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Banned
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Originally Posted by sprocket
In truth, a lot of Ron Paul's ideas may not be workable in practice. But he doesn't have a chance in hell of enacting a fraction of his ideas (at least in their current form) even if he is, by some miracle, elected president.
The biggest thing that appeals to me, is that he may help shift the governments focus. Right now all the other candidates are arguing over the best way to expand governments power and entitlement programs. <h3>Paul would turn the debate in Washington in the direction I feel we most need... towards fixing and trimming the federal government.</h3>
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<h3>Can you not see...that for the past 60 years....the wealthiest (...and Ron Paul can't or won't change this by reducing government....) have used the republicans they've sponsored and financed....to make government work just fine.....to benefit them and their wealth transfer goals? The wealth consolidation trends displayed below, confirm my statements!</h3>
THis is an appeal to you to consider the fact that Ron Paul will serve to accelerate the consolidation of the small portion of wealth in the US that the richest do not already own....into their hands, and you work against your best interests if you support his candidacy. "Big government" is not the problem....the problem is government controlled by the few, with a decidedly non-populist agenda. Why is government in some European countries able to operate in the best interests of the majority, but not in the US? <h3>Someday, when your grandchildren ask why the wealth in the US is so unequally divided, you can say that you helped make the disparity even more drastic...that your politics helped to accelerate the demise of what remained of a once thriving middle class. The beginning of the end of the growth of the US middle class began with this, in 1946....Ron Paul offers no solutions to any of what follows:</h3>
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http://hnn.us/articles/1036.html
10-14-02
How Did the Taft-Hartley Act Come About?
By Steven Wagner
Mr. Wagner, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of History, Department of Social Science, Missouri Southern State College.
The Taft-Hartley Act was a major revision of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the Wagner Act) and represented the first major revision of a New Deal act passed by a post-war Congress. So, in order to understand the Taft-Hartley Act, one must begin with the Wagner Act. The Wagner Act was the most important labor law in American history. It gave a major impetus to labor organizations and earned the nickname "labor's bill of rights." It covered all firms and employees in activities affecting interstate commerce except government employees, agricultural workers, and those subject to the Railway Labor Act. It gave workers the right to organize and join labor unions, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to strike. It also set up the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an independent federal agency with three members appointed by the president, to administer the act and gave it the power to certify that a union represented a particular group of employees.
The Wagner Act also forbade employers from engaging in five types of labor practices: interfering with or restraining employees exercising their right to organize and bargain collectively; attempting to dominate or influence a labor union; refusing to bargain collectively and in "good faith" with unions representing their employees; and, finally, encouraging or discouraging union membership through any special conditions of employment or through discrimination against union or non-union members in hiring. This last provision, in effect, permitted closed and union shops (a closed shop is when an employer agrees to hire only union members and a union shop is when an employer agrees to require anyone hired to join the union). There were no provisions in the Wagner Act that prohibited union practices that Congress might deem unfair. Another omission, according to the act's opponents, was a provision that would allow the government to delay or block a strike that threatened national interests.
In the mid-term elections of 1946, <h3>the Republican Party won control of the upcoming Eightieth Congress, gaining majorities in both houses for the first time since 1931. The "Class of 1946," as the first-term Republicans were called, was dominated by members of the conservative "old guard":</h3> John Bricker of Ohio, William Jenner of Indiana, William Knowland of California, George Malone of Nevada, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, Arthur Watkins of Utah, John Williams of Delaware, Richard Nixon of California, Karl Mundt of South Dakota, and Charles Kersten of Wisconsin. These freshmen congressmen were eager to overturn as much New Deal legislation as possible and one of their first priorities was to amend the Wagner Act.
