“It’s really a ‘right to work’… around the union for the corporation. It’s one of those things that are actually named for the opposite of the thing they do, like strip bars call themselves ‘gentlemen’s clubs.’ Or the TV network, dedicated to making us stupider, is called ‘The Learning Channel.’ Or a TV show that airs four days a week calls itself The Daily Show.”
— JON STEWART, The Daily Show (via inothernews)
Political Wire reports on what’s next for labor in Michigan:
Organized labor and its allies essentially have two options to overturn the state’s new “right-to-work” law signed yesterday by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R).
First Read: “First, they have filed legal actions charging that the process violated the state’s Open Meetings Act… Second, critics say they could overturn it by passing a voter-initiated law, which would require getting 258,000 signatures to get on the ballot. And, of course, there’s 2014, when Snyder is up for re-election.”
Fox News: Snyder braces for union backlash.
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TPM: Whatever happens, the labor groups say, expect union attempts to exact political vengeance in 2014 when Snyder and other Republican members of the legislature who pushed the legislation are up for reelection. The likely first decision for pro-labor groups is whether to try and overturn the new right-to-work law at the ballot box. [...] The new law won’t take effect for 90 days after the end of the legislative session. It may take longer than that for the law to have a real effect — existing worker contracts are exempted from the new law. So labor and its allies has some time to figure out what to do next in Michigan. But labor groups are determined that Snyder’s signature was just the beginning of a new fight over worker’s rights in Michigan, not the end.
LANSING, Mich. — The Michigan House approved the first of two right-to-work bills Tuesday that would weaken union power in the historical labor stronghold as hundreds of protesters rallied at the Capitol. The Republican-dominated chamber passed a measure dealing with public-sector workers 58-51 as protesters shouted “shame on you” from the gallery and huge crowds of union backers massed in the state Capitol halls and on the grounds. (Washington Post)
Lansing, Michigan: Thousands of union workers and community members flood the front lawn of the state Capitol to protest union-busting legislation, December 11, 2012. (via)
Joe.My.God: “Early this morning Tea Party advocates traded screams with union supporters on the steps of the Michigan Capitol Building. Breitbart has posted the below video.”
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WHERE do these plutocracy-supporting, low-wage-jobs-loving, Koch and Walton ass-kissing, shoot-themselves-in-the-foot people come from?
Why are Michigan Democrats opposed to right to work laws being contemplated by Gov. Rick Synder? ”Workers are currently not required to join a union — …they simply wanted to preserve the right of unions to collect fees from non-members to pay for wage and benefit negotiations that actually benefit them.”
Michigan prepares for mass protests today against right-to-work legislation: Union leaders in Michigan have been training members in “peaceful civil disobedience” methods in preparation for a protest on Tuesday against controversial right-to-work legislation. Supporters of the law, which among other measures would prohibit unions from collecting fees from non-union workers, are also expected to demonstrate at the state capitol in Lansing. The Republican-dominated Michigan Senate voted the right-to-work bill on Thursday by 22 votes to 16. Governor Rick Synder has said he will sign the bill into law and could do so on Tuesday.
Laura Clawson reports on Obama’s appearance in Detroit yesterday:
Speaking in Detroit Monday afternoon, President Barack Obama strongly criticized the push by Michigan Republicans to pass an anti-union law during the lame duck session. In a speech largely focused on his proposal to tax income over $250,000 and making the case that “our economic success has never come from the top down, it comes from the middle out and the bottom up,” Obama characterized the bill being rushed through the Michigan legislature as political and part of a race to the bottom:
And by the way, what we shouldn’t do. I’ve just got to say this, what we shouldn’t be doing is trying to take away your rights to bargain for better wages and working conditions. These so-called right to work laws, they don’t have to do with economics, they have everything to do with politics. What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money.
You only have to look to Michigan, where workers were instrumental in reviving the auto industry, to see how unions have helped build not just a stronger middle class but a stronger America. [...]
We don’t want a race to the bottom. We want a race to the top. America’s not going to compete based on low skill, low wage, no workers rights. That’s not our competitive advantage. There’s always going to be some other country that can treat its workers worse.
That appears to be just what Michigan Republicans do want, however. After hearing from his state’s congressional Democrats, Gov. Rick Snyder once again insisted that the bill “is all about creating more and better jobs in Michigan.” In fact, we know that freeloader laws lower wages by about $1,500 a year for the average worker—the “right to work for less money” that President Obama referred to.
