Jake Blumgart2013-05-24T22:29:04-04:00Jake Blumgarthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=jake-blumgartCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Jake BlumgartGood old fashioned elbow grease.Wells Fargo and Other Megabanks Don't Care About Your Businesstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.14352412012-04-24T11:41:11-04:002012-06-24T05:12:01-04:00Jake Blumgarthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-blumgart/announced another round of fees on basic checking accounts. Customers in six states will have to pay $7 a month if they receive paper statements, $5 if they get them online. The fees can be waived if the customer direct-deposits more than $500 a month, or maintains a balance of $1,500.
Wells Fargo customers in Georgia, Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania will be hit beginning in May, and the bank expects to expand it across the country in the coming months. While this fee is more narrowly targeted than the across-the-board debit card fees Bank of America attempted to enact last fall (until it backed down in the face of a wrathful public), it is part of a nationwide trend wherein Big Banks relentlessly penalize consumers for basic services. The banking industry, as Lynn Parramore noted on AlterNet, has become an oligopoly, with big players colluding to extract fees from customers, whether or not there is any justification for doing so.
Wells Fargo's new fee, and others like it, shows that the banks were not put off their course by last year's protests. Ordinary consumers have a strictly limited ability to hurt the big banks, which mostly depend on much larger clients for their business. Bank of America's retraction last year was not a game-changing victory, just a temporary setback.
"The biggest banks support an infrastructure that it's not clear if consumers benefit from, or that they necessarily benefit from consumers," says Mike Konczal, a fellow with the Roosevelt Institute who blogs at Rortybomb. "Facilitating the means of payment is one of the core things we want from a banking sector. And banks are basically saying we want to make this really difficult for you. This is exactly the kind of stuff we bailed them out to prevent them from failing to do."
If you were to ask a random passerby what she wants from a bank, a checking account easily accessible by debit card would likely top her list. The big banks do not have the same priorities. The average checking account does not make them much, if any, money, and paying all those cheery bank tellers and mailing statements is awfully expensive.
In the bad old days, the banks made up for this by hitting you with sly undercover fees and charging merchants exorbitant interchange fees, where the financiers take a percentage of any purchase made by a plastic card. (These charges are the reason why many small businesses only take cash.)
New regulations passed by the Democratic 111th Congress and signed by President Obama -- largely within the Dodd Frank law -- make it much harder to hit customers and merchants with hidden fees. But for the big banks, checking accounts, debit cards, and the everyday consumers that rely on them are only worthwhile if they hemorrhage money. So the big banks, which do most of their business in the capital markets and other high financial venues anyway, are finding new ways to bleed us.
As Felix Salmon shows in this chart, the big banking institutions have uniformly decided that free checking isn't a service they want to offer anymore. In 2009, 96 percent of banks worth over $50 billion offered free checking. Today only 34.6 percent do. (By contrast the number of credit unions proffering free checking dropped a mere 6.4 percentage points, from 85 to 78.6 percent.)
Couldn't the banks be backed down from this strategy? After all, Bank of America was dissuaded from its universal $5/per month debit card fees by a passionate public outcry, and the awful publicity that came with it. But it is unlikely similar tactics can reverse the overall trend. BofA relented because its greed was too apparent -- and it hurt everybody, no matter their income or banking habits. In future, the banks will just target smaller and more vulnerable populations, as Wells Fargo has.
Customers have responded to the big bank's disregard for their business by flocking to local banks and credit unions (5.6 million customers moved their accounts as of February). And it doesn't just seem to be the Occupy Wall Street-inspired Bank Transfer day, or similar civic-minded acts of protest, that are leading customers toward smaller institutions, which have less overhead (reasonable CEO pay, for example) and therefore less incentive to rip off their customers. No matter their other political inclinations, no one likes having to keep a perpetual eye out for when their bank will try to screw them next.
On the national level, credit unions haven't even had to advertise themselves as an alternative. Customer disgust and pure market incentives are all the advertisement they need. "With the Bank of America thing that happened last fall we really didn't need to [reach out], people took that into their own hands," said Patrick Keefe, vice president of communications for the Credit Union National Association. "Credit unions don't have the resources to run out and start taking advantage of these situations. But we picked up 1.3 million members last year and got a big chunk of as a result of Bank of America.
Credit unions have been trying to address some of the disadvantages associated with their smaller size. The Philadelphia Federal Credit Union offers surcharge free ATM access at many other credit union ATMs across the nation, along with those of several prominent convenience stores, including 7-11. Online banking is routine too.
However, the significance of moving your money from a big bank to a credit union should not be overestimated. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Felix Salmon argues that as consumers "leave the big banks for smaller competitors, the too-big-to-fail crew will inevitably lose political clout -- and, eventually, start shrinking."
But Konczal is skeptical. He points out that if the big banks are as disdainful of ordinary consumers as these fees indicate, then they probably aren't going to be too badly hurt by the exodus. Regular customers are not the banks' primary business and the only way they'll be interested in continuing to serve our needs is if they can recoup the Dodd-Frank induced losses.
"Bank of America and the rest are so locked on a course of action that has so little to do with their retail consumer relationships that it's probably an afterthought to them," Konczal says. "Given that the crisis and all the stuff we find really reprehensible was not in the retail banking sector that consumers put their money into, it's hard to reform it through that direction. The real reform needs to happen through other spaces, derivatives market, securitization, conflicts of interest."
But if moving your money to a credit union won't make Bank of America or Wells Fargo small enough to fail, it is a rational consumer decision. Credit unions' business model is not predicated on making a buck on your back, so no more stressing about where the next fee will come from. Making the switch may not be a revolutionary act, but it will certainly make your life easier.
The original version of this article was published on Alternet. Reposted here with minor revisions for clarity. ]]>Expanding Title VII to Cover Union Organizingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13998452012-04-04T10:47:01-04:002012-06-04T05:12:02-04:00Jake Blumgarthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-blumgart/
Cory Ballard, a 25-year-old resident of Strawberry Mansion, a nearby neighborhood, and single father of two sons, got a job as a player's services representative, a position he describes as the "frontlines of the casino." He was well-liked by coworkers and managers both.
The latter half of that equation quickly changed when Ballard and many of his coworkers signed a petition in support of a union-organizing drive with UNITE HERE Local 54, which represents casino workers in the region.
He wasn't initially a union supporter, but management's tactics seemed fishy. "They had these anti-union meetings, to tell us why we don't need a union, but they never give the opposing side, so I sought my own information and decided the union was best for me," Ballard told reporters outside the Sugarhouse offices last Tuesday.
Management's attitude toward Ballard quickly soured after they learned of his pro-union stance and he was soon asked to resign after the company alleged he gave free slot play to someone he knew and claimed he would do jail time if he did not resign. He won his job back soon afterwards (with the help of coworkers who marched into management's office to demand he return to work), and Ballard returned with a union button. He was fired at the beginning of 2012 for a minor error, one that multiple employees made, and which he immediately reported to his boss. Ballard was the only one terminated.
"[This] is typical of what happens in union organizing drives: Even though the National Labor Relations Act makes it illegal to discriminate against someone based on whether or not they support a union," says Richard Kahlenberg, co-author with Moshe Marvit of the new book, Why Labor Organizing Should be a Civil Right. "[Companies] don't want to have to share productivity gains with their employees, they'd rather keep it for management and the stockholders. Firms... want to send a message to employees that they will be fired if they get involved in union organizing."
At a recent action in his support, Ballard presented Sugarhouse's management with a petition for his reinstatement signed by two-thirds of his coworkers in the player's services department. A group of his former colleagues and a local minister marched into the casino's executive offices to present his former bosses with the signatures. "Cory was one of the best coworkers we had," one current Sugarhouse employee told a manager. "It's outrageous and wrong. We know that it could happen to any one of us."
Six other strong union supporters, who have taken leadership positions on the organizing committee have been fired since the campaign went public, although never explicitly for their union support. The casino's media representatives say that the company "does not comment on individual personnel matters."
"It is unjust and unlawful for them to terminate me for my union support," Ballard says. "This is my federal right to express myself and decide I want a union. But people are actually afraid to stand up and speak because they are afraid this could happen to them."
And that's the point. Contemporary American businesses show little compunction at breaking the central pillar of American labor relations, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), and firing workers who express a desire for representation. Terminate a few prominent union supports, let fear keep the rest of the workforce in check, and let the vast majority of profits flow to management and shareholders, instead of to the workers who create them. A recent study by Kate Bronfennbrenner of Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, shows that employees are fired in more than one in three union organizing drives. And that may be an underestimate. By Bronfenbrenner's accounting less than half of unfair labor practices (firings, wage cuts, harassment, and surveillance) are reported, often because the remaining employees fear further reprisals.
Employers ignore the NLRA with impunity because labor cases are arbitrated under a substantially weaker legal regime than the rest of American law. There is no jury and pre-trial discovery is not allowed, meaning the prosecutors have to solely rely on publicly available information, documents the company offers, and witness accounts, which probably includes testimony from (nervous) workers still employed at the firm. No recourse is allowed outside the NLRB and claims cannot be taken up in federal court.
The process can take up to three to five years and, in 2009, the fines paid by lawbreaking firms only averaged $5,149 per employee. (Employees terminated for organizing are required to look for work and wages are then deducted from the NLRB settlement.) Compare that paltry sum to the wages and benefits the employers would have to pay to the whole workforce if the union won. The incentives are entirely in favor of breaking the law.
It is for these reasons that Kahlenberg and Marvit argue that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act should be extended to cover labor organizing. In Why Labor Organizing Should be a Civil Right (available as of April 1), the authors claim it is time to change both the broken legal system that ineffectually "protects" American workers like Ballard, and the tactics of reformers who want to change it.
Kahlenberg and Marvit first argue the legal case. Title VII provides a powerful defense against discrimination based on race, sex, age, and religion (among others). Under the Civil Rights Act the employee can opt out of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission process (close to the civil rights equivalent of the NLRB) and take the case to a federal court, before a jury, where they are provided with the means to retain a lawyer if they do not have the necessary funds.
Such suits are not an easy win. The opponent is almost always a business with substantial legal and monetary resources. But the incentives are not one-sided: Employees stand to win much more than $5,000. As Kahlenberg and Marvit note, "a plaintiff may be awarded a variety of remedies, including back pay (with interest), reinstatement or front pay, equitable relief, compensatory damages, and punitive damages." Lost overtime, health and pension benefits are included, as are "money damages to cover emotional pain, suffering, inconvenience, mental anguish." These cases also make the right of "discovery" available, opening up internal documents and data to the court and the public--a prospect many companies dread. In short, firing workers would no longer be a painless way to stamp out a union organizing drive.
Kahlenberg and Marvit lay out their argument clearly and concisely. The legislative proposal is simple: "The amendment of the Civil Rights Act to include protection for an employee to join or not join a union." Their idea is sound, and while it only covers one of the numerous issues that beset American workers, the protections it offers are well worth fighting for. The book's actual text is a mere 113 pages, even though it contains chapters that cover everything from an overview of international labor laws to a treatise on the importance of organized labor in a functioning democracy.
