Views and Opinions
- Medicare and Mediscares
- Workers give, business gets in Legislature
- In Boeing case, right-wing flies off course
- ‘We’re not Wisconsin?’ No, arguably we are worse
- America the Stony-Hearted
- The Need for Greed
- America Held Hostage
- Boeing shouldn't blame NLRB for doing its job
- Business Groups Running Up Score In Olympia
- The Unwisdom of Elites
Medicare and Mediscares
Source: Paul Krugman in The New York Times
Posted: May 27, 2011
Yes, Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, is a sore loser. Why do you ask?
To be sure, Mr. Ryan had reason to be upset after Tuesday’s special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District. It’s a very conservative district, so much so that last year the Republican candidate took 76 percent of the vote. Yet on Tuesday, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, took the seat, with a campaign focused squarely on Mr. Ryan’s plan to dismantle Medicare and replace it with a voucher system.
How did Ms. Hochul pull off this upset? The Wisconsin congressman blamed Democrats’ willingness to “shamelessly distort and demagogue the issue, trying to scare seniors to win an election,” and he predicted that by November of next year “the American people are going to know they’ve been lied to.”
You can understand Mr. Ryan’s bitterness. He has, after all, experienced quite a comedown over the course of the past seven weeks. Until his Medicare plan was rolled out in early April he had spent months bathing in warm approbation from many pundits, who had decided to anoint him as an icon of fiscal responsibility. And the plan itself received rapturous praise in the first couple of days after its release.
Then people who actually know how to read a budget proposal started looking at the plan. And that’s when everything started to fall apart.
Mr. Ryan may claim — and he may even believe — that he’s facing a backlash because his opponents are lying about his proposals. But the reality is that the Ryan plan is turning into a political disaster for Republicans, not because the plan’s critics are lying about it, but because they’re describing it accurately.
Read the complete source story here.
Workers give, business gets in Legislature
Source: The Everett Herald
Posted: May 26, 2011
You'd be hard pressed to find a better example of "kick-'em when they're down" politics this year than the workers' compensation legislation rushed through Olympia on Monday. By the governor's own estimate, the bill will take about $1 billion that injured workers would have received over the next five years and give it to their employers instead.
Washington was the first state in the nation to create a workers compensation program. Legislators acted at the behest of businesses that feared being sued by injured workers or by their survivors if they were killed in industrial accidents.
This was the bargain: Workers gave up the right to sue their employers for most workplace injuries. In exchange, employers participated in a compensation program to give workers some measure of dignity after sustaining injuries and illnesses at their workplaces.
One of the good things about Washington's workers comp system is that it keeps private insurance companies out. They can't profit from injured workers, because we have a state system. As a result, costs to employers are among the bottom third for states, while benefits for workers are ranked third best in the country. Voters like it that way. Last November, the people drubbed Initiative 1082 (60 percent voted "no"), which would have given our workers' comp system over to private insurers. Read the complete source story here.
In Boeing case, right-wing flies off course
Posted: May 26, 2011
Source: The Stand
Right-wing pundits and politicians have been in rare form over the past few weeks, with the National Labor Relations Board’s complaint against Boeing serving as a catalyst for their ramped up attack on workers’ rights. As usual, the facts have all too quickly been lost in the frenzy of overblown rhetoric and apocalyptic projections for businesses. The reality is much less remarkable: NLRB Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon’s job is to enforce the law. And no company, not even Boeing, is above the law.
So let’s review: The congressionally-mandated mission of the NLRB is to enforce the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, a law that protects workers’ rights and promotes a level playing field for workers and businesses. The agency’s nonpartisan mission has been accepted by Presidents and legislators on both sides of the aisle for the past 75 years.
When it comes to Boeing, the company’s own statements to employees and the media indicated that it was moving production in response to workers at its Washington state facility exercising rights guaranteed under the NLRA. Given that the NLRB’s role is to investigate potential violations of the law, the agency had little choice but to respond. Far from overreach, Lafe Solomon was just doing his job.
Despite news headlines nationwide, claims that the complaint is a politically-motivated throwback to unions are a fabrication. The Obama administration had no part in issuing the complaint against Boeing — the NLRB is an independent federal agency. It was Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon — a career civil servant who has spent nearly 30 years working for the Board under both Democrats and Republicans — who filed the complaint as a prosecutor whose job is to enforce the law.
