If the Democratic Party has any desire to be a factor in American politics, now is the time to get something done. They have been in power for a year and a half and have very little to show for it.
They have done nothing on minimum wage, immigration, abortion, voting rights. There are five open Court of Appeals seats and 48 District Court seats.
Given all this, I would suggest that both the Senate and House should cancel the August recess and get down to work.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
The Democratic Party politicians that have been elected to the US Congress are getting the most important thing done for themselves. They got elected. Our two party political system has successfully utilized special interest politics to galvanize the electorate into deeply polarized factions such that actually accomplishing policy for the greater good is unlikely, if not impossible. However, despite the futility of politics there is no escaping the fact that politicians need jobs.
Yeah, so we can get a couple of Dems to vote with Reps to do nothing. Here’s a thought, concentrate on increasing the amount of Dems in Congress to get something done. Let’s face facts, everybody knows what the problem is, and it ain’t Dems.
part of the problem is that while Dems are ‘sort of in charge’, as one house Congress isnt only sort of their hands. but mostly isnt. they cant just push what ever they want to get done and have it done. and while the filibuster is the main blocker, the dems wont be charge always, and what the dems can do in one session of congress, the gop cant reverse when they get in charge (and that is always possible….what ever we feel about it). so eliminating is a one time fix at best (i was in favor till it was pointed out that its only as long as the either party is in charge, once they arent, what they did is going to revoked. but they may have not gotten as much as we really wanted, they did get some things done.
There are actually 11 Court of Appeals openings and 66 for District Court seats. Biden has nominated 3 Court of Appeals and 18 District Court. So Biden also has to get to work.
yep. course it takes getting those nominations through the senate. that while isnt run by the GOP, its not by much. and since the GOP blocked Obama’s nomination to the SCOTUS because…they could and power and politics
By most measures — with one glaring exception — people around the world are better off than ever. So why doesn’t it feel that way, especially to Americans?
Has the world entered a time of unusual turbulence, or does it just feel that way?
… Survey after survey has found that a majority of people in low-income and middle-income countries like Kenya or Indonesia tend to express optimism about the future, for both themselves and their societies.
Such countries represent most of the world’s population, suggesting that optimism is, believe it or not, the prevailing global mood.
Those countries, after all, are where those long-term gains in health and well-being are most pronounced.
Many of these regions also experienced decades of civil conflict and unrest during the Cold War, when the United States and Soviet Union treated them as battlegrounds, propping up despots and insurgents.
But these same surveys also tend to find that in wealthy countries, most respondents express pessimism about the future.
Much of this may come down to economic mobility, rather than global headlines. People in low-income countries tend to believe they will be better off financially in the future, whereas those in wealthy countries consider it unlikely.
But pessimism about one’s personal circumstances can easily become pessimism about the world.
Polls in the United States have found that people who see little hope of personal financial advancement also feel the country as a whole is getting worse, and disapprove of political leaders. The erosion of secure working-class jobs, as manufacturing work flees overseas and labor unions wither, is thought to have precipitated much of the West’s populist backlash. …
and oddly enough inflation isnt just in the US, its a world wide phenomenon. so how exactly do we solve our problem when other countries will export theirs to us? and i suspect this time around, inflation isnt going to be solved by the Fed.
well life expectancy in the US isnt going, has been a downward trend for a while now (which is part of the reason why we arent the leader in health care some think we are). and i dont know just how well are doing on literacy compared to similar countries.
The PRO Act would add some teeth to the toothless NLRA ($50,000-100,000 fines for retaliating against union organizers) and pull some teeth from Taft-Hartley (take down right-to-work laws). Does anybody expect this would magically triple union density from today’s 6.5% in private (non-gov) economy to 20% — even while 50% want to join a union? When private union density was 20%, McDonald’s, Target, Walgreen’s and Walmart were not unionized. We want them all unionized this time around, don’t we?
Half the Prime delivery drivers whose opinion I seek about federally mandated, regularly scheduled union elections (cert/recert/decert) at every private workplace have no idea in the world what I am talking about. I guess they are from the other 50%. They are intelligent; it seems they live in a time and place that has largely forgotten what a labor union even looks like.
Only the promise of mandated cert/recert/decert elections could claw back enough Obama/Trump voters to safely swamp any Republican efforts to steal the coming elections (by putting the dominant political party in charge of counting votes for instance: the real road to serfdom).
