Blog

By Hilda Solis
Outgoing U.S. Secretary of Labor

It has been an honor to be your secretary of labor. Today, as I prepared to say farewell, I decided that I wanted to share my experience through journeys, and through beginnings and endings, because that reflects what’s in my mind, and more importantly, what is in my heart at this present moment.

Thirty-two years ago—after only a year in Washington—I left my job in President Carter’s administration. Wanting to say something meaningful about what I learned as that job was ending, I wrote a letter to incoming President Regan that appeared in the Hispanic Link News Service.  I had forgotten all about it until a recent reprint by Hispanic Link.

In the letter, I told President Reagan about what I did in the White House, and why I thought it was important.  I also told him a little about myself, including the story of how I got that job.

While I was in graduate school, I filled out dozens of applications for internship positions at every level of government. Almost as a lark, I also sent a letter to the White House.  A staffer for President Carter read my résumé and called my parents’ home in La Puente, California. I was outside in our vegetable garden when my father hollered out to me: “Phone call for you. Someone who claims he’s from the Casa Blanca.”

I ran so fast that I knocked over a table lamp and shattered it. My mother, whom I love dearly, can attest to the truth of that story, and to this day, she still tells my husband how much she liked that lamp.

I’m sharing this story not just because it is about my coming to Washington for the first time—and leaving Washington for the first time—but, rather, it reflects my continuous, lifelong passion, and obvious excitement, for public service.  (more…)

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis

By Hilda Solis
U.S. Secretary of Labor

I was “raised union.”

My mother, who immigrated to the United States from Nicaragua, worked the 3 p.m. to midnight shift at a toy factory after the birth of my younger twin sisters. She was a member of the United Rubber Workers, which later merged with the Steelworkers Union.

My father worked at a battery recycling plant and was a shop steward there for the Teamsters Union. His plant went on strike several times when I was a kid. During those times, he explained to my mother, my six brothers and sisters, and me that it would be tough. Although the union paid a small part of his wages when they were on strike, it was a hardship. But we understood that we had to make sacrifices. And we did.

When I was in ninth grade, my dad would come home at the end of the day and ask me to sit with him at our kitchen table. From his pockets, he would pull pieces of paper with writing in Spanish on them — notes given to him by his co-workers. There were all sorts of things scribbled on them: concerns about health and safety practices at the plant, questions about paychecks that didn’t add up, and ideas about how to improve the efficiency and productivity of the line. He’d ask me to translate them into English for him.

The first time, I didn’t understand what they were. When I asked, he explained: “They are the voice of the workers.” He said that the paper scraps started a conversation between the union and management. He told me it was a way to get them together “at the table.” After that, I understood. (more…)

--------- Tula Connell --------- Photo by Joe Kekeris

By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor

The nation’s governors met last weekend in Washington, D.C., for their annual conference. Well, not all of them. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was a no-show, preferring to make the rounds on the weekend television interview programs to explain away why he wants to take away the freedom of public employees to bargain for good middle-class jobs.

Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) also met last weekend. Here are excerpts from the statement U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis made Saturday morning when meeting with the DNC. Walker needs to read these remarks. And so does Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who’s right on the heels of Walker in his attacks on nurses, teachers and EMTs.

I’ve been following the developments in Wisconsin, and Ohio, and many other states across the country.

We know that many states are facing tough budget decisions. We know that there’s room for shared sacrifice. (more…)

Mike Hall

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

A new study shows that the economic impact of unemployment insurance (UI), especially for long-term jobless workers, has a huge positive effect on the economy, not only for the jobless, but by keeping millions of other workers on the job.

With Republican lawmakers balking at maintaining UI for millions of jobless workers out of work for more than six months in an economy that has nearly five job seekers for every opening, the new research bolsters the case for maintaining the programs.

If lawmakers don’t act by Nov. 30, 2 million jobless workers will be without help by the end of the year.

The study, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor, shows the UI program had an even more positive impact on the economy this time around than in previous recessions. (more…)

James Parks

By James Parks
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

BP agreed this week to pay a fine of $50.6 million to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for violations related to the 2005 explosion at its Texas City, Texas, refinery that killed 15 and injured 170. The company also must pay another $500 million to protect workers at the plant, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said this afternoon during a press conference call.

