The announced Lordstown Plant Closing near here is yet another blow for Blue Collar Workers…The MAGA acronym included the hopes of restoring the jobs of blue collar workers, especially in the manufacturing sector. The song at the bottom best sums it up! Here in northeast Ohio where many communities have seen their economies decimated from closed factories these past few decades, it looks like our area is about to take another big hit:trumbull-county-ohio-shifted-points-vote-trump-it-didnt-save-its-car-plant. Some of these manufacturing communities look like bombed-out war zones, with their landscapes dotted by old dilapidated structures that have been abandoned for years. Worse yet, the residents have had their economic vitality sapped right out of them.
So many blue collar workers put their trust in Trump based on his bold promises to bring back these factory jobs, as even last year from a speech in Youngstown, he commented on all the closed factories saying all those jobs would come back. But it might be time for all those blue collar workers to realize our prez has no idea how to actually accomplish that: the-midwest-is-losing-faith-in-trump-as-his-neglect-fuels-regional-decline. As opposed to how he ran his companies, a president can’t browbeat other companies into submission: And these problems of so many good-paying lost jobs, which have a spillover effect on all other local businesses, was a long time in the making. The Mahoning Valley was once the hub of the steel-making industry, but all that started to change on Black Monday in 1977 with the closure of Youngstown Sheet & Tube (a company at its peak in 1950 employed 27,000), which from there saw a cascade of plant closings & the region’s economy has never recovered.
While it’s ironic Trump’s tariffs have saved some steel jobs in our area recently, the higher cost of steel has contributed to the car companies losing money (running into the billions), to where both Ford & GM have announced some big layoffs: general-motors-plant-closures-tariffs-trump. Plus the Trump tax bill actually has a provision providing financial incentives for companies to move their operations to another country, which we are seeing a new plant being built in Mexico to make the Chevy Blazer. So we should echo what Trump just said in a recent tweet, “thanks President T”: union-clings-to-gm-plant-in-area-where-trump-promised-jobs.
That Lordstown GM plant was one of the few large factories to have survived through the years in the Mahoning Valley, so the announcement is another huge blow to an area which has struggled mightily: without-gm-lordstown-ohio-would-never-be-the-same. Investors love the cutbacks for the cost savings & profits, but yet again it’s the workers & their families left holding the bag. And isn’t it ironic just a decade ago taxpayers bailed out GM: sherrod-brown-ohio-taxpayers-rescued-gm-yet-company-doesnt-respect-workers. The capitalist system has evolved to where employees can be exploited to enrich the large corporations, their top execs & shareholders: gm-layoffs-are-another-victory-capital-over-labor. Workers still lack a voice. Something has got to change!
As a nation we should make it our national mission to restore good-paying jobs that can earn a decent living. It shouldn’t take a college degree to carve out an occupation making a livable wage, but we’re still lagging way behind on providing viable vocational ed, apprenticeships & job training for careers that don’t require college. And more attention should be given earlier during the school years to offer better guidance on potential careers matching the aptitudes & interests of each student. To be sure, most blue collar jobs moving into the future aren’t likely to look anything like the old work on the floors of massive steel or automobile factories, especially with automation continuing to eliminate a lot of those jobs. But that is the big challenge we face as a nation.
We need to create & invent brand new/more productive occupations which can make significant contributions to society, while employing those who need these better jobs with pay commensurate with the added value such jobs can bring. Some jobs would be private & some public, but it will take a private-public partnership to successfully pull this off. And it will definitely take creative thinking to reinvent careers, but can be ultimately accomplished if we put our minds to it. Any nation that can successfully land a spacecraft on Mars some 300 million miles away, we should certainly make it our chief mission to create many more better, more productive professions. Other articles on these GM closings you could search for from these news sources & titles, plus the song at the bottom we dedicate to all those hard-working blue collar workers:
businessinsider/gm-layoffs-plant-closings-stock-outrage
markets.businessinsider/general-motors-stock-price-halts-3-north-american-factories-cuts-15-workforce
theguardian/general-motors-set-to-cut-workforce-as-slowing-sales-and-steel-tariffs-bite
washingtonpost/gm-layoffs-and-plant-shutdowns-suggest-us-economy-may-be-starting-to-slow–and-dent-trumps-claim-of-an-industrial-renaissance
washingtonpost/trumps-entire-economic-argument-looks-shaky
washingtonpost/daily-202-gm-layoffs-show-why-there-s-a-crisis-of-confidence-in-american-capitalism
yahoo/gm-layoffs-sure-look-broken
msn/gms-plan-to-drop-chevy-cruze-hits-ohio-town-hard
thehill/ex-ohio-lawmaker-says-voters-will-blame-trump-for-not-saving-gm
dailykos/GM-announces-more-winning-will-close-auto-plant-in-Trump-country
Time for a Revolution on behalf of Blue Collar Workers
Let the classic hit song at the bottom provide inspiration! As our senator (Sherrod Brown) here in Ohio has often said, & it’s truly what America needs as much as anything, we must restore the dignity of work. On that we can all agree: work-the-new-political-breakthrough. This entire article from the next link is posted below about the people who’ve become the forgotten Americans, struggling workers who’ve experienced the American Dream pulled out from underneath them. See those reports pulled from the-once-and-future-worker-and-the-forgotten-americans-review-alienated-angry-in-need-of-a-job:
For too long, the American working class was ignored in politics and public policy. All that changed in 2016. The election served notice that the working class, especially working-class men, felt overlooked, alienated and angry and were desperate enough to try anything—even Donald Trump. Two powerful books now tell us why. Since the 1970s, men without college degrees have seen their full-time employment fall, their real wages decline, their family income stagnate and their children’s shot at the American Dream—that is, living a better life than their parents—seemingly fade before their eyes. The thematic core of Oren Cass’s “The Once and Future Worker” and Isabel Sawhill’s “The Forgotten Americans” is that working men are losing ground in America. One rejoinder to this grim diagnosis is that, after you factor in means-tested government programs, declines in family size and increases in the number of working women, the fate of the working class appears less dire: Indeed, its consumption levels have increased in recent years. To which Mr. Cass replies: Yes, “many people have iPhones,” but “neither readjusted data nor celebration of gadgetry does anything to improve the reality of deteriorating individual, family, and community health”—a reality that follows from the loss of decent, stable jobs, as both Mr. Cass and Ms. Sawhill note.
