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Witch hunter Joseph McCarthy would be proud of ALEC. So proud! Like McCarthy, the shadowy corporate lobby group wants oaths of allegiance.
McCarthy demanded loyalty pledges to the United States. ALEC, by contrast, wants its lawmaker members to vow first allegiance to ALEC.
ALEC (All Legislation Enhancing Corporations) asked the legislators it appoints as state directors to raise their right wings and swear: “I will act with care and loyalty and put the interests of the organization first.”
ALEC first. Before the lawmaker’s constituents. Before the interests of the lawmaker’s state. Before the constitution of the United States. ALEC asked its lawmakers to forsake their oaths of office and swear fidelity instead to the organization that wines, dines, indulges and indoctrinates them with buckets full of corporate cash. The ALEC loyalty oath clarifies the allegiance of the 1,810 state legislators that ALEC claims as members. They see their primary duty as serving corporations, specifically the corporations that give millions to ALEC.
ALEC (the sham that calls itself the American Legislative Exchange Council) is a secretive corporate front group that solicits money from corporations and spends it flying lawmaker-members to conferences in swanky settings where they help corporate members write legislation to fatten the corporate bottom line. The lawmakers take ALEC legislation back to their states, where they often introduce it word-for-corporate-written-word, sometimes with the ALEC logo still affixed to the pages.
This process effectively eliminates those pesky voters from lawmaking. ALEC is the middle man bringing corporations and lawmakers together, facilitating a process in which corporations craft legislation for themselves, then lawmakers, all fat and happy on the corporate dime, take that legislation home and get it passed. No citizen input needed, thank you.
“Stand your ground laws” are an ALEC achievement. These shoot-first-ask-questions-later decrees create deadly situations like the one in which George Zimmerman walked free after shooting unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin.
Shoot first laws are great for gun manufacturers, assuring no liability for hotheads who rashly use their products. Florida’s shoot first law wasn’t so great for Trayvon Martin. And, as it turns out, shoot first wasn’t great for ALEC, which lost about 400 lawmaker members and at least 40 significant corporate sponsors as a result of publicity linking ALEC to the shoot first laws and other legislation detrimental to citizens, such as ALEC’s voter suppression legislation requiring citizens to perform backflips through flaming hoops before exercising their most basic right in a democracy.
ALEC documents leaked to The Guardian newspaper reveal the shadow group’s latest campaign to enrich corporate members at the expense of citizens. ALEC wants homeowners who have bought and installed solar panels or wind turbines to pay utility companies to accept the excess electricity they generate.
When utilities get power from oil or coal-fired generators or nuclear plants, they pay for it. But ALEC’s energy industry members want homeowners who produce renewable energy to be treated differently. They want homeowners who produce green electricity to pay the utility to take it, and then the utility would sell it.
The utility gets paid by both the energy producer and user! It’s a win-win, where the utility wins twice. For green energy producers and consumers, it’s a lose-lose.
Such legislation is the reason ALEC needs that loyalty oath – to get lawmakers to swear to serve corporations and ignore constituents.
ALEC claims it didn’t adopt the loyalty oath. But citizens have no way of knowing if that’s true because ALEC’s meetings are clandestine affairs, no reporters or citizens allowed. Documents leaked to The Guardian newspaper reveal that ALEC proposed the oath at its August meeting. It’s contained in a massive list of duties for state legislative coordinators, a list so long that it’s not clear when coordinators would have time to work for the citizens of their state, a list complete with an agreement signature sheet where the coordinator would swear to complete the work for ALEC.
ALEC met again last week. Maybe it adopted the loyalty oath then. Again, the public doesn’t know because ALEC excluded reporters and citizens from its work sessions. It allowed reporters only to attend speeches by Republican publicity seekers such as Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who insisted on shutting down the government for 16 days in a failed attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act and deny millions health insurance.
Cruz said he loves ALEC almost as much as he loves seeing his own face on television. Then he slandered Sen. Dick Durbin, who conducted hearings earlier this year on ALEC’s role in propagating shoot first laws.
In a warped attempt to be funny, Cruz attributed to Sen. Durbin a frightening McCarthy line. Cruz told the ALEC members: “I was just at the Capitol and I was asked to pass along an inquiry from Sen. Durbin: ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of ALEC?’”
Cruz is wrong. Americans should be asking that question because they can’t be sure their state lawmakers haven’t sworn first allegiance to ALEC and thus foresworn their duty to first serve the citizens of their states and uphold the constitution.
ALEC claims 1,810 state lawmakers hand over – or get their state taxpayers to pay for them –$100 ALEC membership dues. But that might be an exaggeration. For example, ALEC claims every single legislator in Iowa – all 150 of them, Democrats included – and every single legislator in South Dakota – all 105 of them, Democrats included – are members. This is an organization that describes its mission as advancing free markets, limited government and federalism. Those are the priorities of the Tea Party, not Democrats.
While some organizations have tried to compile ALEC membership lists based on leaked ALEC documents, some individual lawmakers on those lists, particularly Democrats, have publicly denied any association with ALEC.
Voters have a right to know where the allegiance of their lawmakers’ lies. They should be asking if their elected representatives have sworn to serve ALEC first. And if so, those should be the first to go.
At the first Thanksgiving, there was no expression of the sentiment: “I built this feast by myself.” Native Americans sat side by side with pilgrims – religious leader by huntsman, chief by planter. They shared the bounty they’d all worked to create.
