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You’ve heard all the reasons given for the economic implosion of 2008: the bursting of the housing bubble, the risky investments of financial firms, the use of incomprehensible financial instruments as get-rich-quick-schemes—all of them the result of a massive agenda of across-the-board deregulation pushed by Republican lawmakers since the 1980s.

But at the root of the behavior that led to the 2008 market crash that nearly took down the economy, according to experts who spoke yesterday at a conference at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., is the soaring level of executive pay at the nation’s giant corporations—a system of salary, stock options and bonuses that is not tied to a company’s long-term performance, but rather to the short-term profits that stand to enrich CEOs via the options and bonuses. Consequently, explained AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka at yesterday’s conference, ”Executive Pay and the Dodd-Frank Act,” excessive executive pay led to excessive risk-taking by CEOs and other top officials in corporations and financial institutions.

In 1980, Trumka said, executives at the nation’s largest companies earned about 42 times the level paid the average factory worker, according to an estimate by BusinessWeek magazine at the time. Today, he said, the average CEO at a corporation in the Standard & Poor’s 500 collects a payout that is some 343 times larger than the median paycheck received by the average worker. (more…)

Labor Day is traditionally a time for picnics and parades. But this year is no picnic for American workers, and a protest march would be more appropriate than a parade.

Not only are 25 million unemployed or underemployed, but American companies continue to cut wages and benefits. The median wage is still dropping, adjusted for inflation. High unemployment has given employers extra bargaining leverage to wring out wage concessions.

All told, it’s been the worst decade for American workers in a century. According to Commerce Department data, private-sector wage gains over the last decade have even lagged behind wage gains during the decade of the Great Depression (4 percent over the last ten years, adjusted for inflation, versus 5 percent from 1929 to 1939).

Big American corporations are making more money, and creating more jobs, outside the United States than in it. If corporations are people, as the Supreme Court’s twisted logic now insists, most of the big ones headquartered here are rapidly losing their American identity. (more…)

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Robin Hood, the guy who robbed the rich and gave to the poor, wore a short frock and tights. From the get-go, the guy serving the disadvantaged while sporting gay attire would fail the entrance exam required to become a card-carrying Republican.

The GOP is, after all, the anti-gay marriage, anti-repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell crew. More than that, Republicans are anti-working class. Their recent policies and activities show them clobbering the middle class while kissing the wealthy’s, well, you know.

Consider health insurance reform and tax cuts for the rich.

The GOP spent the entire fall election cycle yammering about the federal deficit. The world as we know it was coming to an end because of the deficit, they contended loudly and repeatedly.

Then, immediately after Election Day, Republicans insisted on extending tax cuts for the rich. They added more than $36 billion to that supposedly-cataclysmic federal deficit in 2011 so that they could pad the pockets of the nation’s millionaires.

To secure that bonus for millionaires, Republicans held hostage extension of unemployment compensation, which during this grave recession, sustains the nation’s workers who are out of jobs and, all too often, also out of foreclosed-on homes.  The deal comes down to this: The average millionaire will be $100,000 richer as a result in 2011. The average worker will get $15,236 in unemployment benefits if jobless the entire year of 2011.

Republicans insisted on giving the rich $84,764 a year more than the poor.

Repealing health insurance reform, as the GOP has said it hopes to do before month’s end, would have the same result – increasing that supposedly-cataclysmic federal deficit while slamming the poor and middle class.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has calculated that the Affordable Care Act will decrease the federal deficit by $140 billion over 10 years. That’s what the GOP wants to repeal – a deficit reduction measure. Republicans want to add $140 billion to the debt.

Most injured by repeal would be the nation’s poor and middle class. That’s because rescinding the law would once again allow insurers to deny health care to children with pre-existing conditions. It would mean the elderly would once again pay more for preventative care and prescriptions.  It would permit insurers to once again withdraw coverage from people when they get sick. It would mean insurers could kick out young adults who are now covered under their parents’ plans until age 26. It would permit insurers to re-impose “lifetime maximums,” so that they could cancel the coverage of people with costly illnesses. It would permit insurers to once again pocket for profit and “administrative expenses” an unlimited percentage of premiums paid by workers and employers. It would mean small businesses would lose tax breaks that will help them pay for health insurance for workers.