But America's political system is the Achilles heel of any attempt to change our grotesquely inadequate labor laws. As the authors note, four different Democratic presidents, with substantial congressional majorities, have failed to pass various types of labor law reform. Even Lyndon Johnson and the famed 89th Congress, which passed Medicare, Medicaid and the Voting Rights Act, proved unable to enact pro-labor legislation that would have banned so-called "right-to-work" laws, which enable workers to use a union's services without paying dues, quickly sapping its resources.
The central problem, according to the authors, is that labor law reform efforts have been too wrapped up in the complexities of the NLRA, an isolating context that sets labor and business up as two opposing special interest groups. By contrast, adjusting the Civil Rights Act emphasizes and protects the individual worker's right to join a union, theoretically negating the specter of a brutish clash between large institutions.
"This effort goes to a question everyone can understand: Should you be fired for trying to join a union?" Kahlenberg told AlterNet. "We can elevate this discussion to a higher plane and take it out of the special interest box and put it into the more morally elevated notion of vindicating individual civil rights."
This fresh focus could expand the appeal of reform. Everyone knows about the Civil Right Act and even most conservatives support it. (The book has already received verbal support and blurbs from influential labor and civil rights groups, including the NAACP.) The authors understand some political hurdles -- Republicans and big business will always oppose anything like this, so reformers must wait for another sweeping Democratic victory -- but they may underestimate other institutional barriers. All of the previous reform efforts were shattered on the battlements of the anti-democratic Senate (every proposal passed the House), which over-represents thinly populated, anti-labor states. Today, with unions weaker than ever before, and an influential wing of the Democratic Party shot through with anti-labor, pro-business ideology, it seems doubtful that even a carefully calibrated proposal like this could get through a Democratic-dominated Congress.
The question is likely to be academic for a long while. Complete Democratic control of Washington historically lasts for little more than one congressional session every 10 years. But when such a majority comes again, Kahlenberg and Marvit's plan will be preferable to another attempt to tinker with the current rusted machinery. As the case of Cory Ballard and Sugarhouse Casino shows, it is time to try something new
This article was originally published on Alternet. ]]>Americans Are Protesting, But What Stops Full-Scale Rioting?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13898492012-03-30T13:01:22-04:002012-05-30T05:12:01-04:00Jake Blumgarthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-blumgart/This story was originally published on Alternet.
Michael Katz's Why Don't American Cities Burn? is both a crushing reminder of seemingly intractable problems that still face American cities and an exploration of why things aren't worse. It is a slim book that serves as a general overview of the current state of the urban studies field, and although it went to the presses before Occupy Wall Street broke out, it provides some insight into the structural challenges facing the protesters who have recently flooded the streets of American metropolises.
Katz lives in Philadelphia, where he teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania. The book's engrossing prologue is told in the first person and uses a murder trial, at which Katz served on the jury, as a framing device to set up his major themes. He gives us a portrait of the North Philadelphia badlands, where the underground economy is the largest employer and violence is a normalized part of life. Katz weaves fascinating insights on urban America into the larger narrative, which centers on a deadly confrontation between two black men, Shorty and Herbert, and ends with the former dead of a knife wound.
Why Don't American Cities Burn? returns to these two men again and again, but readers hoping for a continued easy read will soon be disappointed. Chapter 2, titled "The New African-American Inequality," looks at almost every imaginable metric by which well-being can be measured and shows that inequality persists in every way, despite significant advances, between black Americans and their counterparts. It is as enlightening an as unremitting litany of statistics can be, but the effect is numbing.
Katz uses Herbert and Shorty as the catalyst for the titular chapter, which asks why anger at the crushing conditions in many urban neighborhoods resulted in a wave of criminal violence, rather than acts of collective rage. The conditions that inspired urban violence in the 1960s still exist and, in many cases, have worsened: unemployment, police brutality, failing schools, segregation and poverty.
Similar conditions led France's immigrant youth to a two-week spasm of violence in 2005, an event that captured headlines across the world and provided Katz with the inspiration for Why Don't American Cities Burn? But the United States has seen very little urban rioting since the 1960s -- the L.A. riots of 1992 being the obvious exception.
Katz traces the lack of urban unrest, both peaceful and violent, to America's complex web of freedoms and repression. In contrast to European immigrant communities, the Hispanic-American community has not typically turned to burning cars, instead favoring non-violent protests and organized political pressure. Katz hypothesizes that this may be because the United States assimilates immigrant communities in a fashion alien to most industrialized societies. After five years in the U.S., documented immigrants can be naturalized, and their children are considered American at birth; most European nations are far more stringent.
Still, there is persistent inequality between whites and blacks, and the African-American middle class and those who were not given the chance to take advantage of the gains of the 1960s. Anger over this injustice is kept corralled within heavily segregated neighborhoods by a militarized police force and the political repression of most non-mainstream political organizations, thus curbing "collective violence against perceived injustice or organized political protest." And America's masses of undocumented immigrants are kept in line by the fear of ICE raids, while "the twin mechanisms of deportation and unemployment constitute an effective method of social control."
Instead of collective violence or mass protest, Katz argues, despair and rage have been turned inward, resulting in heightened personal or criminal violence, like the confrontation between Herbert and Shorty. (Katz notes that of the 375 Philadelphia murders in 2005, 308 of the dead were black men, most of them young.) Massive unemployment and deeply troubled school systems contribute to the rise of criminal activity. The problem metastasizes as the influence of the underground economy (reinforced by the hostile tactics of many urban police departments) strains, and often breaks, the community's relationship with law enforcement.
The first factor complicating Katz's thesis is Occupy Wall Street. Although OWS's decentralized nature makes it difficult to assert that it is and will always be completely non-violent -- some say claims of protestor violence have been exaggerated while police brutality runs rampant. In a December podcast Katz said: "I see no evidence... whatsoever" that the Occupy movement will lead to cities burning. He does see the movement as a new form of social movement in America (no leaders, very diffuse) using organized, largely non-violent protest tactics to make demands upon city governments in an age of austerity and ever-increasing inequality. Since the interview, Occupy Oakland has been the site of sustained protestor and police conflict, with reports of militant occupiers attacking property and police. But the city seems to be an outlier, with a tense history between activists and a police force that is currently being threatened with a federal takeover due to its checkered history.
But mostly OWS still fits into Katz's formulation. The movement's effectiveness may be hindered by the fact that it is almost entirely rooted in Northeastern, Midwestern and West Coast metropolises, which are dramatically underfunded and underrepresented in national and state politics. There are immense structural limits to the power of the local politicians who actually deal with OWS. When Philadelphia's Mayor Michael Nutter declared his allegiance to the 99 percent, the claim actually held more validity than occupiers might think. Cities have suffered immense fiscal losses over the last half century, as many of their more affluent citizens decamped for the exurbs taking their tax dollars with them. To make matters worse, conservatives in D.C. ended most national spending on cities: "Between 1980 and 1990 the share of big city expenses covered by the federal aid dropped from 22 percent to 6 percent," Katz writes.
Following the Great Recession and the end of the Obama administration's stimulus spending, conservative state legislatures are raining hellish cuts upon helpless and already cash-strapped city governments. Right-wing politicians know that urban dwellers don't vote Republican anyway, so making them suffer won't lose them many votes.
In short, the Occupy movement is running up against the same problem that previous generations of urban social movements faced: They are marching and making demands far from where real power is located. Faced with another brutal round of state-imposed cuts to everything from higher education to Medicaid, Donald Schwarz, deputy mayor for health and opportunity, told the Philadelphia City Paper, "Philadelphia will do all it can to blunt these effects, but given the city's fiscal situation and the magnitude of the estimated cuts... there's not much we can do."
Another recent phenomenon complicating Katz's thesis brings criminal violence, as collective violence, into more affluent areas. In recent years, low-income, largely black youth have been engaged in seemingly spontaneous mass gatherings (some organized through social media), which often result in violence and theft in predominantly white or ethnically diverse business centers. Dubbed "flash mobs" by the media, incidents usually involve a great mass of youth idling in, or sprinting down the street, while some members vandalize, thieve and viciously beat bystanders.
The impetuous behind these collective attacks is murky, but the answer could relate to one reason Katz provides for the 1960s riots: "boundary challenges," when shifting boundaries between ethnically homogenous areas provoke violence. Philadelphia, along with many of the other flash-mob afflicted cities, experienced a downtown boom and the gentrification of some neighborhoods close to the city center, while adjacent low-income areas, populated by people of color, have seen little benefit. Philadelphia is one of the most racially segregated cities in America, and the wealthier downtown neighborhoods are the only places where white population grew in the last 10 years. The revitalized core makes disparities clearly visible to impoverished youth, who have been slammed by dramatic cuts to school budgets and youth programs. (Philadelphia youth program funding fell from $16 million in 2002 to $1.2 million in 2010, according to the New York Times.)
Katz ends his book with a cry against despair. Too often, he argues, leftists have internalized a fatalistic view of urban problems, when progress has been and is being made. The public housing high-rises that justly earned so much scorn in the 1960s, have largely been torn down and today public housing is often better and cheaper than the offerings of the private housing market. The living-wage movement carries on, and on a parallel track, market-oriented anti-poverty programs are generating new interest in social programs. Defeat is not inevitable.]]>Eastern Europe's Conservative Crackdown on Reproductive Freedomtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12632862012-02-09T13:40:42-05:002012-04-10T05:12:01-04:00Jake Blumgarthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-blumgart/
"There is a very strong pronatalist [anti-choice] current in Central and Eastern Europe and that goes along with nationalist tendencies in many of these countries," says Johanna Westeson, European regional director for the Center for Reproductive Rights. "One of the things that is very visible is the so-called demography argument. Birthrates are very low in Central and Eastern Europe, and, in an attempt to increase birthrates, women's reproductive rights are being [restricted]."
In 2010, Hungary's right-wing nationalist Fidesz party swept to victory and quickly entrenched their position. The conservative government infringed upon the independence of the judiciary, the central bank, and the media, while installing party loyalists in institutions ranging from courts to opera houses. In March 2011, Fidesz and its Christian Democratic allies presented a new constitution, with no input from opposition parties.
Seven months later, that constitution is law, including a stand-alone section reading: "Every human being shall have the right to life and human dignity; embryonic and foetal life shall be subject to protection from the moment of conception."
Hungarian abortion law remains unchanged, so far. But the constitution is less than a month old and new elections will not be held until 2014. And that may not even matter. Fidesz's recent redistricting makes it next to impossible to lose future elections.
"We know what their intentions are. Even though it doesn't create restrictions on abortion itself, it creates the ability," says Christina Zampas, practitioner-in-residence and supervising attorney with the University of Miami Law School's Human Rights Clinic. "If you look globally at countries that have this language in their constitution... they almost inevitably have restrictive abortion laws."
