“Why There’s No Outcry”: At Some Point, Working People, Students, And The Broad Public Will Have Had Enough
People ask me all the time why we don’t have a revolution in America, or at least a major wave of reform similar to that of the Progressive Era or the New Deal or the Great Society.
Middle incomes are sinking, the ranks of the poor are swelling, almost all the economic gains are going to the top, and big money is corrupting our democracy. So why isn’t there more of a ruckus?
The answer is complex, but three reasons stand out.
First, the working class is paralyzed with fear it will lose the jobs and wages it already has.
In earlier decades, the working class fomented reform. The labor movement led the charge for a minimum wage, 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and Social Security.
No longer. Working people don’t dare. The share of working-age Americans holding jobs is now lower than at any time in the last three decades and 76 percent of them are living paycheck to paycheck.
No one has any job security. The last thing they want to do is make a fuss and risk losing the little they have.
Besides, their major means of organizing and protecting themselves — labor unions — have been decimated. Four decades ago more than a third of private-sector workers were unionized. Now, fewer than 7 percent belong to a union.
Second, students don’t dare rock the boat.
In prior decades students were a major force for social change. They played an active role in the Civil Rights movement, the Free Speech movement, and against the Vietnam War.
But today’s students don’t want to make a ruckus. They’re laden with debt. Since 1999, student debt has increased more than 500 percent, yet the average starting salary for graduates has dropped 10 percent, adjusted for inflation. Student debts can’t be cancelled in bankruptcy. A default brings penalties and ruins a credit rating.
To make matters worse, the job market for new graduates remains lousy. Which is why record numbers are still living at home.
Reformers and revolutionaries don’t look forward to living with mom and dad or worrying about credit ratings and job recommendations.
Third and finally, the American public has become so cynical about government that many no longer think reform is possible.
When asked if they believe government will do the right thing most of the time, fewer than 20 percent of Americans agree. Fifty years ago, when that question was first asked on standard surveys, more than 75 percent agreed.
It’s hard to get people worked up to change society or even to change a few laws when they don’t believe government can possibly work.
You’d have to posit a giant conspiracy in order to believe all this was the doing of the forces in America most resistant to positive social change.
It’s possible. of course, that rightwing Republicans, corporate executives, and Wall Street moguls intentionally cut jobs and wages in order to cow average workers, buried students under so much debt they’d never take to the streets, and made most Americans so cynical about government they wouldn’t even try for change.
But it’s more likely they merely allowed all this to unfold, like a giant wet blanket over the outrage and indignation most Americans feel but don’t express.
Change is coming anyway. We cannot abide an ever-greater share of the nation’s income and wealth going to the top while median household incomes continue too drop, one out of five of our children living in dire poverty, and big money taking over our democracy.
At some point, working people, students, and the broad public will have had enough. They will reclaim our economy and our democracy. This has been the central lesson of American history.
Reform is less risky than revolution, but the longer we wait the more likely it will be the latter.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, January 25, 2014
“Raising The Minimum Is The Bare Minimum”: What America Needs Is To Shift Income From Capital To Labor
In 1995, when John Sweeney ran the first and as-yet-only insurgent campaign for the presidency of the AFL-CIO, his platform took the form of a book entitled America Needs a Raise. If that title rang true in 1995, it clangs with deafening authority today.
Which leads us to the only problem with the current campaigns to raise the minimum wage: It’s not just workers at the low end of the wage scale who need a raise. It’s not just the work of the bottom 9 percent of labor force that is undervalued. It’s the work of the bottom 90 percent.
Conservatives who oppose raising the minimum wage argue that we need to address the decline of the family and the failure of the schools if we are to arrest the income decline at the bottom of the economic ladder. But how then to explain the income stagnation of those who are, say, on the 85th rung of a 100-rung ladder? How does the decline of the family explain why all gains in productivity now go to the richest 10 percent of Americans only? And are teachers unions really to blame for the fact that wages now constitute the lowest share of Gross Domestic Product since the government started measuring shares, and that corporate profits now constitute the highest share?
We need to raise the minimum wage, but that’s only the start. Even more fundamentally, we must reverse the deeper and more profound redistribution of wealth that has now plagued the nation for several decades: that from capital to labor.
