Trumka: Obama Showed He Hears People Not Heard by 1%
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address tonight made clear that he hears the people who aren’t being heard by the 1 percent, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. Obama’s speech showed he “listened to the single mom working two jobs to get by, to the out-of-work construction worker, to the retired factory worker, to the student serving coffee to help pay for college.”
By laying out a vision of an America that can create jobs and prosperity for all instead of wealth for the few, Trumka said the president “voiced the aspirations and concerns of those who are too often ignored.”
Obama also made clear that the era of the 1 percent getting rich by looting the economy, rather than creating jobs, is over.
“Now it’s time for Congress to stop standing in the way of rebuilding our country and act,” Trumka said.
President Obama presented Congress a choice, Trumka said, between Obama’s vision of the need to invest to achieve stable, long-term prosperity for all and the vision of presidential candidates squabbling over how much further to cut the taxes of the 1 percent.
Obama “spoke to the confidence of working people that if we are determined and committed, we can revitalize ‘Made in the USA.’ That commitment to American manufacturing, made possible in part by enhanced enforcement of trade laws being violated by China , is welcome news to the too many productive, hard working Americans sitting idle unnecessarily.”
Trumka praised the President’s powerful insistance “on a more humble Wall Street subject to a thorough investigation of the misconduct in the mortgage markets that wrecked our economy,” and applauded the creation of a new mortgage crisis unit to be co-chaired by New York’s Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman. Read the rest of this entry »
White House: Insource Jobs, Decrease Inequality
 |
Is it patriotic to ship America’s jobs overseas? President Obama doesn’t think so. He’s right, of course. We live in a globally connected world, but let’s face it: Home-grown corporations must first focus on their own back yards—a novel concept all to many, it seems.
Obama implicitly raised the question yesterday during his Insourcing American Jobs Forum, which featured representatives from more than a dozen large and small businesses that have made decisions to bring jobs to the United States and to increase their investments here.
Pointing to the CEOs in the room, Obama said they ”take pride in hiring people here in America, not just because it’s increasingly the right thing to do for their bottom line, but also because it’s the right thing to do for their workers and for our communities and for our country.
I don’t want America to be a nation that’s primarily known for financial speculation and racking up debt buying stuff from other nations. I want us to be known for making and selling products all over the world stamped with three proud words: “Made in America.” And we can make that happen.
Cantor Cancels Speech as Occupy Philly Plans Protest
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) supposedly wants to talk about the nation’s inequality—but not to just anyone. Cantor, at the last minute, canceled an appearance this afternoon at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was slated to speak. Curiously enough, Occupy Philadelphia had organized a march from City Hall to the campus to protest Cantor’s speech. But Cantor’s not giving a reason for the cancellation.
Earlier this week, we noted that Cantor had shifted his rhetoric to seemingly take a softer line on the Occupy Wall Street movement. But despite changing his tactics from calling protesters “mobs” to suddenly going on the circuit to discuss inequality, Cantor’s “solution” is the same old rhetoric backed by the 1 percent: Don’t create jobs. Cut taxes on the rich.
Occupy Philadelphia and the rest of us 99 percenters around the country aren’t fooled.
Danger: Income Inequality Threatens National Stability
 |
Income inequality has become so severe in this nation that people in Really Important Positions (except for most Republicans in Congress) are starting to take note—and issue warnings.
Saying “income inequality is just getting worse and worse and worse,” James Chanos, president and founder of the New York-based investment firm Kynikos Associates, told Bloomberg this week that the widening gap between rich and poor is reshaping the U.S. economy, leaving it more vulnerable to recurring financial crises and less likely to generate enduring expansions. As Bloomberg paraphrased his comments:
Left unchecked, the decades-long trend toward increasing inequality may condemn Wall Street to a generation of unimpressive returns and even shake social stability….
Separately, Nouriel Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics and economics professor at New York University, published an article yesterday describing “The Instability of Inequality.” In it, Roubini argues that “globalization, unfettered financial capitalism, and Read the rest of this entry »
Creating Jobs the First Step to Ending Inequality in America
Adele Stan, a journalist and lifelong member of the labor movement, reports on a timely forum on inequality and jobs at Georgetown University today.
In Washington, D.C., as in dozens of other U.S. cities, the 99 percent movement is inescapable, even in the politest of venues, as demonstrated today at a forum titled “Jobs, Inequality and the Role of Government,” sponsored at the Georgetown Law School. The movement’s chant, “We are the 99 percent,” is meant to draw the distinction between the average American and the top 1 percent who possess 42 percent of the nation’s wealth.
Sponsored by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University and the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), the forum brought together economists and academics with representatives of labor, the financial community and the Obama administration. The 99 percent movement, as represented by young people working with Occupy D.C. and the October 2011 protests, made its presence felt in the question-and-answer session that followed opening remarks by CWA President Larry Cohen, Goldman Sachs Senior Investment Strategist Abby Joseph Cohen, and Jason Furman, White House adviser and deputy director of the National Economic Council.
Cohen presented a series of slides that told a grim tale of the economic fate of the average American who, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has suffered virtually stagnant wages while generating a nearly 200-percent growth in productivity. Cohen’s final chart suggested a major reason for the productivity/compensation disparity: compared with other major democracies, the United States lags far behind in collective bargaining coverage. Indeed, in a chart showing 10 major democracies—Germany, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, South Africa, Spain, Sweden and the U.K.—the United States ranked dead last.
