Blog

Robert Creamer

By Robert Creamer
Political organizer, strategist and author

This Saturday, a broad coalition of progressive organizations will hold a massive One Nation Working Together rally — actually kind of a revival — aimed at allowing progressives to emerge from a defensive crouch, stand up straight and mobilize our forces to do battle in the decisive midterm elections.

Due to a navigational error, the U.S. 4th Infantry Division landed on the wrong inlet on Utah Beach in Normandy on D-Day in 1944. For hours the were disoriented and pinned down by German defenders. Then the only general to accompany the amphibious assault, General Ted Roosevelt (son of President Teddy Roosevelt), personally rallied his troops from the beach, over the seawall and established a beachhead that was critical to the successful invasion of France that ultimately ended World War II.

Saturday’s rally is aimed at energizing thousands of latter-day General Ted Roosevelts who can fan out across America and do the same for the progressive forces that can be successful on Nov. 2 if — together — we stand up straight, take the offensive and refuse to be pinned down by constant attacks from the right.

The president’s speech to 27,000 in Madison, Wisconsin, last Monday night fired up all present. It was a great start. But this weekend’s rally organizers plan to communicate one central message to the thousands of activists who will gather in Washington Saturday: The President and other Democratic political leaders are not the only ones responsible for rallying our forces. We are all the generals who will rally our troops off this beach. It’s up to us to take the leadership to prevent the Big Business, Wall Street-dominated, Tea-Party Republicans from reclaiming right-wing domination of American politics.

For forty years the right was on the offensive in America. At least when Bill Clinton was president, Democrats had a team on the field, but in so many respects the right-wing offensive continued until their crushing defeat in November 2008.

For the last 18 months, the progressive forces have once again been on the offense. But the entrenched corporate interests didn’t roll over and play dead. They fought tooth and nail — they lied, they bit, they poked eyes — and did everything in their power to stop change. (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

When Herbert Hoover ran for president in 1928, the Republican party promised his victory would assure the prosperity of  “a chicken in every pot.” This week, Republicans proffered a similar pledge to America.

Hoover won, and in 1929, after a decade of GOP rule in Washington, Republicans did deliver something foul to Americans. It wasn’t the much-anticipated cooking hen. It was the Great Depression.

Now in the Great Recession, also delivered during a GOP presidency, Republicans have presented a new promise. They pledged to withdraw all unspent Recovery Act money to prevent it from employing even one more worker; kill health care reform to stop 30 million Americans from getting affordable insurance; slash $100 billion from federal programs protecting the middle class; preserve tax cuts for the rich and cut government regulation — like oversight of Gulf-oil-gusher-BP and contaminated-egg-producers Jack and Peter DeCoster.

This time, the GOP downsized the “chicken in every pot” promise. Instead they’re pledging a salmonella-poisoned egg.

In 1932, Americans wisely rejected re-electing Republican Hoover, who is regarded as one of the nation’s most inept leaders, and chose instead Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, revered as one of the best. This fall, it’s crucial that Americans choose sagely again, selecting Democrats intent on reforming Washington and protecting the nation’s middle class.

Eight years of Republican rule in Washington climaxed with the worst recession since the Great Depression. Since that downturn officially began in December of 2007, poverty, unemployment and foreclosures have risen while middle class income and health insurance coverage have fallen.

The poverty rate increased to the worst level in 16 years, with 3.7 million people slipping from the middle class to the ranks of the poor in 2009. One in seven Americans now is impoverished. More than 8 million workers have lost their jobs, and 2.3 million families have lost their homes to foreclosure. Nearly one in four mortgage holders is under water, meaning they owe more on their house than it’s worth. Also, last year, the number of uninsured Americans rose by 4.4 million to 50.7 million — 16.7% of the population. It was the largest annual increase since the government began collecting comparable data in 1987.

By contrast, on Wall Street, where unrestrained and unregulated bankster recklessness caused the recession, happy days are here again. The banks that taxpayers bailed out have resumed paying million-dollar salaries and bonuses. The nation’s top 25 hedge-fund managers each took home an average of $1 billion (BILLION) last year. Those hedgers are among the nation’s richest 1 percent, those whose take home pay grew so fast between 1979 and the start of the recession in 2007 that nearly 39 percent of all income growth went to that tiny number of super-wealthy. Only 36 percent went to the bottom 90 percent of the nation’s population.

Democrats, keenly aware of the diverging experiences of the nation’s sucker-punched workers and its well-heeled elite, have worked to aid the beleaguered middle. They passed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated created between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs by July.

