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

What could Romney’s handlers be thinking when they hyped his connection with Donald Trump — fundraising with Trump, offering supporters the possibility of a meal with Trump, relishing Trump’s attention and endorsement?

Trump signifies everything Romney presumably doesn’t want people to associate with himself — conspicuous wealth, arrogance, hubris, and a distinct preference for money over all other human values.

Trump, like Romney, represents almost everything that’s wrong with the American economy today — an unprecedented amount of wealth and power at the very top, widespread insecurity and declining real wages for everyone else, and a form of casino capitalism that places huge bets with other peoples’ money and depends on everyone else to bail it out when the bets turn sour.

But wait a minute. Perhaps Romney’s handlers are smarter than they seem. Maybe Mitt has decided to let it all hang out. Rather than try to hide what’s obvious to everyone, the new strategy is to make Romney’s liabilities into assets by flaunting them. Be even bigger and bolder. Money rules! (more…)

By Jim Hightower
Author, Commentator, America’s Number One Populist

An activist group has declared: We’re sick and tired of being stomped on by the Powers That Be in Washington, and by gollies, we’re not going to take it anymore!

Hooray! It’s about time for regular folks ro rebel and make big-shot Congress critters of both parties listen to us. But – uh-oh – wait a minute, these mad-as-hellers aren’t wielding pitchforks and torches, but big bags of cash. Holy Thom Paine – they’re bankers!

Very few Americans on this side of the ATM machine think that the biggest problem in Washington is that the moneychangers don’t have enough clout. But, incredibly, here they come with a SuperPAC intended to force lawmakers to bow even deeper to their needs. “Congress isn’t afraid of bankers,” declared one of the honchos who organized Friends of Traditional Banking SuperPAC. “They don’t think we’ll do anything to kick them out of office,” he said, but that’s exactly the plan.

In a dramatic escalation of Big Money’s assault on America’s democracy, FTB’s funders are not out to support candidates, but “to defeat our enemies.” A Utah banker who chairs the new political entity explains that an incumbent who sides with the people against bankers is not intimidated when the banking lobby puts a mere $10,000 in an opponent’s campaign. “But if you say the bankers are going to put… $1 million into your opponent’s campaign, that starts to draw some attention.” He calls this a “surgical” approach to carving out political power. Yeah – like doing surgery with a chainsaw! (more…)

It’s not every day that you get a chance to take some small part in making history. I was recently honoured to be part of the delegation from Unite the Union attending the USW’s 70^th Anniversary celebrations in Cleveland, Ohio. I was also humbled to be asked to address the inaugural Next Generation conference the following day. To say that the two events were the most inspirational days of my life would only just about do them justice.

As I stood in front of 500 of my brothers and sisters from across America and Canada, my heart was pounding so loud I was sure that the microphone was picking it up. I took a deep breath and started to speak. I spoke about preparing ourselves for when we would be the ones leading our great unions.

We have a great burden to bear; the world is very different than how it was 70 years ago. Our message can be heard instantly across the globe, translated into dozens of languages with only a few taps, and we have more power to be heard now than at any other time in our unions’ history. We need to harness the power of today’s technologies but in doing so, not lose sight of all that our forefathers, and mothers, have fought hard to achieve.

In this global age our bonds of unity must strengthen, our understanding of differing cultures deepen and our resolve to speak up for the oppressed, mistreated, underpaid and discriminated must harden.

The work,which was started on May 25, 2012, is some of the most important for our generation.

Together even the impossible is now possible.

Yours in Solidarity,

Naomi Shipsides
Chair Unite National Young Members Committee

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Guide Dogs of America changes lives—thanks to the Machinists union (IAM) and, of course, some dedicated pooches.

For more information about issues related to working families, please visit http://www.aflcio.org.

By Dave Johnson
Fellow, Campaign for America's Future

This spring the spirit of the Occupy Wall Street movement arrived at corporate shareholder meetings, with the 99% Power coalition demanding decent corporate governance that serves the interests of We, the People rather than just a few people. There are results inside and outside of the big corporations. Most visibly, last week Amazon dropped ALEC and earlier, Citigroup shareholders said stop the executive gravy train. Even bigger: the public is learning that We, the People actually can make a difference when we stand up and demand change.

Leo Gerard, Workers Of The World Unite — With Shareholders

At Citigroup, shareholders had their say on CEO pay — and they yelled, “No damn way!”
Concerted action by shareholders, workers and public interest groups compelled corporate change in several other cases this spring as well.

At least three CEOs resigned. Executives truncated one shareholder meeting to 12 minutes. And across America and Europe, CEOs lamented the end of automatic approval for excessive executive compensation.

A wave of corporate change is rising because the rabble and the stockholders share an interest: decent corporate governance. To shareholders, decent means more long-term corporate vision providing reasonable returns and fewer risky, quick-profit schemes benefiting only executives. To workers, the unemployed, community and environmental groups, decent means operating corporations in the best interest of the nation, including treating workers with dignity and refraining from polluting. Together, the rabble and the shareholders wield power.

99% Power Coalition

The 99% Power coalition includes citizens groups, workers, retirees, job seekers, families fighting foreclosure, students burdened by debt, immigrants and environmentalists.