The GOP intends to deny tens of millions of uninsured Americans the hope that soon they’ll be able to afford coverage.

Republicans want to, as they put it, “undo” the health insurance benefits that the Affordable Care Act provides to Americans. And they’re offering nothing in return, nothing to help the uninsured, nothing to help the untold millions cheated by insurance corporations, nothing to require premiums to be spent on health care.

That’s the way Republican-hood rolls, protecting the wealthy, pummeling the poor. The rich, in the case of health insurance, are CEOs earning millions while increasing rates in double digits during a recession. The Los Angeles Times reported in August, for example, that the top executives of the nation’s five largest for-profit health insurers pulled down $200 million in compensation in 2009. The poor, in this case, are policy holders who the insurers charged rate increases as high as 39 percent.

House Republicans would exempt their cancelling of health insurance reform from their own rule that new legislation be paid for. So they wouldn’t have to find an additional $14 billion when they attempt to fulfill their campaign pledge to slash $100 billion from domestic programs – that would be from the programs most needed by the nation’s workers – those that help pay for education and transportation, for example. Because these domestic programs are such a small part of the budget, securing $100 billion from them would cost each department approximately 20 percent of its funds this year. That means painful reductions to areas like law enforcement and medical research. This is accompanied by Republican demands for cuts to many workers’ only retirement plan – Social Security.

In the meantime, the main concern of most Americans, as it was in the grueling days of Robin Hood, is jobs. Not the deficit. The GOP offers no plan to increase jobs for formerly working people, to end the suffering of tens of millions of Americans. Republican-hood is, instead, focused on pampering those who don’t need it.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

The president kicked up his “corporate charm offensive,” meeting for hours with 20 CEOs last week. Characteristically, he started with an apology for not “finding the right balance” in addressing business. “We want to be boosters,” he said, because “when you do well, America does well.” The president and the business leaders talked about free trade, fiscal discipline, and relief from regulation. The White House let it be known the president was considering a speaking gig at the board meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, the right-wing corporate lobby that had accused him of waging a “general attack on our free enterprise system.”

You can’t fault the president for showing a little love to America’s corporate leaders, but there is one small problem here: The entire premise of the meeting is wrong. The reality is that the corporations are doing extraordinarily well — and America is in trouble. US corporations recorded the highest profits on record last quarter, while more than 20 million people were in need of full-time work, and poverty is at record heights. What is good for General Motors or General Electric or IBM is no longer necessarily good for America.

In fact, these executives and their companies are more part of the problem than part of the solution for this country. They’ve been making out like bandits, but Americans are less and less the beneficiaries of their success. As President Obama has stated, if we are to revive an America with a vibrant middle class and a widely shared prosperity, we need fundamental reforms to build a new foundation for growth and prosperity — an agenda the country needs and the CEOs he met with largely oppose. Consider: (more…)

By Sam Pizzigati
Editor, “Too Much” 

If you started last year on the payroll at Verizon or Alcoa or Boeing or IBM, you may have found yourself off the payroll by year’s end. All these American corporate giants — and dozens more — have slashed their payrolls by the thousands since the Great Recession first kicked into gear. 

But if you started last year in the chief executive suite of any of these companies, you ended the year with more than your job. You ended the year with many more new millions in your pocket.

In fact, details a just-released new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, CEOs at the 50 U.S. firms that have fired the most workers since our current economic meltdown began “took home nearly $12 million each on average in 2009,” a windfall 42 percent higher than the year’s overall CEO pay average. 

These layoff-happy CEOs, Executive Excess 2010 makes plain, didn’t just line their own pockets while they were throwing employees out the door. These CEOs, in effect, threw people out the door to line their own pockets. 

