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That am I thankful for this year? I am thankful the conservative movement has stopped trying to pretend to be something that they are not.

Instead of masquerading as “compassionate conservatives” who want “clear skies,” “personal retirement accounts,” protect Medicare” and “tax relief” for all, today’s conservative just lays it on the table:

Tax the poor. Deregulate the rich. Drill Baby Drill. Filibuster the jobs bills. And to hell with Social Security and Medicare.

Before we enter the sweeps month of the “GOP 2012″ reality TV show — when the crazy will be turned up to 11 — let’s pause before Thanksgiving, and give thanks for the many wonderful crazy moments conservatives have shared with us so far this year, so we all know exactly what conservatives would do to America if given the chance.

“So Be It.” One month into his speakership, John Boehner lets us know — with inaccurate numbers, of course, — what he feels about having our government help create jobs: “In the last two years, under President Obama, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs. If some of those jobs are lost, so be it. We’re broke.”

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Whirlpool has announced they will be closing their refrigerator plant – located in Fort Smith, Ark., – in 2012.  The closure of the plant – which manufactures side-by-side refrigerators, will be followed by a move of part of the factory’s production to Mexico.

City and union officials say that the plant closure will result in the elimination of between 1000 and 1500 jobs from the Fort Smith, Ark., area. Members of the United Steelworkers union – Local 370 – have pledged to do their utmost to convince Whirlpool to reverse the decision.

USW District 13 Director Mickey Breaux is said to have offered to Whirlpool to address any problems and help to preserve the impacted jobs, but the company declined his offer.

Here at www.fridgefreezersite.com our thoughts go out to the impacted families, and we hope local efforts to save the plant are successful. We implore Whirlpool to work with the local community to resolve this situation in a mutually beneficial manner!

Steven Jones
Keller, Texas

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In another disgusting attack on workers, the National Labor Relations Board’s sole Republican member, Brian Hayes, has threatened to resign in order to deny the Board’s three-person quorum it needs to issue any rules. Hayes’ resignation threat is specifically aimed at working people in that it would cripple the Board from adopting a modest new rule that would remove frivolous lawsuits and red tape that delay union elections, which the Board intends to pass this year.

The NLRB is an independent federal agency whose members are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The Board’s role is to enforce the National Labor Relations Act, the 76 year-old law that safeguards employees’ rights to organize and sets the rules for unionization in the private sector.

In June of this year, the Board announced a straightforward proposed rule governing procedures in representation cases. The Board stated, “The proposed amendments are intended to reduce unnecessary litigation, streamline pre-and-post election procedures, and facilitate the use of electronic communications and document filing.”

Anyone who has taken part in a private sector union organizing drive will tell you that employers frequently hold back the workers’ voting for eons by way of legal filings and appeals — many of which are frivolous but, by law, need to be reviewed by the NLRB. (more…)

Conservatives say they want to “bring back” the old USA, the one that existed during those decades of the twentieth century they only seem to see through a gauzy golden haze. Whatever its problems, that country was a place where Republicans and Democrats agreed on two simple principles: That the most fortunate among us should pay their fair share, and that our government must invest in the nation and its future.

When Rick Perry says he wants to bring back “the America I where I grew up,” he’s talking about the era when Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican President, built the Federal highway system. One of the reasons Eisenhower was able to do that is that the top tax rate was much higher than it is today. While today’s highest marginal today is 35% and capital gains are taxed at only 15%, the highest tax bracket was 91% the year Rick Perry was born.

Whenever I talk about tax brackets I’m attacked by right-wingers who say I don’t understand, that high taxes discourage job creators. They’ll say things like “You hippies just don’t get it! If taxes are too high rich people will stop working and investing. The Job Creators will go away!”

Well, I do get it. When I spent a student year in Great Britain the top marginal tax rate was 102%. Once a person reached a certain level of income, they had to pay more in taxes than they earned. And a few years before that, George Harrison made a compelling case against the 95% tax bracket on the Revolver album by singing “Taxman.” (The line is “that’s one for you, nineteen for me.” I make that a 95% marginal tax rate, but you can check my math if you like.) (more…)

Regular politics in Washington now resembles an ecological dead zone where truth perishes in a polluted environment. Democrats and Republicans shadowbox over their concocted fiscal crisis, neither willing to tell voters the truth, both eager to avoid blame for the damage they are doing to the country.

Out in the streets, meanwhile, the contrast with brain-dead politics is exhilarating. In Occupy Wall Street, we are witnessing a rare event—the birth of a social movement. Ordinary people are engaging in sustained grassroots protest against the political order and against citizens’ exclusion from the decision-making that governs their lives. They seek to rearrange the distribution of power, and they are doing so by injecting a creative, often playful vitality that has been missing in our decayed democracy. The protesters have slipped around the soul-deadening, high-gloss marketing of mass-communication culture. Instead, they insist that politics starts with citizens talking to one another and listening—agreeing and disagreeing with mutual respect. The open-door, nonhierarchical membership commits people to engage in what historian Lawrence Goodwyn calls “democratic conversation.”