Democrats reformed health insurance so that children with pre-existing conditions can’t be denied insurance; senior citizens won’t have to pay for “donut hole” medications; young adults up to age 26 may remain on their parents’ plans, and insurance companies can no longer choose doctors or place lifetime limits on coverage or drop the sick. On top of all that, the Democrats’ reform will lower federal deficits by $138 billion.

Now, Democrats are fighting to preserve income tax cuts for the middle class while eliminating breaks for the rich. The Democrats would continue to lower by $1,132 a year the taxes of median wage earners, those with incomes of about $50,000 a year. Under the Democrats’ plan, the super rich – those taking home more than $1 million a year — would still get a tax cut of $6,349 – six times that of the middle class. But Democrats would have the super rich pay $97,651 in taxes a year that they now pocket.

Democrats think the rich have an obligation to pay those taxes. To get where they are, in the top one percent income bracket, they’ve used tax-subsidized public services at significantly higher rates than the other 99 percent of Americans. That includes services such as roads and airports, civil courts, the U.S. patent office, the U.S. Department of Commerce and professional licensing, regulation and inspection departments.

Republicans don’t agree. They believe the middle class should pay so the rich can continue getting breaks. The GOP believes it is fine to give tax cuts to the rich that will cost nearly $1 trillion over 10 years, but not pay for them. Conversely, Republicans have refused to extend unemployment insurance for the middle class jobless unless that’s paid for. The GOP believes it’s appropriate to continue tax breaks for multi-national corporations that ship jobs overseas but it’s not to extend aid to the middle class unemployed to pay for health insurance.

In their Pledge to America, Republicans promise to take care of the rich. They said they’d change Washington by decimating the very regulation that protects middle class workers and their families and by cutting off money that is providing jobs to the unemployed.  The GOP pledges to undermine middle class America.

It might be called a turkey, but even that would inflate its value. It’s a rotten egg hurled at middle America.

***

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.

Les Leopold

By Les Leopold
Author, “The Looting of America”

The ranks of the working-age poor in the United States climbed to the highest level since the 1960s as the recession threw millions of people out of work last year, leaving one in seven Americans in poverty. The overall poverty rate climbed to 14.3 per cent, or 43.6 million people, the Census Bureau said last week in its annual report on the economic well-being of US households. Gulfnews.com

While 43.6 million Americans live in poverty, the richest men of finance sure are getting pissy. First Steve Schwartzman, head of the Blackrock private equity company, compares the Obama administration’s effort to close billionaires’ tax loopholes to “the Nazi invasion of Poland.” Then hedge fund mogul David Loeb announces that he’s abandoning the Democrats because they’re violating “this country’s core founding principles” — including “non-punitive taxation, Constitutionally-guaranteed protections against persecution of the minority, and an inexorable right of self-determination.” Instead of showing their outrage about the spread of poverty in the richest nation on Earth, the super-rich want us to pity them?

Why are Wall Street’s billionaires so whiny? Is it really possible to make $900,000 an hour (not a typo — that’s what the top ten hedge fund managers take in), and still feel aggrieved about the way government is treating you? After you’ve been bailed out by the federal government to the tune of $10 trillion (also not a typo) in loans, asset swaps, liquidity and other guarantees, can you really still feel like an oppressed minority?

You’d think the Wall Street moguls would be thankful. Not just thankful — down on their knees kissing the ground taxpayers walk on and hollering hallelujah at the top of their lungs! These guys profited from puffing up the housing bubble, then got bailed out when the going got tough. (Please see The Looting of America for all the gory details.) Without taxpayer largess, these hedge fund honchos would be flat broke. Instead, they’re back to hauling in obscene profits.

These billionaires don’t even have to worry about serious financial reforms. The paltry legislation that squeaked through Congress did nothing to end too big and too interconnected to fail. In fact, the biggest firms got even bigger as they gobbled up troubled banks, with the generous support of the federal government. No bank or hedge fund was broken up. Nobody was forced to pay a financial transaction tax. None of the big boys had a cap placed on their astronomical wealth. No one’s paying reparations for wrecking the US economy. The big bankers are still free to create and trade the very derivatives that catapulted us into this global crisis. You’d think the billionaires would be praying on the altar of government and erecting statues on Capital Hill in honor of St. Bailout.

Instead, standing before us are these troubled souls, haunted by visions of persecution. Why? (more…)

Leo Hindery Jr.

By Leo Hindery Jr.
Chairman, U.S. Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation

We really have, as a nation, seen our train completely fall off the fairness track. The unprecedented income inequality in the nation today is such blight that I thought it would stand on its own as an indictment of the actions and decisions since 1980 of certain of our political and business leaders which wrought this nightmare.