Such a law would not be popular in Hungary. While more than 50 percent of Hungarians identify as Catholic, only 21 percent attend services regularly. Poll numbers from March, 2011 showed 42 percent of respondents found abortion "acceptable due to family or economical problems" and a further 29 percent thought that women should have complete control over their bodies. Fidesz seems to recognize these facts. The same can not be said of their Christian Democratic (KDNP) allies.
Changing the constitution requires a two-thirds majority in Parliament and while Fidesz controls the vast majority of seats they cannot obtain a supermajority without help. Although Fidesz and the KDNP are tightly knit and cooperate during elections, when the two parties met to craft the new constitution, the KDNP faction threatened to forsake the alliance, denying Fidesz their supermajority, if a life-from-conception clause was not included.
"There is a big chance that the government could restrict abortion, not with a big ban but in more subtle ways less likely to stir much opposition from the people in general," says Kuszing Gábor, a consultant with the Association Against Patriarchy (Patent), one of the principal groups opposing the new constitutional language. "But this government [has] done so many unthinkable things, which are so unpopular, that I can imagine them actually doing it."
Abortion isn't the only front where Hungarian conservatives are encroaching upon reproductive freedom. For a brief moment it seemed that emergency contraception -- Plan B -- would be available over the counter. But on August, 2011 it was unexpectedly ruled that the pill endangered the "mother" and the "fetus" (Plan B prevents fertilization from occurring).
A coalition of feminist groups and other elements of civil society have been banding together and attempting to raise public awareness and protest the constitutional provision. The coalition is impressively diverse: health professionals, traditional civil rights groups, NGOs, and international human rights organizations. It is unclear whether they will have leverage in a country where political and judicial power is concentrated entirely in the hands of the people who wrote the very constitution they object to.
Meanwhile, fiercely anti-choice policies are being introduced across Central and Eastern Europe. Heavily Catholic Slovakia recently saw an attempt to pass a law establishing longer waiting periods and bias counseling requirements. A constitutional court case is challenging the legality of Slovakia's abortion law outright. In 2008 legislation was introduced in Lithuania banning abortion except in instances where the woman's life is at risk or the pregnancy is the result of a crime (it failed by narrow margins).
Many of these states are Catholic bastions, but the state of abortion rights in Russia shows that the trend is more than another case of the Vatican's unfortunate power over sexual and reproductive policy. But 2011 saw a series of sweeping anti-abortion laws, informed by recommendations from the Church, that enacted week-long waiting periods, a 12-week legal cap, requirements that women over six weeks pregnant be shown an ultrasound, and mandatory appointments with a government psychologist who will try to convince the woman to carry her pregnancy to term. Abortion providers are now forced to spend 10 percent of any advertising on descriptions of the supposed dangers of abortion.
Coercive attempts to increase birthrates do not work. Abortion and access to contraceptives are tightly restricted in Poland, but the national birthrate continues to decline. As Michelle Goldberg demonstrates in The Means of Reproduction, "in contemporary societies, birthrates are highest where support for working mothers is greatest." France has one of the highest birthrates in Europe, along with abortion laws that are more liberal than Hungary's current standards: women can expect generous paid maternity leave and, more importantly, easy access to public daycare and after school care.
Central and Eastern European leaders would do well to note that women in industrialized societies feel more comfortable having children if they know they won't have to quit their jobs and remain at home. Enabling women to comfortably choose larger families is the way to end the demographic crisis. Restricting, or even banning, abortion, will only cause more women to get the procedure illegally, and dangerously.
Jake Blumgart is a freelance reporter-researcher based in Philadelphia. Follow him on Twitter. An extended version of this article was published by Towards Freedom. ]]>4 Absurd, Damaging Right-Wing Lies About Food Stampstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12009572012-01-12T15:45:34-05:002012-03-13T05:12:01-04:00Jake Blumgarthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-blumgart/food stamp challenge." During the challenge, the congresspeople maintained a $4.50-per-day food budget to better understand the situation of those in the food stamp program, which delivers an average weekly benefit of $32.59. (The program was officially renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, in 2004.)
"There are a lot of myths associated with food stamps," including "the argument that it is rife with fraud" and the idea that beneficiaries are shiftless, said Speier. "Many of those who are on food stamps are the working poor. I really feel strongly that unless we walk in the shoes of someone on food stamps, we have no idea. I had no idea, I really didn't."
The food stamp challenge highlights the realities of a program in peril and serves as a necessary corrective to the narrative promoted by today's ultra-conservative Republican Party. The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece calling SNAP "a magnet for abuses and absurdities" and a "conspiracy against self-reliance." In March, the powerful House Agriculture Committee recommended cutting SNAP in lieu of farm subsidies, which largely benefit the wealthy. And in October Senator Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama, fumed, "No program in our government has surged out of control more dramatically than food stamps."
The congressional supercommittee, which has been attempting to reduce the deficit, eyed the program hungrily as well, even though SNAP costs a mere $68 billion of a federal budget that is larger than $3.5 trillion -- a drop in the bucket compared to the reckless, wasteful and fraud-prone Pentagon spending or the nation's unbelievably high healthcare costs.
The attacks on SNAP are wrong on their merits. They are also cruel, especially if the accompanying proposals are enacted. There are currently 45.8 million people on SNAP (an astounding one out of every seven Americans). Less than half of beneficiaries are of working age, but a majority of adults on the program are underemployed or work jobs with wages so low they can't always afford housing, utilities and transportation in addition to sufficient food for their families. They aren't lazy or weak; they're trapped by low-wage employment in an economy that's mostly creating jobs that pay less than $13.52 an hour.
Perhaps SNAP's congressional opponents wouldn't be such a danger if voters better understood the program. But as Speier noted, there are many myths about the program that poison the public perception of it. Here are four rebuttals to common misconceptions about the federal food stamp program.
1. The program is rife with fraud and abuse.
In the Wall Street Journal editorial, SNAP is denounced as an "unmonitored welfare program" that hemorrhages billions in unjustifiable and fraudulent claims. This is demonstrably false.
In 2010, the Government Accountability Office found that "the national rate of food stamp trafficking [trading benefits for money or non-food goods] declined from about 3.8 cents per dollar of benefits" in 1993 to 1 cent per dollar today -- a historic decline. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, which runs the program, SNAP "had the lowest error rate in history at 3.81%. Over 98% of those receiving benefits are eligible for SNAP."
Steps can be taken to bring those numbers down even further, but to argue, as the GOP has, that sweeping cuts are needed to address minimal levels of fraud and abuse is akin to recommending a howitzer barrage as an appropriate response to a household fruit fly infestation.
A more appropriate response would be to double down on the USDA's successful anti-fraud campaign. The Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, cards that went into circulation in 2004 (replacing traditional food stamps) make it significantly easier to detect abusive users and the retailers that enable them. The USDA employs over 100 staffers to investigate these crimes. Hiring a few more to bolster the effort makes more sense than letting millions of Americans go hungry.
2. There are too many "hipsters" and college students on food stamps.
Since the start of the Great Recession, the food stamp population has almost doubled, from 26 million in 2007 to between 45 and 47 million starting in 2009. This increase has largely been the result of the cratering economy and persistent unemployment making more Americans poorer and therefore eligible for food stamps. But the government also set higher income eligibility limits in recent years (130 percent of the poverty line, or annual income of $14,157 for an individual) and eased accessibility restrictions on the unemployed and childless.
These changing criteria should be welcomed. Too frequently social programs (e.g., Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit) are limited to families, while low-income people without children are left to fend for themselves. These attempts to bring policy in line with economic realities have broadened access to food assistance to demographics that stretch the stereotypical image of "poverty," including jobless professionals, students, young people and people with middle-class backgrounds.
Presumably it is these people who the Wall Street Journal refers to as "trust fund babies driving Rolls Royces [getting] free food courtesy of Uncle Sam." Salon's coverage of this non-issue brought swarms of commenters (478 as of this writing), some of whom responded humanely, but many who denounced "self-imposed poverty" and called the "hipster" recipients a "burden to society."
"There are some people who may have a hip looking haircut or a tattoo who are unemployed or underemployed and have the same legal rights and moral rights to food as anyone else," noted Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?. "Anyway, the vast majority of people who are using food stamps were poor, and are now poorer."
The "hipsters on food stamps" narrative gets a spotlight that is disproportionate to actual trends. For one thing, beneficiaries aren't "secretly middle-class." Close to 90 percent of households that use SNAP live below the poverty line, while 40 percent of households live at half of the poverty line (less than $10,000 a year for a family of three). According to the USDA, close to half of the beneficiaries are children (48 percent), and another 8 percent are over 60. A majority of those who are of working age are working. In the 1990s, half of new food stamp beneficiaries participated in the program for eight months or less -- basically, until they found a job. There is no reason to assume that the same isn't true for today's beneficiaries; it just takes them longer to find employment.
SNAP is an entitlement program, meaning that anyone who is eligible can gain access. Just because someone graduated from college, or grew up outside of poverty, doesn't mean she don't need help now. This recession devastated the assets and savings accounts of many middle-class people, so relying on family isn't an option for many individuals. Meanwhile, the job market remains exceptionally weak. More people need food assistance now, no matter their background.
3. Recipients "waste" their benefits on unhealthy food.
Many policy analysts and other influential figures argue that recipients should not be allowed to use food stamps to purchase soda or other junk food. This proposal is both demeaning and doesn't address any actual problems. First of all, there is little evidence that, given options, low-income people eat less healthily than middle-class people. (One recent study shows that poor people tend to eat less fast food than their middle-class counterparts -- and food stamps can't be used to purchase hot food anyway.) It isn't as though food stamp beneficiaries are buying unusual amounts of soda, candy, other junk food. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "Almost 90 percent of the food consumed by food SNAP households goes to fruits and vegetables, grain products, meats, or dairy products."
The reason that many low-income areas have higher obesity rates than wealthier areas is that low-quality food, like white bread, is cheaper and more easily accessible than, say, fruits and vegetables, especially in areas where supermarkets are scarce.
4. The program is too generous, and food stamps are a significant contributor to national debt.
Conservatives have made a great show of moaning about the recent explosion in SNAP's caseload. Those who would make this an issue (ahem, Jeff Sessions and the Wall Street Journal) are being dumb-headed or malicious, or both. The food stamp program is designed to be responsive to economic downturns. The reason over 15 million people have been added to the rolls is simple: We've suffered the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, and the economy is still stagnant. SNAP is doing exactly what it is meant to in these circumstances: ease the plight of those who have been negatively affected by the downturn and boost their purchasing power.
The idea that benefits are too generous is absurd. Monthly benefits run to $133.80 a month for each member of the household, or about $4.50 a day -- although poorer households get more generous benefits, while increased income leads to stingier assistance. And, again, food stamps can't be used to purchase hot food, alcohol, tobacco, or other non-food items.