This OSHA photo shows some of the damage from the 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery.

Last October, OSHA proposed fines of $87.4 million after it found that the company had failed to correct problems at the Texas City refinery under a previous settlement following the 2005 explosion and more than $30 million for some 439 new violations the agency found in 2009.  BP had contested those penalties.

As part of this week’s settlement, BP has agreed to what Jordan Barab, OSHA’s deputy assistant secretary, called “unprecedented oversight” from OSHA on its safety procedures, including monthly meetings between BP and local OSHA officials, detailed quarterly reports, third-party verification and high-level meetings between OSHA and BP officials of safety.

The United Steelworkers (USW), which represents workers at the Texas City refinery, also will be involved in monitoring safety procedures.USW Vice President Gary Beevers said:

Our members at the Texas City refinery have a lot at stake here. They want to keep their jobs and they want a safe environment to work in… The members will be watching BP’s every move to make sure that the settlement agreement is met and that BP fulfills its obligations. The local union will be participating in conference calls and meetings regarding BP’s efforts to take corrective action.

 As Solis said:

We feel this agreement achieves our goal of protecting the workers at the refinery….The size of the penalty rightfully reflects BP’s disregard for workplace safety. We hope it sends a message to all employers that we will enforce the law so that workers can return home safe at the end of their shifts.  

 Read Solis’ remarks here and the full agreement here.

***

Re-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Defying popular stereotype, CEOs and labor representatives sat on a panel and largely agreed on major issues confronting industry and working people.

It happened Monday, Nov. 30 as CNBC taped “Meeting of the Minds: Rebuilding America” in a hall at Carnegie Mellon University before an audience of nearly 600 students, businessmen, steelworkers and other trade unionists.

For the broadcast Dec. 2 at 8 p.m., host Maria Bartiromo said the Steel City of Pittsburgh was chosen because:

“It was here that America’s soul was forged.”

She assured the audience that the panel of speakers – Dan DiMicco, President and CEO of Nucor Corp.; Bill Ford Jr., Executive Chairman of Ford Motor Co.; Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric; John Engler, President and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers; U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, and me  — would tell them how to put America back on track.

Since precious few Americans, even those in the same political party, agree on how to realign America, that’s when a typecast smack down between CEOs and unionists might have begun.  

But it didn’t. That’s because on the most crucial issues, like manufacturing strategy and trade policy, the panel pretty much concurred.

Really.

For example, this is the United Steelworkers’ position on manufacturing strategy: America needs one.

The lack of a strategy handicaps the U.S. when it attempts to compete with virtually every other industrialized nation in the world. They have policies. They’ve decided which manufacturing areas they’re going to emphasize and support. And they do that with taxes, tariffs, loans, grants, even higher education guidelines.

As I said that night:

“We need to have a plan. All the other major countries in the world have plans. I am not mad at China. I am mad at us. They are doing what they need for their people.”

Bill Ford and Dan DiMicco joined that position.

Ford said, for example, that he met recently with the president of another country where his company manufacturers cars. That president, who he did not name, asked, “How can I help you?” Ford said that country already had a manufacturing strategy, so he could have a conversation with that government. But, he said, today, in the United States, that same conversation “is almost impossible because there is no policy.”

DiMicco agreed. He stressed that a manufacturing agenda must be designed, and he said he believes that is now being done with the support of President Obama’s administration. “We need to create jobs for 30 to 40 years, not the short term,” he said.

Here’s something else we agreed on: trade laws must be enforced and improved. The failure to do so has led to huge U.S. trade deficits and the migration of millions of good, middle-class manufacturing jobs overseas.

Several USW officers went to Washington, D.C. the day after the CNBC show taping to testify before the U. S. International Trade Commission in an attempt to save the U.S. industry that makes specialized steel pipe that is called oil country tubular goods. Between the end of 2008 and September of 2009, this industry lost 2,421 workers because of a killer cascade of unfair Chinese imports.

