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…)
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.
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…)
Last week, President Obama described the sequestration situation in simple, stark terms: keep it in place and punch the middle class in the gut. Or, he suggested, soften the blow substantially by ending special tax breaks for the rich.
“Republicans in Congress face a simple choice. Are they willing to compromise to protect vital investments in education and healthcare and national security and all the jobs that depend on them? Or would they rather put hundreds of thousands of jobs and our entire economy at risk just to protect a few special interest tax loopholes that benefit only the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations?”
President Obama is recommending reducing the pain of sequestration by raising revenue. This could be accomplished by eliminating cushy deals that the rich and corporations have bought for themselves over the years with lobbyist dough.
Rig the Vote is the evil opposite of Rock the Vote. Rock is the campaign by a nonprofit to increase political engagement and register young people. Rig is the campaign by the GOP to suppress political engagement and subvert balloting.
The GOP rigged the vote by limiting registration, demanding specific photo ID at the polls and creating hours-long waits in poor and minority districts. The GOP also connived to re-apportion state electors to the Electoral College. And if six key states had adopted the change, President Obama, who received the majority of the popular vote by a margin of nearly 5 million, would not be president.
All of this was calculated to stifle and sabotage voting by those who lean Democrat, particularly the 47 percent of Americans who Republicans disdain. Republicans, who grovel to the 1 percent, realized they weren’t going to win if they played fair and square by those pesky old American tenets of one-person-one-vote and majority rule. They figured the more Democrats they could prevent from voting, the weightier Republican ballots would become. In this scheme, Republicans wouldn’t have to bother winning the hearts and minds of the majority. Instead, this bull-dozing of democracy would enable rule by the minority.
The minority – specifically Republican Mitt Romney who received only 47 percent of the popular vote – would, in fact, be ruling had the GOP’s Electoral College rigging plot succeeded. Currently, the Presidential candidate who receives the majority of popular votes in a state receives all of its electors, except in Maine and Nebraska. The GOP wanted to change this system, but only in blue states – those that traditionally have voted for Democrats.
“I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red ought to be looking at.”
“Controlled red” are those states with Republican governors and Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. In vote-blue-controlled-red states, which happen to be large and densely populated – Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin – the GOP wanted to apportion electors by congressional district. Those districts that voted Republican would get an elector for Romney; those that voted Democrat would get one for Obama. Under this plan, Michigan would have given Romney the majority of electors, 9, while awarding 7 to President Obama, although President Obama won the popular vote in Michigan by nearly 10 points. This enables the loser to win; it facilitates minority rule. (more…)
President Obama demonstrated his gutsiness in recent months by speaking so many words that craven politicians contend cannot be spoken.
These are hot-button words like same sex-marriage, immigration reform, gun control and climate change. Fighting words. The president even specifically addressed three of these in his second inaugural speech – the civil rights of gay Americans, the threat of climate change and the need for immigration reform.
Taking on any one of these issues, let alone all of them at once, illustrates the audacity of the guy. That’s good because another inflammatory word must be placed on his to-say list: Union. Radical Republicans and the multi-national corporations that fill their moneybags are brazenly attacking labor unions, attempting to deny all workers the right to collectively bargain. President Obama must forcefully condemn this malicious campaign to undermine the American middle class. He must proclaim to the whole country, not just to labor union members, that he will protect the right of workers to use the power of collective action to secure equitable wages.
“So let us never forget: much of what we take for granted – the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, health insurance, paid leave, pensions, Social Security, Medicare – they all bear the union label. It was the American worker – union men and women – who returned from World War II to make our economy the envy of the world. It was labor that helped build the largest middle class in history. So even if you’re not a union member, every American owes something to America’s labor movement.”
On Labor Day two years later, radicals in the Republican Party were pushing so-called Right to Work (RTW) legislation that denies companies and unions the right to bargain over requiring payments in lieu of dues from workers who decline to join the union. These laws weaken unions because they allow workers to shirk their responsibility to help pay the costs of the union services they benefit from. Here’s what President Obama said then:
“I know it’s not easy when there’s some folks who have their sights trained on you. . .And I want everybody here to know, as long as I’m in the White House I’m going to stand up for collective bargaining. And we’re going to keep at it. Because having a voice on the job and a chance to organize and a chance to negotiate for a fair day’s pay after a hard day’s work, that is the right of every man and woman in America – not just the CEO in the corner office, but also the janitor who cleans that office after the CEO goes home. Everybody has got the same right.”
“And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America. Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.”
Oscar came to the United States at the age of 16 to work. There were no jobs for him in his native Guatemala, and he felt obligated to help support his parents.
He was lured across borders by the promise of work. He believed, as so many immigrants do, that there would be a job for him in America.
For the past five years, he has worked at a Los Angeles car wash that cheated him and other immigrant workers out of pay, refused protective gear and even denied drinking water.
