Republicans...

-- by Dave Johnson

Probably going to be a serious candidate for President soon...

-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 11:10 AM PST on September 10, 2010.

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To Fix The Economy Raise Wages

-- by Dave Johnson

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America's Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture as part of the Making It In America project. I am a Fellow with CAF.

To fix the economy we have to fix wages. Increased wages will restore demand. The changes that will increase wages will help restore democracy.

The social contract used to be that citizens in our democracy share the benefits of our economy through increased wages that come from increases in productivity. This broke down and working people's incomes have been stagnant since the Reagan Revolution. (Yes, I'm telling the same story again. It needs to be told, over and over so people can understand what is happening to us. We are feeling the effects of the Reagan Revolution coming home to roost.)

Reagan and the conservatives weakened the government and broke the unions. Government and organized labor were the forces in our society that had stood up for the interests of regular people against the "moneyed interests" and weakening them fundamentally changed the fairness equation of our economy. After the Reagan Revolution working people's share of the benefits from increased productivity turned down:

All of the benefits of improvements in our economy now flow to a few at the top. This results in intense concentration of wealth:

With more and more of the income and wealth going to a top few, We, the People are thought of less and less as citizens and more and more as "the help." But who is our economy for, anyway? Our economy can operate for the benefit of We, the People, or it can operate for the benefit of a wealthy few at the expense of the rest of us. This is the ongoing battle. And history has shown over and over that when economies operate for the few, they don't work.

This is not just about sharing the economy, it is about sharing the decision-making power. In our form of government We, the People are supposed to make the decisions. When Reagan said, "Government is the problem" he was really saying that decision-making by We, the People is a bad thing. When conservatives complain about "big government" they are complaining about We, the People having a big share in decision-making. When they call for "less government" they are calling for less of a share of the decisions-making by us. This means the wealthy and powerful have more of a share -- of everything.

With the income, wealth and benefits of the economy increasingly flowing to a top few, working families tried to compensate for the loss in various ways. Women entered the workforce. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich explains, "By the late 1990s, more than 60 percent of mothers with young children worked outside the home (in 1966, only 24 percent did)." (Please read his whole post if you have time.)

Then, still not getting by on stagnant wages with rising prices, people worked more hours or added second jobs. Then they started using up their savings.

Finally they resorted to adding debt.

This all finally broke down, demand slowed, and the economy has slowed to a crawl. The 90s financialization and "dot com" bubbles obscured the way things were headed, and then the housing bubble of the 2000s continued the illusion. But debt just kept rising people kept working longer and harder to get by, while the richest few kept getting richer. Finally it all crashed and current attempts to prop it up by helping the wealthy and big businesses are not succeeding. Bailing out big banks and their executives and shareholders and not holding anyone accountable, while letting predatory corporations continue their economy-draining practices has not only kept the worst parts of the "share of the wealth" problem in place, it has undermined people's faith in government and demcoracy. Changes need to be made.

Most people pay for things with income from jobs. If we want demand to rise, then we need to raise incomes. But things are still going in the wrong direction. As CAF's Robert Borosage writes today,

"Over the last decade, we lost one in three manufacturing jobs. Inequality reached Gilded Age extremes. CEOs and bankers pocketed million dollar bonuses while cooking the books and gambling on exotic securities, inflating the housing bubble until it burst. Health insurance companies kept a strangle hold on a health care system that costs twice as much as those in other industrial countries, leaves millions uninsured and provides worse health care."

Who Gets What For What?

This bad economy situation is going to drag on until we make real changes in the structure of who gets what for what in this country. Every incentive in the economy is to try to reduce wages, cut benefits and eliminate jobs. Think about that. People get bonuses and raises and owners get richer if they eliminate YOUR job or at least cut back your pay and benefits. For example, by replacing a worker with a machine, the owner of the machine gets more money, the worker gets nothing. But in the larger economy each time this happens it means there are fewer people in a position to buy whatever goods or services the same companies that eliminated the jobs are in business to provide. And it means that a few wealthy people become more wealthy and powerful.

This is where government comes in. Government is supposed to be the force that speaks for and protects the interests of the people, empowers people through education and rules, set conditions to keep wages high, lay down the infrastructure in which businesses thrive, and coordinates the international competition for industries and jobs. But the Reagan Revolution broke that. We need to restore it.