I also hoped that by now the American people would be standing up and saying en masse that “enough is enough”.

In fact, not only is the inequality persisting, but it has become so embedded that it’s now dictating our nation’s finance industry practices, tax policies, and sense of corporate social responsibility.

In 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression when America began to keep track of income inequality, the top 10% of earners received 49% of total income and the top 1% received 24%. In 2007, on the eve of the current recession, the top 10% earned 50% of total income and the top 1% received 24%. In other words, the Great Recession of 2007 was foreshadowed by almost the exact same outrageous incomes imbalance as existed just before the Great Depression, the evidence of which is that the top one-tenth of 1% of earners now earn as much as the bottom 120 million earners combined. (more…)

Les Leopold

By Les Leopold
Author, “The Looting of America”

The August unemployment numbers are ugly, yet again. Nearly 30 million Americans are still jobless or forced into part-time jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics official unemployment rate is 9.6%. It’s borader and more telling jobless rate (U6) of 16.7% confirms that we’re stuck in our own version of the Great Depression. We’ll need more than 22 million new jobs to bring us back to full-employment. Happy Labor Day.

To get out of this quagmire we’ll have to face up to two fundamental facts:

1. We really are in the midst of a horrific jobs crisis. All the happy talk about the economy being on the road to recovery is just plain old denial. We’ll never find jobs for all the people who desperately need them until we recognize that this employment crisis poses a clear and present danger to our republic. Modern capitalist societies require full employment. When we don’t have it for long periods of time, chaos ensues. What’s missing in Washington is a sense of urgency. Denial is dangerous — and an insult to the unemployed.

2. We must face up to the real causes of this mess. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans are succumbing to a wrong-headed narrative that has been pushed into our heads:

“We Americans sank ourselves in debt. We consumed more than we produced. We bought homes we couldn’t afford and used them as ATMs. Of course Wall Street did its part by offering us mortgages they knew we couldn’t really afford. The government also contributed mightily by pushing Fannie and Freddie, the giant housing agencies, to underwrite “politically correct” loans to low-income residents who shouldn’t have been buying homes at all. In short, we all are to blame.” (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

This Labor Day feels gloomy. It’s a celebration of work when there is not enough of it, a day off when too many desperately seek a day on.

America has commemorated two Labor Days since this brutal recession began near the end of George Bush’s presidency in December of 2007. Now the relentless high unemployment, the ever-rising foreclosures, the unremitting wage and benefit take-backs have replaced American optimism and enthusiasm with fear and anger.

Happy Labor Day.

On this holiday, we can rant with Glenn Beck, kick the dog and hate the neighbor lucky enough to retain his job. Or we can do something different. We can join with our neighbors, employed and unemployed, our foreclosed-on children, our elderly parents fearing cuts in their Social Security lifeline and our fellow workers worrying that the furlough ax will strike them next. Together we can organize and mobilize and create a grassroots groundswell that gives government no choice but to respond to our needs, the needs of working people.

We can do what workers did during the Great Depression to provoke change, to create programs like Social Security and achieve recognition of rights like collective bargaining. These changes were sought by groups to benefit groups. In a civil society, people care for one another. And America is such a society – one where people routinely donate blood to aid anonymous strangers, children set up lemonade stands to contribute to Katrina victims and working families find a few bucks for United Way.

The self-righteous Right is all about individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. That proposition – the do-it-all- by-yourself-winner-takes-all philosophy – clearly failed because so many Americans are jobless, homeless and too penniless to afford boots.

Over the past decade, the winner who took all was Wall Street. The banksters gambled on derivatives and other risky financial tomfoolery and won big time. Until they lost. And crashed the economy. After the American taxpayer bailed them out, those wealthy traders returned to making huge profits and bonuses based on perilous schemes.

Still, they believe they haven’t taken enough from working Americans. They’re lobbying to end aid for those who remain unemployed in a recession caused by Wall Street recklessness. And they’re demanding extension of their Bush-given tax breaks. This is the nation’s upper 1 percent, people who earn a million or more each year, the 1 percent that took home 56 percent of all income growth between 1989 and 2007, the year the recession began.

Since 2007, 8.2 million workers have lost jobs. Millions more are underemployed, laboring part-time when they need full-time jobs, or barely squeaking by on slashed wages and benefits. Since the recession began, the unemployment rate nearly doubled, from 5 percent to 9.6 percent, and that does not include those so discouraged that they’ve given up the search for jobs, a decision that is, frankly, understandable when there are only enough openings to re-employ 20 percent of the jobless. Five unemployed workers compete for each job created in this sluggish economy.

