Unionism, perceptions and gender

Natasha Vargas-Cooper has an insightful take in today's New York Times on an underlying gender issue in the ongoing protests of public employees and their supporters in the Midwest - one that is embedded in the current weakened position of the union movement.

"What did you do in the war, Mommy?"

WHEN a couple dozen brawny, uniformed and helmeted firefighters, led by a bagpipe player, marched through a crowd of pro-union protesters in Madison, Wis., last month, I knew, almost to a certainty, that Gov. Scott Walker had picked a fight with the wrong crew.

As the firemen assembled on the Statehouse steps, the swelling, boisterous crowd, which had raucously encircled and occupied the Capitol for days, pushing back against Governor Walker’s plan to strip public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights, all of a sudden slipped into silent reverence.

(pic via proud Dad, Marc Cooper)

While the plan exempts policemen and firemen, the first responders rallied under the oldest first principle of militant unionism: An Injury to One is an Injury to All. And the presence of these mostly white, husky, mustachioed firemen — many with soot still speckling their uniforms — had highlighted a major issue that generally goes undetected by the news media when covering labor conflicts 

In short, it’s what my old union called “the Husband Issue.”

Allow me to explain.

The real story of the original Tea Party - a revolt against tax breaks for a mega-corporation

Very illuminating bit of true "Boston Tea Party" history from Thom Hartmann -



Via Crooks & Liars.

This is insane

"Slackers!"

Four - count 'em, FOUR! - Tea Party-GOP state senators have been able, via filibuster, to deny 34,000 unemployed residents of Missouri $105 million in extended unemployment benefits, after the federally-funded extension passed the GOP-led state House 123-14 two months ago and had the support of Republican Senate leaders and Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon.  More HERE.  Words fail...

Via Dan O at Beautiful Horizons.

Update: And, unfortunately, the context for that bit of political pathology is THIS news from Economix @ NYTs:  "Average length of unemployment rises again..."

"There is no US federal debt crisis"

"Dangerous subversives!" or just...uh...Republicans?

Harvard professor of political economy emeritus, former aide to Pres. Johnson and consultant to the US Treasury Francis Bator states it flat out in the Financial Times: "There is no federal debt crisis (as distinct from a governance crisis and a tax-phobia crisis.)" Well worth checking out  (HERE) for some realistic perspective in contrast to the hysterics, half-truths and anti-government demagogy that are routinely injected into the  politics of deficits, taxes, spending and debt.  Key excerpts below:

In 2010, CEO Pay Went Up 27% While Worker Pay Went Up 2%

I've got nothing to say.  More at "Think Progress."

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

Nobel-Prize winner and former chief economist for the World Bank, Joe Stiglitz takes on the dramatic  increase in disparities of income and wealth in the US @ Vanity Fair:

Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened... In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent (of income) and 33 percent (of wealth.) One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided.

Graph - Lane Kenworthy

While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow...

The good news - Jobs numbers were up in March

Ezra Klein takes a second look...

I have no idea if Tim Pawlenty is really this foolish!

"I have respect for Michelle Bachmann."

Ryan Avent @ The Economist catches former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty - one of those GOP candidates deemed "serious" by pundits - issuing a pronouncement based on "thoroughly discredited fringe beliefs."  What Avent dubs his "strange ideas" indicates TeePaw apparently doesn't have any more of a clue about economic policy than that other noisesome GOP 2012 hopeful & Tea Party icon Michelle Bachmann, whose whacky screeds suggest she's the insistent voice of Loony Toons Town in our public discourse.

The Economist's Avent:

TIM PAWLENTY, former Minnesota governor and potential Republican presidential candidate, has thoughts on money:

The former Minnesota governor said the administration has devalued the dollar by injecting "fiat money" into the economy. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) predicted Tuesday that the U.S. will face a double-dip recession that could last all the way until the 2012 elections. The likely presidential candidate said the government, under President Obama, has devalued the dollar by injecting "fiat money" into the economy in an attempt to boost it — a plan he said will be damaging in the long-run.

