Kansas, Here We Come

As Bevin and his billionaire buddies light their cigars with C-notes they stole from working Kentuckians, the legislature is slashing and burning what's left of Kentucky's economy.

Because for the nth time, rich people and corporations don't create jobs; working people who spend their paltry paychecks create jobs.

But repugs are making sure working Kentuckians don't have any money to spend.

From the Herald:

Now the legislature is preparing to write a two-year budget that Republican Gov. Matt Bevin warned this week will be “brutal” because of a massive increase in costs for public pensions, as well as Medicaid and prisons. Lawmakers say they have no political appetite in this election year for tax increases that would raise more revenue. So everyone is bracing for the worst.

“They are — they are systemically ruining our schools on purpose,” Dunn said at the Capitol rally, wiping tears from her eyes.

The economic catastrophe in Kansas has proven beyond all doubt that budget cuts drive a state into bankruptcy.  Only more revenue - massive taxes on the rich and corporations - and spending on education and infrastructure and health care can save and grow an economy.

But Kentucky repugs see the Democratic tsunami coming this year and they think avoiding necessary tax increases is going to save them.

It won't. It will just hand a dying state to the Democratic candidates who take back the General Assembly in November.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article193214139.html#storylink=cpy

Foreign Policy Blowback

Because if a normal president had set out to make Central America the source of our own destruction, she could not be more successful than the Orange Loser is about to become.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

But for as terrible as all of this is, it’s only getting worse under Trump:

The Trump administration has made clear that human rights considerations are inconsequential to its foreign policy. But the human cost of these policies in Central America and Mexico will be incalculable, and will create blowback. Instead of suppressing migration and stabilizing the region, these measures will escalate the rampant violence that has sent desperate refugees fleeing from their communities to the United States in search of sanctuary, perpetuating a cycle of misery for which Washington bears significant responsibility, but from which it offers little relief.

There is much more horrifying detail at the link. Given what the United States owes Central America for more than a center of war and exploitation, at the very least, we should open our borders to any Central American who wants in. It’s the least we can do. But we can do much more and we should. Alas, Central America is always seen as a problem in American foreign policy circles, with at best a shrug about how the U.S. did so much to create these problems.

If Only Democrats Had Gotten Something Done

Some dumb twat twitted a stupid question, and Wonkette nailed the moron to the wall:

That is one excellent question! Why didn’t the Dems pursue a progressive agenda when they had the chance? Why, they could have come up with some kind of plan that would have resulted in the largest reduction in Americans without healthcare in history, for instance, and maybe passed a bill to ensure women could more easily sue after experiencing employment discrimination.

 

If Democrats had really wanted to be progressive during the Obama administration, they could have changed the way student loans worked, so they were issued by the government instead of private banks, with more options to repay based on students’ actual income, and maybe a rule that would forgive loans for students becoming doctors or teachers or social workers in under-served areas (of course, Trump will reverse that last one, so it doesn’t count). And maybe Obama could have cracked down on scammy for-profit colleges, if Dems had only cared about ordinary Americans getting ripped off.

You know, if Dems actually had wanted to push a Better Deal for ordinary Americans, maybe they would have put in place some kind of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that would have had the power to protect people from predatory lending practices and scammy credit card companies, and which — at least until Trump nixed it — was in the process of cracking down on ripoff payday and car-title lenders? Heck, maybe they could have instituted — even in the face of enormous obstruction and pushback — some kind of system to regulate big banks to prevent another economic collapse like the one in 2008.

For that matter, maybe if Democrats had had even the least scintilla of concern for everyday folks, from a progressive perspective, they might have passed some kind of stimulus to head off a second Great Depression, or they could have saved American auto manufacturers and tens of thousands of jobs, instead of letting them collapse like Republicans wanted.

And gosh, if Democrats wanted Americans to have better lives, maybe they would have taken some kind of action against racist police departments, or worked to reform mandatory minimum sentences and sentencing disparities. They might even have tried to protect the planet by committing to the Paris climate agreement or protect sensitive lands by declaring new national monuments.

Damn. That sure was a heck of a legitimate question. Why would anyone think Democrats might have a legitimate economic agenda anyway? They had so many chances but accomplished so little.

Doktor Zoom, fighting the lies.  What repug lie have you refuted today?

Incentives

As someone once said, repugs claim that giving more money to the rich makes them work harder, but giving money to the poor makes them work less.  Right.

Refusing to Tax the Rich Has Bankrupted Kentucky

Negative credit rating.  Negative.  That's economic disaster territory.