This Thanksgiving will be very different for too many American workers. They won’t share in the bounty they helped create. The perfect symbol of that is an Ohio Walmart placing bins in an employee-only area asking low-paid workers to donate Thanksgiving food to their low-paid colleagues.
The six Waltons who own Walmart are the richest family in the world. They’re worth $102.7 billion, more than America’s poorest 49 million families put together. The Waltons’ turkeys will be served with gold leaf on gold platters. By private chefs. On very, very private estates. There won’t be any Walmart greeters or cashiers or stock boys sitting side by side with Waltons at their opulent celebration of bounty. Meantime, the Waltons pay such poverty wages that Walmart workers can’t afford their own Thanksgiving meals. The Walton heirs’ gluttonous, aristocratic attitude betrays the promise of the New World.
It’s not unique to the Waltons, although they bear special responsibility as the nation’s largest private sector employer, one that made $15.7 billion last year. Other highly profitable corporations, particularly fast food restaurants, also pay poverty wages to workers while handing to CEOs and stockholders virtually all of the benefits derived from front-line labor.
McDonald’s, like Walmart, is so immersed in this patrician philosophy that it offers its 700,000 U.S. workers clueless advice instead of decent wages. Earlier this year, McDonald’s provided workers with a budget to help them make ends meet on pittance pay. McDonald’s told them to take a second job, work 80 hours a week! Even then, the budget didn’t account for heating bills.
A raise would work much better for most workers. That’s exactly what McDonald’s gave its CEOs last year. It tripled the pay of its new and retiring CEOs. The new guy, Jim Skinner, now gets $27.7 million. That’ll buy a lot of turkeys.
Now, on the eve of Thanksgiving, McDonald’s has offered its workers some more advice – including breaking their food into small pieces so they’ll feel full after eating less. Good advice for workers who can’t afford a Happy Meal, let alone a turkey and trimmings.
Also, McDonald’s McResource site tells workers not to whine about their low wages and empty stomachs. Don’t worry, be happy, it warns: “Stress hormone levels rise by 15% after ten minutes of complaining.”
Many McDonald’s workers are ignoring that counsel. Like Walmart workers, fast food workers are taking to the streets in strikes and protests. They want their employers, who are wealthy from the sweat of laborers, to share the bounty workers helped create.
The biggest single action by Walmart workers was last Black Friday – that big shopping day after Thanksgiving. Since then, Walmart workers have taken to the streets in increasing numbers across the nation.
Similarly, fast food workers began a wave of strikes last November in New York City, and those protests now have spread to 60 cities.
Participation takes valor from workers who can’t make it paycheck to paycheck. They know striking means risking everything. Many have suffered for demanding decent treatment.
Just last week, the Office of General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board found merit to allegations that Walmart unlawfully surveilled, threatened, punished or fired workers who engaged in legally protected strikes and protests in 14 states. Resolution for these workers could take years, however.
The protesting workers are asking their employers to pay them living wages. They don’t want to depend on taxpayer aid.
That’s right. Taxpayers prop up the payrolls of the fabulously wealthy Walton family and the highly profitable fast food corporations.
A report issued last month by researchers at Berkeley and other universities, titled “Fast Food, Poverty Wages: The Public Cost of Low-Wage Jobs in the Fast-Food Industry” calculates that the cost to taxpayers in welfare payments, food stamps and other public assistance to the families of fast food workers is more than $10 billion a year.
The researchers found that fast food workers’ families are enrolled in public assistance programs at twice the rate of the overall U.S. workforce.
It’s a similar story at Walmart, where 1.4 million Americans work. A study earlier this year by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce found that one Walmart Supercenter can cost taxpayers as much as $1.7 million a year in public benefits for low-paid workers. That study is aptly titled, “The Low-Wage Drag on Our Economy: Wal-Mart's Low Wages and Their Effect on Taxpayers and Economic Growth.”
A Walmart spokesman, Kory Lundberg, tried to put a positive spin on the Thanksgiving food donation bins at the Ohio store. He said the food drive is proof that workers care about each other. That is true. It is workers supporting workers.
Then he added: “This is part of the company’s culture to rally around associates and take care of them when they face extreme hardships.”
That is not true. The Waltons aren’t depositing turkeys and yams in those bins. Those bins are there because the Waltons don’t rally around their associates; the Waltons don’t care that their workers face extreme hardships – hardships that would be avoided if the Waltons paid a living wage.
Walmart workers are planning more protests this week on Black Friday, as many as 1,500 across the country. They are asking for your help, and you can find out how by going to this Working America site. It will be too late to change this year’s Thanksgiving for low-paid workers. But if you take McDonald’s advice to not worry and be happy, you can participate with the belief that your efforts will change next year’s Thanksgiving from bleakness to some semblance of bounty for millions of American workers.
Typically, the GOP styles itself as the all-knowing party, the party so God-like that it has the right to control how individual citizens live their lives.
GOPers believe, for example, that low income cancer victims don’t need to live at all, so Republicans in 25 states refused the Medicaid expansion that would have provided health insurance to struggling families. Because GOPers believe they – not individual women – should control women’s bodies, Republicans have repeatedly tried to outlaw birth control.
Until recently, GOPers pretty well concealed the belief of some in their party that they should also control corporations. They call themselves the free enterprise party. To many GOPers, that means they should be free to control enterprises. That is because they think they are smarter than corporate executives. Recently, Republicans openly displayed their contempt for CEO decision-making. They ridiculed executives who encouraged their workforce to unionize and sued to stop companies from remaining neutral during union organizing campaigns. Republicans hate unions, and since they believe they know best, they’re not going to allow corporations to accept unions.