New York Times numbers guru Nate Cohn: “But pinning Mrs. Clinton’s loss on low black turnout would probably be a mistake. Mr. Obama would have easily won both his elections with this level of black turnout and support. (He would have won Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin each time even if Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee had been severed from their states and cast adrift into the Great Lakes.)” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/upshot/how-the-obama-coalition-crumbled-leaving-an-opening-for-trump.html
The PRO Act is not going to start any Obama/Trump voter stampede for Republican Party exits. But, federally obliged, labor union election cycles are just what today’s democracy deprived American workers would recognize that they overwhelmingly need. * * * * * * * * * * * *
[cut-and-paste from: Which Side Are You on?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back by Thomas Geoghegan] First, [Taft-Hartley] ended organizing on the grand, 1930s scale. It outlawed mass picketing, secondary strikes of neutral employers, sit downs: in short, everything [Congress of Industrial Organizations founder John L.] Lewis did in the 1930s. And Taft-Hartley led to the “union-busting” that started in the late 1960s and continues today. It started when a new “profession” of labor consultants began to convince employers that they could violate the Wagner Act, fire workers at will, fire them deliberately for exercising their legal rights, and nothing would happen. The Wagner Act had never had any real sanctions. … So why hadn’t employers been violating the Wagner Act all along? Well, at first, in the 1930s and 1940s, they tried, and they got riots in the streets: mass picketing, secondary strikes, etc. But after Taft-Hartley, unions couldn’t retaliate like this, or they would end up with penalty fines and jail sentences. [snip] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1565848861?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1565848861
How about a truly unbeatable political issue to re-make America’s labor market in one sensible stroke — regularly scheduled cert/recert/decert labor union elections at every private sector workplace?
I never heard of a union cert/recert/decert election being anything like expensive — though I would be glad to think it through if you can put me wise.
(AP) — Jill Biden apologized Tuesday for saying Latinos are “as unique” as San Antonio breakfast tacos during a speech to the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization.
“The first lady apologizes that her words conveyed anything but pure admiration and love for the Latino community,” tweeted Jill Biden’s spokesperson, Michael LaRosa.
Dr. Biden flew to San Antonio on Monday to address the annual conference of UnidosUS, a Latino civil rights and advocacy group formerly known as the National Council of La Raza.
But her attempt to compliment Latino diversity didn’t go over very well when she said that the community is “as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio.”
She also badly mispronounced “bodegas,” small stores in urban areas typically specializing in Hispanic groceries.
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists and others registered their offense on social media, with the journalists’ organization tweeting that, “We are not tacos.”
“Using breakfast tacos to try to demonstrate the uniqueness of Latinos in San Antonio demonstrates a lack of cultural knowledge and sensitivity to the diversity of Latinos in the region,” NAHJ said. …
Republicans were quick to jump on the gaffe, with Senator Marco Rubio of Florida making his Twitter profile a taco and Texas’s Ted Cruz highlighting the comments and tweeting, “personally, I’m a chorizo, egg & cheese.” …
There’s an old story about Charles Darwin, which may or may not be true but seems appropriate to our current economic moment. According to the tale, two boys glued together pieces of various insects — a centipede’s body, a butterfly’s wings, a beetle’s head and so on — then, as a gag, presented their creation to the great naturalist for identification. “Did it hum when you caught it?” he asked. When they said yes, he declared that it was a humbug.
That’s kind of where we are in the economy right now. I’m not suggesting anyone is faking the data, but the different pieces of information we have don’t seem to line up — they almost seem to come from different countries. Some data suggest a weakening economy, maybe even on the verge of recession. Some suggest an economy still going strong. Some data suggest very tight labor markets; others, not so much.
Let’s talk about the numbers, and how they don’t add up.
The number we usually use to assess where the economy is going is real gross domestic product — and according to the official estimate, real G.D.P. shrank in this year’s first quarter. We won’t have an official (advance) estimate of second-quarter G.D.P. until later this month, but “nowcasts” that try to estimate G.D.P. based on partial information — like the Atlanta Fed’s widely cited GDPNow — suggest slow growth or even an additional period of shrinkage.
In case you’re wondering, no, two quarters of declining G.D.P. won’t mean we’re officially in a recession; that determination is made by an independent committee that takes a wide variety of information into account. And given the confusing picture right now, it’s unlikely to declare a recession, at least yet.
Among other things, another widely used number — job creation — is telling quite a different story. The official estimate of growth in nonfarm employment in June came in quite strong — 372,000 jobs added — which doesn’t look at all like what you’d expect in a recession.
So do we have a conflict between data on output and data on employment? If only it were that simple. We also have alternative measures of both output and employment — and in each case these are telling different stories than the more widely cited numbers.
