How Much Of A Scam Was Trump's Carrier Announcement Yesterday?

"Trump, who lost the popular vote, has now sent the message it is open season for massive corporations to seek specialized tax breaks from the incoming Administration. This is crony capitalism at its worst. Trump is not only failing to drain the swamp, he is fertilizing the swamp."
-Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA)

In reference to what Gaius was talking about this morning, let's look at some of the fallout from Trump's Carrier announcement. The first time I ever heard about Carrier announcing they would move their plant from Indiana to Mexico was when Bernie started campaigning on it-- loudly. Trump saw that too and quickly started parroting Bernie's complaints on the the campaign trail. Yesterday Bernie penned an OpEd for the Washington Post, Carrier just showed corporations how to beat Donald Trump, warning that American workers have a lot to be worried about because of the nature of the deal Trump cut with United Technologies, Carrier's parent company (in which Trump holds an immense financial stake personally). The deal, he writes, "keeps less than 1,000 of the 2100 jobs in America that were previously scheduled to be transferred to Mexico. Let’s be clear: It is not good enough to save some of these jobs. Trump made a promise that he would save all of these jobs, and we cannot rest until an ironclad contract is signed to ensure that all of these workers are able to continue working in Indiana without having their pay or benefits slashed."

In exchange for allowing United Technologies to continue to offshore more than 1,000 jobs, Trump will reportedly give the company tax and regulatory favors that the corporation has sought. Just a short few months ago, Trump was pledging to force United Technologies to “pay a damn tax.” He was insisting on very steep tariffs for companies like Carrier that left the United States and wanted to sell their foreign-made products back in the United States. Instead of a damn tax, the company will be rewarded with a damn tax cut. Wow! How’s that for standing up to corporate greed? How’s that for punishing corporations that shut down in the United States and move abroad?

In essence, United Technologies took Trump hostage and won. And that should send a shock wave of fear through all workers across the country.

Trump scores publicity win after Carrier keeps jobs in Indiana. Now will other companies take advantage?

...Trump has endangered the jobs of workers who were previously safe in the United States. Why? Because he has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives. Even corporations that weren’t thinking of offshoring jobs will most probably be re-evaluating their stance this morning. And who would pay for the high cost for tax cuts that go to the richest businessmen in America? The working class of America.

Let’s be clear. United Technologies is not going broke. Last year, it made a profit of $7.6 billion and received more than $6 billion in defense contracts. It has also received more than $50 million from the Export-Import Bank and very generous tax breaks. In 2014, United Technologies gave its former chief executive Louis Chenevert a golden parachute worth more than $172 million. Last year, the company’s five highest-paid executives made more than $50 million. The firm also spent $12 billion to inflate its stock price instead of using that money to invest in new plants and workers.

Does that sound like a company that deserves more corporate welfare from our government? Trump’s Band-Aid solution is only making the problem of wealth inequality in America even worse.

I said I would work with Trump if he was serious about the promises he made to members of the working class. But after running a campaign pledging to be tough on corporate America, Trump has hypocritically decided to do the exact opposite. He wants to treat corporate irresponsibility with kid gloves. The problem with our rigged economy is not that our policies have been too tough on corporations; it’s that we haven’t been tough enough.

We need to re-instill an ethic of corporate patriotism. We need to send a very loud and clear message to corporate America: The era of outsourcing is over. Instead of offshoring jobs, the time has come for you to start bringing good-paying jobs back to America.

If United Technologies or any other company wants to keep outsourcing decent-paying American jobs, those companies must pay an outsourcing tax equal to the amount of money it expects to save by moving factories to Mexico or other low-wage countries.  They should not receive federal contracts or other forms of corporate welfare. They must pay back all of the tax breaks and other corporate welfare they have received from the federal government. And they must not be allowed to reward their executives with stock options, bonuses or golden parachutes for outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries. I will soon be introducing the Outsourcing Prevention Act, which will address exactly that.

If Donald Trump won’t stand up for America’s working class, we must.

As Joshua Holland pointed out at The Nation this week, whenTrump promised to get tough with companies that offshore jobs, he never said anything about buying them off with our tax dollars. And this isn't just about Carrier air conditioners, which Trump sued in 2007 because of air-conditioner malfunctions in one of his hotels. The single biggest customer for United Technology's $56 billion business is the U.S. government. Trump may have saved a few hundred jobs-- it won't even be a thousand-- but at what cost? Yesterday's Indie Star's headline told the whole story: Federal access likely biggest factor in Carrier deal.

State Rep. Kaniela Saito Ing (D-Maui) is certainly the most progressive political leader in Hawaii-- and the only progressive elected official in the whole state to back Bernie's hugely successful primary campaign-- and he saw right through the little ploy. "Trump," he told us after the announcement in Indiana yesterday, "is setting a dangerously low standard for corporate handouts. Threaten your workers with offshoring, exploit them as pawns, then watch the business-friendly corporate tax breaks roll in. The Carrier charade is an anti-worker moral hazard, that voids corporate bosses of all accountability. A true pro-worker agenda starts from the ground up through living and prevailing wage laws, collective bargaining, paid leave, and putting an end to Trump's union-busting agenda."

Retired Marine Colonel Doug Applegate, who nearly toppled predatory multimillionaire Darrell Issa this month in the suburbs north of San Diego-- and who is Blue America's first endorsed candidate for 2018-- took one look at Trump's "deal" and mentioned that "the annual tax rebates to Carrier from the State of Indiana in the amount of $700,000... Sounds like Republican corporate welfare checks to me!"

Even today's Wall Street Journal, a bastion of neo-liberalism with a screwed up but internally consistent way of analyzing this whole thing, looked askance at the clumsy, ineffective way Trump went about this.

[R]eal job security depends on the profitability of the business. Carrier wanted to move the production line to Mexico to stay competitive in the market for gas furnaces. If the extra costs of staying in Indianapolis erode that business, those workers will lose their jobs eventually in any case.

This isn’t to fault Mr. Hayes’s decision, since Mr. Trump made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. The state of Indiana threw in $7 million in tax incentives, but those weren’t decisive. Mr. Trump’s real hammer is his threat to impose a tariff on Carrier imports to the U.S. Carrier has a 30% share of the U.S. gas-furnace market, and a 35% tariff could kill the business. That’s the same sword Mr. Trump previously held over Ford Motor Co.

United Technologies also gets about 10% of its revenue from sales to the Pentagon, another source of government leverage. Then there’s the potential damage to the Carrier brand, especially its consumer air conditioner sales, if Mr. Trump decided to blast it from the bully-- and we mean bully-- pulpit. So United Technologies decided to take the small cost against earnings and invest to make the Indiana plant more competitive.

...A mercantilist Trump trade policy that jeopardized those exports would throw far more Americans out of work than the relatively low-paying jobs he’s preserved for now in Indianapolis. Mr. Trump’s Carrier squeeze might even cost more U.S. jobs if it makes CEOs more reluctant to build plants in the U.S. because it would be politically difficult to close them.

Mr. Trump has now muscled his way into at least two corporate decisions about where and how to do business. But who would you rather have making a decision about where to make furnaces or cars? A company whose profitability depends on making good decisions, or a branding executive turned politician who wants to claim political credit?

The larger point is that America won’t become more prosperous by forcing companies to make noneconomic investments. A nation gets rich when individuals and business are allowed to take risks as they see fit in a competitive economy. Politicians are rotten investors. Mr. Trump would help the economy, and his Presidency, far more if he focuses on getting the pro-growth parts of his agenda through Congress.