Just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the lawsuit that right-wingnuts filed to criminalize corporate neutrality in union organizing campaigns. The gist of the suit is this:
A union called Unite Here was helping workers at a Florida racetrack, Mardi Gras Gaming, to organize so they could collectively bargain for better wages and benefits. Unite Here and Mardi Gras struck a neutrality deal in 2004 under which Mardi Gras would provide the union with access to the racetrack to talk to workers and would voluntarily recognize the union without a secret ballot election if more than half of the workers signed cards stating their desire to be represented by Unite Here.
The union promised that workers would not picket or boycott the casino during the organizing effort. And it would campaign for a ballot initiative to allow Mardi Gras to add slot machines, a measure the union favored anyway because it would create more jobs at the track.
Unite Here sought the neutrality agreement because such deals increase the success rate in union organizing. When a union secured a neutrality agreement with voluntary recognition, like the Mardi Gras pact, 78 percent of organizing campaigns succeeded while only 46 percent of efforts without the deals did, according to research by Adrienne Eaton and Jill Kriesky.
Mardi Gras clearly felt the deal served its purposes. Unite Here estimates that it gave $100,000 in time and money to help win the ballot initiative.
After Mardi Gras got the ballot vote it wanted, however, it reneged on the neutrality deal. It cut wages and fired 10 workers who had signed an organizing flyer. Then it backed a lawsuit filed by the National Right to Work (For Less) Committee, a GOP hand maiden, on behalf of one worker who didn’t want the union.
In that suit, the Right to Work (RTW) For Less Committee is asking the court to declare neutrality agreements illegal. Federal law forbids companies from delivering anything of value to unions. That’s intended to prevent CEOs from bribing union leaders with stuff like cash and Cadillacs to accept crappy contracts. RTW for Less contends a neutrality pact is a thing of value.
The GOP, through its RTW For Less mouthpiece, wants to order corporations never to accept unions. This bit of conversation from the court arguments captures that:
Justice Elena Kagan asked William Messenger of the RTW For Less Committee if he was contending a company is forbidden from inviting a union onto its property even if the employer’s philosophy was: "I think that my employees should have a right to listen. . .and to decide for themselves whether they want to be represented."
"That's correct," replied Messenger, asserting that a company has no right to allow a union on its property. The GOP thinks it knows best. For the GOP, best is no unions. So it’s going to make sure employers can’t allow unions, even if the company would prefer to collectively bargain with its workers.
The GOP sent that message loudly to Volkswagen earlier this year. VW told the workers at its Chattanooga, Tenn., plant that it would like to create a works council there. To do that in the United States, the plant must be unionized because the council negotiates labor issues with the employer, the company told the New York Times.
When it became clear that VW, which deals with unions at all of its other major plants, would maintain a neutral stance toward a United Auto Worker (UAW) effort to organize the Chattanooga plant, Republicans began ridiculing the corporation. GOP Sen. Bob Corker, a former Chattanooga mayor, said, for example, that VW would become a “laughingstock” if it partnered with the UAW. Tennessee GOP Gov. Bill Haslam and other Tennessee Republicans flatly told VW officials to reject the union.
GOPers Corker and Haslam insist they know what’s best for this international corporation.
Some big time GOP groups are backing efforts to persuade VW workers to reject the union. GOP anti-tax guru Grover Norquist’s group, Americans for Tax Reform, has bankrolled consultant Matt Patterson’s scheme to kill union efforts in Chattanooga, according to an investigation by In These Times.
In an op-ed, Patterson compared the UAW organizing effort to the Civil War. Using the charged language of those who fought to sustain slavery and glorifying a battle won by the forces of slavery, Patterson wrote:
“Today, Southeastern Tennessee faces invasion from another union – an actual labor union. . . One hundred and fifty years ago, the people of Tennessee routed such a force in the Battle of Chickamauga. Let their descendants go now and do likewise.”
In the radio version of Father Know Best, the patriarch was an arrogant potentate. He would say, for example, “What a bunch of stupid children I have!”
That is how Republicans have always regarded workers. Now they’ve revealed they feel the same way about CEOs.
In a shocking turn of events, Republicans now care about whether Americans have health insurance!
It happened quite suddenly. The moment can be precisely pinpointed. It occurred early in the day of Oct. 1 when the media declared the launch of the Affordable Care Act website a fiasco.
Bam! Presto change-o! The GOP saw an opportunity and seized it, no matter that it required complete reversal of the party’s previous policy position. Congressional Republicans railed and ranted about the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Affordable Care Act website denying Americans the ability to sign up for health insurance. Not only that, the GOPers cried, some insurance companies were cancelling the policies of some constituents!
Before this miraculous transformation, the GOP had for years fought all attempts to provide health insurance to the 47 million Americans without it. Not one Republican voted for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which will extend coverage to 25 million Americans. Then House Republicans voted 46 times to cripple or kill the law.
Republican lawmakers in 22 states refused the ACA’s Medicaid expansion that would have enabled 5 million of those states’ residents to get coverage. Republicans shut down the government for 16 days in a failed attempt to defund the ACA. And Republicans created the “burn your Obamacare card” campaign to persuade young people to pay fines and risk bankruptcy and death by refusing ACA health insurance.