There are so many things that government could be doing to get the economy working again for working people, small and medium businesses and big corporations that want to make an honest living. Boost the minimum wage, modernize the infrastructure, provide health care, provide free education through graduate level, increase Social Security, help unions organize, impose a democracy tariff so imports don't get around the protections provided by our democracy, and return to taxing the rich who reap the dividends and payout of all the past investment that We, the People made to make business thrive.

And there are larger structural changes we can make. Just brainstorming but what if workers replaced by machines directly got some of the income generated by the machine. Workers laid off this way several times might then have enough income to get by without working! Or what if we cut the workweek from 40 hours to, say, 35 before overtime kicks in. Maybe that would increase hiring, while giving regular people more leisure time. (And keep cutting the workweek as machines and computers do more of the work.)

And, of course, to have wages at all people have to have jobs. One would think this would go without saying but these days it seems there is a need to point out that people are hurting for jobs, because the DC elite seem to have moved on from that. We badly need government programs to directly hire people to do things that help the people of the country. We would have all of this if the Reagan Revolution hadn't weakened government of, by and for We, the People.

Other posts in the Reagan Revolution Home To Roost series:

Tax Cuts Are Theft
Reagan Revolution Home To Roost -- In Charts
Reagan Revolution Home To Roost: America Drowning In Debt
Reagan Revolution Home To Roost: America Is Crumbling
Finance, Mine, Oil & Debt Disasters: THIS Is Deregulation

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-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 11:52 AM PST on September 09, 2010.

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Social Security: Policy By Fairy Tale

-- by Dave Johnson

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America's Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.

Lots of kids believe in Santa Claus. This is because people repeat the fable to kids over and over, telling them that Santa Claus will deliver presents to them if they're good. And then there's the Boogeyman, the "amorphous embodiment of terror." In some regions stories of the Boogeyman are repeated and repeated, and to keep the Boogeyman away little children do what they are told.

A popular Boogeyman is "Social Security is going broke." This fable originated from a 1983 Cato Institute Journal document, "Achieving a Leninist Strategy" by Stuart Butler of Cato and Peter Germanis of the Heritage Foundation. The document laid out a long-term strategic plan to dismantle Social Security. Part of the idea was to manufacture public beliefs like those we hear repeated (and repeated and repeated) today, "Social Security is going broke" and "Social Security is a Ponzi scheme."

Meanwhile a popular Santa Claus myth tells the pubic that energy independence can be achieved at low cost if only we would open up more land (and sea) to oil drilling.

Enter Rick Berg, candidate for Congress in North Dakota. Berg is proposing to scare away the Boogeyman by bringing in Santa Claus to fight the good fight. News story, Berg proposes Social Security fix,

Drilling for oil underneath western North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park and other federal lands nationwide could be a way to ensure Social Security funding for the long haul, Republican U.S. House challenger Rick Berg said.

During a meeting with The Forum’s editorial board Wednesday, Berg discussed his ideas for how to make the Social Security system viable for future generations. He said one option is drilling for oil and other mineral resources on federal government land.

Oh yeah, there is one more thing that is repeated over and over. The other day I wrote, "The way a lobbyist argues for or against anything today is to say it will create or cost jobs." And right on queue, here's Berg:

Berg told the editorial board his proposal was just one way the government could add more money into the Social Security system.

“It needs to be solvent, and I’m supporting putting more money in that — mineral money in there — and getting people working again,” he said.

Social Security isn't broke, doesn't need fixing, and the last thing we need is more drilling. We need a Renewable Energy Standard and we need to set a price on carbon to trigger the new green technology revolution, get us off of oil and coal and create millions of jobs.

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-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 11:49 AM PST on September 09, 2010.

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Incredibly Obvious Things In Front Of Our Faces

-- by Dave Johnson

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America's Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture as part of the Making It In America project. I am a Fellow with CAF.

Conservative economic policies just don't work and it's incredibly obvious right in front of our faces. Knowing that obvious things are right in front of our faces and knowing that conservatives really, really don't want us to see those things, it's instructive (and sometimes entertaining except for the tragic consequences) to watch how conservatives try to distract us.

For example, look at this chart:

The stimulus worked but was not enough. It is obvious. It is right in front of our faces.

So what do they do to distract us? LOOK OVER THERE!!! A MOSQUE!!! BURN A KORAN!!!