The layoffs these CEOs engineered, the new Executive Excess explains, “in no way rate as an inevitable consequence of red corporate ink.” Nearly three quarters of the nation’s corporate layoff leaders — 72 percent — actually ended last year in the black. Together, the top 50 layoff firms “enjoyed a 44 percent average profit increase in 2009.” (more…)

By Jonathan Tasini
Candidate for Democratic nomination, NY 15^th Congressional District

I wrote recently about how the decline of U.S. wages has made workers here cheaper to hire than workers in India, at least in the call center industry. Today, the news hails from Asia where workers are rising up against poverty-level wages.

From the Financial Times (and, as a side observation, the FT gives far better insight on a regular basis on these trends than anything you can read in the U.S. traditional press):

Bangladeshi garment workers, who make clothes for western brands such as H&M, Gap and Marks & Spencer, greeted a recent 80 per cent pay rise by rampaging angrily through the capital Dhaka burning cars and looting shops.

For the world’s lowest-paid garment workers, the increase in the minimum wage, effective from November, takes their pay from $23 to $43 (€33, £27.50) a month. It was their first pay rise for four years, a period of soaring food and fuel prices. However, the workers were enraged that Dhaka had not agreed to the $75 a month they had demanded.

…Demands for better pay across Asia reflect improving job opportunities in economies that are growing faster than their western markets.

…”There are no industrial relations,” says Mr Alam. “The whole attitude is arrogant and feudal. Owners and government think they are helping the workers. The workers are not treated like workers – they are treated like beggars.“[emphasis added] (more…)

By Richard Trumka
President, AFL-CIO

So now we learn that as millions of America’s families were losing their homes, Goldman Sachs cheered because it stood to make huge money betting on a housing market gone bad. Is that Wall Street’s vision of American values? It’s not mine. And it’s not the values of the thousands of working Americans who are marching on Wall Street today in person with me and online.

Our message is simple: Big Banks tanked our economy and took our money when they needed a bailout. Now they’re thumbing their noses at our communities but making billions in profits. It’s time they pay up.

Pay up by investing in communities to create jobs for the millions of unemployed workers–like Terry in Florida, who was laid off a week before Christmas. Being forced to return his family’s Christmas gifts to the store was just the beginning of his pain. While the corporation he worked for is turning a profit, he fears his family will be homeless by summer.

Meanwhile, in 2009, 25 hedge fund managers were paid the equivalent of the salaries of 680,000 school teachers. That’s in 2009, when we taxpayers spent billions of dollars bailing out the financial sector. If Goldman Sachs is cheering at the collapse of the housing market, what’s the rest of Wall Street saying? Thanks, suckers?

Those may be Wall Street’s values. They’re not America’s.

In a stunning new Pew poll, more than half of those surveyed say within the past year a member of their household has been out of work–up 15 percentage points since last year. Fully 70 percent of Americans say they have faced one or more job- or financial-related problems in the past year, up from 59 percent in February 2009.

And homelessness no longer is a scourge of the most troubled of our society. Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, describes the nation’s epidemic of homelessness as reaching crisis proportions not seen since the Great Depression–and it stems directly from the Big Bank-fueled recession in which millions of workers lost jobs and savings and can no longer afford their mortgage or rent.

Meanwhile, the Big Banks announced massive first quarter earnings–Citigroup, $4.4 billion; Bank of America, $4.2 billion; Goldman Sachs, $3.46 billion; JPMorgan Chase, $3.3 billion; and Morgan Stanley, $1.8 billion. It turns out that much of that money was made by the same risky trading practices that cost taxpayers a $700 billion bank bailout.

The damage inflicted has deepened economic inequality, which has gotten worse since 2007. The richest 10 percent now control nearly 70 percent of the wealth. Those with incomes in the bottom 50 percent have a little more than 2 percent of the wealth.

The bottom line is Wall Street should pay to clean up the mess they made and Congress must enact strong Wall Street reform. We are supporting four ways for the Big Banks to pay–President Obama’s bank tax, a special tax on bank bonuses, closing the carried interest tax loophole for hedge funds and private equity and, most important, a financial speculation tax levied on all financial transactions–including derivatives–that would raise more than $150 billion a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The financial speculation tax would have a negligible impact on long-term investors but would discourage the short-termism in the capital markets that led to so much destruction over the past decade.