It’s no accident, for instance, that communities hit hardest by direct competition from China starting in the 1990s saw dramatic declines in male employment, marriage and children born in wedlock. Nor is it surprising that dramatic increases in “deaths of despair”—deaths largely attributable to suicide or the opioid crisis—have been concentrated in the very class of Americans hit hardest by recent trends in trade and automation. Mr. Cass argues that right-of-center thinkers and politicians need to turn away from their traditional focus on low taxes and economic growth and toward a policy agenda directed at renewing a “labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities.” Ms. Sawhill, for her part, believes that the left needs to focus less on a redistributionist agenda—say, proposals for a Universal Basic Income—and toward policies that will encourage the renewal of work. Most Americans, she says, “want jobs, not handouts.” Work does more than supply income, she observes; it “provides dignity, self-respect, a sense of contributing, and a way of connecting with others.” Getting a monthly check from Uncle Sam is not likely to renew the family or the civic foundations of working-class America.
So, how then to revive work in America for those who don’t have a college degree? Mr. Cass and Ms. Sawhill introduce a range of worthy ideas to advance their pro-work agenda, but two stand out: strengthening vocational education and introducing a federal wage subsidy. Both authors note that we devote too much money from the public purse to higher education, given that only about 36% of Americans now graduate from a four-year college. The federal government, for instance, spends more than $160 billion to help people go to college via loans, tax credits and grants, versus around $20 billion on career and technical education and job training. Ms. Sawhill advocates a new “GI Bill for America’s Workers” that would rectify this imbalance by boosting spending on vocational learning as well as on job training and apprenticeships, especially programs working hand-in-glove with local businesses. To prevent fraud and failure, she adds, these programs would be rigorously evaluated, with their funding made “conditional on the proportion of graduates who secure good jobs.” To more fully reward work, and to make low-wage workers more appealing to employers, Mr. Cass recommends a federal wage subsidy that would boost hourly wages in the direction of a target wage—set at about $15 per hour today. Workers would receive half the difference between their market wage and the target wage, with the federal government depositing the subsidy directly into their paychecks.
This model, with its halfway-to-target design, preserves flexibility, Mr. Cass says, allowing room for businesses to reward better work and for workers to feel so rewarded. The subsidy would in any case boost take-home pay for working-class families and, judging from the results of a recent pilot program in New York City, bring more men and women into the workforce. Another benefit: Unlike most means-tested policies, this approach comes with no marriage penalty because it is based on hourly work, not household size. So, how to pay for a pro-work agenda? Among other things, Mr. Cass thinks we can repurpose some of the approximately $1 trillion that federal and state governments spend annually on means-tested programs, like food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit. Ms. Sawhill calls for increasing estate taxes to early 1970s levels, which, she says, would raise nearly $1 trillion over the next decade. Both approaches, in some form, seem worth trying, though both would require a determined act of political will—no doubt, a bipartisan one—that we have not witnessed in Congress for quite a while. If we don’t move to shore up the fortunes of the working class—and of work, more generally—we are likely to see electoral surprises, political polarization and social unrest that will make 2016 look tame by comparison.
Tax Bill Dud
Yes, we got played: gm-layoffs-show-Congress-played-americans-with-corporate-tax-cut. We’ve seen enough to know the proceeds of the tax cuts have gone to the very top rather than working middle-class Americans, with corporations investing in stock buybacks over plants & equipment, while also trying to avoid paying higher wages. So the primary consequence for America from last year’s tax bill has been much higher deficits. See more details about this boondoggle in excerpts from trumps-tax-cut-party-officially:
The sharp cut in tax rates President Trump signed last year was supposed to trigger an investment boom. In June, six months after the tax cuts went into effect, Trump called the tax-cut law an “economic miracle” and said, “Our country is doing so well. I don’t think it’s ever done like this, in terms of the economy.” The miracle was more like a mirage. One key element of the Republican tax legislation was a sharp cut in the corporate tax rate, from 35% to 21%, which went into effect at the start of the year. As expected, the tax cuts roughly doubled the growth rate in corporate profits. Investors expected a stock-market rally. Yet equities have wobbled all year and the S&P 500 is now down about 6% in 2018. The market, apparently, hasn’t been fooled by the bubbly math accompanying the corporate tax cuts. Earnings growth for the S&P 500 rose from 12% last year to an estimated 23% this year, according to Goldman Sachs. But EPS growth is likely to drop back to 6% next year and just 4% in 2020. Those numbers are still good, and the lower growth rates of the next two years will come atop higher baseline profits. But the sharp slowdown in earnings growth that investors now expect explains a good part of the stock-market selloff of the last two months.