Also, the expanding food stamp program is not even close to being a significant driver of our national debt. As previously stated, SNAP rolls expand and contract with the health of the economy. If and when the nation gets to a better place economically, the number of enrollees will decline; it's no miracle. The only reason food assistance is being targeted is because the constituencies that use food stamps -- the poor and nearly-poor -- are not particularly powerful, especially compared to the those who protect genuinely wasteful spending, like agricultural subsidies and the gluttonous military budget.
Cutting food stamps in the name of debt relief would be a PR stunt, a political ploy. And while its effect on America's debt will be negligible, the suffering that would be inflicted on millions of Americans, almost half of them children, would be very real.
This piece was originally posted on Alternet.
]]>Four Popular Safety-Net Programs Tea Party Republicans Have Turned Againsttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10987592011-11-18T10:47:57-05:002012-01-18T05:12:01-05:00Jake Blumgarthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-blumgart/
These policies have two things in common. They've historically enjoyed high levels of support, not just from the Democratic Party, but from Republicans as well. And today's GOP plans to dismantle or seriously weaken all of them, setting back almost a century of progress.
This isn't a sudden lurch to the right, but the continuation of a process that has been in motion for decades. After Democratic president Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights laws of the 1960s, conservative southern whites began breaking towards the Republicans. With these energetically reactionary voters added to their base, Republican elites could rely on more consistently hardline support for a platform consisting largely of tax breaks for the wealthy and attacking social programs.
"We have a new breed of Republican that is much more radical," says Peter Edleman, expert on social insurance programs and an assistant secretary of health and human services in the Clinton administration. "Every time the Republicans come to power, they are more conservative. Reagan was very negative about a whole series of programs that helped low-income people, Gingrich was worse than Reagan and now the Tea Party is the worst we've seen."
Below you will find four examples of social programs that used to be supported by Republicans (at least some of them), but have suffered sustained attack over the last thee years.
School Lunch Programs
Ensuring that American students can attend school with full bellies seems like the most uncontroversial public policy of all time. Besides the obvious common decency argument, multiple studies show that children learn better when they aren't hungry.
Free school lunch programs were originally instituted following World War II and the basics of the program are reauthorized every five years. The last time it was up for reauthorization, as the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004, it passed both houses of Congress unanimously. (Only Ron Paul voted against the iteration before that.)
Not so last year, when the Child Nutrition Bill met the Tea Party. Sure, the bill was a little larger this time and it included some additional guidelines to encourage a more nutritious diet. "The bills are very, very similar," says Joel Berg, author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America? and who served eight years at the Clinton administration's US Department of Agriculture (which oversees many of the government's anti-hunger programs).
But House Republicans used these changes as an excuse to vote against the bill en masse. Despite the Obama administration's desperate concessions to get more Republicans on board, 157 of the 170 member House Republican caucus voted against the bill. And they've continued their crusade against healthy school meals since gaining a majority in the House.
"The last two times it passed Congress with virtually no controversy," says Berg. "That's a huge change. Lots of people have gone after food stamps. But going after school meals, I don't know if the Grinch would do that. But House Republicans do. If they can't be for healthier school meals for kids what can they be for?"
Food Stamps
As Berg points out, food stamps--now officially known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)--have encountered greater conservative opposition than school lunch programs. But the program has also obtained significant levels of Republican support throughout its history. Which makes sense: food stamps are certainly a more conservative alternative to, say, cash assistance programs, which have long been derided by the GOP.
Indeed, Richard Nixon and his administration advocated for and oversaw a significant expansion of the program and laid the groundwork for the groundbreaking Food Stamp Reform bill 1977, which created the program as we know it today. Powerful conservative senators like Robert Dole and Richard Lugar allied with their Democratic counterparts to strengthen food stamps.
Ronald Reagan initially instituted significant cuts in food stamps, but the program was expanded again in 1985 and 1987. While Newt Gingrich and his ilk were venomous in their opposition, George W. Bush seemed to be a quiet supporter. In 2002, he advocated the restoration of food stamp eligibility to many legal immigrants who had been denied it as a result of a Clinton-era concession to the right. Eric Bost, the Bush administration's Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services, said, "I assure you, food stamps is not welfare."
But Eric Bost is long gone. Earlier this year, Paul Ryan proposed, and the House Republican caucus approved, a budget that included a plan to make SNAP a block grant program, similar to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, or what remains of welfare). This would be a disaster. Block grants mean that each state will get a set chunk on money for food stamps every year. The amount of money can't rise with need, so if a bunch of new people become eligible for food stamps--because of, say, a massive recession--the states will be unable to add them to the SNAP rolls. To make matters worse, the amount of money granted to the states for SNAP will be at the mercy of inflation and will be worth less every year. If TANF is anything to go by, the lump sum won't be increased, and food stamps will cover fewer and fewer people every year.
This draconian policy proposal was approved by almost every Republican in the House, including former anti-hunger advocates like Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO). All but five Senate Republicans voted for Ryan's budget too, including Lugar. The Democratic majority in the upper chamber defeated the Ryan bill, but Lugar, personifying the GOP's hard-right swing on this policy, proposed deep cuts to the program a few months later.
Community Health Centers
Community health centers have existed since the 1960s, introduced as part of the War on Poverty and really taking off in the 1970s. These health centers are meant to provide quality healthcare regardless of income or insurance status (they are generally priced on a sliding scale).
Conservatives have appreciated the fact that community health centers are phenomenally cost-effective. According to the National Association of Community Health Centers, the "Estimated Total Medical Savings Per Person" for center patients in 2009 was $1,262. Another study shows that health centers save $24 billion a year.
No less a conservative than George W. Bush was a big fan, doubling federal spending on community health centers during his presidency. He called them "an integral part of the healthcare system because they provide care for the low-income, for the newly arrived, and they take the pressure off of our hospital emergency rooms."
It wasn't just the president who supported community health centers. The Health Care Safety Net Act, which passed in 2008, was entirely uncontroversial with hardly a hand raised against it.
Fast-forward three years, and GOP attitudes have changed dramatically. In 2011, the House decimated the $2.2 billion in appropriations annually allocated to health center funding, cutting more than one-third of the budget. The Affordable Care Act provided funds to further expand the number of community health centers across the nation, but the money mostly had to fill in the gaps left by Republican marauding instead. If the reduced annual appropriations remain in effect past 2014 the money from the Affordable Care Act will dry up, leaving community health centers with less federal support than they won in 2008. Millions could be left without care.
The Earned Income Tax Credit
Conservatives love shaking their heads in righteous consternation and asking: "Did you know that only 53 percent of Americans pay taxes?" They've even got a Tumblr about it.
This juicy little sound bite ignores several key points. First, those 47 percent of people who "don't pay taxes" actually just don't owe any federal income taxes, largely because they don't have much income. Second, they do pay state, local, sales, payroll, gasoline, and other excise taxes -- federal income taxes made up just 22.7 percent of all taxes paid in this country last year. (Note that rich people get to avoid the vast majority of their payroll taxes, which represent about the same share of the total as federal income taxes.) Third, the reason many of the so-called 47 percent don't pay income taxes is because of the earned income tax credit (EITC), a policy instituted in the 1970s as a more conservative way to boost working-class incomes than the minimum wage.
The EITC essentially rewards parents who work hard for low pay with a break on their incomes taxes and, in many cases, a refund. It was expanded and greatly strengthened under Ronald Reagan's Tax Reform Act of 1986, which indexed it to inflation so the benefit wouldn't stagnate. He declared the tax program "the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job-creation measure to come out of Congress." To a lesser degree George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush beefed the EITC up too, while the latter also allowed bipartisan moderates to expand access to the child tax credit to low-income people too.
"It's a real blend of conservative and liberal values," says Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "If you talk to average people, this is one that Americans are generally for: a big catch for [American attitudes towards social programs] is that the person on the receiving end is doing their best and working hard. [By that logic], the earned income tax credit is something conservatives should like."
That's not the way today's GOP sees it. The "We are the 53 Percent" nonsense is an implicit attack on the earned income tax credit. But there have been plenty of explicit attacks as well from Senator John Cornyn, R-Tex., to conservative Fox News anchors who deride it as "a form of welfare income redistribution." More substantively, Republican state politicians are actively attempting to slash the program and Tea Party icon and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has promised to "do away with EITC," if she is elected.
The Democratic majority in the Senate and President Obama's veto pen have defeated many of the worst of these reactionary excesses. But what happens if, and when, the Republicans have a more powerful position in Washington, D.C.? So much for compassionate conservatism.
This piece was originally posted on Alternet.]]>Four Things Occupy Wall Street Should Know About the Federal Reservetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10840492011-11-11T11:34:51-05:002012-01-11T05:12:01-05:00Jake Blumgarthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-blumgart/strain of monetary policy analysis too.
In Philadelphia, the first edition of the Occupy Philadelphia Inquirer had "End The Fed, End The Wars" displayed prominently on its front page ("Forget Wall St. as a whole...End the Fed....End the economic slavery"). Several similarly exasperating videos posted to the Facebook page were met with approving comments, while the Occupy Philly website was briefly dominated by a Federal Reserve-bashing activist.
Many people involved with Occupy Wall Street and its spin-offs would denounce such posturing, and rightly so. This variety of fed-bashing is espoused by Ron Paul, a Republican candidate for president who wants to "Abolish the Welfare State," repeal Roe v. Wade, scrap the EPA, and end most forms of taxation. Most importantly, eliminating the Federal Reserve, adopting the gold standard and having a tight monetary policy are directly opposed to the occupiers' key goals: reducing unemployment, easing debt and stemming the foreclosure flood.
Here are four things the Occupy Wall Street movement should know about monetary policy and the Federal Reserve.
1. "Ending the Fed" is a Terrible Idea
First, a quick primer on what the Fed is and what it does. The Federal Reserve is America's central bank, which means that it supervises the banking system and controls the supply of money. The financial regulatory aspect of the Fed's mission is a huge mess and the "Audit the Fed" provision of the Dodd-Frank law is only the first step in sorting it out. But the institution's other role should be equally, if not more important to Occupy Wall Street. When it comes to monetary policy, the Fed has a dual mandate "to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates."
There are many legitimate reasons to critique the Fed and how it fulfills its mandate. But the "End the Fed" movement isn't interested in reform. As one popular Youtube occupier/ranter puts it, "this is all because our government prints too much money...that's fake money that they printed out of thin air...there's not going to be a middle class in ten years, end the federal reserve...get corporations out of our politics!"
There is no evidence that getting rid of the Federal Reserve would ameliorate any of the problems named above, or any of the other issues the Occupy movement is organizing against. In fact, it would probably make everything worse.
"If tomorrow we closed the Fed and started using a gold standard, it would be so chaotic nobody would know what to do," Ron Paul said in a recent interview. And remember that the United States dollar is the most popular reserve currency in the world. As a general rule, throwing the global economy into economic turmoil isn't a good idea.
"Countries generally don't ever eliminate their central banks, but they do sometimes eliminate their monetary policy independence," says Matthew Yglesias, a blogger for the Center for American Progress, who frequently writes about the Fed. "The United States used to have a gold standard instead of discretionary monetary policy. That meant that the value of a dollar would ebb and flow with the discovery of gold mines. The problem with [this] kind of setup...is that you can't respond to economic shocks, and when depressions happen they're really severe."
