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

Soon after President Obama’s second inaugural address, John Boehner said the White House would try “to annihilate the Republican Party” and “shove us into the dustbin of history.”

Actually, the GOP is doing a pretty good job annihilating itself.  As Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal put it, Republicans need to “stop being the stupid party.”

The GOP crackup was probably inevitable.  Inconsistencies and tensions within the GOP have been growing for years – ever since Ronald Reagan put together the coalition that became the modern Republican Party.

All President Obama has done is finally find ways to exploit these inconsistencies.

Republican libertarians have never got along with social conservatives, who want to impose their own morality on everyone else.

Shrink-the-government fanatics in the GOP have never seen eye-to-eye with deficit hawks, who don’t mind raising taxes as long as the extra revenues help reduce the size of the deficit.

The GOP’s big business and Wall Street wing has never been comfortable with the nativists and racists in the Party who want to exclude immigrants and prevent minorities from getting ahead.

And right-wing populists have never got along with big business and Wall Street, which love government as long as it gives them subsidies, tax benefits, and bailouts.

Ronald Reagan papered over these differences with a happy anti-big-government nationalism.  His patriotic imagery inspired the nativists and social conservatives. He gave big business and Wall Street massive military spending. And his anti-government rhetoric delighted the Party’s libertarians and right-wing populists.

But Reagan’s coalition remained fragile. It depended fundamentally on creating a common enemy: communists and terrorists abroad, liberals and people of color at home. (more…)

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

A panel of Republican-appointed judges, including one who has, according to Think Progress, previously suggested that all business, labor and Wall Street regulation is constitutionally suspect, ruled that President Obama’s 2012 recess appointments of three members to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) are invalid. Senate Republicans had been blocking confirmation votes on the three before the president’s action.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called the ruling “shocking.”

In a radical and unprecedented decision, the court has interpreted the Constitution in a way that would deprive both Republican and Democratic presidents of a critical tool they have used hundreds of times over the years—including 179 appointments by former President George W. Bush and 139 appointments by former President Clinton—to keep agencies functioning and make the government work. In this case, the affected agency is the National Labor Relations Board—a crucially important agency that enforces workers’ rights.

On Jan. 4, 2012, Obama appointed Deputy Labor Secretary Sharon Block, attorney Richard Griffin and NLRB counsel Terence Flynn to fill vacancies on the labor board, bringing it to full strength for the first time in more than a year. (more…)

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

President Obama is off to a good start in his second term. “We, the people,” he pledged in his second inaugural, “still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity.” Amen to that.

But as the economy continues its agonizingly slow recovery, his greatest challenge will be to reverse the economy’s widening inequality. Ordinary working families are falling further and further behind the cost of living.

The picture is especially brutal for young adults, who are likely to find themselves saddled with college debt, facing jobs that offer neither benefits nor career security.

Though the unemployment rate is coming down, the deeper trends in job markets only intensify the trend of the past three decades — the lion’s share of the gains going to the top.

Corporate profits are up over 60 percent since Obama took office. Average earnings are just about flat, despite productivity gains, but that average conceals widening inequality. A new report by the Economic Policy Institute finds that income for the top one percent is up by 8.2 percent since 2009, while earnings are down by 1.2 percent for the bottom 90 percent.

There is a lot of blather about why our income inequality continues to widen — it’s the educational system; it’s the skills gap.

But think about it. Our incomes were far more equal in the golden age of the blue-collar middle class during the post-World War II boom — when most Americans did not go to college. Even though most of our citizens had only basic skills, we managed a much more equally shared prosperity.

You want to talk about skills? The lion’s share of America’s earnings increases in the past 30 years went to financial engineers — people whose “skills” cost the rest of the economy trillions of dollars of lost assets and output.

How should we fairly compensate those financial engineers? By my reckoning, they owe the rest of us about ten trillion dollars. What sort of skill does it take to give toxic mortgage-backed securities triple-A ratings? The most notable skill of these people was staying out of prison. The link between skills and earnings, always somewhat arbitrary, has evaporated.

The latest hot trend is the proclaimed renaissance of American manufacturing. The press is full of stories about how companies such as General Electric are bringing jobs and factories home.

Why is manufacturing coming back? It’s a combination of multiple factors. Higher energy prices have raised shipping costs; engineers and designers want to be closer to the factory floor; retailers don’t like delays; robotics have made the manufacturing process so much more productive that less human labor is needed — and American workers have substantially cut their wages. G.E., the star of a recent feature in The Atlantic magazine, for “insourcing” jobs back from China, pays workers about $13.50 an hour (or a lot less than a room-cleaner in a unionized hotel.) (more…)

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

We needed heroes after the financial crisis. Instead we got bureaucrats, compromisers, and perhaps something much worse. Federal law enforcement officials, our “thin gray line” against banker crime, were charged with restoring the balance of justice and reducing the threat of future crises. Seems they had other things on their minds.