Trump also claimed that corporations overflowing with profits would spend bigly on new facilities and more workers. But that isn’t happening, either. A variety of indicators, such as business fixed investment and capital goods orders, show that businesses are spending at roughly the same pace, or perhaps even a bit less, than they were before the tax cuts went into effect. “There has been a clear leveling off in both capital goods orders and shipments, which suggests that the near stagnation in business equipment investment in the third quarter may be the beginning of a more sustained weakness,” research firm Capital Economics wrote recently to clients. Stagnation was not something Trump or his fellow Republicans promised. Job growth is strong, one reason the underlying economy remains relatively healthy. But the pace of job growth, averaging 213,00 new jobs per month, is just slightly above the pace in 2016 and 2017, and actually lower than the pace of job growth in 2014 and 2015. The White House says the corporate tax cuts will eventually raise pay by around $4,000 per year, which would be a 6.5% raise for a family earning the median household income of around $63,000. But pay this year is only rising by 3.1%, which is better than last year but still barely ahead of inflation. The tax windfall hasn’t trickled down yet.
As for the overall economy, GDP growth was strong in the second quarter of this year, at 4.2%—but that may have been the peak. The third-quarter growth rate dropped to 3.5%, and fourth quarter growth is running at just 2.3%, according to forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers. Most economists expect a slowdown during the next two years, perhaps to 2% growth. Stocks have sold off during the last several weeks in large measure because investors believe slower growth will put a lid on corporate profits and possibly lead to a recession. Republicans who were the sole backers of last year’s tax cuts thought voters would thank them with a Republican sweep in the 2018 midterms, which was obviously a miscalculation. Many Americans say they haven’t noticed any tax cut for themselves, even as corporate coffers swell. Meanwhile, the government’s annual deficit, which normally goes down when the economy is strong because more economic activity generates more tax revenue, is going the opposite direction now. Annual deficits will soon top $1 trillion, with some analysts worried all that federal borrowing could force interest rates higher—another worrying contributing to the selloff in stocks.
Concerning Economic Signals
Reich can be counted on to portray the economy as it really is. This article we’ve posted from the-next-crash projects the severe imbalances now bedeviling the economy could lead us into another crash:
Sorry to deliver the news, but it’s time to worry about the next crash. The combination of stagnant wages with most economic gains going to the top is once again endangering the economy. Most Americans are still living in the shadow of the Great Recession that started in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009. More have jobs, to be sure. But they haven’t seen any rise in their wages, adjusted for inflation. Many are worse off due to the escalating costs of housing, healthcare, and education. And the value of whatever assets they own is less than in 2007.Which suggests we’re careening toward the same sort of crash we had then, and possibly as bad as 1929. Clear away the financial rubble from those two former crashes and you’d see they both followed upon widening imbalances between the capacity of most people to buy, and what they as workers could produce. Each of these imbalances finally tipped the economy over. The same imbalance has been growing again. The richest 1 percent of Americans now takes home about 20 percent of total income, and owns over 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. These are close to the peaks of 1928 and 2007. The underlying problem isn’t that Americans have been living beyond their means. It’s that their means haven’t been keeping up with the growing economy. Most gains have gone to the top. But the rich only spend a small fraction of what they earn. The economy depends on the spending of middle and working class families. By the first quarter of this year, household debt was at an all-time high of $13.2 trillion. Almost 80 percent of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck.
It was similar in the years leading up to the crash of 2007. Between 1983 and 2007, household debt soared while most economic gains went to the top. If the majority of households had taken home a larger share, they wouldn’t have needed to go so deeply into debt. Similarly, between 1913 and 1928, the ratio of personal debt to the total national economy nearly doubled. After the 1929 crash, the government invented new ways to boost wages – Social Security, unemployment insurance, overtime pay, a minimum wage, the requirement that employers bargain with labor unions, and, finally, a full-employment program called World War II. After the 2007 crash, the government bailed out the banks and pumped enough money into the economy to contain the slide. But apart from the Affordable Care Act, nothing was done to address the underlying problem of stagnant wages. Trump and his Republican enablers are now reversing regulations put in place to stop Wall Street’s excessively risky lending. But Trump’s real contributions to the next crash are his sabotage of the Affordable Care Act, rollback of overtime pay, burdens on labor organizing, tax reductions for corporations and the wealthy but not for most workers, cuts in programs for the poor, and proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid – all of which put more stress on the paychecks of most Americans. Ten years after the start of the Great Recession, it’s important to understand that the real root of the collapse wasn’t a banking crisis. It was the growing imbalance between consumer spending and total output – brought on by stagnant wages and widening inequality. That imbalance is back. Watch your wallets.
