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Tag: "new gilded age"

The Seventeenth Amendment

[ 81 ] July 21, 2017 |

The conservative dream of repealing the Seventeenth Amendment will not go away. The idea that the people could have the direct election of senators seems utterly uncontroversial to 99.9 percent of Americans. But not to the people who want to strip tens of millions of health care, among many other things. For them, their ability to control state legislatures would guarantee a permanent Republican majority and truly install the New Gilded Age.

Say “hello” to the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, the corporate-funded project to impose a top-down right-wing agenda on the states. ALEC is considering whether to adopt a new piece of “model legislation” that proposes to do away with an elected Senate.

The idea of reversing 104 years of representative democracy and returning to the bad old days when senators were chosen via backroom deals between wealthy campaign donors, corporate lobbyists, and crooked legislators, is not new. The John Birch Society peddled the proposal decades ago. But with the rise of the “Tea Party” movement, the notion moved into the conservative mainstream.

Then–Texas Governor Rick Perry argued in 2012 that the direct election of senators “took the states out of the process.” Several Republican senators apparently agree, with Utah Senator Mike Lee referring to the 17th Amendment as “a mistake” and Arizona Senator Jeff Flake saying, “I think it’s better as it reinforces the notion of federalism to have senators appointed by state legislatures.” What was once a fringe fantasy is being taken ever more seriously by conservative strategists.

Last year, ALEC published an article by a so-called “subject matter expert” arguing that the popular election of senators is “disenfranchising the States.” The article made an old-school states’ rights argument for taking the power to choose senators away from the people and giving it to the politicians who sit in state legislatures.

ALEC has yet to formally embrace the theory, but last month it circulated a “draft resolution recommending constitutional amendment restoring election of u.s. senators to the legislatures of the sovereign states.” That resolution is among the items expected to be considered at this week’s annual meeting of the influential group.

It’s unlikely this would happen, simply because of the difficulty of getting a constitutional amendment ratified. ALEC controls a lot of states, but it doesn’t control 38 states to the extent of repealing one of the nation’s core political reforms. If this happens, so many democratic norms have been rolled back that we are barely recognizable. On the other hand, it is 2017 so all manners of horrors are on the table. And to be clear, the idea of a plutocrat paying cash to state legislators for a Senate seat is the ALEC ideal, not a problem.

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Bring Your Own Guillotine

[ 106 ] July 10, 2017 |

I have nothing else to say about this ad from today’s New York Times.

“I Do Not Support a Livable Wage”

[ 165 ] June 7, 2017 |

Usually, Republicans hide their contempt for workers in some kind of language of bootstrapism or something. But not Karen Handel.

“This is an example of the fundamental difference between a liberal and a conservative: I do not support a livable wage,” she said on Atlanta’s WSB-TV in response to a viewer question about raising the minimum wage. “What I support is making sure that we have an economy that is robust with low taxes and less regulation.”

Yeah, I’d say that is pretty much the difference between a liberal and a conservative. I guess in the New Gilded Age, Republicans aren’t pretending anymore.

Hopefully saying the quiet parts loud helps doom her.

The New Gilded Age in One Story

[ 110 ] May 20, 2017 |

Important journalism coming from the Times.

Where is the revolution?

Would Corporations Also Like Safe Spaces?

[ 57 ] April 26, 2017 |

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Corporations love government interference when it means they can avoid states holding them accountable.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton pledged their support for more paid family leave. Now big business is countering the calls with a proposal of its own: Congress should establish a certain optional amount of paid leave and, if companies meet that threshold, they should be protected from state or local laws that might require more.

The proposal is part of a report being released Tuesday by the HR Policy Association, a coalition of more than 380 major U.S. companies. Together, the group’s members employ 9 percent of America’s private-sector workers. Executives on the committee behind the report represent companies including Marriott International, Procter & Gamble, IBM, Cigna, General Electric, Wendy’s, Oracle and General Mills.

The preemptive strike from the business community is also a response to the increasing number of states and municipalities that have taken matters into their own hands, passing local laws that require employers to offer paid time off.