We usually track economic growth using gross domestic product — the total value of stuff produced. But the government creates a separate estimate of gross domestic income, the money people get from selling stuff, including additions to inventory. The basic accounting says these numbers must be the same. But they’re estimated using different data, so the estimates never agree exactly. And right now the estimates are diverging a lot: G.D.P. shows a shrinking economy, but G.D.I., well, doesn’t …
What about employment? The Bureau of Labor Statistics carries out two surveys, one of employers — which is where the payroll numbers come from — and one of households, which produces an alternate estimate of the number of Americans working. The payroll number is usually considered more reliable — household data are famously noisy — but for technical reasons (the birth-death model; aren’t you sorry you asked?) the payroll data often seem to miss turning points, when employment growth either surges or plunges.
And right now the two surveys are telling different stories. I use quarterly rather than monthly data to smooth out some of the noise; the household data points to a much bigger slowdown than the payroll data …
(Graph at link)
But wait, there’s one more puzzle. Everyone says we have an extremely tight labor market, and when you combine that with high rates of consumer price inflation, there are widespread fears that we’re on the verge of entering the dreaded wage-price spiral. But wage growth isn’t accelerating. In fact, it’s falling fast, and at this point may not be much above the level consistent with the Federal Reserve’s long-run target of 2 percent inflation …
(Another graph, at the link.)
Are you confused? You should be. I’ve been in this business a long time, and I can’t remember any period when economic numbers were telling such different stories. On the other hand, we’ve never before faced the kind of shocks we’ve gone through in the past few years: Both the pandemic-induced recession and the recovery from that recession were, to use the technical term, weird, and maybe we shouldn’t be surprised the measures we normally use to track the economy aren’t working too well.
My guess about what’s really happening is that the economy is indeed slowing, but probably not into a recession, at least so far. And a moderate slowdown is actually what we want to see. …
Call it the incredible shrinking domestic policy initiative.
As Democrats toil to salvage pieces of President Biden’s sweeping social policy, climate change and tax package this summer, their negotiations have highlighted how substantially they have had to curb their ambitions in bowing to political reality and economic shifts. …
The package was dealt yet another blow on Thursday when Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, told Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, that he was unwilling to support legislation that went beyond a plan to lower the cost of prescription drugs and extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. …
… Senate Democrats had coalesced around one plan to raise taxes on some high-earning Americans by imposing an additional 3.8 percent tax on income earned from owning a piece of what is known as a pass-through business, such as a law firm or medical practice. But Mr. Manchin indicated on Thursday that even that step was off the table.
NY Times – updated : WASHINGTON — Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, pulled the plug on Thursday on negotiations to salvage key pieces of President Biden’s agenda, informing his party’s leaders that he would not support funding for climate or energy programs or raising taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations.
The decision by Mr. Manchin, a conservative-leaning Democrat whose opposition has effectively stalled Mr. Biden’s economic package in the evenly divided Senate, dealt a devastating blow to his party’s efforts to enact a broad social safety net, climate and tax package. …
If the Democratic Party has any desire to be a factor in American politics, now is the time to get something done. They have been in power for a year and a half and have very little to show for it.
They have done nothing on minimum wage, immigration, abortion, voting rights. There are five open Court of Appeals seats and 48 District Court seats.
Given all this, I would suggest that both the Senate and House should cancel the August recess and get down to work.
The Democratic Party politicians that have been elected to the US Congress are getting the most important thing done for themselves. They got elected. Our two party political system has successfully utilized special interest politics to galvanize the electorate into deeply polarized factions such that actually accomplishing policy for the greater good is unlikely, if not impossible. However, despite the futility of politics there is no escaping the fact that politicians need jobs.
Yeah, so we can get a couple of Dems to vote with Reps to do nothing. Here’s a thought, concentrate on increasing the amount of Dems in Congress to get something done. Let’s face facts, everybody knows what the problem is, and it ain’t Dems.
How about an unbeatable issue?
https://onlabor.org/why-not-hold-union-representation-elections-on-a-regular-schedule/
See full treatment [cut-and-paste] below
part of the problem is that while Dems are ‘sort of in charge’, as one house Congress isnt only sort of their hands. but mostly isnt. they cant just push what ever they want to get done and have it done. and while the filibuster is the main blocker, the dems wont be charge always, and what the dems can do in one session of congress, the gop cant reverse when they get in charge (and that is always possible….what ever we feel about it). so eliminating is a one time fix at best (i was in favor till it was pointed out that its only as long as the either party is in charge, once they arent, what they did is going to revoked. but they may have not gotten as much as we really wanted, they did get some things done.