This is unfortunate. Let's review the reasons why:

The Titanic's April Fools link

"I'm pretty sure there will be duck-hunting in Heaven."

Except it's not...

It's former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee - HERE - doing his 24/7 FOX Star fool thing.

 Update: Steve Benen has a lot more on this bit of fake "history" Hucksterism.

No fool...

"Darkness on the edge of town..."

Springsteen writes a letter to his hometown newspaper, which is something more of us should be doing:

Thank you for your March 27 front-page story by Michael Symons, "As poverty rises, cuts target aid." The article is one of the few that highlights the contradictions between a policy of large tax cuts, on the one hand, and cuts in services to those in the most dire conditions, on the other. 

Also, you've shone some light on anti-poverty workers and analysts such as Adele LaTourette, Meara Nigro, Cecilia Zalkind and Raymond Castro, among others, all of whom have something important to add to the discussion: real information and actual facts about what is happening below the poverty line. These are voices that in our current climate are having a hard time being heard, not just in New Jersey, but nationally. 

Finally, your article shows that the cuts are eating away at the lower edges of the middle class, not just those already classified as in poverty, and are likely to continue to get worse over the next few years. I'm always glad to see my hometown newspaper covering these issues.

Bruce Springsteen

COLTS NECK

(Click here to see the article: As poverty rises, NJ cuts target aid.)      Via WitnessLA.

Mississippi mud pie: Haley's Lil' White Lie...

"Where I come from the White Citizens Council were town leaders."

Ezra Klein notes Mississippi Governor Haley Barbor claiming he'd “dug out of a $720 million budget hole in two years without raising anybody’s taxes."

Klein: The problem? Barbour had raised a couple of taxes. But give him his credit: He hadn’t raised income taxes. Rather, he’d raised cigarette taxes and taxes on facilities for the mentally disabled — taxes, in other words, that fall fairly regressively.

Turns out he’s working in a time-honored tradition in the South.

The Gap

Image courtesy of Super Yachts, Lustre Ltd.

25% of home-owners are "under water."

As has been noted with a certain sense of alarm by those among us who believe that a rising economic tide should "lift all boats" rather than just luxury yachts, the income gap between the middle class and even "upper-" and "upper-upper-" middle class as well as lower income folks,  and the economic elite has become much greater over the last 30 years.    

Between 1980 and 2005, more than 80% of the increase in total incomes went to the top 1%.  

Eighty per-cent of the growth in incomes went to one per-cent - a fact that is in my view stunning and at least part of the reason we're in such precarious economic straits.  When wealth doesn't "trickle down," everything from our tax policies to our political discourse gets skewed by the resulting imbalance of economic power and the country suffers.  (Authentic conservatives, incidentally, should take note of this and be as alarmed as liberals or "progressives", because radical increases in economic inequality totally undermine the social cohesion, stable communities and family life, and moderation in our political system that traditionally draws folks to the  "conservative" promise - as distinct from the radicalism of free-market ideologues and right-wing extremists or self-serving agendas of the economic elite that "normal" conservatives often find themselves in bed with.)

Institutional inflation-mongering: bogus hysterics in service of special interests & the economic elite

                                   David Leonhardt @ NYTimes' Biz Day writes: 

 

(Y)ou might think Fed officials would now be doing everything possible to ensure a solid recovery. But they’re not. 

Once again, many of them are worried that the Fed is doing too much. And once again, the odds are rising that it’s doing too little. 

Founders' feud

"My country is the world, my religion is to do good."

Given the Tea Partiers' feverish hijacking of American history, with their largely ignorant "WWTJD?" dogmatics ("What would Thomas Jefferson do?") offered as a simple-minded panacea to current problems, it's useful to look back at the complex and flawed human beings who occupied the "origins" piece of our complicated and often painful history. 