Like the Nixon Administration, Donald Trump’s unpredictable, non-ideological policy-making will sometimes be disorienting for those who claim to believe in free markets. Some conservatives will be tempted to tolerate bad policies that appear to be popular that they’d never accept from President Obama. Many Republicans stayed silent or supported Nixon as he imposed wage-and-price controls and created the EPA, only to regret it later. They shouldn’t make the same mistake with Mr. Trump.

The better strategy is to support him when his policies promote growth and try to block him when he veers into big-government cul-de-sacs. In that spirit, his Carrier shakedown is a short-term political victory that will hurt workers and the economy if it becomes the norm for the next four years.

Even Palin-- currently sucking around for a Cabinet appointment-- slapped Trump around today over the Carrier nonsense, calling it crony capitalism. "When government steps in arbitrarily with individual subsidies," she wrote, "favoring one business over others, it sets inconsistent, unfair, illogical precedent. Meanwhile, the invisible hand that best orchestrates a free people’s free enterprise system gets amputated. Then, special interests creep in and manipulate markets. Republicans oppose this, remember? Instead, we support competition on a level playing field, remember? Because we know special interest crony capitalism is one big fail... [F]undamentally, political intrusion using a stick or carrot to bribe or force one individual business to do what politicians insist, versus establishing policy incentivizing our ENTIRE ethical economic engine to roar back to life, isn’t the answer. Cajole only chosen ones on Main St or Wall St and watch lines stretch from Washington to Alaska full of businesses threatening to bail unless taxpayers pony up. The lines strangle competition and really, really, dispiritingly screw with workers’ lives. It’s beyond unacceptable, so let’s anticipate equal incentivizes and positive reform all across the field-- to make the economy great again."

Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, is happy for the workers who will get to keep their jobs-- fewer than half-- but pointed out that "the Carrier deal is only a bandage on the economic wounds in our industrial heartland. Over the past 16 years, America has lost more than 60,000 manufacturing facilities, and 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since 2000. Not all of those jobs can be reclaimed, but smarter policies will give factory workers a brighter future. A tougher trade policy, a tax code that incentivizes reshoring jobs and production, investments in infrastructure, research, and training are all urgently needed. America has manufacturing know-how, abundant energy resources, a culture of entrepreneurship, a strong homegrown consumer market, and access to amazing innovation. Smarter policies will help us compete. We know these issues enjoy bipartisan support among voters, and they should be the focus of Congress and the Trump administration in 2017."

Yeah, If You Live In A State Where Trump Has A Chance, Just Hold Your Nose And Vote For Hillary... You'll Live

This week The Nation features dueling perspectives on voting for Jill Stein, Kshama Sawant's Don't Waste Your Vote On The Corporate Agenda-- Vote For Jill Stein And The Greens and Joshua Holland's Your Vote For Jill Stein Is A Wasted Vote. Unless Trump suddenly looks like he's going to have any chance of winning in California-- Clinton is up by an average of just over 19 points here-- I plan to, once again, vote for Jill Stein. Obviously, I don't expect her to win. It's simply a protest vote to send the Democrats a message that their dishonest corporate candidate is not acceptable to me. Yes, she's much, much, much preferable to Trump. So would a steaming pile of dog poop, but, unlike Divine, I'll respectfully pass on eating it. Unless you want the Democratic Party to just keep on nominating candidates like Clinton (up and down the ballot) you won't vote for her in any state that is safe from the Trumpist contagion. I have now switched my position enough to say that if I lived in Ohio or Florida or North Carolina or any state that could be a firewall against Trump, I would unhesitatingly vote for Hillary. That said, I don't represent Holland's assurance that between 75 and 90% of those who say that they’re planning to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in November won’t follow through and that the her support "is an expression of contempt for the Democrats that evaporates in the voting booth." If I voted for her instead of Obama last time, you can count on me not voting for Clinton this time. I'm not a typical voter though. Holland makes a pointless effort to bash the Green Party, pointless to me at least, since I see them-- at this point at least-- as nothing other than a vehicle to protest unbearable Democratic Party corporatism and corruption.

"Many Greens," he concludes, "think that their vote isn’t wasted because it sends a powerful 'message' to Washington. But why would anyone in power pay attention to the 0.36 percent of the popular vote that Jill Stein won in 2012, when 42 percent of eligible voters just stayed home? Political parties are merely vessels. The Green Party provides a forum to demonstrate ideological purity and contempt for 'the system.' But the Democratic Party is a center of real power in this country. For all its flaws, and for all the work still to be done, it offers a viable means of advancing progressive goals. One can’t say the same of the perpetually dysfunctional and often self-marginalizing Greens."

Voting for Stein in safe blue states (or even profoundly backward deep red ones where Trump will win by landslides-- say Wyoming, Idaho or Alabama) is a smart move for progressives who can then busy themselves trying to perfect the Democratic Party or the Green Party or any other party... and trying to make sure the Democratic Party reforms itself;f so that it doesn't steal the nomination from the next Bernie Sanders. Sawant sees the Green Party as a legitimate alternative to the Democrats. Good luck with that. "Most progressives," she writes, "will vote for Clinton to keep Trump out of the White House. That’s understandable, but even more important is building an alternative to pro-capitalist parties... [O]rdinary people feel disenchanted and disempowered. Donald Trump is an abomination, and consistently over 60 percent of people polled disapprove of him and his bigotry. Trump is the single-most-unpopular major-party candidate ever, and he deserves to be trounced. But, incredibly, the Democrats have managed to nominate the second-most-unpopular candidate in history: Hillary Clinton, whose disapproval rating stands at 56 percent. Make no mistake: I want Trump to lose this election. But progressives should not support Clinton. Her close ties to corporate America and its brutal neoliberal agenda will serve to increase the appeal of right-wing populism even if she wins."

Clinton’s billionaire backers, who wined and dined her throughout August, want her to promise as little as possible to ordinary people for fear of a mass movement developing under her administration. They know that working people, and young people especially, are fired up in a way that we haven’t seen in decades. E-mails recently leaked from Nancy Pelosi’s office contain explicit instructions not to agree to any specific demands from Black Lives Matter.

The Democratic Party has a special talent for enabling the right. President Obama was first elected in 2008 on a wave of opposition to eight years of George W. Bush’s wars and tax cuts for the rich. But he and the Democrats continued the bailout of Wall Street and stood by as millions lost their homes-- and the leadership of the labor movement and most progressive organizations gave him a pass. This created space for the Tea Party to exploit the legitimate anger of large sections of the working and middle class. It wasn’t until 2011 that Occupy Wall Street gave a genuine left-wing expression to the widespread outrage at corporate politics.

Change comes from mass movements, not from on high, as Bernie Sanders has said. His campaign proved decisively that ordinary people can build a powerful electoral movement representing their interests without taking a penny from corporate America. Polls consistently showed that Sanders would crush Trump in the election. But his campaign was trapped inside a party whose leadership was prepared to do almost anything to stop him.

We need to build a new political party, one completely free from corporate cash and influence... Many progressives will vote for Clinton in spite of their opposition to her politics, simply to prevent Trump from setting foot in the White House. I understand their desire to see him defeated, but even more important is beginning the process-- too long delayed-- of building an alternative to the pro-capitalist parties monopolizing US politics.

Not radical enough for you? Paul Street, writing yesterday for TruthDig also urged his readers to vote for Stein. "Every four years," he writes, "liberal-left politicos scream wolf about how the Republicans are going to wreak plutocratic, racist, ecocidal, sexist, repressive and war-mongering hell if they win “this, the most important election in American history.” The politicos conveniently ignore the plutocratic, racist, ecocidal, sexist, repressive and military-imperial havoc that Democrats inflict at home and abroad in dark, co-dependent alliance with the ever more radically reactionary Republicans. Democrats fail to acknowledge their preferred party’s responsibility for sustaining the Republicans’ continuing power, which feeds on the “dismal” Dems’ neoliberal abandonment of the nation’s working-class majority in service to transnational Wall Street and corporate America. They commonly exaggerate the danger posed by the right-most major party and (especially) the progressivism of the not-so-left-most one." he points to journalist Mark Leibovich's observation that DC has "become a determinedly bipartisan team when there is money to be made. … 'No Democrats and Republicans in Washington anymore,' goes the maxim, 'only millionaires.'" 

