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Voting doesn’t work anymore. If it did, Americans would get what they want — or at least some of it — from Washington.

But they don’t.

Instead of the people’s priority, which is jobs, country club conservatives in Congress stubbornly fixate on deficits. Instead of ensuring millionaires and corporations pay their fair share, House Republicans passed a budget that would destroy Medicare and Medicaid.

Corporate and clandestine campaign contributions have undermined the power of traditional voting, the kind done at polls on election day. Rather than voters, politicians now serve donors — billionaires and banksters — who invest untold millions and demand returns in the form of self-serving policy.

This is demoralizing to those who cherish democracy and the sanctity of one person, one vote.

Hope, however, arrived with the debit card fee victory. The 99 percent forced Bank of America to back off its proposed fee. Average Americans accomplished this by voting differently, not at the ballot box but at the twitter account, the Occupy march and the teller window, where 1 million depositors went to move $4.5 billion from the big Wall Street banks to community banks and credit unions. They found another way to exercise their franchise and force the powerful to respond.

The 99 percent must exploit the method of this triumph to get what they need. Because politicians sure as hell aren’t giving them what they want.

The numbers don’t lie. Coin-operated conservatives in Congress have rejected President Obama’s jobs plan, parts of the jobs plan and Obama’s pitch to raise taxes on the rich to pay for it.

And yet, the electorate strongly supports both surtaxing millionaires and the elements of the jobs plan. In a CNN poll in October, 75 percent favored sending federal money to the states to hire teachers and first responders and 72 percent favored infrastructure investments.

A whopping 76 percent wanted millionaires to pay higher taxes.

In that same CNN poll, there’s another compelling statistic. Sixty-one percent said reducing unemployment was the most important issue. Reducing the deficit didn’t even come close at 35 percent.

The numbers aren’t flukes. Another survey, taken a week later by CBS found the same thing. (more…)

As the Occupy Wall Street movement spread across the nation last week, politicians in D.C. flipped the bird at protesters – including those camping in Washington’s McPherson Square.

Here’s how: While occupiers sought political focus on the unemployment, impoverishment and foreclosures suffered by the nation’s non-rich 99 percent, politicians considered three major pieces of legislation and passed only the one that will help the wealthiest 1 percent and hurt the remaining 99 percent.

Senate Republicans murdered-by-filibuster the American Jobs Act, which would surtax the 1 percent to provide jobs for the 99 percent. The Senate did pass the currency manipulation bill, but House GOP leaders refused to schedule a vote on the measure that would protect jobs for the 99 percent by punishing countries that undervalue their currencies to artificially lower prices on their exports.

By contrast, both houses of Congress adopted the so-called Free Trade Agreements with Panama, Colombia and Korea, which will, just like their predecessor NAFTA, destroy jobs held by the 99 percent.

It’s incredible. Inexplicable. Inexcusable. In a country where joblessness is a painful 9.1 percent. Where one in five children lives in poverty. Where foreclosures rose again last month. Where a whole movement is growing to protest the appeasement of the rich at the cost of the middle class. In that place, Congress chose to walk backwards. It didn’t take two steps forward – which it could have by passing the currency bill and jobs act. No. It just took a giant step backward by embracing job-killing trade agreements.

It all forces the 99 percent to demand even more loudly: Where’s the jobs?

WHERE’S THE JOBS? (more…)

Today, you can take action to stop Congress from approving job-killing trade deals with Korea, Colombia and Panama and tell Republicans and Democrats to put Americans back to work.

Join the AFL-CIO’s National Call in Day and dial 1-800-718-1008 and tell your lawmakers to stop these dangerous trade deals. You can also send your message via email by clicking here.

With 25 million Americans desperately looking for full-time work Congress should be spending its time on job-creating legislation like President Obama’s American Jobs Act, not job killing trade deals.

Also today, hundreds of workers from around the country will be on Capitol Hill to talk with their lawmakers about the trade deals that put corporations over people and profit over prosperity.

Here’s what’s wrong with these trade deals:

• The Korea agreement is the largest off-shoring deal of its kind since NAFTA. If enacted, it likely will displace 159,000 U.S. jobs, mostly in manufacturing. And its glaring loopholes would allow unscrupulous businesses to import illegally labeled goods from China and possible even from sweatshops in North Korea—potentially without any tariffs at all.
• In Colombia, one trade unionist is murdered nearly every week and almost none of the murderers are brought to justice. In 2010, 51 trade unionists were assassinated in Colombia—more than in the rest of the world combined. So far in 2011, another 22 have been killed, despite Colombia’s heralded “Labor Action Plan.” Would we reward a country where 51 CEOs were killed last year?
• And the Panama agreement has many of the problems of the other two deals, like deregulating big banks and letting foreign investors bypass U.S. health, safety labor and environmental laws. Panama is also a tax haven: a place where tax-dodging, money-laundering millionaires and billionaires hide their money.

Please take a few minutes today and call 1-800-718-1008 (or click here to e-mail) and tell Congress to stop the Korea, Colombia and Panama trade deals that will destroy U.S. jobs and decimate American manufacturing—and give a virtual blank check to foreign governments to trample on the rights of workers.

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This entry originally appeared at the AFL-CIO Now Blog.

