Friday, June 16, 2017

Links for 06-14-17 [feedly]

Links for 06-14-17
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2017/06/links-for-06-14-17.html

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I’ve Covered Obamacare Since Day One. I’ve Never Seen Lying and Obstruction Like This. [feedly]

I've Covered Obamacare Since Day One. I've Never Seen Lying and Obstruction Like This.
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2017/06/ive-covered-obamacare-since-day-one-ive-never-seen-lying-and-obstruction-like-this.html

Sarah Kliff:

I've covered Obamacare since day one. I've never seen lying and obstruction like this, Vox.com: Republicans do not want the country to know what is in their health care bill.

This has become more evident each day, as the Senate plots out a secretive path toward Obamacare repeal — and top White House officials (including the president) consistently lie about what the House bill actually does. ...

My biggest concern isn't the hypocrisy; there is plenty of that in Washington. It's that the process will lead to devastating results for millions of Americans who won't know to speak up until the damage is done. So far, the few details that have leaked out paint a picture of a bill sure to cover millions fewer people and raise costs on those with preexisting conditions.

The plan is expected to be far-reaching, potentially bringing lifetime limits back to employer-sponsored coverage, which could mean a death sentence for some chronically ill patients who exhaust their insurance benefits. ...

VISIT WEBSITE
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NYTimes.com: A Finger Exercise On Hyperglobalization

Sent by jcase4218@gmail.com:

A Finger Exercise On Hyperglobalization

Why small cost reductions led to big trade.

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By rescinding the persuader rule, Trump is once again siding with corporate interests over working people [feedly]

By rescinding the persuader rule, Trump is once again siding with corporate interests over working people
http://www.epi.org/blog/by-rescinding-the-persuader-rule-trump-is-once-again-siding-with-corporate-interests-over-working-people/

Yesterday, the Trump administration took yet another step against working people by announcing that the Department of Labor (DOL) will rescind its "persuader rule," which would have helped level the playing field for workers by letting them know the source of the anti-union messages they receive during union drives.

Unions help union and nonunion workers in countless ways. They raise wages, make workplaces safer, and close the gender pay gap. Most importantly, unions let workers have their voices heard on the job. The ability of people to join together to negotiate for better working conditions and pay is even more important in an era of forced arbitration, where women who are sexually harassed often cannot get justice in a courtroom and workers who are being cheated out of minimum wage often cannot file class action lawsuits. All workers deserve a voice in their workplaces, and a union is one of the best ways for working people to make sure they are getting treated fairly on the job.

But many employers fight unionization efforts at every turn, by hiring professional anti-union consultants—"persuaders"—to bust their employees' organizing drives with sophisticated anti-union campaigns. Union-busting firms promise to equip employers with "campaign strategies" and "opposition research," and produce anti-union videos, websites, posters, buttons, T-shirts, and PowerPoint presentations for employers to deploy against their workers' unionizing efforts. Employers spend large amounts of money to hire anti-union consultants—sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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Does corporate America see a future in the United States? [feedly]

Does corporate America see a future in the United States?
http://www.epi.org/blog/does-corporate-america-see-a-future-in-the-united-states/

Does corporate America see a future in the United States?

This article was originally posted on Good Jobs First's blog.

When the term "Rustbelt" was coined in the 1980s and activists learned the early warning signs of a plant closing, one of those indicators was tax dodging. If a company knew it was planning to close a factory, it would often challenge its property tax assessment or seek other tax breaks. And why not? If it didn't expect to be hiring locally in the future, why should an employer care about the quality of the schools?

The national trend today looks like the Rustbelt 1980s on steroids. President Trump's budget proposal follows the playbook that corporate lobbyists have long pushed in state legislatures: tax cuts for companies and the rich, coupled with dramatic cuts to services that benefit everyone. The resulting permanent damage to those public services begs the question: is Corporate America intentionally disinvesting, abandoning our nation?

