5/26/18: We start the Memorial Day
weekend the way Republicans like it. First, there’s excitement
because…well…giant tax cuts for fat cats!
 |
The blogger bicycled across the USA twice
to raise money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund.
Meanwhile, Big Pharma bought up GOP lawmakers
and jacked the price of insulin by 700%. |
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How the
Great Scam worked.
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In related news, did you realize top prices for Rolex watches
can surpass $400,000? This is exactly the way to insure a healthy economy.
Cut taxes and the superrich will create more jobs for Rolex factory workers.
(I should point out the website offering the watch above includes “free shipping
and handling” if that might be a factor in your decision.)
Speaking of the typical American worker, this has been a
great month for them. No, I’m joking! First, the U.S. Supreme Court rules, 5-4,
that companies which require individual workers to sign arbitration agreements can
ban collective action by workers to recover overtime pay they were denied.
Now, if Mega Corporation-R-Us bends the rules and 980
workers are cheated out of $1,900 overtime pay each, those workers can go to arbitration individually and complain.
I think we can say with total confidence that Mega Corporation-R-Us
will not fire Worker #1, who steps forward first and complains.
Or Worker #2, who doesn’t get the message when #1 gets the
boot.
In similar fashion, if Worker #3, a female, has been
sexually harassed by her superior, she must go to arbitration to complain.
She may not join forces with other female Workers, #4, #5, #6 and #7, similarly
harassed.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the Supreme Court majority
in Epic Systems Corp v. Lewis, rules
that the Federal Arbitration Law of 1925 has precedence over the National Labor
Relations Act of 1935. The latter act was passed to improve the rights of
workers eight decades ago.
Now that conservatives have a grip on the highest court in
the land, the corporations can do as they please. This kind of decision is a
“payoff” for donations corporations have heaped in the laps of the GOP.
Abercrombie and Fitch won’t need to change a policy that requires thousands of
workers not scheduled for shifts to come in immediately, at 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday or a Friday, if
given two hours notification. Company leaders at Mega Corporation-R-Us can
sexually harass a nightshift cleaning woman, two receptionists, three interns
and five secretaries over the course of several years.
The nightshift cleaning woman will have every right to pay
for a lawyer and go to arbitration herself.
*
Noble
efforts to save taxpayer dollars.
AS SUMMER APPROACHES, teachers can relax after bruising
strikes in deep red states. These strikes in West Virginia, North Carolina,
Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky were sparked by a variety of issues. In
Oklahoma teachers had gone a decade without raises. Now, you may be asking why
states can’t raise pay for teachers. The answer is simple. GOP lawmakers are
proud of having signed the Grover Norquist “taxpayer protection pledge.”
If you go to the webpage for Americans for Tax Reform you can see that
46 members of the U.S. Senate and 208 members of the U.S. House of
Representatives, all members of the GOP (I think), have agreed never to raise
taxes again, not in a million years, assuming they live so long.
Meanwhile, President Trump has issued a series of executive
orders stripping protections from federal civil service employees. Now it will
be easier to fire them if they ask for more money or improved benefits and – hopefully,
as Republicans would put it – to bust their unions.
Republicans will cast all these moves as noble efforts to
save taxpayer dollars. Actually, these are bricks in a wall (no, not that wall)
to break the power of ordinary American workers.
There was a time when many
workers in private industry had excellent pensions. Then Mega
Corporation-R-Us began to complain about greedy workers. Leaders of the GOP
agreed. Unionized workers with pensions were the worst! Executives at Mega
Corporation-R-Us, however, earning seven-figure salaries were not greedy. Mega
executives wanted to create jobs!!
Mega Corporation-R-Us, Behemoth Retailing, and Leviathan
Cable TV, as well as various multinational corporations, managed to pull off
several slick moves. First, corporations insisted they had no choice but to
move factories from “high-wage” states to states where “business-friendly”
rules prevailed. These states, almost exclusively Republican-controlled, had
laws that made it difficult for unions to organize. They promised lower
taxes on businesses, and reduced services like healthcare for ordinary citizens.
But hey! Job creation! Texas “created” 10,000 jobs by syphoning off 10,000 jobs
from Michigan and Ohio. Those jobs just happened to pay $25.75 per hour in
Ohio. In Texas non-union workers would accept $13 instead.
Democrats were not the enemies of workers. Government was not
the enemy of workers. Unions, imperfect as they are, were not the enemy. The
corporations and their political allies were perpetrating a Great Scam.
Soon the corporations realized that immigrant labor was even
cheaper than non-union labor. You could pay an undocumented Mexican $6 per hour
to install drywall in new homes. An American, if unionized, might demand $23. A
non-union, native-born worker might expect $16. Americans would expect overtime
if workdays stretched to nine or twelve hours. The undocumented wouldn’t
complain if overtime went unpaid. They wouldn’t dare. In Texas, one of the
reddest states in the land, hundreds of thousands of construction jobs were
lost by native-born workers and filled by the undocumented.
Let me stop a moment and make clear. This is not a diatribe
against immigrants. My Irish ancestors came to America in the 1800s for much
the same reason millions of Mexicans have come more recently. I do not fear
Haitian immigrants for their race. I do not fear Syrian immigrants for their
religion. I do not fear Nigerian immigrants for their cultural beliefs. I do
not fear immigrants. As a liberal, I would argue that immigrants enrich this
country in a multitude of ways.
I am simply listing the steps required to pull off the Great
Scam. The Mega Corporation-R-Us crowd, overwhelmingly Republican in sentiment,
took a series of steps that inevitably depressed workers’ wages.
