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President Obama went to Austin, Texas, last week in pursuit of an industrial and employment revival. He wants to launch manufacturing institutes to foster American innovation and job creation.

Republicans responded by ridiculing the President, in the same arrogant way that the blooded aristocrats on the British television series Downton Abbey scorned a chauffeur who sought to marry into the patrician Crawley family.  “No opportunity for the downtrodden!” the GOP and wealthy vow.

Watching Downton Abbey would be pure escapism, a simple respite from the grind of work and duties of home. That is, except for the disquieting reality that Downton Abbey’s classist mores increasingly intrude on American life. The wealth gap between America’s rich and poor has widened to the point where it was in Downton Abbey days. And that is abetted by the GOP practice of continually cutting taxes on the rich while constantly cutting government services that provide opportunity to everyone else.

Income inequality in America is wide and widening. Just get this: while income stagnated for the middle class, the average annual income of the top .01 percent of U.S. households from 2002 to 2007 rose by 123 percent – a gain of $20 million each.

Even after the crash of 2008, the wealthiest .01 percent did just fine. Now, the stock market and corporate profits are soaring.  But only the wealthy are benefitting. The New York Times reported earlier this month that corporate profits in the third quarter of 2012 took the largest share of national income for any time since 1950, while the portion that went to workers fell to the lowest point since 1966.

While making those huge profits, corporations aren’t creating jobs.  For those who do have jobs but aren’t in the top 10 percent income bracket, wages fell 7 percent from 2007 to 2008. Unlike the rich, workers didn’t recover after the crash, with median household income declining 1.5 percent in 2011. (more…)

A century ago, workers were a lot more “flexible” than they are now. Veritable Gumbies in the mills and mines and factories they were, distorting their lives to slog 10 or 12 hours a day, six – even seven – days a week.

Then came the 40-hour week. And weekends. And eventually sick days. And paid vacation days. Now, bosses at mills and mines and factories regard these rules as coddling and consider the workers accustomed to them as unyielding to corporate demands.

The GOP has an app for that. It’s called the Working Families Flexibility Act. This legislation that the Republican majority in the U.S. House is expected to pass this week would force some old-time flexibility into 21^st century workers. The forced flexibility act would award bosses the power to “offer” compensatory time off instead of overtime pay. Bosses, not workers, would determine when the comp time could be taken. The proposal puts control in corporate hands, obliging wage earners to bend over backward for bosses exactly like their Gumby ancestors were compelled to.

Trade unionists and labor rights activists died to achieve the goal of eight-hour days and 40-hour weeks. They were shot and beaten in the streets during demonstrations organized by the eight-hour movement. Their slogan was: “Eight hours for work; eight hours for rest; eight hours for what we will.”

Finally, in 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as part of the New Deal, which gave workers and families rights and security that previously had been exclusive to the wealthy.

FLSA enforces the 40-hour week with a simple measure. It requires employers to pay time and a half to wage earners for each hour worked beyond 40 in a week. That creates a financial disincentive for bosses to order work beyond 40 hours. That also creates a financial incentive for companies to avoid overtime pay by hiring more workers. That was a significant bonus during the Great Depression. (more…)

You are not safe. Not at work. Not at home in your bed. The biggest threat is not terrorism. It’s corporate negligence leading to a blast or collapse or release of toxic chemicals.

Terrorism killed 3,000 Americans on 9-11. But in the dozen years since then, terrorists on American soil have taken the lives of fewer than 25, including those at the Boston Marathon and Fort Hood. By contrast, every year, more than 4,000 perish in American workplaces. These deaths are commemorated every April 28 on Workers Memorial Day. It’s every April 28 because workplace fatalities are relentless.

The explosion earlier this month at the fertilizer plant in West, Texas, that killed 11 first responders and three town residents is a warning to community members that they too may fall victim to workplace dangers. That massive blast should shake Americans out of the delusion that careful corporations and vigilant regulators keep them safe. They don’t. Industry won’t improve safety unless forced. And regulators can’t begin to adequately compel them until properly fanged and funded.