In recent years, states and localities across the country have made drastic cuts to essential public services. Texas eliminated over 10,000 teaching jobs, and ended full-day preschool for 100,000 low-income kids. The city of Muncie, Indiana eliminated so many firefighter positions that the area of the city that fire trucks can reach within eight minutes was cut in half. In Milwaukee, budget cuts left the public transit reaching 1,300 fewer employers in 2015 than in 2001.

Local health departments were forced to cut back everything from neonatal care to cancer screening to vision and hearing tests for school children to inspecting food safety in local restaurants. Officials reported that if the nation faces an outbreak similar to the H1N1 flu epidemic, many localities will be unable to vaccinate their residents. Budget cuts were particularly devastating in the country's school systems. In 2010, the national student-teacher ratio increased for the first time since the Great Depression; and seven years after the onset of the Great Recession, most states had still not restored per-pupil spending to pre-recession levels.

Most striking about these cuts: the legislators who enacted them and the business lobbies that championed them treated them not as temporary tragedies to be repaired when revenues bounced back, but as long-desired permanent cuts to public services. Indeed, many legislatures locked in poorer tax bases by enacting new tax giveaways to corporations and the rich while slashing funding for schools, libraries, and health care. In the same year that Ohio ended full-day kindergarten, legislators phased out the state's inheritance tax—which had only ever affected the wealthiest seven percent of families.

This agenda was driven by the country's premier corporate lobbies: chambers of commerce, manufacturers associations, the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity, and the Fortune 500 corporations that have participated in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Which begs the question about their motives: why would leading corporations seek permanent cuts to education, libraries or public transit? Don't they need full access to labor pools of educated workers and decently-paid consumers to buy their products and services? The behavior of the nation's biggest corporate lobbies appears to be irrational, yet it has been repeated in state after state.

One answer appears to lie in the disturbing fact that the fortunes of "American" corporations have become increasingly divorced from those of American citizens. It may never have been entirely true that "what's good for General Motors is what's good for the country," as the company's president apocryphally suggested in 1953. But it was closer to true when companies relied on Americans both to make and to buy their products. Today, most GM employees and nearly two-thirds of the cars it sells are overseas; it already sells more cars in China than in the U.S. General Motors has been highly engaged in American politics, including as a member of ALEC.

GM is not exceptional. For the first time, many of the country's most powerful political actors are companies that may be headquartered in America but don't primarily depend for their profits upon the fortunes of American society. Foreign sales now account for 48 percent of the S&P 500's total corporate revenues. Among recent ALEC member corporations, Exxon Mobil, Caterpillar, Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, and IBM all earn more than 60 percent of their revenue outside the U.S. Their political interests are increasingly disconnected from the fate of American workers and taxpayers.

The net effect of corporate tax dodging is that by every key measure—share of state revenue, share of GDP, or effective rate—state corporate income taxes have been steadily declining. This creates pressure to raise other taxes, disproportionately borne by working families, who grow to resent a government that costs them more yet delivers less.

Given this reality, we take this corporate-backed push for disinvestment of America's public sector as a big, loud early warning signal. ALEC's agenda is not that of employers committed to their surrounding communities. It more resembles that of a company planning to cut and run. For the rest of us who seek good jobs and future opportunity for ourselves and our children, what's good for GM is good for GM, period.

Gordon Lafer is a professor at University of Oregon and author of The One Percent Solution: How Corporations are Remaking America One State at a Time. Greg LeRoy is Executive Director of Good Jobs First and author of The Great American Jobs Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation.

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Thursday, June 15, 2017

Thom Hartmann: Reaganomics killed America’s middle class

Reaganomics killed America's middle class

This country's fate was sealed when our government slashed taxes on the rich back in 1980

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The article below is a good reminder of how far back this mess really goes.

But it provoked some rethinking as well -- when something has been going on for 3 generations and old tools are getting nowhere --- is it time to rethink some basic understandings and assumptions about reality and the insufficiency of some past dearly held 'principles'.

