June-July 2011
Views and Opinions

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Tempest in a Tea Party
Source: Maureen Dowd, in The New York Times
Posted: July 31, 2011
[...] The world is watching in fearful — and sometimes gleeful — fascination as the Tea Party drives a Thunderbird off the cliff with the president and speaker of the House strapped in the back. The Dow is hiding under the bed with a glass of single malt. Can it get more excruciating? Apple has more cash than the U.S. government.

Amid the chilling anarchy, there's not a single strong leader to be seen — not even a misguided one. All the leaders are followers. You have to wonder if President Obama at some level doesn't want to lead. Maybe he just wants to be loved.

Amid the The citizens of this country tremble at the thought that these are the people governing them. Should we stick our money under our mattresses? It's not only the economy that gets nourished by confidence; it's also politics.

Amid the The maniacal Tea Party freshmen are trying to burn down the House they were elected to serve in. It turns out they wanted to come inside to get a blueprint of the historic building to sabotage it.

Amid the Like gargoyles on the Capitol, the adamantine nihilists are determined to blow up the country's prestige, their party and even their own re-election chances if that's what it takes. (Many are worried about primary races with even more dogmatic challengers, which is a truly scary thought.) If they can drag President Obama off his pedestal, even better. They think he looks down on them and sneers at their values.

Amid the Democratic lawmakers worry that the Tea Party freshmen have already "neutered" the president, as one told me. They fret that Obama is an inept negotiator. They worry that he should have been out in the country selling a concrete plan, rather than once more kowtowing to Republicans and, as with the stimulus plan, health care and Libya, leading from behind.

Amid the As one Democratic senator complained: "The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent." (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: "We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes."

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The Centrist Cop-Out
Source: Paul Krugman, in The New York Times
Posted: July 29, 2011
The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren't complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

As I said, it’s not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. As you may know, President Obama initially tried to strike a “Grand Bargain” with Republicans over taxes and spending. To do so, he not only chose not to make an issue of G.O.P. extortion, he offered extraordinary concessions on Democratic priorities: an increase in the age of Medicare eligibility, sharp spending cuts and only small revenue increases. As The Times’s Nate Silver pointed out, Mr. Obama effectively staked out a position that was not only far to the right of the average voter’s preferences, it was if anything a bit to the right of the average Republican voter’s preferences.

But Republicans rejected the deal. So what was the headline on an Associated Press analysis of that breakdown in negotiations? “Obama, Republicans Trapped by Inflexible Rhetoric.” A Democratic president who bends over backward to accommodate the other side — or, if you prefer, who leans so far to the right that he’s in danger of falling over — is treated as being just the same as his utterly intransigent opponents. Balance!

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Obama Should Raise the Debt Ceiling on His Own
Source: The New York Times
Posted: July 28, 2011
PRESIDENT OBAMA should announce that he will raise the debt ceiling unilaterally if he cannot reach a deal with Congress. Constitutionally, he would be on solid ground. Politically, he can’t lose. The public wants a deal. The threat to act unilaterally will only strengthen his bargaining power if Republicans don’t want to be frozen out; if they defy him, the public will throw their support to the president. Either way, Republicans look like the obstructionists and will pay a price.

Where would Mr. Obama get his constitutional authority to raise the debt ceiling?

Our argument is not based on some obscure provision of the 14th amendment, but on the necessities of state, and on the president’s role as the ultimate guardian of the constitutional order, charged with taking care that the laws be faithfully executed.

When Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, he said that it was necessary to violate one law, lest all the laws but one fall into ruin. So too here: the president may need to violate the debt ceiling to prevent a catastrophe — whether a default on the debt or an enormous reduction in federal spending, which would throw the country back into recession.

A deadlocked Congress has become incapable of acting consistently; it commits to entitlements it will not reduce, appropriates funds it does not have, borrows money it cannot repay and then imposes a debt ceiling it will not raise. One of those things must give; in reality, that means that the conflicting laws will have to be reconciled by the only actor who combines the power to act with a willingness to shoulder responsibility — the president.