For example, "founding fathers" John Adams and Thomas Paine hated each other. Adams called Paine's clarion 1776 manifesto "Common Sense," an "ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass."  Paine's opinion of Adam's tenure in the White House?  "Some people talk of impeaching John Adams, but I am for softer measures. I would keep him to make fun of."

Historian William Hogeland has a fascinating essay (posted at Naked Capitalism & New Deal 2.0) on the roots of this mutual antipathy, entitled "How Thomas Paine and John Adams Clashed Over Income Inequality." He brings Paine, in particular, into clearer focus and in regard to one of our very real and pressing current problems that has not been solved in the ensuing 200-plus years - a problem that, in truth, is getting much worse.

Some excerpts from Hogeland's piece that are especially interesting:

The Paine-Adams antipathy wasn’t just personal. Its sources lay in the founding generation’s deep political divisions over economic equality...

Part 4 of "Common Sense" primer on the deficit hype is up at Winning Progressive

This piece focuses on the attacks on Social Security and the real need to control rapidly rising health care costs as a piece of our overall spending, whether the government is providing insurance via Medicare or not.  Thanks to the folks at Winning Progressive for spreading the word!

"Shoeless Joe" Stiglitz vs. the Alan Simpson & Erskine Bowles Deficit Reduction Proposal

“Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics..."

Joe Stiglitz is a Nobel-Prize winning economist, currently professor at Columbia University, who chaired Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors from 1995-97 and was Chief Economist at the World Bank.  He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001 for his work on "market imperfections." He's long been a critic of free market theorists - who he regards as market "fundamentalists" - and has written extensively on the destabilizing effects of economic globalization.

Stiglitz plays in powerful circles, but he's not a "team player."  He left the Clinton administration after losing an ongoing duel with Larry Summers. In an American Prospect profile ten years or so ago, entitled "Shoeless Joe" and highlighting the often-disheveled professor's unorthodoxy, Jonathan Chait quoted Stiglitz' take on his stint as CEA chief:   

"When I was in the lawyer- and politician-dominated White House environment, I often felt that I had arrived in another world," he recounted. "I had expected lower standards of evidence for assertions than would be expected in a professional article, but I had not expected that the evidence offered would be, in so many instances, so irrelevant, and that so many vacuous sentences, sentences whose meaning and import simply baffled me, would be uttered."

Stiglitz' intellectual credibility and experience combined with his tendency to tell unwelcome truths in high places is why he's such a valuable voice. What this little panegyric is getting to is a broadside that Stiglitz has just fired contrary to other former presidential CEA chairs who had banded together in a joint "letter" to promote the much-touted opinions of Deficit Commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson - pushing an agenda of "compromise" cutbacks to reduce budget deficits long-term. 

"Social Security is a milk cow with 310 million tits!"

Commission co-chair Alan Simpson, you might recall, is the terminally grouchy public scold who makes cracks like, "Social Security was never a retirement" and "it was a good idea when it started, but may no longer be so" - that is when he's not babbling about "the green weenie","sparrow belch" or how "a lot of blood, hair, and eyeballs have to lay on the floor before we (the Simpson-Bowles commission) finish." (Simpson's lips are so loose and he's so dyspeptic there's a StuffAlanSimpsonSays.com website.) Why President Obama chose  - along with "corporate Democrat," former Clinton staffer and investment banker Bowles - this disgruntled old coot to head a key commission looking at the future of Social Security, among other major long-term budget issues, is one I'll never understand.

But back to Joe Stiglitz.  Arguably he's no more the diplomat than Simpson, but his tongue is connected to his brain, not his spleen.  Stiglitz calls the Simpson-Bowles proposals a "near suicide pact" and "a set of unprincipled political compromises that would lead to a weaker America — with slower growth and a more divided society."

Strong stuff. And the substance of Joe Stiglitz' "counter-letter" to his fellow former CEA chairs regarding the deficit commission is compelling:

Terrible Democratic strategy on the budget...