Now, we have a president who promises to build a magic wall
to keep the undocumented out – and keep the jobs in – and the GOP continues to
sell the same worthless “male enhancement” fiscal pills.
Yes. Unemployment is down. Plenty of $10 per hour jobs and
even $13 and $15 per hour jobs are opening up.
For most Americans, the $29 per hour-jobs at Ford Motors,
General Electric and Stanley Tools are gone.
They
were loyal only to their bank accounts.
The corporations still weren’t done. The rise of
multi-nationals meant Ford looked to Mexico to build engines. General Electric
turned to China to manufacture lightbulbs. Stanley Tools started producing
wrenches in Taiwan. The people who ran our corporations showed less and less
loyalty to workers and to this country. They were loyal only to their bank
accounts. Why pay a worker in North Carolina $14 per hour to make underwear, if
a worker in Sri Lanka could make the same garments and do it for $14 per day?
Why build iPhones in the U.S. and deal with overtime rules when you could do
business in China and workers would put in 90 hours per week and never
complain?
True. China was (and is) a communist nation. True. Communism
is founded on the premise of destroying capitalism. Truer still: China
is a growing threat to the United States on the international stage.
The multinationals didn’t
care if decisions they made helped China gain power. Great piles of
money were to be made.
The average American worker could see his or her economic
position weakening but couldn’t exactly understand why. The multinationals sent
Joe’s shipyard job to Vietnam. Calvin’s steel-making job ended up in
Bangladesh. GOP politicians and shills at Fox News told Joe that Democrats
wanted to take away his guns and convinced Calvin there was a “War on
Christmas” to obsess about.
The average worker felt the economic pain. The coal miners
who voted for Trump in 2016 were desperate. They saw a vote for him as a
worthwhile gamble. The men and women at the Carrier plant in Indiana, scheduled
for closing shortly after the election, should, almost unanimously, have voted
Republican, if Republicans could really
save their plant from closing, as Trump promised. If a Republican candidate
was promising to bring jobs back from China, voting Republican, not Democratic,
made sense.
The problem, again, was that the Democrats had never been the
ones to ship jobs to China to begin.
You could listen to the truth, buried at the end of Mitt
Romney’s famous 47% speech if you paid attention in 2012. It wasn’t the obvious part (about
how 47% of Americans were “takers,” and Romney and the superrich were “makers”)
that should have alerted workers to the fact the Great Scam was on.
A
fundamental truth about the Republican Party.
It was the second part that revealed a fundamental truth
about the Republican Party. Romney was talking to a room full of the fattest
possible cats about the joys of
investing in China.
In that role, Romney had reveled in opportunities to make
money by shipping jobs to China, failing to take note of the near-slave wages
and terrible working conditions Chinese workers had to accept.
Here’s how he described the “possibilities” of making piles
of dough in China:
And I remember going to – sorry just
to bore you with stories – but I was, when I was back in my private equity
days, we went to China to buy a factory there, employed about 20,000 people,
and they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23.
They were saving for potentially becoming married, and they worked in these
huge factories, they made various small appliances, and as we were walking
through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per
day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with little bathrooms
at the end with maybe ten rooms. And the rooms, they had 12 girls per room,
three bunk beds on top of each other. You’ve seen them.
American workers would never accept similar conditions.
Romney continued in tone-deaf fashion:
And around this factory was a
fence, a huge fence with barbed wire, and guard towers. And we said, “Gosh, I
can’t believe that you, you know, you keep these girls in.” They said, “No, no,
no – this is to keep other people from coming in. Because people want so badly
to come work in this factory that we have to keep them out, or they’ll just
come in here and start working and try and get compensated. So, we – this is to
keep people out.”
And they said, “Actually,
Chinese New Year, is the girls go home, sometimes they decide they’ve saved
enough money and they don’t come back to the factory.” And he said, “And so on
the weekend after Chinese New Year, there’ll be a line of people hundreds long
outside the factory, hoping that some girls haven’t come back and they can come
to the factory. And so, as we were experiencing this for the first time, for me
to see a factory like this in China some years ago, the Bain partner I was with
turned to me and said, “You know, 95 percent of life is settled if you’re
born in America [emphasis added].” This is an amazing land. And what we
have is unique, and fortunately it is so special we’re sharing it with the
world. I’m concerned about the future, but also optimistic as I said, and I
look forward to getting America back on track…
If wages
and benefits declined, it didn’t bother the fattest cats.
If wages and benefits declined at home, it didn’t bother
Romney or the rest of the fattest cats. It didn’t bother the Koch brothers or
the Walton clan. The Koch’s could afford to donate hundreds of millions to
Republican candidates and causes. They would eventually be repaid for their
“investment” with policies that granted them tax cuts worth billions. The
Walton family continued to donate and continued to pay workers subpar wages.
Walmart managed to curtail hours so fewer employees would qualify for healthcare under the Obama plan. Big Pharma
donated millions to the GOP and kept jacking up drug prices. Republicans kept
arguing that it would be a horrible idea if Medicare started negotiating to lower drug costs. The price of
insulin shot up by 700% in twenty years. And champions of capitalism pronounced
it good.
The average worker got a few extra dollars in his or her
paycheck when Trump and Congress cut taxes.
Unfortunately, Calvin could no longer afford the insulin his
daughter, who suffered from type-1 diabetes, needed to live. Still, if he
watched enough right-wing TV, he found solace in thinking Republicans were
fighting for him, fighting to keep transgender type-1 individuals from using
the same bathrooms as his girl.
The Great Scam was in.
POSTSCRIPT: For more on how the fat cats
prospered, see: 6/29/18, and their efforts to move profits
to offshore tax havens like the Isle of Man and The Cayman Islands.