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CEOs to workers: More for me, less for you
Source: McClatchy
Posted: July 28, 2011
Big company CEOs got a 23 percent raise last year and corporate profits are at record highs. But the minimum wage has less buying power now than in 1956 - the year Elvis Presley first topped the charts, videotape was breakthrough technology and the Dow closed above 500 for the very first time.

It's no accident wages are down while corporate profits are up. As JPMorgan's July 11 "Eye on the Market" newsletter put it, "Reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement in (profit) margins... US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP."

The minimum wage sets the floor under wages, and that floor is sinking. The 1956 minimum wage was $8.30, adjusted for inflation.

Today's minimum wage is $7.25 - just $15,080 annually.

CEOs make more in a few hours than minimum wage workers who care for children, the ill and the elderly make in a year. Median CEO pay was $10.8 million last year among 200 big companies measured by Equilar.

The $15,080 minimum wage workers have for rent, groceries, transportation, medicine and everything else for the year doesn't even buy 2 pounds of the imported caviar featured in the Forbes Cost of Living Extremely Well Index.

The last increase in the minimum wage to $7.25 on July 24, 2009, was so little so late it left workers 30 percent below the minimum wage peak of $10.38 in 1968 - $21,590 annually - in 2011 dollars.

Today's retail clerks, health aides, child care workers, restaurant workers, security guards and other minimum wage workers have $6,500 less in annual buying power than their 1968 counterparts.

That doesn't help our corner stores, our communities or our national economy. It hurts.

We didn't have to go backwards. U.S. income grew $11,684 on average between 1969 and 2008, the year Wall Street drove our economy off a cliff. But there was nothing average about the actual income distribution. Every dime of income growth went to the top 10 percent. Income for the bottom 90 percent declined.

Compare that to the period between 1917 (when the data began) and 1968. Income growth averaged $26,574. The top 10 percent got 31 percent of that growth. The bottom 90 percent got 69 percent.

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Job creators…
Source: David Horsey, in The Seattle PI
Posted: July 26, 2011
It has been the case for a long time that modern-day politicians are barely able to speak unless they have memorized a set of talking points pre-approved and vetted by a team of spin doctors. It’s especially easy to detect this homogenizing influence when a new euphemism repeatedly pops up in the comments of an entire political caucus.

The current case in point: “job creators.”

That seems to be the only two-word description authorized when Republicans make reference to the one percent of Americans who have benefited most from big tax cuts, who have not suffered much from the Great Recession and who control most of the nation’s wealth. Such wordplay makes perfect sense at a moment when the GOP majority in the House is blocking any part of a debt ceiling deal that would spike the tax bill of high income earners. After all, it sounds so much nobler to decry “raising the tax burden on job creators” than to say “let’s preserve tax loopholes for greedy Wall Street billionaires and oil companies.” (Besides, “greedy Wall Street billionaires and oil companies” is a phrase Democrats have already trademarked.)

“Job creators” is a clever choice of words because what reasonable American doesn’t want jobs to be created? There’s nothing this country needs more than restoration of the millions of jobs lost when Wall Street billionaires – oops! I mean, job creators — got way too creative with the nation’s financial system. Plus, the words reinforce Tea Party orthodoxy that the only thing standing between us and a healthy economy are those gosh darn high taxes that are keeping job creators from creating jobs.

Of course, like many orthodoxies, this one does not necessarily stand up to simple reason. If tax hikes kill jobs and tax cuts create jobs, why did Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase lead to a booming economy and a balanced budget in the 1990s while George Bush’s deep tax cuts in 2001 brought us to the mess we are in today?

The answer is… well, the answer is actually complex. In neither case did tax policy alone produce the result. And failure to understand the limited importance of taxes has got today’s Republicans so tied up in one big knot that they cannot bring themselves to accept a debt ceiling deal that goes farther than anything conservatives of past generations would have dreamed they could finagle from a Democratic president.