2. The Gold Standard is an Awful Idea
For much of our history, America subscribed to the gold standard. Dollars were backed by actual gold and could be exchanged for fixed quantities of the stuff. Ron Paul and the "End the Fed" movement are nostalgic for this era. But in actuality, a return to the gold standard is not only a bad idea, it's probably unworkable too.
We left the gold standard in the 1930s because it greatly exacerbated the Great Depression. As deficits ballooned, people feared the dollar would be worthless and began exchanging their cash for gold, which the government had to provide under the rules of the gold standard. The nation's dwindling gold supply became policymakers' first concern--instead of, say, unemployment levels of over 20 percent--and they decided to balance the budget to restore confidence. Taxes were raised, spending slashed, and the depression grew even worse. The dollar wasn't able to react to the needs of the economy: It could only be responsive to the whims of the gold supply.
Even in boom times, a gold standard can be a huge liability. The gold supply grows by 2 percent every year, while the global economy grows at four percent, leading to deflation and constrained economic progress. In short, we'd be putting our monetary policy at the mercy of random fluctuations in the supply and price of gold, instead of having a monetary policy that can adapt to actual economic conditions.
3. The Good and Bad of Modest Inflation
Ron Paul and those who think like him hope the gold standard would serve as a hedge against inflation, which they consider one of the great evils of our time. Inflation can be a huge problem, as anyone who lived through the 1970s will tell you. It can be spurred by government spending to stimulate an economy that has already reached its productive capacity. But right now America is suffering from the opposite problem. The problem isn't inflation, it's unemployment, crushing debt and stagnant growth: issues that can be assuaged through monetary stimulus.
In fact, core inflation levels--the kind that exclude food and energy--are currently at record lows and have been for quite some time (now with charts). In fact, one of the easiest ways to achieve the Occupy movement's goals of lower unemployment and household debt would be to use monetary stimulus to mildly increase this measure inflation.
"The Fed can target higher rates of inflation which would be very effective in lowering the real interest rate and reducing people's debt burden," says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank. "We should talk about deflating the debt. If we had wage and price inflation of four percent every year for two or three years that reduces the debt burden by eight, 10, or 12 percent relative to their wages."
American corporations are currently sitting onmassive cash reserves. If the Fed announced a higher inflation target those horded assets would soon be worth less, thus incentivizing spending. Perhaps more importantly, mild inflation would ease the debt loads crushing many Americans.
Look at the "We Are the 99 Percent" Tumblr. Almost every entry names debt--from student loans, credit cards, medical, or housing--as a principal concern. Household debt is currently 90 percent of GDP. As nominal wages and incomes rise, debt amounts would remain stable (and drop in real value), easing the path to solvency for many and freeing up money for spending, and growth.
These goals dovetail nicely with Occupy Wall Street. As Chris Hayes wrote in a prescient 2009 policy paper on the need for higher inflation, "the central tug of war over inflation is between creditors and debtors: inflation is good for debtors and bad for creditors." The people who are hit hardest by mild inflation are the rich, who own most financial securities, and the banks, who want to keep squeezing as much from their debtors as possible. It would also be significantly simpler to achieve debt relief through inflation, and far more likely to be enacted than the "jubilee" policy associated with OWS. (Nothing like that is going to get through a House of Representatives controlled by this guy.)
4. Don't End the Fed, Make it Accountable to the Needs of the 99 Percent
The Federal Reserve needs a wakeup call. Perhaps an Occupy Wall Street-shaped wakeup call. Instead of waving nonsensical "End the Fed" signs and aping the talking points of a reactionary Republican, occupiers should demand that the Fed be made more democratically accountable and that policymakers seriously execute its dual mandate to maintain stable prices and full employment.
One significant step toward these goals would be the democratizing of the Fed's Open Market Committee (OPM), which controls interest rates, the nation's money supply--the monetary policy side of the institution. There are 12 seats on the OPM: one for the Fed chairman, one for the vice-chairman, and five for the other Fed governors selected by the president and approved by Congress. Then there is the president of the New York Fed and a rotating cast of four of the 11 other regional Federal Reserves. Regional fed presidents are appointed, in large part, by representatives of the banking industry who want to keep inflation low to preserve the value of the debt it holds. True to form, many of the most reactionary voices on the OPM are regional Fed presidents.
Barney Frank is working on legislation to remove the regional Fed presidents from the OPM and replace them with presidential appointees who would be more democratically accountable. "It's like having Merck and Pfizer appointing people to the FDA," Baker says. "I can't think of any other industry where you directly give the regulated industry a voice in its regulator."
Part of the reason the Fed has been so subdued in its pursuit of monetary stimulus is that the right has been so fierce in fighting against it. (Remember when Rick Perry called Bernanke's policies "almost treasonous"?) It is long past time that the left started taking an interest in the Federal Reserve and pushing for monetary stimulus to ease unemployment and the debt burden. Ignore the siren song of Ron Paul and other "End the Fed" types. Occupy Wall Street should fight to ensure that the Federal Reserve works for the many, not the few.
This article was originally posted on Alternet.]]>Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce Cries Wolf Over Earned Sick Daystag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8353762011-03-14T11:19:50-04:002011-05-25T18:40:24-04:00Jake Blumgarthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-blumgart/published an ominous Chamber of Commerce op-ed piece, warning against the earned sick days bill passed out of committee last week. The article prophesied a disturbing mass of unintended consequences: job losses, shuttered businesses, and slashed benefits.
Sound familiar?
It should. Business groups routinely oppose new worker-friendly legislation -- from the minimum wage to family leave -- with apocalyptic economic rhetoric. The Philadelphia business lobby's opposition to the earned sick days bill, which would allow workers to earn five to nine annual paid sick days, is nothing new.
Rather than just making fretful predictions, we should look at empirical evidence gathered from successfully implemented paid sick leave bills. San Francisco's earned sick leave law, which the Philadelphia bill is based on, has received accolades from both employers and workers. Guaranteed sick pay has had no discernible impact upon employment in the city, while profits and benefits have only been marginally affected.
A recent study by the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR), based on interviews with over 700 employers, shows San Francisco businesses reporting overwhelmingly positive experiences with the new law. Two out of every three firms labeled themselves "supportive" or "very supportive." The lowest levels of support were found in sectors where paid sick leave was less common before the law, like food service and retail, but even 60 percent of those employers approved of the measure. Over 70 percent reported that the law had no impact on their profitability.
Philadelphia business lobbyists specifically warn that guaranteed sick leave will cost workers benefits and jobs. But the IWPR study found that only 14.1 percent of San Francisco employers reduced compensation and benefits to accommodate the law, mostly through converting vacation days to sick leave (7.1 percent) or reducing bonuses and raises (7.1 percent). These minuscule numbers are well worth the 16 point bump in sick pay coverage the city experienced, especially among food service workers (who represent a danger to public health if they bring an illness to work).
A 2010 study by the Drum Major Institute shows that San Francisco's paid sick leave law didn't cause significant job losses in the city either. Despite Bay Area business lobbyist's doom-and-gloom predictions, the city's employment level continued to outperform those of the surrounding counties (which include wealthy Silicon Valley) -- just as it had before guaranteed paid sick leave. If job killer predictions were accurate, we'd expect to see markedly heavy losses among industries most profoundly affected by the law. But San Francisco-area employment continued to be stronger than the surrounding counties in retail, hospitality and food service industries.
But the Chamber authors argue that Philadelphia can't be compared to San Francisco. Apparently, we're a special case due to "a high tax burden", "a tough regulatory climate" (no specific numbers are mentioned) and unusually high unemployment (Philadelphia's unemployment rate is little more than a point higher than the national level, just as it has been for the last decade).
That's bunk. San Francisco's labor laws are much tougher than any we have in Philadelphia. Their minimum wage is $9.92, well above Philadelphia's $7.25. San Francisco businesses are required to pay a certain amount towards employee healthcare programs, or face a tax. If the vast majority of San Francisco employers can handle paid sick leave in the face of requirements like these, then Philadelphia business owners will do just fine.
Business owners tend to be small "c" conservative: Afraid of any change and eager to keep conditions stable, and uncomplicated. That's fine. But we shouldn't let their status quo bias prevent us from protecting our citizenry.
Jake Blumgart is a Philadelphia-based researcher with the Cry Wolf Project, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Public Welfare Foundation. His work has been published by the American Prospect, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Stranger, and Campus Progress. Follow him on Twitter.
This piece was originally published on the blog of the Coalition for Healthy Families and Workplaces. ]]>Will Higher Taxes on the Rich Kill Jobs?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7904172010-12-01T12:20:19-05:002011-05-25T18:15:22-04:00Jake Blumgarthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-blumgart/
As he pledged during the 2008 campaign, President Obama, along with most Congressional Democrats, wants to maintain the Bush 2001 tax cuts for the middle class but allow them to expire for high income Americans. Business groups and Republicans are, predictably, claiming that such a plan would "kill jobs," harm small businesses, and deepen the recession. They are crying wolf, but they repeat their misleading warnings so often -- and the media report them as if they were true -- that many Americans believe them.
Obama's proposals would only eliminate the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of taxpayers -- the people in the two highest tax brackets. For individuals with incomes over $373,650, the top income tax rate, currently 35 percent, will return to 39.6 percent, where it comfortably rested for the entirety of the Clinton boom. Individuals with incomes between $171,850 and $373,650 will see their tax rate will climb from 33 to 36 percent. Someone earning $500,000, who now pays $149,371 to Uncle Sam, will owe another $11,349. If you're earning, $1 million a year, your taxes will increase another $34,350 (these numbers were obtained using the Tax Policy Center's Tax Calculator).
Republicans and their conservative think tank allies claim that these modest increases in the top marginal tax rates will destroy the economy. The logic behind this is classic trickle-down economics: high-income people shouldn't pay higher taxes because they make critical investment decisions which, in turn, create jobs.
The trickle-down theory assumes that the rich are so extraordinarily sensitive to changes in the tax code, no matter how minor, that they will automatically respond by working and/or investing less, which translate to fewer jobs. Raising taxes on the nation's rich, even a little bit, will thus undermine economic growth.
In fact, during the 1950s and early 1960s, when America experienced its most impressive stretch of sustained growth, marginal tax rates on the rich were the highest they've ever been -- 91 percent for the top bracket. Meanwhile, during the last decade, when top tax rates were at one of their lowest points in recent history, the US economy experienced its slowest annual growth rate since the Great Depression. Domestic economic growth from 2001 to 2007 averaged 2.39 percent per year (and growth from 2001 through the third quarter of 2010 averaged 1.66 percent). Even during the period between 1971 and 1980 -- the decade with the second-worst showing for growth -- annual growth averaged 3.21 percent.
"The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you," Warren Buffett, the world's third wealthiest person, recently told ABC News' Christiane Amanpour: "But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on." Buffet joined more than 40 of the nation's millionaires -- part of a group called Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength -- to ask President Obama to discontinue Bush's tax breaks for the rich.