On June 23, 1947, the Republican-controlled Congress passed, over President Truman's veto, the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947 (The Taft-Hartley Act, co-sponsored by Republican Senators Robert Taft of Ohio and Fred Hartley of New Jersey). The Taft-Hartley Act retained the features of the earlier Wagner Act but added to it in ways widely interpreted as anti-labor. Labor leaders dubbed it a "slave labor" bill and twenty-eight Democratic members of Congress declared it a "new guarantee of industrial slavery.....
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(Page 148) http://www.roiw.org/1974/143.pdf
"In Table 4 the assets of the super rich are shown as a percent of the personally
held wealth of all individuals in mid-year 1969. The super rich accounted for 4 percent
of the population age 20 and over, but they owned 33 percent of the net worth
of all persons. The share of particular assets held by the super rich varies a great
deal, however. For instance, they held virtually all of the personally held value of
corporate and foreign bonds and of notes and mortgages. The fact that the estimates
exceed 100 percent of some national balance sheet totals is conceptually
impossible but statistically plausible. First, there is a sampling error associated
with the estimation method. Secondly, assets in the national balance sheets are
subject to measurement error. Under these circumstances, it would not be unusual
to find estimates which exceed 100 percent for small balance sheet assets which are
narrowly held.
The super rich owned 23 percent of the value of all real estate and 52 percent
of the value of all personally held corporate stock, according to conservative
estimates."
(Page 172) http://www.roiw.org/1974/143.pdf
TABLE 16
<h3>FINAL ADJUSTMENT: SHARE OF THE SUPER RICH IN NATIONAL WEALTH. 1969</h3>
--
..........................................................Share Held
..............................................................by
Asset............. The Super Rich..... All Persons....... Super Rich
.......................billions $ ........ billions $ ........ %
Real estate.............. 324.7 .......... 1,187.0 .......... 27.4
Corporate stock ......... 494.8 ............ 781.3 .......... 63.3
State and local bonds..... 20.7 ............. 26.4 .......... 78.4
Corporate and foreign bonds 13.2 ............. 9.4 ......... 140.4
Savings bonds ............. 15.8 ............ 51.1 .......... 30.9
Other federal bonds ....... 23.1 ............ 31.1 .......... 74.3
Notes and mortgages ....... 49.2 ............ 35.3 ......... 139.4
Cash ..................... 155.3 ........... 476.2 .......... 32.6
Business assets ........... 67.8 ........... 171.6 .......... 39.5
Other assets .............. 86.4 ........... 745.5 .......... 11.6
Total assets............. 1,251.0 ........ 3,514.8 .......... 35.6
Debts ..................... 107.5 .......... 424.6 .......... 25.2
Net worth ............... 1,144.0 ........ 3,090.2 .......... 37.0
Notes: Starting with "After Adjustment" figures from Table 15, the following final
adjustments were made here:
1. One-half of lifetime transfers have been excluded. The remaining lifetime
transfers have been distributed proportionately by asset type.
2. All assets have been adjusted upward by
(Page 173) http://www.roiw.org/1974/143.pdf
3. The new asset estimates were then compared to national balance sheet
estimates for all persons to determine the share of the nation's personal
wealth in the hands of the super rich.
On the basis of all the adjustments it is concluded that the super rich constituted
4 percent of the adult population in 1969. They owned over a quarter of
the nation's real estate, three-fifths of all privately held corporate stock, four-fifths
of the state and local bonds, two-fifths of the business assets (excluding business
real estate), a third of the cash, and virtually all of the notes, mortgages and foreign
and corporate bonds. Only in the case of miscellaneous assets-which include
consumer durables-and the cash surrender value of annuities and life insurance
contracts, was their share (12 percent) even close to the proportion of the adult
population they represented. <h3>They owned 36 percent of private gross assets and
37 percent of the net worth of all persons.</h3>
After subtracting their debts, the super rich were worth over a trillion dollars,
enough to have purchased the entire national output of the United States plus the
combined output of Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden in 1969....
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Quote:
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archi...704miller.html
Ronald Reagan's Legacy
His destructive economic policies do not deserve the press's praise.