Organizations invloved include The New Bottom Line, The Unity Alliance, Jobs with Justice, Rainforest Action Network, 350.org, Alliance for a Just Society, National People’s Action, National Domestic Workers Alliance, Pushback Network, Right to the City, Public Campaign Action Fund, MoveOn.org, Service Employees International Union, Public Citizen, Enlace, UNITEHERE, Common Cause, Rebuild the Dream, Restaurant Opportunities Centers, Health Global Access Project, United Steelworkers, International Labor Rights Forum, Food Chain Workers’ Alliance and The Other 98%.

These are organizations of We, the People. (more…)

By Sam Pizzigati
Editor, Too Much online magazine

A perfectly respectable business panel is urging corporate boards to ditch the ridiculous rationalizations for CEO pay excess and narrow the gargantuan corporate pay gap. Step one: end CEO stock options.

In Corporate America, the emperors have no clothes.

The entire edifice of mega-million CEO pay, suggests an unexpectedly bold new policy statement from a prestigious Canadian business study panel, rests on assumptions so implausibly inane that only the seriously deluded could ever hold them dear.

The new statement — from Canada’s Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations — calls on corporate boards to eliminate from CEO pay packages the stock options that have ballooned executive paychecks in both Canada and the United States.

But the new policy paper doesn’t just recommend overhauling how today’s corporate executives get paid. The paper takes direct aim at how much. Pay for Value: Cutting the Gordian Knot of Executive Compensation urges “a fair and productive relationship” between executive and worker pay.

What makes these urgings so striking? They come from eminently respectable representatives of Canada’s corporate director and investor communities, all deliberating under the auspices of an equally respectable academic center, Montreal’s John Molson School of Business.

What makes this new policy statement even more striking: The respectables who’ve endorsed it haven’t swallowed the conventional media and political wisdom on CEO pay reform. They don’t celebrate those institutional investors — pension funds and the like — that reduce reforming CEO pay to a matter of making sure that corporate boards only “pay for performance.”

These institutional investors, Pay for Value argues, have become part of the problem. They buy into the same bogus assumptions about rewards and markets that have jumped executive pay levels nine-fold over recent decades. (more…)

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

We now know austerity economics is bad for weak economies facing large budget deficits. Much of Europe is in recession because of budget cuts demanded by Germany. And as Europe’s economies shrink, their debts become proportionally larger, making a bad situation worse.

The way to avoid this austerity trap is to get growth and jobs back first, and only then tackle budget deficits.

The U.S. hasn’t yet fallen into the trap, but it could soon. Last week the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office warned we’ll be in recession early next year if the Bush tax cuts end as scheduled on January 1, and if more than $100 billion is automatically cut from federal spending, as required by Congress’s failure last August to reach a budget deal.

Predictably, Capitol Hill is deadlocked. Democrats refuse to extend the Bush tax cuts for high earners and Republicans refuse to delay the budget cuts.

If recent history is any guide, a deal will be struck at the last moment — during a lame-duck Congress, some time in late December. And it will only be to remove the January 1 trigger. Keep everything as it is, the Bush tax cuts as well as current spending, and kick the can down the road into 2013 and beyond.

Which means no plan for reducing the budget deficit. (more…)

Charlie Averill
Knox, Indiana

Watching the celebration last week of our union’s 70th year of fighting for justice for working families and retirees was an absolutely wonderful experience. What a performance!

Being able to see the past struggles and the pain endured by our members over the years in their struggle for justice, I must confess, brought more than one tear to my eyes. I just hope that some day we will be able to purchase it on DVD.

The fact that the performers were mostly Steelworkers was amazing.

Thank you, Steelworkers, for providing a truly great show. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

In Solidarity,
Charlie Averill, SOAR Sec/Treas

With American Pad & Paper (Ampad), Mitt Romney and his partners took a small but successful paper products business and merged it with other companies in the industry, piling up debt as they went. Ultimately, the company was unable to keep up with the interest payments on its debt and was forced into bankruptcy, but not before Romney and his partners were able to squeeze out more than $100 million for themselves.

By Susan Ryan
Associate Professor, The College of New Jersey

While hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their jobs and are looking for work due to the recession, the one place that full employment still exists is on reality TV. Whether reality performers are running a beauty salon in Jerseylicious, or cutting trees in the Pacific Northwest in Ax Men, there is such a diversity of workplaces depicted on reality television it would be easy to think that the working class, instead of being invisible, has become the class that everyone aspires to join.

In addition, the labor process itself is often the star of the show. As Heather Hendershot has observed labor is very often the subject of reality television , whether contestants are designing and making dresses in Project Runway, or coming up with business strategies on Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. And, as Nick Couldry has argued, these reality shows normalize a system in which citizens “submit to surveillance and external direction” while at the same time accepting “the fragility and impermanence of the opportunities it provides.” The irony of labor becoming spectacle at a time when workers struggle daily to remain employed would be almost comic if it were not for the insidious way that these shows obscure real power relations under the guise of entertainment.

While many reality shows feature some kind of labor, the shows that are most explicitly about the white, male working class are the shows produced by one man: Thom Beers. He has built an empire of reality shows about dangerous, dirty, and adrenaline pumping workplaces, including Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, and Coal. Thom Beer productions include more than a dozen programs on nine different networks, all with an audience of a prime demographic: young men ages 18-24. According to The New York Times “[Beers] is the unchallenged king of reality television variously known as ‘macho TV’ or ‘testoster-reality’ that has swept across cable channels like a ratings-driven wildfire.” And according to Beers, he is successful because viewers are tired of customary reality programming fare: “Audiences are asking for something that’s real. They want to watch real people, having real life experiences, facing true challenges. . . . And that’s what we give them: real heroes from real life.” (more…)