It is worth considering the possibility that objective, as well as subjective, factors drove the Reagan counter-revolution against Roosevelt (and Johnson) -- and and against global social democracy and socialism too. When Reginald Jones (https://www.ge.com/.../leadership/profiles/Reginald-h-Jones) published remarks to the Biz Roundtable calling for a "massive and sustained re-capitalization" of the US economy in the early Seventies, Ronald Reagan, a long time employee of GE, was just starting his Robin Hood in Reverse run for the presidency by heaping praise on Barry Goldwater. The left roundly criticized Reagan and Reaganomics as the robbery it was, and still is, from the pockets of working people. But we, or at least I, did not ask back then what seem to me now like a couple of important questions. 1) Capital (and related commodities) in motion (real transactions) is a material force, no less than wind or ocean currents in the domain of economic society -- and there are no societies without economies. Capital sets the real available choices before CEOs no less than wages and benefits define most of the means of life -- and choices -- set before working families. The rise and culmination of the 20th Century imperial agendas ended in a globalized world where the scales of both production and commerce do indeed require the accumulation and mobilization of truly immense sums and forces. "If you want to move mountains, don't call the granola crowd" Jerry Brown is reported to have quipped in connection to the High Speed Rail project along the Cal. coast. There is a line of profound truth in Brown's remark (could be the Jesuit, or the Buddhist in him!) , which any reform program must consider. 2) Despite massive investments in technology, and economies of global scale, productivity -- at least as currently measured in terms meaningful to capital -- is not rising sufficiently. Ultimately -- a la Piketty -- that means serious, structural and political crisis, because it means the profits will not in aggregate justify the investment, which will retard global investment, which is what is happening across the board, except in SOME of the more "socialized" or "strong industrial policy" nations. This challenge strikes at the heart of serious internal conflicts in a capitalist economy where material production is increasingly automated, while services and intangibles consume the labor market. Neither services nor intangibles can be fully monetized -- i.e. made 'good commodities' -- for their value (example: health care). At the same time this big cycle crisis of which Piketty warns, with very sharp class divisions, takes place in a world where the class structure and composition of the leading economies is very very different than the last time this level of global, pervasive, threats arose and became an irreversible slide toward war, fascism, and dictatorships. Every struggle toward the future, toward social and scientific progress, is now a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-nationality, multi - gender cultural affair. That's good compared to the past. Labor, however, at least as it was legalized in the 1930's, has been all but exterminated in the structural change. That's bad -- which makes the tactics of raising working class bargaining power and unity also very different, indeed a burning question

*********************************************************************

here's nothing "normal" about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it's a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation's middle class.

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens' novels.

At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, "middle" class of professionals and mercantilists – doctor, lawyers, shop-owners – who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people – typically over 90 percent of the population – who make up the working poor. They have no wealth – in fact they're typically in debt most of their lives – and can barely survive on what little money they make.

So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in "normal" capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.

You can see this trend today in America. When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today's dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical "raw capitalism," what we call "Reaganomics," or "supply side economics," our nation's largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.

This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed – this huge change was done in less than 35 years.

The only ways a working-class "middle class" can come about in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval – a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century – or by heavily taxing the rich.

French economist Thomas Piketty has talked about this at great length in his groundbreaking new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He argues that the middle class that came about in Western Europe and the United States during the mid-twentieth was the direct result of a peculiar set of historical events.

According to Piketty, the post-World War II middle class was created by two major things: the destruction of European inherited wealth during the war and higher taxes on the rich, most of which were rationalized by the war. This brought wealth and income at the top down, and raised working people up into a middle class.

Piketty is right, especially about the importance of high marginal tax rates and inheritance taxes being necessary for the creation of a middle class that includes working-class people. Progressive taxation, when done correctly, pushes wages down to working people and reduces the incentives for the very rich to pillage their companies or rip off their workers. After all, why take another billion when 91 percent of it just going to be paid in taxes?

This is the main reason why, when GM was our largest employer and our working class were also in the middle class, CEOs only took home 30 times what working people did. The top tax rate for all the time America's middle class was created was between 74 and 91 percent. Until, of course, Reagan dropped it to 28 percent and working people moved from the middle class to becoming the working poor.