Next up, tax cuts. President Clinton raised taxes on the rich and conservatives claimed it would destroy the economy. But after the tax increases the economy was great, millions of jobs were created and the huge Reagan/Bush I budget deficits (caused by tax cuts and military spending increases) turned into surpluses. Here are some charts that show deficits and jobs following Clinton's tax increases. First compare job growth after Clinton's tax increases and Bush's tax cuts:

It's obvious. Right in front of our faces. Tax increases did not slow the economy or cost jobs, and tax cuts did not create jobs. This next chart shows how the budget went from deficit to surplus after Clinton's tax increases and then, after 'W's tax cuts, to massive, huge, incredible deficits:

It's obvious, right in front of our faces. So how do they distract from that? Well, they just lie!

Conservatives explain the huge 2009 $1.4 trillion Bush budget deficit by just saying it's Obama's. Have you heard that "Obama tripled the deficit"? Look at "Obama's Deficit in Pictures" from Heritage Foundation, claiming Obama has "quadrupled the deficit with his stimulus package".

The problem is that these distractions and deceptions can lead the public to support really bad policies. If conservatives -- after nearly destroying the world's economy the last time they had power -- are able to convince people that we should cut taxes again, or stop efforts to restore demand to the economy, then they could make things get even worse than they did last time.

Don't be distracted. Keep seeing the obvious.

SQUIRREL!!

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-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 1:05 PM PST on September 08, 2010.

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Do Tax Cuts Create Jobs?

-- by Dave Johnson

In California the right, funded by oil companies, has an initiative on the ballot to stop implementation of our CO2 law "until unemployment reaches 5.5 percent." The point is to make people think that the CO2 law causes unemployment.

The idea that a payroll tax cut (i.e., Social Security tax) will help create jobs is the same thing -- cutting taxes to boost employment makes people think taxes cause unemployment. The net result is that we can't get infrastructure, schools, courts, etc. funded.

Tax cuts might provide some stimulus because they force more borrowing, but really, how many employers are going to hire people because payroll taxes are a bit less? What are they going to hire them to do, read the paper? Compared with how many employers would be doing anything they can to bring on employees if customers were pouring through the door?

-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 8:44 AM PST on September 06, 2010.

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Oct 2 March On Washington For Jobs And Change

-- by Dave Johnson

Please click through: One Nation Working Together

DEMAND ALL THE CHANGES WE VOTED FOR

-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 9:02 AM PST on September 05, 2010.

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Zombie Lies Never Die

-- by Dave Johnson

Andrew Breitbart: The man behind the Sherrod affair - latimes.com,

Last fall, Breitbart made his first big splash. He posted an undercover video in which a pair of conservative activists posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend asked employees of the community group ACORN for help with a brothel that would house underage Salvadorans. ACORN was embarrassed when some of its workers seemed too helpful; Congress responded by defunding the organization.

1) They were not dressed as a prostitute and pimp. The guy wore a dress shirt and khaki pants, and said he was hoping to run for Congress.

2) The videos were doctored to make it look like the ACORN employees did something wrong, when they did not. Several independent investigations have reached this conclusion.

Several ACORN offices threw them right out the door.

3) ACORN employees who were represented in the videos as assisting a prostitution ring actually called the police on Brietbart's employees. One is even suing because of the false representation.

But none of this matters because Congress defunded ACORN in response to the Brietbart / FOX News / Drudge Report smear.

-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 6:22 PM PST on September 04, 2010.

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American Jobs Tragedy

-- by Dave Johnson

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America's Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture as part of the Making It In America project. I am a Fellow with CAF.

The stimulus worked but was not enough. Here is the result:

This is known as "the scariest jobs chart," from Calculated Risk.

Robert Reich: The Great Jobs Depression Worsens, and the Choice Ahead Grows Starker

The number of Americans willing and able to work but who cannot find a job hasn't stopped growing since the start of 2008. All told, about 22 million Americans are now jobless. Add in those who are working part-time who'd rather be working full time, and we're up to 25 million.

And because most families depend on two paychecks, the practical impact is almost double.

The DC and business elite don't feel it. They explain the problem by blaming the people they put out of work, saying the unemployed are just lazy, and unemployment checks keep them from looking for work. They're doing just fine and taking good care of each other.

Frank Sobatka describes one of the main reasons for the problem:

Frank's right. Our choice is to manufacture or borrow (until we can't.) Other countries are being smart on trade. Why aren't we? We really, really need an industrial policy to guide us back to growth. We can build a new economy from old roots. I mean, what were we thinking? We turned our companies into buy-sell commodities with our country and people as "costs." So we ended up caught in a machine that grinds us up. This has led to and attitude that citizens are an infestation, if you feed them they breed, like "the help" -- you have to make them work, certainly no longer as the people in charge.