Bevin refused to do anything about it during the 2016 budget session.  Now he and his all-repug legislature can't do anything about it until next year.  Meanwhile, Kentucky's sliding down the shitter.

John Cheves at the Herald:

A credit ratings agency fired a warning shot this week over Kentucky’s $32.6 billion public pension debt.

Standard and Poor’s Global Ratings revised its outlook on Kentucky on Wednesday, from stable to negative, ahead of an upcoming state bond sale. The lowered outlook reflects at least a one-in-three likelihood that S&P will lower the state’s credit ratings during the next two years, making it more expensive for the state to borrow money, the agency said in a statement.

“The outlook revision reflects our view that funding levels of the commonwealth’s pension plans could significantly weaken and associated fixed costs could continue to rise to a level that might significantly pressure budgetary performance and flexibility,” S&P analyst Timothy Little said.

Yes, the pension shortfall is the result of decades of administrations, mostly Democratic, stealing from the pension plan in order to fill budget holes without raising taxes.

But it's repugs whose whole raison d'etre is No Taxes.   Now that they have control of all of Kentucky state government, they'll eliminate the pension system all together before they'll make the rich pay a fraction of their fair share of the taxes that hold the Commonwealth together.

Fine with you?  State worker pensions are a significant source of income and economic growth in this state.  Cancel that system and suddenly billions of dollars in consumer spending vanishes. Then the real budget slashing starts.

And then we're Somalia.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article126347124.html#storylink=cpy

How Repugs Destroy Public Goods

They've been doing it for five decades: scream lies about high taxes, incite hatred against poor and minority communities and blame the "government" their own voters depend on. Repugs get elected, trash the place, leave it for Democrats to clean up, then point to the cleanup costs and scream more lies.  

 

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

But the GOP never does anything that's not at least a twofer. Privatization — of roads and water systems, for example, or public schools via charter expansion — is not just about converting "We the People" assets into private profits for cronies. It's about disrupting the income streams of Democratic-leaning city governments. The goal is to weaken them politically, stripping them of revenue by creating a slow-rolling economic crisis that will force cities to either raise taxes or slash services or both, allowing Republicans in a few years to argue, See, see how badly Democrats have handled your economy? Elect us and we'll show you how it's really done.

Repugs Care Only About the Economic Issues of Straight, Xian White Men

And their allies are the Blue Dog, surrendering "Democrats" who think the way to the White House goes through those same racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic piece-of-shit white men.

 

Via Political Animal:

* Rebecca Traister writes, “Identity Issues Don’t Distract From Economic Issues — They Are Economic Issues.”

The postelection period has seen an enormous amount of pushback against so-called identity politics — specifically the campaigns for social justice and representation for women and people of color — as a frustrating distraction from the serious economic concerns that affect a broad swath of Americans. If only we could get away from divisive “social issues,” goes this line of thinking, Democrats could win elections and be able to enact progressive economic policies that would help far more people. But the idea that fights over reproductive freedom, sexual assault and harassment, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, criminal-justice reform, and gender and racial bias can be somehow separated from larger progressive economic stances is a fiction. As most people engaged in this argument know perfectly well, economic inequality is deeply wrapped up with gender and racial bias. The impending rollback of social progress in a Trump administration will have a staggering economic impact on this country’s women, especially women of color, and regressive economic policies will take a disproportionate toll on those same populations.

Austerity Always Fails, But Bevin Still Demands It

Because austerity works great for a handful of billionaires like Governor Lying Coward, who is perfectly fine with austerity destroying the middle class and turning workers into serfs.

Tom Eblen at the Herald:

Any business person knows that when costs are rising faster than revenue, you should raise revenue and not just cut costs.

But year after year, Kentucky governors and legislators think they can slash spending, dole out more tax breaks and keeping putting off overhaul of a tax system that no longer grows with the economy. The math will never work.

Former Gov. Steve Beshear spent eight years cutting more than $1.5 billion in state spending. In 2012, he appointed the bi-partisan Blue Ribbon Commission to again study the often-studied need for tax reform. The commission recommended solutions that would have raised annual revenue by more than $650 million — solutions that have so far been ignored.

Gov. Matt Bevin last month proposed $650 million in additional spending cuts. He included modest increases for some areas hit hard by previous cuts. He also directed money to start fixing pension plans that are in crisis after years of under-funding by lawmakers. But overall, his budget was the latest variation of the same old strategy: rob Peter to pay Paul.

 Conservative economics always fails.