For as income from work declines for the nation as a whole—inflation-adjusted median hourly wages are now more than $1.50 lower than they were in 1972—income from investment soars. The stock markets are hitting record highs, and major corporations are using the $1.5 trillion they have lying around to raise not wages but dividends. They are also using some of that cash to buy back their own stock, which raises the value of the outstanding shares, to which, happily, most CEO’s compensation packages are linked.
The institutions that once ensured that American workers actually got their share of the pie—unions—have been so thoroughly battered down that they can no longer effectively bargain for raises. That leaves that other instrument of the popular will— the state—as the sole remaining institution that can bargain for workers. That’s why the minimum wage, the living wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit have taken on a greater significance than they previously held: They not only raise the incomes of the poor, but are the last remaining vehicles for raising wages.
That’s why just stopping with raising the minimum, important though that be to the nation’s economic and moral health, is nowhere near enough. Making it safe again for workers to try to join unions is a necessity, too, but that’s a fight that labor has been waging for half-a-century with nothing to show for it. The left needs to battle on other fronts as well.
We could begin by shifting the tax burden from labor to capital—after all, income in America has long been shifted from labor to capital. We could abolish the payroll tax on the first $25,000 that people make, substituting for it a higher threshold on taxable income. We could raise the tax rates on capital gains and dividends not just to the same levels as income derived from work but higher still. And we could explicitly designate some of the revenue from capital income to go to a much expanded Earned Income Tax Credit—expanded not just by making the payments more generous, but also by raising the criterion for eligibility well above the government’s poverty threshold.
By explicitly taking back from capital some of the wealth it has taken from labor, government would begin to address the root causes of economic inequality. Not all of them, to be sure: The stratospheric salaries that top corporate executives and Wall Street traders command aren’t capital income as such. One way to rein in executive pay might be to set corporate tax rates by the size of the gap between top executives’ and median workers’ pay, the data on which the Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to make public under the terms of Dodd-Frank. Or it might be to set corporate tax rates based whether the corporation has a stakeholder or a shareholder board. In Germany, corporations are required to have equal numbers of employee and management representatives on their boards, which has effectively reduced CEO pay at most German companies to a multiple of 10 or 12 times that of its median employee, not the 200 or 300 times that’s the norm in the U.S.
If we want to address economic equality, we need to follow the money. In recent decades, as a result not just of globalization and technology but also of the decline of unions and the rising political power of the rich, the money has almost entirely gone to the rich—in the current recovery, fully 95 percent of income growth to the top 1 percent. So by all means, raise the minimum wage. But don’t stop there.
By: Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect, January 22, 2014
“Appealing Fiction For The Press”: How The Media Marketed Chris Christie’s Straight Shooter Charade
“Chris Christie is someone who is magical in the way politicians can be magical.” — Time’s Mark Halperin appearing on Meet The Press, November 10 2013.
A political bombshell detonated in my home state of New Jersey yesterday when published emails and text messages revealed that Gov. Chris Christie’s deputy chief of staff conspired with a Christie transportation appointee to create a four-day traffic jam last September, allegedly to punish a local Democratic mayor who refused to endorse the governor’s re-election. The unfolding drama not only raises doubts about Christie’s political future but also about the way the mainstream press has presented him over the years.
The widening dirty tricks scandal features patronage and political retribution wrapped in an unseemly culture of intimidation. In sharp contrast, the national political press has spent the last four years presenting, and even marketing, Christie as an above-the-fray politician who thrives on competence.
He’s been relentlessly and adoringly depicted as some sort of Straight Shooter. He’s an authentic and bipartisan Every Man, a master communicator, and that rare politician who cuts through the stagecraft and delivers hard truths. Christie’s coverage has been a long-running, and rather extreme, case of personality trumping substance.
But now the bridge bombshell casts all of that flattering coverage into question. How could the supposedly astute Beltway press corps spend four years selling Christie as a Straight Shooter when his close aides did things like orchestrate a massive traffic jam apparently to punish the governor’s political foes? When an appointee joked in texts about school buses being trapped in the political traffic backup? How could Christie be a Straight Shooter when he’s been caught peddling lies about the unfolding scandal and now claims he was misled about what people close to him were up to?