Republicans would rather not have a debate about whether CEOs of bailed out financial firms, hedge fund managers, or energy company executives can afford paying taxes at the top tax brackets during the Clinton years. So they focus their sound bites on the revered, but mostly misunderstood, small business sector. "The last thing you would want to do is raise taxes in the middle of a recession on our most productive small businesses," Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell said in a September interview with Fox News.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, extension of high income tax cuts would do little to help the overwhelming majority of small businesses. Businessweekreported that the Congressional Research Service analysis found that "Small businesses with actual workers would pay only about 12 percent of the higher taxes." Furthermore, small business employment rose by an annual average of 2.3 percent -- or 756,000 jobs -- during the 1990's when top tax rates were at the levels they'll return to if the cuts expire. By contrast, between 2001 and 2006 -- after the Bush cuts took effect -- small business employment rose at only 1 percent annually -- or 367,000 jobs.
But conservatives and Republicans don't care whether there's any evidence for their dire warnings about higher taxes. To them, it's more like a religious belief than a matter of evidence. U.S. Chamber of Commerce economist Martin Regalia recently called the Obama tax plan "a bullet in the head for an awful lot of people that are going to be laid off and an awful lot of people who are hoping to get their jobs back." The business-sponsored Heritage Foundation agonizes: "The Obama Tax Plan Would Eliminate Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs Each Year." The Heritage report claims that GDP will fall by $1.1 trillion over the next decade if the proposal moves ahead, while Americans can expect an average of 693,000 lost jobs per year over the same period. According to the Heritage folks, business investment, investment in housing, personal savings, disposable income, and consumer spending will all be subject to catastrophic ruin as well. On Fox News, former Speaker Newt Gingrich said that raising taxes will "kill jobs."
But they are simply recycling the same "cry wolf" claims they've used whenever anyone proposes to raise taxes. They did it in 1982 when Ronald Reagan decided to address the swelling deficit, and again in the 1993 battle over Clinton's budget. Their dire warnings weren't true then and they aren't true now.
Reagan's Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) of 1982 was the single largest peacetime tax hike in the nation's history. The act was meant to alleviate a deficit swollen by dramatic increases in defense spending and the massive tax cuts of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, which dramatically slashed taxes across the board. TEFRA was so unpopular with hardcore conservatives that Representative Jack Kemp (R-NY) ran an insurgent campaign against it, sparking speculation that he would challenge Reagan from the right in the GOP primaries in 1984. "There's no way we can get out of this recession by raising taxes," Kemp (R-NY) warned at the time, echoing the mantras of the Chamber of Commerce, the Wall Street Journal, and ultra-conservatives like Congressman Newt Gingrich. But contrary to the claims of Kemp's faction, the economy started to expand only after the passage of the TEFRA tax hikes, which negated around one-third of Reagan's 1981 cuts. Growth surged by almost nine points between the end of 1982 (when TEFRA kicked in) and the second quarter of 1983.
Likewise, Clinton faced ferocious opposition to his 1993 budget plan which raised the top marginal rates to 39.6 percent from 31 percent. At the time, Congressional Republicans predicted doom. "The deficit will be worse," Representative Dick Armey (R-TX) warned in a CNN interview. "The impact on job creation is going to be devastating, and the American young people in particular will suffer...there simply won't be jobs for the next two to three years to go around to our young graduates."
Former Congressman and former SEC chair, Christopher Cox, speaking to the House in May 1993 about impending doom, declared, "This is really the Dr. Kevorkian plan for our economy. It will kill jobs, kill businesses, and yes, kill even the higher tax revenues that these suicidal tax increasers hope to gain."
The Heritage Foundation predicted that Clinton's 1993 tax proposal would lead to job loss and economic disaster. According to a May 1993 Heritage backgrounder claimed:
The Clinton tax hikes on income would have a devastating impact on long-term economic growth. In particular, the increase in the tax burden would reduce savings and investment, thus hampering the economy's capacity to generate new jobs and higher wages. Specifically, higher tax rates on income would punish productive economic activity, reduce tax revenues, lead to increased federal spending and higher budget deficits, reduce job creation and penalize small business.
The doomsayers were wrong then as they are wrong now. When Clinton signed the budget bill into law, the nation's unemployment rate stood at 6.9 percent and the deficit was more than $255 billion. Every year thereafter unemployment and by 2000 the jobless rate was at 4.0 percent, the lowest of any year since 1968. The deficit shrank until, in 1998, the federal government was able to boast of a budget surplus for the first time since 1969.
The conservatives that cried wolf about these tax increases also claimed George W. Bush's tax cuts would spur economic growth, job creation and balanced budgets. Instead, they turned surplus into deficit, the first decline in household income since records were kept in 1967, the slowest job growth since WWII, and Gilded Age level income growth for the super-rich.
It isn't just Fox News that cries wolf. Despite all evidence to the contrary, conservative think tanks, Republican politicians, and business lobby groups continue to issue warnings that modest tax hikes on rich Americans will hurt the economy. They are lying now like they lied before.]]>GOP-Tea Party Rift Is a Mythtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7784772010-11-03T15:01:25-04:002011-05-25T18:10:25-04:00Jake Blumgarthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-blumgart/
Stories about the war within the GOP have been a consistent theme in major publications in the past month. In early October, for example, a New York Times article focused on the battle for the soul of Rand Paul, the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate who just won his race for a Senate seat from Kentucky. The story framed McConnell and DeMint as representatives of two distinct ideological poles, forcing Paul to decide which one to support for Senate GOP leader should he win in November. If Paul chose to back DeMint, the reporter noted, he would be "going up against the Republican establishment to push the Tea Party goal of limited government." Last week, the Times called DeMint the leader of the GOP's "anti-establishment" wing.
An October 18 analysis in the Los Angeles Times observed that "Jim DeMint relishes life on the Republican fringe," suggesting that he stands in stark contrast to the GOP mainstream, led by McConnell. "I think we've got a lot of great candidates who are going to change the face of the Republican Party," boasted DeMint.
In its post-election analysis, the National Journal described an "intra-party spat" between DeMint and the GOP's establishment, including McConnell and Karl Rove.
It's a good story, complete with hints of backroom machinations, rebellion in the ranks, wacky worldviews, and a colorful cast of characters. But as absorbing as good old intraparty strife can be, the narrative suffers from a big drawback. In real world policy terms, it doesn't mean anything.
The battles within the GOP are mostly about personal power, not ideology. The views of the Tea Party-backed candidates who will enter Congress in January are similar to those of current Republicans in both houses. The National Journal ranks Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), the next Speaker of the House, as the 14th most conservative member of the House, but his right-wing views are now the GOP's mainstream. He voted with a majority of his Republican colleagues 95.7 percent of the time.
In reality, the fiery DeMint and buttoned-down McConnell are ideological soulmates. The National Journal ranked DeMint as the second most conservative Senator and McConnell as the eighth most conservative. Based on their voting records, DeMint had a score of 95 (out of 100) on the conservative scale; McConnell scored 89.5. Both McConnell and DeMint are party loyalists. DeMint voted in lock-step with the Republicans 90.4% of the time, compared to McConnell's 92.9 percent.
For the most part, interest groups on both sides of the ideological and partisan divides rank DeMint and McConnell as identical ideological twins. The Military Officers Association of America, National Breast Cancer Coalition, Citizens for Tax Justice, and NARAL all gave both men big fat zeroes in their most recent ratings. The League of Conservation Voters gave DeMint 0, McConnell 9. Their AFL-CIO lifetime ratings are 11 and 12, respectively. Both men are loved by big business and conservative groups. In their most recent ranking both Senators score 100s from the Christian Coalition of America, American Security Council Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform and Family Research Council. The National Federation of Independent Business, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Conservative Union, and the Club for Growth all rank DeMint and McConnell between 90 and 100.
Both men voted against almost every major Obama initiative of the last two years, including the Lily Ledbetter Act (making it easier for women to sue over workplace discrimination), the stimulus package, health care reform, financial reform, don't-ask-don't-tell repeal, both Supreme Court appointments, and the recent extension of unemployment benefits. (One exception -- they both voted for credit card reform.)
Political scientist Keith Poole of the University of Georgia and his colleagues have used Congressional voting records to document that since the 1970s, the two major parties have become more polarized. According to Poole, the GOP has shifted much more to the right than the Democrats have moved to the left. Based on their voting records, Poole calculated that fewer than ten percent of Republicans in Congress can be called "moderates." That number will shrink even more after Tuesday's election. The tidal wave of Republicans will bring more Tea Partiers and right-wing fellow travelers to Washington.
The Republicans have not only become more conservative but also been extremely disciplined when it comes to party-line voting. They have become more ideologically cohesive. On the historic health care reform legislation, for example, the Senate voted along partisan lines, with all 58 Democrats (and two independents) voting in favor and all 39 Republicans in opposition, but in the House 34 Democrats joined all 178 Republicans in voting against the bill.
If DeMint challenges McConnell for the party's leadership, it will be about style, rhetoric, and personal loyalties, not significant policy differences. Both reflect the GOP's rightward movement.
Most contemporary Republican politicians fall comfortably within these conservative ideological parameters, whether they were backed by the Tea Party or not. The species called "liberal Republican" -- like former Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York and Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon -- is virtually extinct. Moderates like former Republican Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) and dethroned Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware have been pushed out. Even Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who once described himself as a "maverick," has fallen in line with the party's hard-right wing. During the 109th Congress he voted with the GOP 79.4 percent of the time, compared to 93.1 percent today.
If there's a "fringe" within the GOP, it isn't the Tea Partiers, but the two moderate Senators from Maine, Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, joined on occasion by Scott Brown (R-MA).
Perhaps the biggest difference between the GOP establishment and the new breed of Tea Party candidates is one of rhetoric and zealousness. But on almost every policy issue of any importance -- protecting tax cuts for the rich, privatizing Social Security, opposing cap-and-trade legislation, overturning the federal right to an abortion, repealing the recently-enacted health care legislation, opposing a withdrawal timetable for Afghanistan, expanding off-shore oil drilling, combating a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, supporting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, limiting the authority of the Food and Drug Administration, and many others -- the new cohort of Republican Senators, including the Tea Partiers, share the convictions of the GOP mainstream.
Regardless of any personal differences, they will join forces to try to stop Obama and his fellow Democrats from winning any more legislative victories.
Those who view the Tea Party vs. the GOP establishment as a major rift suffer from what Freud called the "narcissism of small differences." The GOP is a coalition. Big business provides the money for campaign contributions, lobbying, think tanks, and publications, while small business, the Christian Right, and the Tea Party zealots provide the ground troops. Although they may occasionally disagree on policy matters, the similarities among these conservative factions greatly overwhelm their differences.
Peter Dreier teaches politics at Occidental College. Jake Blumgart is a reporter-researcher based in Philadelphia.