Think Progress reports - a "Tea Partyized" GOP win is likely in current budget "negotiations":

Unfortunately the administration backed away from its budget even before the negotiations started, and the Tea Party is calling the shots in the House. So instead of negotiation between the president’s original level and House leadership’s original level, we’re stuck negotiating between the Tea Party’s $100 billion, and the new status quo’s $50 billion. That means the likely compromise is right where the House Republican leadership always wanted it: around $74 billion.

That’s not much of a compromise if we end up with what the House Republican leadership wanted in the first place.

The full "Think Progress" analysis is HERE.  "The Tea Party is calling the shots in the House" - OMFG! But bending to the crazies seems to be working for the GOP, which is getting it's original offer as the "compromise" with weakened Democrats. This apparent failure is the fruit of the mid-term debacle, of Democratic timidity and - among the base that worked hard for Obama - of our having let the Tea Party activists take center stage at the grass-roots and in the media circus after our guy won the Presidency.      (via Ezra Klein, Wonkbook)

Update: Steve Benen has more on this at Political Animal, HERE.  Up-update: Can GOP over-reach give the Dems leverage?  Brian Beutler, HERE at TPM, has the latest on the potential for a government shutdown.

The unbearable hypocrisy of being a GOP "deficit hawk"

Exhibit A:
Sen. Richard Shelby, Republican, Alabama

At left we have Sen. Shelby expressing his concern over mounting deficits, by pointing his finger at the year before they began growing out of control - 1980. 1980 was, of course, the year the great anti-government fiscal conservative Ronald Reagan was elected President - and proceeded to initiate the Gospel of Tax Cuts, a scheme hatched by the economic elites and which got the federal  deficit ball rolling big-time. 

Thank you Senator Shelby, for reminding us of "the good old days" before the GOP's "Starve the Beast!" strategy to break government took hold.

Currently Shelby - when he's not attacking consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren or fighting regulation of the banking industry - is railing against the dangers of the deficit with public statements such as this:

“Washington must put its fiscal house in order. American taxpayers are rightly infuriated by the federal government’s disregard for the same economic principles that govern every household and business budget.”  

Aside from the nonsensical simplification that the federal government should adhere to identical budgeting principles as "every household," at least let's acknowledge that's a clearly expressed point of view.

But behind the hot air, we find "fiscal conservative" Shelby inserting the pork-barrel “Shelby provision” into the 2010 budget extension.  The "Shelby provision" forces NASA to spend $1.4 million daily on the Constellation moon program, which it already canceled and doesn’t even want:

3rd part of "Common Sense" Guide to the Great Deficit Debate at "Winning Progressive"

 Winning Progressive has the third segment of our "Common Sense" deficit primer up today.  This segment focuses on the drastic growth in income inequality over the last 30 years.  Thanks to WP for spreading the word!

How did GE pull it off ? - "Some people rob you with a six-gun..."

"...some people rob you with a fountain pen"

And some people rob you with lobbyists re-writing the tax laws.

It's been reported widely - including here - that General Electric paid zero taxes on over $14 billion in profits for 2010. What's gotten a bit less attention is the part of the story where GE not only doesn't pay any taxes, but got a "tax benefit" of $3.2 billion - which presumably means that Uncle Sam owes GE a multi-billion dollar credit against future taxes (assuming the sharks at GE ever are liable for any.)

As the New York Times story explains in painful and anger-inducing detail, GE is typical of large corporations - although obviously more skilled than many - in employing a small army of well-funded lobbyists to work Washington for tax breaks, loopholes, "incentives", "credits", etc. - ad nauseum.

This is the background to what are called "tax expenditures" - i.e. money that the US Treasury forgoes on taxable income and corporate profits because of various "work-arounds" as fine print  written into the tax code.  It is a huge issue for corporations like GE, but it's an imbalance in our tax system that comes into play with taxation on wealthy individuals as well.