So why might a serious left progressive living in a contested state (someone like this writer) consider following the venerable left political scientist Adolph Reed Jr.’s advice this year to “vote for the lying neoliberal warmonger” Hillary Clinton? Part of it could be that lefty’s sense that it is better for “the U.S. Left” (insofar as it exists) and the development of the dedicated, day-to-day, grass-roots social movement we desperately need in place beneath and beyond the election cycle when a corporate Democrat occupies the White House. The presence of a Democrat in the nominal top U.S. job is usefully instructive. It helps demonstrate the richly bipartisan nature of the American plutocracy and empire. Young workers and students especially need to see and experience how the misery and oppression imposed by capitalism and its evil twin imperialism live on when Democrats hold the Oval Office.

At the same time, the presence of a Republican in the White House tends to fuel the sense among progressives and liberals that the main problem in the country is that the “wrong party” holds executive power and that all energy and activism must be directed at fixing that by putting the “right party” back in. Everything progressive gets sucked into a giant “Get Out the Vote” project for the next faux-progressive Democratic savior, brandishing the promises of “hope” and “change” (campaign keywords for the neoliberal imperialist Bill Clinton in 1992 and the neoliberal imperialist Barack Obama in 2008).

Hillary will be much less capable than the more charismatic Obama (under whom there has been more popular organizing and protest than some lefties like to acknowledge) of bamboozling progressives into thinking they’ve got a friend in the White House. Unlike Obama in 2008, she’s got a long corporatist and imperialist track record that connects her to the establishment and is hard to deny.

It is an urban myth that Republican presidents spark and energize progressive and left activism. True, they’ve done outrageous things that can put lots of folks in the streets for a bit. One thinks of Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and Bush Jr.’s invasion of Iraq. But the waves of protest recede, followed by repression, and everything tends to get channeled into the holy electoral quest to put Democrats back in executive-branch power. The second George W. Bush term was no activist heyday, thanks in significant measure to the great co-optive and demobilizing impact of Democratic Party electoral politics and the deceptive, not-so “antiwar” Obama phenomenon.

But the main reason it is easy to understand why many intelligent lefties stuck behind contested state lines might follow Reed’s advice is that Trump is no ordinary Republican wolf. By some dire portside reckonings (including Reed’s), “the Donald” is something like a real fascist threat worthy of mention in the same breath as Hitler and Mussolini. He’s a really bad version of the wolf who finally appears to devour the sheep in the ancient [Boy who cried wolf] fable.

...In warning about Trump and instructing lefties not to vote third-party this time, Reed reminds us of the German Community Party’s fateful error: choosing not to ally with the German Social Democrats against the Nazi Party during the early 1930s. The moral of the story is clear: All sane left progressives need to report to duty to protect the flock under the banner of the admittedly horrid (good of Reed to admit that) Hillary.

...[There is] enough to scare lots of left progressives into voting for “the arch-corporatist and Wall Street-sponsored neoliberal imperialist Hillary Clinton (a candidate whom Gupta has described as “right-wing fanatic” and “enemy of workers”) as the proverbial “lesser evil” in a contested state? Sure. For many lefties (this writer included), however, the Trump threat level does not rise that high. The wolf cry still falls on deaf ears. This is for at least six reasons.

First, ominous warnings from smart people notwithstanding, the American corporate, financial and imperial ruling class doesn’t yet need or want real or quasi-fascism through Herr Trump or anyone else at this historical moment. The U.S. model of corporate-managed and “inverted totalitarianism” (Sheldon Wolin) sold as “democracy” is not about strongmen and brown shirts. The notion that the nation’s “deep state” power elite-- the actual rulers who run the nation’s commanding-heights affairs behind the marionette theater of electoral politics-- would (a) let an uber-narcissistic man-child like Donald Trump into the Oval Office and (b) permit him to do the crazy things he talks about is far-fetched.

Neofascism is simply not where the American ruling class is right now. When it is, we will know. If and when it gets there, it will put forward a far more serious and capable frontman than the preposterous Donald-- a man so uninterested in the actual work of ruling that he offered the “moderate” Republican John Kasich control over “domestic and foreign policy” in a Trump White House if Kasich would be his running mate. Trump’s ascendency to the White House could well portend a further chaotic delegitimization of “homeland” authority and a pervasive sense of societal absurdity (I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that my anarchist streetfighter side would relish the installation of a commander in chief as completely absurd as Trump). Along with the humiliating black eye that a Trump White House would be for Uncle Sam on the global stage, this is something the American power elite has reason not to want. It would be bad for business-- and for American-style business rule as usual.

Second, it is frankly comical to think of the ludicrous, soft-fleshed, silver-spooned draft-dodger and pampered television personality Donald Trump as some kind of neo-Fuhrer. He is seen as “unfit for command” by most top military commanders and is far too monumentally unpopular with the majority of citizens to ever rally enough masses to overcome the hostility he faces with the corporate and imperial establishment.

Third, the populace would not be as pathetically supine and powerless as Gupta imagines in response to the election and policies of a vicious clown like Trump. His selection and installment as U.S. president would be understood by tens of millions of Americans as an incredibly provocative development-- provocative and dangerous enough to spark protests and mass mobilizations on a scale like nothing ever seen in American history. That, too, is part of what makes Trump a different kind of Republican wolf. I suggested above that ultra-left backlash theorists (folks who think “things have to get worse before they get better”) are wrong to assume that it’s better to have Republicans in the White House when it comes to sparking popular protest. Trump would be an exception to that rule. The “deep state” has zero interest in the riotous instability that would result from Trump’s election and inauguration.

Fourth, Trump’s not going to win. For all Hillary Clinton’s obvious terrible flaws as a candidate, the big insider cash, the national electoral demographics, and the Electoral College map (just ask Nate Silver and his team of multivariate election predictors at FiveThirtyEight.com) strongly favor her. Her health stumbles and some recent homeland terror attacks have, yes, boosted Trump in the polls recently. That will fade as cold campaign finance realities and corporate media bring the bipartisan ruling class’s long-chosen candidate Hillary to the moment she has literally craved for so long. The big and smart money is still on “the lying neoliberal warmonger.”

Fifth, the Green Party’s Party’s Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka are combining genuine social movement activism with an electoral campaign for a Green New Deal-- a many-sided program that is much more than just another bit of progressive policy wonkery. It’s an existential necessity for a decent future, one that combines a giant livable ecology-saving program of national and energy and economic reconversion with a giant jobs program and universal health insurance paid for by genuinely progressive taxation (long overdue in “New Gilded Age” America) and massive reductions in the nation’s giant Pentagon System (which accounts for half the world’s military spending). How does any environmentally sentient and peace-advocating lefty not vote for all of that in the current age of savage inequality, rampant militarism, and ever-more imminent eco-catastrophe?

Sixth, “lesser-evil voting” (LEV) has a “terrible track record,” as Stein reminded me last spring. The more American liberals and progressives do it, the more the Republican right wing is emboldened, the further the Democrats move into ideological and policy territory formerly held by Republicans, and the more dire the American and global situation becomes. LEV is a viciously circular, self-fulfilling prophecy that itself holds no small responsibility for the ascendancy of horrible Republican presidents and other terrible things like the tea party and Donald Trump phenomena. And one does not seriously challenge LEV only in so-called safe states. You have to draw some lines in the sand and exit left at some point: Protect the flock.

I am not so inured to the quasi-neofascistic evil of the Trump phenomenon and the ugly prospects of a Trump presidency-- especially on the ecological level-- that I cannot understand why many fellow leftists would mark a ballot for the hideous imperial corporatist Hillary Clinton to block Herr Trump. The intra-left bloodletting that takes place on a regular quadrennial schedule over the difficult question of how best to respond to the United States’ plutocratic electoral and party system certainly does not serve the progressive left cause. Let us join together after the latest quadrennial extravaganza to build and expand a great popular movement with a list of demands and the introduction of an election and party system that deserves passionate citizen engagement.

It's a point of view.I hope you're glad to have read it. You can contribute to stopping Trump here if you want to:

Big Anti-TPP Protest At Obama Fundraiser Today

A few weeks ago a friend invited me to a formal dinner at which former L.A. area congressman David Dreier, a mainstream conservative, would be delivering a keynote address. I had nothing better to do-- and it was at Culina, a restaurant with a good reputation I'd been meaning to try-- so I went. The restaurant was OK, but nothing I would go try again. Dreier was even worse. You may have missed it, but John Kerry asked him to represent the U.S. at the Bali Democracy Forum, a key meeting of Asia-Pacific leaders. Dreier, whose congressional career was ruined when a revolt among homophobic bigots in the GOP House caucus forced then-Speaker Denny Hastert to withdraw Dreier's appointment to replace Tom DeLay as GOP Leader, retired from Congress and is now chairman of the Annenberg-Dreier Commission, which is supposed to work to foster international cooperation between Asia-Pacific nations. It's another "free trade" operation and includes a gaggle of untrustworthy Wall Street shills, from war criminal Henry Kissinger to former China Ambassador Jon Huntsman and "Mack" McLarty, ex-Chief of Staff for Free Trade evangelist Bill Clinton.

Maybe it was the wrong crowd for Dreier to exert any energy for but he was a basically a hackneyed dud who slept-walked through a droll speech about nothing in particular. Dreier was the founder of the Congressional Trade Working Group and in 2009 he made a "free" trade speech on the House floor that must have pleased the campaign donors who financed his long DC career. "It goes back to my education in college; and that is, the notion of the United States of America playing a leading role in global economic growth so that we can increase the number of good American jobs. That means good jobs right here in the United States of America. I believe that trade is key to that. Trade, global trade, is going to play a big role in creating jobs, jobs, jobs." Really? Joshua Holland, cut Dreier's corporate cheerleading to ribbons in his book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy.

Dreier gave that speech during the most severe unemployment crisis the United States had faced since the 1930s. It’s a stunningly counterintuitive assertion, because trade agreements facilitate the offshoring of jobs to countries with lower labor costs, which in turn beefs up companies’ profits. That dynamic is evident in executive pay—a 2004 study by the Institute for Policy Studies found that “CEOs at companies that outsource the most U.S. jobs are rewarded with bigger paychecks.” The authors found that “Average CEO compensation at the 50 firms outsourcing the most service jobs increased by 46 percent in 2003, compared to a 9 percent average increase for all CEOs at the 365 large companies surveyed by BusinessWeek.”

As Dean Baker put it, “The truth is, we carefully structured these trade agreements-- we put great effort into it-- to put our manufacturing workers into competition with manufacturing workers in developing nations.

"That meant going to these places and asking: What kind of problems does General Motors face if they want to set up a manufacturing plant in Mexico or Malaysia or China? What can we do to make it as easy as possible? That means that they know they can set up their factory and not have it nationalized, not have restrictions on repatriating profits, etc. Then they need to be able to import the goods back into the United States, and that means not only making sure there are no tariffs or quotas, but also that there’s no safety or environmental restrictions that might keep the goods out."

The offshoring trend can only get worse as long as we stay the present course on trade. Alan Blinder, a conservative economist at Princeton University, estimated that as many as 29 percent of U.S. jobs are offshorable.

And it’s not simply a matter of jobs sent overseas. In a 2007 study analyzing fifty years of research, economist Josh Bivens argued that the current (and largely bipartisan) trade regime adds some bucks to the paychecks of America’s highest earners but keeps wages down for 70 percent of the U.S. workforce, even adjusting for the greater purchasing power they might enjoy because of cheap imports flooding the shelves of Wal-Mart. He found that corporate-driven “free-trade” agreements not only increase the gap between richer and poorer countries, but also add to inequality among citizens of wealthy states such as the United States. Bivens estimated the direct cost of “free trade” deals to families in the middle of the economic pile to be $2,135 per year. That’s about 50 percent more than the same family pays in federal income taxes annually ($1,495).

It’s tempting to focus only on the economic impacts of trade deals such as NAFTA, but it’s just as important to dig deeper into the antidemocratic nature of the “free trade” orthodoxy pushed by Big Business. All too often, progressives tie themselves up in knots discussing trade because they argue the issue on corporate America’s terms, instead of going to the root of the matter: “free trade” isn’t free, and it often has nothing to do with what most people would consider “trade.”

If the central question we’re asking is “Free trade or protectionism?” the debate is already lost. That’s how the corporate globalizers have presented it and that’s how the media-- which clearly have a horse in the race-- report it. And that’s why the so-called free traders have been able to keep the upper hand.

Here’s the truth about “free trade” agreements. When you talk about trade policy, you’re really talking about the enormous influence of corporate power over democratic governance. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the gutsy leader of the fair-trade caucus, explained the close connection during the lead-up to the vote on the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2005. “Our political system is now up for the highest bidder,” Brown told me at the time. “Energy bills are written by oil companies and environmental bills are written by the chemical companies.

"Similarly, this trade agreement-- CAFTA-- but other trade agreements, too, have been written by a select few for a select few-- and that select few is typically the drug industry, the insurance and financial institutions, and the energy companies, and the largest multinational corporations. It’s the same old song, whether it’s international or it’s domestic.

In his book The Myths of Free Trade, Brown described thousands of corporate jets stacked up over D.C. as the vote neared, carrying industry execs eager to descend on the city to lobby for the agreement. Trade policy is clearly an insider’s game.

In their book Whose Trade Organization, Lori Wallach and Patrick Woodall found that among the hundreds of “experts” who sat on the advisory boards that hammered out the thousands of pages of WTO and NAFTA rules, there were only a handful of representatives of labor. The rest were multinational execs and various lawyers, lobbyists, and sundry industry experts. There was almost zero input from human rights groups, environmentalists, or the rest of society. It’s not only that the treaties we’ve signed are flawed, but the process by which they’re created makes it all but impossible that they would benefit working people or protect our commons. These are simply not corporate America’s priorities (nor those of its counterparts in Japan or the EU).

Watch for Kerry to appoint Dreier to something nice and plum soon. This afternoon, starting at 3pm there will be a big protest across from an Obama fundraiser at the Beverly Hills Hotel against the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement. It'll be at the Will Rogers Memorial Park at 9650 Sunset Blvd in Beverly Hills. Flush the TPP reminds us that what we're talking about is a secret trade agreement being negotiated behind the backs of Congress and the American people, which threatens to undermine not just the economic well-being of millions of families but also democracy itself. "Srom food safety and the environment, to worker rights and access to healthcare, the TPP is about much more than trade. It his a global corporate coup." If you're in L.A. today… it goes from 3pm to 6pm.