Between the deaths in Boston and West, my union, the United Steelworkers (USW), issued a report on the threat posed to workers and communities by a highly toxic chemical widely used in oil refining. The report is called “A Risk Too Great.”  That’s because no industrial process endangers more lives from a single accident than alkylation with deadly hydrogen fluoride (HF).

It’s used by 50 refineries across the country, each storing an average of 212,000 pounds. That endangers 26 million Americans. (more…)

Iciness is the defining feature of Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom’s first and only female prime minister, who died last week. She was the cold-as-steel Iron Lady. President Obama, warm, friendly, shaking hands, hugging the bereft, is the opposite.

It’s the same with their philosophies. President Obama, who worked as a community organizer, believes in the power of consensus and collective action. Thatcher, a conservative, scorned compromise and community.

It’s inexplicable, then, that a Thatcher policy would appear in the White House budget released last week. Thatcher once argued for taking milk from the mouths of babes, lobbying to restrict free milk for school children. Similarly, the White House budget proposes taking money out of the pockets of the elderly by cutting Social Security cost-of-living payments. Social Security is community action. It is Americans coming together to care for their parents and grandparents. Thatcher would definitely cut it. Republicans in Congress would. But Democrats should never allow the mean spirit of Margaret Thatcher to materialize in a progressive policy document.

Even in death, which tends to ease loathing, Thatcher is reviled by vast swaths of the United Kingdom. Graffiti gives her a rocky send off. The writing on the wall says: Iron Lady? Rust in Peace.  Reaction to a glowing obituary in The Daily Telegraph was so vile that the paper shut down all comment boards on articles about her. Those who still despise her held “death parties” and used social media last week to push the 1930s song, “Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead,” to the top of the U.K. singles chart. (more…)

As the U.S. Commerce Department released a report late last month showing corporate profits at a 60-year high, suddenly the big news was about how cheating surely must be rampant in social security disability.

Wait, what?

Also late last month, a Washington Post investigation showed that the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones industrial average pay a dramatically smaller portion of their profits in taxes than they did a half century ago. Instead of discussing how that impacts government services, all of Washington is talking about slashing Social Security and Medicare.

It’s bait and switch.

CEOs and 1 percenters have elevated that old con to a whole new level. To them, bait is not a lure to a store but a taunt about the poor. “Look over there, a welfare queen!” they goad. “Look, someone not-quite-dirt-poor might get Medicaid,” they needle. Then they laugh all the way to their secret accounts in the Caymans as the 99 percent fight among themselves over how many pennies the government throws at the poor. The rich snicker as the vast majority of Americans are so distracted they don’t focus on record corporate profits, on record low corporate tax payments or on lobbyists buying tax breaks for corporations and loopholes for offshore accounts.

In defense of the 99 percent, it’s hard to concentrate on the big economic picture when household finances are so grim. The Commerce Department reported that in January personal income fell 3.6 percent. Overall, considering taxes and inflation, the decline was the largest in 57 years. (more…)

Republicans are suffering grievously from the syndrome that singer Joni Mitchell memorialized in the hit “Big Yellow Taxi” in 1970. The chorus says it all:

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Republicans bellyached for years that government must shrink. It had to be smaller. Cut the budget come hell or high water, they yammered. Well, darn if the sequester hasn’t brought hell and high water to Republican districts across America. Now Republican lawmakers can’t stop carping about how small government shouldn’t occur in their districts.  Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till you vote to kill it?

Paradise was among the first to go. Specifically, the paradise of American parks. The National Park Service, complying with the mandate that it slash about 9 percent of its budget through September, reduced hours, cut staff and stopped providing some services such as campgrounds, based on recommendations from each park superintendent.

Among the campgrounds shut down are those at Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. The state’s Republican Senator John Thune is feeling particularly grumpy about that. He accused the Park Service of closing his campgrounds instead of cutting wasteful and duplicative spending, examples of which he neglected to offer.

He’s singing the whiny sequester tune popularized by Republicans who refused to raise taxes on the rich to reduce the impact of $1 trillion in indiscriminate, across-the-board budget cuts they demanded. They all said they wanted smaller government. They huffed and they puffed and they threatened to take down the nation’s economy until they got it.

Now that it’s here, now that it’s affecting their constituents, Republicans contend the $1 trillion in indiscriminate, across-the-board budget cuts they demanded should have been specifically targeted to eliminate only “waste, fraud and abuse.”

That’s a confusing assertion, though, from the party insisting on smaller government, the party whose members swore loyalty oaths to Grover Norquist, the anti-government lobbyist who infamously said government must be shrunk small enough to drown in a bathtub. Even if every speck of waste, fraud and abuse that anyone could ever uncover were eliminated, it wouldn’t add up to $1 trillion. And it wouldn’t shrink government.

Government might be more efficient, but it wouldn’t be smaller.  Smaller government requires cutting actual services and programs – like Thune’s campground.

So far, Republicans haven’t wailed about cuts to programs for struggling families such as unemployment benefits, public housing, daycare aid for poor working women, the home heating help called LIHEAP, or the food assistance called WIC that impoverished mothers use to feed their babies. (more…)

It’s hard to believe considering what happened in 2008 on Wall Street and in Washington, but banking is built on trust.

A worker hands his hard-earned dollars to a teller and trusts the money will be deposited and available for withdrawal when needed. Despite the crash on Wall Street, workers still trust bankers to safeguard deposits from robbers and reckless investments.

Granting banks a little less credulity might be wise. Just consider what happened in the past two weeks. A U.S. Senate investigation revealed that the 2010 Dodd-Frank banking reforms utterly failed in the case of the $6.2 billion “London Whale” gambling loss at JPMorgan Chase. Then a U.S. House committee passed seven measures to weaken Dodd-Frank. And there was the European Union’s demand that Cyprus expropriate money from depositors to prevent that nation’s big banks from failing. That means no depositor can trust that a government won’t dip its hands into savers’ accounts to bail too-big-to-fail banks. The trust is gone, baby.

Last week’s bad banking news began in Cyprus. It’s a cautionary tale about trust in both politicians and bankers. Cyprus is a tax haven for wealthy Russians the way the Caymans are for wealthy Americans. The Cypriot financial institutions, which made bad bets on Greek debt, are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and were closed last week to stave off bank runs.

The European Union, which includes Cyprus but not Russia, was not eager to provide loans to secure moneyed Russians. Euro zone finance ministers and representatives of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank worked out a deal under which Europe and the IMF would provide $13 billion to bail out the banks if the country took $7.5 billion from depositors’ accounts.

Cypriot and European officials betrayed depositors, particularly small ones whose savings of less than $130,000 supposedly are insured. The newly elected president of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, turned on his own people. He rejected a proposed deal under which Cyprus would take 12.5 percent from depositors with more than $130,000 euros and about half of that from smaller account holders. Anastasiades demanded the rich, often Russian oligarchs, pay less, which meant, of course, the smaller depositors, everyday Cypriot workers, would have to pay more. (more…)

Just four months ago, Americans told the Romney-Ryan team: “No.” The electorate rejected them. Many voters objected to Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan treating them the way arrogant 1 percenters treat “The Help.”

Rep. Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, exposed his condescension toward the masses when he described 60 percent of Americans as “takers.” Mitt Romney illustrated his when he referred to 47 percent of Americans as slackers too lazy to take responsibility for their lives, a moment captured on video by a member of “The Help,” Scott Prouty, who was working as a bartender at the $50,000-a-plate fundraiser where Romney said it.

Last week, Ryan revealed the election loss left him unchastened. He remains intent on telling “The Help” what to do. The princeling of the royal Republican team reprised his prosperity-for-the-rich-austerity-for-the-rest budget. Although the public rejected that path in November, Ryan continues to insist he’s correct and the majority is wrong. He doesn’t care what they want. Like any pampered princeling, he doesn’t tolerate challenges from “The Help.”