The Occupy protesters are acting like citizens, believing they have the power to change things. Their ambition reflects a core mystery of American democracy—the fact that humble people can acquire power when they convince themselves they can. Warmhearted and broad-minded, these citizens audaciously claim to speak for the 99 percent—and despite initial ridicule and dismissal of them by much of the press, polls show they have strong public support. The Occupiers have even managed to make uptight reporters write about corporate greed.

Authentic new social movements do not appear very often, and most of them fail. Throughout the nation’s history, rebellions have typically been derailed by their own mistakes and divisions or snuffed out by entrenched power. Even when they endure, it can take years, sometimes generations, to overcome the resistance of the status quo. Think of the abolitionists and the civil rights movement, women’s demand for the vote and equal rights, working people collectively asserting their power in unions. (more…)

I’m getting fed up with pompous pundits lecturing the ‘Occupy!’ movement for not having a set of specific demands.

A case in point: New York Time financial columnist Joe Nocera quoted at length in a story by Phoebe Mitchell in the Daily Hampshire Gazette on Nov 29.  He was speaking at the Amherst Political Union, a debate club at UMass Amherst.

Nocera starts off with the now usual tipping of the hat to the protestors:

“Nocera believes the anger caused by income inequality, a divisive issue across the country in this prolonged economic downturn, is the fuel for both popular uprisings. ‘If we lived in a country that had a growing economy and where the middle class felt that they could make a good living and had a chance for advancement and a decent life, there would be no tea party or Occupy Wall Street,’ he said.”

But we don’t live in such times, and the more interesting story is that OWS and its trade union allies are displacing the Tea Party, and energizing the progressive grassroots. Nocera, however, makes OWS the target.

“He believes that for the Occupy Movement to be successful, it must frame clear demands that outline a plan for creating jobs and refashioning Wall Street to benefit the entire country and not just a select few wealthy investors. Without a solid plan for moving forward, he said, the Occupy protestors will be continued to be viewed by Wall Street supporters as little more than “a gnat that needs to be flicked from its shoulder blades.”

A ‘gnat’ indeed. In due time, a progressive majority may well come to view our dubious ‘Masters of the Universe’ on Wall St as bothersome gnats to be flicked away. (more…)

Terry Maile’s supervisor called her into a conference room with all of her co-workers to hear the news: It was their last day of employment at Level 3 Communications in Pittsburgh.

That was it. The jobs were gone to India.

“I couldn’t stop crying,” said Maile, a divorced mother of one, who until that moment had spent her professional life as a telecommunications worker before being laid off first by Verizon and then by Level 3.

Even then, Maile said, she still believed in the American Dream.

You’ve got to work hard… work hard.

Maile owned her own home. Although she had been forced to liquidate her retirement after the Verizon layoff, she had begun to build it back up. Then came the Level 3 layoff. It shook her to her core. (more…)

The country is still celebrating the inability of the supercommittee to cut Social Security and Medicare, but it is important to move on from this victory to retake control of the political debate from the One Percent. As it stands, the One Percent are insisting that the country genuflect over the non-problem of the budget deficit, at a time when tens of millions of workers are unemployed or underemployed, millions of people are facing the loss of their homes and tens of millions of baby boomers are approaching retirement with little other than their Social Security to support them.

The deficit is the agenda of the One Percent. There is no reason that the rest of us should be concerned about budget deficits when the rest of the country is struggling with the economic disaster created by the greed and incompetence of the One Percent.

This is not a statement of morality; it is a statement based on economic reality. Budget deficits can be a problem when an economy is near full employment and the deficit can be pulling resources away from private investment, thereby slowing growth. However, it is not a problem with large numbers of unemployed workers and vast amounts of excess capacity.

This is what the financial markets are telling us every day as interest rates on long-term government bonds hover near 2.0 percent. If deficits were really crimping the economy, we would be seeing interest rates of 6 or 7 percent, or even higher. The deficit hawks do not have an economic case to support their argument, just money and influence.

In the longer term, the deficit hawks can point to projections of outsized deficits, which they invariably attribute to Social Security and Medicare. The first part of this story is completely untrue.

Under the law, Social Security is financed from its designated tax. It, therefore, cannot contribute to the deficit unless Congress changes the law. (The payroll tax credit in 2011, which was replaced with general revenue, is an exception to this rule.) (more…)

For most of the last century, the basic bargain at the heart of the American economy was that employers paid their workers enough to buy what American employers were selling.

That basic bargain created a virtuous cycle of higher living standards, more jobs, and better wages.

Back in 1914, Henry Ford announced he was paying workers on his Model T assembly line $5 a day — three times what the typical factory employee earned at the time. The Wall Street Journal termed his action “an economic crime.”

But Ford knew it was a cunning business move. The higher wage turned Ford’s auto workers into customers who could afford to buy Model T’s. In two years Ford’s profits more than doubled.

That was then. Now, Ford Motor Company is paying its new hires half what it paid new employees a few years ago.

The basic bargain is over — not only at Ford but all over the American economy.

New data from the Commerce Department shows employee pay is now down to the smallest share of the economy since the government began collecting wage and salary data in 1929.

Meanwhile, corporate profits now constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929.

1929, by the way, was the year of the Great Crash that ushered in the Great Depression. (more…)