For the past year, since Republicans took the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, they’ve behaved like young thugs, extorting Democrats to get what they wanted. Employing the blackmail techniques of schoolyard gangs, House Republicans repeatedly threatened to hurt the American people and the American government if Democrats didn’t submit.

Then President Obama confronted them. In recent weeks, he finally internalized and implemented the advice of American parents on dealing with bullies. He stood his ground. He called the GOP bluff on the payroll tax. And they backed down. He recess appointed four officials, defying GOP attempts to thwart service to American workers and borrowers.

Apparently, it’s a new day in Washington, one in which Democrats, who control the presidency and the majority in the U.S. Senate, are fed up and not going to take GOP extortion anymore.

For a year, Republicans leveraged their demands with blackmail.  If Democrats didn’t accept draconian and economic recovery-starving budget cuts, Republicans would shut down the government. If Democrats didn’t agree to slash the budget by exactly the amount Republicans required, the GOP would destroy the country’s credit rating.

In December, House Republicans overplayed. Initially, they’d opposed President Obama’s proposed extension of the payroll tax break that puts about $1,000 a year back into the pockets of working Americans. Just before the holidays, they changed their minds and said they’d accept a one-year extension, if it were offset by cuts in the federal budget. A dispute ensured between Democrats and Republicans about what to cut. As time ran out before the scheduled holiday break, the Senate compromised and passed a two-month extension, with the remaining 10 months to be settled later. The approval was overwhelming, 89 to 10. The Senators went home.

That bi-partisan action in the Senate left House Republicans with the choice of approving a two-month extension of a tax break they claimed to support or rejecting it, which would increase payroll taxes for 160 million workers.

For days, House Republicans refused to accept the Senate measure, threatening workers with a tax increase. The House Republicans claimed they wanted a one-year extension, but what they really wanted was a one-year extension paid for by cuts they chose without Democratic input. They demanded Senators return to Washington and vote on cuts to support a one-year deal.  Or they’d increase taxes.

The Senate refused. Obama refused. They confronted the bullies.

And the bullies blinked. The House passed the two-month extension.

Before they left town, however, the House Republican majority refused to allow the Senate to recess for more than three days. The Constitution permits each chamber to deny the other the ability to adjourn for more than 72 hours. The result is charade sessions in which a lawmaker, every three days, smacks down a gavel, declares the chamber open for business, recites the Pledge of Allegiance, then strikes the gavel again to close and leaves.

No lawmaker actually works for the people during these “sessions.” But the political dance allows a chamber to claim it’s not recessed. And that’s supposed to stave off recess appointments by the President.

In this case, Republicans intended to block recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. By New Year’s, NLRB membership had dwindled to two, denying the organization the quorum that this group, whose function is to protect workers’ rights, must have to make decisions.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, by law, could not fulfill all of its duties to protect borrowers from fraudulent lending practices until it had a director. Using blackmail again, Republicans said they would filibuster the appointment of any proposed director, no matter how qualified, until they got what they wanted – which was measures to weaken the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, legislation designed to prevent another Wall Street collapse.

Republicans created what appeared to be a foolproof scam to cripple implementation of the law. The legislation wouldn’t be fully effective without a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director and Republicans refused to approve a director unless Democrats agreed to dilute the law. In addition, the GOP would block recess appointments by never officially recessing.

Obama rebuffed this abuse. He called a legislative session that opens for three minutes every 72 hours while 99 Senators are vacationing what it is – recessed. And he made the appointments. He explained:

“When Congress refuses to act and, as a result, hurts our economy and puts people at risk, I have an obligation as President to do what I can without them. I have an obligation to act on behalf of the American people. I will not stand by while a minority in the Senate puts party ideology ahead of the people they were elected to serve. Not when so much is at stake. Not at this make-or-break moment for the middle class.”

Give ‘em hell, Barack!

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union. Follow @USWBlogger

The rebuff had nothing to do with the person, Richard Cordary, who even Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said appeared well qualified.  Rather, it was part of the GOP campaign to hobble the agency created to safeguard borrowers from dodgy payday lenders and predatory mortgage salesmen.

The GOP thwarts regulatory agencies in order to enforce its “you’re on your own” philosophy. That is, each citizen, like an island, fends for himself in a world where the invisible hand of the market serves as regulator. Democrats believe something very different. They espouse the principles set out by President Teddy Roosevelt in his 1910 speech in Osawatomie, Kan., and echoed by President Obama in his address there last week. That is America and Americans are better when citizens work together and watch out for each other, that cooperating invigorates the individual, the economy and the nation, and that primacy is in people and profit is subordinate.

The late Senator Paul Wellstone expressed the essential sentiment most succinctly:

 “We all do better when we all do better.”

Republicans don’t ascribe to that. They want to set up a country where every person is responsible for every aspect of daily life, from ensuring drinking water is safe to reducing workplace hazards. The GOP wants to shred regulations that protect citizens, even eliminate the federal agencies that enforce them. Congressional Republicans have worked to defund the Environmental Protection Agency, a move that would “empower” each citizen to persuade big industrial polluters to limit the particulates, mercury, arsenic, cadmium and lead belching from smokestacks.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said he’d reverse laws forbidding child labor –the same regulations Teddy Roosevelt endorsed to keep youngsters in classrooms and out of factories.  In a nation deeply concerned about the quality of schools and the quantity of imported oil, GOP candidate Rick Perry plans to close the Education and Energy departments. Republican candidate Ron Paul would abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the organization citizens created to aid fellow Americans who fall victim to natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes and floods.