You can see why they are freaking out. Those states and cities are so onerous and mean to our betters!

As of now, federal law offers many employees the opportunity to take unpaid family leave, but doesn’t require employers to give workers paid time off for sickness or childcare, including maternity leave. Since 2011, seven states and dozens of cities have passed laws requiring companies to provide paid sick days. Another two states and the District of Columbia passed laws creating family leave funds and requiring companies to let their employees use them.

In places like California, Arizona, New York City and Minneapolis, new laws let employees accrue at least one hour of sick time for every 30 hours of work, or roughly one sick day for every six weeks of full-time work. Nationally about 61 percent of private-sector workers have access to some form of paid sick days, according to 2015 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Twelve percent have some form of paid family leave.

One sick day every six weeks! What’s next, the slaughtered first born of every CEO? No wonder corporations need special government interference. The free market indeed.

Drain That Swamp!

[ 45 ] April 26, 2017 |

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Congressional Republicans are really going to sell the public on keeping themselves on the ACA while they continue attempting dooming millions of Americans to early and painful deaths.

House Republicans appear to have included a provision that exempts Members of Congress and their staff from their latest health care plan.

The new Republican amendment, introduced Tuesday night, would allow states to waive out of Obamacare’s ban on pre-existing conditions. This means that insurers could once again, under certain circumstances, charge sick people higher premiums than healthy people.

Republican legislators liked this policy well enough to offer it in a new amendment. They do not, however, seem to like it enough to have it apply to themselves and their staff. A spokesperson for Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) who authored this amendment confirmed this was the case: members of Congress and their staff would get the guarantee of keeping these Obamacare regulations. Health law expert Tim Jost flagged me to this particular issue.

A bit of background is helpful here. Obamacare requires all members of Congress and their staff to purchase coverage on the individual market, just like Obamacare enrollees. The politics of that plank were simple enough, meant to demonstrate that if the coverage in this law were good enough for Americans than it should be good enough for their representations in Washington.

That’s been happening for the past four years now. Fast-forward to this new amendment, which would allow states to waive out of key Obamacare protections like the ban on pre-existing conditions or the requirement to cover things like maternity care and mental health services.

If Congressional aides lived in a state that decided to waive these protections, the aides who were sick could be vulnerable to higher premiums than the aides that are healthy. Their benefits package could get skimpier as Obamacare’s essential health benefits requirement may no longer apply either.

I appreciate wanting to keep your staff healthy. Too bad it doesn’t apply to all Americans. I guess being a College Republican who gets a staff job out of college with a fireeating Republican makes you the member of a superior class, unlike those people.

Meanwhile, the Trump tax plan sure looks great!

Reduction of the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent, a cut which sounds like it will indeed apply to “pass-through” companies like the Trump Organization.

Reduction of the top individual tax rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent and reduction in the number of individual tax brackets from seven to three.

Doubling the standard deduction.

Repeal of the estate tax.

Repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Repeal of the “Net Investment Income” tax that helps pay for Obamacare.

It would also eliminate nearly every deduction except for mortgage. Among many other things, this would effectively mean the end of freelancing as a career choice.

How would this affect Herr Trump? Secretary of the Treasury Jay Gould:

How will the president’s own tax bill be affected by the plan? “I can’t comment on the president’s tax situation since I don’t have access to that.”

I’m sure that Trump will make this clear soon enough by releasing his taxes!

On Philanthropy

[ 73 ] April 19, 2017 |

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Americans love philanthropy because we love individualism and we love our rich. We indeed think that could be us with some luck and hard work. Bootstrapism remains a powerful mythology within our society and goes a long ways to understanding why the United States is more economically conservative than Europe. And if you are rich, you are seen as an expert. Thus Bill Gates gets to set a global agenda on health care and Mark Zuckerberg somehow knows something about education. But while individual philanthropists can influence the world for good, the larger impact is really problematic, allowing the wealthy to create policy developing out of wankfests like the Aspen Institute. In the end, every dollar that goes toward rich people’s philanthropies is a dollar that the government should have taxed and spent to create social programs that make philanthropy unnecessary. Imagine a government actually funding public broadcasting instead of a system that relies on fundraising all the time. Imagine government funding higher education instead of forcing university presidents to do the bidding of the wealthy so they can get the donations they need to keep the school running. Imagine the U.S. government declaring war on disease instead of letting Bill Gates set the agenda. Instead Betsy DeVos is running our education system because she is rich and wants to get everyone in religious schools. Great.