The truth is Christie was never the Straight Shooter that political reporters and pundits made him out to be. Not even close, as I’ll detail below. Instead, the Straight Shooter story represented appealing fiction for the press. They tagged him as “authentic” and loved it when he got into yelling matches with voters.
Media Matters recently rounded up some of media’s Christie sweet talk, which is particularly enlightening to review in the wake of the Trenton scandal developments:
In the last month alone, TIME magazine has declared that Christie governed with “kind of bipartisan dealmaking that no one seems to do anymore.” MSNBC’s Morning Joe called the governor “different,” “fresh,” and “sort of a change from public people that you see coming out of Washington.” In a GQ profile, Christie was deemed “that most unlikely of pols: a happy warrior,” while National Journal described him as “the Republican governor with a can-do attitude” who “made it through 2013 largely unscathed. No scandals, no embarrassments or gaffes.” ABC’s Barbara Walters crowned Christie as one of her 10 Most Fascinating People, casting him as a “passionate and compassionate” politician who cannot lie.
Note that when Christie last year easily won re-election against a weak Democratic opponent (via record low voter turnout), the Beltway press treated the win as some sort of national coronation (“Chris Christie is a rock star” announced CNN’s Carol Costello), with endless cable coverage and a round of softball interviews on the Sunday political talk circuit.
Here’s Time from last November’s celebration: “He’s a workhorse with a temper and a tongue, the guy who loves his mother and gets it done.” That, of course, is indistinguishable from a Christie office press release. But it’s been that way for years.
I detailed some of that absurdly fawning coverage in 2010 and 2011, but then I largely stopped writing about the phenomena simply because it became clear that the press was entirely and unapologetically committed to peddling Christie press clippings. They liked the GOP story and it was one they wanted to tell, just like they had been wed to the John-McCain-is-a-Maverick story. So they told it (selectively) over and over and over and over, regardless of the larger context about Christie’s actual behavior and his record as governor. (At one point under Christie in 2012, New Jersey’s unemployment hit a two year high that ranked among the highest in the U.S.)
But again, the dreamt-up Straight Shooter storyline never reflected reality. Here are several examples drawn from just a 10-month stretch during Christie’s first term:
*In August of 2010, the state was shocked to discover it had narrowly missed out on $400 million worth of desperately needed education aid from the federal government because New Jersey’s application for the grant was flawed. Christie initially tried to blame the Obama administration but that claim was shown to be false.
Christie’s own Education Commissioner then publicly blamed Christie for the failure to land the money. He insisted the governor, who famously feuds with the state’s teacher unions, had placed that political battle and his right-wing credentials ahead of securing the federal funds and that Christie had told him the “money was not worth it” to the state if it meant he had to cooperate with teachers.
*In November 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice inspector general found that while serving as U.S. attorney, Christie routinely billed taxpayers for luxury hotels on trips and failed to follow federal travel regulations.
*That December, Christie chose to leave New Jersey for a family vacation in Disney World even though forecasters had warned a blizzard was barreling towards the state, and even though Christie’s No. 2 was already out of the state visiting her ailing father. Worse, in the wake of the epic storm, Christie refused to return home early to help the state deal with the historic blizzard that left portions of the state buried under 30 inches of snow and paralyzed for days. (The storm was so severe the Garden State had to appeal to FEMA for $53 million in disaster aid.)
When Christie did return, he held a press conference and blamed state officials who didn’t escape to the Sunshine State for doing such a poor job managing the state’s emergency response. Bottom line: Christie said he wouldn’t have changed a thing because “I had a great five days with my children.”
*In May of 2011, Christie flew in a brand new, $12 million state-owned helicopter to watch his son play a high school baseball game. After landing on a nearby football field, Christie was driven 300 feet in a black car with tinted windows to the baseball diamond. When he was done watching five innings, Christie boarded the helicopter and flew home. The trip cost $2,500 and Christie initially refused to reimburse the state for the expenses.
Keep in mind, these are all Christie tales that reporters and pundits almost pathologically omitted from their glowing profiles in recent years. Why? None of them fit within the narrow confines of the established narrative, so they were simply ignored.