David Atkins at Political Animal

I’ve written frequently about the abject failures of the Brownback administration in Kansas, showcasing not only the immorality but also the practical incompetence of conservative economic theory applied.

Scott Walker has also famously been failing in Wisconsin, where the state’s economy has been in a tailspin as a result of his disastrous policies. 

SNIP

As Paul Krugman would be quick to point out, this deficit is not the result of overspending, but rather economic malaise directly caused by Scott Walker’s doctrinaire economic theories that have weakened job protections, confidence and consumer demand.

But true to form, Wisconsin Republicans are reacting to the situation not by fixing what they broke, but by proposing a balanced budget amendment that would only make the situation much, much worse.

SNIP

 

Balanced budget amendments, of course, are an awful idea that tie governments into straitjackets, preventing them from engaging in deficit spending precisely when it is most needed to offset private sector economic downturns. Conservatives believe in a magic market fairy dust in which government can only distort an economy that would otherwise thrum with perfect efficiency in its absence, and in which the greatest dangers are inflation and deficits, rather than the real threats posed by deflation, high inequality and weak consumer demand.

It’s not just an immoral worldview. It’s a failure at a practical level as well. Kansas and Wisconsin are proving that fact every day.

And Matt Bevin, our only governor, is determined to make Kentucky the next example of repug economics destroying a state.

Matt Bevin Doesn't Know What the Fuck He's Doing, Part Ten

It's called Capital Mobility, Governor Connecticut Yankee Lying Coward.  It happens when pro-big-bidness government leaders cheer on off-shoring of good jobs in the name of the almighty free market.

This time next year, that GE factory at Appliance Park will be sitting empty and Bevin will be telling thousands of unemployed Kentuckians that they don't need gubmint giveaways like unemployment insurance and food stamps when there are $7-an-hour burger-flipping opportunities going begging.

The following is a statement from Governor Bevin on General Electric Company’s decision to sell GE Appliances to Haier.

“The Commonwealth is proud to be the home of GE Appliances headquarters and we are excited by today’s announcement! This sale to Haier offers great potential for global scalability and job growth. I applaud Haier’s decision to keep GE Appliances headquarters in Louisville in recognition of the strong leadership team and experienced workforce. GE Appliances is a first-class global company and we look forward to working closely with them in the months and years ahead.

“Haier is the number one global seller of appliances. This new partnership puts Kentucky in prime position to compete globally on appliance manufacturing. It is our goal not only to maintain and support the jobs currently at Appliance Park, but also to strengthen and grow the appliance business there. Appliance Park has been an institution in Louisville for decades and has supported tens of thousands of Kentucky families during that time. While there are still many steps that must be taken before this agreement becomes final, we intend to work with the City of Louisville, GE Appliances and Haier to ensure a bright and mutually beneficial future for all involved.”

Watch Live As the Dark Ages Descend on Kentucky

The public swearing-in is at 2 p.m. Eastern, but Matt Bevin was sworn in as governor at midnight. By now, he's already signed executive orders destroying everything worthwhile in the Commonwealth.

Four hundred thousand working-poor Kentuckians stripped of health insurance.

Thousands of minimum-wage state workers losing their $10.10 per hour pay, dropped down to $8.00 per hour.

The death of the bourbon, horse and tourism industries as oil and gas fracking poison groundwater throughout the Bluegrass.

Crumbling roads and bridges and mass unemployment as conservatard austerity slashes the state budget.

Tens of thousands of non-freakazoids forced into a christianist theocracy.

Heading for the hellscape Sam Brownback created in Kansas; ultimate goal the Galtian paradise of Haiti.

Live on KET.

Obama's Giveaways to "the blacks" Skipped African-American Kentuckians

Contrary to the fever dreams of wingnut racists, no, there really is not a secret welfare fund giving billions of dollars to black families in poverty while white families in poverty starve.  Not even in Obama's America.

And here's the proof:

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, African-Americans living in Kentucky saw their average yearly incomes drop by more than 11 percent in one year.

The Courier-Journal (http://cjky.it/1L0s1lr ) reports that the data released last week show that for black Kentuckians, household income fell from $30,183 annually to $26,735. The state's overall median household income fell by 2 percent from 2013 to 2014, from $44,097 in to $42,958.

During that same time period the poverty rate went up for African-Americans in Kentucky from 28.8 percent in 2013 to 32.4 percent. The state's overall poverty rate sat at 19.1 percent in 2014.