Regardless of the facts, GOP legislators are using the case as an excuse to advance their ongoing attack on the NLRB. Politicians like Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.), Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have made repeated attempts to defund and dismantle the agency, and this is just the latest opportunity to do the work of their corporate donors by tearing down protections for workers. Read the complete source story here.
‘We’re not Wisconsin?’ No, arguably we are worse
Posted: May 24, 2011
Source: Brendan Williams in The Stand
Throughout the 2011 legislative session, cold comfort, and perhaps a smug relativism, was found in the statement, “We’re not Wisconsin.”
Indeed, as time passed even Wisconsin was no longer “Wisconsin” as the epitome of an anti-labor state government. Ohio, for example, went further by restricting collective bargaining for police and firefighters. Yet Wisconsin served as the reference point for Tea Party excesses. Regrettably, it, and similar states, was an incredibly-low bar against which to measure progress.But are we really not Wisconsin? Arguably we’re worse.
In Wisconsin, after all, Assembly and Senate Democrats stood up for workers. In Washington, where retreat is defined as progress, it was Democrats leading the charge to rescind worker rights.
Here both parties rolled over labor to enact legislation to begin dismantling our state’s century-old Industrial Insurance Act – effectively equating medical needs with Lotto scratch tickets. The cynical bet is workers, under economic duress, will sell short $550 million in workers’ compensation claims over the next four years.
Not needing to be in the majority to get his way, House Republican Leader Richard DeBolt exulted, “This is a great deal.”
“I’ve felt all along that I was negotiating for the worker” crowed anti-labor Representative Cary Condotta. The outcome was inevitable when, just two months after Initiative 1082 failed, Democrats conceded as gospel a message 60% of voters rejected; namely, that our workers’ compensation system was irretrievably broken.
For years some blocked homeowners’ rights legislation supported by most Democrats, and by 76% of Washingtonians in a 2008 Celinda Lake poll. And again this year we were told the Legislature needed to bend to the will of a conservative Democratic minority. What is it about Washington that makes it the nation’s most under-performing Democratic state?
Attacks on collective bargaining passed the Senate. One “pro-labor” senator excused the Senate’s unilateral teachers’ pay cut by equating it to a cut state workers bargained for in exchange for other considerations. A 10% cut in service hours for home care clients subverts caregivers’ bargaining rights.
Even Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, while attacking Wisconsin workers’ civil rights, only proposed state workers pay roughly as much of their health care premiums as state workers here were already paying – 12.6%. After July 1, Washington state workers will pay 15% of premiums. Walker wouldn’t go that far.
But back when Walker was just a county executive, we had already imported Walker-style leadership for our most sensitive agencies.
The Department of Social and Health Services is charged with protecting our most vulnerable citizens, in addition to being state government’s largest unit. Since May 2009 it has been run by Wisconsin import Susan Dreyfus, who gave $2,000 to her friend Walker (she also gave $1,000 to John McCain for president). ...Read the entire source story here.
America the stony-hearted
Posted: May 23, 2011
Source: The Los Angeles Times
When the political history of the last 30 years is written, scholars will no doubt describe a rightward revolution that jolted this country out of its embrace of New Deal, big-government progressivism and into a love affair with small-government conservatism. But this change, significant as it is, has been undergirded by a less apparent but no less monumental revolution that has transformed the nation's values, ideals and aspirations. Over those same 30 years, we have become a different country morally from what we were.
The United States has always had a complex national moral system. On the one hand, there is the Puritan-inflected America of rugged individualism, hard work, self-reliance and personal responsibility in which you reap what you sow, God helps those who help themselves, and our highest obligation is to live righteously. These precepts run from Cotton Mather to Ralph Waldo Emerson to Billy Graham.
On the other hand, there is also an America of community, common cause, charity and collective responsibility. In this America, salvation comes from good works, compassion is among the greatest of virtues, and our highest obligation is to help others. These precepts run from Walt Whitman to the late 19th century Social Gospel movement to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
These two moralities managed to coexist — often within the same person — because they were not seen as mutually exclusive, especially in the 20th century. Nor was either the province of one political party or the other. Conservatives could subscribe to the ideals of generosity and compassion, just as liberals could subscribe to hard work and individual responsibility. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson's famous declaration in his first inaugural address after the contentious 1800 election that "we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists," one could say that Americans in general were all believers in the Protestant ethic, all believers in the Social Gospel.