But that’s just the point: Republicans don’t believe Americans should help each other – they should only help themselves. In the GOP view, greed and selfishness aren’t sins. They’re virtues.

That’s a new fangled philosophy for Republicans, however. Wealthy Republican Teddy Roosevelt, a big game hunter and war hero who led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill to win the Spanish-American War, might be expected to be a rugged individualist of the go-it-alone ilk promoted by today’s GOP. But he wasn’t. He counseled against a cult of individualism, writing:

“The fundamental rule in our national life – the rule which underlies all others – is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together.”

The concept is citizens working together for their mutual benefit and the advancement of their nation. American citizenship is not, Roosevelt said in his New Nationalism Address in Osawatomie in 1910, all about individual enrichment:

“Those who oppose all reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.”

That could have come from the mouth of an Occupy Wall Street protester.

Then there’s this from Roosevelt in Osawatomie on regulation:

“This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.”

His purpose was to ensure equal opportunity for all people who work hard, he said:

“I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.”

One hundred and one years later in Osawatomie, President Obama reiterated those sentiments. He talked about how in the 75 years after Roosevelt’s speech, America moved toward fulfilling the Rough Rider’s goals. The nation decreased income inequality and increased opportunity. Hard work paid off, and anyone who strived could succeed. This gave rise to the largest middle class and strongest economy in world history.

But, over the past 25 years, this progress eroded. Income inequality rose dramatically. Simultaneously, opportunity diminished. The middle class shrank as hard work too frequently stopped paying off.

How to restore opportunity and shared prosperity is, Obama said, “the defining issue of our time.”  Roosevelt sought it through the square deal. Obama called for something similar:

“I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values; 1 percent or 99 percent values. They are American values, and we have to reclaim them.”

Obama rebuked on-your-own selfishness and greed, saying each American has a stake in the success of all Americans:

“We are greater together than we are on our own.”

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union. Follow @USWBlogger

But they don’t.

Instead of the people’s priority, which is jobs, country club conservatives in Congress stubbornly fixate on deficits. Instead of ensuring millionaires and corporations pay their fair share, House Republicans passed a budget that would destroy Medicare and Medicaid.

Corporate and clandestine campaign contributions have undermined the power of traditional voting, the kind done at polls on election day. Rather than voters, politicians now serve donors — billionaires and banksters — who invest untold millions and demand returns in the form of self-serving policy.

This is demoralizing to those who cherish democracy and the sanctity of one person, one vote.

Hope, however, arrived with the debit card fee victory. The 99 percent forced Bank of America to back off its proposed fee. Average Americans accomplished this by voting differently, not at the ballot box but at the twitter account, the Occupy march and the teller window, where 1 million depositors went to move $4.5 billion from the big Wall Street banks to community banks and credit unions. They found another way to exercise their franchise and force the powerful to respond.

The 99 percent must exploit the method of this triumph to get what they need. Because politicians sure as hell aren’t giving them what they want.

The numbers don’t lie. Coin-operated conservatives in Congress have rejected President Obama’s jobs plan, parts of the jobs plan and Obama’s pitch to raise taxes on the rich to pay for it.

And yet, the electorate strongly supports both surtaxing millionaires and the elements of the jobs plan. In a CNN poll in October, 75 percent favored sending federal money to the states to hire teachers and first responders and 72 percent favored infrastructure investments.

A whopping 76 percent wanted millionaires to pay higher taxes.

In that same CNN poll, there’s another compelling statistic. Sixty-one percent said reducing unemployment was the most important issue. Reducing the deficit didn’t even come close at 35 percent.

The numbers aren’t flukes. Another survey, taken a week later by CBS found the same thing.

At a time when companies are hoarding $2 trillion in reserves, failing to create jobs and demanding tax cuts, the CBS poll provided a snapshot of public opinion on corporate responsibility. It found 67 percent opposed shrinking big business tax obligations.

That is a result of the public knowing intuitively what a report released last week proved: corporations aren’t paying their fair share. Citizens for Tax Justice conducted a comprehensive study that showed 280 of the nation’s largest publically-traded corporations paid only 18.5 percent of their profits in taxes over the past three years. That is little more than half the official rate of 35 percent, and it is lower than the rate paid by their competitors in other industrialized nations.

Thirty of the companies paid nothing. For three years.

Numerous polls over time found Americans, including Tea Partiers by a two-to-one margin, strongly oppose cutting Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare benefits. Yet, what is the Congressional super-committee talking about? Cutting Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.

If only the public could get their elected representatives to listen. If only they could walk into those plush Congressional offices — the way corporate lobbyists do — grab those lawmakers and get them to understand the sentiment of all those polls, the feeling of the vast majority of the electorate: Tax the rich; don’t cut the social safety net; create jobs now; worry about the deficit when the economy improves.