John Miller
Quote:
....... In the broader historical sweep, the Reagan tax cuts saved America from following Western Europe into welfare-state decline. In addition to igniting growth, his tax cuts put a brake on the expansion of government that had seemed unstoppable.
When Mr. Reagan took office, the top marginal U.S. tax rate was 70%. When he left the top rate was 28%; it is now 35%, and even John Kerry has conceded with his proposal to cut some corporate taxes that the marginal rate of tax matters. Today Americans may disagree about what tax cuts are needed, how deep they should go, and what they ought to target. But the debate itself reflects Mr. Reagan's central premise: that people respond to incentives, and that high taxes interfere with natural human creativity and drive.
—The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2004
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....Two days after his death, the Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy editorial tribute to Ronald Reagan, in the editors' estimation the most important president since FDR. In their paean to the fortieth president, Reagan gets credit for everything from winning the Cold War to renewing a sense of optimism at home. Oh, and he gets extra kudos for doing it all with that famously sunny disposition.
On economic policy, <h3>as the Journal tells the story, by tying the hands of meddlesome government bureaucrats and cutting taxes, Reaganomics ignited an episode of miraculous economic growth that restored prosperity to the U.S. economy</h3>. But like much of what Reagan had to say while he was president, what the Journal offers is just so much happy talk that masks a mean-spirited, economically unsound, and socially destructive policy agenda. ...
...Today, the average real earnings of nonsupervisory workers remain far below those of 30 years ago, despite healthy wage gains in the second half of the 1990s expansion, when unemployment rates dropped toward 4%.
Nor did Reagan era growth do much to alleviate poverty. The poverty rate in 1989 at the end of Reagan's two terms was still 12.8%. That was just one percentage point lower than at beginning of his administration. In contrast, the 1990s boom knocked three percentage points off the nation's poverty rate, while the 1960s boom nearly cut it in half.
Reagan administration economic policies did not result in a 1960s-style prosperity, when workers' real wages went up in tandem with the value of stock holdings—just the opposite. Since 1980, the gains from U.S. economic growth have gone overwhelmingly to the well-to-do, and economic inequality has steadily worsened. By 2000, the ratio of the family income of the top 5% to that of the bottom 20% stood at 19.1, a dramatic rise over the 1979 ratio of 11.4. Reagan's economic policies ushered in the return of levels of inequality unseen since the eve of the Great Depression. ....
...But what about the particulars of Reaganonomics (or supply-side economics), which in practice meant large tax cuts targeted at the rich, a military buildup, and slashing social spending? That too is a disturbing story.
The tax cuts came in 1981, Reagan's first year in office. The administration's plan slashed corporate and individual income tax rates, with the biggest cut in the top rate. The Reagan team promised that their tax cuts would jolt the economy back to life because, as the Wall Street Journal's editors put it, "high taxes interfere with natural human creativity and drive." And the true believers went so far as to suggest that the economy would grow fast enough that tax revenues would actually rise, making the tax cuts painless.
The results never came close to measuring up to the supply-side rhetoric. For starters, the tax cuts busted the federal budget. The federal deficit ballooned from 2.7% of GDP in 1980 to 6% of GDP in 1983, the largest peacetime deficit in history, and was still 5% of GDP in 1986. Tax revenues did pick up, especially after the 1983 payroll tax increase kicked in, reducing the deficit somewhat.....
.....Worse yet, most low-income taxpayers missed out on the Reagan tax cuts. The bottom 40% of households paid out more of their income in federal taxes in 1988 than they had in 1980. Increases in the payroll taxes that finance Social Security and Medicare, which made up a far higher portion of their federal tax bill than income taxes, swamped what little benefit these taxpayers received from lower income tax rates. For the richest 1%, on the other hand, the Reagan tax cuts were pure elixir. This group saw their effective federal tax rate drop from 34.6% to 29.7%, according to a recent study conducted by the Congressional Budget Office. As these numbers suggest, Reagan left a far less progressive federal tax code than he found.