Congress also must aggressively address the jobs crisis now–if not because it’s the right thing to do, then because of November 2010. That Pew poll I cited above? It found Americans united in the belief that the economy is in bad shape: 92 percent give it a negative rating.

Wall Street’s values are based on greed. The American people’s values are rooted in working hard, playing fairly and doing right by our family, neighbors and friends.

If you can’t march and rally with us on The Street, join us live online today at 4 p.m. EDT. We’ll be 10,000 strong on the ground and marching for tens of thousands more who have signed up to take part in our virtual march.

Working people are angry–and we are right to be angry at the betrayal of our economic future. Help us turn that anger into the energy to create jobs, fix our economy and build a stronger nation.

 By David Sirota
Newspaper columnist, radio host, bestselling author 

This month, a British government report admitted that one of the major rationales for invading Iraq — the claim that Saddam could deploy WMDs in 45 minutes — probably came from a cab driver. Had the public originally been told about this sketchy sourcing, there may have been a more, ahem, forceful mass opposition to preemptive war in the Middle East.

It’s a good lesson about the need for transparency. We cannot fully snuff out spin, and we will never be able to guarantee perfect results from policy choices. But we can increase the chances for successful societal decision-making when we at least know the facts.

That’s the common sense rationale behind our sunshine laws. While courts say we can’t ban politicians from raising private money, we can force politicians to disclose who their benefactors are so that we know what they really represent. We may not bar sugary foods — but we do require nutrition labels so we can know what we are eating.

More often than not, this was the American compromise: We fought about regulations and mandates, but there had been consensus support for transparency.

“Had been,” mind you, is the key phrase — and the cab-driver-induced war is only the beginning.

In 2008, the New York Times’ David Barstow reported that 75 retired military officers regularly appearing on television “have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.”

Collectively, the group represented “more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants,” and here’s the kicker: “Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to viewers.”

Had networks reacted to Barstow’s blockbuster with better disclosure, we could have rested easy. Instead, the deceptions persist.

HuffPost recently showed how “major television networks continue to host retired generals as military analysts without alerting viewers to their extensive ties to defense contractors.”

Additionally, Wired magazine reports that neoconservative think-tankers who directly helped craft the Pentagon’s Afghan escalation are now appearing throughout the media as allegedly disinterested analysts of the escalation — again, without any mention of their concurrent work.

Considering the sometimes murky relationship between advertisers and newsrooms, it’s easy to think this opacity is the exclusive transgression of commercial media. Unfortunately, it’s not — it has bled into the country’s single most powerful economic institution, the Federal Reserve.

This is the bank currently lobbying against congressional oversight by arguing it must preserve its “independence” — the same institution whose regional board members are elected by the private banks they regulate and whose chairman, Ben Bernanke, quietly cavorts with the bank CEOs he’s supposed to be independent from. Even worse, the Fed is paying many of the ostensibly objective economists who sculpt the debate about Congress’s Fed policy.

HuffPost ace reporter Ryan Grim found that the Fed today doles out roughly $400 million a year for “research” — much of it to outside economists who then advocate for the Fed’s agenda without disclosing their Fed ties. For instance, seven of the eight economists on a recent anti-oversight letter to Congress failed to note they are or were on the Fed’s payroll.

That blatant chicanery, though, is not the worst of it. The real subterfuge is how the Fed’s shadowy pay scheme bakes an invisible pro-Fed consensus into our public discourse. Through its academic largesse, Grim notes the Fed “so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession.”

Ronald Reagan, of course, warned us to “trust, but verify.” It was good advice, except for one hitch: What happens when the verifiers are the ones who can no longer be trusted?

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David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “Hostile Takeover” and “The Uprising.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

 

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Americans are paying big time now for decades of buying into a hoax.

And it wasn’t sub-prime mortgages.

It was the conservative contention that government is evil and inept. Swallowing that absurd assertion resulted in relaxation and elimination of supposedly onerous and unnecessary government regulations – from the ones that prevented banks from growing too big to fail to those that protected union organizers from illegal corporate obstruction tactics.