Incoming Louisville Urban League President and CEO Sadiqa Reynolds says the trend is troubling and underscores an urgency to create policies that will end cycles of poverty.

Why should you care? African-American families with 11 percent less income spend at least 11 percent less money at restaurants and clothing stores and car lots and on college tuition and rent and ball games.

And that means at least 11 percent fewer jobs and less income for everyone.

Something is way the fuck out of whack in this economy, and billionaire tax cheat Matt Bevin and his billionaire tax cheat friends are the reason.

It's Economic Violence That's Killing Our Cities

There's not a rich person or corporation in this country that didn't get that way by cheating and stealing from the poor. That doing so also keeps the blahs down is just a bonus.

Zandar:

Charles Warren details in The Atlantic how Ferguson, Missouri spent years using its police as a taxation force, harassing the (mostly black) citizenry to raise money to run the local government despite Ferguson being the home of a $24 billion Fortune 500 corporation.

Take a walk along West Florissant Avenue, in Ferguson, Missouri. Head south of the burned-out Quik Trip and the famous McDonalds, south of the intersection with Chambers, south almost to the city limit, to the corner of Ferguson Avenue and West Florissant. There, last August, Emerson Electric announced third-quarter sales of $6.3 billion. Just over half a mile to the northeast, four days later, Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. The 12 shots fired by Officer Wilson were probably audible in the company lunchroom. 

Outwardly, at least, the City of Ferguson would appear to occupy an enviable position. It is home to a Fortune 500 firm. It has successfully revitalized a commercial corridor through its downtown. It hosts an office park filled with corporate tenants. Its coffers should be overflowing with tax dollars. 

Instead, the cash-starved municipality relies on its cops and its courts to extract millions in fines and fees from its poorest residents, issuing thousands of citations each year. Those tickets plug a financial hole created by the ways in which the city, the county, and the state have chosen to apportion the costs of public services. A century or more of public-policy choices protect the wallets of largely white business and property owners and pass the bills along to disproportionately black renters and local residents. It's easy to see the drama of a fatal police shooting, but harder to understand the complexities of municipal finances that created many thousands of hostile encounters, one of which turned fatal.

The familiar convention of the true-crime story turns out to be utterly inadequate for describing the social, economic, and legal subjection of black people in Ferguson, or anywhere in America. Understanding this requires looking beyond the 90-second drama to the 90 years of entrenched white supremacy and black disadvantage that preceded it.

The key to Ferguson's plight is nothing less than decades of a regressive "race to the bottom" taxation system designed exclusively to benefit white property owners and businesses at the expense of black tenants and renters.

Like most of the rest of St. Louis Country, mid-century Ferguson was defended by exclusionary zoning codes and whites-only collusion in the real estate market. In the 1960s Ferguson was known as a “sun-down” community: African Americans, mostly from neighboring Kinloch, came in to work in the houses of wealthy whites in Ferguson during the day, but were expected to be out of town by the time the sun set. To this day, the adjacent cities are joined by only two through streets, the Ferguson city line runs down a neutral zone lined on either side with mirror-image three-way intersections. If you have been to St. Louis, you likely landed in Kinloch. Over the last three decades, the vast majority of that city’s black residents have been displaced to accommodate the expansion of Lambert-St. Louis Airport. Over the same period of time, a small number of African American homeowners and a much larger number of African American renters have gradually replaced whites in Ferguson. Ferguson, which was almost entirely white in 1970, today has a black majority. 

In 1981, a federal judge in Missouri declared that the “severe” residential segregation of the St. Louis metropolitan area had produced a constitutionally impermissible degree of segregation in the region’s schools. The court tasked the East-West Gateway Government Council and the Missouri Housing Development Commission with developing a plan to desegregate the metropolitan area, but they simply ignored the ruling. At the turn of the 21st century, almost one-half of St. Louis County’s 90-odd municipalities had black populations under 5 percent.

And that brings us to Emerson Electric.

For tax purposes, Emerson’s Ferguson campus is appraised according to its “fair market value.” That means a $50 million dollar solar-powered data center is only worth what another firm would be willing to pay for it. “Our location in Ferguson affects the fair market value of the entire campus,” Polzin explained. By this reasoning, the condition of West Florissant Avenue explains the low valuation of the company’s headquarters. 