Note: This article originally indicated that the Children's Health Fund rated Senators McConnell and DeMint. Although the Children's Health Fund does track votes, it does not rate Senators.]]>Six Months After Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster, Republicans Still Obstructing Progresstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7513172010-10-05T15:06:39-04:002011-05-25T17:55:20-04:00Jake Blumgarthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-blumgart/
Massey Energy Company, owner of the doomed mine, falls into the latter category. In fact, the company has one of the worst safety records in the nation. In 2009, the mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) tried to fine Massey $12.9 million, but the company appealed a stunning 75 percent of the violations, putting off payment indefinitely. Upper Big Branch alone was cited over 3,000 times since 1995, and received 53 new safety violations in March, including specific citation of the mine's ventilation system, meant to disperse potentially explosive methane gas. Frequent inspections did little to hinder the operator's unscrupulous practices, partly because the non-union workers feared retaliation if they expressed their concerns to inspectors.
Meanwhile, Massey's CEO, Don Blankenship, insists that the industry is capable of regulating itself. "Washington and state politicians have no idea how to improve miner safety," Blankenship declared at a 2009 anti-union rally. "The very idea that they care more about coal miner safety than we do is as silly as global warming." Since April, two more miners have died at Massey sites.
Massey isn't the only bad actor on the American scene. In a worldwide worker safety survey of 39 companies, provided by financial risk analysts at the RiskMetrics Group, Massey, Patriot Coal, Peabody and CONSOL all received a "CCC" rating, the worst possible outcome. No other surveyed company received such a low rating. This is partly accounted for by the fact that Appalachia's underground mining is riskier than the machine-dominated surface mining in the Western states. Even so, there is no excuse for the industry's sporadically inflated death toll in recent years. 44 miners have died so far this year, nearly matching 2006's grim high of 47.
According to Blankenship, the problem is government overreach, not company negligence. "The feeling of the industry is that we're regulated too much and not too little," Blankenship told Bloomberg T.V.'s Margaret Brennan in July, a day after the Robert C. Byrd Mine Safety Act passed the House Labor and Education Committee on a party line vote. In August, the West Virginia Coal Association's senior vice president, Chris Hamilton, indiscriminately blasted all government regulation in a pro-mountain top removal press release. "We plan to...call on lawmakers and administration officials to discontinue efforts to regulate the coal industry--and the hundreds of thousands of jobs it provides--out of business."
These hang-wringing comments echo the views that the industry and its allies have espoused for decades. . "Rigid, inflexible, thoughtless regulation...can have a plainly detrimental effect on achieving a safe, efficient, and productive coal industry," Ralph Bailey, chairman of the Consolidation Coal Company, protested during the 1977 hearings to update the Coal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1969--the first meaningful piece of safety legislation. "It's the overregulation and enforcement of the Act as an end in itself that has caused the coal industry most of its problems..."
Lawmakers ignored Bailey's false warnings and passed the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977. During the 1980s and 1990s, the industry prospered and productivity increased.
Contrary to the contentions of Blankenship and his cohorts, Congress' fresh attempts to reform mine safety laws aren't anymore likely to disrupt the coal industry than the 1977 act did. And the laws badly need updating. The safety laws were last amended in 2006, in the wake of the Sago, West Virginia mine disaster, where 12 miners died in an explosion. The resultant MINER Act was almost purely reactive--providing for more oxygen reserves, fast response rescue teams--basically strengthening safety measures for workers after a disaster took place but establishing few preventive standards. Many experts agreed that stronger, preventative legislation was needed, but when Rep. George Miller (D-CA) tried in 2008, President Bush threatened to veto the legislation. The bill died in the Senate.
The Upper Big Branch tragedy renewed Congressional interest in mine safety. In response, Democratic lawmakers, led by Rep. Miller and Sen.Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), crafted the Byrd Act. The Act greatly expands whistleblower protections, granting all miners the "express right" to refuse to work in unsafe conditions and ensuring that miners receive full pay if their section of the mine is closed for safety reasons. To ensure government accountability in the event of an accident involving the death of three or more workers, the act mandates a panel of independent experts to review the actions of the operator and MSHA. Among many other much needed reforms, the act would give MSHA investigators subpoena power, update the agency's underused "pattern of violations" authority, and increase both criminal and civil penalties while requiring operators to pay their fines within 180 days, on pain of a shut down.
In an attempt to justify their opposition to the Byrd Act, business lobbies have latched onto one addendum to the bill, which expands some of the legislation's provisions to all private workplaces. (Proposed alterations include increased whistleblower rights and heightened criminal penalties.) Business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, have fiercely denounced this aspect of the Byrd Act. "The proposed changes will impose substantial costs on businesses--particularly small businesses--which are struggling to create and retain jobs," reads a list of objections issued by industry front-group Coalition for Workplace Safety.
The Republicans have gleefully adopted this excuse. Before voting against the House Labor Committee's version of the bill, ranking Republican John Kline (R-MN) complained: "[The Act will] drive up costs and litigation for employers all of which would make it more difficult to create jobs at a time when our economy needs them the most." On September 28, Sen. Rockefeller tried to bring the Miner Safety and Health Act to the floor for a vote, a move that requires unanimous consent from the Senate. Wyoming Republican Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) objected, accusing the Democrats of using the bill for partisan gain, and prevented the vote. (Wyoming produces around 40 percent of the nation's coal, and Enzi's largest donor for the years 2005-2010 is Foundation Coal, one of the largest operators in the country.)
In fact, numerous studies document that safety regulations don't result in the job killing apocalypse that business groups and their political allies always predict. A 2004 study commissioned by the Public Citizen Foundation shows that the cost of compliance with every environmental, safety, and health regulation studied have "never [risen] to the levels estimated by private sector industry". A 2005 report by OMB Watch lists numerous regulations, many concerning worker safety: industry objected to every one with dire predictions of job loss, skyrocketing costs, and business failure. In every case, their predictions were proven wrong.
All the rhetoric and excuses from Massey, the business lobbies, and Congressional Republicans are part of the game plan: Delay until November. The Byrd Act's chances look bleak if the Republicans win a majority in one or both chambers in November. Rockefeller told The Hill last week that the bill "has less of a chance [in 2011 because] there's going to be even more of the ideology factor plus the party discipline factor." If the bill survives, it is likely to be substantially weaker than the current iteration.
But activists aren't giving up the fight. "I don't think it's dead, and let's not forget what might happen in a session after Election Day," said Phil Smith, director of communications for the United Mine Workers, referring to the lame duck session after an election but before the next Congress opens.
If the Republicans and their industry allies are successful in sinking the Byrd Act, another option for reform won't present itself again soon, or at least until the next mine explodes.
Jake Blumgart is a researcher with the San Diego-based Center on Policy Initiatives' Cry Wolf Project funded by the Ford Foundation and the Public Welfare Foundation. Peter Dreier teaches politics and chairs the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College, and co-coordinates the "Cry Wolf Project," a foundation-funded research project to examine the accuracy of warnings about the impact of liberal and progressive policies.]]>A New Labor Standard for Labor Day: Paid Sick Leavetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7041142010-09-03T14:46:23-04:002011-05-25T17:30:22-04:00Jake Blumgarthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-blumgart/
For almost 40 percent of the nation's private workforce, the answer to that last question is no. A recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows only 33 percent of workers earning $10.50 an hour or less have access to paid sick leave, compared with 81 percent of those earning $24.22 an hour or more. This means, perversely, that if you can afford to take an unpaid sick day, you generally don't have to.
Politicians and policy advocates across the country are aware of this squeeze on working families, and paid sick leave bills have been introduced at the city, state, and national levels. Most of these proposals are based on the earned sick time model: Employees must work, say, 30 hours to earn one hour of sick leave. Those earned hours accumulate, eventually, into full paid sick days. All the proposals include a cap on the number of mandated paid sick days. Most require five to nine days a year. Some allow employees to carry over unused sick days from one year to the next.
"The economic climate makes it even more important for lawmakers to act because, in this economy, workers can ill-afford to miss a paycheck or risk the long-term unemployment that often follows losing a job," said Vicki Shabo, Director of Work & Family Programs for the National Partnership for Women & Families. "Workers shouldn't have to put their economic stability and job security on the line every time they get sick. It's bad for business, bad for workers, and bad public policy."
So far, only two U.S. cities have adopted paid sick leave laws. Since 2008, five other cities, as well as 21 states and the U.S. Congress, have considered similar bills. So far, none have passed, because organized business interests have thwarted the proposals, claiming that even the most modest benefits will harm the economy and kill jobs. That scare tactic has proven quite potent in the present climate, with employers fiercely resistant to anything that even hints at additional costs.
Are these claims correct or are the business groups crying wolf? One way to judge is to examine whether places that already have paid sick leave laws are suffering the dire consequences that corporate America warns against. A majority of the world's nations guarantee sick leave benefits, as do Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. (Similar legislation was passed in Milwaukee with 68 percent of the vote, but area business groups sued and a local court overturned it).
In 2006, San Francisco became the first American city to guarantee its citizens the right to paid time off to recuperate from illness. Business groups, spearheaded by the local Chamber of Commerce, lobbied against the ballot measure, which came on the heels of a municipal minimum wage raise and a universal health care law in the city. The business-side arguments evoked the typical "job killer" rhetoric. After voters approved the law by 61 percent, Kevin Westlye, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, told the New York Times, "There's no such thing as a free lunch on something like this," and darkly warned of rising prices and shuttered restaurants.
Four years later, these dire predictions have not come to pass. A recent study by the Drum Major Institute (DMI) shows that San Francisco's employment rate has remained stronger than in any of the five neighboring counties, including wealthy Santa Clara (Silicon Valley). Even the industries where opponents warned that the impact would be harshest - retail, hospitality, and food services - remained stronger, without exception, than their nearby counterparts.
At least 145 nations guarantee working adults some form of sick leave, including rich countries like Germany and Canada, and poorer ones like Indonesia and Senegal. Most of them allow at least one week, and over half ensuring leave of a month or more. A 2006 study in the Journal for Comparative Policy Analysis revealed that there is little, if any, connection between sick pay laws and unemployment levels. A 2009 follow up study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows that the duration of European sick leave laws doesn't have any discernible relation to unemployment rates either.
Studies show that paid sick leave is beneficial for employers too. Currently, businesses lose money from high turnover rates caused by illness absences and from the lowered productivity that results from sick employees spreading their germs at work. The Institute of Women's Policy Research found that if all U.S. workers were offered seven days of paid sick leave annually the result would be "a net savings of $8.1 billion a year due to increased productivity and reduced turnover."
Today, even San Francisco business owners have come around. Jim Lazarus, senior vice president of the city's Chamber of Commerce, told the Wall Street Journal that the legislation hasn't stirred up any backlash from his members. And in a June article in Business Week, former doomsayer Westlye, executive director of the restaurant industry's lobby, sounded downright enthusiastic about the bill: "[Paid sick leave] is the best public policy for the least cost. Do you want your server coughing over your food?"