There are actually 11 Court of Appeals openings and 66 for District Court seats. Biden has nominated 3 Court of Appeals and 18 District Court. So Biden also has to get to work.
Judicial Vacancies | United States Courts (uscourts.gov)
yep. course it takes getting those nominations through the senate. that while isnt run by the GOP, its not by much. and since the GOP blocked Obama’s nomination to the SCOTUS because…they could and power and politics
Believe it or not…
Is the World Really Falling Apart?
NY Times – July 12
or Does It Just Feel That Way?
and oddly enough inflation isnt just in the US, its a world wide phenomenon. so how exactly do we solve our problem when other countries will export theirs to us? and i suspect this time around, inflation isnt going to be solved by the Fed.
well life expectancy in the US isnt going, has been a downward trend for a while now (which is part of the reason why we arent the leader in health care some think we are). and i dont know just how well are doing on literacy compared to similar countries.
[cut-and-paste]
How about an unbeatable issue?
The PRO Act would add some teeth to the toothless NLRA ($50,000-100,000 fines for retaliating against union organizers) and pull some teeth from Taft-Hartley (take down right-to-work laws). Does anybody expect this would magically triple union density from today’s 6.5% in private (non-gov) economy to 20% — even while 50% want to join a union? When private union density was 20%, McDonald’s, Target, Walgreen’s and Walmart were not unionized. We want them all unionized this time around, don’t we?
Half the Prime delivery drivers whose opinion I seek about federally mandated, regularly scheduled union elections (cert/recert/decert) at every private workplace have no idea in the world what I am talking about. I guess they are from the other 50%. They are intelligent; it seems they live in a time and place that has largely forgotten what a labor union even looks like.
The 50% who remember would kill for regularly scheduled cert/recert/decert elections.
https://onlabor.org/why-not-hold-union-representation-elections-on-a-regular-schedule/
Only the promise of mandated cert/recert/decert elections could claw back enough Obama/Trump voters to safely swamp any Republican efforts to steal the coming elections (by putting the dominant political party in charge of counting votes for instance: the real road to serfdom).
New York Times numbers guru Nate Cohn:
“But pinning Mrs. Clinton’s loss on low black turnout would probably be a mistake. Mr. Obama would have easily won both his elections with this level of black turnout and support. (He would have won Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin each time even if Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee had been severed from their states and cast adrift into the Great Lakes.)”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/upshot/how-the-obama-coalition-crumbled-leaving-an-opening-for-trump.html
The PRO Act is not going to start any Obama/Trump voter stampede for Republican Party exits. But, federally obliged, labor union election cycles are just what today’s democracy deprived American workers would recognize that they overwhelmingly need.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
[cut-and-paste from: Which Side Are You on?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back by Thomas Geoghegan]
First, [Taft-Hartley] ended organizing on the grand, 1930s scale. It outlawed mass picketing, secondary strikes of neutral employers, sit downs: in short, everything [Congress of Industrial Organizations founder John L.] Lewis did in the 1930s.
And Taft-Hartley led to the “union-busting” that started in the late 1960s and continues today. It started when a new “profession” of labor consultants began to convince employers that they could violate the Wagner Act, fire workers at will, fire them deliberately for exercising their legal rights, and nothing would happen. The Wagner Act had never had any real sanctions. … So why hadn’t employers been violating the Wagner Act all along? Well, at first, in the 1930s and 1940s, they tried, and they got riots in the streets: mass picketing, secondary strikes, etc. But after Taft-Hartley, unions couldn’t retaliate like this, or they would end up with penalty fines and jail sentences.
[snip]
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1565848861?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1565848861
How about a truly unbeatable political issue to re-make America’s labor market in one sensible stroke — regularly scheduled cert/recert/decert labor union elections at every private sector workplace?
A question.
How could unions afford to hold these votes in right to work states?
I never heard of a union cert/recert/decert election being anything like expensive — though I would be glad to think it through if you can put me wise.
I have no special knowledge, but if NLRB processes are followed the costs cannot be small.
Say what???
Jill Biden apologizes for saying Latinos are ‘unique’ as tacos
Boston Globe – July 12
The Humbug Economy
NY Times – Paul Krugman – July 12
Manchin nixes support for climate spending and tax hikes, blowing up Biden’s economic agenda for the 2nd time – Washington Post
Senator Joe Manchin unwilling to support legislation
NY Times – July 14