Recent comments
ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer's World
Thom Hartmann has written a dozen books covering ADD / ADHD - Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder.
Join Thom for his new twice-weekly email newsletters on ADHD, whether it affects you or a member of your family.
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
Union intimidation, Kend? Substantiate that wild claim. I've been a working stiff forever and there is never anybody who doesn't want to join a union. There isn't anybody who doesn't want better pay, better conditions to work under and better job security. What rightist fantasy is this that some working people don't want a union?
Some people don't want good health care either, right Kend? Were interfering with their freedom.
HUD's federally funded Housing Choice Voucher Program, otherwise known as Section 8, is failing many of the people it is suppose to help. In case you are not familar with some of the specifics, the amount of rent that a person has to be from one year to the next can fluctuate rather wildly as the funding for the program does not appear to be stable. The rent has gone up in some cases so much that HUD's own guideline that a person pay 30% of one's income toward the rent is violated, because the tenant all of a sudden has to pay more than 30% toward rent due to federal funding and budget cuts affecting the program. If a person's apartment cannot pass inspection, even if this is because the landlord refuses to provide any maintenance as most leases spell out will be provided, the Section 8 program penalizes the tenant, instead of taking the landlord to court. A woman in Ohio on the program had her apartment flunk the required inspection. She took the case to a hearing officier who agreed with the housing inspector. Her rental subsidy had been stopped. Then, the woman felt it necessary to take the housing authority to court, probably a federal court. She told the judge that she had paid for some repairs herself and that the landlord would not provide maintenance and should have been responsible for fixing the problems that caused the apartment to fail the inspection. The judge sided with the tenant and reversed the decision. I also read that the director of a small public housing authority in Southern Indiana told a landlord that a prospective tenant who would have been assisted through the Section 8 program and who happened to be African American was "not the kind of person you want to be renting to." The applicant sued the housing authority for discrimination and the housing authority lost the case. HUD is on the side of well-off property management companies and landlords, not low-income citizens. The government does not provide funding to decrease the national waiting lists for housing vouchers. During Bill Clinton's administration, according to Adloph Reed Jr. writing in the March issue of Harper's, the government got out of the business of helping to finance apartments through public housing. People in Section 8 live in privately owned apartments. Public housing has been associated with mismanagement, crime, poor building maintenance, and in some cases, old, obselete buildings. This whole issue is among the most important. Unfortunately, both on your show on on this Web site, there is little detailed discussion including those with knowledge and expertise in this area on housing, and how to address the increased financial squeeze on renters.
In my lifetime, the economic system has morphed in innumerable ways. The days of the 50's and 60's: a capitalistic system of highly competitive businesses energized by the tax code to reinvest their profits into the growth of the enterprise generating I ever increasing, higher paid work force. Yes, the counter revolution took to the streets seeking social justice, the end of war, and equal rights for minorities and women. The eighties brought the wrecking ball of economic America: consolidation of corporatiinto and banks, many the result of unwanted hostile take over. Tax codes modified, placing the burden on the workers and at the same time forcing out the unions. Computerization, sku labels, instaneous computerized results. Middle management fired. local businesses undermined by the likes of Walmart. Entire small cities displaced. Like a virus, the financisl plague spreads through the factories of americif proudest cities: Detroit, Harrisburg PA steel plants, Delco Radio, and countless plants. jobs sent to Mexico, China, Vietnam, call centers in India, computer processing centers in the Phillipines. The advent of the Internet arrived with its promise to deliver groceries and all our household needs to our doors. eBay, amazon. Travel sites. Download movies. chat with the friends you have not seen in 20 years and still don't have anything in common. The banks took a craspop followed by the rich scooping asks devalued assets at dirt bottom prices! The politicians rhetoric is but a plagiarism from thirty years ago, get a job! Everything has changed since the days when a man's labor was valued And necessary to make our country prosper, Today, work is little more than an exercise of futility.
The Bureau of Labor Stastics:
Union Membership in 2013: Public sector Had a union membership of 35.8%. Private sector had a membership of 6.7%. Total Union membership as a percentage of the total workforce. 11.3%. This is the lowest percentage of Union membership ever since data was first collected in 1983, when it was 20.1%.
This trends raises several questions in my mind. Why do workers in the Private sector not feel the need for a union? Most of the losses have been in the Private sector. My second question is why do so many government workers feel the need to Unionize? Are our governments treating workers so unfairly the feel they need to unionize? or is it more for political access.