While the Reagan military buildup kept overall government spending from shrinking, Reagan's budgets slashed social spending. Domestic discretionary spending, which includes just about all nondefense spending outside of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, was the special target of Reagan's budget cutting. Relative to the size of the economy, one-third of domestic discretionary spending disappeared: it fell from 4.7% of GDP in 1980 to 3.1% in 1988. Hardest hit were programs for low-income Americans, which in real terms suffered a withering 54% cut in federal spending from 1981 to 1988. After correcting for inflation, subsidized housing lost 80.7% of its support, training and employment services 68.3%, and housing assistance for the elderly 47.1%. These programs have never returned to their pre-Reagan spending levels. In fact, under the Clinton administration spending on domestic discretionary programs continued to decline relative to the size of the economy.
Reagan's economic legacy endures. Government continues to turn its back on social spending for the poor in favor of ineffectual tax giveaways for the rich, at same time that it finds unlimited monies for military adventures. Lopsided economic growth showers benefits on stock investors while doing precious little for workers or—not an entirely separate group—the poor. And today's Depression-level inequality is not mitigated as much as it once was by the tax code ......
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<h3>...and 35 years later.... the top 5 percent own 58.9 percent of everything, vs. the top 4 percent owing 37 percent of US wealth in 1969....</h3>
Quote:
http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/fac...ome&wealth.htm
The Distribution of Wealth in America
There is very little data about the distribution of wealth in America. There is one source, <a href="http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/oss/oss2/scfindex.html">the Survey of Consumer Finances</a>, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Board, that does provide data from 1983.
<img src="http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/faculty/hodgson/Courses/so11/stratification/WealthIncome07.gif">
<img src="http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/faculty/hodgson/Courses/so11/stratification/Wealth83_04.gif">
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Quote:
http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/bp195
September 3, 2007 | EPI Briefing Paper #195
Economy's Gains Fail to Reach Most Workers' Paychecks
by Jared Bernstein and Lawrence Mishel
Research assistance from James Lin
....Conclusion
Most workers have relatively little to show in terms of real wage and income gains over this recovery. The real wage of the typical male worker, for example, is up only 1% since 2000 and not at all since 2003. Even a broader measure like real average compensation has risen less than 1% per year and has barely budged since 2003. As of 2006, the median income of working-age families (those headed by someone less than 65) was down -4.2% in real terms over the cycle, a loss of -$2,375 (2006 dollars). Poverty, at 12.3%, remains 1.0 percentage point above its 2000 trough. ....
....When examined closely, the wage findings tell an important story about whso has and who lacks the bargaining power to benefit from today's economy. Economic elites talk up the economy, with bullish references to GDP, productivity, and job growth. But just whose economy are they talking about?
Clearly, policy makers need to focus much more attention on real wage trends, inequality, and the productivity/wage gap. A central goal of economic policy must be to reconnect the living standards of the workers embodied in the tables and charts to the growth in the overall economy (see www.sharedprosperity.org). That will not occur simply because we wish it to, nor will it arise automatically from faster overall growth. It will be the result of deliberate policies to build institutions and mechanisms that enable working persons to claim their fair share of the growth they themselves are helping to create......
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~Bush has stacked the National Labor Relations BOard with anti union/anti worker POS appointees such as...KIrsanow. Instead of protecting workers rights, the agenda is to eliminate them:
Quote:
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/lab...rbs-decis.html
......The majority stated that it wasn't questioning the legality of voluntary recognition; however, <h3>this case is one of a growing line of decisions in which the Board has repeatedly undermined and questioned the validity of such recognition.</h3> The Board bases its decision on the need "to provide greater protection for employees’ statutory right of free choice and to give proper effect to the court- and Board-recognized statutory preference for resolving questions concerning representation through a Board secret-ballot election."