And American workers weren’t prepared for this downturn, having already suffered losses in the years before it began. The median income, adjusted for inflation, of working-age households declined by more than $2,000 in the seven years before the recession started.

At the same time, practices like off-shoring jobs and signing regressive international trade deals contributed to the loss of middle class, blue collar jobs. A new report, “The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market,” by the Center for American Progress and The Hamilton Project, says:

“The decline in middle-skill jobs has been detrimental to the earnings and labor force participation rates of workers without a four-year college education, and differentially so for males, who are increasingly concentrated in low-paying service occupations.”

The recession compounded that, the report says:

“Employment losses during the recession have been far more severe in middle-skilled white- and blue-collar jobs than in either high-skill, white-collar jobs or low-skill service occupations.”

What that means is high roller banksters are living large; lawn care workers and waitresses subsist on minimum wage, and working class machinists and steelworkers are disappearing altogether.

The researchers found the U.S. economy is increasingly polarized into high-skill, high-wage jobs and low-skill, low wage jobs. America is losing the middle jobs and with them its great middle class.

No wonder the rising anger in middle America.

But fury doesn’t solve the problem. This Labor Day, we must organize to save ourselves and our neighbors. We must stop America from descending into plutocracy. We must demand support for American manufacturing and middle class jobs. That means terminating tax breaks for corporate outsourcers, ending trade practices that violate agreements and international law and punishing predator countries for currency manipulation that subverts fair trade by artificially lowering the price of products shipped into the U.S. while artificially raising the price of American exports.

We must demand support for American industry, particularly manufacturers of renewable energy sources like solar cells and wind turbines that create good working class jobs, increase America’s energy independence and reduce climate change.

We must insist on policies that support the middle class, including preserving Social Security and Medicare, extending unemployment insurance while joblessness remains high, and enforcing the health care reform law so that every American worker and family can afford and is covered by insurance.

On this Labor Day, we should all have a picnic, invite neighbors, friends and family, and over hot dogs and potato salad, organize to save the American middle class.

Mobilize to end the gloom and restore American optimism.

***

For help: the Union of the Unemployed, the AFL-CIO, USW, Working America. Join the One Nation March for jobs Oct. 2 in Washington, D.C.

Robert Borosage

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

Rep. John Boehner, the perpetually tanned House Minority leader, unveiled his plan to get the economy going today in a speech before the Cleveland City Club. Hold on to your job; if he becomes speaker, things will get worse.

Understandably, Boehner said not a word about the policies that led to the Great Recession. In fact, he said not a word about the economic collapse. Instead, he argued only that America’s economy was in trouble because business was scared to death. It isn’t the worst recession since the Great Depression, the lack of demand and customers that is plaguing businesses; it is the fear of tax hikes and regulation.

In response, Boehner detailed a five-point plan to “break the ongoing economic uncertainty.” Three of the five points are basically rhetorical. He calls on Obama to pledge to veto any future tax increase. He calls on Obama to fire his economic team. And he promises to eliminate the 1099 tax return mandate that requires small businesses to report any expenditure on goods and services over $600, an aggravation that Democrats are also intent on reversing.

The last two points have greater substance. Boehner would keep tax rates where they are, opposing Obama’s plan to let the Bush tax cuts expire for couples making more than $250,000 a year, or the top 2% of Americans. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates this would add about $1 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. (more…)

Dr. Partha Banerjee

By Dr. Partha Banerjee
Faculty and Special Events Coordinator, Harry Van Arsdale Center for Labor Studies, Empire State College, SUNY

Conversations I’ve recently had with politically-enlightened people from America, India and Europe are quite illuminating. They support the notion that there are more commonality than difference across the moderate “left and right” working class, and that creating alliance and synergy across the democracy, equality and justice spectrum would be a good thing.

They agree that the elite political center has failed to serve us, the common people, and without an effective alternate plan, the center as well as far right or far left would continue to influence the moderate majority with their purposefully distorted and exclusive solutions to the problems the average working person and family now have.

Especially with the U.S. economic meltdown and consequent unemployment and massive uncertainties, far right Tea Party, with help from its media mouthpieces, is frantically busy “fishing in troubled waters” employing their divisive, ultraconservative ideology – separatist, dark-age doctrines America’s young generation rejected when it elected Barack Obama in November, 2008.