We thought moving a factory was "trade," when it is really about evading democracy's protections of We, the People. We didn't see that Wall Street was at war with the real economy and We, the People, paying out $140 billion for bonuses but zero for America's future. We thought getting back to "normal" was an option. But really, It's The Economic Paradigm, Stupid!

Here's another part of the problem: Tax cuts are theft. Our investment in infrastructure created the conditions that enable commerce to prosper – the bounty of democracy. In return we ask those who benefit most from the enterprise we enabled to share the return on our investment with all of us – through good wages, benefits and taxes.

What Can We Do?

Here are parts of the solution: We need a democracy tariff at the border to stop greedy employers from stepping around the wage, safety and environmental protections that We, the People fought to build. We need to tax the wealthy and Wall Street to pay to fix up the infrastructure and public structures that enabled their wealth. Tax Cuts Leave Nothing Behind -- Infrastructure Investment Leaves Behind Infrastructure. Not only that, Tax Cuts Caused The Deficits, Therefore...

Where Are The Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs? It's The JOBS, Stupid! Why DC Elites Don't See This?

P.S. if you have time, please click the links.

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-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 1:07 PM PST on September 04, 2010.

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Down With Tyranny

-- by Dave Johnson

You don't read DownWithTyranny! often enough. I know I don't.

-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 9:10 AM PST on September 04, 2010.

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Labor Day: Labor Got It Right -- Who Could Have Known?

-- by Dave Johnson

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America's Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture as part of the Making It In America project. I am a Fellow with CAF.

"Who could have known?" That's the cry from the big-corporate and DC elite as the economy and the environment and so many imporant things crash around us. (Around us, not them, they're doing just fine and taking good care of each other.)

Who could have known that 25%-per-year house price increases was a bubble?
Who could have known that a housing bubble could burst?
Who could have known that deregulating the financial industry could lead to a financial meltdown?
Who could have known that concentration of wealth could cause consumer demand to dry up?
Who could have known that huge tax cuts for the rich combined with huge military spending increases could cause massive budget deficits?
Who could have known that the Social Security trust fund needed a "lockbox" so it wouldn't be given away as tax cuts?
Who could have known a deregulated deep-water well could cause a massive, destructive, uncontrolled underwater gusher?
Who could have known that continuing to put carbon into the air would cause problems for the climate?
Who could have known that moving our factories out of the country would lead to high unemployment and structural trade deficits?
Who could have known that invading Iraq was wrong and a deadly, disastrous, costly, long-term mistake?
Who could have known that a too-small stimulus that focused on tax cuts wouldn't turn the economy completely around and then conservatives would claim that the stimulus "killed the recovery?"

(List continues into infinity...)

Add organized labor to the list of those who got it right, time after time.

Organized labor was right about the 40-hour workweek.
They were right about the middle class.
They were right about the weekend.
They were right about paid vacations.
They were right about paid holidays.
They were right about paid sick leave.
They were right about providing good, secure retirement plans for everyone.
They were right about providing unemployment benefits to tide people over.
They were right about providing maternity leave, child care and family leave for families.
They were right that trade agreements like NAFTA and letting China into the WTO would lead to massive trade deficits and job losses.
They were right about workplace and consumer safety.
They were right about keeping manufacturing in America.
They were right about fighting discrimination in the workplace.
They were right about raising the minimum wage and the effect that low-wage policies would have on the economy.
They were right about the effect of excessive CEO pay on the economy.
They were right about the devastating effect of the Bush tax cuts.
They were right about the need to maintain and modernize our country's infrastructure.
They were right about going green.
They were right ab out the dangers of Wall Street's financialization of the economy.
They were right about providing good health care to everyone.
They were right about strengthening, not cutting Social Security.
They were right about democratizing corporate governance.
They were right about fighting privatization.
They were right about fighting deregulation.
They were right about providing good education opportunities to everyone.
They were and are right that we need a national jobs agenda
Labor was right about people joining together instead of being on our own.

(List continues into infinity...) They were right and they continue to be right.

And unions have been fighting for these things for all of us, not just for their members.

Please add to these lists in the comments! What other things could nobody have known, and what other things did labor get right?

Enjoy Labor Day. In fact, for those of you that still have jobs after the decades of conservative policies, enjoy having weekends off, the 40-hour week, paid vacations, sick pay, health care, etc. And if you have a job but don't have those things ... JOIN A UNION!

P.S. Here's an example of being right:

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-- Posted by Dave Johnson at 12:12 PM PST on September 03, 2010.

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