More Dire Future Signs
The effects of last year’s tax bill have been disappointing all along, with stock buybacks far outpacing business investment, while laying the groundwork for annual trillion dollar deficits. Remember here at The VORACS I’ve been warning about the folly of trickle-down even before that bill was signed. But now many economists are sensing the tax cut sugar-high is wearing off, as based on the indicators economic growth is projected to tail off in 2019, seen in excerpts from trump-tax-cut-trade-war-2019-gdp-goldman-sachs-baml (& some are even forecasting a recession soon):
But according to a growing consensus of Wall Street economists, the economy is showing fresh signs it could cool off in 2019, as the shot in the arm from Trump’s policies wears off during the course of the year. Economists at Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML), and JPMorgan all predicted that 2019 GDP growth will be materially lower than in 2018. “Growth is likely to slow significantly next year, from a recent pace of 3.5%+ to roughly our 1.75% estimate of potential by end-2019,” Jan Hatzius and David Mericle, Goldman Sachs economists, said in a note to clients. In the run-up to the passage of the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) most Wall Street economists agreed that the tax cuts in the bill would prompt a short-term bump for the US economy. While the size and duration of the bump were hotly debated, all three Wall Street economists expect the boost will start to fade in the second half of 2019. There are already signs that the boost from the tax cuts are fading and they could become more obvious next year, JPMorgan’s economists said. They cited the slowdown in capital investment from corporations, for instance. “The tax cuts already have been lifting growth throughout much of 2018, and we think that federal spending associated with the spending bill will firm noticeably around the turn of the calendar year,” the JPMorgan economists said. “But the impact from the tax cuts likely is already starting to fade and the lift from federal spending will also ease over time, so we expect fiscal thrust to moderate toward the end of 2019.”
Please Read this Article pinpointing the Heart of our Economic Troubles from a Big-Picture View
Here is a major concern expressed about our democracy at the macroeconomic level, with a correct conclusion big business & big government are both major threats to our personal liberties & independence. But when those two establishment forces team up as a consortium of power & privilege, it sets the stage for the type of elitism which controls & represses the population. So basically it’s dominance by the big corporations over smaller competition & employees, while DC governing leadership condones such a rigged system, robbing citizens in their pursuit of happiness & financial security. We’ve posted this entire perceptive article from shallow-conception-democracy-tim-wu, so please read as it gets to the very core of what has become wrong with modern-day capitalism:
Over the last several decades, many in the west have come to accept a remarkably narrow concept of what the economy and a democracy are for. The economy exists to make us rich, or at least pay the bills. It’s thought to be working when the stock market and the GDP rise. Democracy is voting for someone who is “on your side”. The two are linked when you vote for someone who promises to make you rich, or at least cut your taxes. At the risk of stating what has become obvious in recent years, this materialistic view of the economy and democracy is at best thin and at worst dangerous. Prolonged economic dissatisfaction and our thin conception of democracy have left behind a spiritual hole that has driven voters across the United States, Europe and South America into the arms of angry populists and nationalists who offer a new spiritualism based on the nation. But there’s another, nearly lost, democratic tradition, in which the goals of a democracy and a worthy civilization are irreducibly linked to the healthy development of its citizens along social, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions. In this older conception, a great democracy is one that serves as a cauldron for the building of good character and the pursuit of a worthwhile life – one that includes but also goes beyond mere material security. This version of democracy puts the focus not on the ballot box or the ticker tape, but on the quality of citizens’ lives as actually lived. In doing so, it recognizes that healthy personal growth doesn’t just happen: it requires both liberties and securities in which human flourishing becomes possible.
On this view, all citizens should have the security to transcend a brute struggle to survive and feel safe, and the freedom to seek something more with their lives. As the American jurist Louis Brandeis once put it, “the ‘right to life’ guaranteed by our Constitution” should be understood as “the right to live, and not merely to exist”. Brandeis’s view has radical implications for what a country and its economy should look like. In particular, it demands that we acknowledge, limit and balance the dangers of both government oppression and private coercion in our lives. That means protection against government censorship and oppression, to be sure. But it also means freedom from industrial domination, exploitation, or so much economic insecurity that one constantly fears unemployment or poverty. As Brandeis wrote, no one is really free “if dependent industrially on the arbitrary will of another”. Since the industrial revolution, we have had to reckon with the growth of private power – once in the form of the trust or cartel, now in the form of the giant corporation, the monopoly and the multinational.
The might and wealth of these entities can exceed even those of governments. In the United States especially, they have also claimed many of the political rights of citizens for themselves: rights of free speech, to spend money to influence politics, and to the free exercise of corporate religion – nearly everything except, so far, the right to vote. For most people in industrialized countries today, our sense of autonomy and security is equally, if not more, influenced by private forces and economic structures than by government. The conditions of work – from the size of one’s wages and the length of one’s hours, to threats of being fired, harassed or mistreated by bosses, to even personal safety – now largely determine how much of our lives are really lived. Outside of work, our daily lives are also shaped profoundly by economic matters such as rent, access to transportation or groceries, and health insurance, even more so than by any abstract freedoms. That is why real freedom must be understood as freedom from both public and private coercion – a point that has been utterly forgotten by so-called libertarians, conservatives and even most neoliberals.
This leads to a crucial further insight: that “bigness” – the domination of the economy and politics by giant firms – is a curse. From the perspective of individual liberty, there is a fundamental difference between an economy dominated by giant multinationals and one comprising much smaller concerns in a state of competition. When private power is concentrated, corporate citizens can begin to crowd out humans with their demands. A certain inhumanity arises, and we lose sight of the idea that human flourishing ought be the goal. Working conditions make this dynamic particularly clear. In the United States, employees are regularly subject to infringements that range from the invasive to the outright tyrannical. Employees in lower-level jobs are regularly prohibited from casual conversation or lingering (which Walmart calls “time-theft”), denied access to bathrooms (Tyson foods), subject to searches upon leaving work (Amazon), or subject to mass, suspicionless drug tests for even routine jobs (many industries).