In fact, the opposite is true: The rock-bottom assessment value of the Ferguson campus helps ensure that West Florissant Avenue remains in its current condition, year after year. It severely limits the tax money Emerson contributes to the Ferguson-Florissant district’s struggling schools (Michael Brown graduated from nearby Normandy High School, a nearly 100 percent African American school that has been operating without state accreditation for the last two years), and to the government of St. Louis County more generally. On the 25 parcels Emerson owns all around St. Louis County, it pays the county $1.3m in property taxes. Ferguson itself receives far less. Even after a 2013 property tax increase (from $0.65 to the state-maximum $1 per $100 of assessed value), Ferguson received an estimated $68,000 in property taxes from the corporate headquarters that occupies 152 acres of its tax base—not even enough to pay the municipal judge and his clerk to hand out the fines and sign the arrest warrants. 

St. Louis County doesn’t just assess Emerson a low market value. It then divides that number in three—so its final property value, for tax purposes, ends up being one third of its already low appraised value. In some states, Ferguson would be able to offset this write-down by raising its own percentage tax rate. Voters would even be able to decide which services needed the most help and raise property taxes for specific reasons. But Missouri sets a limit for such levies: $1 per $100 of property. As Joseph Pulitzer wrote of St. Louis during the first Gilded Age, “millions and millions of property in this city escape all taxation."

A $24 billion company generates just $68,000 in taxes for the city in which it resides.  One percent of assessed value.  Put the $50 billion data center in a place like Ferguson and it becomes nearly worthless to tax.

America is broken.

How christians Became Corporate Stooges

Must have been easy for people who think an invisible sky wizard runs their lives to think that the greed and selfishness of giant corporations are social goods.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Kevin Kruse excerpts his new book on how corporations created the public symbols of modern Christianity as part of their mobilization against the New Deal. It’s a must read, as is no doubt his book:

Back in the 1930s, business leaders found themselves on the defensive. Their public prestige had plummeted with the Great Crash; their private businesses were under attack by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from above and labor from below. To regain the upper hand, corporate leaders fought back on all fronts. They waged a figurative war in statehouses and, occasionally, a literal one in the streets; their campaigns extended from courts of law to the court of public opinion. But nothing worked particularly well until they began an inspired public relations offensive that cast capitalism as the handmaiden of Christianity.

The two had been described as soul mates before, but in this campaign they were wedded in pointed opposition to the “creeping socialism” of the New Deal. The federal government had never really factored into Americans’ thinking about the relationship between faith and free enterprise, mostly because it had never loomed that large over business interests. But now it cast a long and ominous shadow.

Accordingly, throughout the 1930s and ’40s, corporate leaders marketed a new ideology that combined elements of Christianity with an anti-federal libertarianism. Powerful business lobbies like the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers led the way, promoting this ideology’s appeal in conferences and P.R. campaigns.

Generous funding came from prominent businessmen, from household names like Harvey Firestone, Conrad Hilton, E. F. Hutton, Fred Maytag and Henry R. Luce to lesser-known leaders at U.S. Steel, General Motors and DuPont.

In a shrewd decision, these executives made clergymen their spokesmen. As Sun Oil’s J. Howard Pew noted, polls proved that ministers could mold public opinion more than any other profession. And so these businessmen worked to recruit clergy through private meetings and public appeals. Many answered the call, but three deserve special attention.

From this alliance between preachers and capitalists comes most of the ideas that right-wing Christians today cite about why this is an overtly Christian nation and why socialism is a sin. It’s toxic and it’s powerful. Kruse pushing the timeline of this alliance back from the 50s into the 30s is really important in understanding its deep roots.

Attention KY Democratic Candidates: This Is How You Beat Repugs

Go ahead, steal her whole speech.  Senator Professor Warren won't mind.

Wonkette:

Recently Republicans seem to have discovered the struggles of America’s middle class. Out of nowhere, they’re suddenly talking about this problem. Well that’s great, but talk is cheap and when it comes to action, these Republicans seem to have amnesia about what they’ve actually done to hard-working Americans.

Republican trickle-down policies created tax breaks and loopholes for the wealthy while leaving working families to pick up the pieces. I’ll believe Republicans care about what’s happening to America’s middle class when they stop blocking legislation that would require billionaires to pay taxes at least at the same rate that teachers and firefighters do.

Republican trickle-down economics blocked increases in the minimum wage that would have lifted 14 million people out of poverty. I’ll believe that Republicans care about what’s happening to America’s working families when they stop blocking minimum wage increases and agree that no one, no one in this country should work full time and still live in poverty.

Republican trickle-down economics squeezed billions of dollars of profits out of people who had to borrow money to go to college. I’ll believe Republicans care about what’s happening to America’s future when they agree to refinance student loans.