Members Liebman and Walsh vehemently disagree with the majority's reasoning, as stated in the opening of their dissent:
Sadly, today’s decision will surely enhance already serious disenchantment with the Act’s ability to protect the right of employees to engage in collective bargaining. As the majority recognizes, the Board’s task in these cases is to balance the Act’s twin interests in promoting stable bargaining relationships and employee free choice. But the appropriate balance was struck 40 years ago, in Keller Plastics, and nothing in the majority's decision justifies its radical departure from that well-settled, judicially approved precedent. The voluntary recognition bar, as consistently applied for the past four decades, promotes both interests: it honors the free choice already exercised by a majority of unit employees, while promoting stable bargaining relationships. By contrast, the majority's decision subverts both interests: it subjects the will of the majority to that of a 30 percent minority, and destabilizes nascent bargaining relationships. In addition, the majority's view fails to give sufficient weight to the role of voluntary recognition in national labor policy and to the effect of existing unfair labor practice sanctions to remedy the problems the majority claims to see.
Among the dissent's many objections to the majority's reasoning is that the window period is "a “Catch 22” for the union. [T]he knowledge that an election petition may be filed gives the employer little incentive to devote time and attention to bargaining during the first 45 days following recognition. Yet, if unit employees perceive that nothing is being accomplished in that initial bargaining, it stands to reason that they may be more likely to sign an election petition and even, ultimately, to vote against the union—even if they previously had supported it." As the dissent notes, this pressure on the union to produce results against a recalcitrant employer, while having to fear a quick decert petition is what the recognition bar is supposed to avoid.
<h3>I support the idea of maximizing employee free choice and the advantages of a free and fair election. However, I find the Board's use of these ideas to be disingenuous. The current majority has done nothing to rectify the obvious imbalance that exists in Board-run elections; to the contrary, they seem intent on minimizing employee choice whenever it is to the employers' advantage.</h3>........
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Bush bypassed senate confirmation with three NLRB appointments, as he stacks the deck against workers rights on a mediation board existing to protect them:
(The NLRB was manned by statuatory five members when Bush took office....)
Quote:
http://traditionallaborlaw.blogspot....intention.html
Thursday, September 01, 2005
President Bush Announces His Intention to Recess Appoint Peter C. Schaumber to the NLRB
On August 31, President Bush announced his intention to recess appoint Peter C. Schaumber, of the District of Columbia, to be a Member of the National Labor Relations Board, for the remainder of a five-year term expiring on August 27, 2010.
Schaumber's first term expired this past Saturday, August 27. With that expiration, the Board was reduced to just two Members. As reported in the Daily Labor Report, the Board had announced that it would take the unprecedented action of issuing decisions with only two Members. By recess appointing Schaumber, the President avoids potential litigation over whether the Board has statutory authority to issue two-Member decisions.
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsourc...query=kirsanow
April 02, 2006
Distinctive politics set labor-board member apart
By Alison Grant
Newhouse News Service
....But it's distinctive politics rather than distinctive looks that have thrust Kirsanow into national view. The black Republican attorney and member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission opposes affirmative-action programs as "loserhood" for blacks.
He backs school choice and private retirement accounts on the grounds that black men are cheated by Social Security because their life expectancy is shorter than that of whites. He says Ronald Reagan deserves a spot on Mount Rushmore for his transcendent achievements.
If the fragility of the South Dakota monument prevents adding another president, he says, the carving could go on Yosemite National Park's Half Dome. Such views helped ignite a battle royal when President Bush appointed Kirsanow to the Civil Rights Commission in 2002.
He was seated only after a federal appeals court ruled his appointment was valid. Now Bush has selected Kirsanow, 52, for another polarizing government body.
In January, Bush recess-appointed him to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which oversees union elections and works to prevent and remedy unfair labor practices. Labor lawyers had tried mightily to derail his nomination.....
http://www.jimhightower.com/node/6214
LABOR LAW LAWBREAKER
Monday, September 17, 2007
The Bush regime is so hostile to the rights of labor that Bush’s own National Labor Relations Board is refusing to obey our nation’s labor laws.