Or at least that is the way it was.
But over the last 30 years or so, something has happened to reshape the country's moral geography. Everyone knows about the rise of Moral Majority-style Christian evangelicals as a potent force in right-wing politics. It injected a certain aggressive moralism into our political discourse and led to campaigns against abortion rights, homosexual rights, sexual freedom and other issues perceived as and then framed as moral matters. As a result, our politics became "moralized"; they were transformed into a contest of one set of values pitted against another.
This was hardly the first time politics was overtaken by morality. One has only to think of abolition and Prohibition. The difference this time was that as politics were being moralized and polarized, our morals were also being politicized and polarized. The two moral systems that had so long coexisted suddenly became mutually exclusive, oppositional and finally inseparable from the two regnant political ideologies.
One can see this division in something as simple as the denigration of the term "liberal," the "L" word, with its attendant idea that to be compassionate, caring and tolerant — virtues that had been celebrated, if only via lip service, by most Americans — is really to be mush-minded, weak and, more concretely, willing to give taxpayer largesse to the undeserving and lazy. (This was essentially the argument that some Republicans, such as former Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), used when they sought to deny an extension of unemployment benefits.
It is easy to miss how significant a change this is. It transforms compassion, a bulwark in practically any moral system, into a negative force that undermines the good of individual initiative. Indeed, conservative ideologue Marvin Olasky wrote a book to this effect, pungently titled "The Tragedy of American Compassion," in which he called for the privatization of all charitable efforts. It rapidly became a conservative touchstone.
Read the entire source story here.
The Need for Greed
Posted: May 18,2011
Source: Timothy Egan in The New York Times
The bet was audacious from the beginning, and given the miserable, low-down tenor of contemporary politics, not unfathomable: Could you divide the country between greedy geezers and everyone else as a way to radically alter the social contract?
But in order for the Republican plan to turn Medicare, one of most popular government programs in history, into a much-diminished voucher system, the greed card had to work.
The plan’s architect, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, drew a line in the actuarial sand: Anyone born before 1957 would not be affected. They could enjoy the single-payer, socialized medical care program that has allowed millions of people to live extended lives of dignity and decent health care.
And their kids and grandkids? Sorry, they would have to take their little voucher and pay some private insurer nearly twice as much as a senior pays for basic government coverage today. In essence, Republicans would break up the population between an I’ve Got Mine segment and The Left Behinds.
Again, not a bad political calculation. Altruism is a squishy notion, hard to sustain in an election. Ryan himself has made a naked play for greed in defending the plan. “Seniors, as soon as they realize this doesn’t affect them, they are not so opposed,” he has said.
[...] When the House of Representatives voted to end Medicare as we know it last month, it was sold as a way to save the program. Medicare now covers 47.5 million Americans, but it won’t have sufficient funds to pay full benefits by 2024, according to the most recent trustee report. Something has to be done.
Many Republicans want to kill it. They hate Medicare because it represents everything they are philosophically opposed to: a government-run program that works and is popular across the political board. It’s tough to shout about the dangers of universal health care when the two greatest protectors (if not creators) of the elderly middle class are those pillars of 20th-century progressive change, Social Security and Medicare.
For next year’s election, all but a handful of Republicans in the House are stuck with the Scarlet Letter of the Ryan Plan on their record. Soon, there will be a similar vote in the Senate. It will not pass, but it will show which side of the argument politicians are on.
There is a very simple way to make Medicare whole through the end of this century, far less complicated, and more of a bargain in the long run than the bizarre Ryan plan. Raise taxes. It hasn’t sunk in yet, but most American pay less taxes now than anytime in the last 50 years, according to a number of measurements. And a majority of the public now seems willing to pay a little extra (or force somebody else to pay a little extra) to keep a good thing going. Both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush raised taxes, by the way.
Given a choice between self-interest and the greater good, voters will usually watch out for themselves — unless that greater good is their own family. For Republicans intent on killing Medicare, it was a monumental miscalculation to miss that logical leap. Read the complete source story here.