The USW union is joined in this petition by U.S. Steel Corp., Maverick Tube Corp., Evraz Rocky Mountain Steel, TMK IPSCO, V&M Star LLP, V&M TCA, and Wheatland Tube Corp.  Now there are a few more CEOs who agree with the USW.

During the CNBC taping, Immelt conceded that the policy of trying to put factories on barges to ship them overseas in search of the lowest labor costs, “has turned out to be not such a good idea.” For manufacturers like GE, and the  U.S. workers who lost those jobs, America must enforce trade laws and create a manufacturing policy to establish the  incentives essential to keep those factories at home in the U.S.

I have been ranting about trade for a long time. Rarely have I heard someone as angry about it as I am. But DiMicco clearly is. Listen to what he told the CNBC audience: 

“You should be a lot ticked off about the failed trade policies in Washington, D.C. . . . That has destroyed the middle class in this country.”

One of those from the audience permitted to ask the panel questions seemed more ticked off about the trade union movement than failed trade policies. She asked Ford if shedding the United Auto Workers would enhance his bottom line.

He said no:

“We are very happy with our union work force. There is a misconception that we want to get rid of the union.”

He said Ford collaborates with its union workers. He noted that he is a fourth generation Ford and walks through plants greeting many fourth generation UAW workers who are committed to Ford’s success. “Together we have gotten a lot done,” he said.

Union leaders have no qualms about negotiating with CEOs like Bill Ford for a fair split of the profit-pie in collective bargaining. But first, working together, we must make sure – with a manufacturing strategy and strong, enforced trade laws – that there is a pie.

Robert Borosage

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

It ain’t easy. No use jokin’. Everything’s broken.”
–Bob Dylan

We can’t go back to the old economy. That economy — marked by booms and busts, Gilded Age inequality, declining wages, growing household debts, and unsustainable trade deficits — didn’t work very well for most Americans. President Obama is faced with the difficult task of creating the structure for the new economy even as he works to lift us out of the collapse of the old.

That’s why his stunning budget calls for health care reform, ending our addiction to oil and investing in education as both a way out of the mess and a down payment on the future. His pace is as unrelenting as the crisis. Next up: reviving America’s middle class, insuring that once growth returns, its blessings are widely shared. And the centerpiece of that is the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

EFCA helps revive the right of workers to organize in this country. Over the last decades, that basic right has been shredded, as companies waged open warfare on union organizing, and administrations often failed to enforce the laws protecting that right. The tactics were bare knuckle: fire the organizers; hold closed door meetings to threaten the workers. And if workers did vote for a union, one-third of employers simply refused to negotiate a contract with them.

The campaigns have been brutally successful. Today, over a majority of workers say that they would join a union if given a choice, but only about 7.5% of the private workforce is organized.

EFCA gives workers the right to choose a union, either in a closed election or with a majority signing pledge cards. It forces employers to negotiate in good faith, requiring arbitration if no agreement is reached. It stiffens penalties on employers for violating workers’ rights.

But EFCA isn’t just about worker rights. It’s about whether we can return to an economy with a broad middle class. When unions represented 30% of the private economy, they won family wages, health care, pensions, paid vacations — the basics of middle class existence. Rising union wages and benefits helped lift the wages of non-union workers as well. America has never done much redistribution through taxes. We built a middle class because workers were able to win a decent share of the profits and productivity that they helped to generate. Unions were central to that.

Naturally, as the unions have lost ground, so has America’s middle class. Over the eight years of the Bush recovery, we witnessed the extreme: an economy in which profits were up, CEO salaries soared, productivity was up, but workers lost ground. As a recent EPI statement notes, the median working household lost $2000 in annual income over that period. That reality contributed directly to the inequality, speculation, and household indebtedness that provided the kindling for the economic conflagration we now experience.

That’s why Obama was an early sponsor of EFCA as a Senator. Earlier this month, he noted that he saw unions as part of the solution, not part of the problem.

“We need to level the playing field for workers and the unions that represent their interests, because we know that you cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement. ..”The American economy is not and has never been a zero-sum game. “When workers are prospering, they buy products that make businesses prosper. “We can be competitive and lean and mean and still create a situation where workers are thriving in this country.’

In her first appearance as Labor Secretary, Hilda Solis, the daughter of union workers, journeyed to Miami on Monday to speak at a union rally on the eve of the AFL-CIO Executive Council meetings and to listen to workers telling their stories. Hector Capoda, an AT&T worker and member of the Communications Workers of America, told how he’d been part of organizing a union with majority sign-up. His father, he said, had never had a union, never earned more than $13 an hour and didn’t have health care. But as he grew older and weaker, the family could survive because his brother, “a policeman and union,” his sister, “a nurse and union,” and he had the resources to keep the family together. Clearly moved, Solis confirmed that the president’s support for EFCA, and pledged to enforce the law, announcing that “there is a new sheriff in town.”

EFCA will be introduced into the House in the next couple weeks, where passage is guaranteed. The real donnybrook will be in the Senate where it has strong majority support but must overcome efforts by a conservative minority to block the vote with a filibuster. The Chamber of Commerce and various business lobbies have threatened to spend $200 million or more to stop EFCA, which Home Depot’s founder, Bernie Marcus, charges will lead to “the demise of civilization.” Unions are gearing up a major grassroots effort to pass the bill.

But this isn’t just a union fight. As the president suggests, this is a central fight for an economy that works. If workers are paid decently, families needn’t take on massive debts to educate their children or afford their home. Social Security remains secure if workers once more capture a fair share of the profits they produce. CEOs and speculators have a more difficult time cooking the books if they must negotiate with strong unions. To build an economy that works, strong unions aren’t the only answer, but they are central part of the answer.

The campaign on EFCA will be fierce. Gaining 60 votes won’t be easy. The business community will go all out, claiming that strong unions will ruin America, trample workers’ freedoms, drive jobs abroad. But we’ve tried an economy with weak unions — and that didn’t work out so well.

Obama is right to tee this up early even as he struggles to get the economy moving, to get the financial system reorganized, to move on health care and new energy. This is a fight that citizens across the country should join. It will be a critical building block of the new economy that we must construct from the ashes of the old.

Robert Kuttner

By Robert Kuttner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect

I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem, to me it’s part of the solution.

– President Barack Obama, January 30, 2009

The great union leader John L. Lewis, who headed the United Mine Workers from the ’30s through the ’50s and helped organize millions of workers into the CIO, used to declare in organizing drives: “President Roosevelt wants you to join the union.” Roosevelt never said that in so many words, but FDR did strongly back the Wagner Act, giving workers the clear right to organize.

During World War II, Roosevelt’s War Labor Board made clear that corporations seeking war contracts needed to have good labor relations. In practice, that meant unions; and it meant “pattern bargaining” in which workers for different companies in the same industry got the same wages, so that companies could not play workers off against each other.

Roosevelt’s wartime contracting policies, the Wagner Act, and the militancy of the labor movement laid the groundwork for the golden age of American unions during the postwar boom. Not coincidentally, this was also the one period in the past century when the economy became more equal, and more secure for working people.

So, while Roosevelt’s words never quite urged workers to join unions, his deeds spoke volumes. John L. Lewis was well within the bounds of poetic license.

On Friday, President Obama, a onetime organizer, had more words to say about unions, and they were the kind of explicit endorsement that we literally haven’t heard from a president since FDR’s day.
“We need to level the playing field for workers and the unions that represent their interests, because we know that you cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement,” the President said. “When workers are prospering, they buy products that make businesses prosper. We can be competitive and lean and mean and still create a situation where workers are thriving in this country.”
Wow!

And Obama offered deeds to match. This stunning declaration of support came at the White House announcement of a Task Force on Middle Class Working Families headed by Vice President Biden, with Jared Bernstein as its executive director. The idea was proposed last summer by Change to Win unions, who endorsed candidate Obama early in the primary season. He embraced the concept, and it was a commitment he kept. His remarks and actions were a dazzling example of the transformative power of a president to shift public opinion and the political center of gravity.