Other policies, like protective tariffs and strong labor laws also help build a middle class, but progressive taxation is the most important because it is the most direct way to transfer money from the rich to the working poor, and to create a disincentive to theft or monopoly by those at the top.

History shows how important high taxes on the rich are for creating a strong middle class.

If you compare a chart showing the historical top income tax rate over the course of the twentieth century with a chart of income inequality in the United States over roughly the same time period, you'll see that the period with the highest taxes on the rich – the period between the Roosevelt and Reagan administrations – was also the period with the lowest levels of economic inequality.

You'll also notice that since marginal tax rates started to plummet during the Reagan years, income inequality has skyrocketed.

Even more striking, during those same 33 years since Reagan took office and started cutting taxes on the rich, income levels for the top 1 percent have ballooned while income levels for everyone else have stayed pretty much flat.

Coincidence? I think not.

Creating a middle class is always a choice, and by embracing Reaganomics and cutting taxes on the rich, we decided back in 1980 not to have a middle class within a generation or two. George H.W. Bush saw this, and correctly called it "Voodoo Economics." And we're still in the era of Reaganomics – as President Obama recently pointed out, Reagan was a successful revolutionary.

This, of course, is exactly what conservatives always push for. When wealth is spread more equally among all parts of society, people start to expect more from society and start demanding more rights. That leads to social instability, which is feared and hated by conservatives, even though revolutionaries and liberals like Thomas Jefferson welcome it.

And, as Kirk and Buckley predicted back in the 1950s, this is exactly what happened in the 1960s and '70s when taxes on the rich were at their highest. The Civil Rights movement, the women's movement, the consumer movement, the anti-war movement, and the environmental movement – social movements that grew out of the wealth and rising expectations of the post-World War II era's middle class – these all terrified conservatives. Which is why ever since they took power in 1980, they've made gutting working people out of the middle class their number one goal.

We now have a choice in this country. We can either continue going down the road to oligarchy, the road we've been on since the Reagan years, or we can choose to go on the road to a more pluralistic society with working class people able to make it into the middle class. We can't have both.

And if we want to go down the road to letting working people back into the middle class, it all starts with taxing the rich.

The time is long past due for us to roll back the Reagan tax cuts.

John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

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Have We Been Had? Why Talking About the Working-Class Vote for Trump Hurts Us [feedly]

Have We Been Had? Why Talking About the Working-Class Vote for Trump Hurts Us
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/have-we-been-had-why-talking-about-the-working-class-vote-for-trump-hurts-us/

Like many of my friends and colleagues who study class and are worried about the increasing economic inequality of this country, I was at first overjoyed that the recent presidential election would force us to reckon with the subject of class. Usually ignored, working-class people were now becoming subjects of a national conversation. And we've seen some fine discussions from folks like Joan Williams, Konstantin Kilibardo and Daria Roithmayr, and Jack Metzgar.

Unfortunately, the discussion too often tips over into pity and blame, and I think we should be very careful to guard against this. I would like to make two suggestions. First, we should challenge the those who claim that the "white working class" voted for Trump. That's both empirically mistaken and strategically misplaced. Second, we should pay attention to how this conversation plays right into the hands of a long-standing conservative discourse that pits "middle America" against out-of-touch elites. That we who write articles, analyze data, and blog about politics and class are the elites people are warned against should not come as a surprise, but we should avoid participating in the "let's figure out what is wrong with white working-class voters" game.

First, who really put Trump in the White House? The short answer is, many of us did. I don't think we will have the full answer for quite some time. We still don't have any data on occupation and the 2016 vote. We can look at American National Election Studies(ANES) data from November 2016, however, to compare the vote by income and education. The top bars on the chart below show all ANES respondents, the second whites only. Trump had the edge among white people without a college degree, although less so among middle-income voters than the poor or the rich (he did really well among rich white men without a college degree). This is a small sample, however, one that doesn't include any poor whites with a college degree (who do in fact exist!)

This data doesn't show the white working class overwhelmingly in support of Trump. Not more than half of the working class even voted, so to say that the "white working class" gave us Trump seems more than a little overstated.

