mykeystrokes.com

"Do or Do not. There is no try."

Scott Walker Finds Making Bumper Stickers Is Easier Than Creating Jobs

Where are the jobs, Gov. Walker?

Scott Walker, the chief executive of Wisconsin, is riding a wave of triumph. The state Supreme Court just upheld his famous crusade to strip collective bargaining rights from public workers. The state legislature just voted, along party lines, to approve his 2012 budget reordering the state’s finances to his conservative tastes.

On Monday morning, Walker stopped by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to participate in a roundtable discussion about “what works and what doesn’t” in job creation.

Walker regaled the assembled business leaders and governors with tales of his job-creating acumen. He boasted about passing tort reform, tax cuts, a “major regulatory reform” and his celebrated fight against the public-sector unions. “That’s powerful for job creators out there,” he said.

How powerful? “Since the beginning of the year in Wisconsin we’ve seen 25,000 new jobs,” Walker reported.

Sorry, governor, but that’s not very powerful.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Wisconsin’s nonfarm payroll in May was 2,764,300 on a seasonally-adjusted basis, up 20,300 from January’s 2,744,000.

That’s an increase of seven-tenths of one percent in the workforce — not much better than the anemic nationwide growth in nonfarm payrolls to 131,043,000 in May from 130,328,000 in January.

This doesn’t mean Walker’s policies have failed; by his own account, the benefits could take years to materialize. But it does suggest that the conservatives criticizing the Obama administration’s handling of the economy don’t have a silver bullet of their own. Walker, who has large Republican majorities in the Wisconsin legislature, experimented with a long conservative wish-list, but the state hasn’t been a standout in job creation during his six-month tenure.

The truth is that there’s not much more that government can do to boost jobs in the short term. That’s up to the private sector now. Corporate America has recovered so well that profits have been at or near record levels of an annualized $1.7 trillion in the last two quarters – but businesses have yet to spend their piles of cash.

Instead, flush CEOs are demanding still more government spending. This was a theme of Monday’s session at the Chamber, where 23 men and one woman sat around a u-shaped table and listened to Chamber president Tom Donohue describe states as “laboratories of democracy,” where businesses are more likely to find “common sense solutions, innovations, experimentations, bipartisanship.”

Walker, whose tenure has made Wisconsin more of a laboratory of theocracy, clenched his jaw at the mention of bipartisanship. “The very first day I was elected,” he said when his turn came, “I put up a sign that said, ‘Wisconsin is open for business.’” He waved a bumper sticker for the Chamber crowd with that same message. “I called the legislature into a special session based solely on jobs.”

That led to the fight over collective bargaining, the fleeing of Democratic legislators across state lines, and huge protests in Madison. “We got a little more attention than most,” he said.

The attention continued on Monday. Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, one of two Democrats on the panel, said he “took a different approach” than Walker did: “I invited the unions to the table.” Markell said that the cuts he got from the unions exceeded his target by 30 percent, without creating statewide bitterness.

The other Democrat, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, implicitly rebuked Walker when he said “with a Republican House and Democratic Senate we passed our budget with at least 75 percent in both houses.”

In terms of job-creation, neither Democrat’s approach has worked any better than Walker’s. Colorado added 9,000 non-farm jobs this year and Delaware has been flat. Iowa, represented on the panel by Republican Gov. Terry Branstad, added 12,000. Virginia, represented by Gov. Bob McDonnell, added 22,000.

The biggest job creator of the six, Gov. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), boasted that his tax cuts, deregulation and tort reform enabled him to cut “unemployment every month since I came into office, and last month our job creation was more than the entire rest of the country.” That’s nice, but even Scott’s job growth amounts to just 1 percent of the state’s workforce, and Florida’s unemployment is among the highest in the country.

Eventually, the governors – like President Obama – will have more to show for their job-creation policies. But for now, they’ll have to settle for baby steps. Walker told the Chamber that Wisconsin moved up 17 places in Chief Executive magazine’s annual ranking. “Last year we were 41,” he said. “This year, we went up to No. 24.”

If only those happy CEOs would start hiring.

By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 20, 2011

June 24, 2011 Posted by | Businesses, Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Democracy, Economic Recovery, Economy, GOP, Gov Rick Scott, Gov Scott Walker, Government, Governors, Ideologues, Jobs, Labor, Lawmakers, Middle Class, Public Employees, Republicans, Right Wing, State Legislatures, States, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Unemployed, Union Busting, Unions, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Republicans | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Drug Marketing and Free Speech: U. S. Supreme Court Says Data Mining Trumps Your Medical Privacy

Pharmaceutical companies, which spend billions of dollars a year promoting their products to doctors, have found that it is very useful to know what drugs a doctor has prescribed in the past. Many use data collected from prescriptionsprocessed by pharmacies — a doctor’s name, the drugs and the dosage — to refine their marketing practices and increase sales.