Sorry Alice I can't Be fixed. Me and 51 plus one percent of VW workers think the same. I hope all is well with all that rain in your area.
Kend, try shakin' dat sawdust out'cho haid!
All we need do is look at any third world country to see where unregulated business leads; extreme disparity. Its as simple as a game of monopoly; do we really want a society where an insane percentage of the money goes to the %1? Regulations and unions made America's economy explode, because people suddenly had money to spend. When the 1% hold all the money, like a big game of Monopoly, the money doesn't get spent because game over. It is offensive that when big business is extremely profitable, They still fight tooth and nail to not pay their employees better wages. Example Walmart, where their employees need to be subsidized by government welfare to be above the poverty level, while the Walmart owners are the richest people in America., Another example is that jackass that owns Papa John's pizza; he complained tooth and nail and thru a two-year-old baby tantrum, that he might have to add six cents per pizza to give all his employees medical health care (probably need it even more from eating his pizza).
And don't give me this BS that small business would need to lay someone off, because when the 99% have money to spend, businesses flourish (increased profits when the market does better, would far exceed the cost of paying employees higher wages).
Look no one put a gun to anyones head. The VW employees had a vote. One vote one person. Get over it. Geez you guys act like there was no union intimidation.
Craig I want a new jet but no one is prepared to by me one either. There are plenty of jobs that you can work four days a week. Obama care took care of that.
Aliceinwonderland and Mark Sauleys ~ Well said!
Craig Bush ~ Very well said!
Indeed, Craig! Great list. Got my vote! - AIW
We want a 4 day work week 3 day alternative shift with a liveable wage. The raise in minimum wage is not enough. We want our lives back and one less day of servitude. Equal pay for women now. Equal employment rights for farmworkers. We want energy and water efficient home ownership for single income families. Acces to clean water to be proclaimed an inalienable human right and declared a public resource. Single payer health care for all. Treasury notes earmarked for education. A limit of 20 students per class with 15 for math and science. A $10,000 raise for all teachers with guaranteed home ownership in the communities they serve. A minimum subsidy earning allowance for all unemployed. A national work movement to usher in the green economy and national effort to end the petrol-chemical economy. End the oil subsidies. Force a formation of a 50 year super clean-up fund from oil and coal corporations. Enact the carbon tax. Create a socially responsible form of capitilism.
Here's the thing. I just had a long argument on the member blogs about this.
There's this thing called the "Theory of the Surplus Value of Labor" (by Karl Marx) and it goes thus (First let me say that Marx studied the evolution of oppression and enslavement that he expected to result in ultimate liberation. He initially welcomed capitalism thinking that it would liberate people from the enslavement of the feudal social order redistributively giving economic power to the common individual but then he saw that the relationship between capitalist factory owner and worker is really the same as that of the aristocrat or nobility and peasant or serf of feudalism or master and slave of the slave societies of ancient Greece or Rome only in different clothing.) the surplus value of labor is the amount of value produced by the labor of the "direct producers" (factory workers, agrarian feudal peasants, slaves, etc.) that is in excess of the value that is necessary to maintain the subsistence of the direct producer and the direct producer's family so that they can survive to work some more tomorrow and to enable them to reproduce themselves and ensure a continuous supply of labor. That value, the surplus value, the amount produced in excess of that that is needed for the subsistence of the direct producers and their families, is the income of the ruling class.
Thus the value produced by our labor is stolen from us as it has been for millenia since the domestication of plants and animals when that principle of domestication came to be applied no longer just to plants and animals but also to other people, i.e., when soon after the domestication of plants and animals by people commenced the domestication of people by people and different forms of slavery, patriarchy, etc. began.
So then, the degree to which you do that, i.e., the degree to which you take the "surplus value" of your employees' labor (perhaps, in excess of any necessary cost of administering or coordinating their work) is the degree to which you are enslaving, exploiting and robbing them.
Contemporary mainstream economists like to validate this process by euphamizing all the terms of the matter simply calling the surplus value of labor, for example, "profits" or "production less labor costs" that presuppose its legitimacy. But we know what they really mean.
Kend, when a stick up man puts a gun to your head you "agree" to give him your wallet, considering the choice you have. People work where they can not where they want. You think a poor laborer can negotiate a "free" and fair contract with a big corporation, or even a smaller business? The power imbalance is much too great. Unions are because an individual worker lacks the power to negotiate a free and fair contract with their employer but doesn't so much when she or he unites with their coworkers and bargains collectively. It's a matter of compensating the workers with a fair percentage of the profits not the least amount you can get away with giving them.