While the Republican candidates for President made it clear in their debate this week that they are happy to let uninsured people die if they have a serious illness, the Republicans in Congress are plotting to make people with insurance pay even more for their coverage to boost insurance company profits. How? By stealing nearly $2 billion in rebates that insurance companies owe consumers and small businesses and giving the money back to the insurers.

At a time when families are struggling to make ends meet, this would be an astonishing transfer of money from consumers to the already overflowing coffers of the health insurance industry, whose top five companies alone made $11.7 billion in 2010. (more…)

Washington, DC — President Obama’s jobs speech struck me as more remarkable for its message framing than for its contents. The president offered a centrist, roughly half-trillion-dollar combination of taxes and spending to revitalize the economy. The package is probably half as big as it ought to have been, given the economy. But Obama faces enormous resistance from the Republicans in Congress to even this step, so a larger proposal would have seemed less serious, I suspect.

Obama framed his proposal with two even more critical bits of rhetorical craft. First, he clearly defined the difference in ideas between his approach and that of the Tea Party. He rejected an America in which everyone would be left to fend for themselves, and he made it clear that we are a nation of communities, not isolated individuals. He called for America to win a race to the top, not settle for a race to the bottom. He made government action and regulation into synonyms for keeping Americans safe, and presented his jobs bill as a stand-in for this entire debate.

The contrast with the Republican debate the night earlier couldn’t have been clearer. Rick Perry’s call to eviscerate Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” (and the willingness of the other Republican candidates to eliminate parts of the social safety net) might not have sounded that different to Washington insiders than Obama’s willingness to consider reforming those programs. But to most of us, “Ponzi schemes” and “safety nets” are very different. One is a con. The other is a good thing that could perhaps be made even better. (more…)

Some Republicans in Congress shut down the FAA in July to aid their big corporate airline donors who wanted anti-union provisions stuffed into the FAA reauthorization bill.

Next Thursday President Obama will unveil his jobs plan.

He’ll choose either Plan A or Plan B.

Plan A would be big enough to restart the economy (now barely growing) and reduce unemployment (which continues to grow). That means spending another trillion dollars over the next two years — rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, creating a new WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps, and lending money to cash-starved states and cities.

Republicans will oppose it, of course. They’ll say the stimulus didn’t work the first time (they’re wrong — it saved 3 million jobs but it was way too small given the drop in consumer spending as well as budget cuts by states and cities), and we can’t afford it (wrong again — the yield on 10-year Treasury bills is now 2 percent, meaning this is the best time to borrow. And if growth isn’t restored soon, the debt/GDP ratio will balloon beyond belief). But their real hope is to keep the economy anemic through Election Day 2012 so voters will send Obama home.

That means the president would have to fight for it. He’d have to barnstorm the country, demanding Republican votes. He’d build his 2012 campaign around it, attacking the Republican “do nothing” Congress. He’d give ‘em hell. (more…)

With the President planning to address Congress and the nation September 7^th regarding his jobs plan, we can only hope that it will be a real plan and not more lip service.  A real solution to the obvious, for lack of a better term, “elephant” in the room, or in the oval office if you will, a bold statement to all of Congress: “OUR COUNTRY NEEDS WORK.”

Enough with the “not so sweet” Tea Party rhetoric of spending cuts, enough with Democrats backing into a corner and then crawling under the crowd to escape.  Labor doesn’t need the President to put on his “comfortable shoes” and walk on the picket line with us, it’s truly time to put the proverbial gloves on and duke it out.

It’s really hard to understand all the arguments on how to pull out of the recession and put Americans to work, we have a near perfect model; we’ve done this before.  Surely, at a minimum, we could all agree that many of FDR’s policies worked.  We have an aging infrastructure in this country, we are behind the rest of the modern world on public transit, and a great number of our building trade workers are spending more time laid off and on unemployment rather than they are working. (more…)

Sometimes we all tend to take things for granted and we forget that Social Security is the most successful government program in our nation’s history. Let’s be clear. For more than 75 years, Social Security has, in good times and bad, paid out every nickel owed to every eligible American. Social Security has succeeded in keeping millions of senior citizens, widows and orphans and the disabled out of extreme poverty.

Before Social Security was developed, about half of our seniors lived in poverty. Today, fewer than 10 percent live in poverty and all of that is done with minimum administrative costs. In America right now more than 53 million Americans, including over 120,000 Vermonters, receive Social Security benefits. In our state Social Security benefits total over $1.5 billion per year, an amount equivalent to 6 percent of the state’s annual GDP.

Today, Social Security is facing an unprecedented attack from those who either want to privatize it completely or who want to make substantial cuts. In the coming months, a so-called super-committee in Congress made up of 6 Republicans and 6 Democrats will be making decisions to cut the national debt by some $1.5 trillion over the next decade. Social Security is on the table and could be cut by that committee.

(more…)

Last Thursday, President Obama suggested that voters give Congress an earful on the horrible state of the economy. He was right to do that. There is plenty that Congress can do to spur private sector job creation that would not swell our federal budget deficit.

Taken together, these steps would provide a significant boost to the productive sector of the American economy. Creating one manufacturing job will support four or five other jobs in the economy, which is why it makes sense to adopt a coordinated manufacturing policy which would include the following steps:

• Establish a national infrastructure bank to leverage capital for large-scale transportation and energy projects.

• Reshape the tax code in a revenue neutral way to provide incentives for job creation and inward investment. (more…)