The Supreme Court on Thursday made it harder for states to protect medical privacy with laws that regulate such practices. In 2007, Vermont passed a law that forbade the sale of such records by pharmacies and their use for marketing purposes. The ruling upheld a lower court decision that struck down the law as unconstitutional.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the 6-to-3 majority, said the law violates First Amendment rights by imposing a “burden on protected expression” on specific speakers (drug marketers) and specific speech (information about the doctors and what they prescribed). It is unconstitutional because it restricts the transfer of that information and what the marketers have to say.

In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer explains that the law’s only restriction is on access to data “that could help pharmaceutical companies create better sales messages.” He notes that any speech-related effects are “indirect, incidental, and entirely commercial.” By applying strict First Amendment scrutiny to this ordinary economic regulation, he warns, the court threatens to substitute “judicial for democratic decision-making.”

The law would have been upheld, Justice Breyer says, if the court had treated it as a restriction on commercial speech, which is less robustly protected than political speech. The court’s majority unwisely narrows the gap between commercial and political speech, and makes it harder to protect consumers.

By:  Editorial, The New York Times, June 23, 2011

June 24, 2011 Posted by | Big Pharma, Constitution, Consumers, Corporations, Democracy, Freedom, Pharmaceutical Companies, Politics, Regulations, Supreme Court | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Corporate Tax Cuts Don’t Stimulate Job Growth

Prevailing conservative  wisdom dictates that businesses need tax cuts—and investors need capital  gains tax cuts—to get the economy moving. But two very well-executed articles  on wages and taxes published recently suggest that targeting tax cuts at  business executives may do little to improve the dismal unemployment picture.

The Washington Post offers a startling  analysis of income disparity, noting that the gap between the very rich and the rest of us has  grown dramatically in the past few decades, reaching current levels that have  not been seen since the Great Depression. In 2008, the Post reports, the top one-tenth of one percent of earners took in  more than a tenth of the personal income in the United States. But the moneyed  class is not dominated by professional athletes or big-name artistic performers  or even hedge fund managers, the Post found.  Instead, it is due to a big increase in executive compensation, even as real  wages for some of their workers have dropped:

The top 0.1 percent of earners make about $1.7 million or  more, including capital gains. Of those, 41 percent were executives, managers  and supervisors at non-financial companies, according to the analysis, with  nearly half of them deriving most of their income from their ownership in  privately-held firms. An additional 18 percent were managers at financial firms  or financial professionals at any sort of firm. In all, nearly 60 percent fell  into one of those two categories.

The New York Times has a fascinating story that serves as an unwitting companion piece to the Post story. Corporate executives, the  paper reports, are clamoring for a tax holiday to encourage them to bring their  offshore profits back to the United States. And the money in question is big,  the Times notes: Apple has $12 billion  in offshore cash, while Google has $17 billion, and Microsoft, $29 billion. The  companies with money sitting offshore argue that if the federal government were  to offer them a huge tax break—say, a one-year drop from 35 percent to 5.25  percent—the businesses would bring the money home and operate as a  private-sector economic stimulus.

However, the Times notes:

(T)hat’s not how it worked  last time. Congress and the Bush administration offered companies a similar tax  incentive, in 2005, in hopes of spurring domestic hiring and investment, and  800 took advantage. Though the tax break lured them into bringing $312 billion  back to the United States, 92 percent of that money was returned to  shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks, according to a study by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research.

Who needs a tax cut, then? The U.S. economy is  very much consumer-driven; companies aren’t hiring, many business owners say,  because people aren’t buying. The past behavior of corporations that have  received huge tax cuts has not necessarily been to use the money to hire more  people; the Bush-era tax cuts have been in place for a decade, and the  unemployment rate is still 9.1 percent. And executive compensation has grown.  Executives may feel entitled to earn more and more if their companies are doing  well and expanding. But without customers, those companies will go bust.

By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, JUne 20, 2011

June 23, 2011 Posted by | Businesses, Class Warfare, Congress, Conservatives, Consumers, Corporations, Economic Recovery, Economy, GOP, Government, Ideology, Income Gap, Jobs, Labor, Middle Class, Politics, Republicans, Taxes, Unemployment, Wealthy | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mitt Romney Is Unemployed: Freeloading Former Government Employee Seeks Handout

Mitt Romney is just like you: He doesn’t have a job. And that’s hilarious!

Mitt Romney sat at the head of the table at a coffee shop here on Thursday, listening to a group of unemployed Floridians explain the challenges of looking for work. When they finished, he weighed in with a predicament of his own.