In economic terms, taxes are just one of many tools at the disposal of governments to tweak the economy and keep the nation solvent. Sometimes, it has been helpful to lower taxes; sometime it has been helpful to raise taxes (Ronald Reagan, as president, did it three times). Yes, sometimes taxes can get too high, but they can also be so low that the government cannot pay for the things congresses and presidents authorize, like Medicare and Social Security and wars and veterans benefits. Then, we end up with even more debt.

Since debt is what the Tea Party enthusiasts claim to hate the most, you would think they would approve of bumping up taxes on the richest Americans as part of a plan to reduce the red ink. But, no, they insist. That would hurt job creators.

Well, guess what? The job creators have plenty of money. Corporate profits are huge. Banks are flush with cash. Yet, they are sitting on their money instead of creating jobs. There are several reasons why no hiring or lending is going on, but it has nothing to do with taxes being too high.
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Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa Published in the Detroit News on July 13, 2011
Fighting Back Against Unpatriotic Attempt to Undermine Our Safety, Security, Economy
Source: Teamster.org
Posted: July 21, 2011
For most Americans, the recession has not ended. Wages are falling and millions of people can’t find jobs, even after they’ve looked for months.

The grim June jobs report released last week showed things aren’t getting better anytime soon. The unemployment rate actually went up, with 14.1 million Americans officially out of work.

The last thing American workers need right now is a trade deal that puts more of them out of work and lowers their wages. And yet that is exactly what our government is doing to its own people – not once, but four times.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood went to Mexico last week to sign a deal that opens our borders to unsafe trucks from that country. In reporting the agreement, the mainstream press was strangely silent about the 40,000 people killed in Mexican drug wars since 2007. The media made no mention of our widening trade deficit with Mexico since NAFTA was signed in 1992, nor did reporters say anything about the 700,000 jobs lost since then.

Three more job-killing trade deals are in the hopper, and you can bet the news media will swallow whole the phony claims made about them by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other multinational front groups. Congress is now considering trade agreements with Colombia, where trade unionists are routinely murdered with impunity; Panama, a well-known tax haven; and South Korea, in the biggest trade deal since NAFTA.

Lately it seems our trade policy is of the corporation, by the corporation and for the corporation.

Take the Mexican truck deal. Upon signing the agreement, Secretary LaHood issued a statement: “By opening the door to long-haul trucking between the U.S. and Mexico, America’s third-largest trading partner, we will create jobs and opportunity for our people and support economic development in both nations.”

I don’t think anyone on the planet believes that. Polls show most Americans are skeptical that globalization is helping the economy. The deal with Mexico will flood the U.S. with cheap labor, further eroding our workers’ living standards and their rights. It will undermine border security. It will endanger motorists. It ignores the rampant corruption among Mexican law enforcement, when Mexican law enforcement is exactly what the safety of the entire program depends on.

Opening the border is simply a surrender to the trucking industry and to the multinational corporations whose loyalty is to their own greed – it certainly isn’t to the United States or to its people. They’ve wanted this deal for years. They don’t even care that Mexico can’t hold up its end of the bargain. There’s no way that Mexico can offer U.S. carriers the same access to its roads that Mexico gets from the U.S. No American trucking company or trucker wants to haul freight to Mexico and risk kidnapping or death.

The Teamsters have fought like hell against the unpatriotic, anti-American attempt to undermine our safety, our security and our economy by opening the border to dangerous trucks. We have fought like hell against trade deals that lower our standard of living, erode our national security and contribute to extreme economic inequality. We will continue to fight like hell because we love our country, even if the corporations don’t.

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They, Too, Sing America
Source: Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
Posted: July 16, 2011
Last week I spent a few days in the Deep South — a thousand miles from the moneyed canyons of Manhattan and the prattle of Washington politics — talking to everyday people, blue-collar workers, people not trying to win the future so much as survive the present.

They do hard jobs and odd jobs — any work they can find to keep the lights on and the children fed.

No one mentioned the asinine argument about the debt ceiling. No one. Life is pressing down on them so hard that they can barely breathe. They just want Washington to work, the way they do.

They are honest people who do honest work — crack-the-bones work; lift-it, chop-it, empty-it, glide-it-in-smooth work; feel-the-flames-up-close work; crawl-down-in-there work — things that no one wants to do but that someone must.

They are women whose skin glistens from steam and sweat, whose hands stay damp from being dipped in buckets and dried on aprons. They are men who work in boots with steel toes, the kind that don’t take shining, the kind that lean over and tell stories when you take them off.

They are people whose bodies melt every night in a hot bath, then stiffen by sunrise, so much so that it takes pills for them to get out of bed without pain.

They, too, sing America. But they’re the ones less talked about — either not glamorous enough or rancorous enough. They are the ones without champions, waiting for Democrats to gather the gumption to defend the working poor with the same ferocity with which Republicans protect the filthy rich, waiting for a tomorrow that never comes.
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Getting to Crazy
Source: Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Posted: July 14, 2011
Getting to Crazy
A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. "Has the G.O.P. gone insane?" they ask.

Why, yes, it has. But this isn't something that just happened, it's the culmination of a process that has been going on for decades. Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display either hasn't been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye.

And may I say to those suddenly agonizing over the mental health of one of our two major parties: People like you bear some responsibility for that party's current state.

Let’s talk for a minute about what Republican leaders are rejecting.

President Obama has made it clear that he’s willing to sign on to a deficit-reduction deal that consists overwhelmingly of spending cuts, and includes draconian cuts in key social programs, up to and including a rise in the age of Medicare eligibility. These are extraordinary concessions. As The Times’s Nate Silver points out, the president has offered deals that are far to the right of what the average American voter prefers — in fact, if anything, they’re a bit to the right of what the average Republican voter prefers!

Yet Republicans are saying no. Indeed, they’re threatening to force a U.S. default, and create an economic crisis, unless they get a completely one-sided deal. And this was entirely predictable.

First of all, the modern G.O.P. fundamentally does not accept the legitimacy of a Democratic presidency — any Democratic presidency. We saw that under Bill Clinton, and we saw it again as soon as Mr. Obama took office.

As a result, Republicans are automatically against anything the president wants, even if they have supported similar proposals in the past.
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An Unequal America Is A Weaker America
By Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa
Published in the Detroit News on June 15, 2011
Source: Teamster.org
Posted: July 11, 2011
The Michigan Chamber of Commerce is pleased with the corporate tax breaks recently signed into law. I don't agree with them. But I don't challenge the right of Michigan businesses to form an association to protect their interests.

Nor do I think the government should stop doctors from joining the American Medical Association, or pig farmers from joining the National Pork Producers Association, or carmakers from joining the American Automotive Association. I don't view that as a threat to free enterprise.

But somehow it's a threat to free enterprise when working people join together to protect their wages and benefits. In the last few months, politicians from Washington to Wisconsin have tried to limit working Americans' right to band together to protect their interests.

I'm very proud of Teamsters who've been defending that right against the recent onslaught of attacks. Tens of thousands of Teamsters rallied against anti-worker legislation in hundreds of cities and towns over the past few months. My union has recently fought against -- and defeated -- dozens of bills aimed at weakening unions.

Working people today are fighting unprecedented assaults on their economic well-being. The November election was the first in decades where corporations and Wall Street speculators were allowed to contribute unlimited amounts of secret money to political campaigns. They took full advantage of it to push their radical anti-worker agenda.

Now they're seeing the return on their investment. The rich got $120 billion in tax breaks, while firefighters, teachers and nurses got pink slips. The rich got record profits, and they got to pit even more American workers against cheap labor overseas. There are 7 million fewer jobs now than there were in December 2007. Wages are falling.