The Waltons have created lots of jobs — but are they jobs YOU’d want to try to support your family with? How many of us want an American economy based almost exclusively on minimum-wage, no benefits “Mcjobs” — or a future for our children where, if you’re not born into wealth, those kinds of jobs are the only aspiration?
Steve Fraser discusses the “archaeology of decline,” or “another Great Migration — instead of people, though, trillions of dollars were being sucked out of industrial America and turned into “financial instruments” and new, exotic forms of wealth. If blue-collar Americans were the particular victims here, then high finance is what consumed them. Now, it promises to consume the rest of us.”
Camden, New Jersey, for example, had long been a robust, diversified small industrial city. By the early 1970s, however, its reform mayor Angelo Errichetti was describing it this way: “It looked like the Vietcong had bombed us to get even. The pride of Camden… was now a rat-infested skeleton of yesterday, a visible obscenity of urban decay. The years of neglect, slumlord exploitation, tenant abuse, government bungling, indecisive and short-sighted policy had transformed the city’s housing, business, and industrial stock into a ravaged, rat-infested cancer on a sick, old industrial city.”
That was 40 years ago and yet, today, news stories are still being written about Camden’s never-ending decline into some bottomless abyss. Consider that a measure of how long it takes to shut down a way of life.
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Once upon a time, Youngstown, Ohio, was a typical smokestack city, part of the steel belt running through Pennsylvania and Ohio. As with Camden, things there started turning south in the 1970s. From 1977 to 1987, the city lost 50,000 jobs in steel and related industries. By the late 1980s, the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency when it was “morning again in America,” it was midnight in Youngstown: foreclosures, an epidemic of business bankruptcies, and everywhere collapsing community institutions including churches, unions, families, and the municipal government itself.
Burglaries, robberies, and assaults doubled after the steel plants closed. In two years, child abuse rose by 21%, suicides by 70%. One-eighth of Mahoning County went on welfare. Streets were filled with dead storefronts and the detritus of abandoned homes: scrap metal and wood shingles, shattered glass, stripped-away home siding, canning jars, and rusted swing sets. Each week, 1,500 people visited the Salvation Army’s soup line.
The Wall Street Journal called Youngstown “a necropolis,” noting miles of “silent, empty steel mills” and a pervasive sense of fear and loss. Bruce Springsteen would soon memorialize that loss in “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”
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And no one can forget Detroit. Once, it had been a world-class city, the country’s fourth largest, full of architectural gems. In the 1950s, Detroit had a population with the highest median income and highest rate of home ownership in urban America. Now, the “motor city” haunts the national imagination as a ghost town. Home to two million a quarter-century ago, its decrepit hulk is now “home” to 900,000. Between 2000 and 2010 alone, the population hemorrhaged by 25%, nearly a quarter of a million people, almost as many as live in post-Katrina New Orleans. There and in other core industrial centers like Baltimore, “death zones” have emerged where whole neighborhoods verge on medical collapse.
One-third of Detroit, an area the size of San Francisco, is now little more than empty houses, empty factories, and fields gone feral. A whole industry of demolition, waste-disposal, and scrap-metal companies arose to tear down what once had been. With a jobless rate of 29%, some of its citizens are so poor they can’t pay for funerals, so bodies pile up at mortuaries. Plans are even afoot to let the grasslands and forests take over, or to give the city to private enterprise.
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Unprecedented for the United States, these numbers come close to the catastrophic decline Russian men experienced in the desperate years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Similarly, between 1985 and 2010, American women fell from 14th to 41st place in the United Nation’s ranking of international life expectancy. (Among developed countries, American women now rank last.) Whatever combination of factors produced this social statistic, it may be the rawest measure of a society in the throes of economic anorexia.
One other marker of this eerie story of a developed nation undergoing underdevelopment and a striking reproach to a cherished national faith: for the first time since the Great Depression, the social mobility of Americans is moving in reverse. In every decade from the 1970s on, fewer people have been able to move up the income ladder than in the previous 10 years. Now Americans in their thirties earn 12% less on average than their parents’ generation at the same age. Danes, Norwegians, Finns, Canadians, Swedes, Germans, and the French now all enjoy higher rates of upward mobility than Americans. Remarkably, 42% of American men raised in the bottom one-fifth income cohort remain there for life, as compared to 25% in Denmark and 30% in notoriously class-stratified Great Britain.