America Held Hostage
Posted: May 13, 2011
Source: Paul Krugman in The New York Times
Six months ago President Obama faced a hostage situation. Republicans threatened to block an extension of middle-class tax cuts unless Mr. Obama gave in and extended tax cuts for the rich too. And the president essentially folded, giving the G.O.P. everything it wanted.
Now, predictably, the hostage-takers are back: blackmail worked well last December, so why not try it again? This time House Republicans say they will refuse to raise the debt ceiling — a step that could inflict major economic damage — unless Mr. Obama agrees to large spending cuts, even as they rule out any tax increase whatsoever. And the question becomes what, if anything, will get the president to say no.
The debt ceiling itself is a strange feature of U.S. law: since Congress must vote to authorize spending and choose tax rates, why have a second vote on whether to allow the borrowing that these spending and taxation policies imply? In practice, however, legislators have historically been willing to raise the debt ceiling as necessary, so this quirk in our system hasn’t mattered very much — until now.
What has changed? The answer is the radicalization of the Republican Party. Normally, a party controlling neither the White House nor the Senate would acknowledge that it isn’t in a position to impose its agenda on the nation. But the modern G.O.P. doesn’t believe in following normal rules.
So what will happen if the ceiling isn’t raised? [...]
[...] if we hit the debt ceiling, the government will be forced to stop paying roughly a third of its bills, because that’s the share of spending currently financed by borrowing. So will it stop sending out Social Security checks? Will it stop paying doctors and hospitals that treat Medicare patients? Will it stop paying the contractors supplying fuel and munitions to our military? Or will it stop paying interest on the debt?
Don’t say “none of the above.” As I’ve written before, the federal government is basically an insurance company with an army, so I’ve just described all the major components of federal spending. At least one, and probably several, of these components will face payment stoppages if federal borrowing is cut off.
And what would such payment stops do to the economy? Nothing good. Consumer spending would probably crash, as nervous seniors started wondering how to pay for rent and food. Businesses that depend on government purchases would slash payrolls and cancel investments.
Furthermore, markets might well panic, especially if interest payments are missed. And the consequences of undermining faith in U.S. debt might be especially severe because that debt plays a crucial role in many financial transactions.
So hitting the debt ceiling would be a very bad thing. Unfortunately, it may be unavoidable.
Why? Because this is a hostage situation. If the president and his allies operate on the principle that failure to raise the debt ceiling is an unthinkable outcome, to be avoided at all cost, then they have ceded all power to those willing to bring that outcome about. In effect, they will have ripped up the Constitution and given control over America’s government to a party that only controls one house of Congress, but claims to be willing to bring down the economy unless it gets what it wants.
Boeing shouldn't blame NLRB for doing its job
Posted: May 13, 2011
Source: Jeff Johnson in The Seattle Times
THE National Labor Relations Board complaint against Boeing has caused quite a stir. According to the NLRB charge, Boeing chose to set up its second 787 production line in North Charleston, S.C., in retaliation against the Machinists' Union because of repeated strikes against the company and the possibility the union could go on strike again.
On April 24, The Seattle Times editorialized against the NLRB action ["Feds shouldn't reverse Boeing's S.C. decision"] claiming both the union and the company are grown-ups and both know their rights. According to The Times, the union has a right to strike and the company has the right to build production facilities anywhere it wants within the confines of the law.
Both sides do have rights, but only one side, Boeing, violated the law. Boeing committed an unfair labor practice — not by putting its factory in South Carolina, a right-to-work state; it broke the law when it made it clear to employees it was relocating because of strikes. This action created a chilling effect on its employees as well as the state of Washington.
The Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO applauds the NLRB general counsel's decision. The NLRB is simply doing its job, defending the rights of workers to collectively bargain and to act in concerted activity. Were Boeing's actions to go unchecked, companies would be free to coerce and intimidate workers, their unions and states into deals that primarily profit the company. This would make a mockery of the fundamental human right of workers to stand together in order to balance out the power of corporations.
Yet instead of simply having its day in court, Boeing is trying to use its tremendous political clout to stop the actions of this independent federal law-enforcement agency. It is trying to win politically because it cannot win its case in a court. Read the source story here.