“I should tell my story,” Mr. Romney said. “I’m also unemployed.”

According to Jeff Zeleny, the room full of unemployed people laughed at this, which would make it the first recorded instance of someone laughing at something Mitt Romney intended to be funny.

But should they have laughed at poor Mitt Romney? Like so many Americans, the longer Mitt Romney has gone without a job, the worse his chances of finding new employment have become. There are not very many openings in his chosen field, and he has no other marketable skills. Poor Mitt Romney is in many respects a modern-day “forgotten man.”

Should Mitt Romney just rest on his laurels, waiting for some government handout? No! In fact, his insistence on getting another job in government is exactly what is preventing him from swallowing his pride and taking any work that is available. He’s too good to work at Walmart now? He should stop looking to Washington for a solution to his problem, get some part-time minimum wage work, and consider going back to school. There are many fine for-profit institutions that offer night courses for adults just like him.

Mitt Romney needs to pick himself up by his bootstraps and quit complaining.

 

By: Alex Pareene, Salon War Room, June 16, 2011

June 17, 2011 Posted by | Class Warfare, Conservatives, Economy, GOP, Government, Governors, Income Gap, Jobs, Middle Class, Mitt Romney, Politics, Public Employees, Republicans, Right Wing, Unemployed, Unemployment, Wealthy | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

How The GOP’s War On Workers’ Rights Undermines The Economy

The battle has resumed in Wisconsin. The state supreme court has allowed Governor Scott Walker to strip bargaining rights from state workers.

Meanwhile, governors and legislators in New Hampshire and Missouri are attacking private unions, seeking to make the states so-called “open shop” where workers can get all the benefits of being union members without paying union dues. Needless to say this ploy undermines the capacity of unions to do much of anything. Other Republican governors and legislatures are following suit.

Republicans in Congress are taking aim at the National Labor Relations Board, which issued a relatively minor proposed rule change allowing workers to vote on whether to unionize soon after a union has been proposed, rather than allowing employers to delay the vote for years. Many employers have used the delaying tactics to retaliate against workers who try to organize, and intimidate others into rejecting a union.

This war on workers’ rights is an assault on the middle class, and it is undermining the American economy.

The American economy can’t get out of neutral until American workers have more money in their pockets to buy what they produce. And unions are the best way to give them the bargaining power to get better pay.

For three decades after World War II – I call it the “Great Prosperity” – wages rose in tandem with productivity. Americans shared the gains of growth, and had enough money to buy what they produced.

That’s largely due to the role of labor unions. In 1955, over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized. Today, fewer than 7 percent are.

With the decline of unions came the stagnation of American wages. More and more of the total income and wealth of America has gone to the very top. Middle-class purchasing power depended on mothers going into paid work, everyone working longer hours, and, finally, the middle class going deep into debt, using their homes as collateral.

But now all these coping mechanisms are exhausted — and we’re living with the consequence.

Some say the Great Prosperity was an anomaly. America’s major competitors lay in ruins. We had the world to ourselves. According to this view, there’s no going back.

But this view is wrong. If you want to see the same basic bargain we had then, take a look at Germany now.

Germany is growing much faster than the United States. Its unemployment rate is now only 6.1 percent (we’re now at 9.1 percent).

What’s Germany’s secret? In sharp contrast to the decades of stagnant wages in America, real average hourly pay has risen almost 30 percent there since 1985. Germany has been investing substantially in education and infrastructure.

How did German workers do it? A big part of the story is German labor unions are still powerful enough to insist that German workers get their fair share of the economy’s gains.

That’s why pay at the top in Germany hasn’t risen any faster than pay in the middle. As David Leonhardt reported in the New York Times recently, the top 1 percent of German households earns about 11 percent of all income – a percent that hasn’t changed in four decades.

Contrast this with the United States, where the top 1 percent went from getting 9 percent of total income in the late 1970s to more than 20 percent today.

The only way back toward sustained growth and prosperity in the United States is to remake the basic bargain linking pay to productivity. This would give the American middle class the purchasing power they need to keep the economy going.

Part of the answer is, as in Germany, stronger labor unions — unions strong enough to demand a fair share of the gains from productivity growth.

The current Republican assault on workers’ rights continues a thirty-year war on American workers’ wages. That long-term war has finally taken its toll on the American economy.

It’s time to fight back.

 

By: Robert Reich, RobertReich Blog, June 15, 2011

June 16, 2011 Posted by | Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Congress, Conservatives, Democracy, Economy, Equal Rights, GOP, Gov Scott Walker, Governors, Ideologues, Ideology, Jobs, Labor, Lawmakers, Middle Class, Politics, Public Employees, Right Wing, State Legislatures, States, Union Busting, Unions, Wealthy, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Republicans | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »