinois, at best on a good day, he was simply a neo-Keynesian liberal with a few high tech green ideas. Keynesians believe, among other things, that when markets fail, government has the task of being the consumer of last resort, even hiring people directly to build infrastructure and put people to work. (more…)

This Labor Day is dedicated to America’s hardworking women and men who make our country strong. Let’s get America back to work. America Wants to Work.

Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke’s closely watched annual speech at this morning’s session of the Fed’s Jackson Hole Conference is a good illustration of why Thomas Carlyle referred to economics as the dismal science. Chairman Bernanke was doubly dismal, not just as an economic pessimist but as a political coward.

Bernanke’s assessment of the economy was typically qualified with on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand-that, to reassure financial markets. But worse, it was gutless in terms of the proposed solutions to the crisis.

On the one hand, said Bernanke, manufacturing is up 15 percent, households are paying off debts, and the banking system has not gone off a cliff. On the other hand, unemployment is stuck on a plateau of over 9 percent, the housing mess is dragging down the economy, and despite low interest rates for the elite, most borrowers face tight credit conditions.

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