Today's Teamster News 10.19.13

Teamsters Stop FMCSA Attack on Truck Drivers  teamster.org   ...The Teamsters Union helped score a victory for truck drivers this week when H.R. 3095 was signed into law compelling the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) to follow the formal rulemaking process to set strict guidelines for when they can require screening, testing and treatment for sleep apnea...
Star-Ledger unions ratify new 4-year contracts, agree to buyouts   Star-Ledger   ...After months of negotiations under the cloud of a threatened shutdown of the state’s largest newspaper, the Star-Ledger’s production unions, including the Teamsters Union, have ratified new four-year contracts, agreeing to buyout packages for at least 55 workers...
Since End of U.S. Recession, More Seniors in Workforce  Gallup   ... There has been a three-point increase since 2010 in the percentage of Americans aged 65 and older who are in the workforce -- employed full time through an employer, self-employed, working part time, or unemployed but actively searching for work. At the same time, there has been a two-point decrease in the percentage of Americans aged 18 to 29 who are in the workforce...
Millennials still lag in forming their own households  Pew Research   ... most Millennials (adults ages 18 to 32) are still not setting out on their own. As of March 2013, only about one-in-three Millennials (34%) headed up their own household...
Is The Debt Still Worth The Degree?  zero hedge   ...The price of a college education has increased 1,000% or more over the past 3 decades...
You Thought the Government Shutdown Was Over. You Were Wrong. New Republic ...It was an awful time. Federal employees had to take unpaid furlough days. Beneficiaries were thrown off of federal programs. Courthouses had to be sold. Federal agencies like the FBI, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health strained to meet commitments, leading to more crime, more outbreaks of disease and less basic research, among other horrors. This may sound like a description of the recent government shutdown, which ended October 16. But this describes the fallout from sequestration...
Pro-Coal Kids' Pages Pulled from Government Site as Public Pressure Increases Alternet ...The Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity has removed coal-related educational sections from its website, less than two weeks after the launch of a grassroots campaign demanding that the pages be taken down...
Food Stamp Outage Highlights Problems With Privatization of Public Services  Truthout   ...Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a subsidiary of Xerox since 2000 that specializes in privatizing government administrative services for the most economically vulnerable Americans, has taken heat in the past for siphoning excessive fees from welfare recipients, mismanaging Medicaid payment systems, and failing to complete multimillion dollar contracts for public agencies...
"Fix the Debt's" "Fix the Debt Q&A" needs to be fixed (hilarious)  Storify   ..."Fix the Debt" decided to have a Twitter Q&A about fixing the debt. I'm not sure it went the way they wanted...
How Mexico is upending the U.S. auto industry  Washington Post ...More U.S. automakers have been shifting their plants south of the border, attracted by Mexico's lower wages and dense industrial clusters…
States Clamping Down on Workers Mislabeled as Contractors  Bloomberg News   ...When construction slowed during the recession, some companies hired workers and wrongly designated them as independent contractors to avoid paying insurance, taxes, fair wages and overtime...
Scott Walker Steers State Funds to Union Busters  PolicyMic   ...Scott Walker (R-Wisc.) made headlines in 2011 with his plans to bust public sector unions and strip unions of their collective bargaining powers, which led to mass protests in the Madison Capitol building. Now he is back with his latest contribution to increasing jobs in Wisconsin: making them up and steering them to his supporters...
Moral Monday Leader Comes To Boone Oct. 28  High Country Press   ...Moral Monday leader Rev. William Barber II will address “The Necessity of a Moral Movement in North Carolina and the Nation” on Monday, Oct. 28...
BART strike: About 400,000 S.F.-area commuters to be affected  Los Angeles Times   ...Bay Area residents were without commuter rail service and facing a morning of frustration Friday as BART workers went on strike after a week of marathon negotiation collapsed overnight...
Michigan Walmart worker says he was fired for helping assaulted woman  Associated Press ...A Michigan man says he was fired from his job at Walmart after he tried to help a woman being assaulted in the parking lot of one of the retail giant's stores and ended up fighting with her attacker...
Wal-Mart workers on strike, defying firings  The Salon   ...In protest of paltry hours and defiance of firings, over 80 Wal-Mart workers in Hialeah, Florida walk off the job...
The U.S. Blows Everyone Else Out Of The Water In 1 Key Way  Huffington Post   ...That one way? We're really, really good at creating really, really rich people -- like, $50 million-plus rich. Just ignore the fact that our 400 wealthiest people are worth more than the entire bottom half of the country combined. Look at the chart…
Krugman on GOP’s “top-down class warfare”  The Salon   ...The New York Times columnist explains how the GOP policies have stalled a true economic recovery...
McDonald's Has Their Hands in All of Our Pockets  AlterNet   ...Do you want to pay for billion dollar companies to make more money? Of course not, but in recent studies, we learned that we are, in fact, playing billions of dollar to support low-wage fast food workers for America's top seven restaurant chains...
Euro Capitals Tighten Fiscal Leash as EU Polices Cuts  Bloomberg News   ...Even with the 17-nation euro area projecting economic expansion next year, policy makers are keeping a fiscal leash on growth by maintaining austerity policies to save the euro...

Five years after bailouts, the rich are even richer

The super-rich are doing super well -- and why not? They deserve it after sending financial markets into a tailspin, plunging the global economy into a deep recession, and bankrupting governments around the world.

Oh wait.

Over the last three years of recovery, income for the top five percent has grown more than five percent while income for the rest of us fell. 

Think Progress reports:

Overall income growth has been paltry since the recession, according to the Census report. After median household income fell for two years, it has leveled off, seeing virtually no growth over the past two. It was $51,017 in 2012, 8.3 percent lower than in 2007. 

But the rich are doing far better. The top 5 percent was making $191,157 or more in 2012, while the bottom fifth made $20,599 or less. 

It’s amazing how little has changed in five years. Economist Dean Baker writes:

As we mark the fifth anniversary of the Wall Street bailouts, it is clear that little has changed in the way they do business. They are still engaging in the same sorts of market manipulation and tax gaming as they did before the crisis.

The weak conditions on the bailout money had no lasting effect in areas like executive compensation. The industry itself is more concentrated than ever as the big banks used the crisis to merge with other banks, making them even bigger. And the Dodd-Frank reforms have been watered down to the extent that many are now pointless.

Five years ago, this seemed impossible. In September of 2008, the world was on the brink of economic meltdown. Governments scrambled to rescue big banks. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson gave grim reports to the nation. They said unprecedented intervention was needed and they assured us that sweeping regulatory reforms would follow.

That was right after huge debts that piled up in a shadow banking system popped the housing bubble. The iconic investment giant Lehman Brothers collapsed, sending shockwaves through the world financial system and taking down banks and corporations worldwide. There was long overdue rage directed at the greedy CEOs and bankers who made billions off of predatory subprime mortgages and complex financial instruments – literally betting on people losing their homes and lifesavings.

There was even talk of nationalizing the banks. At the very least, a system overhaul was promised, with tighter regulations to stop the reckless gambling of Wall Street’s “casino culture.”

But today the casino is still pulling in huge profits – thanks to taxpayer money that rescued it in the first place. Remember when we were told the taxpayer bailout program called TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) was necessary to help underwater homeowners? That didn't happen. It was supposed to help banks start lending again as well, and that didn't happen either. The banks sat on enormous stockpiles of money. Even up to the first three months of 2012, major banks cut lending by $24 million.

All of that free government money that went to Wall Street resulted in an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the middle class to the super-rich. As the government took on the colossal debts of the high finance fraudsters, it led to soaring deficits and the ensuing budget cuts that devastated public services and the social safety net – all in the name of austerity.

It was a grand heist by the rich against middle-class workers and the poor.

Five years after the 2008 crash, 95 percent of gains made since the recovery have gone to the top 1 percent. Meanwhile for the bottom 60 percent wages have been stagnant or declining. And almost 25 percent of homeowners with mortgages are underwater.

So that wonderful recovery we’ve all heard about since the onset of the Great Recession? It’s been a recovery almost exclusively for the Wall Street tycoons who engineered the economic crisis. The rest of us are still paying for it.

According to the Guardian:

Five years after the financial crisis, America's super-rich have recovered all their losses to see their wealth reach an all-time high.

According to Forbes magazine the 400 wealthiest Americans are worth a record $2.02 trillion, up from $1.7tn in 2012, a collective fortune slightly bigger than Russia's economy. In another sign of fizziness at the top of the economy, the cost to enter the billionaires' club has also gone up to levels not seen since the 2008 crash. In 2013, an aspiring plutocrat needs at least $1.3bn to make the Forbes list

In the same five years that the rich have been getting richer and workers’ wages remain stagnant, we’ve seen an all-out war on American workers in the form of “right to work” for less laws and other anti-worker attacks by right-wing groups like ALEC and the Koch Brothers.

Five years is long enough. It’s time to fight back for workers and demand a recovery for the middle class.

The super-rich are the new secessionists

Here's a terrific article by Mike Lofgren in The American Conservative about the revolt of the super-rich. The whole thing is worth reading, but here's the meat of the argument:

...the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. 

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare? 

Being in the country but not of it is what gives the contemporary American super-rich their quality of being abstracted and clueless. Perhaps that explains why Mitt Romney’s regular-guy anecdotes always seem a bit strained.

And here's an interesting fact about who is supporting our government (our military, our health care system, our highways, our space program):

In 1950, payroll and other federal retirement contributions constituted 10.9 percent of all federal revenues. By 2007, the last “normal” economic year before federal revenues began falling, they made up 33.9 percent. By contrast, corporate income taxes were 26.4 percent of federal revenues in 1950. By 2007 they had fallen to 14.4 percent.

Lofgren has written a new book, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. We just may have to pick it up.

5 good reasons why you should get a raise

There’s plenty of reasons why workers deserve a raise. Heck, the one percent gives itself a raise every chance it gets while median household income fell more than 20 percent since 2001. The federal minimum wage ($7.25) hasn’t been raised in six years.

A recent piece by Marshall Auerback at AlterNet distills the top five reasons for raising the minimum wage. They are:

1. It’s good for families. According to economist James Galbraith, a higher minimum wage would increase the income of 28 million working Americans, especially for women who tend to work lower wage jobs than men. More family income means some choosing to retire or go back to school, creating more job openings for those who need work. And more revenue from payroll and income taxes would also help bring down the deficit. 
2. It’s good for the economy. A higher minimum wage means putting more money into the hands of those who actually spend it. Working Americans – not the super-rich who like to hoard their wealth and stow it away in a tax shelters overseas – are the ones who put their money back into the real economy.
3. It helps people get out of debt. That’s because more money for workers means less money going toward the unproductive, shadow economy of finance, insurance, and real estate. Since deregulation took hold in the 1970s, more of the national income has been funneled into the pockets of the one percent who like to gamble with our money in the Wall Street casino, putting workers in debt. 
4. It protects workers from abusive employers. A higher minimum wage would give bosses less power to exploit low-wage labor like undocumented workers. That also means less downward pressure on wages in general. 
5. It delivers justice for working people. Raising the minimum wage is the least we can do to restore some fairness for workers who have been robbed by 30 years of class warfare orchestrated by the one percent. It’s one of many overdue reparations owed to working Americans.

As Auerback writes in his piece, increasing the minimum wage would do even more for the middle class than token tax hikes on the super-wealthy:

This is far more sensible policy than symbolic nods to the left through gimmicks such as the so-called Buffett Rule, which might raise new revenues from the mega-wealthy through taxes, but will likely amount to very little because gazillionaires can hire clever accountants to help them get around it. No, we need policies that clearly do something for hard-working people who have been clobbered by a financial crisis they didn't create.

Several states are pushing measures to raise the minimum wage, including Massachusetts, which is looking to move it up to $10 per hour.

Workers came out in dozens of cities nationwide last week demanding an increase in the federal minimum wage, part of a coalition campaign led by SEIU, AFL-CIO and other groups.

-- Union Thug

'Retirement Heist': Corporations plundering pension funds

Some rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.

American corporations looted hundreds of billions of dollars from their pension funds and used their booty to reward top executives, according to a new book called "Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers," by Ellen Schulz.

Schulz, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, writes that corporate pension funds had $250 billion in surplus assets a decade ago. Not anymore. That money's all been siphoned away. Pension Pulse tells us that Schulz explains how companies used these tactics:

• Siphon billions of dollars from their pension plans to finance downsizings and sell the assets in merger deals.
• Overstate the burden of rank-and-file retiree obligations to justify benefits cuts, while simultaneously using the savings to inflate executive pay and pensions.
• Hide growing executive pension liabilities, which at some companies now exceed the liabilities for the regular pension plans.
• Purchase billions of dollars of life insurance on workers and use the policies as informal executive pension funds. When the insured workers and retirees die, the company collects tax-free death benefits.
• Exclude millions of low-paid workers from 401(k)'s to make the plans more valuable to the top-paid.

NPR had the story today about the book, reporting:

Schultz cites this example of one well-known company whose pension fund has dropped significantly since the early 1990s. General Electric announced it was closing its pension plan to be more competitive. She says the company's financial filings show that GE has not put a cent into its pension plans since the mid-1980s. Over the years, GE, like most large companies, used assets in the plans to pay for other things.

Writes Pension Pulse:

And now that there is no more money left to plunder, corporations have decided to dump defined-benefit plans and move into less costly and more risky defined-contribution plans, shifting the retirement burden onto workers and leaving them at the mercy of this volatile wolf market.

Somehow, none of this is surprising.

Send Elizabeth Warren a thank-you note

More than half a million people have viewed this youtube video in the past two weeks. That's what's known as going viral.

Predictably, the propaganda machine funded by giant corporations and the heirs of billionaires is striking back. Just google "elizabeth warren" and "job creators." You'll find crap like this:

The rich will be just fine if we raise their taxes; they’ll still be rich, but in the aggregate will invest less money in our economy. The resulting reduction in job-creating investment, however, will punish workers and those who desperately want and need to become workers again.

Right. That's exactly why U.S. corporations are sitting on $2 trillion worth of cash after firing 2.9 million American workers and hiring 2.4 million workers overseas in the past decade. 

You can show you agree with Elizabeth Warren by signing the petition here. It says,

Thank you for standing up for progressive values, and for showing other Democrats how to fight against the Republicans' 'class warfare' nonsense.

'Nobody in this country got rich on his own' (video)

Elizabeth Warren is running for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. She's a Harvard professor and, as such, too much of a smarty-pants woman to win over Bay State guys. At least that's what the pundits are saying. But watch this and judge for yourself.