But that’s all over. Presto change-o! Now Republicans want Americans – including young people – to get health insurance! They’re outraged, really OUTRAGED, that the faulty ACA exchange website is making it difficult for Americans to buy insurance. They’re doubly outraged that insurance companies have cancelled the policies of some constituents because, apparently, they think Americans can only purchase insurance on the exchanges and not the way they’ve previously always bought it – directly from insurance companies.
“My constituents are frightened,” announced U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, “They are being forced out of health care plans they like. The clock is ticking. The federal website is broken. Their health care isn’t a glitch.”
That is true! Health care is important to Texans who can afford to buy their own plans! Republicans like Brady believe, however, that health insurance is not important at all for the 1 million low-income Texans who would have qualified for it under the ACA Medicaid expansion – the expansion that the Texas GOP refused to accept, thus denying low-income people coverage.
That’s quite a glitch for low-income residents of the state that likes boasting about its big stuff – like its record of being number one in the country for the highest rate of uninsured people!
Brady claims to be very, very angry that the website is faulty. But a faulty federal website is exactly what he and other Republicans wanted. They did everything they could to ensure that’s what happened.
If they wanted to improve the likelihood that their constituents would get a smooth-operating system, they could have set up their own state-based exchange websites. Kentucky did that, and its site is being held up as a model for what the federal site could be once it’s repaired. Similarly, there have been few complaints from residents of the 12 other states that established their own exchanges.
Usually, Republicans are all for states’ rights. They hate centralized, federal power. But not in this case! That’s because they knew the more states that piled into the federal exchange, the more crushing the demand and the more likely something would go buggy. And that’s exactly what they got! Thirty-six states rebuffed the opportunity for local autonomy, and Republicans got what they wanted – something else to complain about, even if that means they’re whining that their constituents can’t get the very insurance that Republicans never wanted them to get anyway.
Brady’s complaint about insurers dropping clients is legitimate. It’s outrageous. The law allowed some of these plans to continue – grandfathered in – even though they didn’t comply with the new rules. But some insurance companies cancelled them anyway.
In some other cases, the policies didn’t qualify for grandfathering. And in some, the insurer would have cancelled them whether the ACA had been passed or not. Such cancellations occurred regularly in the past.
In some cases, the insurers sent the policy holders threatening termination letters. Some policy holders interpreted these letters to mean that they had to buy more expensive policies immediately or lose coverage. At least one state has fined a national insurer for misleading policy holders.
In another case, an insurer cancelled the plan that covered a Seattle woman, her husband and 15-year-old daughter and recommended they accept a new plan at an extra $300 a month. The letter didn’t mention Washington’s state insurance exchange, where the woman found a plan that will cost her family $1,000 less a month than the one the insurer told her to accept.
Her conclusion: “People who are afraid of the ACA should be much more afraid of the insurance companies.”
Not everyone will be as lucky as this Seattle woman. In the end, the ACA will probably force about 3 percent of Americans to buy higher-quality and probably more expensive health plans. Another 3 percent will have to buy a new plan but will pay about the same amount for about the same benefits. Eighty percent of people will be unaffected. And 14 percent will benefit greatly. These are the Americans who are currently uninsured and will gain access to affordable policies under the ACA.
That’s not perfect. But now that Republicans have decided they care whether Americans have access to health insurance, surely they will be working night and day to assist the 3 percent who will have to pay more, and no longer trying to kill the law that will help 25 million Americans get health insurance.
Anthony Tenny told Clearwater Paper several times that he was concerned about working in excessive red cedar dust at its Lewiston, Idaho, sawmill. But nothing changed. So he reported his fears to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
Within a month of OSHA inspecting the plant, Clearwater fired Mr. Tenny – despite his six-year tenure, supervisors’ praise and promotions. Five days after Clearwater sacked Mr. Tenny, another worker, John Bergen III, a 10-year Clearwater veteran, died after inadvertently stepping into a gaping opening in the floor of the adjacent paper products plant.
It’s reprehensible that thousands of workers still are killed on the job every year. It’s unconscionable that employers punish workers for reporting hazards. And it’s outrageous that workers who are fired illegally aren’t adequately protected. The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 established workers’ rights to safe workplaces, to refuse to labor in hazardous conditions and to be free from retaliation for reporting dangers. But OSHA, the underfunded agency charged with enforcing the law, can’t effectively shield either workers or whistleblowers. The agency is a soleless work boot – fine on the surface but failing its purpose. As a result, it’s not safe at work and not safe reporting dangers at work.
Last week, OSHA filed a whistleblower complaint in federal court against Clearwater, seeking $300,000 in compensatory and punitive damages for Mr. Tenny.
It has been a long time coming for the husband and father who lives in a small town dominated by Clearwater. The Clearwater pulp, paperboard, and consumer product facilities and the sawmill, now owned by Idaho Forest Group, employ about 2,000 in the town of 32,000.
Three difficult years have elapsed since Mr. Tenny lost what was a good, family-supporting job. Now, finally, OSHA has his back. Mr. Tenny, 48, completed training and has a new job. But he felt stung again last week when some local press stories about the OSHA lawsuit noted that Clearwater gave him a drug screen before firing him but neglected to report that the test results were negative, according to his attorneys, Erika Birch and Jonathan Thorne of Jobs for Justice.
The Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, Dr. David Michaels, said when OSHA filed Tenny’s case: “Raising a workplace safety and health concern is a courageous act of good citizenship. Not a single worker should fear harassment, intimidation or a disciplinary action for contributing to a safe and healthy workplace.”
But workers do fear retaliation. And for good reason. OSHA doesn’t protect them. It is hobbled by antiquated legislative language and inadequate staff. That’s the assessment of the Center for Effective Government in a report it issued last month titled, “Securing the Right to a Safe and Healthy Workplace.”
OSHA is so shorthanded that it depends heavily on workers themselves, as opposed to OSHA inspectors, to report hazards. OSHA is without sufficient staff because for decades Congress has failed to properly fund the agency. In 1981, OSHA had one federal inspector for every 1,900 workplaces. Since then, as workers and employers increased, the number of inspectors declined, so that by 2011, there was one OSHA inspector for every 4,300 workplaces, one for every 62,000 workers.
The sequester cuts made matters worse, slicing the OSHA budget. The number of retaliation complaints filed with OSHA rose 46 percent between 2005 and 2012, but with budget and staff cuts, OSHA was less able to deal with them.
On top of all that is the weak whistleblower language in the law itself. It gives workers too little time – only 30 days – to file a complaint. The burden of proof is too high. OSHA takes too long to investigate, and if it declines to take action, the worker is prohibited from seeking relief through the courts himself. Newer whistleblower statutes for other agencies provide better protections, such as longer periods in which to file complaints and recognition of the right to pursue a case privately if the government declines to act.
The Center for Effective Government report says this: “several provisions of the OSH Act are too narrow and the remedies too weak to actually protect workers. . . The end result is that federal law simply does not protect workers who demand a safe and healthy workplace.”
OSHA workers themselves acknowledge that. A federal Government Accountability Office survey found less than 10 percent of OSHA inspectors believed an employee who filed a complaint would be protected from retaliation.
The Protecting America’s Workers Act would have remedied many of these problems. But Congress failed to pass it. President Obama asked for more money for the OSHA whistleblower program, but Congress refused to provide it.
Recognizing the problems on the federal level, the Center for Effective Government recommends state legislation to protect workers. And it notes that some states over the years have adopted such laws.
But just last week, another research organization, the Economic Policy Institute, issued a report detailing state legislative attacks on worker wages, rights and workplace standards over the past two years. The author, Gordon Lafer, writes that these destructive initiatives, sought by corporations, included measures undermining workplace safety protections. It doesn’t seem likely, then, that states will increase workers’ whistleblower rights and safeguards.
When employers face no sanctions for retaliating against workers who report hazards, it sends a powerful message to other workers to keep their mouths shut and accept the risk of death on the job. A country that sustains such a policy is soulless.
Pope Francis has the antidote for what ails the United States. He gave the Catholic Church’s 1.2 billion followers a dose last week when he suspended the Bishop of Bling.
The German bishop, Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, bought himself a $20,000 bathtub while spending $42 million renovating his residence. It’s an echo of John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief executive who bought a $35,000 toilet while spending $1.2 million on office renovations just months before confessing to $56 billion in losses.
Unlike Elst and Thain, Pope Francis is beloved for his asceticism. He lives in Spartan rooms and drives a 1984 Renault. He runs an organization as big as any American corporation. Yet he doesn’t demand millions in pay and perks. American CEOs, by contrast, place themselves on $35,000 thrones bought with the sweat of struggling minimum wage workers. The income inequality they’ve caused over the past half century is corrosive to the American ideal of an egalitarian society free of grotesquely wealthy royalty. It’s poisoning the cherished concept that any American who works hard and follows the rules can make it.
The Catholic Church is not without sin. Sex abuse scandals and cover-ups have rocked the faith of the devout. But Pope Francis seems to be uplifting the church, returning it spiritually to the days when its leader ministered to the poor, healed lepers and expelled money changers from the temple. Pope Francis sets the example, wearing plain loafers instead of the handmade red leather slippers of his predecessor and taking the name of the medieval saint known in Italy as the poverello or little poor man. Suspending the Bishop of Bling suggests Pope Francis won’t tolerate imperial behavior by subordinates either.
American CEOs and boards of directors should take note. The income inequality they’ve fostered with outsized CEO pay packages and paltry wages for workers is creating an American royal class served by serfs. Instead of fixing that problem as Pope Francis is, they’re trying to conceal it.
The numbers are staggering. Bloomberg calculates the average CEO of a Standard & Poor’s 500 Index corporation gets 204 times what the typical worker receives. In other words, if the median worker earns $30,000, the CEO is pulling down $6,120,000 – yeah, more than $6 million.
Some of the disparities are way worse. Take Ronald Johnson’s pay package, for example. The former CEO of JC Penney Co. got $53.3 million last year. The average JC Penney worker got $29,688, Bloomberg figured using government averages for department store wages.
That’s a ratio of 1,795 to 1. It means the JC Penney board of directors decided that Johnson was worth 1,795 times the average Penney’s worker. Or, to put it another way, the JC Penney board determined that it would take 1,795 Penney’s workers to equal the talent of one Ronald Johnson, a guy whose leadership resulted in a disastrous, money-losing 25 percent drop in sales. The board booted their $53 million man within 18 months.
Johnson’s super-paid poor performance is typical. The Institute for Policy Studies reviewed the accomplishments of 241 corporate chief executives who ranked among America’s 25 top-paid CEOS in one or more of the past 20 years and found nearly 40 percent were bailed out by taxpayers, busted for fraud or booted like Johnson of Penney’s and Thain, of over-priced toilet fame.
CEO compensation continues to skyrocket while rank-and-file worker pay stagnates. Bloomberg determined that the ratio between CEO and worker wages rose 20 percent since 2009, meaning the guy at the top kept getting more while workers’ pay went nowhere. This has been the pattern for half a century in the United States, where these ratios are much higher than they are in Europe. In Norway, for example, it’s 58-to-1. In the 1950s, academics put the U.S. figure at 20-to-1. It rose rapidly since then, meaning executives got more and more in relationship to workers: increasing to 42-to-1 in 1980, then up to 120-to-1 in 2000.
The excessive pay and stock bonuses that executives get don’t necessarily translate to good decisions for shareholders, workers or communities as CEOs strive to personally benefit from short-term gains instead of long-term investments. British economist Andrew Smithers figures that in the 1970s, American companies devoted to investments 15 times as much capital as they distributed to shareholders. Now it’s less than 2 to 1. Today, CEOs suck out companies’ value rather than building for the future.
Federal law has long required corporations to reveal CEO pay, but it did not mandate that corporations determine the wages of their typical workers and publish that too. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is supposed to change that. It requires public companies to report the ratio between the CEO’s package and the pay of the median worker.
Finally, after a three-year delay, the Securities and Exchange Commission last month proposed regulations for disclose of this information. CEOs and their lobbyists immediately redoubled their efforts to scuttle this requirement.
They realize it’s demoralizing for workers to discover that their corporation’s CEO took $96 million out of the company, as Oracle’s Lawrence Ellison did last year. But they know it’s worse, it’s actually demeaning to employees when the board of directors awards the CEO 1,287 times what it pays the typical worker for his labor and devotion to the company. That 1,287-to-1 figure is Bloomberg’s estimate for the CEO-to-worker pay ratio at Oracle.
CEOs and board members don’t want workers to get that pay ratio information. They don’t want workers to feel degraded, and thus a little less devoted. And they don’t want to be humiliated by shocking ratios at companies like JC Penney where the CEO’s decisions damaged the corporation.
But a little mortification can get good results – like removal of the Bishop of Bling. The SEC should ignore corporate protests about the pay reporting requirements.
And corporate boards should behave more like Pope Francis, banishing imperial CEOs and rejecting royal pay package demands. If they did, they wouldn’t have to fear embarrassment when those pay ratio numbers get released.
Republicans characterize the ordeal they just subjected the country to as a war. House Speaker John Boehner said, “We fought the good fight. We just didn’t win.”
Sen. John McCain said, “Republicans have to understand we have lost this battle, as I predicted weeks ago, that we would not be able to win because we were demanding something that was not achievable.”
Just like any war, this one cost blood and bounty. Republicans wounded their party with their failed gambit to defund the Affordable Care Act by shutting government and threatening default. But what’s worse is they bloodied the economy. At a time when millions are struggling to find work, the Republican hostage taking depressed growth and killed jobs. It’s one thing for the GOP to blast itself in the foot, it’s unconscionable for Republicans to shoot America.
Deservedly, the GOP is suffering from its self-inflicted injury. A Washington Post-ABC poll found nearly three-quarters of Americans disapproved of Republicans. And it wasn’t just Democrats and Independents griping. The poll showed 47 percent of Republicans disapproved of Congressional Republicans.
A Doylestown Republican’s comments to the New York Times explain that disgust. Jean Naples is outraged that the government shutdown disrupted funerals for U.S. soldiers. But more pertinent to supposedly Main Street-loving Republicans was her complaint that the shutdown caused a severe cash flow problem for her husband’s business.
McCain conceded the damage to the GOP, again using combat language: “This is a hard blow to the Republican Party.”
Republicans can pummel their own party if they want to, but what’s amazing is that 18 of them in the Senate and 144 in the House voted against restoring government services and paying America’s debts. They voted to continue pulling billions out of the economy, hurting businesses like those owned by Jean Naples’ husband, and furloughing hundreds of thousands of federal workers. They voted to continue battering America.
The economy was cannon fodder for these Republicans. Standard & Poor’s estimated that the 16-day shutdown took $24 billion out of the economy and suppressed growth. S&P predicted growth would decline to 2.4 percent in the fourth quarter. That’s significantly below the 3 percent projected before Republicans closed government. Growth means job creation; slower growth means fewer jobs.
With government workers furloughed, the work they did that is essential to business stopped. That included inspecting imports, financing exports and issuing permits for oil and gas wells. The nation’s king-crab fishing fleet, for example, couldn’t leave the Seattle harbor because these small business owners couldn’t get the necessary permits. Companies and home buyers couldn’t get federally backed financing. Businesses dependent on visitors to federal parks and monuments lost money and laid off workers.
“This is as dangerous to us as an earthquake,” the owner of a restaurant near a closed national park told the New York Times. The economic toll from the shuttering of Zion National Park forced four counties in Utah to declare a state of emergency. The National Park Service calculated the monument and park closures cost the economy $76 million a day.
Similarly, the U.S. Travel Association estimated that the shutdown cost $152 million a day in lost travel. Around the capital, $217 million a day was lost in federal and contractor wages. They were sitting ducks in the GOP war on government.
The conservative Peter G. Peterson Foundation estimated that crisis-driven fiscal policy – like Republicans threatening to shut down the government any time they don’t get their way – and the uncertainty in the market that has caused over the past several years – already cost the country 900,000 jobs. The October shutdown killed even more jobs. A survey by the Business Roundtable, a trade group, found that half of top executives cut their hiring plans because of the government closure and default threat. To the GOP, job losses are just collateral damage.
The shutdown may continue to bludgeon the economy for months to come. After Republicans went to the brink of default in 2011, S&P downgraded the credit rating of the United States. This time, another major agency, Fitch Ratings, issued a negative outlook. A downgrade by Fitch could roil markets and raise borrowing costs – not just for the government, but also for home buyers and businesses.
The uncertainty caused by the threat of default already increased the cost of government borrowing. HIS Global Insight estimated that a rise in rates on Treasury bills means taxpayers will have to pony up an extra $114 million in interest for one week’s worth of borrowing.
Business confidence dipped in October. And consumer confidence plunged, similar to its nosedive when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, starting the Great Recession. That means the holidays may not be very happy for retailers or seasonal job seekers.
Businesses and consumers justifiably fear that Republicans will close the government again on Jan. 15, when financing expires under the deal approved last week. GOP Representatives John Fleming of Louisiana and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois already threatened to do that. Kinzinger happily recounted Boehner assuring the Tea Party last week, “This isn’t the end of the fight.”
The deal to open the government, Fleming said, “will get us into Round 2. See, we’re going to start this all over again.”
To Republicans, governing is a fistfight, a war. It’s about destruction: defunding the Affordable Care Act, dismantling Social Security, demolishing Medicare, disassembling the National Labor Relations Board. It’s gunning down America.
In the early days, the iconic image of D.C.-hating Tea Partiers was a sign reading: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Occasionally their protest placards added a little profanity to that directive. Right now, though, Tea Partiers should be cursing their Republican bedfellows.
While privately laughing at a group that would demand the government keep its hands off of a government program, Republicans propped up Tea Partiers, with corporate-backed groups like Americans for the Prosperous giving them untold millions in funding.
Tea Partiers, in return, took up the Republican attack on the Affordable Care Act, seeking to deny health care for 50 million uninsured Americans while insisting no one touch their health insurance – Medicare. Last week, though, the GOP threw Tea Partiers under the bus. And the guy who shoved first was Tea Party darling Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who proposed in a <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230344200457912394366916789... Street Journal op-ed</a> that House Republicans <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/us/politics/ryan-is-again-in-the-foref... about defunding the Affordable Care Act and cut Medicare instead</a>.
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Soon after President Obama was first elected, a ragtag bunch of protesters, egged on by rabid right-wing talk show hosts, took to public squares with Gadsten Flags and signs protesting the Wall Street bailout, government in general and any attempt to cut Medicare or Social Security. Conservative, libertarian and business groups seized this opportunity, <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/2010/0919/Who-s-picking-up-the-ta... the supposedly grassroots groups with massive financial backing. </a>
Bankrolling, schooling and organizing the motley protesters provided wealthy, right-wing ideologues like the Koch brothers with a mechanism to convert their <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/2010/0919/Who-s-picking-up-the-ta... agenda into what appeared to be a movement.</a>
Early on these right wing subsidizers, <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/2010/0919/Who-s-picking-up-the-ta... Heritage Action for America and FreedomWorks to Club for Growth and the Koch brothers’ Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce</a>, opposed the Affordable Care Act. They goaded and organized Tea Partiers to protest it at town meetings across America.
Together, right-wing money and “grassroots” Tea Partiers, supported GOP candidates Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, who promised to destroy the Affordable Care Act, even though it was based on a health insurance plan Romney had instituted as governor of Massachusetts.
Unfazed when the American people rejected Romney and Ryan, the well-heeled right-wingers met in Washington shortly after President Obama’s second inauguration <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/us/a-federal-budget-crisis-months-in-t... devise a new scheme to kill the Affordable Care Act. </a>
They concocted a plan to persuade conservative lawmakers to refuse to finance the federal government until Democrats and President Obama agreed to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/us/a-federal-budget-crisis-months-in-t... the Affordable Care Act</a>. Two weeks ago, Republicans in the House began holding the government hostage to that demand.
At first, the GOP and Tea Party thought it was all good. They hate the government, so shutting it down was fun for them. They hate the Affordable Care Act, so plotting extortion to destroy it was a kick for them.
But then, stuff started going wrong for them.
The American people didn’t like the government shut down. They wanted their National Parks open. They wanted their <a href="http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/08/20873175-routine-fda-inspecti... inspected and <a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/shutdown-salmonella-2/">salmon... outbreaks</a> stopped. They wanted all <a href="http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/us/wwii-vets-exert-right-to-vis... War II veterans</a> to regain easy access to the monument dedicated to them. They wanted the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan to be flown to meet flag-draped caskets.
Businessmen and women were angry too. The indefinite shutdown created uncertainty and cut profits. More than <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/10/10/furloughs-... furloughed federal workers</a> weren’t spending money on Main Street. Untold millions weren’t visiting national parks and monuments, and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/us/outside-national-parks-feeling-sque... weren’t spending at local hotels and restaurants.</a> Businesses <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/business/smallbusiness/shutdowns-effec... get federally guaranteed loans</a>.
While Americans weren’t happy with politicians in general, they blamed Republicans in particular. The GOP favorability rating <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/10/09/230969497/shutdown-di... ten percentage points in a month</a> to the lowest for either party since Gallup began asking the question in 1992.
By contrast, the Affordable Care Act seemed to get high favorability ratings. After the exchanges opened on Oct. 1, high demand caused delays and crashes on the web site where the uninsured could sign up for coverage.
And then there was what must have felt like a real smack in Tea Party face. Koch Industries, owned by the Koch brothers, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/us/kochs-and-other-conservatives-split... a letter to members of Congress Wednesday</a> denying that Koch had supported shutting down the government to extract defunding of the Affordable Care Act. Instead, Koch claimed it supported reducing government debt and spending.
And that’s exactly what Ryan offered. <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230344200457912394366916789... other things, he wants to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security</a>. In the past, Ryan and Republicans have proposed privatizing Social Security and voucherizing Medicare. In both cases, the government would tell the elderly: “You are on your own, grandma.” If your investments don’t work out, eat cat food. If you can’t afford the cost of medical care beyond what the voucher will pay, go lie down and die.
House <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/us/politics/ryan-is-again-in-the-foref... last week embraced his proposal</a>. Some Tea Partiers took umbrage at that, whining that Ryan didn’t mention their demand for the death of the Affordable Care Act.
Like their original confusion about who provides them with Medicare, the Tea Partiers have it all muddled again. They’re crying about 50 million uninsured Americans retaining access to doctors under the Affordable Care Act instead of protesting, as they did in their early days, the Republican attempt to strangle Medicare.
Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid and other crucial government programs that benefit all Americans can be saved. For a start: Lift the cap on Social Security taxes so that they’re paid on all income <a href="http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/240/~/social-securit... Medicare taxes are.</a> Tax capital gains at the same rate wages are. Mandate competition by drug companies providing pharmaceuticals under Medicare Part D.
That is what the Tea Party should be demanding. Their signs should read: Get your dirty GOP hands off my Medicare!
Republicans tried and tried, more than 40 times, in fact. Unlike the Little Engine That Could, the GOP couldn’t. They just couldn’t repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Last week they switched tracks to exploit a different tactic – extortion. It’s an old style mafia shakedown. The threat made by the Grumpy Obstructionist Party (GOP) is simple: “Gimme what I want or I’ll kill the government.” Democrats refused to pay the ransom by defunding the Affordable Care Act, so the GOP defunded the federal government.
That cost 800,000 federal workers their jobs. It denied life-saving treatment to kids with cancer. It closed national parks and hobbled tourist-dependent businesses. It ended services to veterans, children and seniors. The suffering could stop, Republican extortionists say, if President Obama would just surrender the Affordable Care Act, just give the GOP what it failed to achieve through the normal democratic, majority-rule process.
President Obama has said he won’t submit to this shakedown. Instead, he should counter with demands of his own – demands that Republicans approve legislation that Democrats want but didn’t get passed through the normal, democratic, majority-rule process.
Democrats’ counter offer must be big and bold. Republicans want the Affordable Care Act repealed? Well, Democrats want gun control, immigration reform, a financial transaction tax, an income tax increase for the 1 percent, a raise in the minimum wage, the Employee Free Choice Act, better Social Security benefits, an end to GOP challenges to abortion rights, re-institution of the Glass-Steagall Act regulating Wall Street, Cap and Trade environmental regulations, a constitutional amendment overturning the Citizens United campaign finance decision, immediate approval for all of President Obama’s federal judge nominees, a human heart for Grover Norquist, a spine for John Boehner and a chicken in every pot.
That would be a good start for negotiations.
Bargaining is what the GOP keeps saying it wants. It insists on haggling over doing the most basic job of Congress – properly funding the federal government and paying bills Congress racked up.
For example, here’s what Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky got caught saying on an open mic to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: "I just did CNN and I just go over and over again, ‘We're willing to compromise. We're willing to negotiate.’ I think... I don't think they poll tested we won't negotiate. I think it's awful for [Democrats] to say that over and over again.”
And here’s U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the failed Republican vice presidential candidate and chairman of the House Budget Committee: “It’s untenable not to negotiate.”
President Obama is appalled by the prospect of horse trading to restore government operations that should never have been shut down. He believes Congress should fulfill its budgetary and bill-paying obligations without bribes or coercion.
He’s taking the high road.
In Congress, though, the wrangling is down and dirty. Democrats have a strong hand if they choose to negotiate, not only because their list of demands is longer, but also because some Republicans don’t have a clue what they’re fighting about.
Here’s Republican Rep. Marlin Stutzman from Indiana, for example: “We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
Stutzman doesn’t know what he wants in exchange for costing 800,000 federal workers their jobs and endangering untold numbers of small businesses and the economy. But he sure as hell isn’t going to be disrespected by someone somehow! Maybe Democrats could buy him a scepter, since, apparently, having his colleagues demonstrate reverence is more important to him than a functioning U.S. government.
Democrats should begin negotiations by offering to waive their demand for a human heart for Grover Norquist. He’s the dude who persuaded so many Republicans to pledge never to raise taxes, the result of which is that the 1 percent does not pay its fair share and the poor are denied food stamps.
This proposal from Democrats is really just designed to begin talks. Few Republicans have a soft spot in their hearts for Norquist because his no-new-taxes pledge has caused them so much heartburn. So they’re unlikely to accept a human heart for him in exchange for the death of the Affordable Care Act. That’s fine because what Norquist needs most is not a heart but a soul. And Congress can’t accomplish that. Securing a soul requires divine intervention.
With the two sides talking, the next step in negotiations is easy for Democrats. They could agree to repeal the Affordable Care Act in exchange for Republicans approving single payer health insurance – Medicare for all.
With Medicare for all, Norquist could get his human heart transplant, Boehner could get a backbone, and every American would get health insurance – just like the citizens of all other Western industrialized nations.
That’s a deal where everyone wins.