I could go on, but the point is the same: Talk is cheap. It’s time for action — action that will strengthen America’s middle-class families and build a strong future, action that will produce good jobs now and in the future. It is time to put up or shut up.

I have a message for my Republican colleagues: You control Congress. Stop talking about helping the middle class, and start doing it.

"Put up or shut up" goes for you, too, Kentucky DINOs. Start campaigning with this speech right now, or you're not only going to lose the Governor's Office this November, you're going to lose the House next year, too.

"We can make sure that the middle class is the engine that powers America’s prosperity for decades to come."

Not until you tax the billionaires and millionaires out of existence, Mr. President. Plutocracy and Democracy cannot share the same economic space. It's one or the other, and right now too many of your policies are expanding the latter and shrinking the former.



Full transcript here:

How Bipartisanship on Free Trade Will Destroy the Economuy

Bipartisanship is no longer the hallmark of a thing that both sides want and that therefore must be good.

It's now hallmark of a thing that because both sides want it, it must be catastrophically bad.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

But there is one significant area where Obama and the Republicans agree and that is on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP is a free trade deal that would straddle the Pacific Rim, including Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the U.S., and Vietnam. It would create the world’s largest free trade zone. If you liked NAFTA sending millions of jobs out of the United States with no labor or environmental protections for the nations receiving these jobs, you will love the TPP. So far the TPP has gone nowhere because of Harry Reid and Democrats in the Senate. This law is anathema to senators like Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown and should be for any of us who value American jobs and the dignity of the working class. The Obama Administration last year sought fast-track authority for the TPP from the Senate. Democrats refused. Republicans won’t.

SNIP

Is giving American companies even more incentive to move American jobs abroad what we want from a Democratic president? No. Is giving corporations the ability to defeat national attempts to hold them accountable what we want from a Democratic president? No. Is outsourcing pollution to the world’s poor what we want from a Democratic president? No. Fighting the TPP needs to be central to the political agenda of progressives over the next two years.

Advice for Alison From Somebody Who Knows Coal Far Better Than She Ever Will

Run on progressive solutions to economic problems, and stop running away from the Democratic Party.

George Zornick at The Nation:

The midterm elections are twenty-seven days away, and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has been keeping a relentless road schedule campaigning for Democratic candidates. One thing he’d like to see more of: talk about basic economic fairness issues.

“I think more populism, or more focus on the economic issues, would be helpful,” he told a small group of reporters at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, DC. “I think it would help drive turnout as well. I think the candidates that focus only on negative things, doing everything negative, have a real danger of having their base go flat.”

Trumka said that in talking to workers on the campaign trail, he frequently confronts a problem that has bedeviled Democrats in many past midterms: apathy. Union members wonder why it matters if they vote.

“They say that at the plant gate, at doors, on the telephone,” Trumka said. “I try to explain to them that the economy is not like the weather. Those that are in power, and those that want to be in power, want us to believe the economy is like the weather—there’s nothing you can do about it, so don’t bother. But the economy…it’s nothing but a bunch of rules. And those rules decide the winners and losers, and those rules are made by the men and women we elect. That’s why this election is important.”

Bosses Stealing $50 Billion From Workers Every Years

And that's not counting what they steal in terms of low wages and lack of benefits; that's actual taking-money-out-of-your-pocket theft.

Danny Vinik at The New Republic:

As the economy slowly recovers, it’s become increasingly clear that it’s not just unemployed Americans who need help from the government. It’s those that are employed as well.

That’s the main finding of a new report from the Economic Policy Institute on wage theft. What is wage theft? It’s when employers refuse to pay their workers their rightful wages and benefits, such as refusing to pay overtime. It’s a major problem across the United States. One study, which EPI cites, examined three cities (New York, Chicago and Los Angeles) and found that two-thirds of workers in low-wage industries had experienced a pay-related offense in any given week in 2008. Those violations cost workers more than $2,600 a year on average—nearly 15 percent of their total earnings. If wage theft is as prevalent in the rest of the United States as it is in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, then it costs workers more than $50 billion a year.

Why It's Right to Always Blame the Rich

Steve M:

We should always be suspicious of the rich. We should be deeply suspicious of any analysis of our economic problems that doesn't blame the rich. They have all the political power. Their recession ended years ago. They're experiencing an economic boom. When do we get some of what they're having? Well, the first step is suspecting them whenever our economy goes off the rails. After all, they're in charge.

Organize and Take the Big Bag

Because only the union can get you anywhere close to what you've earned.

Down with Tyranny: