Two Disastrous Trips For America: One To China-- Canceled-- And OneTo The U.K.-- Should Have Been Canceled

Mitch McConnell's wife/beard, Elaine Chao, a longtime spy for China and a member of the Trumpanzee Cabinet, had her trip to China abruptly canceled after myriad ethics questions were referred to officials of the State Department and Transportation Department. "Chao," reported the NY Times "had made a series of unorthodox requests related to her first scheduled visit to China as a Trump cabinet member, according to people with knowledge of the email. Among them: asking federal officials to help coordinate travel arrangements for at least one family member and include relatives in meetings with government officials... In China, the Chaos are no ordinary family. They run an American shipping company with deep ties to the economic and political elite in China, where most of the company’s business is centered." Acting as a giant money laundering operation, the company has financed Mitch McConnell's Senate career-- to the tune of millions of dollars (provided by the communist government) in return for his cooperation on Chinese interests.

Unfortunately an even more inappropriate trip-- Trump's state visit to the U.K.-- began this morning. Trump's first tweets, just before Air Force One touched down, were a childish attack on London's popular mayor, Sadiq Khan, criticizing his height and calling him a "stone cold loser." Apparently no one has gotten through to Trump that these trips abroad are so he can't represent America, not for him to represent his business interests and his out-sized ego. Theresa May cancelled a one-on-one meeting with the boorish pig while he was flying over the Atlantic.

Trump then proceeded to attack CNN, ininsuating people in the U.K. detest him because CNN feeds them fake news. Apparently he hasn't paid any attention to the local media, which is far more critical of him and his grifter family than U.S. media ever is. The Independent wrote that "We know Trump isn’t a joke-- he is responsible for rampant xenophobia, sexism and transphobia and the creeping rise of far right politics. His climate denial and persistent facilitation of the fossil fuel industry is a death sentence for communities in the global south. But if flying a balloon caricature is what gets under his skin-- then that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Trump has repeatedly shown that he doesn’t respond to reason, to facts or to science. What he does respond to is humiliation. Our balloon is part of a proud history of political satire in the UK that sends a clear, orange, message to Trump and his politics of hate that they are not welcome here."

Some people have asked whether a personal attack on Trump is fair. The same question that was posed after Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage were doused in milkshakes during their recent European election campaigns.

The answer is yes. Trump is responsible for thousands of personal attacks and the power and politics of the far right is a dangerous threat to lives of thousands of lives here and around the world. Every policy signed that removes reproductive rights from women, every detention or deportation that separates a child from a parent, every climate denial shouted into the smoke of a February wildfire is an attack on millions of individuals.

The Stop Trump protests in the UK are about more than a balloon. It’s a gathering of those who want to stand up to Trump’s vile dialogue and politics, standing in solidarity with those most affected by them in the UK. For the thousands of us in the streets, there are thousands more organising and campaigning every day to create a future free from Trump’s hate.

...After Tuesday, we must continue to resist and undermine Trump and far right politics at every level. Balloons in the air, milkshakes in hand, boots on the ground: we will continue to organise for a radical economic, environmental and social movement that centres justice for everyone.

So today we’re asking just one thing of the public. If you hate the politics of Trump, and love the Baby Balloon, please do give what you can to help make him fly and to support the people who are standing up to his damaging policies.

The police prepared for over a quarter million people protesting Trump in London alone-- with sister protests in Manchester, Belfast, Birmingham and Nottingham-- as Baby Trump blimps and balloons fill the British skies. It was widely reported across Britain that UK political leaders had decided to boycott the Queen's obligatory banquet to honor Trumpanzee. Superficially, the royal family welcomed Trump the way they were supposed to but they still made it clear that they were only doing what they had to do. The Washington Post pointed out that "Some of the traditional trappings-- such as staying over at Buckingham Palace, a royal welcome at the Horse Guards Parade and a gold carriage procession down the Mall-- are notably absent."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Dear Kentucky,

Ask not what you can do for your $enator. Ask what your $enator can do for you. Yeah, well, forget that. Mitch McConnell has achieved Banana Republic status. His willingness to cement that status by being complicit in Trump's treasonous presidency is evident on a daily basis.

Most who go to Washington only go for personal gain, not any sense of altruism, but if Mitch stays in the $enate much longer, he just might make it from 11th richest to #1. With Mitch, the money has rolled in and in and in. Tsunamis of it. He has mysteriously become fabulously wealthy; laughing at us all the way to the bank you might say. I guess he's done very well investing his salary (paid for by us) very, very shrewdly. I'm sure it's all on the up and up. Don't you think so? Imagine if the American public paid you the reader the same salary (The official one of $193,400 for a $enate Majority Leader) Mitch gets. You'd see it add up to mega millions too, right? Especially if you had to bear the absurdly high cost of living in Washington? Yes, there's his wife's family fortune, but still, let's just say he's done unusually well regardless.

Next thing you know, we might hear that the Deutsch Bank Laundromat is involved in handling his finances like it is with so many other people connected to the Trump Crime Family. He's even got his wife-beard a cushy job as part of the Trumpanzee Dream Team of Fascists. Her name is Elaine Chao and she "serves" as Secretary of the Department of Transportation. She arrived here as a 3-year-old immigrant from Taiwan, perhaps on one of her father's ships.

In the world of my dreams, Chao has to, one day soon, quickly arrange the hubby's transportation to some country we don't have an extradition treaty with, maybe a place like Taiwan, or Russia. He doesn't make it. A Steven Seagal character intervenes.

West Virginia's Senate Race: A Big Ugly Mess... Centered Around "Cocaine Mitch" McConnell

In his latest ad, West Virginia Republican Don Blankenship strike back at Mitch McConnell by refersring to himl as "cocaine Mitch"-- as in "Ditch Cocaine Mitch." Catchy. The primary is next Tuesday and McConnell is spending millions to make sure Blankenship loses. And it's working. Blankenship's polling has gone down from 1st to 3rd since McConnell's ad campaign went into full swing. Blankenship was formerly referring to McConnell as "a swamp captain," so this is a decision to get more aggressive with the very disliked head of the DC establishment Republicans.

McConnell controls a shady SuperPAC-- the Mountain Families PAC-- which is spending money in the primary to destroy Blankenship with TV ads reminding voters that he is a "convicted criminal," who lived a lavish lifestyle while ignoring mine safety laws. "Don Blankenship," one ad concludes, "was about the money. "West Virginia families paid the price." A million dollars in vicious ads like this have tanked Blankenship's campaign and made it a lot easier for popular conservative Democrat Joe Manchin to keep his seat.

The name-calling is intense. One of McConnell's former staffers, Josh Holmes, long rumored to be a McConnell lover, accused Blankenship of being "mentally ill" and Blankenship himself asserting that McConnell is in thrall to China, due to his Chinese father-in-law's shipping company, Foremost Maritime Corporation, which has financed McConnell's career and personal wealth. In fact, it was on one of the family ships, the Ping May, that the 90 pounds of cocaine was found-- being smuggled from Colombia to Holland. Recent polling has shown that McConnell is the most hated and toxic politician in America.

A decade before McConnell, a notorious closet queen, "married" Elaine Chao (a beard), her criminal father, James Chao, started donating to/bribing McConnell. In 2014, Lee Fang, in a report for for The Nation explains how McConnell benefitted from his relationship with his father-in-law (the cocaine smuggler).

The Republican Senate minority leader’s personal wealth grew seven-fold over the last ten years thanks in large part to a gift given to him and his wife in 2008 from James Chao worth between $5 million and $25 million (Senate ethics forms require personal finance disclosures in ranges of amounts, rather than specific figures). The gift helped the McConnells after their stock portfolio dipped in the wake of the financial crisis that year, and ensured they could pay off more than $100,000 in mortgage debt on their Washington home.

The generous gift made McConnell one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, with a net worth averaging around $22.8 million, according to The Washington Post’s review of his financial disclosures.

Following the gift, McConnell sent a letter of congratulations to an auditorium of Chinese officials in Shanghai who were gathered for an event honoring James Chao’s wife (McConnell’s mother-in-law, Ruth Mulan Chu Chao, who passed away in 2007). The Shanghai Mulan Education Foundation, created in her honor, regularly hosts students from the University of Louisville, where McConnell has a leadership academy bearing his name that sends students on trips to China.

The ties between McConnell and his in-laws have come under scrutiny before. In 2001, they were probed in depth by the New Republic in an article that charged that McConnell led an effort to soften his party’s criticism of China. Through James Chao, who was a classmate of Jiang Zemin, the president of China in the ’90s, McConnell and his wife met with Jiang several times, both in Beijing and in Washington. McConnell subsequently tempered his criticism of Chinese human rights abuses, and broke with hawks like Senator Jesse Helms to support Most Favored Nation trading status with China. As Foremost established closer ties with mainland China, McConnell endorsed the position that the United States should remain “ambiguous” about coming to the defense of Taiwan. In 1999, McConnell and his wife appeared at the University of Louisville with Chinese Ambassador Li Zhaoxing. Li used the opportunity to bash congressional leaders for rebuking China over its repression of the Falun Gong religious sect. “Any responsible government will not foster evil propensities of cults by being over-lenient,” Li reportedly said at the event with McConnell and Chao. Rather than distance himself from the remarks, McConnell reportedly spoke about his “good working relationship” with Li.

...McConnell has positioned himself over the years as a tough on drugs politician. In 1996, McConnell was the sole sponsor of the Enhanced Marijuana Penalties Act, a bill to increase the mandatory minimum sentencing for those caught with certain amounts of marijuana. A press release noted that his bill would make “penalties for selling marijuana comparable to those for selling heroin and cocaine.”

In recent weeks, McConnell has touted his role in calling for more federal money to be used for drug enforcement.

Blankenship, whose own fiancée is from China, has been on the campaign trail telling West Virginia Republican voters that McConnell "has a lot of connections in China" and that his wife, now Trump's Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, is "from China, so we have to be really concerned that we are in truth" when it comes to putting America’s interests first. Meanwhile, McConnell's former lover, Holmes, noted that Blankenship had used a "racial blast" against the Taiwan-born Chao, whom he described as "the dictionary definition of the American dream... The one consistency we've seen over the last decade is that the death rattle of a primary candidate is always a tendency to attack other Republicans because they know reporters will report it. At this point what's clear is that voters are writing him off and so he knows that by attacking McConnell he'll get attention."

McConnell knows Manchin will easily defeat Blankenship, which is why he's doing all he can to make sure he loses next week's primary. As of the April 18th FEC reporting deadline Blankenship had raised $3,517,000, as much as the 2 generic GOP establishment candidates, Patrick Morrisey and Evan Jenkins combined. 99.94% of what Blankenship has "raised" ($3,515,000) came from his own bank account. McConnell's Mountain Familes PAC has spent $1,328,456 attacking Blankenship and McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund has kicked in another hundred grand. Meanwhile Schumer got into the act by spending $1,833,351 to help Blankenship, persuaded that he will be the easiest Republican for Manchin to beat. Sounds like a vile mess? Of one thing there is no doubt: the winner of the West Virginia Senate race in November will be a conservative who puts special interests ahead of working families' interests. The game may be expensive-- but it is definitely rigged.

What Do Desperate Republican Primary Candidates Do When They Get REALLY Desperate? West Virginia, Mountain Mama

New polling for West Virginia's Republican primary-- which in May 8th-- is making felon and far right crackpot Don Blankenship desperate. He's been leading establishment candidates Congressman Evan Jenkins and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey-- and now he isn't. Fox shows both considerably ahead of him now. In a state where Trump had an 87% approval rating among Republican primary voters, Blankenship, the candidate most like him, is coming in a distant third.

So how's he responding? He's on the attack-- against Mitch McConnell, who has been leading establishment attacks against him. But blankenship has now gone beyond just reminding West Virginia GOP voters that "McConnell should not be in the U.S. Senate, let alone be the Republican Majority Leader. He is a Swamp captain. The Russians and McConnell should both stop interfering with elections outside their jurisdictions." Now he's attacking McConnell's personal life.

He hasn't mentioned that McConnell is a closet case, used to pick up young men in Louisville's "pickle park" and that his marriage to Elaine Chao is a farce. But that may come next. Right now he's just talking about the marriage from another perspective, one's we've been pointing out for over a decade-- that the marriage has helped make McConnell wealthy because of China trade

On Monday, Blankenship told a West Virginia radio show on 106.3 FM, that McConnell has a conflict of interest because his father-in-law is a "wealthy Chinaperson." His "wife" was Secretary of Labor under Bush and Trumpanzee appointed her Transportation Secretary. The New York Times exposed Blankenship as not even living in West Virginia any longer (but near Las Vegas) and that he himself had once mulled Chinese citizenship for himself because he admires authoritarian governance.

He didn't bring up the rumors that McConnell is a closet queen, but only said that he has "an issue when the father-in-law is a wealthy Chinaperson"-- Chao’s father owning a shipping company in China-- and that "there’s a lot of connections to some of the brass, if you will, in China."

The Times noted that Blankenship’s own fiancée, Farrah Meiling Hobbs, was born in China and moved to the U.S. in 1996, tand that she's a "former Chinese professional basketball player and part-time model." While he was criticizing McConnell for being "soft on China" and demanding that McConnell and other senators need to be "more transparent," about their business ties, Blankenship is the only candidate in the West Virginia race who is refusing to disclose his personal finances-- required by state law-- claiming that the penalties are so light that he has no incentive to do so. Last week he said "I don’t personally think anybody should have to disclose private information," quite different from what he now saying about McConnell

Josh Holmes was Miss McConnell's campaign manager and later his chief of "staff." Here's a recent tweet he put out about Blankenship in regard to his fears about Blankenship exposing the close relationship and a McConnell have always enjoyed:

Can Democratic Senators Keep Price And Mnuchin From Being Confirmed?

For the whole span of his political career, Tom Price, a mealy-mouthed hypocrite and slick, practised liar, has used his office to enrich himself. Yesterday, writing for the Wall Street Journal, James Grimaldi dug a little deeper into the sweetheart deals that make Price look like one of the worst of Trump's swampy cabinet picks. He has consistently attempted top cover up his unethical and criminal behavior and is entirely unfit for office.

Rep. Tom Price got a privileged offer to buy a biomedical stock at a discount, the company’s officials said, contrary to his congressional testimony this month.

The Georgia Republican tapped by President Donald Trump to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services testified in his Senate confirmation hearings on Jan. 18 and 24 that the discounted shares he bought in Innate Immunotherapeutics Ltd. , an Australian medical biotechnology company, “were available to every single individual that was an investor at the time.”

In fact, the cabinet nominee was one of fewer than 20 U.S. investors who were invited last year to buy discounted shares of the company-- an opportunity that, for Mr. Price, arose from an invitation from a company director and fellow congressmen.

The shares were discounted 12% off the traded price in mid-June only for investors who participated in a private placement arranged to raise money to complete a clinical trial. The company’s shares have tripled since the offering.

...[Crooked Trumpist Congressman Chris] Collins and Price said they have publicly disclosed their trades as required under the 2012 Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, which aims to prevent members from using political insider information to make stock gains. Democrats have called for the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate Mr. Price’s trades under the STOCK Act.

Both congressmen have played key roles writing health-care legislation, including the 21st Century Cures Act, sprawling legislation that included major provisions regarding the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of drugs and devices. Mr. Collins wrote legislation that would have permitted the FDA to speed up trials for new drugs.

Mr. Collins, a member of the health panel of the Energy and Commerce Committee, acknowledged provisions of that legislation could eventually affect Innate Immuno, along with all drug companies.

Mr. Price has traded more than $300,000 in shares of health-related companies since 2012, while on the House Ways and Means Committee’s subcommittee on health and while writing and voting on health-care legislation that could affect the shares of those stocks, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal. He plans to divest his health-care and other corporate stockholdings within 90 days of his confirmation, he said in a letter to the Office of Government Ethics before his confirmation hearings.

There are sleazy patterns emerging, not just when you look at the totality of Price's career, but when you examine the careers of all of Trump's cabinet nominations. Like Trump himself, they have benefited by playing fast and loose with ethical considerations, with rules and with laws. Trump's Commerce Secretary nominee, Wilbur Ross, for example, enriched himself by running shoddy mining operations and ignoring demands from the state and federal governments about dangerous situations in his mines that eventually caused a dozen tragic and unnecessary deaths at his Sago Mine in West Virginia. (Upshur County, where Ross destroyed so many lives and so many families with his psychotic greed, is the heart of Trump country, a county with catastrophic opioid addiction and a 76-19% margin of victory last November for Trump over Clinton. Now they can think about Trump's pick of Wilbur Ross when they're high on oxycontin and hydrocodone.)

The Senate, though, should turn down Price, not just because he's a dishonest, self-serving sleaze bag and liar but because his plans for American health care will be far more of a catastrophe for America than Wilbur Ross' neglect of his miners were for West Virginia. Yesterday the Economic Policy Institute issued a new report about the impacts of Price's plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The report provides a rough estimate of how the combination of tax cuts and spending cuts in the ACA repeal will affect employment in U.S. states.

• ACA repeal would cut federal spending nationwide by roughly $109 billion in 2019 and taxes by roughly $70 billion in 2019.
• The combination of tax cuts and spending cuts embedded in ACA repeal would reduce national job growth by almost 1.2 million in 2019, all else equal. That is because the spending cuts would hurt job growth more than the tax cuts would help it. The benefit cuts would come mostly out of the pockets of cash-constrained households that will be likely to significantly cut back their spending in response to lower disposable income, while the tax cuts would disproportionately go to high-income households who tend to save a significant portion of increases in disposable income.
• The jobs that would be lost are not just health care jobs. Previous high-quality studies of the jobs gained through Medicaid expansions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) indicate that more than three-fourths of the jobs gained were not in the health care sector.
• Every state would lose jobs. How significant this job loss is would be determined by the extent to which a state expanded spending (and thus how much spending it will lose), what portion of a state’s households fall in the groups getting the largest tax cuts (how much it will gain).
• The top 15 job-losing states, as measured by jobs lost as a share of both the total employment and the share of residents under age 65, are Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia.
• Monetary policy is unlikely to be able to provide an expansionary boost to economic activity anywhere near large enough to counteract the significant fiscal contraction posed by ACA repeal, even in 2019. Thus, any claims that any ACA job losses would be neutralized by countervailing Federal Reserve policy are unconvincing.
• States can also be ranked by their relative income burden stemming from ACA repeal. This relative burden measure looks at gains stemming from tax cuts minus losses stemming from spending cuts, scaled to each state’s share of the under-65 population. This population is chosen as our scalar because the coverage expansions of the ACA were aimed entirely at the under-65 population (as the 65 and over population is covered by America’s large single-payer health system, Medicare). Generally, states that took up the ACA Medicaid expansion see a higher relative burden, as they have more to lose from repeal. Additionally, states with a low share of national top 1 percent households will also see a higher relative burden, as they will receive lower-than-average benefits from the tax cuts embedded in ACA repeal.
• While states that never took up the Medicaid expansions that were part of ACA generally face a lower relative burden from repeal, it is important to note that these same states benefit disproportionately from the insurance premium and cost-sharing subsidies of the ACA. Overall, insurance premium and cost-sharing subsidies are roughly 0.4 percent of non-expansion states’ gross domestic product (GDP), while they are roughly 0.15 percent of GDP in expansion states.

Yesterday Senate committees voted in favor of confirming Rick Perry, 17-6, Ryan Zinke, 16-6, and Betsy DeVos, 12-11 (all Democrats voting NO), but the Senate Finance Committee couldn't vote on Mnuchin and Price because the Republicans couldn't muster a quorum-- all Democrats, citing lies from both nominees to the committee, boycotted the sessions. That was a great strategy from Sherrod Brown but how long will the Democrats stick with it?

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee used a procedural tactic-- courtesy of Mazie Hirono (D-HI)-- to delay a committee vote on Sessions' confirmation recommendation. Apparently, they'll be voting this morning instead. The arbitrary firing of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, a woman of integrity and character, doesn't sit well with many who are very worried that Sessions will be a puppet-- and worse-- for a deranged and authoritarian president who has no respect-- in fact has nothing but contempt-- for the rule of law.

By the way, for those keeping track, Democratic senators who voted for Zinke: Ron Wyden (OR), Joe Manchin (WV), Martin Heinrich (NM), Catherine Cortez Masto (NV) and Angus King (ME). And voting with the GOP for Rick Perry were Debbie Stabenow (MI), Joe Manchin (WV), Catherine Cortez Masto (NV) and Angus King (ME).

The full Senate voted 93-6 to confirm Mitch McConnell's "wife," Elaine Chao as the Secretary of Education. McConnell didn't have the decency to recuse himself. The 6 Democrats who dissented were stalwart resisters Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley plus 3 self-serving, untrustworthy symbolic resisters-- Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand.

Amidst rumors that Andrew Puzder no longer wants to be Labor Secretary and is trying to get Trump to let him off the hook, the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee has postponed a vote on his ill-starred confirmation for the 4th time. (He hasn't filed his financial disclosure paperwork yet, prompting many to wonder what he and Trump are hiding when Puzder is already known as a complete scumbag who companies have thrived became of his serial violations of labor standards. His February 7th hearing was cancelled yesterday and no new date was set.

Mitch McConnell-- The Cocaine Connecton

Florida Republican Trey Radel, a former Hate Talk Radio host and former U.S. congressman, got kicked out of his House seat for dealing cocaine in Washington. The FBI is covering up their own drug abuse investigation of another GOP coke freak, Ohio's David Joyce. Staffers tell me that there are "over a dozen" prominent Republican congressmen who use cocaine regularly. "Peter Russo didn't have anything on these GOP hypocrites," one told me, referencing a Pennsylvania Democratic congressman who came to an untimely first season end in House of Cards.

No one has ever told me that Mitch McConnell, whose private life I have looked into a lot-- he's a closet case who was kicked out of the Army after a few days for fondling a private's privates-- is a cocaine user. That doesn't mean he isn't; it just means no one has told me that he is. In fact, McConnell plays the role of an anti-drug law-and-order Republicano; he sponsored a bill to increase the mandatory minimum sentencing for marijuana use. But the immense wealth he's accumulated since getting into the Senate-- he's the 11th richest senator with a net worth estimated at $11.97 million-- may have had more to do with drug smuggling than was previously understood.

This week one of America's top investigative journalists, Lee Fang, published the results of his work on McConnell's cocaine connection in The Nation. Turns out there was more of a reason why McConnell is so "pro-coal" than anyone ever suspected. His crooked in-laws, who have made him a multimillionaire, were using coal shipping as a front.

Before the Ping May, a rusty cargo vessel, could disembark from the port of Santa Marta en route to the Netherlands in late August, Colombian inspectors boarded the boat and made a discovery. Hidden in the ship’s chain locker, amidst its load of coal bound for Europe, were approximately 40 kilograms, or about 90 pounds, of cocaine. A Colombian Coast Guard official told The Nation that there is an ongoing investigation.

The seizure of the narcotics shipment in the Caribbean port occurred far away from Kentucky, the state in which Senator Mitch McConnell is now facing a career-defining election. But the Republican Senate minority leader has the closest of ties to the owner of the Ping May, the vessel containing the illicit materials: the Foremost Maritime Corporation, a firm founded and owned by McConnell's in-laws, the Chao family.

Though Foremost has played a pivotal role in McConnell's life, bestowing the senator with most of his personal wealth and generating thousands in donations to his campaign committees, the drug bust went unnoticed in Kentucky, where every bit of McConnell-related news has generated fodder for the campaign trail. That's because, like many international shipping companies, Chao's firm is shrouded from public view, concealing its identity and limiting its legal liability through an array of tax shelters and foreign registrations. Registered through a limited liability company in the Marshall Islands, the Ping May flies the Liberian flag.

McConnell's ties to the Chaos go back to the late 1980s, when James Chao began donating to the senator. In 1993, McConnell married James's daughter, Elaine Chao, a Republican activist and then-former Reagan administration official who would later serve as Secretary of Labor in the George W. Bush cabinet. James Chao emigrated to the United States from Taiwan, and founded the Foremost Maritime Corporation upon settling in New York. The company has grown significantly over the years, from acting as maritime agent during the Vietnam War to controlling a fleet of approximately 16 dry bulk cargo ships in operation today.

Foremost acts as a shipping agent, purchasing vessels made primarily in China and coordinating shipment of commodities. Records reviewed by The Nation reveal that Foremost transports corn, chemicals, and other goods to cities throughout the world. The company has offices in New York and Hong Kong.

Some of the goods shipped by Foremost echo themes of the McConnell campaign. At a Young Professionals Association of Louisville event this month, McConnell stressed his opposition to carbon dioxide limits imposed by the federal government that would impact the domestic coal market. He argued that such efforts would be fruitless given the role of coal in developing countries and the rising coal trade. Foremost ships routinely transport coal from ports in Australia and Colombia, countries with cheap coal, for export to Asia and Europe.

The firm, however, leaves a faint online trace. Foremost's website FMCNY.com is blank. 

Records and court documents obtained by The Nation show that the ownership of the company's vessels-- with names such as Ping May, Soya May, Fu May, and Grain May-- is obscured through a byzantine structure of tax entities. Most of Foremost's vessels are flagged in Liberia, which ensures that crew members of Foremost's ships work under Liberia's maritime labor laws, which critics note allow for intimidation in the workplace and few protections for labor unions. In addition, a Liberian "flag of convenience" allows ship owners to pay lower tonnage taxes than ships that fly the U.S. flag. Maritime companies have increasingly used the Marshall Islands to register their vessels. The jurisdiction boasts of “no taxation, lax regulation, and no requirements for disclosure of many corporate details-- even to the United States government,” according to a report in the World Policy Journal.

The recent seizure of cocaine on a Foremost coal ship came as authorities in Colombia have stepped up anti-drug trafficking enforcement in the region. The Nation spoke to Luis Gonzales, an official with the Colombian Coast Guard in Santa Marta, who told us that the Ping May's crew were questioned as part of an ongoing investigation, but that no charges have yet been filed. His team found the cocaine in forty separate packages.

Contacted by telephone, a representative of Foremost said he is “obviously going to have no comment on this one.”

McConnell has benefitted in many ways from his relationship with his in-laws.

The Republican Senate minority leader’s personal wealth grew seven-fold over the last ten years thanks in large part to a gift given to him and his wife in 2008 from James Chao worth between $5 million and $25 million (Senate ethics forms require personal finance disclosures in ranges of amounts, rather than specific figures). The gift helped the McConnells after their stock portfolio dipped in the wake of the financial crisis that year, and ensured they could pay off more than $100,000 in mortgage debt on their Washington home.

The generous gift made McConnell one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, with a net worth averaging around $22.8 million, according to the Washington Post’s review of his financial disclosures.

Following the gift, McConnell sent a letter of congratulations to an auditorium of Chinese officials in Shanghai who were gathered for an event honoring James Chao’s wife (McConnell’s mother-in-law, Ruth Mulan Chu Chao, who passed away in 2007). The Shanghai Mulan Education Foundation, created in her honor, regularly hosts students from the University of Louisville, where McConnell has a leadership academy bearing his name that sends students on trips to China.

The ties between McConnell and his in-laws have come under scrutiny before. In 2001, they were probed in depth by the New Republic in an article that charged that McConnell led an effort to soften his party’s criticism of China. Through James Chao, who was a classmate of Jiang Zemin, the president of China in the ’90s, McConnell and his wife met with Jiang several times, both in Beijing and in Washington. McConnell subsequently tempered his criticism of Chinese human rights abuses, and broke with hawks like Senator Jesse Helms to support Most Favored Nation trading status with China. As Foremost established closer ties with mainland China, McConnell endorsed the position that the United States should remain “ambiguous” about coming to the defense of Taiwan. In 1999, McConnell and his wife appeared at the University of Louisville with Chinese Ambassador Li Zhaoxing. Li used the opportunity to bash congressional leaders for rebuking China over its repression of the Falun Gong religious sect. “Any responsible government will not foster evil propensities of cults by being over-lenient,” Li reportedly said at the event with McConnell and Chao. Rather than distance himself from the remarks, McConnell reportedly spoke about his “good working relationship” with Li.

Last Friday, McConnell dipped into his personal fortune to lend his own campaign $1.8 million for the final week before the election. Members of the Chao family and employees of Foremost have also given over $90,000 in contributions to McConnell over the years.

Requests for comment to the McConnell team about the Ping May cocaine incident have gone unanswered.

McConnell has positioned himself over the years as a tough on drugs politician. In 1996, McConnell was the sole sponsor of the Enhanced Marijuana Penalties Act, a bill to increase the mandatory minimum sentencing for those caught with certain amounts of marijuana. A press release noted that his bill would make “penalties for selling marijuana comparable to those for selling heroin and cocaine.”

In recent weeks, McConnell has touted his role in calling for more federal money to be used for drug enforcement.

And then there's the stuff like this, which, hopefully, isn't over the heads of voters Tuesday:

McConnell on China: “You Wake Up One Day And Look Around And You Can’t Find A Communist With A Flashlight”

The Cincinnati Enquirer is the dominant newspaper for northern Kentucky and publishes a Kentucky edition every day. This morning’s Mitch McConnell exposé by Curtis Ellis and Harry Wu isn’t only going to be read by folks in Ohio. And the basic premise that Ellis and Wu are making— that McConnell has enriched himself while in the U.S. Senate through his dealings with Communist China— aren’t new to Kentuckians. Even here at DWT we’ve been covering McConnell’s funny business with China regularly since 2007.

China has funneled immense sums of money into McConnell’s career through the Chamber of Commerce and through his crooked father-in-law, an agent for the Chinese Communists. McConnell and his “wife,” Bush’s vehemently anti-worker Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, have powerful and very profitable ties to the highest echelons of the Chinese Communist Party— and those ties have brought them considerable benefits, both politically and financially. With the Chinese Communists poised to crack down hard on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, McConnell still doesn’t understand— or doesn’t want to understand the nature of the tyrannical regime in Beijing he owns his fortune— and his power— to. As Wu and Ellis assert, love is blind when it comes to McConnell and the Chinese communists.

Sen. Mitch McConnell is one of the strongest supporters of free trade and closer ties with China. Some say his attitude is a result of his marriage to Elaine Chao. After all, Jiang Zemin, China's former Communist Party boss and dictator, is a close family friend of the senator's wife, and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao praised her father for building up China's industry. Jiang Zemin, the hard-liner who took power following the Tienanmen Square massacre, is notorious for his repression of religious minorities and Tibet.

It would be easy to blame McConnell's wife for his pro-China stance.

But it would be wrong.

It would be wrong because President Bill Clinton wasn't married to Elaine Chao when he asked Congress to treat Communist China as a "Most Favored Nation" and make it safe for corporations to move American factories there. Conservatives warned of China's threat to our national security, but McConnell ignored these concerns and voted to open the door to more investment in the communist country, as Clinton asked.

It would be wrong because Al Gore was not married to Chao when he took illegal campaign contributions from foreign nationals in the Chinagate scandal. The man convicted of laundering campaign money for Gore also directed dollars to McConnell. (He eventually returned the money.)

It would be wrong because the CEO of Loral Space and Communications wasn't married to Chao when his company told China how to improve its missile guidance systems. Loral could save money by using Chinese rockets to launch communications satellites into orbit, and they wanted to make sure the rockets didn't crash on takeoff. The Pentagon said the information Loral provided placed America at greater risk.

It would be wrong because the CEO of AIG insurance wasn't married to Chao when he wanted to set up shop in China and sought Washington's help. AIG lobbied hard to get Congress to ignore China's record on human rights and national security issues. They shoveled contributions into congressional campaign coffers – McConnell received tens of thousands of dollars from AIG and the top contributors to the US-China Business Council. AIG became the first Western insurance company to do business in China, and then went on to collect $182 billion in the Wall Street bailout.

And George W. Bush wasn't married to Chao, either, when he nominated her to be labor secretary despite concerns about her "business relationship with communist China." Besides her family friendship with Beijing's communist bosses, Chao had ties to the company at the center of the Chinagate money laundering scandal, another firm in partnership with an intelligence-gathering front for the People's Liberation Army, and an Internet company, Multacom, subsequently linked to a notorious Chinese cyberespionage ring. Bush remained faithful even after Chao told an interviewer U.S. companies aren't moving offshore for cheap foreign labor, but because American workers are sloppy, lack "good personal hygiene" and have "anger-management" issues.

No, McConnell's problem isn't that he's married to Elaine Chao. It's that he's married to the Washington-Wall Street establishment that will do anything to stay in power and sees China as a "strategic partner" and money-making opportunity.

Love is blind, and it's love of money, not a woman, that makes McConnell and his friends in Washington unable to see the threat communist China poses to our people and our nation.

Maybe McConnell doesn’t share attitudes like these with Chao but the former Labor Secretary wasn’t an advocate for American workers when she was in Bush’s cabinet. She always defended Big Business moving jobs off shore— and not only for the slave wages. Chao lectured American workers that “U.S. employers say that many workers abroad simply have a better attitude toward work. American employees must be punctual, dress appropriately and have good personal hygiene. They need anger-management and conflict-resolution skills, and they have to be able to accept direction. Too many young people bristle when a supervisor asks them to do something."

McConnell never did an honest day’s work in his entire miserable life but since becoming a senator in 1984 he’s managed to amass $11.97 million, making him the 32nd richest Member of Congress.

The Senate minority leader has now been among the 50 wealthiest lawmakers for six consecutive years, since he won re-election to a fifth term. And in 2013, he saw his minimum net worth jump almost 30 percent, to a hair less than $12 million.

The Kentucky Republican’s reportable assets nearly tripled in 2008 thanks to a $5 million gift that he and his wife, former Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao, received from her father, James, soon after the death of her mother. (After emigrating in the 1960s, the senator’s father-in-law founded a successful international trading business, now called the Foremost Group, specializing in importing Chinese-made goods to the United States.) The money has been invested ever since in a tax-exempt money market fund that remains the McConnells’ most significant asset by far.

The fact that McConnell has become so much better-off during his three decades in Congress has recently become an issue in his highly competitive re-election campaign. His Democratic challenger, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, aired a television ad in August alleging the incumbent had overstayed his welcome in the Senate by becoming “a multimillionaire in public office” while opposing minimum wage increases, fighting unemployment insurance extensions and supporting “tax breaks that send Kentucky jobs overseas.”

McConnell has not listed any liabilities for several years, and the bulk of the most recent increase in the value of his assets is attributable to investment gains by Chao. One of her mixed investment funds increased in value by at least $500,000, while the disclosure forms for the first time mentioned a pension investment fund in which she’s invested at least $500,000. Chao also received deferred compensation of at least $250,000 from Protective Life Corp., a life insurance business where she was on the board of directors.

Miss McConnell In A Tizzy

Neither of these China suck-ups is Chinese

Miss McConnell, who was booted out of the Army after just one week for fondling a private enlisted man's private parts, has some kind of a Republican "marriage" to former Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. This kind of stuff isn't allowed to be written about in the Village. Outré, outré, outré... so outré. It's like when people used to talk about Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley having a hankering for teenaged boys or Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig enjoying himself regularly in public toilets. "How dare you!" the Villagers would bellow. "How dare you!" No, not at Foley or Craig... at anyone who wrote about it. It's just not how we do things... in the Village. No doubt! But we call the old pervert from Kentucky Miss McConnell anyway. Enjoy it... or ignore it.

May 20 is my sister's birthday. I think it was a 2007 post on May 20 when we first started looking seriously into Miss McConnell getting wealthy from his business dealings with Red China. It was the first of many.

Yesterday during a live blog session with Kentucky activists about Tuesday's gubernatorial primary, there was a brief conversation about how the Bush Regime's chief Senate obstructionist Mitch McConnell is a closet queen. Cliff Schecter pointed out, perhaps facetiously, that McConnell sometimes emerges from the closet to do business with his Chinese communist partners. "A review of financial assets held over the past six years by Elaine L. Chao and her husband, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, reveals that the labor secretary-designate serves as director of an insurance company that jointly owns a Lippo Group subsidiary with the Chinese government... McConnell, has received steady campaign contributions during his years in the Senate from Lippo partner American International Group Inc., and its chairman, Maurice 'Hank' Greenberg."

McConnell "is China's biggest Republican booster in the Senate, fighting to liberalize trade with Beijing."

The Post story claims that "dead pets and melamine-tainted food notwithstanding, change will prove difficult, policy experts say, in large part because U.S. companies have become so dependent on the Chinese economy that tighter rules on imports stand to harm the U.S. economy, too." There is no mention of Mitch McConnell and the agenda he and his "wife," U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, have pushed, quite relentlessly, an agenda that has helped to make them enormously wealthy and powerful... at the expense of some dead dogs and cats and some people getting sick. The Post claims that so many U.S. companies are involved with China now that there is little that can be done about it. That's how McConnell and Chao planned it.

Trading with the largely unregulated Chinese marketplace has its risks, of course, as evidenced by the many lawsuits that U.S. pet food companies now face from angry consumers who say their pets were poisoned by tainted Chinese ingredients. Until recently, however, many companies and even the federal government reckoned that, on average, those risks were worth taking. And for some products they have had little choice, as China has driven competitors out of business with its rock-bottom prices.

China's less-than-stellar behavior as a food exporter is revealed in stomach-turning detail in FDA "refusal reports" filed by U.S. inspectors: Juices and fruits rejected as "filthy." Prunes tinted with chemical dyes not approved for human consumption. Frozen breaded shrimp preserved with nitrofuran, an antibacterial that can cause cancer. Swordfish rejected as "poisonous."

The always cynical and self-serving McConnell was key in rejecting a bill that would have allowed senior citizens to purchase inexpensive Canadian drugs because, he claimed, the U.S. couldn't guarantee their safety. When someone brings up the safety of Chinese products to McConnell he turns into a veritable dragon lady, screaming and hissing and cursing about "Free Trade."

McConnell, Chao and the Bush Regime are literally allowing their partners in Communist China to poison the American public. "So pervasive is the U.S. hunger for cheap imports, experts said, that the executive branch itself has repeatedly rebuffed proposals by agency scientists to impose even modest new safety rules for foreign foods. 'Sometimes guidances can get through, but not regulations,' said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group. Guidances, which the FDA defines as 'current thinking on a particular subject,' are not binding. Under the Bush administration in particular, DeWaal said, if a proposed regulation does get past agency or department heads, it hits the wall at the White House Office of Management and Budget."

Yesterday the Villagers were all up in arms because someone at ProgressKentucky, a state good government PAC, tweeted something inartfully about Elaine Chao being Chinese (which she is). "Liberal" Villagers like nothing more than pinning the racism tag on progressives. There was inartfulness but no racism, none. Zero. ProgressKentucky is doing yeoman's work against McConnell's reelection but the Villagers want a pound of flesh now for the outrage, the outré, outré, outré. This was the PAC's first spirited defense yesterday:

Mitch McConnell’s campaign manager, Jesse Benton, has accused Progress Kentucky of race-baiting by retweeting a Twitter message that mentioned McConnell’s wife’s nationality.

“Progress Kentucky strongly denies that the organization has engaged in any such thing,” said Shawn Reilly, executive director of Progress Kentucky. “Benton’s statements are an attempt to divert attention from the fact that Mitch McConnell has engaged in the selling of the American middle class overseas for decades.”

Here are the facts:

In 1997, McConnell pushed for trade relations favorable to China resulting in American jobs going overseas. McConnell and his father-in-law James S.C. Chao, who is president of Foremost Maritime Corporation, met “privately with Chinese officials, including Jiang Zemin, then general secretary of the Communist Party of China. (Chao’s father and Jiang were schoolmates in China.),” according to the Herald-Leader.

On November 9, 2006, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao formally thanked Chao in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, for his role in developing the Chinese shipbuilding industry "at a rapid pace."

In January 2013, the Courier-Journal reported that eight members of the Chao’s family each gave $10,000 to the Kentucky Republican Party in the final weeks of 2012.

“When the Premier of China publicly thanks an industrialist for his role in developing Chinese industry, then that industrialist and his family contribute $80,000 to the Kentucky Republican Party, it is fair to question whether McConnell is selling out the middle class of America,” said Reilly.

Personally, James S. C. Chao has contributed $15,500 to Mitch McConnell's campaigns, $30,000 to the Kentucky Republican Party, and $17,500 to the Republican National Committee.

   Senator Mitch McConnell has a conflict of interest that many are afraid to talk about, and Progress Kentucky is not.

That isn't what the Villagers define as a pound of flesh. It just pissed them off even more. Pissed, pissed, pissed. Yesterday ended with another press release from ProgressKentucky, the apology the Villagers demanded-- but won't ever be satisfied with:

Progress Kentucky is dedicated to ensuring the people of Kentucky have the kind of representation in the US Senate they deserve. In an effort to educate KY voters as to the varied interests of Sen. McConnell we provided information about connections between the senator and business and government interests in China. This information included an inappropriate comment on the ethnicity of the former Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao, the senator’s wife.

We apologize to the secretary for that unnecessary comment and have deleted the tweets in question. In addition, we have put a review process in place to ensure tweets and other social media communications from Progress KY are reviewed and approved prior to posting.

Senator McConnell’s record deserves a thorough and legitimate airing. We believe that after fair examination of it Kentuckians will agree that Senator McConnell has been wrong over and over on the issues that matter. We will continue to inform Kentucky voters the important issues at stake in this election.

Here's a self-aggrandizing clown who hasn't bothered to find out what really happened. I don't follow him but it was retweeted by the NRSC, which is how I did see it:

Warning: Don't look at this item unless you have a cast-iron stomach! Yes, it's Miss Mitch and her, uh, wife

Heavens above, it's America's, um, sweethearts?

Didn't get a chance to pass on this item from our pal Al Kamen in yesterday's Washington Post "In the Loop" column. You'll probably want to adjust your travel plans accordingly. -- Ken

Worth a look

No particular plans for the holidays? If you find yourself in Kentucky, stop by the University of Louisville and check out the newly opened archives housing the papers of Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his wife, former labor secretary Elaine L. Chao.

The archives are in the Ekstrom Library. Loop Fans may recall a $14.2 million McConnell earmark that paid for a new library wing three years ago and included an auditorium named for Chao. This new exhibit, as described by Chao's e-mailed holiday greeting card, is a "7,000 square foot facility." She adds: "The gallery is over 2,000 square feet, and features memorabilia, photos, and videos from Mitch's and my childhoods through our careers. In particular, the exhibits chronicle the immigration of our family from Asia to America, our initial years in America, the challenges of assimilating to a different land."

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Indications are that Americans are now paying a steep price for our shocking national disdain for labor unions

Have you seen this Brave New Films video (brought to us here by WarOnGreed.org)? A sustained campaign built around it has won some still-too-limited concessions from Burger King -- see below.

"When I mentioned the word 'union,' I was told never, never mention that word again if I want to keep my job."

-- Burger King worker-turned-executive Gene Franques, in the video

"Suppose that China and the United States did have powerful unions. In China, such unions might have pushed for higher wages, social insurance and more domestic consumption. Here, such unions would have preserved more of a manufacturing sector and boosted wages in the service and retail sectors, so that American consumers could have relied more on income than on credit to make their purchases. The two nations would have had more sustainable economic strategies. And the world economy might not now be plunging into what, so far, appears to be a bottomless pit."

-- Harold Meyerson, in his Wednesday Washington Post column,
"The Dysfunctional Duo"

by Ken

Last night Howie talked about the grotesque situation that has developed around the nomination of Rep. Hilda Solis to be the first secretary of labor since . . . well, at least since the Clinton administration who actually believes that the job includes standing up for the rights and working conditions of working people. Anyone who has so quickly forgotten the horror of the Bush regime tenure of now-former Secretary Elaine Chao is directed to Joe Sudbay's Thursday AmericaBlog post, which began:

For the last eight years, America's workers have had the crap kicked out of them by the Bush administration and Republicans on the Hill. We had an anti-labor Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao, who is married to the vehemently anti-labor GOP Senate Leader, Mitch McConnell. Those two are worth millions (she was on 13 corporate boards before becoming Labor Secretary) so you can imagine they didn't have much in common with people who actually work for a living. Chao and McConnell were a potent (and very wealthy) combo determined to undermine the safety and job security of America's workers.

Do Americans understand the problems set out in the above Burger King video? ZP Heller offered a valuable take in a Saturday OpenLeft post:

All week long, Brave New Films, SEIU and many progressive bloggers have been holding Burger King's feet to the deep fryer. Together we exposed Burger King's horrendous working conditions; launched a contest asking people to Have It Their Way with Goldman Sachs (Burger King's top shareholder) for squandering $6.5 billion of the bailout on bonuses while average BK workers earn less than the federal poverty line; and staged peaceful demonstrations at Burger Kings across the country protesting the fast-food chain's low wages, lack of healthcare, and lobbying against unionization legislation. So what was Burger King's response? They served up this flamebroiled pile of garbage yesterday: "Burger King Corp. (BKC) believes unions serve a purpose in some workplaces and a number of its guests, vendors and franchisees have positive union membership experiences. BKC is not anti-union. BKC and its franchisees serve a diverse consumer base and, therefore, aim to remain neutral on political issues."

Neutral on political issues, eh? If that's the case, why did Burger King spend $319,648 between 2006 and 2008 lobbying against pro-labor laws like the Employee Free Choice Act? Why did Goldman Sachs spend $15,849,000 in 2008 alone lobbying against the Employee Free Choice? And why, as SEIU's Michael Whitney noted, has Burger King fought this legislation through their involvement with the National Retail Federation, which stands firmly behind an anti-union group called the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace?

If Burger King is "not anti-union" as they claim, then let's see them stay out of their workers' efforts to unionize. And if they're "not anti-union," does that mean they're suddenly pro-worker? Then perhaps they should quit dropping hundreds of thousands on lobbying efforts to oppose federal minimum wage hikes. They should improve workplace conditions to comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act. And while they're at it, they could also provide their employees healthcare so they no longer have to rely on publicly-funded health insurance programs that cost taxpayers up to a quarter of a billion dollars a year. If Burger King is really "not anti-union," let's see them put their money where their mouth is. Until then, we'll continue to have it our way.

I really don't understand what it is with Americans and labor unions. Is it simply yet another effect of the chokehold the Right has gained over the American mis-education system?

When I was growing up, even though I'm not aware that anyone in our extended family was a union member -- there are more management types in my family history -- Samuel Gompers was a household name. (Gompers was the crusading labor organizer who forged the American Federation of Labor, which when merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955 became the powerful AFL-CIO coalition.) It was part of the general public understanding, once upon a time, that the American prosperity of the second half of the 20th century would have been impossible without strong labor unions, because the economy could never have blossomed without consumers to buy the products sold by American industry.

I've got a bad feeling that none of this history is taught to today's students. For Americans who have no idea that, for example, the mines were once operated as something close to slave-labor camps, with the tacit acquiescence and even active support of the U.S. government, maybe we need to schedule nationwide screenings of Martin Ritt and Walter Bernstein's shattering 1970 film The Molly Maguires (with huge performances by Sean Connery, Richard Harris, and Frank Finlay)? (Anyone is welcome to borrow my Laserdisk copy.) And slide-show presentations tracing the origins of the ILGWU, including the still-almost-unimaginable horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911?

All useful, but I doubt that it would be helpful. It would all be dismissed as, "That was then. We've gotten past all of that." But of course we haven't. As with so much else that's gone wrong in this country, a lot of it started with Reagan. It was in the Reagan administration that open warfare against unions became not only acceptable but officially approved. Over time, partly in sync with changes in the structure of the economy, such gains as organized labor had achieved were steadily ungained.

There's no question that the unions did themselves no favor with the excessive demands and entrenched corruption that set in at the height of their power. But of course this was a pale reflection of the wanton abuse of power and corruption characteristic of the managements they were dealing with -- where does anyone think the overweening and corrupt union bosses learned it all from? It's notable that the anti-union propagandists were never heard from when crusading union members were trying to reform the unions from within. And it's not hard to understand why: It wasn't the corruption the anti-unionists objected to, it was the very notion of workers being able to push back against the bullying of management. If anything, strong and uncorrupt unions are their worst nightmare.

The liars and delusionaries who preach "the free market" have it that all the problems for which pro-union advocates insist unions are necessary can be solved more simply and fairly by the workings of the free market. The only difference is that the liars know better, while the delusionaries don't. Even if there were such a thing as a free market it would be bullshit, for a panoply of reasons, most of which come back to the basic fact that it's human nature to seek any advantage that's obtainable by any means, and when management has no checks on its powers, it will exploit those advantages in every way possible, dehumanizing workers to the level of merely another commodity, like plant fixtures and raw materials, simply occupying another column on the balance sheet.

But of course we've never had a free market, and it's the last thing the people who claim to champion such a thing want. What they want is for the government to play the role it played back in Molly Maguires days: behind-the-scenes enabler and when necessary active partner of management.

I guess Americans like to think that unionism is a grubby business that's beneath them. Of course in other countries even white-collar workers have benefited from union organization, but Americans like to think they're "individuals" who are above all of that. This may be why so many white-collar Americans were so stunned to wake up and find that their jobs had been outsourced to cheaper workers abroad, kaboom! More perplexingly, even Americans who are bitter and resentful about their poor prospects for job improvement seem to identify with the managements that have worked so hard to trap them in dead-end jobs, and to replace even those jobs with even worse, no-benefits "opportunities."

Economists have told us for decades that in strong union economies, even non-union workers benefit in terms of wages and working conditions from the countervailing force offered by unions to untrammeled management control. In the simplest terms, where there are strong unions, managements wishing to keep them out of their workplaces have to treat their workers with a respect that's likely to vanish with as union options do.

We haven't had many more grotesque national spectacles than that of the predominantly Southern senators, which is to say states from what was once the slave-holding South, states that have invested heavily via massive tax subsidies in non-union auto plants, used the economic meltdown as leverage to try to once and for all destroy the U.S. auto-industry unions. We're talking about intellectual flyweights like Alabama's Richard Shelby and Tennessee's appalling Bob Corker. It might have been funny if it wasn't all so dishonest and shabby and shameful -- the careful cherry-picking of numbers to "prove" the arrogance of the unions, who in fact had already made massive concessions and were the only parties offering additional cooperation.

All of this was churned up by the really fine, thought-provoking Harold Meyerson column I quoted from at the top of this post. Meyerson advances the proposition that we Americans, like our chief international partners in union-hating, the Chinese, pay a steep price for this, and in the economic meltdown the bill has come due. I have too much respect for Meyerson's argument to try to "highlight" it. So here it is in full:

The Dysfunctional Duo

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, February 18, 2009; A13

We are hemorrhaging jobs just now, but by historic standards, unemployment may look a little low. The official unemployment rate (which understates actual unemployment, to be sure) is at 7.6 percent, a far cry from the 10 percent-plus during the downturn of the early 1980s. In those years, Midwestern manufacturing shed more jobs than it is shedding today. Where's the comparable unemployment now?

It's out there, and then some. Only, it's in East Asia. We've offshored it.

In China, where exports dropped 17.5 percent in January, tens of thousands of factories have closed, and the government estimates that 20 million migrant workers -- rural Chinese who moved to manufacturing zones for the work -- have lost their jobs. Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan all project declines in their gross domestic products this year.


The problem is that East Asia is one big export platform, and its mega-importer -- the United States -- has stopped buying. If the emblematic image of the Great Depression was that of Americans lined up for bread or living in urban shantytowns, the signature image of the current collapse is the acres of Japanese-made cars gathering dust in the immense parking lots abutting the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors. According to Morgan Stanley economists, exports account for 47 percent of the output of East Asia's developing economies. Here in the United States, consumption accounted for more than 70 percent of our GDP on the eve of our consumer meltdown.

The solution for East Asia, and China in particular, is to change its economic strategy. Instead of relying so heavily on exports, China will have to increase its domestic consumption. It will have to invest in upgrading its infrastructure and establish social insurance programs so that its citizens, instead of hoarding money, will be able to spend more. It will have to allow wage levels to rise, creating a more stable domestic market for its goods.

Devising a successful economic strategy for the United States is a good deal trickier. When our economic elites offshored much of our manufacturing sector to East Asia and other cheap-labor lands, and took arms against union labor here at home, they ensured that most of the American jobs created over the past quarter-century would come in retail and service sectors that paid less than manufacturing. Every year for the past couple of decades, we've added lots more sales-clerk, cashier and fast-food jobs than we've created in high technology or energy. Yet Americans have been able to maintain middle-class living standards -- not through rising income but through rising debt, available to us because China has funneled the immense revenue it amassed selling us goods back to us in the form of loans that we can no longer repay.

At the center of the global meltdown, then, is the misshapen economic codependency of the United States and China. Each has followed a fundamentally unstable economic model, with one nation suppressing wages so that it could export more and the other living on borrowed funds so that it could purchase more. Despite the sharply different roles that each nation carved for itself, though, a shared characteristic allowed them to chart their ultimately disastrous course.

What do the United States and China have in common? They are the only two major economic powers that are resolutely hostile to unions. In China, any unions not controlled by the state are outlawed, which is why so many protests about unpaid wages and the like take the form of riots; there's no legal way to enforce workers' rights. In the United States for the past 30 years, business has been implacably opposed to labor, routinely violating the National Labor Relations Act rather than permitting employees to join unions.

Over the past few years, as global alliances of unions have begun to win agreements with global corporations, there's been one major impediment to such accords. "I always look at the percentage of a company's revenues from two nations, China and the U.S.," says Ron Oswald of the International Union of Food Workers, "in deciding whether to push for an international agreement." That's what happens when worker organizing is all but forbidden.

But suppose that China and the United States did have powerful unions. In China, such unions might have pushed for higher wages, social insurance and more domestic consumption. Here, such unions would have preserved more of a manufacturing sector and boosted wages in the service and retail sectors, so that American consumers could have relied more on income than on credit to make their purchases. The two nations would have had more sustainable economic strategies. And the world economy might not now be plunging into what, so far, appears to be a bottomless pit.

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