Since the Great Depression, market capitalism never faced such a global crisis, with a 10 percent nationwide unemployment in the U.S., with 20-40 percent out-of-work people in some states and industries (the construction industry is one example). The new crisis that precipitated on October 10, 2008 hit the richest individuals and corporations the most (although it broke down countless poor and middle class families too totally dashing their hopes for a house to live in, a workplace to work in, and basic education and health care for themselves and their children). (more…)

Eric Lotke

By Eric Lotke
Research Director at the Campaign for America’s Future

Today’s new unemployment report contains no news, just decimal point changes. It tells us what we already know, that times are bad. The question is whether our great nation can rise to the challenge.

Unemployment remains unchanged at 9.5 percent, with 14.6 million people out of work. In July, we lost 202,000 jobs in the government sector as the census winds down, and we gained 71,000 jobs in the private sector. African American unemployment grew fractionally worse to 15.6 percent, and teenagers to 26.1 percent.

But the micro details don’t change the big picture. People are out of work and out of hope. Mortgages are underwater, savings are in the tank and fewer than half of grown-ups think their kids will be better off.

So what are we going to do about it? Our 200 year old democracy ended slavery and turned the Great Depression into the New Deal. Can we thrive in this century too?

We know what doesn’t work. Asset bubbles and trade deficits. Tax cuts and supply side economics. Shopping for cheap stuff made in China. (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

A brutal competition pits worker against worker continually now in this country. Five unemployed people vie with each other for each available job. It’s like a cruel game of musical chairs, with five desperate competitors for one seat.

Workers who’ve lost cars to repossession and homes to foreclosure run around frantically trying to get that one job. When the music stops, four disheartened, still-unemployed people move to other viscous cycles of five struggling to win one available job.

Republicans watching this blame the 14.6 million unemployed Americans for the inadequate number of chairs. They’ve called the unemployed lazy and refused to extend unemployment compensation. Meanwhile, the GOP is demanding an extension of Bush’s tax cuts for the rich.

To the GOP, the rich are deserving. Republicans see the unemployed as leeches — not as victims of filthy-rich, banksters who destroyed the economy, not as the stalwart citizens whose tax money Bush used to bail out Wall Street.  To Republicans, the unemployed – along with the un-rich – deserve only disrespect.

And they’ve been heaping it on.

Republican Sen. John Kyl of Arizona said during a debate on the Senate floor, for example. “In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah demanded drug tests for those receiving unemployment benefits, “We should not be giving cash to people who basically are just going to blow it on drugs.”

Republican Senatorial candidate Sharron Angle of Nevada said extending benefits to the unemployed, who she characterized as “spoiled,” would be “terrible.” She told a radio station: “You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job, but it doesn’t pay as much. And so that’s what’s happened to us is that we have put in so much entitlement into our government that we really have spoiled our citizenry and said you don’t want the jobs that are available.”

Republican Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer of South Carolina said the unemployed, like stupid stray animals, should not be fed: “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania denied U.S. Labor Department statistics, insisting there are plenty of jobs, but the unemployed are shiftless and prefer their paltry government benefits over jobs: “The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there.”  

By contrast, Democrats, who view the highest unemployment rates in 28 years as an emergency, have repeatedly tried to get a compensation extension passed and will mount another attempt Tuesday.  

Disdainful of the unemployed, Republicans have refused to vote to extend the lifeline unless Congress ends its historical practice of classifying unemployment compensation as emergency funding, which is added to the deficit. The GOP is demanding that the $35 billion cost of extending compensation be offset by cutting federal programs or by reducing the stimulus – the very program designed to create jobs for the unemployed. In the six weeks since extended unemployment compensation expired and Republicans have blocked renewal, weekly checks averaging $300 ended for 2 million Americans.  

Republicans try to sound fiscally responsible as they explain their votes disregarding the plight of the unemployed. But Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl’s words wreck the GOP’s deliberate disinformation campaign. While insisting that unemployment compensation extension be offset, Kyl says that’s entirely unnecessary for extension of Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. When Republicans give rich people tax breaks, the GOP thinks it’s fine for the $678 billion cost to be added to the deficit.

Minority whip Kyl’s stance is held by the majority in his party. Most Republicans agree Congress need not pay for tax cuts benefitting the wealthy. “That’s been the majority Republican view for some time,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.”

Today, American workers face the worst job market since the Great Depression, with unemployment stuck at 9.5 percent and the average spell of joblessness lasting 35 weeks. In May, there were 11.8 million more unemployed workers than there were job openings.

Democrats see the pain of losing a job, financial security and hope for the future. Republicans see something entirely different – lazy, drug-addicted moochers living off the rich who the GOP believes should continue to be taxed at rates lower than those paid by their secretaries.