Capitalism, or a competitive system, also make impossible ethical behavior of business owners. Ethics are not competitive, they are an impediment to one's competitiveness. If your competitor pays their employees a slave wage you have to as well or get done in by their competition. That's how the Walton family got to be the richest in the world and why Walmart destroys more jobs than it ever creates. When Walmart moves into a community Kroeger's has to leave; Safeway has to leave; Ehrmann's has to leave because they are union shops and can't compete with Walmart's low wage model.
The future of workplace democracy is not unions but worker owned businesses. When a worker owned business falls on hard times, i.e., experiences low sales or profits, employee/owners (effectively, partners) collectively agree to take a pay cut. Traditional businesses close their doors when that happens.
Democratically agreed upon progressive tax policies are another way of fairly compensating working people.
The reasons manufacuring left Detroit and New York are much more nuanced. Examine, for example, why Germany and France have retained their manufacturing and you'll see it's because unions there are stronger and here they are not strong enough.
Kend, read Thom's report "Lawmakers Intimidate VW Workers", dated February 17th. (Talk about willful ignorance… tsk-tsk) Tennessee Governor Haslam threatened to eliminate VW's state tax incentives if workers unionized. Meanwhile you've got these Republican fascist bullies pushing their weight around, scaring people with consequences if they try to unionize. Corporate anti-union gestapo bullies, doing what they always do. (YAWN)
I'll not spend my Saturday morning paraphrasing something Thom wrote that you apparently never bothered to read. - AIW
Alice. You must have been happy when the government took the shares from GM from the shareholders and and gave them to the employees. This will be a good test. "to hell with the share holders" you say. You do know most of them where seniors pension funds don't you.
If the power is so tilted why did the VW plant decline the union? The employees there have all of what you just said they didn't have. Unions to me are a good thing. They help a lot of people who can't help themselves but sometimes they push to hard.
I have a freind that works for the post office here. He gets nine weeks holidays. He told me the average postal carrier is off on sick leave 38% more than the private sector. Even he says that's crazy. Our post office here just went to super box delivery nation wide. No more door to door. There is a union that went to far. Now the whole nation suffers.
Baloney, Kend. Without strong unions to back them up, workers are denied a seat at the negotiating table and thus, forced to accept whatever crumbs are offered. (Remember "collective bargaining"?) With the balance of power tilted completely towards the business owners' side of that table, no actual "agreement" is even possible. Employers hold all the cards. It's non-negotiable; comply or else, suckers. You call this "freedom", living paycheck-to-paycheck with no benefits, no safety net and just a heartbeat away from homelessness?! Let's get real my friend. Against this kind of backdrop I say, to hell with the shareholders! - Aliceinwonderland
Sorry Alice but nothing is stole from you. a employee works for a Agreed amount of money for a agreed amount of work. I think anyone making that kind of money is stealing from his shareholders though.
Thanks, Marc. I concur.
Aliceinwonderland ~ Don't feel bad about your linguistic background. It is what it is. I myself speak two languages. Not much either on the grand scheme of things. The two I know, English and Spanish, are revered amongst languages. Spanish because of its consistency and simplicity. English because of it's clarity. In the 18th century, when the Constitution was written, English was acknowledged as the superior language of law because it was "impossible" to second guess it's meaning. As we all know now that is not so. The purity of language remains in the ear of the listener. If one wants to they can twist the meaning of anything written in any language.
Lets look at ancient Greek and Hebrew. The Ten Commandments wrote the simple phrase, "Thou shalt not kill." How can that be screwed up, you might ask? What does "kill" mean? Is it the same as murder? Is defending killing? When you say, "I didn't have sex with that woman," what does 'sex' mean? What does 'didn't' mean? There is always more than one way to stick your hand in the cookie jar regardless of language.
The latter most "Judeo-Christian" Empire--The United States--has slaughtered more innocent people than any other group in the history of the world. How can that be? It is precisely because of the fact that human communication is only limited by human imagination. If you want to twist any words to suit your needs you can. If a child is told by their parents not to touch a cookie jar, and they still want cookies, they will find a way. Like you said it is all semantics. The time has come where we need to put our money where our mouth is. One language is all you need to master to tell that you are being lied too. One language is all it takes to insist on the truth. Anything less is not civilized.
Okay Kend, Marc, Palin- here's my take on all this. Kend, the hell rich folks "earned" it! From my perspective it makes no difference if someone started the business from scratch and is the owner. If he (or she) has employees, in all likelihood that's who is doing most of the work producing or providing whatever it is said owner is in the business of selling. Like Thom has pointed out over & over, nobody gets rich or "makes it" by themselves. And if business owners are not willing or able to pay employees a living wage for full-time work, wealthy or not, they've no business hiring in the first place. And if they are wealthy, well shame on them.
Don't tell me the CEO of United Health "earns" the millions he rakes in every year, to cite just one example. Sorry Kend, that's BS. You're not selling me on the idea that anyone "earns" thousands of bucks per hour. Where health "insurance" piracy is concerned, that's government-sanctioned extortion pure and simple. Put more bluntly: THEFT.
This next point I'm about to make is one I've made before, but it's been awhile and I think it bears repeating. I'll begin by acknowledging that I don't know about any language outside of English (I'm almost embarrassed to say). However I've long observed that the English language in itself is not neutral; there's a semantical slant to it. I suspect this is true of all languages to varying degrees. When it comes to words or phrases used by most of us to express our thoughts, there is nothing neutral about it. I'm talking about these little biases woven through everyday dialogue. Want an example? Look at how folks refer to that which is earned through labor, rather than simply taken (with or without coercion or force) or stolen, or received as a gift. Because nobody - and I mean NOBODY - "earns" $9000 bucks an hour, or millions of bucks in annual "compensation". Virtually everyone uses the "e" word it seems, regardless of political persuasion… Even progressives do! And it grates on me big-time, whenever I hear it. When it comes to these grossly overcompensated toadies at the top of the ole dung heap, I prefer to use words like "given" or "paid" (or less polite terms than that!) rather than referring to such ill-gotten gains as something they've "earned".
This of course goes without saying, I've neither the ability nor the right to change everybody's behavior or way of speaking. I'm simply sharing an observation, along with my problem with this, because of how it relates to the topic at hand. There is nothing morally sound about any society with such extremes of poverty and wealth. Why dignify CEO piracy by referring to such ridiculous compensation as something they've "earned"? The hell they "earned" it! They stole it from us. - Aliceinwonderland
Kend, maybe you should clean out your pipes more often...they get clogged up with nonsense. You're not a plumber are you, by any chance?
Palin you have a progressive tax already. If everything I read is correct the to 30 % pay 70% of the taxes. I am just saying don't get too tax greedy the wealthy will take all there money out of the country and invest it else where.
Dont blame people for taking there money else where blame the government for not changing the tax law. I am totally with you on this you should pay your taxes.
Kend ~ Just what isn't fair about a progressive tax? Most workers can only afford to pay a certain amount because almost everything else goes to the cost of living. High wage workers, earners, and investors can afford to pay more; and, since their use of the commons amounts to a greater strain on the commons, they have the inherent responsibility to pay more. What's not fair about that?
PS Personally I feel that if this group of high income earners wish to accumulate their fortunes overseas instead of recirculating their capital in our own economy, they should be taxed at an even higher rate then otherwise. Make the incentive to spend their profits here. What is spent here stays here. What's not fair about that?
PPS Nothing Palindromedary said is incorrect.
I wouldn't believe anyone named Barrett, Bond, or Fleming. Or Ewing.
Wow 10K, I didn't even realize Liberty was your running partner! If you and your wife were within reach, I'd give ya each a hug.
If I recall correctly, one dog year is equivalent to roughly seven human years. However longevity really varies quite a bit according to breed. Many large breeds like German Shephards or Great Danes live only half as long as those little bitty yappers, to highlight the farthest ends of the spectrum, so this is a very rough figure.
The diet thing has been like an evolving transition for us. When I think back on how my hubby & I ate back in the 1980s, I can only shake my head... Even so, that wasn't nearly as bad as many people habitually eat! If only it weren't for budgetary constraints, we'd all eat organic produce.
Organic gardeners do exist, Palin; if we could afford it I'd gladly shell out a few hundred bucks for a season's fresh organic produce, delivered right to our door each week for maybe half or two-thirds of the year! Coughing up that amount of cash all at once just for food isn't an option for us right now. I'm more distrustful of things labeled "organic" at the grocery store, however. I hate eating any product of corporate farming, even its vegetables. I try reassuring myself that we're still better off eating corporate farmed fruits & veggies than, say, pizza or pop tarts.
Anyway... like ole Bugs Bunny used to say: "That's all, folks!"
- Aliceinwonderland