The Last labor Day

by folkbum

This is why EJ Dionne makes the big bucks:

That the language of Lincoln and John Paul is so distant from our experience today is a sign of an enormous cultural shift. In scores of different ways, we paint investors as the heroes and workers as the sideshow. We tax the fruits of labor more vigorously than we tax the gains from capital — resistance to continuing the payroll tax cut is a case in point — and we hide workers away while lavishing attention on those who make their livings by moving money around.

In Which The Smartest Guy in the Room is Also the Shortest

By 3rd Way

This Labor Day we should listen to our former labor secretary's analysis of what is ailing our economy.

The national economy isn’t escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. None of the standard booster rockets are working...

That’s because the real problem has to do with the structure of the economy, not the business cycle. No booster rocket can work unless consumers are able, at some point, to keep the economy moving on their own. But consumers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services they produce as workers; for some time now, their means haven’t kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them.

This crisis began decades ago when a new wave of technology — things like satellite communications, container ships, computers and eventually the Internet — made it cheaper for American employers to use low-wage labor abroad or labor-replacing software here at home than to continue paying the typical worker a middle-class wage...

But for years American families kept spending as if their incomes were keeping pace with overall economic growth. And their spending fueled continued growth. How did families manage this trick? First, women streamed into the paid work force...

Second, everyone put in more hours. What families didn’t receive in wage increases they made up for in work increases. By the mid-2000s, the typical male worker was putting in roughly 100 hours more each year than two decades before, and the typical female worker about 200 hours more.

When American families couldn’t squeeze any more income out of these two coping mechanisms, they embarked on a third: going ever deeper into debt... From 2002 to 2007, American households extracted $2.3 trillion from their homes.

Eventually, of course, the debt bubble burst — and with it, the last coping mechanism. Now we’re left to deal with the underlying problem that we’ve avoided for decades. Even if nearly everyone was employed, the vast middle class still wouldn’t have enough money to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

Where have all the economic gains gone? Mostly to the top... In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income...

The rich spend a much smaller proportion of their incomes than the rest of us. So when they get a disproportionate share of total income, the economy is robbed of the demand it needs to keep growing and creating jobs.

What’s more, the rich don’t necessarily invest their earnings and savings in the American economy; they send them anywhere around the globe where they’ll summon the highest returns...

THE Great Depression and its aftermath demonstrate that there is only one way back to full recovery: through more widely shared prosperity. In the 1930s, the American economy was completely restructured. New Deal measures — Social Security, a 40-hour work week with time-and-a-half overtime, unemployment insurance, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, the minimum wage — leveled the playing field...

Policies that generate more widely shared prosperity lead to stronger and more sustainable economic growth — and that’s good for everyone. The rich are better off with a smaller percentage of a fast-growing economy than a larger share of an economy that’s barely moving. That’s the Labor Day lesson we learned decades ago; until we remember it again, we’ll be stuck in the Great Recession.

Until the political parties controlling this country can agree on the root cause of our economic doldrums I don't see how our government can do much to help the job situation. It is absurd that one party's cure for what ails us is to increase the national debt by continuing tax cuts for some of the wealthiest people in the world while selling themselves as champions of the middle class. It is equally absurd that the opposing party isn't capable of standing up to special interests and truly be the champion of the middle class.

Driving a Dumb Bargain

By Keith R. Schmitz

How numb are we to the financial bailout?

The Bush administration has handed out $350 billion in emergency money to help out financial organizations in peril and to save our economy from supposedly going over the cliff.

Now what? The AP has inquired into where the money has gone -- something probably not done by our government to date -- and are hearing from the banks...nothing.

But we shouldn't be surprised. Regulation by the Bush administration of practically anything over these past eight years has been non-existent. Yes we can't.

$350 billion. It took the Bush administration about three years to painstakingly blow that much money in Iraq.

But here's the really amusing part.

Outrage II. The Big Three hat in hand approach Congress ask for dough to carry them over their financial troubles. True, these operations could have been better managed but what ran them on the shoals? Tight credit.

Why? Brought to you by...the financial meltdown -- perpetrated by the banks and financial houses propped up by the huge bailout. Your money as the local TV stations like to point out.

The circle will not be unbroken.

Here's where the irony thickens. Congress fell all over itself to help out the fat cats who produce essentially nothing and get rewarded billions for their so-called work.

The American auto industry -- and their unions -- get hauled up on the dissecting table with demands that every dime gets an accounting. These operations manufacturer something. We as a country have been falling behind in that category over the past few years as many of you know.

Blasted the most was the "bloated" union wages. Jim Cramer on Hardball has just pointed out that the pay given out to any one off the heads of the Wall Street firms is as much as a whole factory full of union laborers.

And we fretted after 9/11 that irony was dead.

Happy Labor Day

by folkbum

Phil Ochs singing "Joe Hill."

Esperanza Unida's shafting of their workers goes on and on

via Global Girl - How about no more air-trips to Turkey for the Esperanza Unita's executive director, Robert Miranda, until Esperanza Unita pays their workers?

From today's MJS: Esperanza Unida's payroll problems continue under Miranda's administration:

Mark Freund, a former welding instructor and manager at Esperanza Unida, said he wasn’t in a position not to get paid, or to get paid late.

After repeated delays, he complained to the state Department of Workforce Development when his paycheck was 19 days late. After finally getting his check July 21, he said, he agreed to be laid off. But pay problems continue at the south side job training agency, where remaining workers still don’t get their checks on time. ... Maria Franco, hired a year ago as fund development administrator, said Esperanza owed her $1,000 in back pay, and $500 in vacation pay for about a month. Franco, who has worked for other Latino nonprofits, said she agreed June 27 to go on layoff, but returned the next week to finish her work. She said she was handed a three-day suspension for insubordination and escorted out. Later she received written notice from executive director Robert Miranda that she had been fired. ...“I don’t talk about disgruntled workers or their allegations. It’s a personnel matter,” he said Wednesday.

Miranda did confirm that staff members were not paid on schedule last week.

Maybe if Miranda, and his attorney, and his Board Chair, were not spending so much time disparaging progressives in Esperanza Unida's frenzied quest for electoral office, they would not be screwing over their workers so badly.