He said as much at a news conference after releasing a budget that even the conservative Wall Street Journal described as nearly a twin to the one he and Romney ran on. Here’s what Ryan said after he was asked why he was pushing ideas that the American people spurned in November:

“The election didn’t go our way — believe me I, I know what that feels like. . .That means we surrender our principles? That means we stop believing in what we believe in? . . .We think we owe the country solutions to the big problems that are plaguing our nation. . .We’re showing our answers.”

What Ryan calls answers are the same old schemes, the ones to which the majority of Americans said, “No!” But the consensus of the populace doesn’t matter to Ryan. During the campaign, he and Romney made it perfectly clear they don’t like and don’t respect “The Help.”

The contents of the Ryan budget demonstrate that as well. His proposal, like his previous budgets, would damage or destroy government programs that workers cherish, from Medicare and Medicaid to Pell Grants and food stamps. While Ryan’s budget slashes the living daylights out of those, it awards the wealthy and corporations additional gigantic tax breaks. (more…)

The U.S. Attorney last week confirmed Americans’ fears about Wall Street. The banks, Eric Holder said, were not just too big to fail, they were also too big to jail.

That means bankers operate beyond the pale, outside the historical fence line encircling civil society. Past the pale is where barbarians resided, returning regularly to rampage. These days, bankers operate from beyond the pale, raiding civilization with impunity.

Unlike vulnerable ancient villages, however, the United States has considerable power over these banker barbarians. Banks, after all, are nothing but corporations. Corporations are legal constructs that citizens have the right to rebuild to properly serve society. European countries began doing that last week. Their first steps included limiting banker bonuses and giving shareholders binding say on CEO pay.

It started on Sunday, March 3 when the Swiss voted to grant to those who own corporations – the shareholders – the right to determine executives’ and directors’ pay.  In addition, the referendum outlawed golden handshakes and golden parachutes. These are massive handouts to corporate executives – like the $78 million that Swiss-based healthcare products corporation Novartis proposed as a goodbye gift for CEO Daniel Vasella.

Nationwide outrage scuttled Vasella’s windfall and withered referendum opponents. The measure, called the Minder Initiative after its author Thomas Minder, passed with 68 percent of the vote. Even before Vasella, the Swiss were annoyed that the country’s biggest bank, UBS, had to be bailed out and that another huge bank, Credit Suisse, gave its CEO $76 million in shares in 2010. (more…)

The invisible hand of the market, which the GOP worships as an infallible god, is curled into a fist and is pounding America’s lowest-paid workers.

Those workers have complained about the grinding poverty level of minimum wage. Wal-Mart warehouse workers and New York fast food workers recently demonstrated. They’re fed up. Well, they would be if they could afford enough to eat. President Obama responded, asking Congress to raise the minimum wage, which was last increased to $7.25 an hour in 2009.

Republicans, the party of NO, replied to Obama’s request with a surly, “No way!” Respect the hand, they said, referring to their beloved spectral regulator of the market. Government, Republicans said, must not tell business what to do, must not “burden” business by requiring it to pay a little more. Republicans never mention the burden under which 18 million minimum wage workers struggle, working full-time for $15,080 a year, barely enough to feed, clothe and house themselves. That’s because Republicans revere non-humans – corporations and invisible hands – while denigrating and disrespecting humans who work with their hands to serve food, care for the elderly and stock shelves.

The disrespect could be heard in Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s voice as he derided 47 percent of all Americans as “takers.” That huge number Romney despises includes minimum wage workers – 84 percent of whom are 20 or older – whose children receive immunizations and antibiotics through Medicaid because employers paying minimum wage virtually never provide health insurance.

That GOP disrespect for low-wage workers was in the voice of House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, when he rebuffed the President’s proposal to increase minimum wage by asking:

“Why would we make it harder for small employers to hire people?”

Clearly, Boehner doesn’t care that each year, as inflation rises and minimum wage remains flat, survival gets harder and harder for working people. Clearly the Speaker doesn’t care that the minimum wage now, because it hasn’t kept pace with inflation over the past four decades, is effectively $3.30 an hour lower than it was in 1968, making life significantly harder for this century’s low-wage workers. The hardship of humans doesn’t concern Boehner. (more…)