Second, elite hand-wringing about the vote plays right into a narrative long spun by conservatives to mobilize resentment among those who feel analyzed and scorned, so as to shift attention away from actual conservative policies. Decades ago, conservative writer Samuel Francis claimed that the New Deal was nothing other than "a power grab by the liberal elite, whose life-styles, aspirations, and values" were "Bound together, rationalized, and extended by what may be called the 'cosmopolitan ethic.'" Francis emphasized the "open contempt" this ethic held toward "the small town, the family, the neighborhood, the traditional class identities and their relationships – as well as for authoritative and disciplinary institutions – the army, the police, parental authority, and the disciplines of school and church."

Clinton's election narrative echoed these ideas. She wanted liberals to see this election as a referendum on race and inclusion, and anyone who was against her was deplorable or being used by deplorables. As Sharon Sullivan has argued, "one of the main ways that white class hierarchies operate is through the production and display of white middle-class moral goodness." Have you noticed how infrequently rich whites are called out for being deplorably racist?

Honestly? This election wasn't a referendum on anything. We had no good candidates to choose from. We didn't choose either one of them. Millions of Americans sat out the vote (or were pushed out, but that is another story). And each of the millions of people who did had their own reasons for casting their vote. Most likely we'll never be able to get to the bottom of how much racism, sexism, and other prejudices motivated voters in this election. (On a side note, is it really that surprising that a critical mass of white people respond to racist dog whistles?) Yes, we need to try to understand the attraction of a strange man who seems to appeal to our worst instincts and desires, but not at the risk of failing to come together to continue the fight for a better world for all of us. Politicians manipulate. Let's stop focusing on who is manipulated and why and focus instead on making sure this doesn't happen again.

I would suggest that the main reason we are currently focused on the working-class vote, and not, say the professional-managerial vote, or the rich white male vote, is because these people are respected to make decisions. In contrast, pundits and analysts have always questioned ability of working-class people to make decisions. This is just another way the educated left is playing into a conservative narrative of condescending liberal elitism.

Here's the problem as I see it. If Trump's supporters came from all sections of the (white) American electorate, the narrative of working-class support of Trump diverts us from the real story, which is much more ordinary. One party — a party that denies climate change, that wants to rollback protections for workers and the planet, that is willing to sacrifice millions of lives to the Moloch of economic growth — has managed to suppress its opponents' votes (the majority of poor and working-class people do not vote), spin a story of a liberal media being out of touch with "regular Americans," and lead kind-hearted but possibly naïve liberals everywhere to once again fear the (white) working class. Neat trick. any Leftist coalition will be destroyed by fear and mistrust.

It has been a very long time in this country since we had a party that was both about and for the working class (have we ever?). Instead, our parties appeal to mythic constructs about identity. It is much easier to appeal to white workers as white than as workers in such circumstances, especially when the candidate of the party that historically championed labor is also ignoring labor and putting her foot in her mouth with classist remarks. This is how we lose.

The side of the wealthy exploits the classism of the other side, and wins voters by doing so, even as it pushes for policies that favor the few and harm the many. They have been doing this for a very long time. This is how they win, and we play right into their hands.

We've been had. We need a new narrative. We need to recognize the working class for who it is. It is us, white, black, and brown. It is the person who works three jobs and can't afford healthcare as well as the worker with a union job, the person living in subsidized housing as well as the suburbanite who is hoping her job doesn't disappear. The working class is the American people, our democratic polity, native-born and immigrant, gay, straight, and transgender. We don't all look alike, and we certainly don't all think alike. But we are all harmed by a politics that seeks to divide us. No, they didn't vote Trump. Americans like us did. And we all need to fix it.

Allison L. Hurst

Allison L. Hurst is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Oregon State University and the author of two books on the experiences and identity reformations of working-class college students, The Burden of Academic Success: Loyalists, Renegades, and Double Agents (2010) and College and the Working Class (2012). She was one of the founders of the Association of Working-Class Academics, an organization composed of college faculty and staff who were the first in their families to graduate from college, for which she also served as president from 2008 to 2014.

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