Category: Class War

Michigan

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Give us your money or lose everything! I wonder if Republicans used to be bank robbers in a past life.

Why do I suspect that workers will make significant concessions – and end up losing their collective bargaining rights, anyway? Because that’s how Republicans roll!

Michigan’s new Emergency Manager Law is already forcing major concessions from unions. The law gives the governor the power to declare a city insolvent and appoint an emergency manager with virtually unlimited power to reorganize every aspect of city business, including dissolving the city entirely. The emergency manager even has the power to terminate collective bargaining agreements.

As a result of these expanded new powers, public employees unions in some Michigan municipalities are already making large preemptive concessions to keep their cities from tripping any of the “triggers” in the new law that might give the governor an opening to send in a union-bustingemergency manager, Eartha Jane Melzer reports in the Michigan Messenger.

In Flint, the firefighters’ union agreed to increase contributions to health insurance and give up holiday pay and night shift differentials. Flint Firefighters Union President Raul Garcia told the Wall Street Journal that these concessions were driven by fear of a state takeover of Flint. “I would rather give concessions that I would like than have an [emergency financial manager] or something of that magnitude come in and say this is what you are going to do,” Garcia said.

The new law also gives the Emergency Manager the power to privatize prisons, Melzer notes.

Upping the ante

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

This is a good sign. Instead of sitting around and waiting for leadership from the White House, liberal Congress members are taking the initiative to push tax legislation that will clearly draw the lines between the rich — and everybody else. From The Hill:

In an interesting development, liberals are calling for taxes to be raised on people making more than $1 million annually while Obama and other party leaders have embraced $250,000 or more per year. The left-leaning lawmakers stress that while they still support what Obama wants to do, the president wasn’t able to convince the Democratic-led Congress to pass his tax blueprint last year.

The group of legislators, which includes Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), argue that poll numbers suggest the public is on their side and that added revenue is needed to narrow deficits and keep programs such as Head Start from being placed on the chopping block.

But they downplayed the dollar figure differences between their plans and the president’s.

“I don’t think there’s anything magical about 250,000 or a million. It’s how much money do you need,” said Sanders, whose proposal would set a 5.4 percent surtax on income over $1 million a year. “In my view, the Democrats and the president should be very strong on this issue: that our goal is shared sacrifice and let’s not balance the budget on the backs of the working and middle class.”

Schakowsky signaled that her legislation – which would create a 45 percent bracket for income between $1 million and $10 million a year, with a top rate of 49 percent for income of $1 billion a year and above – could work in concert with a plan to return rates to Clinton administration levels. The current top individual tax rate of 35 percent would rise to 39.6 percent at the end of next year, unless Congress again extends existing high-income rates.

“I certainly don’t see it as a counter to the real and specific debate on the Bush tax cuts,” Schakowsky said. “The fact is, Republicans don’t want to do anything to take away tax breaks from the richest Americans, and we want to stimulate that debate.”

Food for thought

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Matt Taibbi on the bank bailouts:

I have no doubt there were mountains of improprieties committed before and during these transactions. I think in the end we’re going to find out that the emergency bailouts of 2008 were really a wide-scale government-aided effort at consolidating financial power, in which the taxpayer was asked to fund a series of lucrative mergers that greatly limited consumer choices and made the entire financial system markedly less transparent. To me there’s a dangerous precedent involved when you have one group of investors who get all their news from the papers, and another group of active traders who are on the phone with the Treasury and the Fed in real-time as they marionette the economy.

Hiring the unemployed

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

A Wharton School publication says refusing to hire the unemployed is a really bad idea:

As an article yesterday in the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, some employers feel that people who fail to find a job after months of looking probably have “something wrong” with them. In addition, the article noted, companies worry that unemployed workers fall behind in job skills, especially when one in three job seekers has been out of work for more than a year.

