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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…)

Americans have been worshiping a bull. Too many citizens, and particularly politicians, prostrate themselves to Wall Street’s bronze idol.

They revere financial titans who pay themselves and their minions millions to manipulate money and gamble recklessly. Politicians gave tribute to the financiers with tax breaks and bailouts when the bankers’ bad bets threatened to bankrupt their institutions.

This false idolatry produced a nation gripped by massive unemployment, a nation in which destructive income inequality has risen beyond robber baron levels, a nation where greed has been perverted from sin to good, a nation where politicians genuflect to money changers, not majority citizens.

Salvation for the majority is not more failed trickle-down economics or more deregulation so that Wall Street can resume committing unfettered wagering. Redemption is political and economic systems devoted to serving the common good, not the affluent few.

These concepts — that governments should protect majorities and that the international financial collapse is an opportunity to transform the system into one supporting a more fraternal and just human family — are contained in a report released last week by the Pope’s Council for Justice and Peace. It says:

“The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence.”

Those values mandate economic and political systems that transcend “personal utility for the good of the community,” the report says, then adds:

“The primacy of the spiritual and of ethics needs to be restored and, with them, the primacy of politics, which is responsible for the common good – over the economy and finance.”

This is exactly what the 99 percenters — the Occupy Wall Street activists of every faith — have been saying. They want systems that work for the vast majority of citizens, not just the 1 percent at the top.

A day after the Pontifical Council reported that inequitable distribution of wealth has increased both between individuals and nations, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office documented a massive spike in income inequality within the United States from 1979 to 2007.

The household income of the nation’s richest 1 percent grew 275 percent during that nearly 30-year period, according to the CBO report.

By contrast, the income of the middle class rose by one-seventh of that — 40 percent. For the poor, the increase was one-fifteenth of that for the rich — only 18 percent over 30 years.

The result is that the richest 20 percent of households got more money in those 30 years than the entire bottom 80 percent.  That is redistribution of wealth – moving it from the poor and middle class to the richest.

The CBO study cites several factors contributing to the rising inequality, including federal tax policy. The CBO says tax policy fed inequity as the incomes of the wealthiest rose astronomically and their federal tax burden shrank.

This pattern is consistent internationally. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development determined that from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s income inequality increased in three-quarters of the 30 developed countries studied. (more…)

To convey the significance of the Occupy Wall Street movement, NBC News anchor Brian Williams this week quoted the 1960s Buffalo Springfield song, For What It’s Worth:

“There is something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

Maybe it’s unclear what the Occupy Wall Street movement ultimately will accomplish. But what’s happening – for the past three weeks in New York and now in hundreds of towns across North America – is a roiling, inspirational, grassroots expression of anger, disgust and revolution.

And, frankly, given what’s been going on in the United States since the bank bailout, it’s amazing that this uprising didn’t precede the Arab Spring. The powers-that-be, from the rich and influential to their coin-operated politicians and corporate-owned media, have mocked and belittled and ignored the protesters, the 99 percenters as they call themselves – everyone but the richest one percent. No matter what the critics say, these young people, with righteous outrage and new age communication, have launched the American Autumn.

This revolt could have started in the spring of 2009, immediately after the Bush administration pushed through Congress the Troubled Asset Relieve Program (TARP), the $700 billion in taxpayer money spent to prop up banks that had gambled and lost untold trillions. A Bloomberg News investigation later would show that the United States lent, spent or guaranteed as much as $12.8 trillion to save the banks. Despite that help, the Wall Street recklessness ruined the American economy, throwing tens of millions out of jobs and homes. (more…)

Wisconsin State Senator Lena C. Taylor receives the USW Fight Back Award at the 2011 USW Constitutional Convention.

United Steelworkers workplace deaths May 2008 – July 2011.

USW International Vice President Tom Conway talks about the damage to America’s manufacturing sector caused by unfair foreign trade.

The corporate-led attacks on our rights are coming from every level, in every state. Across the nation, we’re standing up in true Steelworker fashion. Check out some of our work in this highlight then join the fight!

AFL-CIO Community Services Director Will Fischer sends us this report from New Orleans.

In the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Southeast Louisiana Building and Construction Trades Council and the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO have regularly pitched in to repair and rebuild the community.

Last week, union members joined with the St. Bernard Project’s Rebuilding Program to work on a house in New Orleans East at the home of a retired disabled Electrical Workers (IBEW) member from the embattled Avondale Shipyard. The work included re-wiring the electrical of the entire home and plumbing. Volunteers included members from IBEW Local 130, Plumbers and Pipe Fitters (UA) Local 60 and United Steelworkers (USW) Local 13-447.

After inspections are passed, volunteers will hang sheetrock and paint. Says Tiger Hammond, president of the Greater New Orleans Central Labor Council:

We’re always ready to extend a hand to someone in need. This last project was especially important, though. Any time we can help one of brothers or sisters out, we’ll always be there…that’s what the union is all about.

(more…)

The National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB’s) modest, common-sense proposed rule to remove roadblocks for workers who want to vote on whether to form a union has drawn praise from working men and women, political leaders and activists around the country. Here’s a sample of the comments:

Electrical Workers (IBEW) President Edwin Hill:

By eliminating delays, the board is not only bringing some balance. It is also saving money for taxpayers who foot the bill because of unnecessary litigation.

Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Larry Cohen:

Workers at T-Mobile USA and nearly every other company know firsthand how U.S. corporations use delay to keep workers from making a fair choice about union representation. The changes proposed by the National Labor Relations Board are a first and modest step toward ending some of that delay.

AFT President Randi Weingarten:

By cleaning up and modernizing the system, these proposals will help level the playing field for workers, ensuring they have a fair chance to vote….The board’s proposed changes won’t fix all of those problems, but they are a step in the right direction.

United Steelworkers (USW):

The proposal would remove unfair obstacles so that workers who petition for a vote on whether to form a union can have a vote. (more…)

Efforts by those who never want to hear someone say, “Bye-bye American manufacturing,” converged coincidentally to make June Buy American month.

First, at the forceful urging of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the Smithsonian on June 8 opened an all-American-made gift shop in the National Museum of American History. Three days later, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio introduced legislation requiring federal agencies to buy only 100 percent American-made flags.

Then, at the Netroots Nation 2011 conference in Minneapolis, Minn. this week, the AFL-CIO will serve American union-made beer, including Schell’s, brewed in Minnesota by members of my union, the United Steelworkers (USW). The Alliance for American Manufacturing will host at Netroots an American-made fashion show at which it will serve USW-member made Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain bars.  And the BlueGreen Alliance is distributing to Netroots attendees mercury-free, USW-made, energy-efficient, non-curly cue Oshram Sylvania halogen light bulbs. (more…)