The NLRB –the agency responsible for protecting employee rights – is flagrantly violating the bargaining rights of its own employees. Here’s the story: In 2005, NLRB employees petitioned an administrative law authority for the right to organize themselves into a union bargaining unit within the labor agency. NLRB officials opposed this, but the authority ruled in favor of the employees.
Having jumped through all the legal hoops and been certified, the union set out to bargain with NLRB management – but the labor agency’s top officials refused! The union went back to the authority, which investigated the situation and has now ruled that the NLRB is in violation of federal law. That should have been that, but Bush’s hand-picked head of the labor rights agency, Ronald Meisburg, said to hell with labor rights. He is contemptuously refusing to bargain with the employees.
Meisburg is pulling a stall tactic that corporate violators routinely use, hoping to outlast the unionizing effort. By defying the ruling, he is forcing the issue into federal courts – a process that he smugly estimates will delay any bargaining past the expiration of his term in 2010.
Will it surprise you to learn that the guy Bush chose to protect the rights of workers from corporate abuse has spent most of his career in service to corporate employers that seek to undermine workers rights? Corporate bias is one thing, but this is lawlessness! By blatantly violating the rights of NLRB employees, Meisburg is signaling to all employers that contempt of labor laws is OK – go ahead and stiff workers with impunity.
When the law enforcer becomes the law breaker, he’s not fit for the job. To demand Meisburg’s ouster, call the senate labor committee: 202-224-5375
“We Demand the Resignation of General Counsel Meisburg,” National Labor Relations Board Union Flyer
“Law Enforcer is a Law Breaker: FLRA Issues Complaint Against Labor Board,” National Labor Relations Board Union press release, August 19, 2007
“Federal Union Demands Resignation of Labor Board Boss Ronald Meisburg,” National Labor Relations Board Union press release, August 15, 2007
“Complaint and Notice of Hearing,” Case No. WA-CA-07-0501 United States of America Before the Federal Labor Relations Authority San Francisco Region, August 15, 2007
“NLRB General Counsel Ronald E. Meisburg,” www.lawmemo.com
“Bush Nominates Anti-Union Lawyer to NLRB,” www.truthout.org, November 18, 2005
“Help Labor Stop Bush NLRB Assault on Workers’ Rights,”
www.truthout.org, June 26, 2006
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The choice you are facing is a simple one.....you can either vote for candidates committed to taxing back from the rich...what they have paid lobbyist and bribes to take from the rest of us for the past sixty years....remove their stranglehold on the government and force government to work for the rest of us...as it has in France, Denmark, Sweden, and to some extent....in Canada.....or you can back Ron Paul or republicans committed to "smaller government"....a euphemism for looking the other way while the wealthiest complete their union/middle class busting agenda...it's that simple. Why do the wealthiest ten pecent.....even in Canada.....own only thirty percent of total national assets....but more than 70 percent in the US?
Is it because you've allowed the weakthy to divide you...to appeal to your ego and individualism.....because....someday.....you'll be wealthy and you won't want to be heavily taxed.... Someday....the wealthiest will own 90 percent of total US wealth, there will be no unionized employees....and your grandchildren will be serfs...because you bought the BS of conservatives and libertarian-constitutionalists. The weakthy chucjke softly to themselves as the listen to you yearn for a Neil Boortz described, libertarian "utopia". It's bullshit. Government and tazation are there for a populist wave to take control of and reverse this decline. The French and the Swedes don't permit their rich to own their government.....why do you want to give it away? FEMA functioned during the '90's...only the management was changed....Ron Paul offers nothing to the overwhelming majority in the US.....the 90 percent who own less than thirty percent of all US wealth......
Last edited by host; 10-20-2007 at 12:17 AM..
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