Employers such as car washes, corporate farms, construction companies and lawn care businesses entice immigrants into the United States by providing jobs with no questions asked. They lure undocumented workers in, and then abuse them with impunity. This endangers all workers because the low-wage, hazardous conditions undocumented workers endure can become the standard. This is especially true in bad economic times. More border security is fine. But to ensure safe, family-supporting jobs remain the norm, America must hold employers to account for baiting immigrants.
Like many immigrants, Oscar, now 29, stayed with a relative when he arrived in America. At first, he found work delivering cosmetics. The company treated him decently but laid him off when business declined. That’s when he got the job at Vermont Car Wash in L.A.
The owner promised minimum wage, which was $8 an hour then in California. But when Oscar received his first paycheck, he discovered Vermont paid him $7 an hour and compensated him for only about half the hours he worked. (more…)
By Richard (RJ) Eskow
Senior Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future
Our nation was gripped by so many fallacies and delusions in 2012 that the whole Mayan calendar end-of-the-world thing didn’t even make the list.
Even those apocalyptic prophecies were more plausible than the idea that cutting Social Security will help the deficit, that government spending cuts will jump-start the economy, there were no crimes on Wall Street, or that we live in a “divided nation” whose “center” wants more business as usual in Washington.
Here then, without further ado, are our Top 12 Political Fallacies for 2012.
1. Austerity works.
Last year we said austerity economics was dead. It is. Unfortunately nobody told the politicians. They’re still trying to force it onto the people of Europe, even as its effects make the economies there progressively worse.
They’re trying to force more of it on us, too. The Republicans want to decimate Social Security, Medicare, roads and highways, education, programs for the poor … The Democrats offer a more modest form of austerity, but austerity’s exactly what the President last proposed to Congress.
If austerity’s so good for us, why are they trying to terrify us with the a”fiscal cliff”? T heirMonster In the Closet is austerity. Apparently they don’t see the irony in that. But there’s something else they shouldn’t overlook.
Obama will never run for office again, but most of Democrats on the Hill will. Hope they don’t forget that – because we won’t. (more…)
By Jim Hightower
Author, Commentator, America’s Number One Populist
As I learned from experience in my “vote-for-me” period, the nature of the political scramble is this: You win some, you lose some. Counting Democratic primary contests, I ran seven statewide races in Texas, winning five.
My final loss was a squeaker in November 1990, having been surprised by a fusillade of truly vile TV ads fired at me in the last two weeks by a fellow who went on to become nationally infamous as the Michelangelo of Smear: Karl Rove. But: Win some, lose some. In my concession press conference, I simply noted that in politics, “One day you’re a peacock, the next day you’re a feather duster.” And, after all, feather dusters are quite useful things to have–in the political arena, as well as in the home.
So, in this 2012 post-election Lowdown, let’s assess the condition of our progressive plumage.
Top prize, of course, was the presidency, and we won! Sort of. Really what we did was avert a hard Romney-Ryan lurch rightward, downward, and backward–all at once. Ouch. That would’ve hurt.
But we also won one more four-year crack at pressuring Obama to be an actual Democrat. We should not waste this opportunity by playing another round of pattycake with him. Gently pushing from the inside–trying to curry favor by being nice and staying quiet–has proven futile with this guy. To the contrary, he’s shown that what he responds to is loud and sustained noise–as he did when confronted by obstreperous tea partiers, intractable Republicans, balky insurance giants, angry Wall Streeters, the pouty US Chamber of Commerce, etc.
He only turned to us when he needed to be re-elected, and we delivered. It was the progressive base (labor, women, Latinos, African Americans, environmentalists, poor people, the LGBT community, students, New Deal defenders, small farmers, anti-war activists, civil libertarians, et al.) that carried him to 332 electoral votes. And for many of us, he was a heavy haul. (more…)
By Robert Kuttner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect
Public opinion is steadily moving away from the Republican Party, as is America’s demographic future. President Obama’s three-point re-election win understated that reality, while events since Election Day have underscored it.
Public opinion dramatically favors restoring higher tax rates on the top 2 percent. Large majorities oppose cutting Social Security or Medicare. Acceptance of same-sex marriage is increasing, and is already the overwhelming majority view of those under 40 — the future electorate. Most Americans don’t support the absence of any regulation of combat weapons.
It is hard to know who was the bigger fool of the week’s public debates, House Speaker John Boehner or NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre. No critic could have done a better job of discrediting the NRA than LaPierre himself. And Boehner, trying to corral a caucus divided between right-wingers and ultra-right-wingers, fell on his face.
And yet a Republican Party, as personified by the House Majority, is the zombie that has been overtaken by public opinion but will neither change nor get out-of-the-way.
So reforms desired by most American voters will be a long time coming. (more…)