Now the Administration’s first-term posse is riding off into the sunset. The most visible departure is Deputy Attorney General Lanny Breuer. Remember those submissive or avaricious sheriffs in the old Westerns, the ones who were always letting the bad guys run wild ?  ”Sorry, Ma’am, I’d like to help you and the boy but there ain’t nothin’ I can do.”  That’s Breuer, whose shattered credibility and extreme reluctance to prosecute has become the stuff of legend.

But he’s not the only one. Meet the senior partners in a firm that be more aptly named “Covington, Burling, and Justice.”

Lanny Breuer

All it took was a well-edited compilation of his own words on PBS’ Frontline to spur an announcement of Breuer’s unscheduled resignation. (Mary Bottari has the Frontline highlights.) They’re denying any connection between the program and the resignation, of course, but the denials ring false. Breuer was already on the record in a speech before the New York City Bar Association as saying that “we must take into account the effect of an indictment on innocent employees and shareholders” at major Wall Street firms.

That’s like not arresting Tony Soprano because they’d all be out of a job down at the Bada Bing Club.

And note that Breuer did not say, “We must take into account the effect of unpunished wrongdoing on defrauded investors, homeowners, or the American and global economies.”  The entire premise is bogus anyway. It’s possible to criminally indict individual bankers without bringing down the whole bank. If necessary, the government can assume control of a failing institution to make sure that its workforce stays employed.

Besides, when did prosecutors start worrying about stock market value before deciding whether or not to indict suspected crooks? It must’ve been after Wall Street wrongdoing brought down the world economy and shattered global markets.

This anarchic reasoning reached its apotheosis (or nadir) with the Justice Department’s recent refusal to indict anyone at HSBC for laundering money on behalf the murderous Mexican drug cartels.  Here’s what that means in very real terms: If you work at a big bank you can fatten your bonus by breaking the law as many times as you want. You won’t even be punished for colluding with crazed drug-dealing killers who have murdered 35,000 people, sometimes by tossing their severed heads onto a club’s dance floor or leaving them in the town square to show everybody who’s boss.

We know who’s boss on Wall Street, too.

If Attorney General Holder endorses Breuer’s thinking he’s had the good sense to keep it to himself. But Breuer, who met Holder when they both worked for Wall Street firm Covington & Burling, couldn’t resist the temptation to brag. Still, shed no tears. Public shame can be a ticket to Wall Street prosperity.

Robert Khuzami

Robert Khuzami was Breuer’s partner in crime non-punishment over at the SEC.  Khuzami ran the agency’s enforcement division until his resignation was announced earlier this month. That inspired a Ben Protess puff piece in the New York Times Dealbook page that reads like a regulatory Fifty Shades of Gray – call it Fifty Shades of Gray Pinstripe – with Khuzami as the “dominant” and the rest of us as “submissives.’ We’re told that Khuzami is “an imposing presence with a piercing stare,” an effect he tries to replicate for the camera with lamentable results.

We’re also told Khuzami had “a knack for grilling lawyers” who worked for him — a knack that clearly did not extend to bankers under his scrutiny. (more…)

By Hugh J. Campbell
Philadelphia, Pa., son of a Steelworker

Harry Moser, founder of Reshoring Initiative, is courageously engaged in a debate on Economist.com. The link to the debate follows: Offshoring & outsourcing: Do multinational corporations have a duty to maintain a strong presence in their home countries?  Moser’s opponent argues that: competitiveness is hardly likely to be undermined by multinational corporations investing abroad.

Since 1997, with multinational corporations able to defer paying U.S. income tax on overseas earnings, multinational corporations investing abroad has undermined America’s competitiveness, perhaps more than any other single factor. Al-Qaeda’s central aim in its war on the United States is to bleed America to the point of bankruptcy. If you view offshoring and outsourcing as weapons of economic destruction aimed at America, please vote yes in the debate that U.S. multinationals still have a duty to America.

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By Susan H. Bitensky Alan S. Zekelman Professor of International Human Rights Law, and Director, Lori E. Talsky Center for Human Rights of Women and Children

On December 11, 2012, Michigan became the twenty-fourth state to enact so-called “right to work” (RTW) laws. Though elsewhere these laws are not a new phenomenon, it was nevertheless shocking when Michigan took the plunge. Michigan, after all, is the birthplace of the United Auto Workers, has provided the backdrop for many historically significant labor struggles and, until December 11, has stood as a bastion of unionization in a country that has seen organized labor dwindle to 11.8 percent of the workforce [PDF].

That RTW could happen in Michigan may tell us something dire about the future of the American dream. Regardless of whether the latter was merely a bill of goods before, Michigan’s RTW statutes now surely reduce that vision to cruel myth. The demotion is assured by the fact that RTW laws severely weaken labor unions, the very institutions created and controlled by workers to improve their economic circumstances. As such, unions are uniquely situated to make rank-and-file dreams a sometime reality. If unions are to be weakened in Michigan, then where will they be strong?