Despite the success of the San Francisco law, business groups continue to use the same tired rhetoric against similar legislative proposals. From California to Connecticut, business groups cry wolf about paid sick leave, and its supposedly catastrophic economic effects.
Our nation's lawmakers would do well to ignore them. Paid sick leave would have a tangible impact on the lives of American families--and politicians. The National Opinion Research Center released a poll in June showing that 86 percent of Americans favored laws guaranteeing paid sick leave. Strong majorities of self-identified Republicans as well as Democrats supported the proposal. Most said they would be more likely to vote for politicians who backed it.
All employees should be able to take time off for their illnesses, not just those lucky enough to have the right job. As the San Francisco experience shows, we can make our economy friendlier to beleaguered workers without harming their employers.
Jake Blumgart is a researcher with the San Diego-based Center on Policy Initiatives' Cry Wolf Project funded by the Ford Foundation and the Public Welfare Foundation. His work has been published by the American Prospect, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Stranger, and Campus Progress. A shorter version of this article was originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow him on Twitter.
]]>The Soda Tax Warstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5448982010-04-20T15:14:38-04:002011-05-25T16:15:25-04:00Jake Blumgarthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-blumgart/
Last year, the Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, and the American Beverage Association (ABA) spent an unprecedented $37.5 million lobbying Capitol Hill to quash a proposal in Congress to tax soft drinks as part of a plan to pay for health care reform.
Coke and Pepsi are formidable industry players, controlling well over 70 percent of the $43.3 billion industry. In addition to their titular colas, the two companies produce the vast majority of the most well known soft drinks, including Sprite, A&W, Fanta, PowerAde, Nestea, Mr. Pibb [Coke] and Sierra Mist, Mug, Slice, Gatorade, Lipton [Pepsi].
Big Soda called the proposed soda tax a "job killer," a "slippery slope" towards more taxes and more government regulation and would do "irreparable harm" to an industry that provides "220,000 good-paying jobs with health benefits." According to Kevin Keane, ABA's senior vice president for public affairs, "Once government reaches into your grocery cart, your business could be next."
Having lost in Congress, public health advocates are now taking the battle back to the states. More than ten states (including California, Washington, and New York), as well as the city of Philadelphia, are now considering a tax on soda. Policymakers hope to check rapidly increasing obesity rates among children and adults, which governments often end up paying for in higher medical insurance costs, and explore an untapped revenue source in a tight budgetary year. Researchers have found that beverages high in added sugars are a significant driver of increasing calorie intake and obesity.
Big Soda is, understandably, exceedingly unhappy about this attack on their carbonated profits. Their response includes the standard arsenal of big business opposition tactics and arguments.
Armies of deep-pocketed lobbyists are marshaling astroturf front groups to give their enterprise a respectable air. And then there are the blistering press releases, replete with easily digestible talking points. These generally fall into two categories. Some are philosophical: It's unfair to single out one industry for taxation. Or, obesity isn't the government's role, it's about personal responsibility and good parenting. Or, obesity is only a result of lack of physical exercise and watching too much television (perhaps viewing those Pepsi and Coke ads!)
And then there are the allegedly hard-nosed economic objections: Soda taxes will drive businesses away, kill jobs, discourage fresh capital from investing in areas that make soda sippers feel unwelcome, and trigger future excise taxes on food. Or they proclaim that the tax is regressive because poor people are big soda customers.
The soda industry's reaction to New York Governor David Paterson's proposal for a penny-an-ounce tax that would raise $1 billion a year was typical. "This tax will threaten thousands of well-paying, New York jobs in the beverage and related industries," said ABA CEO Susan K Neely. "[And] burden hard-working New Yorkers with new taxes on their groceries, including juice drinks and soft drinks." (In fact, the tax doesn't cover juice drinks that actually have fruit juice in them).
But experience shows that Neely is wrong. Sodas represent what Dr. Francine Kaufman -- Professor of Pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California and Head of the Center for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism at the Childrens Hospital Los Angeles -- called a "sugar delivery system," akin to tobacco's role as a "nicotine delivery system." Soda and tobacco can ultimately kill people, but soda or tobacco taxes don't kill jobs.
Soda taxes have existed in various states for decades, provoking little controversy. Tennessee passed a soda tax as early as 1937. West Virginia followed with a liquid levy of its own in 1951.
In 1992, both Ohio and Arkansas passed soda taxes as part of an effort to balance their crippled budgets. The taxes were hardly onerous: a penny per twelve ounces in Ohio, and two cents per twelve ounces in Arkansas. At that point, Big Soda went on the warpath. Despite the negligible size of the taxes, the industry feared a nationwide trend and reacted forcefully, mounting expensive campaigns to take the fizz out of the reform movement.
Soda distributors and bottlers, mostly affiliated with Coca-Cola and Pepsi, pumped millions of dollars into the two states to repeal the taxes. These efforts came to a head during in 1994.
The corporate carbonators whipped up considerable opposition through expensive campaigns that featured the typical "crying wolf" arguments about the negative consequences of taxes on consumer goods.
The more successful anti-tax campaign emerged in Ohio, where the Stop Taxes on Food Committee -- a front group primarily backed by the Pepsi and Coke twins -- spearheaded the repeal effort. The threat of other food taxes -- an unpopular proposition -- was the centerpiece of the repeal effort. Diana Winterhalter, a spokeswoman for the Committee, was quoted in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer: "If they could raise one (food tax), they could raise another one."
The industry attacked the tax as a money grab, an argument strengthened by the fact that the tax wasn't earmarked for a particular program, but simply sent to the state's general fund. A mere two years after Ohio's legislature passed the soda tax, citizens repealed it. The industry-backed referenda won by a 2-1 ratio despite the strong support of a coalition of labor, health care and education groups and then-Governor George Voinovich, a Republican, who claimed that 99 percent of the repeal funds came from Coke and Pepsi. Overall, Big Soda spent $9 million on the repeal campaign, compared with only $148,000 by the tax proponents.
"We believe we assured Ohioans protection against hidden taxes -- now and in the future -- against food," Winterhalter said upon Big Soda's victory. Voinovich saw it differently: "It's the most despicable, deceitful fraud perpetrated on the citizens," he said the day after the election.
While Ohio bent to Big Soda like a plastic straw, Arkansas has resisted efforts to repeal its soda tax. In 1994, and again in 1997, the industry has tried to get first voters, and then the legislature, to abandon it, and each time their efforts failed. In 1994, the soda lobby launched a multi-million dollar campaign against the tax, bringing in outside consultants, flooding T.V. and radio stations with ads. The industry went all out against the tax, fearing it might serve as a template for a national soda tax, or at least copy-cat state taxes. Despite this industry effort, Arkansas voters rejected the repeal by a healthy 55-45% margin.
Why? In Arkansas, the state legislature had smartly earmarked all the revenue from the tax -- which totaled more than $46 million in 2009 -- to the state's popular Medicaid program, providing an additional funding source to protect health care for the poor in times of economic stress. In contrast, Ohio had allocated all proceeds from the soda tax to the general fund, which was easily attacked as throwing the funds into the government bureaucracy.
Because Arkansas's soda tax has been preserved since 1992, its experience offers a good test of the industry's warning that imposing soda levies will lead to additional excise taxes on real food, or hurt the business climate in the restaurant and bottling industries.
In 1997, restaurant industry groups warned that the soda tax put Arkansas' economic future in jeopardy. In 1997, Wayne Dyer, executive director of the Arkansas Hospitality Association, argued that the tax hurt the state's business climate and Arkansas Business magazine, the mouthpiece for the state's Chamber of Commerce, relayed the message to its readers: "If there's one profit percentage in Arkansas and another in Tennessee, he [Dyer] says, where do you think a business will choose to locate?"
But the industry was crying wolf. For example, in late 1993, Back Yard Burgers, a Tennessee-based chain, bought five stores in Arkansas. When asked by Arkansas Business if the company had known of the tax before investing in Arkansas, Back Yard's chief financial officer Stephen J. King affirmed that they had, but said that they didn't care. "It really didn't enter into it at all," King assured the reporter. Since then, the firm has added another seven outlets in Arkansas.
Apparently, other business owners agreed with Back Yard Burgers' assessment. In fact, the total number of eateries, restaurants, and cafeterias in Arkansas is about the same as the numbers in Kansas and Mississippi, neighboring states with equivalent populations
The "job killer" canard doesn't ring true in Arkansas either. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in the food and drink services sector increased by 6 percent in the two years after the soda tax was adopted, the highest increase since the Labor Department began collecting the data. From 1992 to 2008 private employment in Arkansas' Food Services and Drinking Places increased by 57.5 percent, twice the rate of total private sector employment in the state.
The bottling industry in Arkansas is holding up, too. The total "soft drink manufacturing" establishments in Arkansas outnumber those of two neighboring states, Kansas and Mississippi, every year surveyed, as do the number of people employed by these businesses.
What of Big Soda's claim in its successful Ohio repeal effort that soda taxes would lead to government taxation of actual food products? Wrong again. Arkansas has not leveled an excise tax against any food product.
The Arkansas soda tax has not brought economic ruin to the state's business climate. It hasn't dissuaded restaurant growth or employment. It hasn't driven bottlers out of Arkansas and into the surrounding states. And it hasn't led to the taxation of actual food.
What is has done is raise funds for the Arkansas Medicaid program, bringing health care to the state's poorest citizens.
"It has ensured, up until now, we didn't have to make cuts to our Medicaid program," said Elisabeth Burak, health policy director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. "The soda pop tax is a very good thing. It is an important reserve fund to protect Medicaid when the economy goes down, and it is serving its exact purpose right now."
What are lessons of the Arkansas soda tax?
First, business warnings that new taxes are automatic "job killers" are typically bogus. The impact of new taxes depends on myriad factors that corporate propagandists ignore.
Second, reformers who want to push big business to be more socially responsible need to be armed with the facts to counteract the corporate PR machine.
Third, voters want to know how their taxes are being used and whether they are used effectively. In the case of Arkansas' soda tax, they know that the money is going to help the most vulnerable of their fellow citizens. Ohio's voters just saw the money being shoveled into the general fund, and voted with the industry, despite the fact that their tax was half the size of its Arkansas counterpart. A Quinnipiac University poll conducted April 6 found that only 31% of voters said they support Gov. Paterson's soda tax, but almost half said they'd support a "fat tax" if the money was used to finance health care (which is actually part of Paterson's proposal).
Arkansas is hardly a liberal state. But it has held onto its two cents per twelve ounce soda tax for 18 years -- in the face of organized business opposition -- because the citizens know when Big Soda is crying wolf.
As more and more cities and states debate whether to enact soda taxes to generate more revenue and combat obesity, it would serve them well to consider the Razorback State and see for themselves that they don't have to swallow Big Soda's lies.
Jake Blumgart is a freelance reporter-researcher, who has written for The American Prospect and The Stranger. Peter Dreier is professor of politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College and a frequent contributor to Huffington Post, The Nation, The American Prospect, and other publications.]]>