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Meanwhile, for more than a quarter of a century the fastest growing part of the economy has been the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector. Between 1980 and 2005, profits in the financial sector increased by 800%, more than three times the growth in non-financial sectors. …In the early 1990s, for example, there were a couple of hundred hedge funds; by 2007, 10,000 of them. A whole new species of mortgage broker roamed the land, supplanting old-style savings and loan or regional banks. Fifty thousand mortgage brokerages employed 400,000 brokers, more than the whole U.S. textile industry. A hedge fund manager put it bluntly, “The money that’s made from manufacturing stuff is a pittance in comparison to the amount of money made from shuffling money around.”
For too long, these two phenomena — the eviscerating of industry and the supersizing of high finance — have been treated as if they had nothing much to do with each other, but were simply occurring coincidentally.
Here, instead, is the fable we’ve been offered: Sad as it might be for some workers, towns, cities, and regions, the end of industry is the unfortunate, yet necessary, prelude to a happier future pioneered by “financial engineers.” Equipped with the mathematical and technological know-how that can turn money into more money (while bypassing the messiness of producing anything), they are our new wizards of prosperity!
Unfortunately, this uplifting tale rests on a categorical misapprehension. The ascendancy of high finance didn’t just replace an industrial heartland in the process of being gutted; it initiated that gutting and then lived off it, particularly during its formative decades. The FIRE sector, that is, not only supplanted industry, but grew at its expense — and at the expense of the high wages it used to pay and the capital that used to flow into it.
Think back to the days of junk bonds, leveraged buy-outs, megamergers and acquisitions, and asset stripping in the 1980s and 1990s. (Think, in fact, of Bain Capital.) What was getting bought and stripped and closed up supported windfall profits in high-interest-paying junk bonds. The stupendous fees and commissions that went to those “engineering” such transactions were being picked from the carcass of a century and a half of American productive capacity. The hollowing out of the United States was well under way long before anyone dreamed up the “fiscal cliff.”
Continue reading: Steve Fraser, The National Museum of Industrial Homicide | TomDispatch
And the GOP is calling for MORE austerity cuts for the rest of us while supporting an extension of Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. How on earth do middle / working class Republican base voters justify this in their minds?
itwouldappeariwaswrong: All the awards
CBS DETROIT: EAST LANSING (WWJ) - A Michigan State University student is recovering after he was beaten up and had his mouth stapled shut during what investigators are categorizing as a brutal hate crime.
Zachary Tennen, a 19-year-old sophomore in MSU’s journalism program, said he was at a house party on the 500 block of Spartan Avenue early Sunday morning when two men approached him and asked if he was Jewish. When he responded “Yes,” the two men raised their arms into a Nazi salute and said “Heil Hitler” before knocking him unconscious, according to Tennen’s mother, Tina.
About 20 people reportedly watched as the men proceeded to staple Zachary Tennen’s mouth shut at the lips and gums. His jaw was broken in two places during the attack.
“They knocked me down really hard … and I assumed someone would help me,” Zachary Tennen said in a statement. “But after some guys at the house basically kicked me out, I had to get a cab.”
[...] Anyone who may have witnessed or has information on the incident is asked to call the East Lansing Police Department at 517-351-4220.
— MSU Student Knocked Unconscious, Mouth Stapled Shut In Alleged Hate Crime
via: romnoid
“Throughout this campaign, Governor Romney has embraced the most strident voices in his party instead of standing up to them. It’s one thing to give the stage in Tampa to Donald Trump, Sheriff Arpaio, and Kris Kobach. But Governor Romney’s decision to directly enlist himself in the birther movement should give pause to any rational voter across America.” — Obama campaign
Related:
Today's remarks follow 5 straight Romney ads about Obama being the president of lazy welfare recipients taking your $. Not subtle.—
Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) August 24, 2012
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Jed Lewison catches Romney going birther
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Mitt Romney in Commerce, Michigan just a few minutes ago:
Now, I love being home in this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born. Ann was born in Henry Ford Hospital, I was born in Harper Hospital. No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised.
The crowd, predictably, went nuts.
If this doesn’t reek of desperation and flop sweat, I don’t know what does. Either Gawker’s The Bain Files are that upsetting — or is this a promise of things to come at the RNC rollout of Mitt Romney 2.012: Warmer and Fuzzier.
THIS is all he’s got to excite his ‘base.’
Jonathan Alter discusses the Republicans’ “Voter Suppression Project” and how its designed to help Mitt Romney in battleground states like Michigan, where President Barack Obama’s auto bailout, which Romney opposed, has helped bring the state’s unemployment rate down by 5.7 points since 2009:
Across the country, the Republicans’ carefully orchestrated plan to make voting harder — let’s call it the Voter Suppression Project — may keep just enough young people and minorities from the polls that Republicans will soon be in charge of all three branches of the federal government. [...] The Republican effort to restrict voting isn’t just anti- Democrat, it’s anti-democratic. No fair-minded person believes the tall tales of voters pretending they were someone else, which have been debunked by the Brennan Center for Justice and others. What fool would risk prison or deportation to cast a single vote? This isn’t about stopping vote-stealing and other corruption, for which there are already plenty of laws on the books. It’s about rigging the system to keep power.
The last stop for Mitt Romney’s bus tour is his home state of Michigan. But don’t expect a happy homecoming: In addition to arguing that we should “let Detroit go bankrupt,” the policies that Romney is proposing would cut student aid for 337,000 students and jobs for 9,900 teachers. And 510,000 Michigan families would see their taxes go up by an average of $900.
Send this postcard to your friends to tell them what Michigan already knows: Romney economics would be a disaster for our country.
via: demnewswire
image: ericmortensen
The Detroit News reports that the word “vagina” is about the most offensive thing you can say to a Republican:
House Republicans prohibited state Rep. Lisa Brown from speaking on the floor Thursday after she ended a speech Wednesday against a bill restricting abortions by referencing her female anatomy. Brown, a West Bloomfield Democrat and mother of three, said a package of abortion regulation bills would violate her Jewish religious beliefs and that abortions be be allowed in cases where it is required to save the life of the mother. “Finally, Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but ‘no’ means ‘no,’” Brown said Wednesday. [...] Brown’s comment prompted a rebuke Thursday by House Republicans, who wouldn’t allow her to voice her opinion on a school employee retirement bill. “What she said was offensive,” said Rep. Mike Callton, R-Nashville. “It was so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.”
Does Rep. Callton really think the word VAGINA is off limits in “mixed company,” when mixed company implies that some in attendance have actually OWNED one of those things — probably for many years?
What would Callton prefer to call this purely feminine, yet apparently offensive anatomical monstrosity, from which he was certainly pushed through at birth?
As Freud would say: “Mr. Callton, tell me about your mother…”
UPDATE: A Newsy video describing the incident:
WHAT ROMNEY / REPUBLICANS STAND FOR———————————————
“With how he treated me, is that how he’s going to treat others? You know, if he gets in office is he going to be that way to us little people?” – Dianne Bauer, owner of the Main Street Diner in Council Bluffs, Iowa, regarding Mitt Romney’s use of her diner for a campaign stop (The answer is YES, Dianne, of course that’s how he treats the little people who aren’t immediately being used as a photo-op. lol)
Mitt the Mormon — The uptick in anti-Mormon voter attitudes may come as a surprise to those who predicted Romney’s candidacy would have a mainstreaming effect on his faith. But as University of Sydney scholar David Smith, the paper’s author, writes, just as President Obama’s successful candidacy didn’t put an end to tense race relations in America, Romney’s political assent hasn’t cured the country of anti-Mormonism. In fact, as the data shows, Romney’s rise may have led to increased anxiety about his religion among his natural political opponents. […] Strikingly, the correlation between attitudes about Mormonism and support for Romney is even stronger than political ideology or party identification. Perhaps most potentially distressing to Romney’s campaign is the study’s finding that conservatives who said they were less likely to vote for a Mormon were much more likely to say they were undecided or would not vote at all in a contest between Obama and Romney. Pundits have been predicting for months that anti-Mormon Republicans would stay home in November; this study reaffirms that idea. – Buzzfeed
Romney tells CEOs they deserve more tax cuts, deregulation, and warm tongue baths from DC – Preaching to the converted on lower taxes and less regulation, Republican Mitt Romney courted more than 100 of America’s top chief executives Wednesday demanding government be an ally of enterprise, “not the enemy. Government has to be the partner, the friend, the ally, the supporter of enterprise — not the enemy,” Romney told a gathering of the Business Roundtable, a grouping of executives of leading US firms with some $6 trillion in annual revenue. “Too often, you find yourself facing a government that looks at you like you’re the bad guys,” he said in a 20-minute speech before going into a closed-door discussion with his audience. “I want to change the attitude (in Washington) and encourage the growth of enterprise in this country.” – Raw Story
Romney Endorses Massive Corporate Tax Giveaway That Failed To Create Jobs In The Past – [At the same CEO roundtable, Romney] called for the repeal of the tax on corporate profits that is levied when those profits are returned (repatriated) to America. Repealing the tax, Romney said, would drive investment in the United States and spur job creation. In the past, however, temporary tax holidays for profits stored overseas have not led to the job creation that proponents promised. Instead of creating jobs, companies used a 2004 repatriation tax holiday to line their executives’ pockets, paying stock dividends and buying back shares. The holiday “didn’t accomplish the stated goals of bringing jobs and investment to the US,” according to former member of President Bush’s Council on Economic Advisers. – Think Progress
image: 1percenthole
Adelson give $10 million to Romney Super PAC – Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who helped keep Newt Gingrich’s failed presidential campaign alive during the GOP primaries, is giving $10 million to a super PAC supporting Mitt Romney, the Wall Street Journal reports. The $10 million donation to the super PAC Restore Our Future appears to be the largest single donation toward Romney’s efforts so far. – Political Wire
The rise of the megadonors (the end of democracy) –The Adelsons are hardly the only ones taking advantage of the post-Citizens-United free-for-all. But they are blowing all other donors away: Their spending exceeds that of the next six biggest donors. (So far, most major donors are also supporting conservative super-PACs, which are outspending their liberal counterparts by a factor of 7 to 1.) – Mother Jones
John McCain Haz a Sad – Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told The Hill that President Obama never made a sincere effort to reach out to him after the 2008 election. He wants us to know he’s not bitter, though – not even a little bit.
How they cheat to win in Michigan – Michigan Republicans passed three bills yesterday to make voting harder. In particular, the legislation makes it harder to run a voter-registration drive. As has been their custom this year, House Republicans passed the legislation under immediate effect over the objections of the minority Democrats. That means the legislation could become law this year instead of waiting until 2013. – Maddow Blog
WHAT THE PRESIDENT / DEMOCRATS STAND FOR ————————————
“I am telling you, I want you all to pay attention over the next five months and see if they’re offering a single thing that they did not try when they were in charge, because you won’t see it.” — President Obama
image: randomactsofchaos
A lampoon of Mitt Romney, by Mitt Romney: “Out of touch” – the video features a highlight reel of the Republican’s gaffes, a collection of Romney’s missteps, including such comments as “corporations are people,” “I like being able to fire people,” and “I’m also unemployed.”
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Sen. Sanders blasts conflicts of interest at the Federal Reserve – Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday explained the importance of ending conflicts of interest at the Federal Reserve, [such as with] Jamie Dimon, the CEO and chairman of JPMorgan Chase, serv[ing] on the New York Fed’s board of directors. “The idea that we don’t have a Fed which is sitting there with knowledgeable, intelligent people who are fighting for the middle class and working families and not just for the profits of the large financial institutions — I mean, to me, that’s just a very simple reform,” Sanders said on Current TV’s Viewpoint. “But at the end of the day, if we are serious about trying to rebuild the middle class of this country, rebuild our manufacturing sector, et cetera, no question we need real Wall Street reform. To get Wall Street reform, we need Fed reform. To get Fed reform, we’ve got to get the bankers off of the regional Feds.” Sanders has introduced the Federal Reserve Independence Act to prohibit banking industry executives from serving as Fed directors. – Raw Story
Millions of old people are benefitting from Obamacare but are voting for Romney anyway – A Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services study determined that senior citizens more than any other demographic group of Americans benefit from Obamacare. The law hasn’t even really kicked in fully and yet 14.3 million senior citizens have benefitted from the law’s preventative care provisions. In other words, millions of old people have received free preventative care via Medicare that they wouldn’t have received if Obamacare hadn’t been passed. And so they’re going to vote for the guy who wants to repeal the law. – Bob Cesca
Senate Republicans introduce bill to block Obama Admin’s rule allowing home health workers to earn minimum wage – The Obama administration last year introduced a rule that would extend minimum wage protections to home health workers who, up to that point, had received no guarantee of a livable wage or fair overtime pay. But Senate Republicans are attempting to block the rule from going into effect: A group of Republican senators on Thursday introduced legislation aimed at blocking the Obama administration’s controversial efforts to extend minimum wage and overtime protections to 2 million in-home care providers through Department of Labor regulations – Think Progress
Both President Obama and Mitt Romney will deliver economic speeches in Ohio today. – Associated Press