Traditional balloting has failed to get country club conservatives to listen to the public. To the majority. To the people who a democratically-elected government is supposed to serve.

The Bank of America debit card fee reversal suggests, however, that the majority can win with non-traditional balloting. In this case, a big bank that had been bailed out by the public after it engaged in excessively-risky betting, a bank that gave its CEO a $9 million bonus after he lost billions, announced that it had “the right to make a profit” off the backs of poor people by charging them a new $5-a-month fee to use their own money with their debit cards.

Other Wall Street banks indicated they would do the same.

Fed up, depositors said they wouldn’t take it anymore. They began transferring their money out of the Wall Street banks, participating in the “Move Your Money” campaign that urged citizens to deposit their savings in community banks and credit unions. YouTube began featuring outrageous videos of Wall Street bank branches denying depositors access to their accounts when they tried to withdraw their money to move it.

The effort was tweeted and blogged. It was cheered by Occupy Wall Street protesters who marched to bank headquarters buildings in New York City carrying thousands of letters of complaint.

Wall Street banks began backing off their new fee plans. One by one they abandoned Bank of America. Finally, it too cancelled the fee, meanwhile refusing to disclose just how much businesses it lost.

Last Saturday was the big, official “move your money” day. Of course, the Wall Street banks won’t tell how many more customers they lost. But depositors, more than 78,000 of whom pledged to make the move, made their point.

They voted differently. They voted with their feet and their wallets. And they won. They cast ballots in the only way coin-operated politicians and big banks respond to.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union. Follow @USWBlogger

They revere financial titans who pay themselves and their minions millions to manipulate money and gamble recklessly. Politicians gave tribute to the financiers with tax breaks and bailouts when the bankers’ bad bets threatened to bankrupt their institutions.

This false idolatry produced a nation gripped by massive unemployment, a nation in which destructive income inequality has risen beyond robber baron levels, a nation where greed has been perverted from sin to good, a nation where politicians genuflect to money changers, not majority citizens.

Salvation for the majority is not more failed trickle-down economics or more deregulation so that Wall Street can resume committing unfettered wagering. Redemption is political and economic systems devoted to serving the common good, not the affluent few.

These concepts — that governments should protect majorities and that the international financial collapse is an opportunity to transform the system into one supporting a more fraternal and just human family — are contained in a report released last week by the Pope’s Council for Justice and Peace. It says:

“The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence.”

Those values mandate economic and political systems that transcend “personal utility for the good of the community,” the report says, then adds:

“The primacy of the spiritual and of ethics needs to be restored and, with them, the primacy of politics, which is responsible for the common good – over the economy and finance.”

This is exactly what the 99 percenters — the Occupy Wall Street activists of every faith — have been saying. They want systems that work for the vast majority of citizens, not just the 1 percent at the top.

A day after the Pontifical Council reported that inequitable distribution of wealth has increased both between individuals and nations, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office documented a massive spike in income inequality within the United States from 1979 to 2007.

The household income of the nation’s richest 1 percent grew 275 percent during that nearly 30-year period, according to the CBO report.

By contrast, the income of the middle class rose by one-seventh of that — 40 percent. For the poor, the increase was one-fifteenth of that for the rich — only 18 percent over 30 years.

The result is that the richest 20 percent of households got more money in those 30 years than the entire bottom 80 percent.  That is redistribution of wealth – moving it from the poor and middle class to the richest.

The CBO study cites several factors contributing to the rising inequality, including federal tax policy. The CBO says tax policy fed inequity as the incomes of the wealthiest rose astronomically and their federal tax burden shrank.

This pattern is consistent internationally. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development determined that from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s income inequality increased in three-quarters of the 30 developed countries studied.

If basic morality fails as a reason to reverse these trends, then the Pontifical Council suggested another. Such inequality leads to instability and violence:

“If no solutions are found to the various forms of injustice, the negative effects that will follow on the social, political and economic level will be destined to create a climate of growing hostility and even violence, and ultimately undermine the very foundations of democratic institutions, even the ones considered most solid.”

So far, the violence surrounding the 99 percenters in the “Occupy” movement has come from the government and police and not the other way around, thus the photos and videos of defenseless women pepper-sprayed by an officer in New York and a bleeding, critically-injured Iraq war veteran struck down by police in Oakland.

Historically, it wasn’t always that way. During another spike in the nation’s history of income inequality, in the first two decades of the 1900s, violence was turned on the rich. An anarchist shot robber baron Henry Clay Frick and bombings terrorized industrialists. As the socialist movement surged, Andrew Carnegie wrote that the gulf between rich and poor threatened the survival of capitalism.

Also ignoring morality, just consider that income inequality impedes economic development. An International Monetary Fund study found high levels of inequality retards economic recovery while relatively equal income distribution supports sustained growth. Numerous academic studies have reached the same conclusion – inequality diminishes economic expansion, for many reasons, including its tendency to provoke political and social unrest.

Yet conservative politicians continue to demand changes that would make matters worse. Candidates Herman Cain and Rick Perry, seeking the Republican nomination for president, have proffered flat tax plans that would compound the burden on the middle class and poor. On being informed that his would increase income inequality, Perry said, “I don’t care about that.”

When Democrats on the debt-reduction super committee suggested raising $1.3 trillion in tax revenues, including levies on the rich, a measure consistently supported by huge majorities of the American public, Republicans summarily rejected the proposal, calling it absurd.

The answer to the question, “What would Jesus do?” in this case is clear. The only gospel story in which Jesus engaged in violence is the cleansing of the temple of moneychangers. Morality demands an end to Wall Street worship and a new era in which both politics and financial markets work for the majority, for the common good.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union. Follow @USWBlogger

They still don’t.  This despite the fact that they promised voters during their campaign to take control of the U.S. House one year ago that they’d create jobs. That they’d focus on jobs. That nothing was more important to them than jobs.

Now, what they’ve offered instead of actual jobs is a polyglot of GOP talking points. It’s certainly no vision to move the country forward. It’s a plot to set the country back – to repeal the health care law that will soon help provide coverage for the nearly 50 million Americans without insurance, to rescind the Wall Street reform law designed to prevent another financial sector-caused meltdown, and to thwart regulations, like those that stopped distribution of listeria-infected cantaloupe that killed 25.

GOP Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio called the Republican polyglot a “pro-growth proposal to create the environment for jobs.” It is, in fact, a pro-business proposal to permit corporations to destroy the environment for humans.

It is another GOP ploy to appease, accommodate and absolve corporations. It is another GOP ruse to firmly establish in America an economy designed for, dedicated to and directed by corporations rather than a just economy controlled by and beneficial to the 99 percent.

Republicans offered up their “Jobs Through Growth Act” mishmash after the GOP minority in the Senate wielded the filibuster again to block a vote on President Obama’s $447 billion American Jobs Act, a measure that even Republican economists determined would create 1.9 million jobs and reduce the nation’s aching 9.1 percent unemployment by as much as 1 percent.

The Republican measure, by contrast, could hurt the economy, according to Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody’s Analytics, an independent firm whose chief economist advised the McCain presidential campaign. Here is what Faucher said:

“Should we look at regulations and make sure they make sense from a cost benefit standpoint? Certainly. Should we reduce the budget deficit over the long run? Certainly.  But in the short term, demand is weak, businesses aren’t hiring, and consumers aren’t spending. That’s the cause of the current weakness, and Republican Senate proposals aren’t going to address that in the short term. In fact, they could be harmful in the short run if the focus is on cutting spending.”

Of all the Republican proposals, the most insidious, the most dangerous, the absolutely most outrageous is their demand to roll back Wall Street reform, to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act that was passed in an attempt to prevent recurrence of the 2008 financial collapse that destroyed the U.S. economy and caused the highest levels of foreclosures, unemployment and misery among the 99 percent since the Great Depression.

Go back, the Republicans are saying. Go back to 2007 when Wall Street financiers sold worthless mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting investors, contending with a straight face that these were assets. Go back to 2008 when these firms made hundreds of millions betting those securities would fail. Go back to 2009 when the banksters, bailed out by taxpayers, awarded billions in bonuses to the executives who’d gotten the firms and the U.S. economy into so much trouble. Go back to early 2010, the Republicans are saying, before Obama signed the Dodd-Frank reform act, and allow Wall Street to do it all over again. Reprise unfettered, irresponsible Wall Street, the Republicans demand.

For Republicans, it’s all about enforcing freedom for the few – allowing corporations and millionaires to do whatever they want. No matter what that means to the freedoms of the 99 percent. The GOP demand for repeal of health care reform is another example of that. Already, this law has expanded health coverage for a million young adults because it allows them to remain on their parents’ plan until age 26. It has also helped 1.2 million senior citizens afford their prescription drugs by beginning to close the “donut hole” during which they must pay.

Still, Republicans want to get rid of that law. They want to regress to those free-for-all days when health insurance corporations could make unlimited profits from illness, deny coverage to those with chronic illnesses and terminate coverage when policy holders got sick. They want those young adults dropped. They want senior citizens to pay more for their prescriptions again. For Republicans, it’s all about enforcing freedom for the few – allowing health insurance corporations to do whatever they want. No matter what that means to the freedoms of the 99 percent.

The Republican rebuke of any attempt to control the 1 percent is highlighted in their “jobs bill” by its call for a regulation moratorium.  No new rules! The country is in the midst of the deadliest outbreak of foodborne illness in 25 years. Twenty-five people are dead. A total of 125 people in 26 states have been sickened by listeria-poisoned cantaloupe from Jensen Farms in Holly, Colo. One sickened woman suffered a miscarriage. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says more illnesses and deaths may occur over the next several weeks.

If the Republicans got their way, the FDA would be unable to write new regulations to prevent another such incident. It’s fine with the GOP that Jensen had hired its own inspector, a firm that certified the Jensen packing plant fine and dandy just before listeria-tainted cantaloupes killed 25 and just before the FDA found numerous, obvious violations.

That’s because the Republican precept is: an economy just for the 1 percent.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union. Follow @USWBlogger

Here’s how: While occupiers sought political focus on the unemployment, impoverishment and foreclosures suffered by the nation’s non-rich 99 percent, politicians considered three major pieces of legislation and passed only the one that will help the wealthiest 1 percent and hurt the remaining 99 percent.

Senate Republicans murdered-by-filibuster the American Jobs Act, which would surtax the 1 percent to provide jobs for the 99 percent. The Senate did pass the currency manipulation bill, but House GOP leaders refused to schedule a vote on the measure that would protect jobs for the 99 percent by punishing countries that undervalue their currencies to artificially lower prices on their exports.

By contrast, both houses of Congress adopted the so-called Free Trade Agreements with Panama, Colombia and Korea, which will, just like their predecessor NAFTA, destroy jobs held by the 99 percent.

It’s incredible. Inexplicable. Inexcusable. In a country where joblessness is a painful 9.1 percent. Where one in five children lives in poverty. Where foreclosures rose again last month. Where a whole movement is growing to protest the appeasement of the rich at the cost of the middle class. In that place, Congress chose to walk backwards. It didn’t take two steps forward – which it could have by passing the currency bill and jobs act. No. It just took a giant step backward by embracing job-killing trade agreements.

It all forces the 99 percent to demand even more loudly: Where’s the jobs?

WHERE’S THE JOBS?

Either the Occupy Wall Street protesters aren’t loud enough or the politicians in Washington refuse to listen. It’s not just street demonstrators who politicians can’t seem to hear. Poll after poll has shown Americans’ first priority, their major concern is jobs.

Yet when President Obama proposes the American Jobs Act, a measure that would create 1.9 million jobs and ease taxes on the middle class and small businesses, Republicans in the Senate rebuff it. If the majority ruled, the jobs act would have passed the Senate with 51 Democrats in favor. But in the Senate, the GOP stops all action by requiring 60 votes to end their filibusters. They talk and talk and talk. And Americans who need jobs get nothing.

Where’s the jobs?

Amazingly, in a city frozen by political gridlock, the Senate passed with bipartisan support the currency manipulation bill. The legislation would make it easier for the United States to punish market-distorting currency undervaluing by imposing tariffs. The measure is crucial to stop what now seems an inexorable rise in the U.S. trade deficit with China, which continuously kills American manufacturing and jobs.

Last month that deficit rose to a record $28.96 billion, an increase of $2 billion over one month’s time. Over the past decade, 57,000 U.S. factories have closed and 6 million jobs have disappeared, with deliberate currency undervaluing by China a major factor. Though employment rose overall last month, the nation lost 13,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs.

The currency manipulation bill has 225 co-signers in the House, more than the majority it needs to pass. But Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner has said he will not permit the chamber to vote on it. He will thwart an attempt to end the practice that is destroying American jobs – even though Republicans in both the House and Senate support it.

Where’s the jobs, Boehner?

Then Congress passed the Free Trade Agreements. Despite the incessant claims that the three will create “tens of thousands of jobs,” it’s clear that they won’t because simultaneously Congress finally renewed the lapsed Trade Adjustment Assistance for workers who lose their jobs as a result of free trade.

Here’s what the New York Times said about the agreements and jobs:

“Economists generally predict that free trade agreements, which eliminate tariffs and other policies aimed at protecting domestic manufacturers, benefit all participating nations by creating a larger common market, increasing sales and reducing prices. But such deals also create clear losers, as workers lose well-paid jobs to foreign competition.”

The United States can’t afford to lose any more manufacturing jobs. Yet it is projected that these agreements will particularly damage the U.S. textile, electronics and auto supply industries.

Again and again, politicians told Americans that NAFTA would create hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs. It did the opposite. Why would something different occur with these three copycat deals?

Where’s the jobs?

This is what the Times editorial board said about Republicans:

“The Republicans offer no actual economic plans, only tired slogans about cutting regulations and spending, and ending health care reform. The party seems content to run out the clock on Mr. Obama’s term while doing very little. On Tuesday, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, accused Republicans of trying to “suffocate the economy” in hopes that the pain would work to their political advantage. They are doing little to refute that charge.”

As the Occupy Wall Street movement has shown, America can’t wait. The middle class needs help now.

Where’s the jobs?

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union. Follow @USWBlogger

Given what’s been going on in the United States since the bank bailout, it’s amazing that Occupy Wall Street didn’t precede the Arab Spring. The powers-that-be, from the rich to their coin-operated politicians, have mocked and belittled and ignored the protesters, the 99 percenters as they call themselves – everyone but the richest one percent. No matter what the critics say, these young people, with righteous outrage and new age communication, have launched the American Autumn. Unions like mine, the United Steelworkers, understand their issues and are here to support them.

To convey the significance of the Occupy Wall Street movement, NBC News anchor Brian Williams this week quoted the 1960s Buffalo Springfield song, For What It’s Worth:

“There is something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

Maybe it’s unclear what the Occupy Wall Street movement ultimately will accomplish. But what’s happening – for the past three weeks in New York and now in hundreds of towns across North America – is a roiling, inspirational, grassroots expression of anger, disgust and revolution.

And, frankly, given what’s been going on in the United States since the bank bailout, it’s amazing that this uprising didn’t precede the Arab Spring. The powers-that-be, from the rich and influential to their coin-operated politicians and corporate-owned media, have mocked and belittled and ignored the protesters, the 99 percenters as they call themselves – everyone but the richest one percent. No matter what the critics say, these young people, with righteous outrage and new age communication, have launched the American Autumn.

This revolt could have started in the spring of 2009, immediately after the Bush administration pushed through Congress the Troubled Asset Relieve Program (TARP), the $700 billion in taxpayer money spent to prop up banks that had gambled and lost untold trillions. A Bloomberg News investigation later would show that the United States lent, spent or guaranteed as much as $12.8 trillion to save the banks. Despite that help, the Wall Street recklessness ruined the American economy, throwing tens of millions out of jobs and homes.

Poverty and hunger skyrocketed in the richest country in the world. As tax revenue fell, states, towns and school districts slashed essential public services and laid off teachers, librarians, firefighters and police officers.

Maybe it just took this long for the middle class to grasp all the horrible effects of the Wall Street gambling and to realize that a government held hostage by country club conservatives bent on cutting public services just made matters worse. Maybe young people looked at unrestrained war spending, Pell Grant slashing and voter disenfranchising and decided they were fed up and not going to take foreclosure of their futures anymore.

Whatever the spark, the American Autumn began three weeks ago in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, formerly Liberty Square. Late in September, some of the one percenters sipped Champaign on an upscale restaurant balcony as they looked down on the protesters in the streets below. This week, as protests spread, wealthy risk-takers at the Chicago Board of Trade put signs in the windows of their ritzy offices bragging, “We are the 1 percent.” They don’t get it.

Nor does Bank of America. Here’s a bank bailed out by taxpayers that just announced it would begin imposing a new fee –  $5 a month, $60 a year – on debit card users. This bank also just announced that it would worsen the recession caused by bankster recklessness by laying off 30,000 workers.

This is a bank that engaged in the habitual, anti-capitalistic Wall Street practice of rewarding poor executive performance by giving its CEO Brian T. Moynihan a $9 million bonus immediately after the institution he runs lost $2.2 billion in 2010. Moynihan responded to criticism of the $5 fee by saying customers – and ultimately taxpayers — must line his pockets and that of shareholders, regardless of how badly he runs the bank or how stupidly he gambles with its money. That’s because, he asserted, the bank has a “right to make a profit.”  No matter what.

The media and country club conservatives belittled the protesters. Here’s what Herman Cain, a Tea Partier seeking the GOP nomination for president, said:

“Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks if you don’t have a job or you’re not rich. Blame yourself!”

He continued:

“It’s not a person’s fault because they succeeded. It’s a person’s fault if they failed. And so this is why I don’t understand these demonstrations and what it is that they’re looking for.”

He called the protesters “anti-capitalist,” although it was the banks that sought a socialist bailout from the government when they got themselves in trouble.

Cain didn’t blame banksters for unemployment, even though it was Wall Street gambling that took down the economy. He blames the teachers and police officers thrown out of work by local governments that are cash-strapped as a result of the recession — caused by Wall Street recklessness.

Cain and the media keep saying they don’t understand what the protesters want. They just don’t get it.

A specific list of demands is unnecessary. What the 99 percenters want is obvious. They want the American dream restored. Good public education for everyone. Equity in opportunity. Shared sacrifice so that the rich pay a tax rate at least equal to that charged the middle class. An end to poverty and unemployment in the richest country in the world.

In the Buffalo Springfield song, For What It’s Worth, lyrics talk of 1960s youths criticized for their protests:

“Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind.”

This time protesters will get backing. The members of my union, the United Steelworkers, get it. Members of the unions of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win federations get it. We’re here to support the young people of the American Autumn.

The U.S. allowed China to join the club of trading partners in the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 under the condition that China observe club rules.

Over the past decade, however, China has profited immeasurably by ignoring, flouting and circumventing the rules barring market-distorting practices. Among the most destructive of these violations is China’s deliberate undervaluing of its currency, which makes Chinese exports to the United States artificially cheap and U.S. exports to China artificially expensive.

This nurtures Chinese industry and poisons American manufacturing.

In the trade contest with China, the referees have been absent or silent or completely craven on the issue of currency undervaluation, even as it kills U.S. factories and jobs. American workers need a trade rule enforcer. With unemployment above 9 percent, the situation is desperate. American workers can’t be played anymore.

Just last week, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a non-partisan think tank, issued a report showing that the trade deficit with China cost the United States 2.8 million jobs since the WTO allowed China into the trading club. Every congressional district in the U.S. lost jobs as Chinese exports to the United States overwhelmed U.S. exports to China.

The trade deficit is the difference between the value of Chinese exports to the United States and U.S. exports to China. It was $84 billion the year China entered the WTO. Last year it grew to $278 billion – a 230 percent increase.

EPI also determined that China’s currency manipulation is a major cause of the trade deficit. The report explains that China has aggressively bought U.S. dollars and other foreign exchange reserves to depress the value of the yuan. Smart move, but prohibited under WTO rules.

Without this deliberate market interference, the yuan would have risen in value over the years as China’s productivity soared. But a stronger yuan would have increased the cost of Chinese products in the U.S. and decreased the cost of U.S. exports to China. That would have quashed Chinese exports and invigorated American exports, lowering the trade deficit.

The currency manipulation is not surprising considering China’s other routine trade-distorting and rule-violating practices. These include giving government subsidies to factories that export. WTO rules permit governments to subsidize manufacturers that sell only within their own countries. But subsidized products can’t be exported because the government aid artificially lowers prices, which wrongly propels them ahead of unsubsidized products on the international market.

Developing countries often violate the rule anyway. They game the system. Everyone wants a leg up. It has served the Chinese economy and the Chinese people well. Progress for third world workers is to be celebrated. But it’s unjust when a country accomplishes it by defying rules it pledged to follow.

The United States has repeatedly imposed tariffs on China for exporting improperly-subsidized products. For example, my union, the United Steelworkers, filed a case seeking relief from subsidized Chinese passenger and light truck tires sold in the United States. Both the U.S. International Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Commerce determined China breached the trade rules, and President Obama imposed tariffs on imported Chinese tires for three years. When China appealed the tariffs, the WTO concluded that Obama was right.

That’s enforcement.

And the result is that tire companies now are spending hundreds of millions to expand U.S. operations and hiring hundreds of U.S. workers.

But when it comes to currency manipulation, the U.S. government is all threats and no enforcement.

The U.S. Treasury Department has considered officially designating China a currency manipulator, a finding necessary before commencing sanctions. But it never did. The U.S. house and senate considered legislation but failed to pass it. And Obama asked China to allow the value of its currency to float up naturally. In June of 2010, China said it would.

But it hasn’t.

It’s more than a year later, and maybe another hundred thousand U.S. jobs lost. Washington seems to be listening only to greedy reactionaries who contend sanctions will spark a trade war.

They’re wrong. Every time the USW wins a trade case – including the tire case — the reactionaries have wailed that the tariffs will prompt a trade war.

China won’t do it because the value of Chinese exports to the United States is four times that of American exports to China. China faces four times the risk in a trade war. The greedy reactionaries consist mainly of multi-national corporations that have outsourced production and jobs to China and are concerned only with profits and totally unconcerned about the U.S. economy and unemployment.

Another EPI study released earlier this year showed that if China and other Asian countries properly valued their currencies, as many as 2.25 million jobs would be created in the United States and the U.S. budget deficit would decline by up to $71.4 billion per year.
More jobs; lower debt – that’s why a bipartisan group of U.S. senators and congressmen introduced legislation last week to enable the U.S. Treasury Department to more easily declare a country deliberately undervalues its currency and to punish manipulators.

There can’t be any more dawdling or cowering or negotiating on this. American workers need enforcement now.

***

Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union. Follow @USWBlogger

Original here

The legislators asked more of those who had benefitted most from the advantages America provides. They asked less of those who benefitted least.

As time passed, the rich and wealthy corporations perverted the progressive tax code. Now what America’s got is a flip-flop under which the fabulously wealthy pay taxes at rates lower than the middle class.

This week, President Obama proposed returning the tax code to a time closer to equity and sensibility. He asked that millionaires and corporations pay taxes at the same rate as the middle class. Not more, as they once did. But at an equal rate. It’s not revolutionary. It’s retro. And it would help create jobs.

It’s an idea whose time has come – again. And it should be implemented immediately.

Obama called it the Buffett Rule after billionaire Warren Buffett who has written repeatedly that he thinks it’s wrong that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary. He spoke out most recently in a New York Times op-ed on Aug. 14 titled, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.” Here’s what he said:

“Our leaders have asked for ‘shared sacrifice.’ But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

“While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks.”

His petition to American lawmakers for a return to fairness has been joined by fellow billionaire Mark Cuban and a large group of Americans calling themselves Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength. In an open letter to political leaders, these millionaires asked to be taxed more. It says:

“We are writing to urge you to put our country ahead of politics.

“For the fiscal health of our nation and the well-being of our fellow citizens, we ask that you increase taxes on incomes over $1,000,000.”

Cuban wrote on his blog that millionaires may choke when they see the size of their tax bills, but then they should rejoice at having such a “problem.” He also said:

“In these times of ‘The Great Recession’ we shouldn’t be trying to shift the benefits of wealth behind some curtain. We should be celebrating and encouraging people to make as much money as they can. Profits equal tax money. While some people might find it distasteful to pay taxes. I don’t. I find it Patriotic.”

The rich are ready to pay their fair share. It’s not fair now. Buffett and the other richest 399 billionaires in America pay an average income tax rate of 16.6 percent, while a worker earning between $35,000 and $84,000 a year pays a marginal rate of 25 percent.

Obama described the simple math of tax rates in seeking institution of the Buffett Rule. The nation is faced with a massive deficit and a crushing recession. America doesn’t receive sufficient tax revenues to buy everything it wants. So it must make choices. It could continue to give the rich and corporations special tax treatment and pay the country’s debts on the backs of the middle class. That would require slashing the programs that sustain workers – Medicare, Medicaid, food inspection, public education, Pell Grants – and the government programs that kindle the economy and provide middle class jobs such as infrastructure construction.

Or America could ask the rich to pay a tax rate equal to that of the middle class. America could end outrageous loophole for massively-profitable corporations – loopholes that not only enabled GE to pay no taxes at all last year but allowed it to demand the government give it $3.2 billion! Asking the rich to pay an equitable rate would raise enough money to moderate cuts to crucial government services.

The wealthy supporters of increasing taxes on the wealthy recognize another benefit of paying more – it increases their ability to earn more. Government services, from public schools and roads to civil courts and patent protections benefit business. Cutting funding for those services threatens business profits.

In addition, if government spends money to renovate schools and improve infrastructure as Obama has proposed in his jobs plan, it creates jobs. Those workers spend money. And that stimulates demand for products.

Only when corporations experience demand will they begin spending some of the record $2 trillion in cash they are now just sitting on to hire new workers. Those new workers will spend their paychecks, further increasing demand. It’s a virtuous cycle. The rich pay more in taxes and get more in profits.

Tax equity is not radical. It’s basic fairness. In fact, it’s not even progressive. Progressive would be returning to the days when the fabulously wealthy and profit-fat corporations paid higher tax rates than the middle class. Progressive would be charging the rich a “wealth tax” each year, not on their earnings but on the value of their holdings. This tax, suggested for the United States by Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, already is collected by France, Norway, Switzerland and five other countries.

Parity isn’t progressive. But it is equitable and sensible.

Celebrate Labor Day.  Really, celebrate. It’s important.

Wear a t-shirt announcing to the world the name of your union and march in a parade, chanting and whooping it up about how glad you are to belong to an organization whose members are devoted to looking out for each other. If you’re among those without a union, proclaim your profession and declare your pride in the hard work you do. Make some happy noise. Infect your fellow marchers with your zeal.

Invite your most beleaguered neighbors, friends and co-workers over for a picnic. Raise a pint, braise some burgers and praise your companions for their skill, devotion and compassion. Recognize them for all they’ve persevered through since this relentless recession began in December of 2007.  Build esprit de corps among your fellow workers.

This is one day devoted to labor, to the middle class, to the majority. One day out of 365. On this holiday, everyone gives an obligatory nod to workers. So don’t fret this Labor Day. Don’t waste it away in apathetic doldrums. Don’t let the minority rich and their purchased politicians take this celebration away from us too.

Some, including former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, have called for protests on Labor Day. They say workers must use this opportunity to demand that Washington solve the real crisis debilitating this country – dogged joblessness.

Reich is right. But it’s too early for that. Ultimately, workers must flip this ugly situation upside down so that once a year it’s Rich People’s Day. Once a year, the middle class gives the frivolous Kardashians and tax-shirking GEs of the world an obligatory nod. But every other day, 364 days a year, is labor day.

Then, we would have a country committed to the wellbeing of the majority, the middle class, the workers, whose labor creates wealth.

Getting there is a long haul from where we are now, though. We must develop some self-confidence before we start protesting. Achieving the change we want requires an uprising of hope and anger. There’s plenty of anger out there. The populace is seething after suffering years of “no, not-for-you” politics from country club conservatives:

No more unemployment insurance extensions. No more Social Security and Medicare as you and your parents know it. No public option, providing health insurance for all. No end to tax breaks for corporations that off-shore jobs. No more Trade Adjustment Assistance workers who lose their jobs because of off-shoring. No end to tax breaks for corporate jets. No end to tax breaks for oil companies making billions. No end to income tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires. No extension of the payroll tax break for the middle class. No reasonable restrictions on the big Wall Street banks that got bailed out with taxpayer money. No help for unemployed homeowners threatened with foreclosure. And no, there won’t be any jobs program. The country club conservatives must sustain high unemployment to regain the White House. So too bad for the jobless.

These unremitting attacks on the middle class have left workers feeling beaten up and beaten down. Workers are suffering from what author, psychologist and social critic Bruce E. Levine calls “battered people syndrome.”  Exhausted, depressed, and blaming themselves for the country’s problems, too many workers feel unable to challenge the elite overlords.

This combination of anger and hopelessness produces destruction and self-destruction, like the riots that left London burning last summer. Hopeless about their future and angry at the rich for bilking the poor and at expense-padding British politicians imposing “austerity,” the city’s jobless ruffians abandoned morals, just as the wealthy and the ruling class had.

Frances Fox Piven counsels in her book, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America that hope is crucial, that constructive change arises from the mix of hope and anger. In places like Libya and Egypt this Arab Spring, wealth proved insufficient to overpower the majority invigorated by hope and anger.

The bitch for the rich in a democracy like America’s is that majority rules. And, frankly, the rich and corporations (newly dubbed persons by the U.S. Supreme Court) are a tiny minority in America.

Even though we’re the majority, workers can’t win until we hope we can, until we feel some assurance that we can overcome. It’s a long haul to hope from resignation and pessimism.

So let’s put some effort into fostering optimism. Let’s strengthen each other this Labor Day. We must raise that hope before we organize Reich’s protests.

Rile yourself up and pump up a friend this Labor Day so we can unite in anger and hope to push back the naysayers and make every day Labor Day. This video helps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5CtBOSKscU

***

Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union. Follow @USWBlogger

Posted August 31, 2011 at 10:02 am, in From the USW International President
Orignal Source Article