So, what is this law that puts unions and their constituencies into such bleak decline? Despite the name, RTW enactments do not give anyone a right to work that he or she would otherwise not have. A RTW law, instead, permits workers in an organized bargaining unit to refuse to join the union and refuse to pay union dues while still enjoying all the benefits of union representation. Indeed, the union remains legally bound to fairly represent all employees in the unit, whether they pay dues or not. Though this arrangement is unjust in more ways than one, the focus of this article is on the institutional damage RTW statutes wreak upon unions primarily by depriving them of funds. With less funding, of course, unions are less able to organize, negotiate for and otherwise represent employees.

Yet, the US economy has long been structured so that, in all but the coziest of “mom and pop” businesses, employers possess massive power (subject to statutes setting only minimal protections for workers) to dictate the terms and conditions of employment to unorganized workers. This extreme imbalance is caused not only by the privileged position of capital in our society, but also by the circumstance that, when employees have no union, each employee must fend for himself or herself in dealing with the employer. Visualize, for example, a lone worker asking the likes of Boeing or Exxon Mobil for a raise, and the problem becomes clear. (more…)

Kenneth Quinnell
AFL-CIO

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) seemingly have rallied enough of their House allies to push the battle over causing a U.S. government default down the road, with a temporary three-month extension of the government’s borrowing authority (or “debt ceiling”). But House Republicans have not changed their ransom demands. They’ve simply chosen a different hostage. For now.

House Republicans are still demanding benefit cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They are still demanding deep budget cuts that would jeopardize the economic recovery and increase unemployment. And they are still refusing to cancel across-the-board budget cuts that are scheduled to take place in March 2013 by asking Wall Street to contribute more tax revenue or closing tax loopholes for the richest 2% of Americans.

While House Republicans have put on hold their threat to tank the economy by causing a government default, they have shifted their attention to tanking the economy by shutting down the government if they do not get their way.

The willingness of House Republicans to postpone the debt ceiling fight is a welcome development. It is a minor concession to pressure from working family advocates. And it suggests that House Republicans are slowly coming to the realization that they do not have as much leverage as they thought they had to pursue policies that voters overwhelmingly reject—and that, in fact, voters overwhelmingly rejected in the past election. (more…)

Earlier this month, Gary May, who was a superintendent at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia when a 2010 explosion killed 29 workers, was sentenced to 21 months in prison.

May had pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges filed after the worst mining accident in the United States in 40 years. He’d confessed that between 2008 and 2010 he and other officials regularly alerted miners when Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) inspectors were coming so that they could conceal – rather than correct – known safety violations.

May also admitted that he ordered subordinates to falsify records and disable a methane monitor to make the mine appear safer.

The United Mineworkers of America (UMWA) called the UBB disaster industrial homicide concluding that by knowingly circumventing safety regulations, Massey Energy, which owned UBB, had all but assured a fatal accident would occur eventually.

Massey also further endangered workers by waging a war on organized labor.  Because unions fight to uphold workers’ rights, Massy, like other large mining companies, spent decades trying to reduce unionized work forces, either by closing unionized mines or by intimidating workers who tried to organize.

In a study of the impact of unionization on mine safety, Stanford Law Professor Alison Morantz found that “unionization predicts a substantial and significant decline in traumatic mining injuries and fatalities,” with fatal accidents reduced by as much as 68 percent.

Union workplaces are safer because union safety committees oversee working conditions and regularly check for hazards and safety violations.  A non-union worker risks suspension or firing for reporting safety issues, but union safety committees can report directly to MSHA or state inspectors with less fear of retaliation because the union will protect safety committeemen who are targeted by employers. (more…)

Kenneth Quinnell
AFL-CIO

According to a new report from Oxfam, the wealth and income that the world’s richest people accumulated last year would be enough to eliminate world poverty four times over. Ben Phillips, a campaign director at Oxfam, said that extreme wealth is now one of the major obstacles to solving the problems of extreme poverty. The $240 billion the top 100 billionaires in the world made in 2012 would completely eliminate extreme poverty, the report concludes.

Oxfam also calls for numerous solutions for tackling extreme poverty:

“Concentration of resources in the hands of the top 1 percent depresses economic activity and makes life harder for everyone else—particularly those at the bottom of the economic ladder,” said Jeremy Hobbs, Oxfam’s executive director.

“We can no longer pretend that the creation of wealth for a few will inevitably benefit the many—too often the reverse is true,” he said. “In a world where even basic resources such as land and water are increasingly scarce, we cannot afford to concentrate assets in the hands of a few and leave the many to struggle over what’s left.”

“From tax havens to weak employment laws, the richest benefit from a global economic system, which is rigged in their favor. It is time our leaders reformed the system so that it works in the interests of the whole of humanity rather than a global elite.” (more…)