Unfettered, Wall Street speculators went on a rampage of reckless wagering that ultimately knocked the wind out of the world economy’s bubble. With unrestrained corporate threats and interference, union membership declined to 12 percent, although 58 percent of non-managment workers surveyed said they’d like to join a union.

Now, that reviled institution – government – is the only one big and strong enough to rescue the economy that perpetration of the hoax devastated. How ironic. The  government must also restore the ability of the American people to organize unions at their workplaces, if they so choose, by passing the Employee Free Choice Act.

President Barack Obama has said he wants to make government cool again. He stood on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill.  on the bicentennial of  Abraham Lincoln’s birth and talked about why the 16^th President supported the union and why concerted action is so effective. Speaking of the hoax, he said, “Such knee-jerk disdain for government – this constant rejection of any common endeavor – cannot rebuild our levees or our roads or our bridges.”

Common endeavor is the power of unions, whether they be unions of states or labor unions. That is why corporations across America so fear the Employee Free Choice Act. It would ease forming a labor union. It would allow workers – rather than CEOs – to decide whether to create a labor union by collecting signatures from a majority of workers or by a secret ballot election.

Big business is attempting to perpetrate a second hoax on America – that the Employee Free Choice Act is no good. They’ve been flying a bunch of anti-union lobbyists to Washington to pressure politicians to vote against it. Sounds a lot like CEOs jetting to D.C. in private planes for bailout money. 

The bailout money will, of course, come from the pockets of working Americans who those very CEOs don’t want to unionize. And after decades when the policies of the government-is-evil-hoax meant wealth accrued to the very richest, it turns out that the economy would have been better served if wealth had been more evenly distributed.

More workers with more money to spend means more cars and houses and All-Clad pots and pans bought. Those purchases keep other workers employed, who spend more money.

When those workers are unionized, studies reveal two important statistics.  One is that they earn 30 percent more than non-union workers. The other is that they are 59 percent more likely to be covered by employer-provided health insurance. So, in the end, unionization is good for the economy.

That effect was acknowledged in 1935 when the National Labor Relations Act was passed to encourage unionization and collective bargaining. It occurred in the midst of the Great Depression and followed decades rocked by lesser economic “panics” causing runs on banks.

The NLRA “Declaration of Policy” says this about this law: “The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract, and employers who are organized in corporate or other forms of ownership association, substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners.”

Simply put, employers wield considerable strength, and workers must be able to unionize so wage and benefit negotiations occur on a more even playing field. There’s power in common endeavor.

In 1935, in the depth of the Great Depression, the government encouraged workers to use their power to obtain better wages. It did that because better wages to many would help end the depression for all.

Since then, corporations and CEOs – the perpetrators of the great government-is-evil hoax — have also chipped away at the NLRA. They’ve seized from workers the ability to determine how unions are formed.

And they increasingly harass workers trying to form unions. In 2007, employers illegally harassed or coerced 29,000 workers. In the 1950s, companies illegally punished fewer that 1,000 workers a year for union activity. Thirty-six percent of workers who voted against a union said they did so because of pressure from the employer, according to an NLRB survey of 400 election campaigns in 1998 and 1999.

Just like in 1935, workers now need unions to help them secure better wages, which will, in the end, be good for the country because it will improve the economy.

For that to happen, though, the Employee Free Choice Act must pass. Workers must have the right, once again, to choose how they want to form their own organizations.

In Obama’s speech in Springfield, in which he discussed the union of states, he quoted Lincoln on the purpose of government, saying, “The legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, by themselves.”

In this quote, labor unions could be substituted for government: “The legitimate object of unions is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, by themselves.”

That is why workers must vanquish the new hoax being perpetrated by conservatives, greedy CEOs and other labor union-haters. Workers must win the freedom that they had in 1935 to choose how to form their unions. Labor unions give workers the ability to do what needs to be done but which cannot be accomplished by individuals. And that includes bargaining for the better wages that, when spent throughout the economy, will help end the current great recession.