TPPtoolkit_Nov2012

Republican Elected Officials In Red States Are Giving Voters An Excellent Reason To Defeat Them Next Year

Joshua Holland, author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy and a senior producer for Bill Moyers, has been spectacularly scrupulous in exposing right-wing talking points about the economy. This week he explained how "all private insurance premiums in the 25 red states that are refusing to expand their Medicaid programs will be 15 percent higher as a direct result of that decision." His overall assertion is what many people already knew in their hearts, namely that the single biggest problem with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act is a deliberate agenda of sabotage and obstruction by the Republican Party. Disingenuous conservatives are "complaining about insurance policies being cancelled and the ACA’s error-plagued exchanges at the same time as they actively work to keep millions of poor Americans from gaining coverage under the law’s Medicaid expansion."

The victims of Obamacare’s implementation problems being hit the hardest, by far, are those whose incomes fall between the federal poverty line and the eligibility cutoffs in those 25 states rejecting Medicaid expansion. Not only will they be left uncovered, they won’t even be eligible for the generous subsidies that people earning slightly more than they do can use to buy insurance. It’s brutally unfair. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that 4.8 million poor adults may fall into that coverage gap-- about twice the number of people expected to pay more for their insurance when their substandard policies are cancelled.

And it gets worse. In 40 states, adults without children are ineligible for Medicaid regardless of their income level. In 30 states, the parents of children who qualify for Medicaid may not be eligible themselves. All of these people would be covered under Medicaid’s expansion, but they’re being left high and dry in the 25 states who have rejected expansion. And while the problems plaguing healthcare.gov result from mismanagement and a contracting boondoggle, those red state lawmakers who refuse to expand Medicaid are inflicting this harm intentionally, based solely on their ideology.

In other words, they’re actively working to maintain America’s shamefully high rate of uninsured. And that comes with deadly consequences. Because, in this country, we do ‘let ‘em die’-- we let the poor and the uninsured die from treatable illnesses every day.

Last week, the Texas Observer ran a heartbreaking essay by Rachel Pearson, who recalled being a young medical student volunteering at a free clinic in Galveston, Texas. Pearson had a patient-- a poor, uninsured patient-- who was obviously very sick. But Pearson couldn’t properly diagnose his ailment with the resources available to the clinic. When his pain became severe, she sent him to an emergency room, but the personnel there refused to treat him because his symptoms weren’t an immediate threat to “life or limb.” As time passed, his condition deteriorated until he began having difficulty breathing. It was only then that an emergency room finally admitted him and diagnosed the cancer that had metastasized throughout his body. “It must have been spreading over the weeks that he’d been coming [into the clinic],” she wrote. He died a few months later. “The shame has stuck with me through my medical training-- not only from my first patient, but from many more,” wrote Pearson, who now heads the clinic.

A 2009 study published in the American Journal of Public Health linked 45,000 deaths every year to the uninsured, even “after taking into account education, income, and many other factors, including smoking, drinking and obesity.” The lead researcher of the study, Andrew Wilper of the University of Washington School of Medicine, told the Harvard Gazette, “We doctors have many new ways to prevent deaths from hypertension, diabetes and heart disease-- but only if patients can get into our offices and afford their medications.”

This is the real-world backdrop for our fierce debates over Obamacare. Yet Republicans’ answer to the uninsured crisis is to claim that having no coverage at all is better than being enrolled in Medicaid. And that’s why conservatives have no legitimate leg to stand on in griping about the program’s flaws, no matter how deep they run. Because when it comes to health care, the American conservative movement has nothing constructive to offer to fix the problem of getting more people health insurance-- they can only whistle past the graveyard.

…Liberals like to point out that the Affordable Care Act was modeled on a conservative, market-friendly approach to reducing the number of uninsured-- a plan born at the Heritage Foundation and championed by such conservative luminaries as Newt Gingrich.

But that’s only half true. It was a Republican plan 20 years ago, when conservatives still expressed an interest in governing responsibly. Today’s tea party-dominated movement sees health insurance as something that fosters dependency on the government, and must therefore be limited to those who can afford it themselves or get it from their employers.

Liberals have every reason to be dismayed over the maddeningly problematic launch of the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges because their preferred route to expanding coverage-- building on the popular and already functional Medicare system-- would have avoided many of the problems plaguing this overly complex, public-private scheme. But conservatives, serving up only red-meat rhetoric about government takeovers and litigation run amok, have nothing real to offer in terms of solutions. As such, in a rational world they should have nothing to say about Obamacare’s rocky rollout.

As Jonathan Martin explained to NY Times readers yesterday, implementation of Obamacare is dividing Republican governors. At the Republican Giovernors Association meeting in Scottsdale this week there was what Martin calls a "sharp disagreement among those who have helped carry out the law and those who remain entrenched in their opposition." This is, for example, the difference between obstructionists like Scott Walker and Rick Perry and more mainstream conservatives like John Kasich and Chris Christie.

The governors who refused the Medicaid expansion money that is part of the health care law-- believing they had found a wedge issue-- are already boasting about it.

“I said no,” Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said, “because if I took the Medicaid expansion I’d be dependent on the same federal government that can’t get a basic website up and going even after two and a half years to come through with payments for Medicaid in the future when they start weaning off paying for 100 percent of coverage.”

Under the new law, the federal government pays the entire cost of Medicaid expansion for three years and 90 percent after that.

Mr. Walker, who is seen as a candidate who can potentially bridge the differences between the Tea Party and the Republican establishment, said conservatives would have long memories on how the law was carried out.

“I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker, but I think it’s pretty high on the importance list for a lot of voters out there,” he said.

...Mr. Walker and Mr. Perry are not the only ambitious Republicans to sound a “Where were you on Obamacare?” line of attack. Senator Rand Paul said this week that Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, perhaps the leading 2016 contender among establishment Republicans, would have to answer for his decision to take the Medicaid money.

“On the case of the New Jersey governor, I think embracing Obamacare, expanding Medicaid in his state is very expensive and not fiscally conservative,” Mr. Paul said.

He added, “Many Republican governors I would say are conservative did resist expanding and accepting Obamacare in their states.”

Mr. Paul’s criticism underlines one of the challenges governors face as they contemplate presidential campaigns. House members and senators do not face the same dilemma: While members of Congress vote on legislation, bills can be passed without their support. But governors face decisions that affect the residents of their states.

Gov. John Kasich of Ohio expressed this political fact of life, becoming animated as he was questioned at a meeting with reporters here about his decision to expand Medicaid.

“I always try to put myself in the shoes of somebody else to say: ‘How would I feel if I didn’t have health insurance? Are you kidding me?’” said Mr. Kasich, who has been mentioned as a 2016 hopeful, his voice rising. In defending Medicaid, he spoke at length about the scourge of drug addiction and challenges faced by those with mental illnesses.

“It’s going to save lives,” he said. “It’s going to help people, and you tell me what’s more important than that.”

The issue is a particularly delicate one among Republican governors, not only because they have disagreed on whether to take the Medicaid money, but because Mr. Christie, already a leading figure in the party, formally took over the Scottsdale meeting as the association’s chairman.

…Mr. Kasich, asked if taking the funding could hamper his own presidential prospects, shot back, “Is that how you’re going to make a decision?”

At least they can all agree about one thing: Congress is a mess-- and the Republican governors don't seem to have any problem throwing John Boehner and his cronies under the bus.

• Rick Scott (R-FL)- "It's pure insanity, what's coming out of there"
• Nikki Haley (R-SC)- "Chaos… we don't like the job they're doing"
• Bobby Jindal (R-LA)- "Dysfunction"
• Chris Christie (R-NJ)- "incredible contrast between what you see being discussed here… as opposed to what's going on in Washington, D.C."

And it's not just Republican governors bemoaning their own party's extremists in Congress. On a fat cat donor call sponsored by Rove, McConnell blamed Ted Cruz and Mike Lee for the ugly mess the Republicans find themselves in as they head into the 2014 midterms. McConnell said that the Tea Party movement is "nothing but a bunch of bullies" that he plans to "punch… in the nose."

On the call, according to a donor who was on it, McConnell personally named Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) as Tea Party conservatives he views as problematic for him. “The bulk of it was an attack on the Tea Party in general, Cruz in particular,” the source, a prominent donor, said in a phone interview with Breitbart News.

But the most memorable line came at the end of the call.

“McConnell said the Tea Party was ‘nothing but a bunch of bullies,’” the source said. “And he said ‘you know how you deal with schoolyard bullies? You punch them in the nose and that’s what we’re going to do.’”

Rove, as well as American Crossroads President and CEO Steven J. Law who also serves as the president of sister group Crossroads GPS, were also on the call. Rove “talked in a slightly gentler way, or let’s say, a more diplomatic way,” the source said. “But the message was pretty well the same: That if we’re going to save this thing, we have to back real Republicans.”

Will The GOP Shut-Down-The-Government Strategy Further Decimate California Republicans?

Trends start in California

Obama beat Romney 6,493,924 (59%) to 4,202,127 (38%) in California. Obama won every county with a substantial population except Orange and Riverside-- and Riverside was a 49-49% tie. Of California's 53 congressional districts, Obama won 41 districts (including 3 with Republican congressmen, Jeff Denham, David Valadao and Gary Miller) and of the 12 Romney won, Obama was within striking distance in 3, all occupied by GOP congressmen who are Boehner loyalist committee chairmen, Darrell Issa, Ed Royce and Buck McKeon. There were 7 districts where Romney failed to even get 20% of the vote. Could it get even worse for Republicans in California? You bet it can-- and it is. For example, a poll released this morning by PPP shows that if the election were held today, an unnamed Democrat candidate would beat Miller 48-39%.

That has a lot to do with why very conservative Establishment hack Devin Nunes has been railing against teabaggers in general and against Ted Cruz in particular. Nunes would like to run statewide and he sees the GOP brand continuing to crumble in a state where there's already been a lot of crumbling.

An even vaguely competent DCCC would be working not just to beat Gary Miller, Dave Valadao and Jeff Denham, in the districts Obama won, but would be working on one or two-cycle strategies to rid Congress of-- for starters-- McKeon, Issa (whose districts Obama won in 2008) and Royce.

In his article about how the shut down heavy the pressure is on moderate Republicans, Joe Tanfani, writing for the L.A. Times, doesn't even mention any California moderates, primarily because there are no California moderates. All of them are conservatives, either crazed teabaggers like McClintock and La Malfa, or somewhat more more mainstream or Establishment conservatives like Kevin McCarthy and Paul Cook. So L.A. Times readers are stuck trying to relate to obscure Republican backbenchers they never heard of in New Jersey and Pennsylvania like Jon Runyan, Frank LoBiondo, Charlie Dent, Pat Meehan, Jim Gerlach, and Mike Fitzpatrick.

The Miami Herald ran with a story about the woes a few California Republican congresscritters are facing-- 2, Valadao and Denham, in the San Joaquin Valley. Even wingnut Tom McClintock (the only Californian on the list of the 32 right-wing extremists who forced the shut down), in one of the state's reddest districts is feeling the pressure from angry constituents.

Carolyn Botell, administrator of the Yosemite Chamber of Commerce in Groveland, Calif., said in an interview Friday that local businesses have been “financially devastated” by the combination of the government shutdown and the earlier Rim fire that burned more than 256,000 acres. Botell said businesses are “definitely seeing less people,” although she added there are “a lot of people coming in who don’t know about the situation.”

“One of the questions my visitors ask me is how long will this last,” Botell said, “and I just tell them I have absolutely no idea.”

During the last federal government shutdown, in 1995-96, vocal complaints from Yosemite-area communities helped persuade the region’s then-congressman, George Radanovich, to eventually repudiate the shutdown tactic. Like other lawmakers at the time, he came around to the view that national parks should be immune from shutdowns.

McClintock’s office did not respond to multiple queries Friday.

On Wednesday, though, he and other House Republicans passed a funding bill that would selectively reopen the National Park Service, while leaving other public lands agencies closed. House Republicans have been passing a number of similarly selective funding measures, while seeking to maintain leverage in efforts to delay or change the Affordable Care Act.

…“I tried everything I could to steer us against this strategy,” Nunes said in an interview Friday. “It’s going to end badly for some in my party.”

On Capitol Hill, the term of the week is “clean CR.” This refers to a continuing resolution, or funding measure, that is free of Republican attempts to defund, delay or take some other action related to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Democrats are using the “clean CR” option as an attack line on Republicans, including Denham and Valadao. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on Friday declared in a statement that Denham “won’t budge from his reckless shutdown, voting in lockstep with his Republican leadership to refuse to end the shutdown.”

Denham, in an interview, countered that he’s been joining House Republicans in passing individual funding bills, which he blamed the Senate for blocking. He insisted that a bill to reopen the entire government should rightly be paired with provisions delaying or changing the Affordable Care Act.

“The problem is, Obama has been picking and choosing which parts of this law to implement,” Denham said. “It’s unfair to my district.”

Valadao, likewise, said an interview Friday that he supports the House Republican leadership, which has so far been adamant about combining anti-Affordable Care Act provisions with any long-term government funding bill. Valadao said he’s been hearing from many valley residents who share his concern about the new health law; at the same time, he said he’s willing to consider new directions.

“I’m going to keep my options open,” Valadao said. “We have to sit down at the table and talk.”

Friday night Alan Grayson appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and helped explain to TV viewers what their father's Republican Party has turned into. "There are really 3 Republican parties: there are the corporate shills, there are the religious fanatics and then there are the freedom fiends, the ones who want to make sure you have the right to sleep under a bridge.” Our old friend Joshua Holland has been trying to explain the Republican mindset that is causing so many problems for so many of the ones who don't live in the Old Confederacy. He laid it all out for Bill Moyers:

It’s widely understood that the government has been shut down by a relatively small number of Republican lawmakers who represent deeply red districts. They’re insulated from public opinion at large. They don’t fear a general election loss to a Democrat; they’re motivated by avoiding a primary challenger from their right flank.

So to fully understand what’s driving the Republican Party’s brinkmanship, one has to look at the motivations of its base voters-- how they see the world around them. This lies at the heart of what’s happening in the Capitol today.

Democracy Corps-- a Democratic-leaning polling firm-- released a study this week based on a series of focus groups they conducted with loyal Republican voters. They divided them up into three sub-groups which together represent the base of the party. Evangelicals represent the largest group, followed by Republicans who identify with the tea party movement. “Moderates,” the third group, make up about a quarter of the party’s base, according to the pollsters.

Fear of a changing society is one thing that unites all three factions. The battle over Obamacare, write the study’s authors, “goes to the heart of Republican base thinking about the essential political battle.”

They think they face a victorious Democratic Party that is intent on expanding government to increase dependency and therefore electoral support. It starts with food stamps and unemployment benefits; expands further if you legalize the illegals; but insuring the uninsured dramatically grows those dependent on government. They believe this is an electoral strategy-- not just a political ideology or economic philosophy. If Obamacare happens, the Republican Party may be lost, in their view.

And while few explicitly talk about Obama in racial terms, the base supporters are very conscious of being white in a country with growing minorities. Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities. Race remains very much alive in the politics of the Republican Party.

They worry that minorities, immigrants, and welfare recipients now believe it is their “right” to claim [public] benefits. Tea Party participants, in particular, were very focused on those who claim “rights” in the form of government services, without taking responsibility for themselves.

They are also unified in their belief that Obama is a usurper who has hoodwinked the public into re-electing him by hiding his true beliefs, which are essentially Marxist. They also think that Democrats have won the major political battles of our time because Republican legislators in Washington didn’t put up a fight.

But there are also deep divisions within the base, according to the analysis. Evangelicals still focus overwhelmingly on social issues. They think gay rights are the biggest threat to our society, but they also worry about the loss of what they see as an idyllic small-town culture. They feel besieged as the cultural ground shifts beneath them, and see themselves as a beleaguered, “politically incorrect” minority.

Tea partiers display a libertarian streak, and are far less concerned with social issues. They are staunchly pro-business. But there’s an easy alliance between these two groups -- which make up well over half of the GOP base-- because Evangelicals think the tea partiers are fighting back, and vice versa.

Both groups displayed a high level of paranoia, according to the researchers who conducted the study. They noted that this was the first time, in many years of conducting focus groups, that participants worried that their participation might trigger surveillance by the NSA or an audit by the IRS. In addition to thinking that Obama is a liar, and a covert Communist, these two groups were also more likely to express the belief that he is secretly a Muslim.

The moderates were, as one might expect, quite different. Like the tea partiers, they don’t worry as much about social issues. Their concerns are traditionally conservative-- they worry about excessive regulation and taxation. They have a hard time taking Fox News seriously, and hold a deep disdain for the tea party faction. They are also keenly aware of their waning influence within the coalition.

Moderates are not so sure about their place in the current Republican Party. They worry about the ability of Republicans in Congress to make government work. They believe the party is stuck, not forward-looking, and representative of old ideas. They worry about the Republican Party’s right turn on social and environmental issues-- which makes it difficult, especially for young moderates-- to view the Republican Party as a modern party.

Unlike the tea partiers and Evangelicals, the moderate faction desperately wants lawmakers in Washington to find a common middle ground. They are less likely to worry about unauthorized immigration than the rest of the base, and some went so far as to speak positively about immigrants’ contributions to our society and economy.

Climate change is another dividing line between moderate Republicans and the hard-right. GOP moderates may be unsure of the science on climate change, but they don’t reject it out of hand, and some are legitimately worried about the effects of a changing climate.

In this, they stand out from the Evangelical and tea party wings. The study’s authors write:

Moderates are not even in the same conversation as Evangelicals who deeply doubt scientists writ large and Tea Party Republicans who are consumed by the big government and regulations that inevitably result from climate science.

Evangelicals and Tea Party Republicans share and are consumed by skepticism about climate science-- to the point where they mistrust scientists before they begin to speak.

The whole study is fascinating. You can read it here.

U.S.A.-- A Country Of Economic Refugees

Not my housekeeper, Juana

My housekeeper, Juana, is from El Salvador. The only way I know she's an American citizen is that we talk about who she's voting for every time elections roll around. Unlike Mitt Romney, I'm not running for office so I have no idea who's on the gardening crew. I know Roberto, the main guy, is American because he was born in L.A. But I'm not sure what the status of his employees are. I suspect the Gang of 8 proposals aren't really meant to make their lives any easier. As Joshua Holland explained in The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy, "the idea that immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, take jobs from the native-born and keep wages low and taxes high is so deeply embedded in our discourse that even many progressive-minded people have come to believe it [and] that people believe immigration plays a much greater role in the plight of many U.S. workers than it actually does." But just because that's a widely-held belief, it doesn't make it true.

Here is the reality: new immigrants (legal or not) have a negative short-term impact on local governments’ fiscal situation, but over the long haul, they contribute more in taxes than they take in services. Immigrant labor may have a negative effect on wages for a small group of Americans, but that’s anything but established, and the positive contributions-- including their contributions to native workers’ wages-- are enjoyed by a much, much larger group of Americans. All of these factors are very small in relation to the economy as a whole, and almost none of the rhetoric about how immigration hurts working people is justified by the data.

...The Corporate Right, which has made strange bedfellows with immigrants’ rights activists in recent years, has pushed a narrative that’s very different from the one embraced by the nativists. Corporate America argues that newly arrived workers take jobs that Americans won’t do. Yet that’s only partially true; many unauthorized immigrants fill nonunion jobs that are impossibly crappy, pay poverty wages, and are rife with workplace violations, and they work those jobs side by side with millions of natives and legal residents. The reality is that there are not enough Americans who are willing or able to tolerate poverty wages and other workplace abuses.

At the same time that spending on immigration enforcement was going through the roof, the resources allocated to enforcing overtime, minimum wage, workplace safety, and other protections for workers were cut and cut again. According to research conducted by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, the number of workplaces that fell within the jurisdiction of the Department of Labor’s wage and hour division more than doubled between 1975 and 2004, and the number of workers in those establishments increased by 55 percent. Yet during that period, the number of inspectors available to enforce basic labor standards declined by 14 percent, and the number of “compliance actions” the agency completed plummeted by more than a third.

Those who advocate more law enforcement to tackle the immigration issue often invoke images of the United States descending into anarchy-- of a nation losing control of its borders and therefore its sovereignty. There is anarchy in America, there is lawlessness, but you’ll find a lot more of it in the kitchen of your favorite diner than along the Rio Grande.

Unfortunately, there’s not much in the way of nationwide data on workplace violations, but we do have a large body of local and state studies, and all point to the same conclusion: they are simply rampant at the lower end of the economy and among vulnerable populations.

Consider the findings of just a few of those studies, as compiled by the Brennan Center:

• A 2004 study of two hundred workers conducted at multiple sites in Fairfax County, Virginia, found that

• 54.6 percent were paid less than agreed on.
• 53.1 percent reported nonpayment for work done.
• 35.6 percent said they’d been victims of racial discrimination.
• 25.8 percent had been given bad checks.
• 16 percent reported that they’d been subject to violence on the job.
• 14.9 percent said they’d received threats from employers.

• A 2002 study of chicken processors found that six in ten plants failed to pay workers overtime.

• In a 1998 study of restaurant workers in Los Angeles, only two out of forty-three establishments complied with basic labor laws.

• A 2005 study of grape pickers in California’s Central Valley found that half of all workers reported pay stubs that reflected less than the total number of hours worked, and half reported that they had not received all of the overtime pay they were owed.

• A 1998 study looking at workers in the restaurant, garment, hotel, and motel industries-- all occupations with large numbers of unauthorized workers-- found that only one in twenty restaurants complied with minimum wage laws and only a third of hotels and motels were in compliance, as were only four of ten shops in the garment industry.

Study after study reported similar findings. And it bears repeating: although these illegal jobs are clustered in industries in which many unauthorized workers toil, millions of legal immigrants and U.S. citizens work those same jobs and are also victims of widespread employer abuses. According to one 2003 study, the percentage of workers being ripped off via minimum wage violations is not that much lower for natives than it is for immigrants-- 13 percent versus 9 percent among women and 9 percent versus 6 percent among men.

Most of the focus of the immigration debate in this country has been on the immigrants themselves, especially unauthorized immigrants. But very little attention is paid to the other side of the transaction: the incentives that U.S. companies and households have to hire an unauthorized worker over a citizen.

For one thing, enforcement efforts rarely target employers. As the Washington Post noted, while “federal immigration authorities arrested nearly four times as many people at workplaces in 2007 as they did in 2005... only 92 owners, supervisors or hiring officials were arrested in an economy that includes 6 million companies that employ more than 7 million unauthorized workers. Only 17 firms faced criminal fines or other forfeitures.” Those raids devastate workers’ families, but they represent little more than an inconvenience to employers, who have little reason to improve working conditions when they can hire new employees who are just as easy to exploit.

Illegal immigrants sell their labor on a black market that’s similar in many ways to those for other illicit goods and services, such as the drug trade. The sellers’ incentives are well-understood: the lion’s share of those who have moved to the United States in the last decade are economic refugees, fleeing home countries where they can’t eke out a dignified life. Human traffickers, who can realize enormous profits from shipping people across national boundaries, provide for the market; their incentives, again, are well-understood.

The buyers, of course, are Americans-- and not only corporate America. Middle-class households and many small firms use illegal labor, but their side of the transaction goes largely undiscussed. Without looking at both sides of the coin-- demand, as well as supply-- it’s impossible to arrive at a reform agenda that can result in an effective, humane, and sustainable system of immigration control.

An unregulated sector of the economy, rife with illegal jobs, is the largely unexamined “pull factor” for much of the (low-skilled) immigration to the United States. Most recent immigrants work at jobs that fall somewhere between what’s available in their native countries and the kind of jobs one would expect to find in a highly advanced economy. They also tend to be jobs that can’t be easily outsourced to countries with an abundance of cheap labor.

A good example of these kinds of jobs can be found in New York City, where the cost of living is among the highest in the country. A report in Crain’s New York Business News found that in underregulated New York restaurants, green grocers, retail corner laundries, and private households, “Typically, workers will be quoted a flat weekly salary of $300 and then have to work 60 hours a week, receiving an effective wage of $5 an hour with no provision for overtime.”36 New York State’s minimum wage was $7.15 per hour, and federal and state laws require overtime pay for any hours worked over forty per week.

In order to create a sustainable model for immigration control, we need to look at decreasing the demand for workers who are willing to fill those jobs. This means breaking Americans’ addiction to exploitable labor. As long as there are $5-per-hour jobs in New York City that few natives can afford to work, and millions of workers who don’t have jobs that pay that much in poorer countries, we’ll have a large number of people who want to migrate to our shores. As long as our immigration system doesn’t permit enough of them to migrate legally, we’ll have an “illegal immigration problem.” It’s simply the law of supply and demand at work.

Yet it’s not true that all unauthorized immigrants work those kinds of jobs. There’s no question that employers are sometimes legitimately unable to find citizens or legal residents to fill even decent jobs. That’s especially true in rural communities, where young people tend to take off for the big city and the population is aging and in decline. In 2007, I spoke with Oklahoma state senator Harry Coates soon after his state passed one of the most restrictive immigration laws in the nation. Employers in Oklahoma weren’t only having problems filling low-paying “McJobs,” he told me. “In the oil fields, they’re paying $18 to $20 per hour to start,” he said, “but they can’t find enough willing workers to fill the jobs. We’ve told our young people to work with their minds, not with their hands.” Coates added, “We’ve shot ourselves in the foot by running off willing workers for willing employers.”

Progressive immigration and workplace reform would focus our enforcement resources on cleaning up the bottom end of the labor market: on the jobs that bring people to our shores, rather than on the immigrants who work them. Guaranteeing workers-- immigrant and native alike-- the right to organize and enforcing wage and overtime laws would equalize the price of hiring unauthorized and legal workers and would go a long way toward addressing the demand for illegal labor without the ugliness of raids and deportations.

Once the goal of eliminating substandard and often illegal jobs-- un-American jobs-- from the U.S. workplace is accomplished, there would be far less resistance to new workers coming in to fill jobs that can’t be staffed by Americans. Public opinion research shows that when people perceive the economy to be functioning well for them, much of the anxiety over immigration disappears.

Instead we get a bigoted, right-wing ideologue like Ted Cruz sitting on the Judiciary Committee's Immigration, Refugees and Border Security subcommittee singing tunes for his Know Nothing base:

Cruz Claimed Obama Wants Immigration Reform Bill To “Crater” So Democrats Can Use It As “A Political Wedge.” According to Ted Cruz in an interview with the Dallas Morning News, “[Obama’s] behavior concerning immigration leads me to believe that what he wants is a political issue rather than actually to pass a bill. What he wants is for the bill to crater, so that he can use the issue as a political wedge in 2014 and 2016. That is why I believe the president is insisting on a path to citizenship for those who are here illegally. Because by insisting on that, he ensures that any immigration reform bill will be voted down in the House.” [Dallas Morning News, 3/24/13]

Cruz: “I Do Not Support The Dream Act And Categorically Oppose Amnesty.” In an interview with the blog Conservatives in Action published on Cruz’s campaign website, Cruz said, “I do not support the Dream Act and categorically oppose amnesty. I categorically oppose amnesty and I strongly support legal immigration for those that have followed the rules and come here to pursue the American dream.” [TedCruz.org, 7/18/11]

Cruz: “End Benefits Like In-State Tuition For Illegal Aliens.” According to the Texas Tribune, Ted Cruz said, “We need leaders who will get serious about enforcing the border: triple the border patrol; use walls, fences, and technology; end sanctuary cities; repeal Obama’s newly ordered amnesty; and end benefits like in-state tuition for illegal aliens." [Texas Tribune, 6/25/12]

Cruz Called On Romney To End Obama’s “Deferred Action” Policy Toward Young Undocumented Immigrants. According to the Huffington Post, “Ted Cruz, a Republican senatorial candidate from Texas, said Monday he thinks presidential candidate Mitt Romney should end President Barack Obama's deferred action policy, going beyond Romney's line that he doesn't need to because he'll fix the problem quickly through Congress. Asked by Telemundo whether Romney should reinstate deportations of young people granted deferred action, Cruz said, ‘I do.’ ‘I think it is without authority, and we're a nation of rule of law, and it is not defending anyone's freedom to be undermining rule of law,’ he said of President Obama'sJune announcement that his administration would grant work authorizations and deferred action-- reprieve from deportation concerns for two years-- to some undocumented young people.” [Huffington Post, 8/28/12]

Cruz Attacked Primary Opponent’s Support For Guest Worker Program. According to Fox News Latino, “Cruz went on the offensive against Dewhurst on illegal immigration-- a key issue in the state that shares the longest stretch of U.S.-Mexico border-- calling attention to Dewhurst’s 2007 support of a guest worker program for the state’s undocumented immigrants, announced at a speech in South Texas. Cruz called the guest worker idea more expansive than President Obama’s decision to call off deportations for immigrants without criminal records who came here illegally as children-- a policy that Cruz opposes and called ‘illegal.’” [Fox News Latino, 7/18/12]

Cruz Supported Border Wall, Including Possibility Of Confiscating Private Property. According to Fox News Latino, “Cruz also distinguished himself from Dewhurst with his full-throated support for a border wall estimated by the Department of Homeland Security to cost $7.3 billion, or $6.5 million per mile. Cruz defended the border wall proposal even if it meant expropriating private property-- a position that the debate’s moderators, WFAA reporter Brad Watson and Gromer Jeffers of the Dallas Morning News, said contrasted with Cruz’s message of fiscal conservatism. ‘One of the specific powers and responsibilities of the federal government is to secure the borders,’ Cruz said. ‘Property can be taken with due process of law and just compensation.’” [Fox News Latino, 7/18/12]

Cruz Criticized Idea Of Providing Green Cards To Unauthorized Immigrants. According to the Washington Examiner, “Sen. Ted Cruz signaled yesterday on FOX News that he was concerned about allowing illegal immigrants to get a green card-- reportedly part of the Gang of Eight Senate bill for immigration reform. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., supports the idea of allowing illegal immigrants to apply for a green card after a 10-year wait. ‘The problem with the green card is the green card is a permanent legal residence status, and anyone who has a green card is eligible for citizenship within five years,’ Cruz explained to FOX News host Sean Hannity. ‘And so, if someone can get a green card, that is a path to citizenship.’” [Washington Examiner, 4/2/13]