I recognize this is the society in which we live and given the real world I don’t begrudge anyone going after donations. But it’s really not a good scene and is part and parcel of the New Gilded Age.

TrumpCare: Republican Class Warfare

[ 33 ] March 11, 2017 |

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Finally, someone is standing up for our wealthiest citizens and the lives of endless luxury they deserve.

Two of the biggest tax cuts in Republican proposals to repeal the Affordable Care Act would deliver roughly $157 billion over the coming decade to those with incomes of $1 million or more, according to a congressional analysis.

The assessment was made by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan panel that provides research on tax issues.

It is not unusual for tax cuts to benefit mostly the wealthiest, but still save some money for a majority of Americans. But the benefits of these reductions would be aimed squarely at the top.

The provisions would repeal two tax increases on high earners enacted in 2010 to help pay for the Affordable Care Act: an increase in capital gains taxes and other investment-related income, and a surcharge on Medicare taxes.

People making $200,000 to $999,999 a year would also get sizable tax cuts. In total, the two provisions would cut taxes by about $274 billion during the coming decade, virtually all of it for people making at least $200,000, according to a separate assessment by the committee.

“Repeal-and-replace is a gigantic transfer of wealth from the lowest-income Americans to the highest-income Americas,” said Edward D. Kleinbard, a professor at the University of Southern California law school and former chief of staff for the Joint Committee on Taxation.

And by deserve, the rich have the right, nay, the duty, to drink champagne and brush their teeth with luxury toothpaste while watching the poor suffer and die. What a good time it will be!

Organizing Against the Plutocrats

[ 11 ] March 7, 2017 |

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Sarah Jaffe has an interview with labor activist and overall genius Stephen Lerner that explores some of the campaigns he’s been involved with recently to connect labor organizing with targeting the plutocrats that dominate the New Gilded Age economy. The whole thing is well worth your reading and consideration. A brief excerpt:

We are doing a lot of work on mapping the different Trump worlds. There are the people, like Mnuchin and the Goldman Sachs folks that are directly in the administration and we map all the benefits that their companies will reap from that. Then, there are the Steve Schwarzmans and the Carl Icahns and this other set of players that run committees for him. So, they can essentially create government policies that will further enrich their companies. Then, there is a third set of people like John Paulson, who made all his money in the housing crisis, who may not be directly working for Trump, but who supported him and is now going to reap the benefits. For example, he is heavily invested in Puerto Rico.

What we have been looking at is, how do you identify the corporate collaborators with Trump, and then look at ways to start putting pressure on them so that they pay a price for the fact that they are in bed with Trump?

One thing is that many of these folks who are in bed with Trump have significant investments from public employee pension plans and college endowments. We have been ongoing running the campaign saying that pension funds and endowments basically are getting lousy deals from these guys, meaning they pay a lot of money to invest in them and they get lousy returns. We are going to escalate that, but we are also going to look at some of the hedge funds that have really atrocious policies and raise the issue that colleges and pension plans shouldn’t invest in racist companies. For example, this guy Robert Mercer whose family owns part of Breitbart. They are Cambridge Analytica, the secret polling apparatus for Trump. I think it is the city of Providence in Rhode Island has invested in one of his funds.

We want to start raising the issue for a bunch of these people that we should cut off their capital. Basically, public dollars or the dollars of progressive institutions shouldn’t be invested in them. Another thing we are doing is we have been introducing legislation on a state-by-state basis to tax the carried interest exemption. This is a loophole that lets them take the regular income that most people pay 30-35 percent on and they get to take 15 percent. I won’t bore you with the details of how they do it, except it is an $18 billion a year tax loophole.