The task force, and the effusive and genuine embrace of the labor movement, came as a huge relief to union leaders, who have watched anxiously as nearly all the key economic posts went to centrist veterans of the Clinton administration, and the job of secretary of labor was not announced with the other senior economic officials. As it turned out, the appointment of Hilda Solis, a very pro-union member of Congress, was delayed because others had turned down the job first, but the delay sent an unfortunate signal.

Labor activists have also been worried about whether Obama will keep his pledge not just to sign the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) guaranteeing the right to join a union, but to work hard on its behalf with legislators, especially in the Senate. Since the election, the US Chamber of Commerce and allied anti-union business organizations have mounted a furious publicity and lobbying offensive with one message: Mr. President, you don’t need this bruising fight right now.

But the Chamber’s allies in the Republican House Caucus have beautifully undercut that logic. The Chamber’s premise was that EFCA would be highly divisive, at a time then the new president was seeking unity. With the wall-to-wall Republican stonewalling on the Obama recovery package, that premise is up in smoke. And the Chamber’s other allies, on Wall Street, have also done a service by inviting some salutary class warfare. Obama responded last week, calling Wall Street bonuses in the face of government bailouts “shameful,” and seems to genuinely view the growth of unions as a necessary counterweight.

The task force itself will be a welcome counterweight to the outsized influence of Wall Street inside the Obama administration. Several weeks ago, Jared Bernstein, then a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote a joint op-ed piece for the New York Timeswith Robert Rubin pointing out where they agreed. One issue where they pointedly disagreed was on the Employee Free Choice Act, which Rubin explicitly refused to endorse. The Biden operation now looks to be the go-to place for progressives seeing access to Obama’s priorities. The Task Force will serve as the White House center to review all proposals, legislative and administrative, for their impact on the effort to raise wages and rebuild a middle class.

Without Obama’s strong personal engagement, EFCA will be anything but a legislative cakewalk. Democrats may have a working majority. But at least five business-oriented Democrats are not considered certain votes for EFCA, and Obama will need to let them know that the White House considers this bill a top priority.

Our last two Democrats went out of their way not to get close to organized labor. Jimmy Carter did not lift a finger when the last big push to put some teeth back in the Wagner Act’s right to unionize went down to defeat by just two votes in the Senate in 1978.

On Friday, announcing the Task Force, Obama signed three executive orders. One will prevent federal contractors from discouraging their employees to join unions. Another will assure that workers keep their jobs when a contract changes hands. Down the road is an executive order to promote project agreements on construction contracts.

If Obama is serious, he can take a leaf from FDR’s book, and use government’s extensive contracting power to actively promote unions. Late in the Clinton administration, then Vice President Al Gore led an effort called the Responsible Contractor Initiative. The idea was to reward federal contractors who took the high road by providing good jobs and not standing in the way of unions.

It remains to be seen just how much real power Obama will give Vice President Biden. But the task force is a superb beginning. If government can just use its influence to make sure employers stay neutral, it will be a new day for the labor movement–and for American progressivism.

Robert Kuttner is Co-Editor of The American Prospect. His new book is “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency.”

This blog was first published on Huffington Post.

Robert Kutner

By Robert Kutner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect

Barack Obama may soon find that he is committing a big sin against one of the major premises of the reigning ideology. As part of his plan to restructure the auto industry, rebuild infrastructure, and create new green industries and jobs, he will be committing industrial policy. And this will create a head-on collision with one of the cherished dogmas of market fundamentalism — “free trade.”

This clash is long overdue. For several decades, American elites of both parties have been preaching the same gospel of free trade. Supposedly, if we just leave markets alone, different countries will produce and export what they naturally do best, and import products at which their partners excel. In the tidy and oversimplified textbook world, there is no room for questions about pollution, labor standards, product safety, financial engineering, or industrial policy.

But the real world doesn’t work like the Econ. 101 fable. In much of the rest of the world, governments help their industries develop.

However, in the hierarchy of America’s diplomatic priorities, countries like China that subsidize industries (and violate human rights) get a free pass. Other nations like Japan, that basically closed their borders to most imports for several decades while they became industrial powerhouses, got a seal of approval, too. Supposedly, what we lose in jobs and industries, we make up in cheap imports.