IF CEOs have the right to outsource our jobs, then working people have the right to band together to stop them. If corporations can form political committees to lobby politicians, then working- and middle-class Americans can band together to make their voices heard.

Working people cannot offset corporate greed and corporate power unless they can form unions. And the need for unions has never been more evident than it is now. America is in danger of becoming a banana republic, a Third World country of haves and have-nots with nothing in between. We are currently the 42ndmost unequal country in the world, more unequal than Yemen, Tunisia or Egypt.

An unequal America is a weaker America. Inequality has caused too many booms and busts, too much instability and too little economic growth. More and more Americans feel trapped in low-wage jobs, unable to make their lives better. Forty-four million Americans are on food stamps, and two out of five of the families that require that assistancehave a wage earner. There is something very wrong in a country where millions of hard-working people can't feed their families.

Economic inequality undermines peoples' faith that America remains true to the principles upon which it was founded. We must restore the balance between the corporate billionaires and the working class in order to restore Americans' faith in those principles.

The place to start is to make sure working people can join together and have a voice in the democratic process.

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Paul Krugman: No, We Can’t? Or Won’t?
Source: The New York Times
Posted: July 11, 2011
If you were shocked by Friday's job report, if you thought we were doing well and were taken aback by the bad news, you haven't been paying attention. The fact is, the United States economy has been stuck in a rut for a year and a half.

Yet a destructive passivity has overtaken our discourse. Turn on your TV and you'll see some self-satisfied pundit declaring that nothing much can be done about the economy's short-run problems (reminder: this "short run" is now in its fourth year), that we should focus on the long run instead.

This gets things exactly wrong. The truth is that creating jobs in a depressed economy is something government could and should be doing. Yes, there are huge political obstacles to action — notably, the fact that the House is controlled by a party that benefits from the economy's weakness. But political gridlock should not be conflated with economic reality.

Our failure to create jobs is a choice, not a necessity — a choice rationalized by an ever-shifting set of excuses.
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The president and the unions:
The community organizer isn't a labor organizer
Source: TheSeattle Times
Posted: July 1, 2011
The dominant media theme is that President Obama "is on the defensive" because of the NLRB ruling that Boeing broke the law by moving some 787 production to a non-union plant in North Charleston, S.C., in direct retaliation against unions in the Puget Sound area. Amid the sliver of progressive bloggers, the headline is something like, "Obama to unions: Drop dead."

Yet the president made two perfectly sensible points: "As a general proposition, companies need to have the freedom to relocate," but they must follow the law when doing so. And, "What I think defies common sense would be a notion that we would be shutting down a plant or laying off workers because labor and management can't come to a sensible agreement." The chief executive shouldn't insert himself into the process any more than this.

After decades of a business-dominated NLRB making pro-management rulings, now some are shocked that the federal agency charged with ensuring balance between business and labor should actually attempt to do so. Yet it's just that balance, along with the right to organize and bargain collectively in the private sector, that is a cornerstone of American democracy. It also played no small role in lower income inequality. The rise of business power has had the opposite effect, while offshoring millions of jobs and, emboldened by deregulation and the big money to drive self-serving policies, driving the economy into a ditch.

The cautious, temporizing president missed a chance to remind Americans of some basic truths. Your weekends off, eight-hour work day, end of child labor, workplace safety and a host of other goods came thanks to unions, especially in the private sector. Not from the beneficence of moguls. Not from Ayn Rand's fevered imagination. Not from "the free market." But from the hard work and often the blood shed by union members over many decades.
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The real causes of the economic crisis? They're history.
Source: The Washington Post
Posted: June 29, 2011
They say that winners get to write history. Three years after the meltdown of our financial markets, it’s clear who is winning and who is losing. Wall Street — arms outstretched in triumph — is racing toward the finish-line tape while millions of American families are struggling to stay on their feet. With victory seemingly in hand, the historical rewrite is in full swing.

The contrast in fortunes between those on top of the economic heap and those buried in the rubble couldn’t be starker. The 10 biggest banks now control more than three-quarters of the country’s banking assets. Profits have bounced back, while compensation at publicly traded Wall Street firms hit a record $135 billion in 2010.

Meanwhile, more than 24 million Americans are out of work or can’t find full-time work, and nearly $9 trillion in household wealth has vanished. There seems to be no correlation between who drove the crisis and who is paying the price.

The report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission detailed the recklessness of the financial industry and the abject failures of policymakers and regulators that brought our economy to its knees in late 2008. The accuracy and facts of the commission’s investigative report have gone unchallenged since its release in January.

So, how do you revise the historical narrative when the evidence of what led to economic catastrophe is so overwhelming and the events at issue so recent? You and your political allies just do it. And you bet on the old axiom that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes.

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Why the Republican War on Workers' Rights Undermines the American Economy
Source: Robert Reich.com
Posted: June 15, 2011
The battle has resumed in Wisconsin. The state supreme court has allowed Governor Scott Walker to strip bargaining rights from state workers.

Meanwhile, governors and legislators in New Hampshire and Missouri are attacking private unions, seeking to make the states so-called "open shop" where workers can get all the benefits of being union members without paying union dues. Needless to say this ploy undermines the capacity of unions to do much of anything. Other Republican governors and legislatures are following suit.

Republicans in Congress are taking aim at the National Labor Relations Board, which issued a relatively minor proposed rule change allowing workers to vote on whether to unionize soon after a union has been proposed, rather than allowing employers to delay the vote for years. Many employers have used the delaying tactics to retaliate against workers who try to organize, and intimidate others into rejecting a union.

This war on workers' rights is an assault on the middle class, and it is undermining the American economy.

The American economy can't get out of neutral until American workers have more money in their pockets to buy what they produce. And unions are the best way to give them the bargaining power to get better pay.   
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State should move forward with distribution bill
Source: The Everett Herald
Posted: June 13, 2011
Guest Commentary by Rick Hicks
The Teamsters represent 50,000 union members in the state of Washington, including dozens of drivers who deliver spirits to state-run liquor stores. Add in beer and wine distribution, and we represent over a thousand more.

We have grown increasingly concerned by efforts to undermine, or radically dismantle, Washington's existing liquor distribution system. That three-tier system -- with clear roles for producers, distributors and retailers -- has worked well for decades in promoting public safety by keeping liquor out of the hands of minors, while allowing adults to consume alcohol responsibly.

We strongly opposed both deeply flawed initiatives (including one backed by Costco) to privatize our state's liquor system last November, and were gratified when the voters agreed with us in rejecting both proposals. But we also understood that questions and concerns about customer service and efficiency in the current liquor operations remained. That is why, after careful consideration, we joined with allies in the business community to endorse a compromise solution introduced in the Legislature this year where the state would forge a partnership with a private firm to modernize the distribution of liquor.

The liquor modernization proposal we endorsed was widely debated, as was yet another full privatization measure offered by Costco. As it moved through the Legislature, the modernization proposal we supported won strong bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate.

Meanwhile, the Costco legislation fell flat because their bill created many of the same problems that were evident in the ballot measures the public voted down last November. The modernization idea involves no risk to the state. All it does is initiate a non-binding competitive bidding process so the state can solicit bids from firms interested in running the liquor distribution system for a fixed time period. In exchange, the private partner would offer a substantial one-time up-front payment, and would share annual distribution profits with the state. And at the end of the lease the state would continue to own the liquor system, including hundreds of millions in capital investments made by the private partner.

Unfortunately, The Herald's editorial board has sided with privatization interests in attempting to delay the proposal until the latest privatization initiative -- which explicitly repeals the competitive bidding process -- is voted on in November ("Don't cloud issue for voters," June 1). We believe that is exactly the wrong approach. Full privatization is a big step, and a controversial one.

Rick Hicks is secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local Union #174, which represents drivers who deliver spirits to state-run liquor stores.

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Choose voters over donors on 'free trade'
Source: Gordon Lafer, in The Stand
Posted June 15, 2011
As a political scientist, I’m sometimes asked how it’s possible for a democracy to enact laws that are opposed by the majority of voters.

There is no clearer illustration of how this works than the current race to enact a free trade agreement with Colombia.

The majority of Americans opposes NAFTA-style treaties. It’s not just union members; only 27 percent of Republicans think “free trade” helps us. And no wonder: We’ve lost almost 5 million jobs since NAFTA was passed — many of them well-paying manufacturing jobs that were the backbone of the middle class. Millions of families have watched loved ones put out of work by companies who could make more profit in Mexico or China, leaving the public firmly opposed to such deals.

The minority that supports the NAFTA model, however, includes the country’s most powerful corporate lobbies. The strongest advocates of “free trade” are the Chamber of Commerce and multinational corporations such as GE, which sent tens of thousands of jobs overseas and built a profitable business helping others do likewise.

It’s particularly striking to watch Republicans on this issue. John Boehner is portrayed as captive to the Tea Party — but Tea Partiers are more opposed to NAFTA-style treaties than any other group of voters. Yet on this issue, their voices are ignored. When there is a conflict between the passions of their base and the dictates of their funders, Boehner and gang come down squarely on the side of the latter.

Republicans are famous for message discipline, but what’s remarkable right now is the lockstep silence on this issue. From Palin to Boehner to Fox and Rush — conservatives have agreed that it’s best not to alert the base to the fact that their leaders have crossed them.  
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Screwing the Pooch (and We're the Pooch)
Source: The Stranger
Posted: June 3, 2011
"This isn't the budget any of us would have written, given the choice," weaseled state house Ways and Means Committee chair Ross Hunter (D-Medina), raising philosophical questions about whether state legislators have free will. Faced with a recession-­exacerbated $5.5 billion budget shortfall, and no federal stimulus money this time around to bail them out, Democratic majorities in the state house and senate apparently felt they had no choice but to produce a suspiciously Republican-looking all-cuts budget.

If he didn't have a choice, then, um... why the f#ck did it take so long? I mean, if this was the only budget that could've possibly been written, then there should have been no need for extending the legislative session for an extra month, right? Of course Hunter and the rest of his colleagues had a choice. They had plenty of choices. They could've chosen to soften the blow by eliminating tax breaks for out-of-state banks or any number of other unproductive tax "preferences."

But here's what we got instead:

Under a budget passed by a Democratic majority, class sizes will grow, teacher salaries will shrink, college tuition will skyrocket, and health insurance for some of our state's poorest and most vulnerable families will become either unaffordable or unavailable. The legislature slashed $1.6 billion from K–12 education, $620 million from public colleges and universities, $129 million from the Basic Health plan for low-income adults, $179 million from the disabled, $97 million from seniors, and on and on and on. Thousands of state workers will lose their jobs. Those remaining will see their wages reduced through forced furloughs, higher health insurance premiums, and wage cuts.

"I commend the work of our lawmakers," kvelled Governor Chris Gregoire in a statement about the budget. She rubbed more salt into budget wounds by blithely reinforcing the Republicans' central fiscal meme, adding, "We developed that balanced budget with no new revenue."

Yes, not a single tax loophole or exemption will be eliminated, not a single tax raised—and there will be no revenue package referred to the ballot. In fact, the only substantive piece of new revenue will be $67 million to offset cuts to state parks, raised using a $30 per vehicle annual "Discover Pass" now required to use all state wildlife and recreation land—a user fee that, like the bulk of the cuts, burdens Washington's lowest-income families the most.   
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