As the representative of Goldman Sachs, which has become the poster child for corporate greed on both Read the rest of this entry »
Corporations Demand Tax Holiday for Wealthy That Didn’t Work Before
 |
The nation’s richest are trying to sell us on yet another shell game to keep from paying their fair share of taxes. Their lobbyists are pushing a so-called repatriation tax holiday—a huge cut in the tax rate on money companies are holding outside of the country.
The trick here is that we tried this before and it didn’t work out so well for taxpayers, so of course they want to do it again.
Dave Johnson, writing for the Campaign for America’s Future, spells out how this shell game works: companies manufacture a product in China or some other low-wage country and then sell and resell it through another shell company in a tax haven like the Cayman Islands. That shell then sells it to the U.S. company at a high price. So the profit is in the Caymans, where the cost was low and the sell price was high. And the U.S. company, which made a little profit, pays a low tax. Researchers say this shell game costs taxpayers $100 billion a year.
As long as the actual money isn’t brought into the United States, the company’s owners–the very rich (see chart above) don’t pay U.S. taxes on it. So after years of this scheme, a ton of cash—about $1 trillion– is sitting in these tax-haven countries. But the rich can’t use the cash to buy mansions, yachts and whatever else in the United States, if it’s sitting in a bank in the Caymans, but they don’t want to taxes on it.
So their lobbyists are trying to get Congress to pass a “repatriation tax holiday” on the profits they are holding outside of the country. They claim bringing the money home at a reduced tax rate would create jobs. But we’ve been burned once by that scheme. In 2004 Congress let corporations bring profits back to the U.S. at a tax rate of 5.25 percent, instead of the top corporate rate of 35 percent.
And the companies that got the money kept on cutting jobs and used the money to repurchase stock or pay dividends — and to send more jobs overseas according to the Congressional Research Service.
So, rather than trying to balance the budget by cutting services, Congress should look at figuring out way to put that $100 billion to work for ordinary Americans and not the very wealthy.
Click here to read Johnson’s full column, “Lobbyists Admit Corporate Tax ‘Holiday’ Didn’t Work, But Demand It Again.”
Growing Inequality Threatens Middle Class and Democracy
 |
|
Here’s why the One Nation movement is so important. The growing inequality between the super-rich and the rest of us is not only shrinking our middle class, it’s threatening our democracy.
One Nation is a multi-racial, civil and human rights movement whose mission is to reorder our nation’s priorities to invest in our nation’s most valuable resource—our people. One Nation is holding an Oct. 2 rally at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., with tens of thousands of activists, including thousands of union members, taking part.
Speaking at Harvard University this past April, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka warned that massive unemployment and growing inequality are fueling the forces that are spreading hate and misinformation. Saying “the stakes couldn’t be any higher,” Trumka told the audience:
If you care about defending our country against the apostles of hate, you need to be part of the fight to rebuild a sustainable, high wage economy built on good jobs—the kind of economy that can only exist when working men and women have a real voice on the job. Read the rest of this entry »
Global Inequality, Workplace Deaths Increase—No Coincidence
Two new reports paint a sobering picture of what growing global inequality really means. Not only are wages continuing to drop, lowering the standard of living for millions of workers and increasing the wage gap, but evidence is emerging that rising inequality can be bad for your health.
First, the International Labor Organization (ILO), an arm of the United Nations, reported in its “Global Wage Report: 2009 Update” last week that global growth in real wages slowed dramatically last year and is expected to drop even further this year. The report found that in half of the 35 countries for which figures are available, real monthly wages fell in the first quarter of 2009 compared to their average of 2008, often due to cuts in hours worked.
Showdown in Chicago: Thousands Protest Bankers
UPDATE: Check out photos and a video from today’s rally.
More than 5,000 people are packing the streets of downtown Chicago this morning, chanting, marching and rallying against Big Bankers and financial institutions that have taken taxpayer money and are using it to give big bonuses to CEOs and to lobby against financial reforms that would ensure they don’t go back on the public dole.
The crowd is marching to the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers, site of the American Bankers Association meeting, to protest the banking industry’s greed and irresponsibility that crippled our economy, leaving millions of workers behind.
After the house of cards they built collapsed, bankers and the financial industry took $700 billion in taxpayer funds for a bailout. But rather than reform their failed practices, they want to go back to business as usual—with the chance of again precipitating another financial collapse and need for taxpayer bailout in coming years.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who is joining union members and allies at today’s events, has a clear message to bankers: You work for us.
Showdown in Chicago
 |
|
I’m in Chicago for the American Bankers Association meeting. Oddly, I haven’t been invited to the Roaring ’20s dance party I hear they’re having.
Why wouldn’t they celebrate the era of wild money and hot times (which slid into the Great Depression)? After all, the bankers are doing well these days.
They’re doing well because after financial institutions caused the global economic crisis, we bailed them out, to the tune of some $700 billion.
Now they’re in good enough shape to pay the suits $7 billion in bonuses for driving working families and our economy to our knees—to the verge of a second full-fledged depression.
Things might be turning around for the bankers, but for the rest of us, unemployment heads toward 10 percent and home foreclosures continue to devastate families and communities. Working families have lost health care, pensions and savings—and in exchange we’ve gotten predatory lending, outrageous overdraft fees and sky-high credit card interest rates.
