From: Portside Quote of the Day
'Mr. Obama also needs to inspire Americans who have been ground down by the economic crisis and Washington's small-bore sniping. He needs to rally the nation around a big idea - a project that is worth sacrificing for, worth paying for, worth working for.One that lets them know that there is more ahead than just a return to a status quo of lopsided growth in which corporate profits surge while jobs and incomes lag. '... Mr. Obama and his economic team had clearly hoped for an economic rebound in time for the midterm elections. They are not going to get it. The economic damage they inherited was too deep, and the economic stimulus they pushed through Congress, for all of the fight, was too small. Standing back is not doing the country or his party any good. We believe Americans are ready for hard truths and big ideas.' Editorial New York Times August 29, 2010 http://tinyurl.com/2cfuavz *** Labor Day Heroes By Dick Meister Let's pause for a moment this Labor Day to recognize some of our most important, yet most maligned workers. They're teachers and librarians, police officers andfirefighters. They're bus drivers, doctors and nurses.Judges and lawyers, landscape gardeners and arborists.They're laborers and other maintenance and construction workers . They are, of course, public employees. There are millions of them, who every day perform many thousands of the essential tasks that keep our country going. It is they who keep our streets and highways, our parks and playgrounds safe and clean, who help educate our children, provide emergency health care, convey us to our jobs and back home, who sometimes risk their very lives to protect us from harm. Yet for all that, public employees have come under heavy bipartisan attacks by political leaders and would-be leaders who find them an easy target to blame for the budget shortfalls that beset government at all levels. Labor costs, after all, make up the bulk of government spending everywhere. The politicians and too many others who benefit from the public employees' services - and, in fact, demand the services - say public employees are paid too much and their fringe benefits are way too generous, especially their pensions. The employees' pay and benefits were in most cases the result of democratic give-and-take collective bargaining and are guaranteed in union contracts that their government employers agreed to, sometimes after a long and difficult struggle by the workers. But that was then, this is now. This is a time to make scapegoats of public employees, to shift the blame for economic troubles to them. Public servants they were then, but public enemies they are now in many quarters, where they're characterized as overpaid and underworked members of greedy and much too economically and politically powerful unions. Their unions are now in the vanguard of the labor movement, growing larger and stronger while other unions shrink, and becoming serious new threats to anti-labor forces on Wall Street and elsewhere that seek profit from the work of others in private and public employment alike. There's no legitimate reason for any government entity to finance operations at the expense of its employees, whose jobs are among the nation's most important, or to deny them much deserved pay and benefit increases. There's plenty of money available to cover the costs. And where is that treasure trove to be found? Where else but in money-hungry corporate America. It's simple. Repeal the huge tax cuts that President Bush and his corporation-loving, union-hating Republican colleagues bestowed on their wealthy friends. That would bring in an estimated $3.75 trillion over the next ten years and just about erase the federal budget deficit. But that's not going to happen as long as Republicans retain enough votes in Congress to wage a filibuster. GOP leaders would rather try to reduce the deficit by such outrageous steps as raising the Social Security retirement age from 67 to 70, and thus deny much-needed benefits to millions of the working class Americans who we honor on Labor Day. None are more deserving of our appreciation, none more deserving of being honored than the men and women who do the work of government that benefits us all. Happy Labor Day. ____________________ Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based columnist, has covered labor and politics for a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator. Contact him through his Web site, www.dickmeister.com *** http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/03 FDR's Labor Day Plea Resonates Today by Sarah Anderson CommonDreams.org: September 3, 2010 On the eve of Labor Day in 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned in his "Fireside Chat" of a potentially dangerous surge in class divisions if more was not done to support ordinary workers. For FDR, providing the opportunity to labor for a "decent and constantly rising standard of living" was fundamental to a healthy democracy. "The Fourth of July commemorates our political freedom," he said. "Labor Day symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the average man which will give his political freedom reality." This year, our economy is similar to 1936 in at least one way. A rebound from crisis is evident in many indicators - except those most important to working families. When FDR delivered that radio address, unemployment was down from the peak of the Great Depression but still a painful 17 percent. Our current jobless recovery is even more unfair by one particular measure: paychecks for the guys at the top of the corporate ladder. After adjusting for inflation, CEO pay at the top 50 U.S. companies was eight times higher in 2009 than it was in 1936. What's even more outrageous is that the executives who are cutting the most jobs are also getting the biggest payouts. According to a new report by my organization, the Institute for Policy Studies, CEOs of the 50 firms that have laid off the most workers since the onset of the crisis took home nearly $12 million on average in 2009. That's 42 percent more than the average for CEOs of S&P 500 firms as a whole. Each of the 50 firms surveyed cut at least 3,000 jobs between November 2008 and April 2010. Seventy-two percent of the companies announced mass layoffs at a time when they were earning profits. These numbers all reflect a broader trend in Great Recession-era Corporate America: CEOs are squeezing workers to boost short-term profits and fatten their own paychecks. William Weldon of Johnson & Johnson, for example, announced 8,900 job cuts in 2009. His compensation package that year was so large - $25.6 million - that it could have covered the cost of nine weeks of average unemployment benefits for all the workers he fired. Many investors would point to the pharmaceutical company's $12.3 billion in profits last year as proof that Weldon is worth every penny. But such mass layoffs tend to have serious long-term costs, not just for workers who lose their jobs, but also for the corporations that fire them. Beyond the immediate blow to morale for remaining employees, companies that slash their workforces often face higher costs down the road related to hiring and training new employees. A University of Colorado survey of S&P 500 firms over nearly two decades found no evidence that downsizing leads to increased returns on assets. Seventy-four years ago, Roosevelt ended his Labor Day address by declaring that the needs of all American workers "are one in building an orderly economic democracy in which all can profit and in which all can be secure from the kind of faulty economic direction which brought us to the brink of common ruin." Roosevelt's pro-worker policies helped lay the foundation for several stable decades with relatively narrow income gaps during the post-World War II period. As we struggle to recover from the worst crisis since FDR's day, let's put the focus back on what's good for working families. The Great Recession will only be over when the nation is back to work. Sarah Anderson is a co-author of the new Institute for Policy Studies report, Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession. ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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