Is that an accurate assumption? “It’s always tempting to give an ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’ response to such practices, but in this case, there really seems to be only one hand. This is a bad idea,” states Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli. “I’m sure what these employers are thinking is that people who lost their jobs did so because employers didn’t think they were good workers. The essence of a recession like this one, though, is that lots of people lose their jobs” because, for example, the plant closes, the company fails or the employer offers buy-outs.
Continue reading “Hiring the unemployed” →

Indiana

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Courage is contagious, and the Democrats in Indiana are taking a page out of the Wisconsin playbook:

Republicans control every Statehouse power base — governor, Senate and House — but they remain virtually powerless to enact laws so long as 39 House Democrats remain holed up in an Urbana, Ill., hotel.
For now, at least, Indiana’s GOP majority has been outmaneuvered.

Those 39 Democrats managed to shut down the House for a month and win concessions from Republicans on labor and education bills — and they’re angling for more.

As long as they hang together — and thus far the House Democrats are withstanding fines, the threat of censure and blistering accusations that they are derelict in their duty — the legislature is at an impasse.

Without them, the House lacks the quorum it needs to do business. For now, at least, Indiana’s GOP majority has been outmaneuvered.

Those 39 Democrats managed to shut down the House for a month and win concessions from Republicans on labor and education bills — and they’re angling for more.

As long as they hang together — and thus far the House Democrats are withstanding fines, the threat of censure and blistering accusations that they are derelict in their duty — the legislature is at an impasse.

Without them, the House lacks the quorum it needs to do business.

It’s a pretty interesting article, explaining all the pros and cons.

Ayn rantings

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Krugman (remember, your Times links are limited):

Greenspan writes in characteristic form: other people may have their models, but he’s the wise oracle who knows the deep mysteries of human behavior, who can discern patterns based on his ineffable knowledge of economic psychology and history.

Sorry, but he doesn’t get to do that any more. 2011 is not 2006. Greenspan is an ex-Maestro; his reputation is pushing up the daisies, it’s gone to meet its maker, it’s joined the choir invisible.

He’s no longer the Man Who Knows; he’s the man who presided over an economy careening to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — and who saw no evil, heard no evil, refused to do anything about subprime, insisted that derivatives made the financial system more stable, denied not only that there was a national housing bubble but that such a bubble was even possible.

If he wants to redeem himself through hard and serious reflection about how he got it so wrong, fine — and I’d be interested in listening. If he thinks he can still lecture us from his pedestal of wisdom, he’s wasting our time.

Welcome to the club

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

I wonder how many people drained their savings to cover COBRA payments because they thought they’d soon find a new job. That’s why the new healthcare law, as flawed as it is, is a big step toward building a safety net:

The millions of Americans who lost their jobs and their health benefits during the recession often had no way to regain affordable health coverage, leaving them and their families at risk of financial ruin, according to a new report from The Commonwealth Fund.

The spate of layoffs during the recession catapulted 9 million more Americans — or 57% of those who had had health insurance in a job that evaporated over the last two years — into the ranks of the millions already uninsured.
In addition, 19 million people anxiously seeking private coverage over the last three years were either turned down or could not find a plan that was affordable and met their needs, the report found.

The Biennial Health Insurance Survey also found a whopping 60% increase in skipped care due to cost in the past decade. The survey reported that medical debt problems and out-of-pocket spending costs were on the rise as well, with 29 million Americans using up their entire life savings to pay for medical bills and millions more unable to afford food, heat and rent due to medical payments.

“The report tells the story of the continuing deterioration of health care accessibility, efficiency, safety and affordability over the past decade,” Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis said during a noon press conference Tuesday. All this despite the fact that the United States spends more than any other country on health care, she added.

“Most recently it has failed the millions of Americans who lost their jobs during the recession and lost health benefits as well, leaving them with no place to turn for affordable health care coverage,” Davis said.

The Commonwealth Fund report focused on the struggles of the 43 million adults under 65 who have lost their health insurance along with their job over the past two years.

“The silver lining is that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has already begun to bring relief to families,” Davis added. “Once the new law is fully implemented, we can be confident that no future recession will have the power to strip so many Americans of their health security.”