Business Groups Running Up Score In Olympia
Posted: May 13, 2011
Source: Brendan Williams in The Stand
In my six years in the State House, I never met a small business owner who wanted our state to fail.
Yet associations that represent businesses can’t seem to find anything nice to say about our state. Instead they talk down our economy.
After the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) stood up for Washington jobs and charged Boeing moved 787 production to South Carolina in retaliation for strikes here, voices for business responded with outrage… against the NLRB.
Richard Davis, president of the Washington Research Council, called the NLRB position “malign nonsense.” Don Brunell, president of the Association of Washington Business (AWB), declared, “In truth, the move to South Carolina was a reasonable business decision[.]” The business-funded Freedom Foundation suggested Boeing consider saying “‘Screw it – we are so out of here’” and relocate “to a country that appreciates good-paying jobs.” As to the merits of the NLRB action, the Foundation sneered, “A little gub’mint cheese with your union-label whine?”
None of this is new. When Boeing decided to relocate its corporate headquarters to Chicago, the Washington Institute (now the Washington Policy Center) suggested it was because of Seattle’s property taxes. Hmm. Chicago has the highest sales tax rate of any big city and Illinois has an income tax.
During the Initiative 1098 debate we were assured by the initiative’s opponents that Washington has a great business climate precisely because it does not have an income tax. The voter’s pamphlet statement against I-1098 lovingly quoted a Seattle Times editorial that stated I-1098 “takes away the most important tax-based advantage Washington has in attracting business and jobs here: our lack of a state income tax.” Wealthy CEOs, many of whom bankrolled a push for education reform projected – by 2018 – to cost the state billions it doesn’t have, lined up to contribute huge checks against I-1098 and ensure the state’s coffers ran dry.
With I-1098 defeated, we now hear, again, from these same people that Washington has a terrible business climate. Unmentioned now are our state’s “advantages” such as no income tax or no punitive damages in tort law. Instead, we’re told, we now need to eviscerate a century-old workers’ compensation system that ranks 36th nationally in employer share-of-cost.
Is it “anti-business” to question why the business community keeps moving the goalposts? As a guy who’s run a business association, and personally paid the business and occupation tax at its highest rate, I don’t think so. Read the source story here.
The Unwisdom of Elites
Posted: May 9, 2011
Source: Paul Krugman in The New York Times
The past three years have been a disaster for most Western economies. The United States has mass long-term unemployment for the first time since the 1930s. Meanwhile, Europe’s single currency is coming apart at the seams. How did it all go so wrong?
Well, what I’ve been hearing with growing frequency from members of the policy elite — self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing — is the claim that it’s mostly the public’s fault. The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness.
So this seems like a good time to point out that this blame-the-public view isn’t just self-serving, it’s dead wrong.
The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.
Let me focus mainly on what happened in the United States, then say a few words about Europe.
These days Americans get constant lectures about the need to reduce the budget deficit. That focus in itself represents distorted priorities, since our immediate concern should be job creation. But suppose we restrict ourselves to talking about the deficit, and ask: What happened to the budget surplus the federal government had in 2000?
The answer is, three main things. First, there were the Bush tax cuts, which added roughly $2 trillion to the national debt over the last decade. Second, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which added an additional $1.1 trillion or so. And third was the Great Recession, which led both to a collapse in revenue and to a sharp rise in spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs.
So who was responsible for these budget busters? It wasn’t the man in the street.
President George W. Bush cut taxes in the service of his party’s ideology, not in response to a groundswell of popular demand — and the bulk of the cuts went to a small, affluent minority.
Similarly, Mr. Bush chose to invade Iraq because that was something he and his advisers wanted to do, not because Americans were clamoring for war against a regime that had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact, it took a highly deceptive sales campaign to get Americans to support the invasion, and even so, voters were never as solidly behind the war as America’s political and pundit elite.
Finally, the Great Recession was brought on by a runaway financial sector, empowered by reckless deregulation. And who was responsible for that deregulation? Powerful people in Washington with close ties to the financial industry, that’s who. Let me give a particular shout-out to Alan Greenspan, who played a crucial role both in financial deregulation and in the passage of the Bush tax cuts — and who is now, of course, among those hectoring us about the deficit. Read the entire source story here