Now with Christie’s political career reeling thanks to a shockingly vindictive and partisan scandal, it’s time for the press to drop the Straight Shooter charade.
By: Eric Boehlert, Senior Fellow, Media Matters for America; The Huffington Post, January 9, 2014
“Higher Profits, Smaller Paychecks”: Corporations Increasing Profits At The Expense Of Workers
Two cheers for the comeback of American manufacturing. Or maybe just one.
The manufacturing sector has experienced a modest renaissance since it hit bottom during the Great Recession. The number of manufacturing jobs is set to rise this year, as it has every year since 2010. Profits are soaring — in 2012, after-tax profits of manufacturing firms hit a record high of $289 billion. Share values have soared with them. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Industrials Index has risen 59 percent more than the overall 500-stock index since 2009, Bloomberg reported last month.
Wages, however, are falling. Although the average wage for all workers, adjusted for inflation, has declined by about 1 percent since May 2009, Bloomberg reported, it has declined by 3 percent for workers in the more-profitable-than- ever manufacturing sector.
Numbers like these explain the epic drama playing out in Washington’s Puget Sound region, from which Boeing, long the area’s dominant employer, has threatened to at least partially decamp. Several weeks ago, with the reluctant blessing of union leaders who feared the company might relocate production, Boeing presented its workers with an ultimatum: Either they had to agree that the new hires who would build the company’s new 777X passenger jetliner would have to work for 16 years, rather than the current norm of six, to bump up to full union scale, or Boeing would build the plane elsewhere. Instead of making roughly $28 an hour to build one of the world’s most sophisticated pieces of machinery, workers would make roughly $17 an hour, or less, until they’d put in a decade and a half on the job.
By a 2-to-1 margin, the workers rejected their leaders’ recommendation and voted down the offer. Boeing then initiated a bidding war to see how much in tax breaks it could wring from states that wanted the work. More than a half-dozen states have sent in bids, some with side agreements from local unions that members would work at reduced rates, some with no such agreements because unions barely exist in their states.
It’s not as if Boeing is a clothing manufacturer scrambling to meet the price competition of rivals that make their goods in Bangladesh. Boeing’s sole competitor in the large-scale passenger-plane market is Airbus, the European conglomerate whose workers’ wages are comparable to those in the United States. But Boeing has already located one major plant in South Carolina, where workers make about $10 an hour less than their Puget Sound counterparts. It’s through such moves, and the threat of further such changes, that U.S. manufacturers have increased their profits at the expense of their workers’ paychecks.
None of the workers at either end of Boeing’s pay scale makes anything like the federal minimum wage, but I suspect the anxiety instilled by these kinds of stories is one reason there is wide, and growing, support for raising the minimum wage. It takes no great imaginative leap to see a time in the not-too-distant future when the incomes of all but a fortunate, talented tenth of the U.S. workforce are reduced or held stagnant. Indeed, the median inflation-adjusted salary for American men is already lower today than it was in 1969. Tyler Cowen, a heterodox libertarian economist, has written that the U.S. economy is morphing into one in which 10 to 15 percent of the workforce will be wealthy and the remainder will resign themselves to making do with less. He foresees little likelihood that the eradication of the broad middle class will lead to a United States “torn by unrest.”
I am not sure that the docility of the American people can be so readily assumed. The adoption of minimum-wage increases and living-wage ordinances throughout increasingly liberal cities and blue states suggests that where workers have the capacity to rebalance the economy through legislation, they’ll do just that. With the near-elimination of unions from the private-sector economy, legislation remains the sole means available for workers to bargain for their fair share of their company’s revenue, particularly in sectors, such as retail, that can’t really relocate. That’s why the victories of those workers demonstrating at Wal-Mart and fast-food outlets have taken the form of legislated increases in local minimum wages, rather than resulting in union contracts.
The fight for higher minimum wages may be just the beginning of a long battle to rebalance the economy. If laws are not changed to enable workers to form unions without fear of being fired, the battle for higher median, not just minimum, wages will eventually be fought in the legislative arena as well. Profits that come at the expense of downwardly mobile workers may find little honor — or legislative support — in their own country.
By: Harol Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 13, 2013
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