While other nations care about what they produce, the United States disdains having industrial policies, in order to set a good example. Indeed, we have been the principal architect of the World Trade Organization, which discourages government involvement in economic development as an illicit thumb on the free-trade scale.

Now, with the crash of 2008, it is clear that the US economy was built on a financial mirage. Our reliance on asset bubbles – inflated stock and real estate prices – disguised the fact that we were not paying our way. Much of our prosperity was simply borrowed.

Having let so many industries and jobs just go offshore, we don’t make enough to pay for our imports. Instead, we have been relying on loans from foreign central banks to finance our trade imbalance.

Looking at this economic calamity, President-elect Obama has proposed several sensible policies. He wants the U.S. auto industry to reinvent itself, with government aid and government standards. He wants to incubate other domestic industries around the goal of clean energy. And he wants to spend serious money on all of this, to help avoid a depression. The only historical counterpart is the vast industrial mobilization of World War II, which finally cured the Great Depression.

But these ideas about government involvement in the economy violate the sacred dogma of free trade. If the Obama administration is serious about reviving American manufacturing industry, it is only a matter of time before a foreign government hauls the U.S. before the World Trade Organization and charges us with the crime of industrial policy.

To quote our beloved leader George W. Bush in a different context, bring it on. The current version of the W.T.O., designed by and for US multinational corporations to make it easier to outsource jobs and production, has not served the national interest. It is indeed time to use industrial policy to rebuild long neglected domestic industries; and if something has to give, let it be the W.T.O.

As a mark of the total intellectual muddle in how policymakers have thought about these issues, the fact is that we have several implicit industrial policies. For instance, American commercial leadership in aerospace is no naturally occurring phenomenon. It reflects trillions of dollars of subsidy from the Pentagon and from NASA. Likewise, U.S. dominance in pharmaceuticals is the result of government subsidy of basic research, favorable patent treatment, and the fact that the American consumer of prescription drugs is made to overpay, giving the industry exorbitant profits to plow back into research. Throwing $700 billion at America’s wounded banks is also an industrial policy

So if we can have implicit industrial policies for these industries, why not explicit policies to rebuild our auto industry, our steel industry, our machine tool industry, and the industries of the next century such as green energy and high-speed rail? And why not devise some clear standards for which industries deserve help, and why, and what they owe America in return?

The new administration is already a bit schizophrenic on the subject. On the one hand, President-elect Obama has been saying bold things about building the industries of the future. On the other hand, he just appointed as America’s top trade official Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, a man with no serious diplomatic experience and one whose main claim to fame on the trade issue is that he has been a big booster of NAFTA, a badly flawed deal that Obama has pledged to reopen.

Kirk’s appointment was meant to signal that Obama will not challenge the current orthodoxy on trade policy. It was cheered by the U.S. business establishment. What is truly bizarre is that Obama’s reported first choice for the job was California Congressman Xavier Becerra, a critic of NAFTA and other recent trade deals. Kirk will also vehemently disagree on trade and industry with Obama’s new labor secretary-designate, Rep. Hilda Solis, another NAFTA critic.

Maybe, like Lincoln, Obama has the genius to fuse this “team of rivals” into an effective administration; perhaps he will listen to the divergent advice and forge the best course. When the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin coined that phrase to describe Lincoln’s manner of governing, she was referring to the fact that Lincoln literally brought into his cabinet men who had been Lincoln’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. These were people of real stature and of fierce differences, representing a party that was badly fractured on the key issues of how to save the union and whether to free the slaves.

Obama has prided himself building bridges and transcending ideology. We are now beginning to see what that means in practice–a cabinet that represents people of thoroughly contradictory views, with some members who are public figures of real consequence and others who are surprisingly weak. This pattern puts all the more pressure on Obama himself to create coherence out of the stew.

Despite these gestures of broad inclusion, there is no escaping the fact that Obama must quickly make some difficult decisions about which path to follow. And one path precludes another. He can’t have both his industrial policies and his free trade.

Robert Kuttner’s new bestselling book is “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Policy and the Power of a Transformative Presidency.”

Robert Kuttner’s new bestselling book is “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Policy and the Power of a Transformative Presidency.”

Column first published on The Huffington Post