Taxing it on a state level, on the one hand in New York it would produce $3.7 billion in revenue, but the other thing it does is it cuts off their capital. One of the reasons they can give so much money politically is because they have a special tax loophole that gives them $18 billion in cash to play with. One of the ways we can hurt them is cutting off tax breaks and cutting off investment. I think there is a sweet irony of their greed in getting in bed with Trump may make them much more susceptible to cutting off their capital.

Important stuff and a lot of room for organizing against these people. The bank workers organizing with the Communication Workers of America with significant support from overseas bank worker unions is one area that could lead to real success.

Life Under Puzder

[ 196 ] February 8, 2017 |

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I won’t attack Andy Puzder for hiring an undocumented worker to clean his house, but I sure will attack for everything else, including how he treats his own workers.

In 1984, I was hired as a cashier at Hardee’s in Columbia, S.C., making $4.25 an hour. By 2005, 21 years later, my pay was only at $8 an hour. That’s a $3.75 raise for a lifetime of work. Adjusted for inflation, it’s only a 2-cent raise.

Andrew Puzder, the chief executive since 2000 of CKE — which owns Hardee’s, Carl’s Jr., and other fast-food companies — is now in line to become the country’s next labor secretary. The headlines ponder what this may mean for working people in America, but I already know.

I already know what Trump/Puzder economics look like because I’m living it every day. Despite giving everything I had to Puzder’s company for 21 years, I left without a penny of savings, with no health care and no pension. Now, while I live in poverty, Trump, who promised to fix the rigged economy, has chosen for labor secretary someone who wants to rig it up even more. He’s chosen the chief executive of a company who recently made more than $10 million in a year, while I’m scraping by on Supplemental Security payments.

When I began at Hardee’s, I was hopeful. I liked the work and received a promotion to shift manager after only a month. But the pay remained low, and even with my husband’s salary as the head cook at Fort Jackson, we relied on food stamps and Medicaid. We were two full-time-employed adults; we shouldn’t have had to turn to the government, but we had kids to raise, and so we were left with no other choice.

Low pay wasn’t the only reason my family struggled: It was the lack of benefits and respect, too. I remember once my manager came to my house on a day off and demanded I go into work. I remember trudging through Hurricane Katrina to get to the store. I remember being denied a raise multiple times.

In 2005, I was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and had to stop working. After more than two decades at Hardee’s, I left without any savings, a 401(k), pension or health benefits. That’s Puzder’s America.

But hey, fast food workers are all 16 year old kids in their first job and we don’t need to worry about paying them a living wage, right? It doesn’t matter I guess since Puzder will lead us on our Great Leap Forward of Automation in the next four years. Massive unemployment and desperate poverty won’t just be the fate of fast food workers anymore! The New Gilded Age is a glorious time!

The State of the Unions

[ 12 ] January 27, 2017 |

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Predictably terrible! The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its annual report on union density. And who knows, maybe for the last time as the Trump administration continues its war on information. Anyway, the Center for Economic Policy and Research put together a report summarizing it. And union density continues to decline, sometimes by up to 2 percent in some states. Obama’s labor record as far as within the Department of Labor was pretty solid, but all of that meant nearly nothing for actually organizing unions. But hey, Trump named a new NLRB chair and I’m sure that will help!

The Cabinet of Deplorables

[ 21 ] January 19, 2017 |
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While Rick Perry discovers just what the hell the department he is going to run actually does and while Ben Carson examines his own stool in wondrous awe, Betsy DeVos utterly embarrasses herself in a hearing that LAMAR! rigged for her. But it doesn’t matter because she bought her position, just like a good Gilded Age capitalist does.

In 1997, she brashly explained her opposition to campaign-finance-reform measures that were aimed at cleaning up so-called “soft money,” a predecessor to today’s unlimited “dark money” election spending. “My family is the biggest contributor of soft money to the Republican National Committee,” she wrote in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. “I have decided to stop taking offense,” she wrote, “at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect something in return. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our investment.”

Owning the country should provide that. All they need to do know is reintroduce slavery. Which I assume will be on the Republican platform in 2020, assuming they haven’t started the years over at 1 to honor Emperor Tangerine, a la the French Revolution.

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