More broadly, the rise of part-time, unsteady work and its flip-side, overwork, has had deeply corrupting and corrosive effects on how life is actually lived. Perhaps most perniciously, private power, as experienced in the form of an overbearing job, can destroy family life. This has profound inter-generational effects, hampering the development and limiting the future opportunities of children whose parents can’t give them the time and attention they need. To protect human liberty and provide securities consistent with human thriving demands not only humane regulation of the conditions of work, but also an open economy composed of smaller firms who actually obey the laws. In order to achieve this, we need to break, or at least radically limit, the power of monopolies. As Brandeis understood, true freedom implies a distrust of both big business and big government. The unifying principle is this: concentrated power in any form can be dangerous; institutions should be built to human scale, and we need, above all, to pursue human ends.
On that Same Topic are these Enlightening Op-Eds
Look at the chart on the monopolistic trends seen inside monopoly-open-markets-institute-report-concentration. Such monopoly/oligopoly practices have become more prevalent & established, taking advantage of suppliers, employees & customers strictly for their own gain, while always being given a free pass from DC in this crony-capitalist structure. Plus the multinationals have no loyalties to America or any country, since the bottom line always takes priority. The system is now feeding our massive wealth/wage inequalities. Another similar article on that same theme are found in these excerpts from monopolies-in-the-us. Something needs done about this to restore a competitive marketplace, as small business is getting trampled while start-ups cease to exist:
A strong strain of anti-monopoly sentiment has run through our politics ever since. America was born as “a nation of farmers and small-town entrepreneurs,” the historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote, “anti-authoritarian, egalitarian and competitive.” Hostility to corporate bigness animated Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt, as well as the labor movement, Granger movement, Progressive movement and more. Of course, monopolies and other corporate giants have fought back against these assaults on their power, and sometimes succeeded for years or decades at a time. It happened during the age of Rockefeller and Morgan. Over the past 40 years, it has happened again. The federal government, under presidents of both parties, has largely surrendered to monopoly power. “The ‘anti’ in ‘antitrust’ has been discarded,” as the legal scholar Tim Wu puts it in his new book, “The Curse of Bigness.” Washington allows most megamergers to proceed either straight up or with only fig-leaf changes. The government has also done nothing to prevent the emergence of dominant new technology companies that mimic the old AT&T monopoly. This meekness has made possible the consolidation of one industry after another. For a long time, though, it’s been hard to figure out precisely how much consolidation. The available statistics just aren’t very good, which isn’t an accident. In 1981 — around the time that the Reagan administration was launching the modern pro-monopoly era — the Federal Trade Commission suspended a program that collected data on industry concentration.
Fortunately, researchers in the private sector have recently begun filling in the gaps. On Monday, the Open Markets Institute — an anti-monopoly think tank — is releasing the first part of a data set showing the market share that the largest companies have in each industry. Big companies are much more dominant than they were even 15 years ago. Mergers are one big reason. Another is the power of so-called network effects — in which the growth of, say, Facebook makes more people want to use it. True, a few industries have become less concentrated, but they are exceptions. If anything, the chart here understates consolidation, because it doesn’t yet cover energy, telecommunications and some other areas. It also doesn’t cover local monopolies, such as hospitals that are dominant enough to drive up prices. The new corporate behemoths have been very good for their executives and largest shareholders — and bad for almost everyone else. Sooner or later, the companies tend to raise prices. They hold down wages, because where else are workers going to go? They use their resources to sway government policy. Many of our economic ills — like income stagnation and a decline in entrepreneurship — stem partly from corporate gigantism. So what are we going to do about it? It’s time for another political movement, one that borrows from the Boston Tea Partiers, Jefferson, T.R. and the other defenders of the economic little guy. The beginnings of this movement are now visible. Top Democrats believe that anti-monopolism can be a political winner for their party. It’s a way to address voters’ anxiety over high drug prices, digital privacy and more. “The control of business over certain segments of the economy,” says Senator Amy Klobuchur of Minnesota, a potential presidential candidate, “I think it will be a much bigger thing going into 2020.” “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,” Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice and anti-monopoly crusader, said a century ago, “but we can’t have both.”
A Logical Perspective
Panera’s founder explains how the fundamental incentives for American business have become skewed, leading to the rise of Trumpism. So many have been jilted out of middle class lifestyles as workers have gotten the shaft from this corporate short-term profiteering, so they’re ready to blow up the status-quo order of things, even to the point of fully backing a reckless, unhinged presidency. The greed motive by those holding corporate & governmental power tends to run contrary to the aim of shared prosperity. We need organizations existing for the purpose of promoting the public good, not having just a strict tunnel-vision on maximizing profit taking. Here are those interesting thoughts posted from the-founder-of-panera-bread-explains-the-economic-forces-that-led-to-trump:
Over the last few years, however, Shaich has come to believe that the current business environment is far less amenable to the process of building companies like his. Wall Street has embraced the idea that companies exist solely to serve the holders of their stock. Under this way of thinking, managers of companies should focus their actions on driving short-term value for their shareholders, and should pay far less (or no) regard to other constituents who may have a stake in the business, such as employees, customers, or members of the community. Shaich partly blames activist hedge funds, many of which buy shares in companies with the aim of pushing their management to make decisions that drive their stock prices up within a few months. According to Shaich, this makes it more difficult to invest in long-term projects, and create sustainable jobs. He believes that the fixation on short-term profits is jeopardizing the future of American business, and creating social instability that has contributed to our current state of political polarization.
The tension between long-term and short-term economic interests has become a favorite topic in policy circles in recent years, but the election of Donald Trump, in 2016, brought the implications into clearer focus. Much of Trump’s base is made up of white, rural voters; many of them have seen jobs disappear from their communities, while wages have stagnated for those still working. In the midterm elections, Democrats won at least thirty-eight additional seats in the House of Representatives (as of Wednesday), gaining a majority, but Republicans performed better than many people expected; high-school-educated voters came out, once again, strongly in favor of the party of Trump.
According to Shaich, the resentment that these voters feel is a direct result of the quick-profits-over-all ethos that dominates economic thinking. “When we live in a world where we view value creation as the end, and not as a by-product, which is what short-term thinking lends itself to, we end up doing great damage to every other constituency, and that’s what ultimately drives back to the kind of ‘let’s rip down the establishment’ nihilism that in my view is at the core of Trumpism,” he said. “Trump is, ‘Hey, this isn’t serving me. I’ve been sitting here in Michigan and Wisconsin and Ohio, I thought I’d have a middle-class life if I went to work, and my kids can’t pay their student debt. I lost my manufacturing job and I’m making twelve dollars an hour in a service job. And these guys are closing every plant and squeezing every nickel out of the thing, and Wall Street gets rich. And I’m still living a tough life.’ ” He added, “Trump is a human hand grenade to blow up a society that isn’t working for big swatches of America.”
Last year, when Shaich took Panera private, he also stepped down as the C.E.O. (he is still the chairman of the board), to focus on a pet cause: warning the world about the dangers of short-term thinking. He has been travelling the country, giving speeches and talking to business leaders and policymakers, about the urgent need to return to the tradition of investing for the future. “We’ve ended up in a situation, to the detriment of all of us, where our public companies are not able to do the things we want in the economy,” he said. “We say we want G.D.P. growth, but G.D.P. doesn’t come simply from a sugar high of tax cuts. G.D.P. growth only comes from innovation and productivity increases. And innovation and productivity increases occur because people make commitments and they make transformative events.” He added, “This system doesn’t serve the American people. There is an opportunity to ask ourselves, is this what we want?”
The Rich & the Poor
We’ve increasingly become a caste system with a clear dividing line between the haves & have nots, with those born into privilege mostly being the same ones leading financially stress-free lives: millennials-homeownership-affordability. And the plight of the poor is actually worse than it seems: poverty-in-america-greater-than-statistics-indicate. Whatever happened to opportunity for all & upward mobility?
GOP not helping & Dems still working on it
With the GOP compounding our problems, having proven conclusively they kowtow to big donors/large corporate interests over the American people, can the Dems finally show they can govern for the best interests of the American worker? For now the Dems are divided & can’t seem to agree on a basic narrative. A good place to start might be revamping the system so this practice of wage theft stops being the accepted norm, seen in these excerpts taken from big-business-is-stealing-from-their-own-workers-will-democrats-stop-them?:
But in the age of the Uber economy, it’s gotten worse, with all the things you know about: unreliable scheduling, working off the clock, misclassification of workers as independent contractors (a huge problem), and more. If the Democrats’ job number one heading into 2020 is to win back some of those white working-class voters who deserted them in 2016, this general problem of wage theft seems like an awfully good place to start. It affects many millions of Americans of all races and in all places. Yet I don’t hear many Democrats talk about it. No one in the broader public even knows what “wage theft” means. Somebody stole your pay packet as you walked home from work? No. It’s what employers extract from employees in not paying them what they’ve earned.
And Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who is a Democrat, has legislation that would similarly tax companies (though at a lower rate than Sanders) whose employees need public assistance and would offer some tax credits to companies that did the right thing and raised wages. So, stick and carrot, in other words. The Senate actually voted on it during the farm bill debate last June, and while it lost, it got the support of every Democrat. Note, every Democrat: Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, Jon Tester, everyone. Democrats are and will be divided on some cultural issues, but on something like this, they can be 100 percent united.
Wages, work, and the idea that if you work full-time you deserve a decent life have to be the cornerstones of what Democrats present to people in 2020. Medicare for All and free college, which constitute most of what I’m hearing out of the newly energized left that will be seated in the next House of Representatives, are secondary. Medicare for All failed in Vermont, and free college does nothing for the 65 percent of young people who don’t go to college. But everybody (mostly) works. Everybody is entitled to a good wage.
If the Democrats haven’t firmly associated themselves with these simple ideas by 2020, they have failed. In the meantime, please strike a small blow for proletarian decency when you do hit the mall this year by remembering when you’re angry at the sales clerk: She makes $20,000 a year. She may work a second job. She may be on food stamps. So chill out. Check your emails. Go to the Cheesecake Factory and get a drink. She’s trying her best. She already has the contempt of the Republican Party, whose members regularly make fun of food stamp recipients. She doesn’t need yours.
I’ve never said much about Climate Change
But the new report in the link below should give us pause, although it does seem to be based on both science & political spin. The evidence & increasing incidences of natural disasters are indeed very concerning. Admittedly, this has never been a hot-button issue for me. Despite what climatologists in the scientific community say, I still maintain it’s rather presumptuous to claim climate change can be definitively linked to human activity as opposed to natural cycles, while the profession itself depends on alarming us. And the remedies offered by global warming advocates could severely undermine the economy, plus I just don’t believe global warming is nearly the imminent threat as nuclear holocaust.
Having said that, these natural disasters are human tragedies that also greatly hurt the economy. We should not bow to big oil interests & instead aggressively pursue/support alternative energy sources. I’m open-minded towards being ultimately convinced climate change is directly tied to man-made emissions based on this latest evidence, from which I would put our hope in advanced technologies moving forward into the future to help mitigate the damage. We may also have to adapt to whatever climate conditions come along. Yes, this report does provide something to think about, & something requiring both further study & action: trump-climate-change-economic-health-effects-impact-government-report-warning.
Immigration & the Caravan
We have a heartless/immoral president, especially when he ordered the kidnapping of 5000 kids from their families at the border: cbsnews.com/news/chaos-behind-donald-trump-immigration-family-separation-policy-at-southern-border-60-minutes. There was also no structure put in place to eventually reunite families. We really should have had immigration reform years ago. But lately, Trump is squarely to blame. Last year he had a verbal agreement with Schumer & Pelosi on a comprehensive immigration deal with bipartisan support, featuring border security/funding the wall & a DACA solution. But as soon as those radicals in the far-right echo started shouting amnesty, Trump reneged.
So until we can get real immigration reform, we’re stuck with the asylum system now in place. Which isn’t all bad, since the system does help screen legitimate applicants from those we send back, although there’s a severe backlog of cases with not enough judges. But for Trump to unilaterally try sabotaging the program now in place is actually a violation of international law. Here are more articles on Trump trying to beat back on the immigration/asylum laws. In limiting the number of outbound links from our blog, you can search for any of these you’d like to read:
theguardian/migrant-caravan-disabled-children
washingtonpost/how-we-can-help-the-migrant-caravan
washingtonpost/trump-loves-kids-so-his-border-guards-are-firing-tear-gas-at-them
slate/trump-border-troops-immigration-posse-comitatus
usatoday/fake-border-crisis-real-tear-gas-children-talker
salon/did-fox-news-prompt-trump-to-have-refugees-tear-gassed-at-the-border
thedailybeast/sinclair-forces-local-tv-stations-to-air-segment-defending-tear-gassing-migrants
thedailybeast/geraldo-rivera-gives-fox-news-reality-check-on-migrants-these-are-not-invaders
businessinsider/fox-news-commentator-geraldo-rivera-slams-use-of-tear-gas-on-migrants
vanityfair/donald-trump-border-protest-migrants
esquire/honduras-1980s-cia-military-migrants-border
businessinsider/ap-the-latest-us-nixed-fbi-checks-for-teen-migrant-camp-staff
thehill/foxs-napolitano-trump-cannot-legally-shut-down-southern-border
thehill/scalia-would-have-applauded-the-asylum-ruling-trump-rages-about
motherjones/trump-false-claims-migrants-border-grabbers
huffingtonpost/donald-trump-fact-checked-by-reporter
huffingtonpost/trump-defended-tear-gas-migrants
The Resistance is Helping
Here is an article containing an interview with Tom Nichols, a former GOP’er/never-Trumper after my own heart. There’s not enough of us yet, but in the long run this never-Trump movement & backlash against the GOP offer the best chance to someday save the party. The GOP is a basket case the way it is now. That glorious day can come when the current Trump cult, defined by deception, corruption, bullying, immorality & lacking human values, will crumble under the transparency of its evil & weight of its own lies. These excerpts are patched together from conservative-tom-nichols-on-leaving-the-gop-the-republican-party-is-not-capable-of-healing-itself:
The Democratic Party won substantial victories in the 2018 midterms. It will control now control the House of Representatives next year and also won many important state and local offices. The Democratic Party is now reinvigorated and more empowered in its battle against Trumpism. The resistance movement that opposed Donald Trump and his Republican Party in the 2018 midterms is comprised of traditional members of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition. “Never Trumpers” as well as repentant former Republicans have formed an alliance of convenience — if not principle — with the Democratic Party. Their shared goal: Stopping Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s assault on American democracy. It will take time and a thorough analysis of polling and other data to determine if the “Never Trumpers” and ex-Republicans were able to persuade a substantial number of independent and other voters (especially the fabled “white working class”) away from Trump and towards the Democrats during the 2018 midterms. Whatever the empirical data reveals, the presence of these defectors and new allies in the Democratic Party’s anti-Trump coalition has great symbolic value.
(In an interview with Tom Nichols, he said this): I am still in many ways a conservative. I’m not trying to join the Democratic Party. People say to me, “Well, you’re still not on our side.” On a lot of things, they’re absolutely right. I’m still not on your side. I want you to win. I want you to limit this completely insane experiment that is Trumpism and executive overreach. I accept the suspicion of liberals and Democrats, and I fully understand it. I think that’s lousy coalition-building by people on the left, but so be it. By comparison, the people on the right wing — Republicans, conservatives and their allies — are operating from a different set of assumptions and principles. They have become so cynical and corroded that they cannot imagine doing anything based on principle. At some point you just have to accept that the Republican Party is not capable of healing itself at this point. It just isn’t. I respect those people who want to stay and try to put the Republican Party back together after the wreckage. I just don’t think it’s possible. I’m more in line with people like George Will who have said, “Look, the party is just dead. It’s just had it.” That doesn’t mean that conservatism is dead. It just means the Republican Party as a vehicle for those ideas is just done for the foreseeable future.
But I think the people in the conservative blogosphere, media and others who are the enablers, the shields and professional “Trumpsplainers,” are saying things they must know to be false. They know them to be untruths. They know they are advocating for things they’ve spent their whole lives advocating against until now. Those are the people I have a harder time with. A small number of Trumpsplainers may really be converts. But as a group Trump’s defenders have made decisions that ultimately are between them and their consciences. Robert Tucker, who is one of the great historians of Stalin, said, “To treat opportunism as incompatible with deeply held beliefs is to take a simplistic view of political man.” Kurt Vonnegut also said, “We are what we pretend to be, and we have to be careful who we pretend to be.” So after you’ve been on television enough times saying, “It’s really good to lock up children as a deterrent. It’s really good to have trade wars and tariffs. Putin really isn’t that bad a guy,” at some point you believe it. The money compels you. The multimillion-dollar house in Alexandria or Annandale or Prince William or wherever you’re living means that you will do what you think is necessary to stay juiced into the Washington Trump machine.
Those Sinking Poll Numbers
Trump’s disapproval ratings from Gallup just hit 60%, quite an incredible achievement as seen in trumps-disapproval-rating-reaches-all-time-high-after-tumultuous-week & also gallup-60-percent-of-americans-disapprove-of-trump. And the House Dem seats gained could hit 40! Other articles on politics, Trump, the GOP & their base are found in these titles you can peruse, then search for any you’d like to see:
mediaite/mitch-mcconnells-biographer-republicans-are-beyond-redemption-dems-only-viable-option
fivethirtyeight/trumps-base-isnt-enough
msn/never-trump-republicans-went-democrat-in-2018-are-they-gone-for-good
thehill/more-than-4-in-5-americans-angry-or-dissatisfied-with-washington-poll
washingtonpost/life-immitates-melodrama-especially-in-the-trump-era
washingtonpost/heres-the-backup-plan-the-u-s-needs-for-2020
washingtonpost/its-only-talk-is-a-rotten-rationalization-for-trump-support
washingtonpost/morning-bits-voters-better-get-ready-for-the-results-of-trumpism
dailykos/You-wanna-blame-somebody-for-Trump-Blame-his-supporters-Seriously
Various Articles on the Economy
These titles offer up some more interesting thoughts:
msn/economists-see-growth-slowing-drastically-next-year
businessinsider/trump-trade-war-china-steel-tariff-impact-on-economy-household-study
markets.businessinsider/us-china-trade-war-effects-on-economy-could-get-worse
vox/trump-wall-street-journal-interview
theatlantic/emphasize-production-not-consumption
theguardian/facebook-google-antitrust-laws-gilded-age
washingtonpost/another-way-to-visualize-the-great-decoupling
salon/fox-news-judge-napolitano-explains-how-donald-trumps-spending-will-destroy-our-society
nymag/trumps-party-not-his-idiocy-increased-the-deficit
bloomberg/the-one-percent-and-the-case-for-distributional-national-accounts
businessinsider/social-security-helped-slash-poverty-heres-why-its-in-trouble
newsmax/greenspan-sweden-entitlement-problem
thedailybeast/the-nra-just-reported-losing-dollar55-million-in-income
thehill/freshman-hayes-announces-support-for-pelosi
thehill/what-americas-thinking/418508-strategist-says-most-americans-wont-feel-optimistic-until-they
Blue Collar Man
This could be the theme song for the many blue collar workers who want to work hard & support their families, but our economic system has failed them. As a nation this should become our crusade, doing whatever it takes to create these better jobs so these workers can earn a livable wage. It’s also about restoring dignity & respect. Check out these lyrics:
Give me a job, give me security
Give me a chance to survive
I’m just a poor soul in the unemployment line
My God, I’m hardly alive
My mother and father, my wife and my friends
I see them laugh in my face
But I’ve got the power, and I’ve got the will
I’m not a charity case
I’ll take those long nights, impossible odds
Keeping my eye to the keyhole
If it takes all that to be just what I am
Well, I’m gonna be a blue collar man
Make me an offer that I can’t refuse
Make me respectable, man
This is my last time in the unemployment line
So like it or not I’ll take those
Long nights, impossible odds
Keeping my back to the wall
If it takes all that to be just what I am
Well, I’m gonna be a blue collar man
Keeping my mind on a better life
Where happiness is only a heartbeat away
Paradise, can it be all I heard it was
I close my eyes and maybe I’m already there
I’ll take those long nights, impossible odds
Keeping my back to the wall
All that be just what I am
Well, I’m gonna be a blue collar man
You don’t understand
I’ll take those long nights, impossible odds
Keeping my eye to the keyhole
If it takes all that be just who I am
Well I vow to be a blue collar, gotta be a blue collar,
Gonna be a Blue collar man.
Believe it.
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